As irony would have it, my puberty wouldn’t arrive until I moved to America to live with Dad. It’s almost as if all those years of begging to finish my dinner was completely pointless, as Dad took all the credit for my healthy development into a young adult with little and no effort. Not that my Dad was a terrible cook, in fact he was a terrific cook when he had the time; but it was also a fact that Dad could’ve fed me anything remotely resembling human food, and I would’ve gladly shoveled them with complete disregard to the actual content.

Puberty is not without its awkward moments. Victims can easily identified by awkward body developments, strange facial growth resembling either the surface of pizza or the moon, hair growing in strange places and voices that turned into something that belongs on the muppets. For me, the worst side effect was my body odor, a foul and unstoppable stench that emanated from the suddenly overactive glands under my armpits.

Dad, having gone through puberty so very recently, if you consider big bang to also be a recent occurrence, did the best he could. He purchased for me, various brands of colognes to attempt to cover up the unstoppable beast that I’ve become. The result is similar to when shady restaurants tries to sell spoiled and rotten food by putting more salt and soy sauce into the dish. One day, one of my friend, who has been a very gracious and kind person up until that point in our relationship, had decided that he could no longer tolerate sitting next to me on the school bus on the way home, especially after a pick-up game of basketball. He turned and asked me, “Steve, do you know what a ‘deodorant is?’”.

“Yeah, sure, my dad buys them for me?”

“He buys you deodorants, are you sure?”

“Yeah, he buys me all these bottles of cologne and stuff.”

“No, Steve, deodorant is not the same as cologne.”

Americans tend to take their wonderful invention for granted: Cotton gin, steam engine, microprocessors. I personally think the greatest contribution that America has made for the human kind, is the anti-perspirant/deodorant. See, my dad was not the only person who did not have the knowledge of such wonderful invention that eliminated one of puberty’s most vile humiliation, the entire country (or island, or province, depending on your political affiliations) of Taiwan did not know the existence of such wonderful creation. I don’t know how teenagers in Taiwan dealt with puberty, because I was fortunate enough to be away from the combined airspace shared by a couple dozen body odor-emitting teenager all sitting in the same classroom.

I wasn’t the only beneficiary of this new discovery. Even though Dad was years past his teens (despite how much he still wants to be one), he too found “Sure” and “Old Spice” was now his new best friend. Even though body odor wasn’t an issue for Dad, the possibility that he could smell even better, and become even more handsome and attractive than he already was (vanity runs in the genes), is an incredibly appetizing proposition.

The discovery of deodorant marks a fine example of unique experiences that Dad and I share in the period of time we lived together in America. A lot of those experiences are about cultural differences, events and knowledge that are taken for granted. We make fun of Europeans for not using deodorant, because from our perspective, we can’t fathom deodorant as anything but a day-to-day consumable. Rather, it is almost a cultural icon of sorts, embodying the hygenic value of American life.

Amongst those unique experiences Dad and I shared, the rituals of Christmas was also very new to both of us. Even though Christmas is a recognized holiday in Taiwan, we don’t go out and buy trees. Even though we understood certain gift giving aspect of Christmas, it wasn’t required for the family to gather around and open presents on Christmas day. More often than not, Mom simply took us out shopping for one or two toys that we really wanted. Not to mention in a religiously diverse environment such as Taiwan, Christmas has very little religious connotation to most of the general public. Jesus is not the reason for Christmas, Santa is.

That first Christmas, Dad took me out to visit his professor, Dr. Lee Spray’s house in New Jersey. There I saw my very first snowfall, had my own stocking hanging by the fireplace, and placed my first present underneath a real Christmas tree. We spent most of our holidays there, because Dr. Spray always treated us like his own family. Christmas tree, big dinners, fire place, and opening of presents.

After Dad finished his dissertation, we started moving around as he started looking for a job. Now being more than a couple of state borderlines away, we couldn’t visit Dr. Spray’s house anymore. That Christmas we spent by ourselves, with some of Dad’s close friends. Living in a much smaller apartment, we didn’t have a fireplace or room for a gigantic Christmas tree. Even though, Dad was insistent to keep the tradition going, we went out and bought a little plastic Christmas tree and placed it in the corner of our apartment. We didn’t have a fireplace or a big house, but we gathered around the little plastic tree and opened our presents just the same.

That was the last Christmas Dad and I spent together. He accepted a position at an university in Taiwan, and I moved to California to stay with my aunt. We were never able to celebrate another Christmas together, the schedules of our lives just never worked out that way. Dad visited a few times during summer time, and I went back to Taiwan a few times during the summer. Christmas time tickets were always too expensive, and it didn’t make much sense celebrating Christmas in a place where even plastic Christmas trees weren’t easy to find.

Christmas trees notwithstanding, even deodorant was a recent import product, and absurdly hard to obtain. It was also much more expensive than buying the same product in United States at the time. So everytime any family member had a chance to go back to Taiwan, Dad would always make sure they brought back a batch of deodorants with them. Of course, this was over fifteen years ago, and deodorant is now an everyday product, but Dad still asked people to bring some back.

This Christmas, I went to my aunt’s house for dinner. She always cooked twice as much as what we needed to eat, and then cook even more stuff for us to pack and take home. As she was packing stuff for me to take home, she ran off into the garage in search of something that she forgot to give me last time. It was a stick of deodorant.

It was from the batch that she brought back to Taiwan for Dad, but she never got to see Dad before he passed away.

I still have that stick of deodorant in my bathroom. It’s not a brand I use, and it’s almost like a memorabilia of all those unique, weird, odd experiences that Dad and I shared. I thought about getting a glass box and enshrining that stick of deodorant forever, but I’m not sure I want the family heirloom to be a stick of deodorant.

I just hope wherever Dad is, he’s not having problems with body odor.

The perils of the public bathroom is often absent in the recess of our minds, which I suspect is a form of primitive self preservation technique. Denial is obviously the most effective tool for curbing one’s natural instinct to avoid dangerous situations. Despite my brain’s better effort to mask the dangers, thus disallowing any confrontations of the public bathroom, I will put my own life on risk to address this series of life-threatening issues today.

Bathroom Design – The Division

I don’t know who was the brilliant engineer that came up with “the division” between bathroom stalls. The proponent of the division would say, “What, would you rather have no wall at all?” My issue with the division isn’t the fact that it exists, but the fact that it doesn’t exist enough.

Let’s say, if you were building a house, would you ever consider putting in walls with six-inches hollowed on the bottom, or having two-inch space between the walls? Other than a certain type of “converted-loft-into-living space” lifestyle, where the open space is meant to focus and project any strange noise you make into a sonic boom that can be released by cracking your windows just an eighth of an inch (thus allowing all of your neighbors to know exactly what you were doing last Saturday night), it’s hard to imagine anyone would build houses with floating walls on purpose.

So why, in the name of whatever holy entity one might be subscribed to at the moment, would anyone think floating wall in the most holy sanctuary of men is enough? How much longer will I have to watch as shoes pacing by the front of my stall door and pray silently to myself, “Please don’t look, please don’t look please don’t look..” There is no dignity with floating walls, let’s just all pass a bill that makes it mandatory for every public bathroom to have walls that touches the ground, and doors that closes without leaving peeping cracks, okay?

Bathroom Design Part II – The Urinal

Make no doubt, men take pride in their urinals. It’s one of the few (very, very, very few) places where men can claim almost absolute superiority over women. “See, I can go pee in less than the time it takes you to drop your pants and sit down!” However, the urinal itself is filled with an impossible flaw:

Splash.

Back.

I’ve seen all types of urinals throughout my years. Small ones that required precise aiming, gigantic urinals that one can sit inside if so choosed, ones that stretches from top of the ceiling to the floor, and elongated urinals that makes you wonder, “Where do I stand?!” Regardless the size or shape of the urinals, there is one common inevitability. No matter where you “go”, it will splash, you will eventually get some on you in some very visible and embarassing place. You can aim high, you can aim low, you can aim at the little hole on the very bottom or the “cakes” that never seem to really absorb anything (a little tip, the cake usually causes the most amount of unpredictable splashback). It does NOT matter.

This is what leads me to believe, that the designers behind urinals are really all women. It’s a dark, hidden conspiracy. It was created, supposedly, to prove the superiority and the efficiency of the male gender by demonstrating just how fast we can zip in and out of the bathroom, impatiently waiting in front of the women’s bathroom while tapping our toes. In reality, we’ll be staring blankly at the bathroom mirror wondering to ourselves, “How did that get there?” Meanwhile mortified at the slight chance that our dates might even peek (and they will peek!) at the general region.

Gentlemen! Speed & efficiency is NOT the most important issue at hand here. Slow down, aim carefully, and use a toilet if you have to (preferrably one with full length wall enclosures)!!!

How the Fuck Did That Get There?!

Despite my previous recommendation to use the toilet at all cost. There is one exception to the rule: If you can’t aim… don’t use the toilet!!

Even with all its flaws, the urinal provides a much larger (usually) surface area and shorter (usually) distance of travel will make up for one’s lack of aim. Splashback is the price that one has to pay, but you don’t expect for human invention to make up for all of your personal problems, do you?

Men, by default, tend to overestimate their own ability to control anything around them, may it be environmental, circumstantial, or limbs & organs that are actually attached to their body (which by definition, they *should* have control over and yet remain hopelessly without). Men who overestimate their ability to aim, commits the worst of sins that can be associated with the bathroom.

We’ve all had this experience, when you walk into the bathroom toilet stall and think to yourself, “How the FUCK did that even get there?~!!” At times you would think that the person that was using this particular toilet before you, might have their internal organs arrangement inverted from the normal physical anatomy that we’ve studied in school. There are several variations of this reaction:

How the fuck did that get…

• on the toilet seat
• on the floor
• on the door
• in the next stall
• on/in all of the above

combined with…

• a manly growl
• a girlish scream
• utter look of disgust
• utter blank stare of shock

Worst of all, men being men, we are not programmed to innately understand the operation of cleaning apparatus of any kind. Even at the expense of exposing oneself as “the guy who just did that” by simply walking away from the stall with a person waiting directly outside the door, men would still choose to leave things as is, and assume the evidence will magically disappear in between sessions.

Is This Even Made From Paper?

Many people make fun of fast food chains for purchasing meat of such low quality, that they would never actually make it onto supermarket shelves. The same can be said of toilet paper for use in public bathrooms. I have no idea how to source and acquire these toilet papers, but it is not rare for one to consider that large print newspaper might be a better choice.

The types of public bathroom toilet rolls I’ve experienced:

• Thin to the point that any bit of moisture will rip through multiple layers. This will probably remind you of the mistake that you made when you purchased that condom from that gas station vending machine one time.
• Despite being thin enough to melt in the air humidity of say, Florida, the toilet paper still manages to be sharp enough to virtually erase your finger prints.
• Multiple layers that never lines up correctly, which isn’t a big issue, but tends to make me very confused and attempt to “fix” it. Somehow tacking on another 20 minutes to the time I spent in the bathroom when it’s all said and done.
• Perforations that never seem to tear away correctly. One tug, you get half a tear and another 3 sheets, and this will continue as long as you insist that the perforations are there to help you.

Worst of all, is when they use the one ultimate toilet roll that seems to combine all the attributes of above: Thin, rough, multiple layers that seems to be falling apart at rapid pace, and most of all… no perforations at all. I don’t know how much money is saved each year by the mere absence of perforations on toilet rolls, but they make these long, continuous rolls that leaves the tearing and separation of individual sheets to your own device.

How am I supposed to know how many square sheets of toilet roll I need, if there are NO square sheets at all? One simply cannot expect the average, normal people to have the mental acuity to be able to determine an arbitrary value of toilet paper length needed! Can’t they at least print some sort of measurement units on the toilet paper itself (although I doubt that will be cheaper than if they just added perforation).

Even more frightening still, is such toilet rolls are always without a doubt, combined with a toilet roll dispenser equipped with a safe, plastic cutting blade. PLASTIC! It seems to take strength and reflex of Olympic proportion to make sure you get just the right amount (relatively speaking) of toilet paper separated with these dull, plastic blades.

I undersand the plastic blades were invented to protect one from cutting themselves, and thus avoiding potentially embarassing lawsuit. However, I think that anyone who files a lawsuit because they cut themselves while dispensing toilet paper, should probably be quarantined away from the rest of the gene pool.

What Is That Smell?

I’m not talking about “the smell”, we all know what that smell is. I’m talking about the urinal cakes, the air fresheners (both the spray and plugin kind), the blue liquid stuff that comes out when you flush, and whatever fashionable contraception there is to keep the bathroom sanitized and “fresh”.

For some odd reason, none of these devices ever seem to work as advertised. It’s almost as if the aim of such devices is to create a mixture of smell with human excrements that can only smell worse by a factor of ten or more.

Personally, I think all these devices were created to speed up the process and flow of people in and out of public bathrooms. If anyone made a device that can actually completely neutralize the bathroom smell, it would only cause people to stay even longer in the holy sanctuary that is the bathroom. Think about the typical amount of time spent on the toilet reading while you’re at home, versus the time you spent on the public toilet. The time-spent-ratio favors home bathrooms by an enormous amount.

This is no accident my friend, very much like the headache-inducing music or nausea-incuding smell at popular clothing retail outlets, these are all subtle hints that pushes you to get in, get it done, and get out instead of lingering around.

In Conclusion…

The situation is dire, and I’m not sure what I said here will be enough, or in time to save anyone from the perils of public bathrooms. I can only hope that someone out there will read this message, and think twice before they enter a public bathroom. Even if you HAVE to go, please go as safely, as possible.

Our lives as a family, has been a series of comedic, if not tragic timing. My father had, at several different points in his life, prominent career that seemed to point towards the ideal of success. He was once a manager of human resources at RCA of Taiwan, subsequently owned a very successful company with a few partners. I don’t think my father was ever a business genius of any sort, rather his rapid ascension at almost any given opportunity had more to do with his genial personality. Family might be his priority, but friends were a close second to the extent of seemingly eclipsing the first. However, that forgiving personality would prove to be his flaw as well.

I never questioned much about my father’s past, as I’ve never been a person who’s particularly interested with history. Although I’ve overheard that my father’s company eventually failed because of the misplaced trust in one of his partners, resulting in the loss of their IP and the manufacturing plant. It’s a theme that plays out in several different occassions in his life, because by nature, he trusted people until they’re proven untrustworthy.

Dad’s decision to pursue higher education in America came shortly after that. We became a long distance family, while dad pursued his degree and worked hard to eventually migrate us over to United States, mom brought us up on her own with help from various family members. Dad would come home during summer vacation, only being able to stay for two to three months a year.

During one of those summers, we went to pick up Dad from the airport. I remember searching for Dad’s old driver’s license at home the night before, because I had forgotten exactly what Dad looked like (a sort of condition that persist today, I consistently have problems remembering people’s faces). At the airport, I saw this man that vaguely resembled my dad from the driver’s license (he had shaved his mustache, which made him much harder to recognize); I walked up to him and asked, “Are you my dad?” He cracked a big smile at the time and laughed at my silliness, but even at that young age, I thought that I might have unintentionally hurt his feelings.

Dad’s feelings were important to me, although he was gone for most of the year at that point in my life, there was never a question to how much he loved us. Those summer vacations when he was home, were still some of the most memorable part of my life. There as no particular moment in those time that stood out, but it was the most normalcy that existed in our family. We went out, we went shopping, we went to restaurants, we hung out. The most simple part of life was the most treasured, and those months that we had to spend apart just made those moments we spent together even more precious. Dad would place his hand on the back of my neck when we walked down the street, his hand was rough, ridden with callus, and the most wonderful warmth for a little boy.

Dad’s plan was to move the entire family to America, but by the time he got us all green cards (a process which took years of work), my brother was already over the legal age at which males are allowed to leave the country without first serving in the army. Instead of the entire family moving over, my mom had to stay in Taiwan to take care of my brother. The choice to come to America was never forced upon me, but somehow Dad knew that I would’ve enjoyed life here, much more than the life I had in Taiwan.

Even then, the plan was still to move the entire family to America. Timing again foiled my dad’s future, as he finished his Ph.D. at a period of economic downturn with an extremely tough job market, especially tough for a man who spoke English with a heavy foreign accent in a very competitive field. We spent a year traveling & interviewing for jobs in various locations. We would find an apartment here, stay with a friend there. Dad would take trips to visit different university campuses in hopes of landing somewhere, which took anywhere between a day to a week at a time. In that single year, I went attended four different schools, and eventually Dad realized the best opportunities for him is still back in Taiwan.

For better or worse, I ended up being the only symbol of achievement for his years of struggle. Once again the choice of where to stay was left to me, and I chose to stay here. After all the plans fell through, I remained mostly intact to what Dad really wished for. Still, I did not become a doctor as he wished, but I lived a life that’s relatively well-to-do.

The funny thing about having a long distance between Dad and I, that’s probably the thing that made our love the strongest. We didn’t have much time to fight or argue, we barely had enough time to love.

Timing would be my dad’s nemesis for one last time.

As my brother was expecting the first child of this generation of our family, I had made plans to visit them after the baby was born, and spend some quality time living at my parent’s house pretending to be a twelve year old again.

Two days before my brother had his first child, our family’s first grand daughter, my father passed away.

It was sudden and without warning, as his air passageway finally collapsed from years of smoking. We knew he was having problem breathing for a while, but it was under control for the most part. One moment he was just sitting there, watching TV and relaxing with my mom. The next, he couldn’t breathe, and there was nothing we could’ve done about it. It was already too late by the time the ambulance arrived.

I guess everyone always wished that they had more time to spend with their loved ones before they pass away. There is never enough time. It just seemed even more painful because I knew exactly when I was going to book that flight to see him, and that I just spoke to him four days before wishing him happy Father’s Day*.

By rough estimation, there were anywhere between 500 to 800 people who attended Dad’s funeral. Friends, colleagues, family, and hundreds of students from current and years past. For weeks leading up the to funeral I had been calm and comforting my mother whenever possible. Despite my best effort to be the voice of reason and acceptance, I completely lost it when I had to address the crowd. I don’t know if what I said came through as anything more than a series of incomprehensible sobbing.

Up until that moment, I don’t think I’ve ever fully comprehended my dad’s accomplishment since those years when he came back to Taiwan. Seeing all those hundreds of students that all held Dad in such a high regard, realizing how Dad had influenced the lives of so many, filled me up with pride and sadness all at once. I knew at that moment, he loved them all, just as he’s always loved all his friends. They were all Dad’s surrogate family.

I had to wonder, if Dad had lived 20 more years, faded into the distant memories of these students, would they still remember him if he had passed away then?

For once, time did not forsake him. If there was the perfect way to pass through this life, Dad had picked the perfect time. He passed away gloriously, enveloped by the love of all those who will always remember him.

*:Father’s Day in Taiwan is on August 8th.

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.

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…

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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 a few weeks. Multiple interviews are scheduled with each interviewee, each person in the process will take up at least half of a work day. If you were lucky enough to find someone who is equally qualified in both skill set and personality (usually you end up with more of one, or not enough of the other), it will take anywhere between a week to a month to integrate the new hire into the processes of your workflow.

All in all, for just one new hire into an established team, you’re looking at a hiring and development cycle that ranges anywhere between 3 weeks to 2 months. Not to mention that getting the new hire attuned, probably takes attention and time away from the rest of your team. By the time that new hire is an active, autonomously contributing member of your team, you’re looking at 2 months down the road.

This situation is even worse when you’re dealing with short-term hires to finish specific projects. You need to ramp them up to speed to finish the project on time, then after the project is done, you have to figure out if the long term plan of your company justifies keeping that person on tab. The obvious solution is to not make any permanent hires, and simply contract out the work. However, the process of finding a contractor, and maintaining the relationship with the contractor isn’t any easier than finding a permanent hire.

It’s easy to criticize these companies for not expanding resources to get their products out on time. The question is, would you rather put up with shoddy quality on the final product because of improper resource expansion? Under the same situation, I would always choose to maintain the quality of the product, rather than the schedule of the product.

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 after Mulder was nothing but a guest appearance for three or four episodes a season.

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 to widgetize your sidebar. It’ll make the various sidebar components much easier to manage than editing the files directly.
• Inline Ajax Page:
  This is the plugin I use to automatically truncate posts, and be able to expand them on the fly. I like this much more than WordPress’s built-in method to split post. This is also closer to what I used to do on my Blogger page. Expanding post on the same page for reading has always been more appealing to me than linking to subpages.
• Most importantly… Simple Tagging:
  There are a couple of plugins that’ll extend WordPress to work with tags. This is one I picked over the other, for its combination of flexibility and simplicity.

Let’s see how long I stick with WordPress before I get crazy and install something else

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 is only a hypothesis, since project B never got off the groundf anyway).

So to preserve one’s “lack of blame”, one must create at least another level in the chain of responsibilities. Thus, at least this is what I theorized, focus groups & market research were born.

I’m not completely against market research or focus groups, but I *am* against using those as the only benchmark of a company’s ability to make the right decisions. Companies hire people with dozens of years of experience in a given field, trusting that their expertise will provide the company with the right process, visions and plans. Yet at the end of the day, the same said company will question their employees to come up with data & research that supports their every decision.

So what if Jack in Sales Operations has 15 years of experience, and knows that the marketing angle we’re taking simply won’t work? He’s only been in the field for 15 years, what does he know? Let’s go out and do a round of focus group, market research, surveys, then we’ll see if the evidence is substantial enough to prove Jack right or wrong. God forbid if there was inconclusive evidence, in which case we’ll just do another round of research and focus groups until we get enough evidence to be conclusive.

At the end of the day, if we don’t give at least some credence to the 15 years of experience that Jack had, why did we hire Jack anyway? Why didn’t we just hire some fresh-out-of-college data research geek? Google it, wiki it, then focus group, survey; all decisions in consumer product should be made that way, shouldn’t it?

I am Jack’s rambling rage.

I = tenant

Would’ve been nice to know just a few minutes before I get the cat, wouldn’t it?

Worth a read:
The Presto Service and HP Printing Mailbox Review – Part Two

I often thought about creating my own little holiday season, perhaps akin to the “Summer of George”. As attractive of an offer as that is, I’ve never been able to pull together a “Summer of Steve”. My last job left me with over hundreds of unused vacations hours when it was all said and done. I doubt this one will be much different.

So, welcome to 2007, and even though my resolution for this year may include the need for a more regulated sleep pattern, somehow I doubt that’ll be possible between ,World of Warcraft, work, and life in general.

A high school English teacher I once had, made it a point to have a 40-minute class dedicated to the differentiation of the common usage of irony as we know, versus the literary device & meaning of the word. Perhaps it was only fitting, that this particularly bright & dedicated teacher was fired at the end of the semester, due to many student issued complaints about her moodiness; ironic indeed.

Either way, I’m not sure if these particular events in my life qualifies as irony, or maybe coincidence, and for those of us who has more faith in the unseen, perhaps we could call it fate.

As I’ve mentioned before, a surgery scheduled around Christmas was what started me off on World of Warcraft two years ago. That surgery, was a combination of chance, timing, and my own choice. I could’ve had the surgery earlier, or later, but the only time slot that seemed to make sense, was to throw it into the middle of the Christmas season.

However, it also is not the first time I’ve had surgery during the festive seasons. My first surgery (and only other surgery in my life) was also performed around the same time. It was a case of appendicitis that started rearing its head around the 27th or 28th, and eventually grown into body-spasm inducing pain as it ruptured.

Not to delve into the complicated living arrangements that was my youth, but I was staying with my aunt at the time. None of us realized how dire my illness was at the time. Needless to say, I didn’t have much to say about the timing of this procedure. Even less had I to say about the series of mis-steps that eventually led to the surgery room. Besides the extremely delayed diagnosis, we had also made the mistake of not calling an ambulance, opting instead to drive into the emergency room on our own. As a result, I was treated alongside patients with slight fevers and cold, instead of proper treatment for a life-threatening infection that is now spreading through my body. Of course, that mistake was not ours alone, also as much as the hospital workers who simply stashed me into the back of the line.

It was a nurse that was about to go off-duty that noticed me. She had examined me earlier and determined that I probably had appendicitis, and urged the others to get me into a room as soon as possible. Of course, the ball was dropped, and I was sitting in the waiting room for a solid three hours or so before I was finally admitted by her personally. Had she not seen me on her way out of the door, I probably wouldn’t have survived at all.

That is the closest I came to facing death, a fact confirmed by my surgeon days after the surgery. “You were only about another hour or so away from an irreversible infection, you know? Once the infection penetrates the diaphram and reaches your lung, that would’ve been it,” he would later on relay to me with a proud smile on his face. Another life saved, but it never had to be that close if it wasn’t for the incompetency of the hospital to begin with.

However, those hours spent in the waiting room wasn’t wasted. I was very well aware of my own mortality, as the pain grew and festered. It was a pain that wouldn’t give way even to the multitude of pain medication and morphine I had later on. Although the drugs did create a psychological disassociation with the pain, I would be laughing and joking as they’re taking my x-ray, while I can barely move around and stand up due to the pain & muscle spasm. The combination of pain, realization of my fragility, perhaps to a point of how little control I had over the current situation, forced me to re-evaluate my life at that young age.

That event alone, would indeed reshape my life down a direction that I never before considered. In hindsight, it was perhaps childish of me, in both the world I had created for myself up to that point, as well as the epiphany I had from that point on. None of that realization seems significant now that I’m in my later 20′s, or perhaps they’re so ingrained into who I’ve became, that it no longer seem to carry any significance.

It’s been two years since my last Christmas procedure, just as it’s been two years since I first picked up World of Warcraft. As I celebrate this Christmas, a dear friend that I’ve met through World of Warcraft, and then in real life as well (we have almost weekly gatherings at her place), is having a surgery of her own.

The short and happy story, is that she’s safe and sound, with a good amount of weight removed (quite literally). For me though, this special sort of coincidence carries more meaning than just a friend getting over a surgery, but the timing of it, the connection that’s established through both the events in my own life and how I came to meet this person, all makes it seem as if a larger force is at work.

The life threatening operation I had when I was 14, the procedure I had two years ago (almost to the exact date to which my friend entered the hospital), picking up World of Warcraft to pass time while I recovered from surgery… All eventually led to me being a supporting character of some sort in her life, as she is getting her own special Christmas surgery.

I don’t know if this can be categorized as irony, but I had long ago, forgotten the exclusive definition insisted upon by that endearing, if not moody, English teacher.

Knowing that I wouldn’t have very much physical activity for a while, I decided to give World of Warcraft a try. WoW had already been released for several months, and garnered many good reviews. I haven’t been a steady gamer for quite a while, although I dabbled in various MMORPG for a bit (anything from the pre-alpha, beta of Ultimate Online, to a few months in EverQuest amongst other various MMO’s that came and went), I’ve never found any of them to be a satisfying experience. I liked Blizzard’s games from before, and WoW was getting enough good press to garner my interest.

To my surprise, WoW was not only a great MMORPG, but it was a great “game” by any standard. Up to that point, MMO’s has always played second fiddle to your regular PC games. Yes, they have a huge community that may suck you in, but generally the grahpics and gameplay was sub-standard compared to what you would get from a single player experience. WoW was really the first MMO to bring it altogether, great interesting play on a single-player level alongside of the massive world and community. Before you know it, I was sucked into the game, deeply entranched in its social atmosphere, spending hours a night leveling and running new instances and challenges.

I think the biggest misconception about a game like this to the outsiders, is that a game is just a “game”. There are many often heard, cliched complaints about people who are dedicated to WoW. For example, people who wanted you to do something else instead of playing the game may say something like, “Why don’t you just save the game?” To these people, it isn’t obvious that WoW is more than just a game. As with all MMO’s, a huge part of the attraction is the social atmosphere that is established over this virtual environment. Having a game-based objective helps bringing people together via providing them with a common interest. However it is the social interactions and obligations that makes the game as important to people who are playing it, as much as their other, non-game space related social obligations.

In the two years I’ve been in WoW, I’ve gone through the transitions of being a casual player, to a hardcore raider, then toned back down to a semi-hardcore casual player. Through the journey I’ve met a lot of people from all different facets of life. There are your high school and college students who are so addicted to the game to the edge of dropping out of school (which I highly recommend against). There are the working class folks like me. Then there are the independently wealthy folks that doesn’t have to worry about other things in life except to play WoW (I wish I was one of these folks). What’s even more surprising, especially for a person from my perspective of a single, working professional, is that for many people WoW is a family activity rather than an individualistic endeavor. I’ve ran across more than a couple of gamers whose spouse, children, some even grandparents that all played WoW as a part of their daily social interaction.

What is also interesting, is that the older, more mature the gamer is behind the character, the more likely that WoW carries more meaning than just being a game. It is easy for some of the younger kids to dismiss WoW as “just a game” and the social community they work within, whether a pick-up group or a guild, are just means to the next great loot. The older the gamer is, the more cognizant they are of social ramifications of the community they are involved with.

To those uninitiated, it may seem ludicrous to treat the friends that I’ve made in a “game” to those whom I’ve made in real life. The reality is that our social behavior is changing rapidly by an entire generation at a time. Just as kids who make friends via MySpace, communicate to each other by IM and text messages, WoW is no less a social atsmophere within the context of a game as MySpace is a social atmosphere within the context of Web 2.0. I think this behavior is also proven through Second Life, which is a virtual environment without a hint of the game-induced, goal-driven context; unless the goal is of the individual who wishes to participate in such a virtual environment on their own accord.

It also makes me wonder, what if World of Warcraft fails us one day, either by not living up to our expectation (The Burning Crusader expansion is just around the corner, and we’ll see how the critical mass respond to it), or just shutting down operation in transition to another game (perhaps, World of Starcraft one day?). What will be the next destination for our mass social gathering?

Walt Mossberg’s review on Wall Street Journal
(sorry, subscription required for this one)

Presto on CBS’s Early Show

Presto on CBS’s local San Diego station

San Jose Mercury News

A very detailed out of the box experience via Gear Diary

In a way, it would make more sense to shred a certain number of application per year by “accident” in order to extract more application fee out of the same people over and over again. After all, there are no repeat customers in the naturalization market. You can only get naturalized once in a lifetime; well, unless you decide that Vancouver is more to your liking than United States (a conclusion with surprising number of growing supporters).

The irony of the whole thing, is that it wasn’t for 9/11, I may still be amidst the process. It was the establishment of Homeland Security that forced changes in the immigration services that moved all the paper-based processes into one that is electronic. Imagine the most important document in your life handed over to some random person without a face, being packaged & shuffled across the country multiple times. That was the situation that I, along with what has to be hundreds of thousands of immigrants per year has to deal with.

It seems very odd to me, that this, my last application went through with rapid speed. It took no more than six months before I was in an auditorium, with 1255 other newly minted Americans, to take our final oath and turn in our green card. Yet this turn of events was at least in part, made possible by the tragic event that has shaped America for the past several years. The impact of 9/11 isn’t just those people who died, but the families of those who had to carry on, and those soldiers we’re sending overseas to fight in a fictitious war.

Yet for at least one person, 9/11 was a fortunate event.

Even then, I still faded away from Mac in the 90′s. The mid-90′s was a dark period for Apple. Steve Jobs was gone, and Apple stopped innovating on new technology, instead focused heavily on marketing and diluting their own product line by introducing a seemingly endless number of models that catered to no particular segments (well, they were supposed to, just never did a very good job at it). The only memorable about Apple during those periods were the endless informercials I would see on Sundays about their line of Performa, Quadra, Classic… so on & so forth.

After many happy years with Windows (and I do stress, that I was in fact, happy with Windows), I finally made the switch back to Mac. So what prompted me to finally make the switch?…

I never had much “brand loyalty” of any type to begin with. As a personal mantra I have with all of my purchasing decisions in life, I go with what works. Throughout the 90′s, Windows kept on getting better. Despite what Mac zealots may be led to believe by the great Apple marketing machine, Windows 95 was at least on par, if not better than Mac at the time. The subsequent Windows 98 and Windows 2000 releases (we can just try to forget about ME and most versions of NT up to that point.. those were.. *cough*… software I’d rather not traverse) were all heading towards the right direction. Windows XP is really the pinnacle of it all, where Microsoft finally consolidated their codebase, giving backward compatibility & forward progress at the same time. Meanwhile Mac struggled along with System 7, 7.5, 8, and finally the horrible mess that was System 9.

It really wasn’t until Steve Jobs came back, made the decision to completely scrap backward compatibility and ditch MacOS 9, that Apple started to get back on the right track. At least from the software standpoint. PowerPC was a pretty good platform for a while, but the lack of developmental support from Motorola & IBM really allowed PowerPC to fall behind by a fair margin. Forget the talk about how great G3, G4, and G5 was. The fact is, those CPU’s didn’t live up to their performance unless given a very specific situation & specific benchmark that made it look good for the marketing team. Intel and AMD was faster, dollar for dollar. The awesome advancements such as Alvitec was nothing more than glorified MMX and SSE. Good thing those did for our x86 chips, right? (To a point, those features have somewhat became an integrated part of the chip design.. but I’m not an engineer… so I won’t go into it. Ars-technica is great for that type of info)

This year though, I’ve finally hit a “tipping point”, as the scale fell back into Apple’s favor, prompting my switch back to the Mac after nearly 15 years of using Windows exclusively:

1. The switch to Intel
   This is a huge reason for me to switch over to the Mac. Finally I don’t feel like I’m paying extra $$$ for an inferior CPU. The playing field in terms of hardware advancement, is finally even between PC and Mac.
2. PC, despite conventional wisdom, aren’t cheaper
   Pricing a Mac Pro configuration on Dell’s website, as many have suggested before, will actually give you a more expensive PC than the Mac. An equivalently configured Dell will atually cost more. I think part of the reason that Mac seems more expensive, has to do with their configuration & pricing scheme. You have iMac, which would be cheaper if the monitor isn’t integrated. Mac Mini which is a great entry-level machine, but gamers can’t play games on it. Mac Pro which has great, awesome power, but usually is more than what your typical user would need. If you can sell a system configured like a high-end iMac without the built-in LCD screen, that would be the price “sweet spot” for the typical PC buyer right now.
3. I can’t just “upgrade” my PC anymore
   I used to just upgrade bits and pieces of my PC to keep myself up to date. As computer development sped up rapidly due to competition between AMD and Intel, that just isn’t possible anymore. My last major computer upgrade consisted of an entire motherboard, CPU, memory, hard drive, video card and power supply swap. I’ve literally gutted my entire computer to keep myself “up to date”. The price of keeping up went from just a few pieces of hardware, to basically half of a system. Next time I want to upgrade my CPU, I can guarantee that my motherboard wouldn’t be compatible, and who knows what other parts needs to be retired (my hard drives has already fallen behind the current SATA standard).
4. When I buy a Mac, I’m buying a PC too
   Mac can run Windows, either using a virtual machine via Parallels or dual-boot using Bootcamp. Parallels can be a tiny bit slower (you probably won’t notice unless you’re running benchmarks) and it can’t play games (just yet, they are planning to do that in the future), but since you no longer need to emulate CPU, it runs extremely well and extremely fast. In fact, some users reports Photoshop CS2 being faster in Parallels than MacOS (CS2 is not Universal Binary, so it runs via Rosetta emulation mode on Intel Macs. This may not be true anymore, since MacOS X 10.4.8 brought a lot of speed improvements in Rosetta. Still a remarkable fact though). Bootcamp is literally booting your machine like a PC, no compromise in speed whatsoever.
5. MacOS X has matured
   OS X had several years to refine itself. I remember seeing the very first OS X, it was a resource hog and had a lot of inconsistency throughout its UI and file structures. All these problems were slowly ironed out over the past few years. The GUI is extremely stable and flexible. The file system really screams in comparison to NTFS. While Windows Vista is just catching up to where OS X is today, OS X is already moving forward. Which brings me to the last point…
6. Windows Vista
   Ironically, this was probably the nail in the coffin for me. Windows Vista, despite all its praises compared to Windows XP, simply wasn’t impressive to me. It attempts to do everything that OS X already does, poorly. “Aero Glass” is a disgusting attempt at making an eye-catching GUI while giving us no more functional improvements. Sure, it may look cool the first few times, but does transparency really help me work better, or just make everything more cluttered? Flip3D is a complete joke compared to Expose. There just aren’t enough improvements in Vista to prompt me to invest in “Vista Ultimate”, which invariably will be the version I would want to run if I was still a Windows user. Vista isn’t bad, but it’s just not good enough.

Now, I’ll admit that I miss playing some games in Windows. It’s still frustrating to see the extremely wide variety of games available on Windows as opposed to Mac. I’m just happy that some of the best game developers out there do care about Mac (for example, Blizzard with all of their games). There are several promising developments that will perhaps continue to bring more games to the Mac platform.

Meanwhile, I haven’t been this happy with a computer in years.

A staggering amount of changes has happened in the world since then. Our country is now in the middle (or perhaps, some would think optimistically towards the end) of a baffling & almost meaningless war. The web had somehow grown up into “2.0″ without my realization, even more ironic given that I have been doing nothing but the web since college. The mass public has moved into LCD panels despite the obvious performance issues that still plague them (and will never be solved), and thus, so did I.

Yet it’s also amazing how much of the world only seemed to move forward. Every time I see a journalist talk about the usability & greatness of RSS, I think about PointCast. Much of what RSS is now, came from what “push technology” promised. Now the only remain traces of “push” resides in Windows Update, whose insistency is not entirely appreciated by all.

Five years ago, I would also assume that by now, the music industry would’ve wised up and somehow embraced digital music distribution. Sure, iTunes Music Store has been an astounding success in its own right, but it is nowhere near taking over the traditional music sale business. What boggles my mind even more is that the music industry has still yet to accept digital format fully, and is still consistently fighting & negotiating over the distribution model. Take Microsoft’s Zune for example, which actually pays a royalty fee to Universal for every unit sold. Or that fact that Canada still charges a tax for recordable CD’s. I would expect by now, not only the music industry would embrace digital format (I mean, think about it, cutting out the middle man means more profit, right?), but they would offer high quality, lossless codecs. Phish has offered lossless recordings of their concerts for years!

Then again, to put everything into perspective… I’ve gone through two more jobs in these past five years, but I still live at the same place. So who am I to judge?