1. Tenant ask about possibility of having a cat.
2. Landlord says yes, you can have a cat.
3. Tenant lets landlord know when they can expect a call from SPCA.
4. Landlord says it’s all good.
5. Tenant goes to SPCA, fills out paperwork. SPCA worker calls landlord for confirmation.
6. Landlord says yes to SPCA worker, hangs up.
7. Landlord immediately calls the tenant, informing the tenant that she will need the house back in about 5 months or so. Don’t worry, you have plenty of time to find a place to live.

I = tenant

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

Sometimes, I wish I can be working at a company where I really do get “holidays” through the Christmas/New Years season. Last few years I’ve worked in consumer products; meanwhile it is a much more rewarding experience overall than working at a purely tech/web company, it also obliterates any chance of a real vacation over the break.

Christmas is accompanied by an insane & non-stop rush to get last minute promotions in place, and this year, New Years is compromised by the rush to get materials together for CES. Throw in a seemingly endless amount of family events in between, the holidays turned out to be huge fiascos over the past few years.

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.

I think part of this tale could be considered ironic. Although in the strictest sense, the word “irony” is often misused to characterize what could purely be coincidental and unfortunate. Even more confusing is the association of irony, “dramatic irony” in particular, as a common device of literary tragedy.

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…

I first started playing World of Warcraft two years ago, when I had a surgery scheduled right before Christmas. Given my work schedule at the time, the only sensible way to get a surgery done was to mix it into the Christmas/New Years season and lump it into my vacation to give myself adequate time for recovery.

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…

… I became an American citizen at last. As much as I should have been excited, my mood was rather nonchalant, preceded by weeks worth of anxiety, and followed only by a sense of relief. My journey to citizenship was not particularly painful, but it was anything but pleasant. The old immigration services department was extremely inefficient, insisted on pushing paperwork around the country rather than getting data computerized. The result of which was a long and tedious application, and re-application process which was repeated more than a few times in the past few years.

The most frustrating aspect was how much time it took just to confirm that my paperwork had yet again disappeared in the abyss of bureaucracy. At some point I suspected that a team of entrepreneurial gnomes snuck into the the INS office and stole paperwork on a nightly basis, a la South Park’s underpants gnomes. They would then transport those paperwork into their secret underground headquarter, where on one side of the cave, there would be a huge poster of their business development flowchart. One huge block with “Immigration application”, eventually leading into a bubble that says “Profit”; but the step in between would be filled with just a giant-sized question mark.

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…

The very first time I fell in love with a computer, was my brother’s Macintosh. This was way before Microsoft even had Windows 1.0 up and running. It opened my eyes to what the computing experience should be like versus what it was. The concept of a GUI, the usage of this odd little device called “mouse”, the chime as the Mac booted up was all so intuitive to me; so much so, that my brother was concerned with me breaking the computer for the first time. It wasn’t so much that I would spill drinks on it, but I knew how to use the Mac enough to really cause some damage to it, where I would never be able to even navigate my own way through DOS without his guidance.

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…

It’s been a long time since I last published a blog. My last post probably dates back closer to the last quarter of 2002.

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…