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| Carpooling with Mom \ \ \ Hey Hickey, You're So Fine You Blow My MindMom (in Vietnamese): When I was in high school, a boy gave me a "hickey" (there's probably no elegant translation for "hickey"), and all of my classmates were giggling at me about it. So you know what I did?
Me: What?
Mom: I was shocked at first, but then I told them that my mom gave me "cạo gió" (ointment rubbings) because I was sick.
Me: Uh… | | |
| Carpooling with Mom \ \ \ Living in an AquariumMom: You know what? I seem to get along with Pisces. I grew up with Pisces everywhere! You, your dad, anh Toàn (her second husband), my best friend. What a coincidence hah?
Me: That sounds like you live in an aquarium. So are we all alike?
Mom: Yes, every Pisces I have met is multi-talented. Your dad was an engineer and singer. Anh Toàn was a musician and designer. You are multi-talented. My friend is a real estate broker, painter, and programmer! All very creative!
Me: Haha, I wonder if that just means we are all scatterbrains. I have a Pisces friend in Colorado who is like that. Like me: scatterbrains!
Mom: You know what you need? You need a girlfriend like your Mom, a Sagittarius. Someone to ground you.
Me: Thanks Mom. I really don't need that image in my head right now.
Mom: What? You are lucky to have a Mom like me! I am so cool!
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| Carpooling with Mom \ \ \ This Woman…Mom and I commute everyday to work together. She works a block from where I work, near Stanford University. She is really into astrology and palm reading (chiromancy), whereas I am really into pop psychology, e.g. Meyer-Briggs, Socionics, Holland Codes, etc. When we carpool together, we are always talking about people and relationships, and bring our perspectives as astrologer, chiromancer, and pop psychologist. Mom: When are you getting a girlfriend?
Me: When it happens, it happens. a few days later… Mom: Do you need me to help you find a girlfriend?
Me: No mom, I’m doing okay. a few days later… Mom: Your horoscope says July will be a good month for you in the area of romance. The Saturn moon rising in the house of Cancer means sparks will fly on the 2nd weekend. Oooh!
Me: Sure mom.
Mom: You will find your love at a public event, such as a festival, a club meeting, or concert. Are you doing anything that weekend?
Me: Nope, no plans.
Mom: You can go to the movies with me. I will keep an eye out for you. Phở My Life… | | |
| life \ \ \ Dating, Marriage, and Parking LotsMy mom told me today that dating/marriage is like looking for a parking space at the mall. All the good spots get taken really quickly, and all the nice spots start filling up over the course of the day. If you wait too long, you'll only have the spots that are the furthest away or whatever opens up that are closer if you are lucky. Don't spend too much time driving around the parking lot looking for the best spot; if you find a spot that's good enough, just go for it. Otherwise the mall might end up closing and you have no choice but to go home. | | |
| technology \ \ \ Redesigning Group Chats for Instant MessagingI remember doing a research paper analyzing instant messaging for my anthropology class in college. I love anthropology; just being able to study life in a way I never considered. Then when I became a graphic designer, I acquired skills to synthesize solutions. If you ever become a designer (not just a graphic designer), taking anthropology courses is probably one of the best decisions you'll ever make. It is probably a foundation for interaction design, a whole new field of study which looks at how we interact with our environment, and as an interaction designer you would be helping others connect with their world in a more richer and engaging experience. So I had a little chit chat with my cousin about group chats for instant messaging the other day and we complained about the messiness of group chats when people start going off on tangents and you have to somehow follow multiple conversations or look for your own conversation in a pile of other conversations. That has always been the dynamic nature of conversation. Unless you moderate the room, you can never really get people to "stay on point". But why lock the discussion down to just one theme/topic? Chat rooms are and will always be organic. What is needed is a way to leverage the simplicity of the one-to-one conversation in a chat room environment. Let's take a simple problem, and this sometimes happen when I converse with friends, is when two conversations starts to exist in parallel (even though it is only two people!), and they alternate each other. It happens because something new gets introduced before the other person has had a chance to respond.
A: Did you see the new movie Up?
B: Yeah, hold up, my mom's calling.
A: Oh okay. What's going on?
B: I haven't seen Up yet.
B: Mom was just asking if I ate dinner yet.
A: You wanna go see it tonight?
B: She's going to be out so I gotta fed myself.
A: Where is she going?
B: Sure let's go see Up.
A: Yeah, let me go buy tickets for 9:00pm.
B: She's on a date.
Well, you can kinda sense that there are always two topics on the table. In a one-on-one conversation, this is normal, and not so big of a problem. The problem is when you go into chat rooms, and 4 or 5 topics are running concurrently. If it were me, I would consider the possibility of being able to visually drag my own conversational thread into a new space (or press tab twice to indent into a new area). 
Another way to keep conversations more orderly is the ability to insert media objects such as a YouTube link will automatically be clickable into a video frame for playback. But another media object I would like to see is the Text Block. Sometimes my friend copies and entire web page or email, and once she pastes it in my chat window, I can't see our previous comments without having to scroll all the way past the entire copied text. The Text Block is merely a neat way of showing a huge piece of text, but it should be able to collapse into a preview of the first few lines of text like Gmail's email preview when you look at your inbox. I suppose these wishlists aren't new. But I like Google spearheading an effort to change the way we communicate with their Google Wave development.
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