Wesley's Tool-Box - The About Page Redux
Posted by Wesley onWesley's Tool-Box is simply put, what I've done to the world, written out and photographed. You'll see me building stuff, modifying things, and creating weird circuits. I have a handful of tools at my disposal, and I let my skills and imagination do their thing. I also go around a lot of places. Some things got famous, some did not. In any case I aim to post what I can of my doings.
And this time, I have a strong reason to believe that with the third launch of this website, I might actually keep that promise. Third time's the charm, right?
Enjoy your stay.
Wesley Hwang-Chung
July 2005
P.S. Use this graphic when linking to this site:
For those of you who want to know more about the background, read on.
This site has been in some sort of on-again-off-again loop. It was first launched in December 1996, but it never did have anything to see until year 2000. I have cited 'tight' high school curriculum as the excuse for the vacuum in the previous version of the 'about' page, but really, that's pretty thin as far as excuses go. I've done lots of stuff back even then.
So what happened in year 2000 that broke the dry spell, effectively putting the site into its second launch? Something about pencil and Athlon. See, that was the catalyst for the whole gig. Simple pencil doodling unlocks the overclocking powers of a powerful CPU... that was pretty cool. My discovery of this simple trick caught on quick, too.
Since then I've managed to chronicle all sorts of wacky stuff that were practically ahead of its time. For example, Portable Athlon was done at the time when there was no such thing as 'Athlon laptop computer'. It's also basically one of the earliest examples of case mods before this sort of practice became somewhat mainstream a couple of years later. The 'Portable Athlon' moniker survived through two more generations.
The Wearable Computing Project is quite memorable in many ways. This thing became pretty famous back then, making it to all three major TV channels in Korea (KBS, MBC, SBS), plus one cable television channel (e-channel), a major newspaper (Chosun Ilbo, on front page, no less), and two magazines, just to list off-hand. Oh, and bunch of people recognized me in the public, too. A few business proposals came up.
Unfortunately, the 'curriculum' excuse card creeped up its ugly rear again as the year 2002 rolled around, and the site was plunged into darkness for almost three years. Then I realized what the real problem was: I shouldn't have forced myself to create several, whole HTML pages by hand just to write an article! I've written up a lot in discussion boards all the time (total posts amassed goes easily over ten thousand) and that's because I knew I could just write the content, press Submit, and be done with it.
So what's going on now? Well, I installed this whole blogging system on my computer. I can write and manage articles just like I post stuff at a discussion board. More about that in the profile page. Anyway, yes - finally, I don't have to procrastinate because the burden of editing HTML pages and manually linking them are no longer on my shoulders. It's about frickin' time.