Daily misery

Ice Age 2 has inherited all but one essential elements its predecessor was so famously known for - that heart-warming, mammoth-moving yet educational storyline. Which is why I felt something was missing after the show even though I was laughing and giggling like a 5 year olds throughout the entire movie. You gotta have a message, it can be a subtle one, but you need to put it forward. Like sex, it can be a short one, but you gotta have it. Ok lame metaphor. (Btw, having sex out of necessity because you are trying to repopulate your species is not a very solid educational message, IMHO.)

After the movie, my gal friend and I hit the Dish for dinner. The scallops entree was awesome. I swear the coconut rice is the best cooked rice I have ever tasted ever since I came to Lincoln. Then we started to exchange gossips about Malaysians (that’s what Lincoln’s Malaysians do while they’re dining). Oh God some of these gossips are so outrageous I swear I will cut off my penis if they are ever true. Some of them can easily be metamorphosised into blatant personal attacks. It’s a shame really, that we have this kind of ‘tradition’ going among our little community here. Leading such a popular life as I am (see this is a different gal from the one I went to the ice cream session with, and they are both a different gal from the one I had a DVD session with…) , I can only begin to imagine how many times my name pops up on the dining table. Not that I really mind or anything but it’s just disheartening to see the fact that we are already a very small community as it is (around 100?) and yet we have all these groupies and clans saying and spreading the most unthinkable and obnoxious stories (or lies…) about other people because of the mere fact that ‘this is what we do’.

I would be the first to admit I’m guilty for ‘doing what we do’ but there are times when I hope everyone realizes how much hurt and damage we could’ve done to that person and that we would get an entirely different view of perspectives if we are to talk to him/her (if any of us is ever that curious about what’s going on). It’s funny whenever there’s a gathering among malaysians and stuff like that, everyone in the room pretty much knows about everyone’s elses stories and we just pretend like we are chilling and having fun. Pretenders or is that an art of socializing that I’m obviously not very well equipped with?

The night was getting late. As the gal friend and I prepared to leave, came this dude with an apparent asian fetish going inside his head making a pass on her. I was like WTF?! We walked away. Who’s lamer? Me not confronting the horny bastard or uhm… the horny bastard?

It was a great night nevertheless.

I have added the portfolio section, with a little help from an angry, kick ass red monkey. There will be more cool projects being added to that page soon, stay tune. One question that prospective clients and fellow freelancers kept asking me is why do I have to keep some of these projects private (MIA in portfolio). Well the main reason is SEO. When you work with a startup company, the company name will most likely does not even exist in the search engine index because there’s no content other than a splash page on their domain. If you put these clients into your portfolio before they even launch the product, chances are your name will appear higher in the search rankings when the buzz starts to kick in. Which is good for you, but bad for them. And trust me, you dont want bad, angry clients. I’d learned that the hard way so hopefully this will serve as your tip of the day. :)

Did I ever tell you guys how much I love Mayday? I have a lot of respect for this band for many good reasons, but mostly for crunching out songs that are just pure fun to listen to. No one really writes real stuff in their songs anymore. I hope they will stick out for a while. And do you know they are the best selling artist in Taiwan’s entertainment history? Me neither. I thought that honor would’ve easily gone to Jay Chow. Maybe I was wrong.

Anyway, here is ’salty fish’ (direct translation, of course).
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The original version is so much better that it deserves its own post. Thanks to draco for the tip!

Video sites are popping up everywhere right now (in fact I am contracted to design the UI for a new video startup which is launching soon). When you stumble across a video on the web that you like, ever wonder how you can transfer it into your Ipod video? Here’s a simple run through.

First, download the video.
Thanks to this site, you can easily download any videos from those famous video sites.

Then, convert the video files (flv, mpg, avi) to MPEG4 format
I used iSquint to convert the videos into Ipod compatible format. Simple interface and it actually works.

Lastly, put it in your itune and transfer. Duh!
Well, there you go. The picture above is my Ipod, playing a music video downloaded from youtube.com.

There had been some debates about Malaysian oversea students not coming back to work in their motherland upon graduation. Being one of those who fit such demographic profile, I think I can offer some insights in regards to the issue. Well there’s actually only one point that is worth pondering.

It’s not about the money, seriously.
If it was really about the money, then it wouldn’t be that hard, would it? To offer a prelude to my point, people need to aware of the fact that living in other countries is never like living in your own. For some of us, it’s not even close. There’s a lot of things to miss and at times you feel that a significant parts of your life is missing. It is after all the place where most of us are born in, have our first puppy love, high school mud-soccer game, first sex, friends, families and let’s not forgetting the roti kahwin and ba kut teh. But why all these nostalgic recollections coupled with a few thousands bucks per month (or more) still take a preceding backseat when it comes to deciding whether we should go back and serve our country? Well I can’t really speak for everyone but on top of my head, it’s because we love what we do for a living.

I love what I do so much that I just won’t settle for a higher salary back home doing nothing but rest my ass in that executive chair. It’s the same reason why I would go back for half the salary I am currently earning if Malaysia is the place where I want to build my career on. Why is Malaysia not such a place? A dive into my career will probably offers a clearer picture.

I’m a web consultant. Web is a constantly evolving field (as with any other professional fields, I believe). I develop web applications, design UI, information architecture and bla bla bla. As more people are transitioning their desktop-based application to web services, the web is turning into a very exciting place. New technologies are being created every day, new ideas waiting to be developed. I have the privilege to attend web conferences, discussion groups, and talks and learn from various networks of really bright and helpful peers. There’re get-togethers among web developers in many parts of US cities. Research papers are easily accessible and funding are, ahem, more easily and equally distributable, regardless of your skin color. Peer reviews and collaborations are happening in constant frequency. All of these are where it starts to make going back to Malaysia a less attractive proposition.

We don’t have the fundamental infrastructure and professional community in place. One might say, this is exactly why we need you to come back for! Well, does Malaysia, in all honesty, give us the necessary resources and environment to start working on that? The simple answer would be no. I do have Malaysian friends who would go back if they’re being offered competitive salary. In fact, that’s their only concern. But I really believe in doing what you love and had in fact in more than one occasion turn down higher salary offers in favor of lesser one but with the prospect of working on more exciting projects. It’s not very uncommon. And it’s almost an insult to people like us when money is seen as solely the main reason why we won’t go back.

I’m not trying to be an elitist, but merely trying to enjoy my 8 hours everyday to the fullest extend possible. It’s almost a double income when you love your job.

People read about issues like these and somehow make up their own impression on how there’s a shit load of Malaysian surgeons and lawyers working for big ass companies in foreign countries earning big bucks. Well, there’re two big misconceptions in that sentence alone. First, there’s not a shit load of us. Second, it’s not as easy as you think and getting a foreign degree definitely does not guarantee you a 50k or more per year pay check. I would like to believe most of us work very hard to come this far. And for those of us who make it big time, we want to keep doing the thing we love, keep pushing the envelopes and leading the pack, to innovate and work on exciting projects without having many strings attached, to manage a team of brilliant engineers and being able to attend professional conferences and other collaboratory forums. We would love to come back even for half the salary, if Malaysia can offer such a platform. Why? Remember the nostalgic recollections? :-)

So maybe it’s time for the politicians to stop looking for reasons on why we are reluctant go back and serve our beloved nation (it makes a good political campaign’s speech, I know), but to focus more on how to improve our country, both socially and economically. Everything sort of goes along once you get the very fundamental structures well taken care of.

So there’s this girl. She’s just an ordinary, down town lawyer girl. She met this guy in a costume party (or a car accident..whatever). They fall in love with each other instantly and start seeing each other. But this guy is a HIV positive. The girl is angry, confused, in a deep dilemma. The guy regrets everything about his past. He tries to run away. Friends and families start to distance themselves. They can’t have sex. Every conversations about the future is so painful. They break up a couple times only to find back each other arms again…..

I haven’t decide on the ending yet. Maybe we can bounce some ideas back and forth. :-)

I tend to use weird naming conventions in my codes. People usually don’t like to read my codes.

This is part of the xhtml source code for the newly launched www.onoff.se, a Swedish consumer electronic chains who recently ran a full-page ads in national newspapers promoting their new site and how it is ‘mostly adapted accessibility-wise for customers with disabilities, e.g. visual or hearing impairments’. Via [Roger Johansson]

Over the last few years, the general web community has started to embrace the css/xhtml paradigm, distancing themselves from table-based markup in the process. This is a good thing, hell it’s a great thing. Many web developers do so mainly because it is just so much easier and common sense. Having the power to control almost the entire layout from a single css file and apply changes to multiple pages with a single line of code.

Few of us convert because it’s important to separate presentation and content, utilizing semantic markups or that we’re concern about the accessibility and usability issues. People just like to do thing the easier way and happy to say that, css/xhtml is the choice of doing it the ‘easy way’.

Hence the ‘divitis’ syndrome. ‘Every ‘td’ cells represent a div’ thinking brings us the wonderful codes shown in the above picture. In fact, you can even use the ’save for web’ option in Adobe’s Illustrator to transform design mockup to css/xhtml markup! Sweet lovely mother of all Gods. It’s like back in 1995, only 10 times better because now you’re embracing the ’standards’.

That, coupled with the explosion of AJAX (everyone should put onclick, onmouseover events on your ‘a’, ‘div’ and ‘p’ tags! Woot!) make our source code looks fat, ugly and stupid. Not only we have an explosion of ‘div’ tags, but now the endemic has spread with the inclusion of new variants - the overusage of classes and IDes. All because we, as web designers and developers and information architecturist, want to control everything. It’s an irony, considering that the main reason why we were in the ‘table mess’ during the early web years is because designers and developers wanted to control the web and back then the web wasn’t maturing at a pace fast enough to support their ‘creativity’ (or maybe they didn’t know the difference between print and web design) that the only viable solution was to use the table markup.

If the current loading time of Yahoo! Mail beta or having to insert 10 external javascript links in between xhtml ‘head’ tags is what I have to endure/do in order to fully enjoy that ‘rich user experience’, then thanks but no thanks. I want my html 4.0x back.

It’s like taking a huge step forward only to take another two giant steps backwards. *sigh*

Here is some of the stuff I enjoyed recently.

Movies:Leon, Mindhunters, Equilibrium, Duma

Songs: 五月天 - 牙關, 陳綺貞 - 旅行的意義

Articles / Blog entry: Andrew Sullivan’s ‘My Problem with Christianism’, waiterrant’s ‘Sunday Morning’

Game: Rise of Legends

Food: Reese’s peanut butter cups

Update: I’ve added Leon to the movie list. It’s a mind-blowing movie, please check it out. Yes, that’s Natalie Portman when she was still young enough to hold a gun. Btw, Leon was her film debut and it was one hell of a fine debut. ;-)

Before:

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The panoramic header image was taken from my balcony sometimes during last year Christmas season. Stay tune for more interesting, big ass and controversial header images in coming months.

Anyway, an iconbuffet buddy of mine sent me the ‘marseille cafe‘ icons a couple months back. Upon receiving the icons, I just knew I had to come out with a design that plays nice with them. It is, in my opinion, one of the better crafted icons in the free delivery package.

The blog design didn’t get to see any sunlight back then since most of the projects I was working on were those ‘2.0 web applications UI design’ sort of stuff. Until this young woman came to me one day asking for a blog design.

yeawen.com
I was ecstatic and thrill when she told me she was thinking of setting up a blog. I’d pitched the idea to her for quite some times because I’m a big fan of her writing. She’s one of those people ‘who don’t have a blog but should have had one’. So I grabbed ‘marseille’ out of my dusty comp folder and put on some finishing touches on the design, polished it with my AJAX dishwasher, used my magic wand to transform it into a css template and ported it into wordpress theme.

It doesn’t hurt that this project gives me the rare, precious 8 web design warm fuzzy feelings. It’s one of the projects I enjoy working on more than others. Although it is filled with dummy contents right now, I can reassure you she is many times a better writer than I am. She just needs to pick up her lazy ass and starts writing and hopefully this entry will give her that little push.

Oh by the way, she’s my younger sister ;-).

Oh, and enjoy your long memorial weekend.

Update: and she wrote her first entry….