Michael Jackson is my all time favorite and king of pop. Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Tom Waits, Elliott Smith and Elvis Presley are what I have mostly been listening to in the past few years.
last.fm: http://www.last.fm/user/FelixDing
Reading on the sofa for hours, quietly, was one of the sweetest memories of my childhood. In fact I love reading so much that I, even as a child, dreamed about one day when I could go to college and learn the beauty of language and literature. Fortunately, the dream came true. I earned a B.A degree in Chinese Language and Literature several years ago!
My favorite writers and books include Haruki Murakami, Bei Dao, Shu Ting, Chi Li and Dream of the Red Chamber.
I'm an intermediate-level classical guitar player, with a Grade 5 Certificate of Arts Grade Examination of China certified by Shanghai Musician's Association.
In the other novel of Haruki Murakami, the main character often dreams that he can take his violin to the hillside and play alone. I don't know about him but I do a similar thing with my guitar in a beautiful and quiet park near my home.
This personal site, released on August 26th in 2000, has a history of more than 10 years.
The first edition of the site was made in Dreamweaver and PHP. I managed to store all data in text files instead of a real database. The site had a collection of articles, a board and some miscellaneous pages like, "About". Visitors can read these articles and post comments to each of them.
I had redesigned every pixel in the second edition released in the summer of 2001. The site was more like what people call a "blog" nowadays. The posts, with a title, a timestamp and a body, were listed in descending order by time, just like a blog today. The board had been upgraded to a threaded BBS. I had also integrated a home-brew user tracking system so that I could analyze the traffic.
The site gradually became the showcase and the test field of my thoughts in Web design. It had attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, and had gained over 3000 RSS subscribers.
In 2010, however, I shut down the site completely because I felt some parts, both in design and in thoughts, were severely wrong which I couldn't figure out. In that case, the best thing I could do was to stop and think. My world was waiting to rearrange itself around whatever I would choose next.
During the time of thinking and searching, a rumination from Steve Jobs about growing old and facing the future had deeply touched me:
Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.
If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have not to look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away.
The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, "Bye. I have to go. I'm going crazy and I'm getting out of here." And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.
This exactly is what I should do. I want to emerge, new and fresh, in a simple life where I could do some things different, which are being global, being minimal, and never compromising the quality again.
After I understood that, it was time to redesign the whole site. I started over and over again and kept refining and looking for a minimalistic style of my own. Three months later I finally got what you are looking at now. The new edition is not perfect, but for me, it's the clear mark that I'm not only forming my own style, but also re-emerging differently.
