I did run into one snag: Since WordPress’s own default theme is really formatted for a fixed width 800×600 screen, it doesn’t jive with my new design & content areas. I looked around and found this theme, which is a 1024 adaptation of the original WordPress template. You can download this template here:

WordPress Default Theme 1024 Wide

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.

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.

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