My new musical hobby – learning to play the ukulele

Download ZIP of my self-introduction Keynote presentation.
Download PDF of my presentation (no multimedia).

Enjoy cyberstalking me here.

I met up with my classmate Catherine at the Oyster Festival on Stone Street yesterday.  I thought that I would share this funny pic she took of me eating an oyster.  This blog post is just me procrastinating when I should be working on my Walter Benjamin response.  More pics on Flickr.

End of summer update: I got back this morning from a week-long holiday in Northern California. Tons of pictures on Flickr. I will blog more about it later.

Above: The famous Fisherman’s Wharf of San Francisco. Below: LS plays with eels at the Monterey Aquarium.

Sophia & Perilla

I hung out with Sophia today. We had dinner in the West Village at a place called Perilla, which is Top Chef Harold Dieterle’s restaurant. The ambience was casual and cosy, typical West Village. Our waiter was attentive and the menu looked good. I was a big fan of Harold’s when I watched Top Chef, so I had high hopes. But unfortunately, things got weird, but not in a good way. We were presented with exactly one slice of bread each. Mmm, gee thanks. Nobody asked if we wanted more. We shared an heirloom tomato salad and seared sea scallops for the appetizer course. The tomato salad was good, but a bit pedestrian. The pine nuts and the feta cheese in the salad overpowered the subtly of the tomatoes. The scallops themselves were executed to textbook perfection, but like the tomato salad, had some balance issues: their were bacon or pancetta bits that were a little overwhelming, and not advertised on the menu.

Entrees. This is where it gets bad. We had the Romesco Oil Poached Chatham Cod with black olive gnocchi, oyster mushrooms & summer zucchini sauce and the Grilled Pork T-Bone with lavender, lychee-black chick pea salad & green mustard sauce. Off the bat, the cod dish was way too salty, and had a weird “squeaky texture.” The “romesco” was a red sauce smeared on the cod with chunks of nuts in it, a departure from the smooth Catalan classic. I found the nuts too aggressive in texture compared to the tender cod. Much better after I scraped off most of the sauce. The summer zucchini sauce was more of a color element than a flavor contrast, so I can’t say it was all the memorable. The black olive gnocchi was too similar to the oyster mushrooms in color, but were surprising in taste and texture when I bit into them. The color and texture reminded me of Taiwanese pig’s blood black pudding, and not in a good way.

The pork t-bone was a big, thick peace of meat, but not at all juicy or particularly flavorful. It was covered by a giant mound of salad that obscured the meat on the plate, not all too flattering a presentation. I couldn’t really taste the lavender, and the lychees were just kind of random surprises that lacked a real context.

Dessert was redeeming. Sophia ordered the Vanilla Scented Doughnuts with peach compote filling & sour cream curd. Fried dough. Peaches. Cream. Yum. ‘Nuff said. I had the local blackberries Linzer Torte, which was very well executed as well. It did a nice job of clearing my palate of all excess salt from the entrees.

Sorry Perilla, I really wanted to like it. I really tried, but I left disappointed. Luckily, we were able to amuse ourselves with some great people watching, as we observed two very awkward dates at adjacent tables unfold before our eyes. Made up for the lackluster food. We noticed that the awkward date people were drinking a lot more than we were. Maybe they were on to something.

Interactive Telecommunications @ NYU Tisch

Orientation starts tomorrow morning for the masters program in Interactive Telecommunications that I am doing at NYU. Updates forthcoming.

Below: Lee-Sean and the giant sunflowers of Sonoma.

I went out last night to celebrate my friend Sophia’s birthday at Japas 38 Karaoke.  More pics on Flickr.

Here is a photo of me taken at the Top of the Rock. I was there for a work-related cocktail party last week that was part of a big conference we put on.

My photo collection from last week now on Flickr.

Here is me in my new gray cotton suit from Uniqlo. The shirt and socks also by Uniqlo. Shoes from Camper. The tie is vintage Givenchy. Glasses by Oliver Peoples.

Dear Greenwich Club Residences Board:

I would like to bring up my concerns regarding the locking of the Sirius radio control units in the Billiards and Harbor Rooms. I am aware that other residents, including Serina Fojas and Jason Perkal, have also voiced similar concerns about how the situation has been handled. Echoing the sentiments made by above-mentioned residents, I would also like to suggest to the Board that the lock boxes be removed from the Sirius Radio units immediately. I believe that more proportional measures could have been taken to address the issues of excessive volume and channel selection on the Sirius controllers.

The lack of user-controllability of the radio units makes a mockery of the sales pitch promising “individual receivers capable of adjusting the music to the requests of residents” (from 88 Greenwich 5 Star Hotel brochure). To the best of my knowledge, I have not received an amendment to the offering plan that reflects a change to this amenity. In any case, I do not wish to engage in a petty battle over legalistic semantics and fine print, as this is a question of principle. I believe that this issue is best resolved through a spirit of civility and robust community consultation. I do not believe that this happened when the plastic enclosures were placed on the control units without notification.

The real issue is not so much that of plastic boxes over the radio controls, but the unilateral paternalism that characterized the handling of the issue. If excessive music volume is indeed an issue, there are other ways to deal with it short of locking the units. There are volume-limiting devices that can be installed, or perhaps the only volume controls, but not the channel controls should be blocked off. Or perhaps the units should be set on a station that only plays instrumental music, as to be minimally intrusive to the residents enjoying the space. These are just a few ideas to consider. I look forward to further dialogue about how to best address this issue.

Sincerely,

Lee-Sean Huang

I just signed up to participate in the AIDS Walk this Sunday in Central Park with my colleagues at Human Rights Watch. If you able to help, please consider making an online donation to fund a worthy cause. Thanks you so for your support.

• AIDS Walk New York is the world’s largest AIDS fundraising event.
• AIDS Walk New York stands out as a model of community action and cost-efficient fundraising. The priority has always been to have the money raised go directly to vital services to help people living with HIV or AIDS.
• AIDS Walk New York benefits GMHC, the nation’s oldest and most comprehensive AIDS Service organization. The organization’s staff of 189 and 7,000 dedicated volunteers provide services to more than 15,000 men, women, and children living with HIV and AIDS and their families.
• A portion of the net proceeds from the AIDS Walk also goes to dozens of other AIDS organizations within the tri-state area.

While we are on the topic of commitment and settling, don’t miss this past Sunday’s NY Times Magazine article on young married gays in MA.

More photos on Flickr
Thanks to Monica, JETAANY Social Chair, for the organizing the event and for taking photos!

Check out my latest photo sets on Flickr:

Wall Street Walking Tour

JETAANY Sake Tasting @ Satsko

Tampa Trip

I’m going back to school!

I have been accepted into the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (NYU). I will be starting the two-year Masters of Professional Studies (MPS) program in September 2008. According to their website, ITP is:

A graduate department dedicated to creativity and critical thinking applied to new technologies…More than just a graduate school, ITP is a creative ecosystem – a living and interdependent flow of people, projects, ideas and applications all dedicated to exploring and expanding the ability of real people to use media to connect to one another and influence the world around them.

I learned about the program from my former Avaaz colleagues Ji Mi Choi, who worked at ITP, and Paul and Milena Berry of Talacon Social Software who are ITP alumni.

While I concentrated in Government (Harvard-speak for majoring in political science) in undergrad, I have always wanted to go to art school as well. ITP deals with the intersection between technology, art and society, so I think it is the perfect fit for me. I hope to build up some technical chops and make some good connections so I can further develop the multimedia production, technological consulting services and music production wings of my company, Hepnova Multimedia.

Since ITP is an open-ended, experimental program, I am also open to whatever new interests come my way once I am there. I heard ITP alum James Clar give a talk last Friday about his career path. He studied film production at NYU for undergrad and then went to ITP and ended up doing interactive lighting design. I am excited about the versatile toolkit that ITP students acquire and the open-ended career paths that open up afterwards.

For those of you that are interested in applying for the program, I am putting my ITP application personal statement online here. I hope it will be of use for potential applicants.

Also check out current ITP student Caleb Clark’s Graduate School Application Help guide and ITP 101: Lessons learned from year one of the ITP.

I also applied to the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation Program in Social Entrepreneurship for a fellowship to cover my tuition at ITP. Unfortunately, I did not get the fellowship, but NYU did give me a comparable scholarship.

In case anybody is interested, here are my Reynolds Program application essay and biographical sketch.

So I guess I am finally taking the plunge and going to grad school, five years after I graduated from undergrad. After an intense undergrad experience, grad school was not even on my radar. For some time, I thought I would never go back to school because there wasn’t any thing I was interested enough to spend the time, effort and money to specialize in.

I taught English on the JET Programme in Japan from 2003-2006. I was applied and was admitted into the Masters Programme in Asian Studies at Lund University in Sweden in 2006, but I pulled a “runaway bride” and I ultimately declined the offer at the last minute and did not enroll.

Once again, if anybody is interested, here is my personal statement from my Lund application.

Why study Asian Studies in Sweden? Kinda random, I know. I had a wonderful experience studying abroad at Lund during the summer of 2002, where I did a masters-level course in human rights law as part of the Øresund Summer University, so Lund stayed on my radar. Plus, tuition is FREE at Swedish universities (but you still have to pay for your room and board and other expenses), and I had been fascinated by Sweden since a family vacation through Scandinavia when I was in high school. I even took two years of Swedish language in college, although I barely had the chance to practice since the summer program I was one was entirely in English.

Looking back, I didn’t really have an endgame for what I wanted to do after the program (except maybe stay out of George W. Bush’s US of America for a little bit longer, which I guess is a good enough reason), so I did not enroll. Lund is great as a college town, but after 3 years living in Nakatsu, a small provincial Japanese city (more of a town really), I wanted a taste of big city life, so I moved to New York City. Originally, I came to NYC under the pretense of visiting friends and checking things out, but I got my last gig at Avaaz and just ended up staying and settling here and getting my current job at Human Rights Watch.

Tsar Nicholas and I also decided to make the Hepnova Multimedia project a legit business, so we set up an LLC and started doing freelance gigs for clients ranging from Progressive Source Communications to a women’s lingerie business. We have done websites, logo designs, translations, video editing and a variety of other gigs.

I really feel ready for ITP now. I think the masters program will give me the skills and experience to do something creative with technology as a full-time gig. I will be sure to keep all my blog readers posted on what I am up to in grad school. I also hope this post was useful for people considering ITP or people considering grad school in general.

After months of delay, my sofa bed has finally arrived. I am almost done furnishing my apartment. My housewarming party is LONG OVERDUE, but stay tuned, I will be throwing one very soon.

Spring has (sort of) arrived as well. Here are some photos Kris and I took of early spring in Lower Manhattan.

I was in Philadelphia last weekend for my college roommate Kenyon’s wedding. Check out my photos on Flickr.

Photos of my last night (30 November 2007) with Tasha and Annika in the loft at 359 Broadway. Artsy, sentimental, self-indulgent photos. Sure, the loft was old, kinda ghetto, and freezing cold, but it was historic, bohemian, and full of street cred. Moving out is like the end of an era.

See my previous posts about the loft here and here and here. And some other links about the loft here.

Above: Sophia and Lee-Sean at Elijah’s brunch

Below: Lee-Sean and Kris at the top of Twin Peaks

See my complete San Francisco photo set on Flickr. Podcast coming soon…

Above: Buddha Kitsch

Below: Lychees, Rambutans, and Dragon Fruits

Above: Pork and Crab Soup Dumplings from Joe’s Shanghai – not as good as Din Tai Fung, but the best I’ve had in New York.

Below: Shanghai Noodle Soup from Joe’s Shanghai

See the complete set on Flickr.