My father passed away on August 12th, 2008.

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

Within any office environment, there are always some very interesting social dynamics. Every department has corresponding personalities that one would expect knowing the stereotype. The people working in accounting department tend to be cautious and conservative, straight to the point with numbers and figures; but often seem to have a hidden wild streak to offset the hassles of rather restrained daily personality (These are most likely, the craziest and drunkest people at company parties). Engineers are often filled with plethora of trivial knowledge from all walks of life, and have a tendency to always drive meetings into levels of detail that it was not intended for. Designers are always somewhat aloof and odd in their ways, seemingly to harmonize on a different frequency than everyone else. In a politcally correct climate, we regard stereotypes as taboo, when in reality stereotypes are often established from years of factual observations.

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…

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. I’ve just moved to a new place, thus has been very busy trying to rearrange my life as a result.

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

In my younger days, I used to mock my father about how far he is behind the time, the fact that he can’t touch-type (he’s a classic two-finger, and on occassions where he’s striving for productivity, three-finger, typist) or really grasp any idea of what this whole internet deal really is. Occassionally, he still asked me whether sending me email across the ocean, from Taiwan, would cost me any extra fees (naturally, he’s more worried about me having to pay for receiving the email, than the fact that he might have to pay to send email… I love my dad).

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…

In regards to my low energy & lack of sleep:

(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.

Oh, the magic & wonder that is the blogosphere-rama. The last post on my evolving view on love & relationship, seemed to have caught a few unusual eyes. One of which is Jenny Block, an author who lives in an open-marriage lifestyle and is writing a new book.

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

…

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

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

Courtesy of my dear friend Colin at: A)bort, R)etry, F)ail.

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

Indeed, Colin, indeed.

Last night, my best friend informed me that she thinks one of my best talent (at least I hope it’s not my only talent) is being a critic. I think her exact words were something like:

“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

…

Here are some more pictures of my cute & adorable (and crazy) cat!  For no reason at all!

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