I just got back from Taiwan from all of the funeral proceedings. There are way too many thoughts and memories to process at the moment.

The question is… Will I be motivated enough? Typing on this virtual keyboard is serious business!!

Once you understand the stereotype, establishing relationships within the different cultures within the office is pretty easy. Of course, there will always be someone on the fringe, where personality and ideals clash in such catastrophic way that you’ll never truly get along, even on just a professional level. After all, it’s impossible to love the human race in its entirety. So we learn to get along, or at least learn to ignore those cases of absolute incompatibility.

For the most part, I get along with people just fine. However, if there was one personality that I simply can’t stand in an office environment, it has to be the self-righteous IT admin.

These IT admins usually share the following characteristics:

• They’re usually not the admin for your external servers, such as the customer database, or web server, the internet store… or any outward facing assets.
• Instead, they’re usually the internal admin that manages your desktop, network, storage & email.
• Often times, they’re contracted via a third party consulting/management company. This probably has more to do with very few smaller companies want a full-time IT staff. After all, when nothing is wrong with your corporate network, they just sit there and do nothing.
• They’re usually some very biased zealot championing some company or another. For example, a Microsoft-certified IT admin will endless push MS products & praise Microsoft, after all, their livelihood depends on the continued dominance of Microsoft.
• In contrast, they could also be a super dedicated Linux/Unix geek, where they would transition every system you have to open source as much as possible. They might also insist that every website you build must also be viewable in Lynx.

All those characteristics can probably be interpreted as “charming” or “eccentric” in the same vein as Jon Arbuckle. However, this one last characteristic is what really, really drives me nuts:

• Often times, they’re just complete assholes to anyone who they don’t think have any computer knowledge.

The odds, from the view of most IT admins, are against me, given the fact that I’m a Mac user. Often they will refuse to support me, and then laugh at me for my lack of Windows prowness. The assumption is that since I’m a Mac user, I know nothing about how a computer “really” work and will never understand the greatness and the knowledge that’s being held inside their brain as opposed to mine. Of course, they would have no idea that I once upon time, had a SLI-enabled rig with water pipes directing the flow of heat throughout my self-built system. A computer where every single part and spec, down to the cycling speed of the RAM was carefully researched & picked out by yours truly. I’ve simply grown tired of Windows, and tired of spending thousands of extra money just to get 5 more frames-per-second out of some first-person shooting game that I will get tired of before I’m half-way through the game anyway.

To them, being a “Mac user” pretty much equivocate to being completely computer illiterate. That, in turn, gives them the right to sneer and talk to me in that, “I know you won’t understand this, so let me explain this to you as what I would with a five year-old…” tone.

I don’t find it surprising that they would communicate to me in such a tone. What I do find extremely surprising, is that IT admins are seemingly the only people in the company that can also carry that tone of indignity while talking to VP level staff, CEO’s, and sometimes, even the vaunted Board of Directors! These IT admins, are the only people that can simply tell the VP of (insert any non-technical department here, obviously if you talk to the VP of IT that way, you wouldn’t have a job for much longer) that they don’t know what they’re doing, what they’re talking about, at times infer that they’re extremely dumb for having done something. As for resolutions, they will fix whatever mistake you just made, but not before scolding you and making you feel guilty. Of course, they’ll never fully explain to you what happened, either because they don’t really know, or they think it’s a waste of time to educate that little brain of yours with limited capacity for understanding their technical ingenuity.

The reality is this: IT admins are the new generation mechanics. Simply that, glorified mechanics.

Even VP and CEO’s whimper at the feet of IT admins, because they either do not want to deal with the complexity of computers, or do not have the time to deal with it. If you think about it, a CEO can have ran several multi-million dollar, successful corporations, and still resort to sending the car down to the shop for an oil change. In fact, they would be more likely to simply send everything to the shop than dealing with it themselves. Does the car mechanic talk down to the CEO? Of course not, because they understand that they’re in a service industry, and bad service eventually leads to not having any business down the road.

IT admins don’t see themselves as being a part of the service industry, but rather in a strange way, feels as if they’re in control of something much greater. If the CEO doesn’t get email today, then the whole company is screwed, therefore the wellness of the company relies strictly upon the shoulder of the IT admin, right?

Just as these proud IT admins are talking down to people as if they were five year-olds, the five year-olds are commoditizing what the IT industry does best. We’re approaching an age where a huge majority of our kids growing up knowing how to use a computer. They’re building their own websites, writing codes as a part of school assignments. Just how much longer will the current generation of IT admins be able to snicker at those people who don’t know how to use a computer? As the number of computer illiteracy dwindles, so does the job security of IT administration.

So, word of advice: Stop acting like assholes. There will come a day that they’ll just fire you and hire the sixteen year old from next door to do your job.

Should I post pictures of the new place?.. Hrm…

LA Times article

San Francisco Chronicles article

It’s about time. Here is an excerpts from the SF Chronicles article:

In a 4-3 decision, the justices said the state’s ban on same-sex marriage violates the “fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship.” The ruling is likely to flood county courthouses with applications from couples newly eligible to marry when the decision takes effect in 30 days.

“The California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples,” Chief Justice Ronald George wrote in the majority opinion.

Allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry “will not deprive opposite-sex couples of any rights and will not alter the legal framework of the institution of marriage,” George said.

I’ve always hated the Christian fundamentalist argument against gay marriage, especially in regards to how it threatens the traditional definition that a marriage is “between a man and a woman.” I’m sure there will be Federal implications of this ruling afterwards, we’re long from seeing the day where gay marriage is accepted across all states; but this is a great step forward.

Granted, I don’t use a whole lot of Firefox addons, but there is one addon I couldn’t live without: The bookmarking addon from del.icio.us. Since I work on multiple computers at work and home, del.ici.ous has became a valuable tool to keep all of my bookmark in one place. It’s also much more flexible than Google Bookmarks.

Now there is a beta version of the del.icio.us addon for Firefox 3, available here:

delicious blog - Firefox 3, del.icio.us, and you

Just follow the link and install the new version of the addon, so far it’s been working great. With the availability of this addon, my switch over to Firefox 3 is complete.

It’s an old, used, beat-up cliché, but I never thought I would one day consider myself closer to my dad’s category rather than being one of the hip kids that’s ingrained with all of the happenings in the tech world. The fact remains that I’m moving towards being one of the old geezer of the internet. Even though I’m still a notch below thirty, I have been in this tech bubble for nearly a decade.

This realization was made even more clear to me, as I was having a conversation with one of my friend’s friend’s friend, no doubt a connection that’s just enough zip codes apart that I’m likely to run into him at a coffee shop one day, but pretend not to recognize. He was one of the “kids” working at a brand new Web 2.0 start-up, with great aspirations and ideas on creating new software (read: Probably some Facebook/MySpace app), services (read: Odd niche that hasn’t been filled yet) and products (read: … Nevermind, I’ll address this in the following paragraphs).

Somewhere between his passionate speech about how his company is going to do this and that, and how they have this great plan towards building this huge community and thus deriving value, he actually paid half enough of a mind to ask me about what I did. This is where our generational separation came in play: He was absolutely astounded by the amount of money that has to be spent for our company to create, sell, and continue to support a hardware product. There were many statements that sounded like (but not verbatim, since I wasn’t in the mood to take notes about what a college newborn had to dispense) these:

“What is your CPA? Wow, how much? That’s incredible!”
“Wait, how many years of runway do you have to profitability? Really, it takes that long?”
“Wow, you have to maintain inventory? Like, have it stored in a warehouse somewhere?”
“Why would you do this with so much overhead?”
“See, our company’s product is just a service, it doesn’t need warehouse and there’s no overhead!”
“We’ll build a huge user base, and we’ll do it on a super small budget. Just a few servers, that’s it!”
“Oh, profitability? It’s okay, if we build great software, people will use it, and we’ll build value over time!”

What bothered me, is that despite this kid’s college education & apparent (or supposed) brilliance, there seems to be a distinct lack of history & perspective that’s been passed down from our generation to theirs.

Having been through the first internet bubble, a lot of us lived through the harsh reality of what creating a new market, a new industry is really like. The internet bubble was filled with promises, companies with high evaluation and inflated stock prices, all the meanwhile with no real product or real plan towards profitability. Eventually, stock prices normalize, or even just distintegrate completely. Venture capitalist will all want their investment back at some point. Nearly a decade later, we still haven’t figured out how exactly, that we can all profit from this “internet” thing.

The problem, as I see it, is that most of what drives internet’s true economy, is the same things that drives our old economy. For example, Amazon is hardly turning a profit from quarter to quarter (exactly how many quarters they’ve been profitable, I don’t know, but it’s not an amazing amount), but they’re still a sustainable company because they’re basically a traditional retailer in a different medium. EBay is doing very well, because they are basically an online classified/flea market. They are one of the few company, along with maybe Craigslist, that’s figured out a way to be profitable without having to invest huge stakes or store major inventory.

What it boils down to, is that everything we do on the internet, are still extensions of our traditional economy. Instead of going to the drug store, we might be shopping on drugstore.com. Instead of going down to the travel agent’s office, we simply book our flights & hotels online. However the basic product being offered by various internet-based companies hasn’t deviated all that much from tradition.

The web 2.0 companies introduced new concepts of creating user-driven communities, but has any web 2.0 company truly figured out how to monitize anything they’re doing? The methodology behind evaluating web 2.0 company’s worth is almost as ridiculous as the evaluation people used to give to web 1.0 companies. You count up the number of users you have signed up to your service, you give each user on your service some arbitrarily determined value in dollars of how much the “mindshare” of an user on your service is worth. Multiple arbitrary value to registered user base and daily traffic = your company’s value. Of course, this is an oversimplified version of what the actual calculation would entail, but when you have a company that doesn’t create any “real” products, what else is there to evaluate?

So most web 2.0 company’s “real” profitbility plan usually involves one, or both of the following:

1. Serving ads to the user base (Google loves you).
2. Get bought by some other established media entities (News Corp, AOL, MSN… etc…).

See, we really haven’t progressed much beyond what Yahoo and Excite (anyone remember Excite?) was doing nearly a decade ago. We just gave it a different spin, a different face, and a whole new generation of young, hot-blooded college grads willing to do the bidding of whatever VC is haunting their dreams.

No doubt, that web 2.0 is an important progression in the internet economy, but the problem is just as stagnant now as the original internet revolution itself. There are way too many companies that operate on the principle of:

Step 1: Make some software
Step 2: ?????
Step 3: Profit!!!

What bugs me even more, is that these kids seem to have completely forgotten and dismissed the traditional economy that their life is built on. The web 2.0 kids are treating the internet akin to a new age get-rich-quick scheme of sorts, without considering investing their future into a more realistic market. For example, “the kid” was tauting to me about how his company is running a very low overhead, high margin business as he’s holding no real physical product or inventory; I can’t help but wonder, so who is going to be providing “the kid’s” company with real products?

For example, if Dell was to decide that the PC hardware business is too low margin, too high risk and high overhead; if Dell was to abandone the computer market completely and move into just software & services, then who will “the kid” buy hardware from? It’s great that they’re creating brilliant web 2.0 application and all, but what happens if all PC hardware manufacturers decided to move into software, stop making hardware?

If we were to take this a step further, in a end-of-the-world-o-m-g sorta way (which is the mode that I often operate in anyway… it’s not easy being me), what if people who plants our corn & milks our cow decides that they should in fact, move into virtual products & goods as well, because physical products are just too archaic? Does this sound like Second Life gone bad?

The point is, the traditional market will always have its relevance, but almost all wide-eyed kids who just entered the real world are dismissive towards the “old ways of doing things.” They’re far more excited to be working at a web 2.0 company that makes nothing real at all, rather than building a solid consumer product that’s might take years to grow a new category, and spend millions of dollars in marketing. It’s easy to see the few web 2.0 company that’s been lucky enough to be acquired and seeing the owners walking away filthy rich (often still with their company struggling to find a real profitable plan for the future), and think that is the way of the future, a career path.

Consider this: Go see how much money Proctor & Gamble is making every year by selling you Swiffer refills & laundry detergents. It’s not sexy, but it’s a necessity of life.

Say that about Facebook? I still don’t have a Facebook account.

(10:31:49 AM) nano: you need more sleep
(10:31:51 AM) nano: lunesta maybe
(10:34:39 AM) Steve: or maybe just watch the commercial for it like, 1,000 times
(10:34:40 AM) Steve: that’ll put me to bed
(10:36:10 AM) nano: its so peaceful
(10:37:14 AM) Steve: so very peaceful
(10:37:17 AM) Steve: or viagra commercials
(10:37:42 AM) Steve: ironically, for a commercial about a product that cures erectile dysfunction
(10:37:46 AM) Steve: it’s also very good at inducing it
(10:37:57 AM) Steve: watching a middle age guy tossing a football through tires repeatedly…
(10:38:02 AM) Steve: is just… too.. depressing
(10:40:08 AM) nano: hahha
(10:40:12 AM) nano: so true.

Azariah Southworth announces he is gay

I haven’t watched any Christian-based TV programming in years. To be quite honest, even at the highest point of my most fervent belief, I never watched that much religious based programming. So I really have no idea who this person is.

Apparently, he is a very popular Christian TV host.

Apparently, he is also gay.

I can’t fathom the amount of personal agony to be a popular figure for a religion that despises your existence. Can’t even get close to imagining the amount of courage to stand up for who you are, knowing how much ridicule, especially given our current political and religious climate, that you are about to receive.

Kudos Azariah, even though I’ve never watched any of your show.

I found her article on the beginning of her open marriage fascinating:

Portrait of an Open Marriage

You can also find her blog here at My Open Book, she has posted the first chapter of her upcoming book on the website. I’ll find sometime to read it in the next few days, maybe.

Although, there are some things I should clear up. Usually any information, discussion on open marriage and/or open relationships comes from the perspective of a participant. I think the media portrayal of these people is more or less connected to what people think of college frat parties. A bunch of horny, young folks under heavy influence of various chemicals, doing, well… you know the rest.

The reality of me:

• I am not an extremely handsome guy, average at best. Which also means I’m not picking up women at different bars daily and engaging in all sorts of fun activities.
• I am introverted, shy to strangers, and generally don’t enjoy being in huge crowds.
• I am extremely picky in my relationships with others (not just in a love sorta way, I’m even picky about everyday friendship). I have “years” of gaps between intimate relationships.
• As a result of the shyness mentioned above, no, I haven’t dated very much.
• “Haven’t dated very much” is probably an overstatement.
• Oh yeah, lastly, I give off that “a girl’s best friend” vibe, which means for the most part, women cry on my shoulder when their terrible boyfriend had just done something horrible to them. I’m almost always on the side of, “Too bad nothing can ever happen between us, because we’re just such good friends!”

So as you can see, I certainly don’t fit into the media stereotype of a “open-relationship” participant. However, I don’t have to fit that stereotype to consider the evolution of relationships in society. I also think that even if your next-door, all-American-from-the-60’s-sitcom neighbor was in an open-marriage of some sort, you might not ever realize it. Unless you have some voyeuristic habit of your own. (TMI?)

Even though “web 2.0″ could be considered some sort of a revolution, depending on one’s definition, the reality is that web 2.0 perpetuated the communication protocol that was already available. All we did was broaden the base of communication medium. For example, anyone can start their own blog (*cough*.. including yours truly) and attempt to spread their own form of propaganda through the internet. We took what traditionally required years of struggling & attempting to get oneself published in credited medium, and spread that power to anyone with a minimal amount of technical knowledge. It did liberate authors from the traditional pathways of reaching an audience.

Therelies the problem though, that anyone can be an author, but not everyone has content & stories to tell. Numerous blogs are being added to the “blogosphere” all the time, but only a few of them contain meaningful content. Most of the news blogs don’t actually do investigative reporting, they take the same AP wire feeds from traditonal outlets and attach their own viewpoints. “News blogs” don’t bring us news, they talk about news that’s already been brought to us by the good old standard. So even with this supposed revolution, almost all of our content is still based on what we long considered archaic.

So what does all this have to do with love?

I have a profile on Match.com. A supposedly revolution towards how people can find potential dates, and hopefully long-term, meaningful relationships that can extend into the far beyond. However, just as I stated above, Match.com isn’t a revolution in how people can find & relate to each other; it is an evolution of the good old dating services that used to occur through agencies, phones & otherwise. The same personals ads that you can post on Craigslist isn’t that much diffferent in concept as those personal ads that people used to purchase in newspaper (one main difference, is that you no longer have a strict character limit on how much you can talk about yourself, which is ultimately mixed blessing at best).

The evolution here, just as blogs give everyday joe the ability to publish their thoughts, internet dating allow people to broaden their base and discover a much large population. Within the traditional market though, this isn’t all that interesting. Match.com’s existence allows me to see more profiles & potential dates than I would have otherwise (and spending less time at bars), but it also opens up a much higher number of potential competitions. All in all, it’s a good evolution that probably comes out to be a zero-sum game of sorts.

The more interesting evolution with internet, is how this broaden of base and enabling of communication allows what used to be “niche” to become mainstream. For example, linking up D&D geeks across the country through AOL (yes, good old American Online, oh, how I miss the hundred dollar bills for overage from you. Cellphone carriers has nothing on you!), or newsgroups that allows almost any special interest group to exist as a community across hundreds of miles.

Where Match.com is a direct descendant of traditional dating, the impact of internet on the “alternative”, non-traditional, and thus, niche relationships is much more apparent. Sites like AdultFriendFinder has been around for years, for people who are strictly looking for relationships that emphasizes physical connection first over the emotional (or, sometimes nothing emotional at all). There are niche dating sites that targets specific demographics, goth groups, interracial dating, BDSM, and the list goes on and on. There are even sites like AshleyMadison which focuses strictly on martial affair, or open-marriage relationships.

The traditional, Protestant upbringing side of me says, “OMG, I can’t believe there are sites that promotes such sacrilegious relationships!!” The reality is, I denounced going to church when I felt betrayed, when these same people who preached tolerance and love decided to participate in public protest against gay marriages in San Francisco. At the time I was working in a beauty company with several gay co-workers. In particular, my boss at the time, with his partner of more than six years, were ecstatic that they can finally be married and receive that ever-so-important symbolic recognition from the world. Only to see his heart completely crushed when it was taken away from him again.

One out of two marriage licenses that we issue here in United States ends in divorce. Yet somehow, we felt righteous about taking away the right of two people, who have been completely in love for years, the the ability to be married; and gladly give that right to a couple that will end in bitter divorce. At the time I thought, if my boss & his partner can’t get married, what little justification do we have for any of us to be married at all?

I think that’s really the first time, that I had issues the traditional notion of a relationship.

It’s not until recently though, that I find myself realizing that these alternative relationship, ones that veers away from tradition, might be ones that makes even more sense than the gold standard held by society (which should also be noted, isn’t a standard across society of humankind as a whole, but each culture has their unique take).

A bit of wisdom from my best friend is the trigger. In a conversation, she brought up that there is no worse loneliness than being alone in a marriage. I’ve seen those type of loneliness in people that I knew, some of them managed to escape the grasp of that life, but a lot of them also stuck around because they felt that they just had to. Conforming to what society taught them was the “right” thing to do.

This conformist ideal is in line with another friend of mine, who’s much more emboldened in traditional value than anyone else I know. Quite literally, she would fit in America of the 1940’s much better than she would today. She attributes the rising divorce rate to people who aren’t willing to stick around and work things out, very much a tragedy in her belief.

Of course, I can’t agree with it. I’ve seen too many relationships where people stick around not because they had to, but because they thought they were in fact, stuck. They didn’t want to consider the possibility of taking that risk to better their life situation, it’s too scary, too daunting. It’s not that they were necessarily working things out in their own relationship, because sometimes, there is nothing you can do when people change. Sometimes they become someone who you are no longer in love with, and you have to move on.

I simply think that people today are more intelligent and more independent, that people no longer happy to simply being accepted by social standards. Some of those time, on the path to discovering happiness, you have to leave traditional value behind.

What the success of sites like AshleyMadison, AdultFriendFinder really shows, is that as a society we are realizing the viability of those alternative type of relationship. The only type of intimacy that the Bible allows us to have, may not be the only solution. Why can’t we love more than person at a time, why can’t we be intimate with multiple people in our lives? Why is marriage only limited to heterosexuals?

An affair is only an affair because of society’s definition. Eliot Spitzer was ousted for hiring prostitutes, which I had no problems with, the problem I have with him is the fact that he was busting prostitutes at the same time. It’s his conflict of interest, rather than his interest that disgusts me. However, it’s a pretty well publicized example of a man who obviously was looking for something else outside of his marriage, and he went through with it despite of the risks. What’s even more ironic, is that his replacement, David Paterson immediate admitted that he also had extra-marital affairs for years just so it doesn’t become a media circus. In his case, his wife also had extra-martial affairs as well.

I can’t help but think, if our society accepted an “open-marriage” of sorts, or just simply abandone the whole notion of marriage altogether, that these issues would never arise. In my personal relationships, I’ve always been very much loyal and devoted to only one person at a time. However, in that devotion to one, I’ve also managed to almost completely severe my feeling towards other people that were in my life at the time. At one point, it might have been shameful for me to admit that in middle of my dedicated relationships, that I had thoughts about other women. I have at those times, very forcefully closed off my communication with these other people whom I also felt a lot of affections for. Only now, I’m starting to think that maybe I didn’t have to, maybe “we” didn’t have to. Maybe this whole society doesn’t have to. Maybe it’s about time we stopped using marriage as a claim of ownership to another person’s heart.

Of course, very much like the internet’s non-revolution, these type of new ideals with relationship management is nothing new. Beyond the fact that AshleyMadison and AdultFriendFinder are simply expanded markets for existing niches, doesn’t anyone remember the 60’s?

Stick to your cat, it’s not religiously judgemental, so long as you worship it.

Indeed, Colin, indeed.

Although I understand that the CoD series has always been about scripted battles, being a “shooter-on-rails”. The end result is that I am pointlessly bored as our team moves from point A to B, with AI constantly yelling at me, “Soap! Where are you?!” Let’s not go into how any respectable mercenary/militia man would allow himself to have a call sign that reminds one of a bad shower experience in prison. Give me Halo 3 anytime, even with Master Chief’s strangely erotic relationship with a piece of software (granted, a piece of translucent, glowing, and oddly sexy one at that).

So why did I even get CoD4? Part of it is peer pressure, all my friends were doing it. Part of it is that mixture of RPG and various online multiplayer modes are supposed to be fun. After several grueling hours of “grinding” myself to higher levels, which made me wish that I was still playing WoW, here’s what I’ve realized:

Call of Duty 4 is like having really bad sex.

• You spend a lot of time looking around in attempt to figure out where you are.
• You keep yours eyes peeled for any subtle, sudden, or strange movements that may or may not mean it’s okay to proceed.
• You spend hours, or what might have felt like hours in your space/time continuum, in various amount of coaxing and foreplay, just so you can get a shot at actual sex.
• Once in a blue moon, you might actually “engage” in the act of sex, if you’re really lucky or good depending on your degree of self-loathing or ignorance in regards to your insignificance in the universe.
• With all the odds of the world against you, you finally do engage in the act, only to have it end about 5 seconds later. Leaving you with a deep sense of dissatisfaction and regret.

Oh yeah, let’s not forget all the meanwhile, there’s some 12 year old kid yelling at you through the headset, “Do you like nipples?!! I like nipples!!!”

BTW, if you really want to know the secret to getting really, really good at CoD4, consult my dear friend Nano:

(10:02:32 AM) nano: maybe you should dress up like a clown
(10:02:37 AM) nano: noone looks for clowns during warfare
(10:02:46 AM) Steve: indeed O.o
(10:02:55 AM) nano: like that family guy
(10:03:01 AM) nano: when peter is dressed up like one in nam
(10:03:03 AM) nano: and hes like
(10:03:10 AM) nano: ’see, you guys are stupid. theyre going to be looking for soldiers’

Now, go get 25 headshots already.

“you are a very good critic, b/c you are able to articulate your likes and dislikes very very clearly… especially the dislikes”
“If you don’t like something, you will find the best words to say it… and say it in different ways 200 times”

I guess nothing illustrates this better, than a recent email that I had to send off to my housemates. I hate to admit this is almost the best writing I’ve done in … a long time:

Hey gang,

I noticed that the lint filter is sometimes being left full of lint after a load. Please take the small bit of time to clean after your lint. I don’t really mind cleaning out the lint before using the dryer; but it’s just a nice common courtesy to clean after your own lint, rather than having your lint being cleaned after.

Another issue of mine, is the amount of time that’s been taken up to do laundry. IMO:

1. It really shouldn’t take multiple days to do laundry, unless you’re doing laundry for a family of four or five (I do remember the good ol’ days when my aunt always seemed to be doing laundry.. but that was a family of five).
2. Even if you separated all your colors & whites & delicates & whatever, it really shouldn’t take more than half a day.
3. I see laundry being left out there for days at a time, this creates a few problems:
   • I’m not sure when someone’s laundry is “done”. Sure, I can open up the washing machine and take a peek, but that’s almost an invasion of privacy. I don’t want anyone to look at my underwear & such, and I certainly don’t want to look at anyone else’s underwear & such. Which brings me to the next point…
   • I could remove your clothes from the premise, but I really don’t want to touch your underwear & such, just as I would like it if no one touched my underwear and such.
   • The only situation at which I would feel comfortable with seeing your laundry out in public display, or having to touch any part of your laundry while it is in public display is:
     • I happen to be your mother, and I’m doing your laundry for you.
     • We are in a physically intimate relationship where I feel comfortable with that.
   • Given that neither of the situation above applies to any of us (unless I’ve been ignoring obvious signals? If so, I apologize, I’m a bit of a dimwit when it comes to intimacy), I think it’s safe to say that I really shouldn’t be seeing someone’s laundry just “hanging out”.

Anyway, depending on the time of the day, the mood which you’re in, this email may come across as 1) Bitchy & whiny or 2) Hilariously entertaining. Whatever the interpretation, I hope we can all respect each other’s laundry rights and perform the aforementioned duty quickly & respectfully.

I can be such a bitch.

I was a happy XBox owner, happy enough at the time that I sold my PS2 for a very cheap price including a bundle of games to a friend. That turned out to be one of the worst decisions I had ever made, because PS2 continued pumping out quality games for another two years, while XBox failed to pick up much more momentum and lacked quality title until the introduction of the XBox 360.

With that aside, Halo was the reason why anyone bought the XBox at all, even though it was not a particularly innovative game at the time. First-person shooter was already a very well developed genre, although it never fared quite as well on outside of its computer-platform origin. Halo marked the first time, that anyone was able to prove the FPS games can be done just as well on console as they have been on PC.

That brings us to the point, that Halo wasn’t a genre-redefining game of any sort; it is however, very much a genre-refining game.  Very much like Blizzard software, another company that’s been known for their refinement of existing genre, Bungie Software’s accomplishment with Halo is not to revolutionize, but refine and balance everything until it is near perfect.

Small and subtle game mechanics goes a long way towards changing the overall experience of the game. At a time when most FPS was about hoarding the biggest gun and the highest amount possible (in all descendants of Doom-like games, you carried as many weapons as there are in the game at all times, and you only used weakers weapons when the best weapon ran out of ammo), Halo limited the player to carry only two weapons of their choice, with limited ammunition. You had to constantly juggle the best situation to use a certain type of weapon versus another, and that results in drastically different approaches to encounters depending on what weapons you were carrying at the time. One little change to the traditional game mechanic at the time, yielded a completely refreshing and different game experience.

Somewhere along the line, Halo 2 lost of that magic. The developers in various interview admitted that Halo 2 wasn’t quite as balanced and polished as they liked it to be. I felt some of that too, since I could never bring myself to play more than half-way through Halo 2 in numerous opportunities. There was something intangible that bugged me about Halo 2, something that made it stale & boring. A weird balance that I never quite pinned down, but can only react by quitting the campaign.

I was not exactly excited when Halo 3 came out, due to my experience with Halo 2. However, since I got my own XBox 360, there’s no reason to not own the most renowned franchise on the platform. I could’ve picked up a number of other games on the aisle, but most of which I would just rent from Gamefly and then dump once I’m done with them. Halo 3, for whatever its historical value is, should be owned regardless.

The logic behind buying Halo 3 had really little to do with the game’s playability, but in retrospect, after finishing the single player campaign entirely by my lonesome (I didn’t even do that with the original Halo, a friend and I co-oped through the entire game), this was one of the best gaming experience that I’ve had in a long time.

At no point in the game, did I feel that I wasn’t challenged enough, and I was never so frustrated by the difficulty to just “give up” either. Most importantly, is that every battle encounter had a multitude of solutions, the encounters never play out exactly the same way, you are never pigeonholed into doing anything just one way. This is where the subtlety behind the game shines. The balancing of AI, the clear mission objectives & direction, and still having the flexibility to deal with every single battle in a multitude of ways dictated by you, not the game.

By comparison, I’ve also been playing CoD4 through the single player campaign. It is the most mundane & boring single player experience I’ve had in a long time. The feel of the battles might be authentic, but at no point did I ever have the flexibility to play the game the way I want to, versus just following directions that’s being constantly hollered at me. Of course, that is the trademark of the CoD series, it’s a “shooter on rails”. You follow directions, you camp spots, you fire away at enemy from cover for 5 minutes, you move to the next spot. Plant a beacon, pull a switch, more 5-minute cover fights. There are people who appreciate that type of focused, linear gameplay.

However, it is much harder to program a game where the AI reacts to what you do, and you’re given freedom to roam and reach resolution by your own devise rather than scripted events. On that alone, Halo 3 is a much more well made game than CoD4. Toss in the balancing of all the weapons, abilities, even sub-weapons and equipments newly introduced to the game, it is really the best FPS that I’ve ever played.

Of course, this brings up the question if it’s better for a game developer to rehash old gameplay and just refine and polish it, rather than innovating and revolutionizing the industry (and possibly, most likely, falling flat on their face for doing so). That’s an entirely different topic for another day.

Traditionally, I only post emo stuff following you know, some sort of a heart-breaking event in my life. This time really isn’t any different. Yes, there is a heart-breaking event in my life (of a very typical & easily guessable nature). However, that event in itself isn’t to be talked about here in a public forum. As far as this post is concerned, that event only serves as a catalyst for me to think about posting something here that is related to the mood itself, but not the subject matter. It also serves to explain why this “blog” uses a publicly available template, instead of a customized, made-just-for-me template that all proper designer should have.

The heart of the matter is, I loathe everything I make.

I had a conversation with my best friend last night, it was brought up that I have this huge void, a yearning and desire to be loved. She thought that I wanted to be loved by everybody as much as I loved myself, seeing that I always seem to self-righteous and stern about my ideals. There’s no question that she was definitely right about my need to be loved, but the reason is actually opposite of what she thought. I don’t love myself, not even a little bit.

Part of being a designer is that you need to have very firm belief in what you’re doing. Design is subjective, although you may support your design choices with as much rationalization, facts and data as possible, you can’t avoid debating over subjective opinions. For example, if I chose a shade of light green as our branding color, I can support that choice with the rationalization that it is a friendly, approachable color. Thus allowing our brand to stand out against other brands which are more tech-oriented, with a clearly defined male-dominant target audience. At the same time the color will not turn away the tech audience by being too effeminate. I’ve made this choice based on my experience, my personal opinion, and gut instinct.

So when someone asks, “Why can’t we go with blue?” Or even better, when someone says, “I really don’t like green, we should go with a color that’s more, you know… (insert your choice of pretty/normal/like what that other company does/pink here).” As a designer, you need to have the conviction and confidence to stand up for your point of view. This need for conviction is why I seem to be self-loving. “Steve thinks he’s always right,” is a statement of what I seem to be in front of others, not necessary of how I process thoughts internally.

I like to blame my job for this weird personality disorder of mine. It is also very possible though, that I chose this career because of that personality disorder. So in a way, I would’ve been the same whether or not I’m a designer, but by some strange twist of fate I happen to have a personality disorder that allows me to perform better at my job.

So, I have no love for myself. In its place is really a constant stream of self-doubt, insecurity and self-loathing. I can’t really explain how or why it started, it goes back for as long as I could remember, even as a child I was introspective in the worst way possible. I’m constantly examining my own faults, and rarely happy with any of my accomplishments (if one could call them accomplishments-worthy at all). Worst of all, is that even under this constant self-examination, endless number of personal flaws still slip through the crack. Thus the endless cycles of self-examination, loathing, and fixing what isn’t fixable.

How is this an essential part of my creative process? One of the most important lesson that all designer must learn, is that everything has flaws, faults, and must be critiqued. If you can’t identify what is “wrong”, you can never figure out what is “right”. Then you may or may not look at what you’ve just corrected into the “right” and try to determine whether or not the new “right” is now also “wrong” as well. The only thing that stops the cycle, is the deadline imposed by some other department outside of the design process. This pursuit of perfection will never end, and perfection doesn’t exist.

When I’m done with a major design project, I usually sit back a bit, admire all that has been accomplished, and feel good about my existence in the universe for a few brief moments. It’s only a matter of time before I find flaws in what I just accomplished, then there comes the fear and desperate hope that no one else has noticed the same flaws I just found. “How did I let that one get away?” “That color isn’t right.” “I should’ve done something different here.” And it’s only a matter of time before the momentary relaxation turn into another round of complete self-loathing.

Yes, I loath everything I’ve ever created.

There was a time when my portfolio was small enough, and my ambition for my own design-oriented website was just a few pages. I designed the website over the weekend, have everything coded, up and running by the end of that weekend. If I had any time at all to go through the self-examination process, it just stops. I hate what I’ve just created, I must destroy it and rebuild it again. This is also why PixelPushingMonkey has no real website and no real design of mine at the moment. I have not found enough time to complete this massive project in as short of a time as possible, before the self-loathing kicks in, before I want to destroy it all just to rebuild it half-way again.

I guess, this is the quality that makes me at least somewhat decent at my job.

It is also a very slow deterioration that eats through my very own being, a bit at a time, making that heart devoid of self-love even more empty. The void continues to grow, and my yearning for love goes along with it.

It would be a misnomer to say that the cycle never ends, because at some point, I imagine, I would have to stop. I would collapse, I would give it all up. At some point… maybe.

I could let it continue to eat me up inside, or I could force a change of perspective on my own life. How do you change someone into something that they’re not, that they’ve never been? I don’t think it’s possible to change one’s personality and their belief in life by rationalization and willpower. Aren’t we all exactly just as dysfunctional as we’re meant to be?

For the moment, the void is manageable.

As a bit of background, Purple Violets gained a bit of attention as the first movie directly released to iTunes as an exclusive before it is available either as a direct-to-video release via DVD/VHS/rental or in the theaters. This move generated a bit of media coverage which probably would’ve never occured via any other channels, and the film would likely have died an obscure death, or relegated to the bargin bin in Best Buy.

However, Purple Violets’ release is not just a play on generating media hype. The nature of the film itself is almost exactly the opposite of that. I am reminded of a few years ago, when horror movie genre was gathering steam yet again, and there were a lot of hype generated around some horror film fest (something akin to the 4 horror films you’ll never see, major studio will never release, or one of those all-weekend horror film b-flick marathons… or something); and the films all turned out to be forgettable, mediocre waste-of-my-time-and-intellect (what little is left of that last part).

Purple Violet is *not* one of those films that would’ve been dependent on media hype to just be seen. It is a very frank, straight forward and non-assuming film about relationships and human interaction. It doesn’t provoke any new revelations or truth about human nature, it doesn’t have any real controversies to induce emotional conflicts from its audience. Most of all, it does not attempt to make you cry and weep to prove that it is in fact, a very romantic & emotionally engaging film.

To put it blandly, this film is simply about people who had made mistakes in their lives, especially in regards to their choice in relationships; and how they were given another chance to rediscover what they might have been, and what they have lost. The dialogs aren’t dressed up with unnecessary complexity, they’re delivered naturally without pretense. Part of that I attribute to the script (written by Edward Burns, who is also the director), and a part of which I attribute to the wonderful casting (Selma Blair’s best work). The story itself is refreshingly linear, you always know where the movie is going, and it never once pretends that it’s going to veer away from that path.

This movie reminds me of Next Stop, Wonderland, which is another romantic film that delivers its content without dressing. Due to the likable characters and the tenderness of its plot, you can’t help but fall in love with the characters in the film. Purple Violets reminds me of how good a film can be, without trying to be anything that it’s not.

Well, Google released the Android SDK today. The SDK was pretty impressive, giving us a good preview of the the OS user interface (via Engadget). However, one can’t help notice how much the “mockup” looks like a Palm Centro, or any myriad of Palm or Windows Mobile device that’s been available so far. One also can’t help but notice how the UI takes many lessons from iPhone’s UI. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I suppose, but didn’t everyone expect a *lot* more from Google than just another software platform that looks just like any other software platform?

I listen to podcasts when I bike to work every morning (my form of reading the newspaper while having breakfast?), and one of the panelist on TWIT made a lot of sense, although I can’t recall it verbatim (and I’m too lazy to listen through a one-hour long podcast to find the exact quote). Whenever Google can’t conquer a market, they fragment.

Take for example, the “OpenSocial” initiative that Google just started. Google had their own social networking property (www.orkut.com), which was almost completely forgotten as a footnote to all their other services. Facebook became the monstrosity that overtook MySpace, which long before had overtaken Friendster. Orkut, however, was nowhere in anyone’s distant memory. By introducing OpenSocial, Google is undoing Facebook’s dominance in building web applets specifically for their service. In away, it seems like a move that benefits every developer, who can now develop for every social networking site (other than Facebook) and support many “platforms” at once. Of course, the “side” benefit is that Google has planted the seed that could possibly unseat Facebook from its dominance at the top, and also insert themselves as the tour-de-force of any social networking site that may eventually take the throne.

Taking a look at what they’ve done with Android, they’ve essentially fragmented any previous mobile Linux development, again inserted themselves at the helm of the movement. Furthermore, they’ve even fragmented the Java development community as well. CNet’s Crave blog has a great post on this, which touches on some of the issues with Android’s SDK and overall Java development. Of course this isn’t all bad, since Java in itself is a platform that has failed to satisfy anyone. However, once again it shows Google as a very shrewd company at being able to project themselves as a kind, gentle company that can do no evil; and at the same time, position themselves as the titan that is able to undermine an entire industry in one fell swoop.

Who does that sound like? You know it, it’s on the tip of your tongue, you know exactly who I’m talking about.

Yup, Apple.

It was another day of soul-searching later, that I said to myself, “Wait, is that all there is to this news? That’s it? Really? You mean, I didn’t miss anything? I mean.. I combed through my RSS reader for hours and hours looking for more detailed information, something more exciting, something with actual substance…. and… really? That’s it?” For at least a few hours, I thought I was caught in some sort of temporal anomaly and was missing vital information that Google has apparently announced to the entire world minus little ol’ me.

The truth is rather, disappointing? Underwhelming? Indeed, the news outlets were positive on Day 1, and almost all universally speculative and introspective on Day 2. How many times have we been promised a “mobile phone OS based on Linux & open-source”? This harkens back to the Linux PDA days, and we all know how that went. The only difference between Google’s announcement and all the other dozen open-source mobile OS initiative, is that Google has a lot of money. Shitloads of money. Certainly a lot more money than open source Linux companies that’s been trying to figure out how to make any money at all by doing, anything and everything?

Of course you’ll see an impressive list of partners, it’s Google for god’s sake! Everyone jump in the pool! The question is, how many of those partners really have any product development plans? How many of those partners will be looking for their own competitive advantage once the SDK is out? How many of those partners will actually, actively contribute to the initiative once they realized that they are at very high risk to put themselves out of business?

The answer for now is, “It’s Google, they’ll make it work.” We’ll see what develops in the coming months. I see it as Google just throwing a piece of SDK out there, and allowing the sharks to battle it out for supremacy. After all, taking this strategy really means they have very little stake in any particular company. It’s a smart way to position themselves, as a software platform provider that doesn’t really care which hardware wins out. If Sony Ericsson develops something great and put HTC out of business, so be it. If Nokia collapse (well, they haven’t made a commitment to the consortium at all yet, probably a smart move at this point for them), it really doesn’t matter to Google either.

I’m starting to see a bunch of executives & software engineers from companies gather at a coliseum built in Google’s backyard (or maybe by naval airbase or something), and someone from Google is sitting atop in the Emperor’s seat and just giggling at the bloodshed that’s about to happen.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the way that Google is going about this. In fact, it’s probably the smartest thing they could do to get into the mobile device arena without actually becoming involved in it. The style just disagrees with me on a personal level. I like companies that design end-to-end solutions that satisfies consumer needs. For example, Tivo is a great company that threw themselves into the heat of the battle, and forever changed the way we interact with televisions.

That kind of a company earns my respect. Google’s Open Handset initiative makes me wonder, “Is this just going to be a Linux version of Windows Mobile?”

So I was a little disappointed when NBC decided to have a bit spat with iTunes, and decided to pull all of their shows off of iTunes by the end of the year. What really gets to me, is how senseless the arguments the media companies are raising against Apple. This doesn’t pertain to just NBC, but all media companies dealing with iTunes as a whole.

Think back to when Universal was negotiating with Apple for their new music agreement. Their argument was that they’re not making enough money from iTunes Music Store, they want more control over pricing. Similar arguments has been brought up over the years with Apple multiple times, and they’re all along the lines of more control over DRM, more control over pricing, more profit for the record labels. Time and time again they insist that they can’t make enough money from iTunes Music Store alone.

Yet, look what happened these past few months. EMI started selling DRM-free tracks on iTunes, and doesn’t seem to be hurt by it as much as bolstered by it. All the other studios started offering completely DRM-free tracks on Amazon MP3 that sold for as little as $0.89 per track, depending on albums (although the misconception is all tracks are available at $0.89, they are not. Most out-of-print album tracks are $0.99, similar to how such albums costs more than new releases at record stores). They have agreed to sell less restrictive & less expensive music on Amazon, meanwhile telling Apple this is precisely what they cannot ever afford to do.

Now with this NBC deal, they’re complaining about revenue, about not making enough money. Same arguments as the record labels had with iTunes. At the same time, they’re going to be bringing out their own video service that allows you to watch entire shows for free (albeit with advertisements) and even embed videos on other sites in a very web 2.0-friendly fashion. So now they’re just serving up bandwidth and going back to relying on advertisement-based revenue models. Do they really make that much more money from webcasts compared to selling the shows? I’m sure the studios makes a huge amount of money from DVD sales of TV shows. Meanwhile iTunes’ sheer volume may not be as much as DVD sales now, it is a developing market that will probably grow bigger over time as we steer away from solid-state mediums for media delivery.

Furthermore, NBC’s little tirade about how much they’ve helped the iPod, and how they should get a share of that iPod sales revenue, is utterly ridiculous. Has RCA, Sony, Sharp and other TV manufacturers been sending part of their revenue to television stations? Obviously TV as a delivery medium wouldn’t work without the TV stations. So why isn’t NBC charging TV makers a fee for delivering their shows to millions of homes everyday?

We’ll see how this whole thing plays out. In the end, AmazonMP3 might take over iTunes Music Store, but that’s only because iTMS was there to pave the way first. Maybe Hulu.com will succeed, or maybe it’ll be a massive failure. Whatever happens, the end result probably wouldn’t impact iPod sales a slight bit. After all, no one’s stopped buying TV’s because NBC doesn’t have any interesting shows on Wednesday nights, right?

Why do we have asian/chinese “chicken” salad? Our cuisine covered an entire spectrum of all sorts of dead animals, why “chicken”? Is there a perception that Asian people only eat chicken, or somehow the only ingredient that you can mash into a salad from the entire range of Asian cuisine is chicken? Why isn’t there Asian barbecue pork salad? Asian fish salad? Well, if you really need to stay within the realm of poultry, how about Asian duck salad?

Of course, the mere fact that we have a certain salad created to cater to our culture is funny. I mean, growing up in Taiwan and all, Chinese people don’t eat salad, ever. Salad is clearly not a part of our traditional palette. So first we have our named tagged onto a type of food we don’t make, then have it limited to only one type of meat.

There is one possibility I have yet to consider though, maybe all Asian chicken salad strictly forbid the use of any other type of chicken excepted the ones imported from Asia…

Wow, that’s a whole ‘nother mess of complications.

With Tabula Rasa, I had the same problem getting into the game as I did with all other sci-fi-oriented or alternative MMORPG’s that tries to defy the traditional fantasy convention. There are a lot of game-related knowledge that doesn’t have to be explained in fantasy-based RPG’s. A lot of conventions are inherited, preached, rehearsed from years and years of fantasy literary work. Even those who aren’t into the whole RPG scene, understand the basic nature of the medieval-derived culture.

Here’s a pack of hungry wolves, they’ll probably bite me. Here’s a dragon, that’s really bad. I have just acquired a new plate mail armor, which is definitely stronger and sturdier than my previous chain mail armor. Picking up a bigger, two-hand sword probably means I do more damage than a one-hand sword, but swings much slower. Learning a new fire spell that shoots out a bigger fireball, is probably better than the one that shoots out a smaller one (unless, the smaller one is a completely different spell with a bigger concentration of heat in a small package!). Lastly, a blacksmith does exactly what a blacksmith does, and a leatherworker or an alchemist is unlikely to be taking care of farm lands anytime soon.

These are all conventions that one can easily assume when stepping into a fantasy world, and fantasy based MMO’s doesn’t have to explain those items & mechanic in as rich or deep of detail for the gamers to just step into the game to understand. One of the elements that made World of Warcraft so immensely successful, is the speed you can get into the game without having to read or think much about it. Hey, pick up a quest here, it’ll teach you what you need to know. Go find this trainer here, and they’ll teach you what you need to know. Combine that with the normal conventions that you’re used to, it makes for a game that works without having to pick up an instruction manual and dig through forums of information before you even start playing.

With a game like Tabula Rasa, I get the exact opposite feeling. Sci-fi thrives on inventing new terminology and technology. While this works extremely well in other entertainment mediums where the explanation of the technology is a part of the story, it really suffers in games, especially a MMO where there are massive amount of knowledge that has to be acquired already. The preference is that these knowledge will be slowly acquired over time, as in: What does 1 point of strength do for my character development? Exactly how much +hit% do I need? Those are the detailed, geeky math that you get into once you’re really deeply involved with the game. On the outset, you want the basic information to be taught to the gamers as soon and as easily as possible.

Without prior knowledge and conventions, a sci-fi MMO has a much larger task ahead of itself when it comes to the education of its populace. It has to teach you that one type of armor is better than another, what this weapon does versus another. Is a plasma rifle really as useful as a shotgun given your training & talent point allocations? Even the very basic neccessities of the game has to be “taught” somehow transparently to the gamers. If you had to force the community to reach to an outside source to understand what’s going on inside the game, even at the very beginning, then you would’ve created a huge barrier of entry and preventing you from ever building a large & successful community.

I’ve only played Tabula Rasa for a total of 2 hours on my character. This is exactly how I feel.

I don’t understand what’s going on, I don’t understand all the conventions & technology. I can’t even figure out how to equip spells that I supposedly had already trained, then had to take my web browser to a wiki site to figure out how to activate my abilities. Even after learning what I have to do, I failed to do so because by that point, I’m too annoyed by the game to want to play it. Lastly, of course without understanding the conventions and technologies, it makes crafting an impossible variety of jargons that I can’t even start to think about.

The combat system lacks a certain amount of involvement that’s required to keep me interested. What WoW did very well, even with its bloated number of spells & ability in the game now, is making sure that each spell & abilities you used had a purpose of some sort, and you had to use a combination & variety of them to be successful. This was evident very early in the game. This is not quite so evident in Tabula Rasa, where I am not sure why I would use spells versus armed weapon in different situations, or whether there would be any value to ever use one or the other. What I choose to do, seems completely random and have very little effect on the outcome unless I’m specifically told to “use lightning spell on this boss.”

That is not to say that these spells & combat system will become more purposeful as you get to higher level, but if I don’t sense that amount of clarity now, there’s no reason for me to progress beyond the current tedium. It’s more likely for me to think, “OMG, there are how many more of this pointlessly-firing-at-whatever I have to do? For how many levels?” than to consider the fact that the game will expand into some richer & more satisfying.

So, I guess I won’t be playing Tabula Rasa when it reaches final release. Here’s hoping Hellgate: London turns out much better.

Upon installing WP 2.3, I immediately was being fed errors due to the use of Simple Tagging plugin that I had before to manage tags. I had to disable Simple Tagging, then import the tags into WP’s new format. The import process was pretty easy and smooth. However I immediately found that there are no tag management UI built into WP 2.3 at all. Good thing that someone had already wrote a plugin to help manage tags, but it’s perplexing that you would have a blog that supports tags without any UI that help manage tags.

Furthermore, the tag cloud display that shipped with WP has no options whatsoever. It just displays a cloud, it doesn’t give you any customization capabilities. You can’t display a list view that I had before (although arguably I may stick with the cloud view anyway). Although there are a few early plugins that can help you customize the tag cloud display just a little bit, none of them had the flexibility of the Simple Tagging Widget.

Of course, retaining Simple Tagging isn’t possible, because the database structure that Simple Tagging used before is completely invalid with WP 2.3. So even though now there’s an “official” tagging structure in place, overall it is much less effective and usable than previous third party implementations. Over time, there will be third party enhancments to the built-in tagging mechanism for WP 2.3, but I’m really disappointed in how bad the out-of-the-box experience is.

I immediately scheduled an appointment at the Genius Bar, went in and exchanged my iPhone after work. The concierge at the Genius Bar was taken by surprise; he said it was the first time he’s seen this on the iPhone, although it was seen plenty of times on the iPod Touch already. He promptly exchanged my iPhone, and I walked out the Apple Store within 10 minutes of my appointment with a brand new iPhone and a much better screen.

The customer support experience I’ve had with Apple has always been very good. Although I do wish that I didn’t have to do that with almost every first generation Apple product I’ve purchased. I have exchanged an iPod Nano that couldn’t play Apple Lossless formats (even though it played everything else just fine), older iPods where the hard drive failed after less than a few weeks of usage; and my Macbook Pro’s power button has sunken in, which means I will have to take that to the Apple store eventually down the road.

Despite how well their products are designed, it’s also pretty widely known that first generation of any Apple product tend to have some unforeseen issues. I still remembered how the first TiBooks had a misaligned CD/DVD drive that can get your disc jammed and permanently stuck inside. Why can’t they just iron out these launch issues… pre-launch? Oh wells, at least I have a pretty screen on my iPhone now.

First we have to talk about the control of the game. Even though it is indeed the most fluid and well-calibrated use of the Wiimote so far, it still isn’t quite accurate enough to really get it right. There are basically two options to how you control the game, you can opt for the traditional, complete lock-on as offered on Gamecube before; or you can opt for the semi-lock-on, which allows you to lock onto the enemy and strafe around, but still aim your gun manually. The full lock-on makes encounters against non-boss enemies a joke, just lock on, move around and fire away blindly until the enemy dies, and find another enemy to lock onto. In contrast, the “advanced” mode controls is accurate most of the time, but it does lose tracking once in a while, and it’s easy to lose your cursor when tracking starts to get erratic. Before you know it, you’re staring at your feet trying to get the sensor to pick up the Wiimote properly.

An interesting side-effect of the contrasting control schemes, with one being overtly easy and the other being “moody”, is that the game pushes you towards the easier control; but the boss fights would be way too easy with it. So on many boss fights, your control scheme automatically returns back to the advanced mode, with manual aiming being mandatory on many fights. This caused some early confusion as I was playing through the game, as there’s a big red cursor for the boss that I’ve locked onto, but just a tiny little red cursor for where I’m actually firing.

Another sign that the control scheme is still buggy at times, is when you have to interact with switches in the game. I admit that the level of interactivity with the switch, many of which employs a variety of pull/twist/push mechanisms adds a whole level of immersion into the environment. At the same time, I’ve yet to come across a single switch in the game that just worked the way it was supposed to. Most of the time it fails to detect some of the motion I performed, and requires repeated push/pull action for the control to pick up at least some of the movements Similarly, the morph ball “jump” is controlled by a swing of the Wiimote, which often has problem recognizing multiple jumps performed in succession, causing some unnecessary grief in complex manuever situations (such as a bomb double jump with the morph ball).

Even with these flaws, the control scheme still offered a level of immersion that’s hugely appreciable. Except for those long boss fights where you can feel your shoulders getting sore, and at some point you just want the boss encounter to be over with. If minor control problems were Metroid Prime’s only detraction, I would’ve still loved this game. Of course the flaws doesn’t end there.

For Metroid veterans, you guys know what this game is all about. A mixture of some action elements, a lot of puzzle solving, and backtracking through previous levels to uncover new areas that you couldn’t reach until you’ve upgraded your abilities. Metroid Prime 3 still follows this tried and true formula, but I was really hoping that the series would progress and take that concept to a new level.

Puzzles are fun when they can be resolved quickly as to not disrupt the pace of the game. What worked well in Metroid’s 2d incarnations has never worked all that great in 3d. Finding a hairline crack to bomb on a 2d map was relatively obvious & easy. Finding the same hairline crack to bomb open, so you can use your morph ball and solve the puzzle in a fully realized 3d world is much harder. There are plenty of times when I got stuck running around the same area over and over again in attempt to solve a puzzle, only to find that I missed a little crack there, or I missed a double jump into a dark & vacant space that’s practically unidentifiable. That’s *not* good game design, when there are potentially too many points where you can get stuck trying to just get through a room to your next objective. At some point you would think that game testing would’ve caught these mistakes. Looking into every dark crack of every corner of every room, is not my idea of a good time.

The amount of backtracking, although a stable in Metroid’s gameplay, is also an outdated gaming element that should’ve evolved or just scrapped altogether. Visiting the same level that I’ve beaten 3 times before just to open up one more door, and get through 3 more rooms, is again, *NOT* my idea of a good time.

Overall, I think Metroid Prime 3 is a swell game, by far one of the best game on Wii. Does it qualify as a great game in comparison to Gears of War, or BioShock? Probably not, but Wii fans will have at least something to play that isn’t just another cutesy, casual title.

I’ve ran into a few annoyances so far with the iPhone:

• I missed being able to manually manage music. Even though creating a playlist for the iPhone is still pretty much the same thing, it just creates one extra step that I didn’t have to deal with before.
• I’m guessing the above change was made due to the “always disconnected except for sync” nature of the iPhone. I think Apple realized people will need to answer their iPhone at any given time, they can’t wait for the “disconnect first” method of previous iPod and all USB mass storage devices. So unless you are syncing, the iPhone is always disconnected. I think they could’ve created some sort of logic to handle manual management as well… but they just didn’t have the time to do that, so manual management is out.
• As a result of the above change, USB storage mode is turned off, so you can’t use the iPhone as a hard drive. Well, not unless you have other apps to hack it, I suppose.
• For whatever reason, iPhone also do not charge from USB when the computer is turned off. My previous iPods can charge from powered USB hubs even when the computer is turned off. The iPhone cannot. Hence you will probably be wise to grab another dock cable and have that with your AC adaptor ready at all times.
• I really hate the recessed headphone port.

Those are the only gripes I have with iPhone. There are other shortcomings for more advanced users, such as not being able to install native iPhone apps without hacking it (and having to reinstall them again probably after every Apple firmware update to the iPhone). I do wish there is a robust eBook application of some sort, but for the most part I’m happy using the various web-based apps for things that iPhone can’t do with antive apps. For example, Meebo on iPhone works extremely well.

With the new, larger screen, watching movies and tv shows on iPhone is also much more pleasurable than before. Also the playtime is much longer than iPod Video due to the lack of hard drive access. I’ve purchased an entire TV series from iTMS for the first time, and actually enjoyed the private watching experience almost as much as I would have on my HDTV setup. I can watch the shows before going to sleep (instead of hanging around the living room and falling asleep on the couch), I can watch them during lunch breaks at work… etc.

I also ripped some of my DVD’s using Handbrake into iPhone compatible format. I never thought I would enjoy watching video on such a small screen, but there’s something about the private, personal experience I can have now with my movies, just as with my music, that is very satisfying. I don’t think I’ve been this happy with any consumer electronic device in a very, very long while (since my first Tivo?).

Here I think of all the announcements:

1. iPod Shuffle - Practically nothing new and worth mentioning at all.
2. iPod Nano - It’s FAT. I really don’t like the new look. Although I bet once I’ve held on in person, I’d be willing to put up with the new form factor. It is even slimmer and overall smaller than the current Nanos. The proportion of the click wheel to the width of the device is just… ugly. I wish they could’ve worked a little harder and done something else. I was really hoping for an iPod Nano-Touch type of device here. It’s still not a bad iPod, just underwhelming.
3. iPod Classic - Same ol’ same ol’ with bigger hard drive. I do find it funny that the iPod Classic’s hard drive is bigger than some of my friend’s computer hard drive. Nothing new, nothing exciting.
4. iPod Touch - Great device, but it’s not really that fresh since it’s just a stripped down iPhone. Like I said, I rather wished they would integrate Nano + Touch into some device that’s in between.

I’m sure Apple will still sell a ton of them, because no other MP3 player in the market has near the media dominance. The surprise to me was the $200 price drop on the iPhone. I promptly went out and got one, 2-year contract be damned. At $399 it’s a very reasonably priced PDA phone, in fact, one of the most feature-rich and well priced phone you can get. I guess I’ll put up with AT&T for another 2 years at least.

Wireless iTunes Music Store… In a way it’s a long time coming, but I wonder how many times I’ll be wondering around in middle of nowhere just wanting to buy a new song?

Although I wouldn’t go so far as saying everything was “crappy”… I wasn’t extremely impressed either.