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How to Use Things You Collected from Travel for Projects and Still Keep Them Intact After?

There are so many small things you collected from travel, train/plane tickets, travel pass, postcards etc.  You don't know what to do with them, you don't want to make a scrapbook out of them coz you are not sure if they will look good or you simply don't have such kind of energy to complete such daunting task, you obviously don't want to throw them away.....

I asked my flight attendant friend, whom I met years ago from tap dance group, to get me some of the tickets and paper stuffs she could collect from her trip to Russia, so that I could pretend I went there.  Posted this picture on Flickr, then all of a sudden problem solved, see the conversation below:

Shanti: I'd be interested to see what you do with these. I've got a little shoe box full of tickets and receipts I've saved from wherever in the world I've travelled and I'm yet to plan what I will make with them.

Patrick: hahah for things I don't quite care about keeping, they will be used on some of my notebook refill covers. I suggest you to lay them flat on scanner and scan, not for archiving purpose, just to have a random collection of things from places you travelled to, then laser print the scanned collage on a large piece of A3 paper, use that A3 paper for decorative purpose on your stuffs (notebook refill cover, boxes, etc). This way you get to keep the original and you can enjoy seeing the copies of them here and there. Good tip? :)

Shanti: Great tip! Why haven't I even thought of scanning them? I'm sure some of them are probably faded by now. Ooo! I'm excited to get them out and look them over again now:) Thank you!

Patrick: oh gee, I haven't even done that before too, such a great idea come to think of it ..... hahahahah ;)

Behind These Photos, People and Products - Yet Another Blast Update

I'm heading Shanghai tomorrow for 1 week (like every month), so here's an update before I leave.

As usual, my Dad needs your prayer, which has been helpful in many ways.  He was admitted to hospital because of fever last week, he shall be fine and come out in a few days, just wish him less painful and more happiness.

Things Organized Neatly is a very nice place to see the beauty of neat arrangement.  I hope one day they will post my arrangements.  Yesterday I was just thinking about how to effectively carry nothing but a few essential objects yet all of them look beautiful, kind of impossible for tomorrow's travel but a little thought experiement is always pleasing.  Carrying my Turtlejacket Tri-Eye on a leather holster worn on cross shoulder leather strap sure got me a lot of attention :)  I had a dinner with the guy behind Turtleback last week, they will have some beautiful lenses coming out soon which fit the Tri-Eye.  I'm so happy he lusted after my DIY holster the entire time :)

As for the Chronodex self-inking stamp many has been asking for, I nailed the way to keep the wooden cover attached to the body by adding magnets, problem solved.  There are still a few adjustments here and there in millimeters, but the outlook is great.

I can't let somebody carry the Chronodex stamp without the most stunning look (in my own terms), so the cover will be laser engraved!  Been simulating how it will look for days, I still have a few technical problems to solve on the specification but it won't be long to start production, yay!

My day job is full of excitement to see future products and challenges with people and systems (social and computer), mind boggling to think things through, switching beta and alpha all the time.  But I'm glad, the satisfaction is within.  Gee I wish I had this new Fisheye Baby 110 camera with me for the trip starting tomorrow, super cute and handy, they didn't let me keep it.

Every year our Managing Director would send out a long email thanking everybody and sum up our achievements, one sentence stood out this year: "we never put 'maximizing sales and profit' our company's core value". I guess he detected an imbalance somehow, so I'm gonna quote him once in a while in difficult situations :) Some people thought it was just a lie coz any business is after profit afterall, but I look at it differently and I hope this little voice won't die, working hard on it.

Remember I introduced nLostnFound shop a while ago?  I've finally come into agreement with the owner to create a corner with a little more content than just focus on selling products.  The first implementation will be something related to missal books and bakerlite, hopefully we will set up the shelf in Times Square city'super right after I come back from Shanghai in July.  Every antique item is hand picked by the owner and we hope we can share the stories we know about these objects to people visiting.

Smartphone photography is definitely the future, probably 95% of us will not carry a modern day camera 95% of the time, besides Apple just patented a changeable lens phone system, that tells a lot about our future too.  Smartphone photography gadgets are popping up here and there, just that it is not yet a viable business for many.  Like the iPhone cases ecosystem, one great innovation will change everything.  Anyway, we have so many photos we take everyday, we never print them out anymore.  So we worked with Fotomax to offer printing service for smartphone photos, after 2 months of testing and procrastination, finally it is moving forward, customer can now print square photos, make Instagram photo stickers and photo books.  This is a comparison of their booth revamp (in Harbour City city'super) simulation vs. the actual outcome, proud to be able to faciliate ideas into reality.  If you can visualize your ideas, making it happen is just a matter of gathering all necessary elements.  I hope I'm not sounding too arrogant here.

Last week a colleague of mine thought I knew someone who could fix a phone, but I don't, so I took the challenge myself.  Err, not an iPhone but a retro rotary one with a slightly improved 1970s circuit board.  Everything worked except the unbearable noise on the speaker rendering conversation impossible.  First I thought it was a problem with the phone line plugging into an ADSL broadband line so the separator screwed up, but after checking with the phone company that was not the case.  So I picked up my screw driver and tempered with every circuit route inside with a magnifier.  Turned out it was caused by a poor circuit board layout design, there is this one place where a screw is supposed to fix the board onto the phone but the screw was not insulated by eyelets, so the circuit was damaged, not enough electricity could pass through at that point.  A simple bypass using wire fixed the phone.  I had so much fun so instead of charging her HK$200 to fix a HK$165 phone, I wavied it :P  Like how I used to play with making Gundam models, it is tremenduous fun to isolate problems and create solutions for the fun of it.  Great education, are kids exposed to these experience these days?  Probably not from the system.

So now the topic changed to kids.  This is an evil kid, on the surface :)  My niece is actually a super cute kid with a lot of smile and very talkative.  She was just playing a disturbed look with my fisheye lens, don't worry we are good.  Her dad my little brother is a hard working architect building schools.  We just had a family gathering in this Dragon Boat festival.

And a week ago, we had a gathering of 14 kids on a squid hunting boat trip on a rainy day.  We got nothing, not even one squid, and it was funny that all their energy were used up in anticipating and preparation so the boat trip was like the last stop of a great hang out :)

Watching them all together was a bit sentimental, they were kindergarten friends, some went to other schools some stayed and more of them will definitely scatter.  Where are my kindergarten friends?  They were so close to me and we are no longer in touch, we don't even remember each other's name anymore.  This generation of kids is probably the best connected kids ever found on earth, at least their parents have facebook.  I wondered, when we/they look back in 14 years, how will they feel about this video and their time spent together?  Well, in our next gathering, I'm gonna ban iPhones and iPads, they are evil products in this type of gathering.

 

Mr. Kwan's Happy Printing with the Original Heidelberg

The other day I visited one of the remaining traditional print shop in Tai Kok Tsui (大角咀) together with a pro photographer.  "Can we take a look inside?" Shop owner for more than 35 years Mr. Kwan said "sure, help yourself!"

Very humble and friendly Mr. Kwan said "these are quite useless, I'm gonna sell them to junk shops in time".  He was talking about his collection of letterpress types.  "They used to be sold in pounds from 5-6 type making shops in Hong Kong, nowadays there is no such need anymore and these became obsolete."

Yet his Original Heidelberg kept running behind like a living and breathing workhorse, spitting out serialized invoices page after pages.

How often do you need to do serious maintenance of the machine? I asked.  "There is no such need, I bought the machine second handedly almost 35 years ago when I started Happy Printing (快樂印刷, his company).  It costed me about HK$30,000 at that time, a huge sum of money enough to buy me a flat, but this machine gave me a business and raised my family".

I wish there were initiatives like those in Taiwan keeping these treasures (the people, the machines, the stories) alive by giving them new purposes: cultural preservation and education.  "Don't throw them away!" we said, "I will give you a call when I decide to close for business" Mr. Kwan said.