Where to stay in Hong Kong

A lot of my friends from New York are traveling to Hong Kong and they often asked me where they should stay at. Instead of typing essay-length emails every time, I thought that I will create a blog post of my original email so I can just reference this in the future.

Depending on your price range. Centrally located + good + inexpensive options are:

• YMCA Salisbury at Tsim Sha Tsui (next to Hong Kong Cultural Centre, Hong Kong Art Museum, Peninsula Hong Kong) – Kowloon
• YMCA Wan Chai (next to Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, Hong Kong Art Center, Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts) – Hong Kong Island

Moderately priced:

• Sheraton Hong Kong in Tsim Sha Shui (TST) – Kowloon
• Renaissance Wan Chai – Hong Kong Island

If cost is not a criteria for consideration or your client is paying for your stay, then consider these options:

• Intercontinental Kowloon in Tsim Sha Shui (TST) — the original Regent Hong Kong, sold to Intercontinental. Amazing sea views. I used to go to the coffee shop in the lobby for fantastic homemade ice cream in the weekends when I was little.
• Four Seasons Hong Kong in Central (Hong Kong Island) — with Hong Kong's only Michelin 3-Star restaurant Lung King Heen (Foursquare, where SML is currently the mayor), Four Seasons Hong Kong is the place to stay at in if you are a foodie. Four Seasons also has a very responsive Twitter presence and they have been very helpful to many of my queries. Highly recommended.

In general you would want to find hotels around TST / Wan Chai. The urban planning of Hong Kong is buzzing in downtown – and to access all 11 types of transportation, the hub is also there. You can check-in to airport downtown also so this is your best option. I don't know where your conference is, but most likely it would be on Hong Kong Island, so Wan Chai might be more convenience / next door.

There might be even more inexpensive options but I don't really know about them so I can't really recommend any. You can send me listings that you saw on hotel booking site and I can let you know what I know about them. The really cheap lodging options in Hong Kong can potentially be dangerous.

If you don't mind traveling for long distance (subway 30mins to downtown, for example), however, there are cheaper options – for example there is a hotel right next to where I live: Hyatt Regency Shatin (25 mins to TST, 30 mins to Central, approx $1,200 HKD ~ $130 USD) which is in fact the hotel facilities of the teaching hotel for School of Hotel and Tourism Management at The Chinese University of Hong Kong – think Cornell's Hotel / Hospitality. Food is super yummy there.

One typography book to rule them all

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them,
One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
–J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954, chapter 2

The only book you need for typography.

Recently I moved from New York to Hong Kong after spending more than a decade working in Gotham City. During this process, I had to ‘minify‘ a one-bedroom apartment filled with wall-to-wall books to a personal set goal of ten. It turned out to be a very challenging process – and it took me a long time to get it done. Ultimately I had everything down to 30 boxes – which was much higher than my goal, but still an extreme reduction no less.

If you are a book nerd like me, you would understand my dilemma of throwing books away. Yes I know – I haven’t touched most of them in years, and they were pretty much collecting dust — but they are also treasures to me. I remember when and why I bought each of my books, and I recall the lessons I learned from reading it. I had donated them all to charity so that they won’t go to waste, but saying goodbye was difficult.

The process did result in something positive in the end: helping me identify the gems of each genre – in other words – the one book to rule them all!

As a designer, I own a lot of design books. And since design books are visual and are not really about just the words, Kindle + electronic books simply don't do their justice – maybe in the future that will change – for now you simply can't get the same experience from their electronic equivalent, and it is for this reason that most of them don't get issued in electronic format.

So if you ask a designer to get rid of his books, it's a heartbreaking task. In the end, I kept only one book on typography: The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. On Amazon, I recommend seven books on typography. But if there is only one book which you want, this would be the one.

Ironically this was also the only book on the reading list for my graphic design education at Yale – I suppose that's what a good education buys you: the wisdom + access to the gems in each category, saving you the time to read all of the books only to come to the same conclusion?

Here are the rest of the books on typography which I recommend, if you are interested:

• The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
• Language Culture Type: International Type Design in the Age of Unicode by John D. Berry
• Typographically Speaking: The Art of Matthew Carter by Johanna Drucker
• Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface by Lars Müller
• Books, Boxes & Portfolios: Binding, Construct and Design, Step-By-Step by Franz Zeier
• The Complete Manual of Typography by James Felici
• Stop Stealing Sheep &Find Out How Type Works (2nd Edition) by E.M. Ginger

SoundCloud = Innovative Social Network for Musicians

SoundCloud is a social network startup for musicians based in Berlin. Originally from Stockholm, the founders created the site after they have grown "tired of getting emails with YouSentIt links or FTP log-ins just to be able to check out [their] friends latest soon-to-be released tracks."

Just a couple of years ago, when you mention music and social networks, the first site that came to mind is MySpace. Yes, MySpace is a social network and they do put much weight on music and musicians, but MySpace fails to innovate beyond implementing comments + music player, and that is barely social. In this blog post I will go through the many innovations SoundCloud brought to the music scene and explain why I like it so much.

Innovation 1: Time-based comments

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Commenting is the backbone of every social network, but what SoundCloud provides which no one else did was time-based commenting. Each track on SoundCloud is displayed as a waveform, so you can visually see how the music looks like. You can leave a comment to the entire track, but most useful is to get feedback on a specific time segment on the track. Best of all, the UI automatically displays those comments when the playhead hits the time code, which is uber cool.

Innovation 2: Continuous playback of recent tracks from people you follow

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A really useful feature on SoundCloud is the ability to play all the tracks from people you follow. Most social networks for musicians tend to treat the musician as a social media object, and if you want to hear what's new, you need to browse the musician's page to hear his/her new songs. SoundCloud, on the other hand, treats each track as a social media object, and places all the tracks on the same page. Best of all, whenever you are on a page with multiple tracks, hitting the play button will play all the tracks on the same page one after another. Want to be forever entertained by great original music? Sign up an account, follow a bunch of people you like and voila!

Innovation 3: Push to other social networks

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SoundCloud has tight integration with other social networks. It currently supports integration with Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. You can independently customize the message you want to send to push to the different networks, with the option to select whether or not to publish your own tracks and favorites. I push new tracks to Twitter + Facebook but to lower the noise level on my very active Twitter feed, I do not publish favorites to it. The customizable message is sweet as it allows me to hashtag my tweets more easily for data indexing and searching (which I now use extensively on Friendfeed).

Here's an official demo video so you can see this action:

Push to social networks by SoundCloud on Vimeo

Innovation 4: DropBox

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One of the most frustrating experience working with musicians and sound designers is sending large audio files back and forth. Do you put it on the FTP? Do you RapidShare? Host your own extranet? Creating custom and secured solutions are often costly, but SoundCloud made it easy with their DropBox. The DropBox enables everybody, even people who are not on SoundCloud, to share their tracks with you. The DropBox supports a versatile range of audio formats: AIFF, WAVE, FLAC, OGG, MP3 and AAC. Best of all, there is no file size limit to your uploads!

The embeddable widgets is written completely in html + css, which means that you can style it anyway you want, but the minimally designed stock widgets in both white and black fits in perfectly on any graphic design you already have.

See this in action:

The DropBox by SoundCloud on Vimeo

Conclusion

All in all I have had a very good experience on SoundCloud, and I have been recommending it to all my musician + sound designer friends. While SoundCloud intends to be a tool for musicians, it is also a really great way for music lovers who wish to discover indie music not found any where else. Because of the very active community and group participation, I am grateful to have met many great artists in Brooklyn as well as people around the world who are passionate about symphonic electronca.

If you are on SoundCloud, add me at http://soundcloud.com/seeminglee! :)

SoundCloud on the Web

+ http://soundcloud.com
+ Facebook: http://facebook.com/soundcloud
+ Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=17862154200
+ Flickr: http://flickr.com/soundcloud
+ MySpace: http://myspace.com/soundcloudcom
+ Twitter: http://twitter.com/soundcloud

SML Bookstore: SML Recommend Books

I did a test drive on the Amazon Associates program and created a bookstore using my existing Listmania lists:

Redirected smlrecommendbooks.com to this bookstore as a result :)

Graphic Design

See-ming Lee says: "In order to master the art and science of any field, have a solid foundation of the basic principles, learn the history of its development and always have a critical mind of everything that you create. With these tools in hand, you can solve any challenges that come in your way."



Information Design

See-ming Lee says: "Before there was a field called information architecture, IA is the first step in the graphic design process. Content gathering and organization is arguably the most powerful steps in gaining a thorough understanding of what we wish to create and conceptualize. Information needs to be designed in the form that most eloquently describe its function. This collection of books represents best-of-breed examples. From maps to airplane safety instructions, they knock down linguistic and cultural barriers and enable viewers the most immediate path to their content and structure."



Typography

See-ming Lee says: "My graphic design education at Yale has planted the seed for my love for typography and artists' books."



Flash + ActionScript

See-ming Lee says: "A collection of books on ActionScript that I have read and can easily recommend to any ActionScript developers."



Network Theory

See-ming Lee says: "After reading Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams, my exploration of decentralized networks went down a very viral path. Here are a collection of books that I have picked up over the course of a few years. The application of network theory is enormous, and can be used as a tool and device to understand cities, computer networks social networks, human-human interactions (speech), human-computer interactions (HCI), computer-computer interactions (protocol), diseases, computer viruses, nature. This field of study has brought me tremendous amounts of ideas for the next big thing in marketing strategy."



Life Hacks

See-ming Lee says: "As a highly stressed ADD'ed individual working in the information systems / design industry, these books helped me tremendously in balancing my work + my life."



Business Administration
SML Recommend Books: Business Administration

3D: modeling, rendering, mathematics models
SML Recommend Books: 3D

SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Social Bookmarking in Plain English / Common Craft

Last year, I did a presentation on del.icio.us to a group of designers at work, because I felt that it is an awesome tool. I still find myself spending a whole lot of time everyday trying to explain why I like it so much.

Last week I found this awesome video tutorial posted on the official del.icio.us blog and it explains the concept much better than I can. As such, I present to you: Social Bookmarking in Plain English by the wonderful folks at Common Craft:



Related SML
SML Del.icio.us
SML Flickr Set: del.icio.us & the culture of tagging / 2007-10-26
SML Wiki: del.icio.us & the culture of tagging

SML Copyright Notice

© 2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.