My father passed away on August 12th, 2008.

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.

Contrary to population belief, I’ve always felt that the internet didn’t spark a revolution as much as an evolution of existing ideas. Most certaily, “web 1.0″ was about bringing traditional commerce to a new avenue; but in its nature, the idea behind most of these businesses didn’t differ much from their traditional counterpart. In fact, most web 1.0 companies had close ties to mail catalogue & phone order business, just with a different interface & avenue that took less resource to manage, and gave you more information than what could be expressed in more traditional mediums. Even the advent of search engine giants at the time (oh Yahoo, how far have you fallen?) was a direct cousin of our traditional 20,000 page yellow pages that the phone company so happily left on our front porch (and I bet, the cause of many back-injury related work-comp claims for postal workers).

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…

Here are some photos of my cat… and the new place:

svgallery=2007_houseandcat

It’s been more than a month since my last post…

I’ve moved away from the cold fogginess of San Francisco, thirty-five miles to the south where it’s warmer and sunnier in Mountain View. Besides the benefits of weather, I also have a bigger, nicer place along with a much shorter commute to work.

Now that the new furnitures are in place, I’ve been meaning to take some pictures of the new place. There is a certain time in the afternoon when the sun hits the windows just at the right angles, and lights the room brilliantly. I’ve been missing the opportunity to capture just the right pictures at this time though… so I’ll get to it when I get to it.

Step 1: Remember to get my camera’s battery charged.

This past week, Microsoft’s Mac development team announced that a real document converter, that will allow old versions of Office users to convert to new versions of Office 2007 format, will not be released until after Mac Office 2008 is complete. It was a choice of using existing resources to focus on releasing Office 2008 for Mac on schedule, rather than delaying it to get the converter out.

A few weeks prior, Apple made a similar announcement in regards to OS X. In order to get iPhone delivered and out on the market on time, they had to shift resouces from the OS X team to work on the iPhone. Therefore, they had to delay the release of OS X until after iPhone.

The general reaction to both of these events are about the same, although Apple’s announcement created a much more visible ripple through news coverage (and understandably so). Most people would think, a company with the size, resource as Microsoft and Apple, shouldn’t have any issues simply pulling in new resources and get the software released on time. Having gone through the responsibilities of finding new hire and contractors myself, I can sympathize with the difficulty of simply bringing in new resources. It’s never as easy as finding qualified people and bringing them in.

Besides the process of finding and filtering through the number of talents out there available, you have to find the one that culturally fits into the company’s general atmosphere. That process in itself can take more than…

Ran across an interesting little tidbit in my random browsing of the intrawebtube:

Last season for Battlestar Galatica

All I gotta say is, ABOUT TIME!

This past season of BSG was complete, utter crap except for the last episode, which just gave you barely enough to want to see how it ends. The progression of plot in BSG is completely reminiscent of X-Files. One episode in the beginning of the season to continue the cliffhanger from season past, and one/or one two-part episode with a cliffhanger to keep you coming back the next season. Fill in everything in between with utter, useless crap that explores mini-plots that no one cares about.

Since the second season of BSG, I’ve felt that the show was written for maybe one mini-series, or maybe two seasons; then stretched out into many, many more seasons because the TV executives realized they have a franchise on their hand, and they can make a *LOT* of money from it. So let’s stretch out that story arc, fill in as much crap as possible, and figure out how to make money from it for another extra few years.

It’s sad when a series that started off with so much promise, left me in the end saying, “Good riddance.” Although, I’ll still Tivo the last season just to see where it goes, and probably watch the movies and whatever other property they’ll come up with after that as well. After all, I stuck it out for every single season of X-Files, even…

Just updated WordPress to the newest version. I have no idea what security flaw the newest version fixes, but any security flaw fix is better than none. If you have not upgraded to WordPress 2.1.3 yet, download it here.

I’ve pretty much stuck with Blogger since the beginning, before Blogger became a Google property, when it was one of the few freely available blogging tool that existed. So what induced this loyal Blogger blogger to finally change over? One would think that I was dissatisfied with Blogger’s capabilities, but that’s quite the opposite. In fact, the newest version of Blogger, with its tags & widgets, has all of the features that I’ve always wanted.

For the most part, my switch to WordPress almost represents a step backwards. Hosting my own blog, running it on a local database rather than one that will potentially last forever somewhere in Google’s massive server farm. Customizing my own templates, throwing in Plugins to coax WordPress into what I want it to do. In fact, WordPress doesn’t have any official support for tagging, and still relies on a somewhat antiquated category system to deal with post organization.

So why switch to WordPress now? I wish I had a better reason to justify it, perhaps it was just my urge to be able to tinker more than I could with Blogger, perhaps it was the notion of having complete control; maybe it’s even the possibility of implementing WordPress on more sites, where the owner doesn’t feel particularly comfortable with giving everything up to Google.

Whatever it is… I’m happy with the move, until next time, that is.

Meanwhile, here are some tips to getting WordPress up and running:

• Install Sidebar Widgets:
  This addon will give you the ability

…

I’ve always believed that a great product is made a few brilliant people with the vision to create something innovative & intuitive. Perhaps it’s due to my designer background and philosophy, where the success and the failure of a design firm really rests on the vision of a few people, rather than say, a focus group, research institute or a database collected over a number of years.

Apparently, that isn’t the corporate culture we have in America today. The corporate culture we have today is a series of handed-me-down responsibilities. The board of directors demands that the CEO to be responsible for the direction of the company. The CEO demands that his VP’s of various operational group within the company be responsible for the direction of the products. So you would think that somewhere down the line of responsibilities, someone has to make choices & decisions.

Problem is, responsibilities is also directly linked with faults and blame. It wasn’t the CEO that made the decision to focus on project A instead of B, it was the VP of some other department. It wasn’t the VP that made the decision either, it was the people working in the department that gave the VP the valid information, whatever that may be, that led to the decision for the VP to make the recommendation to focus on project A instead of B. Thus causing company to lose market share and money instead of potentially make millions and watch the stock prices go up (which…

There are plenty of things going on that I *can* post about, but didn’t have a chance to. So at some point.. they will be posted, right? Right?….