Category: Day to day life

Updates on what’s going on with us

Alicia and Uncle B

Alicia and Jason came by yesterday for a little while to hang out. Bryan was very excited to see them again. He gave Jason a special nickname: “Uncle B.” Unfortunately his desire for a good nap won over his excitement, and he had to take a break.

When Bryan woke up, Jason and Alicia had already left. But from the living room, I could hear when Bryan woke up, his first words were: “Ah-yi, un, un, Uncle B!” (Ah-yi is an endeared name for “aunt” in Mandarin). He was sooooo disappointed that he missed seeing them!

Sometimes it’s interesting to observe little children’s emotions and reactions towards certain situations. In Bryan’s case, he was utterly shocked that Jason and Alicia disappeared! It was unfathomable to his little mind. His face looked as if he was saying: “Get out! What do you mean they’d gone home? There were just here!”

Farewell to David

David’s wife sent me an IM out of the blue this afternoon; a few short but uninformative lines of text got me all confused…

I was confused because we weren’t expecting to hear that David had just passed away. He was a good friend of Grace’s in Taiwan when they worked at Land Rover.

Everything happened so quickly. Within days of discovering the liver cancer, the disease rapidly took over everything. And he was gone.

We chatted a few times and thought one day I’d finally get to see this guy who loved cars so much and had an outlook about life firmly grounded with realistic expectations, not dreamy clouds like us artist types.

This reminded me of a quote from Steve Jobs’s commencement speech at Stanford:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Coincidently, over this past weekend someone emailed me to thank me for making the speech available for download. And he asked specifically how I felt about this quote. I didn’t think much of it then. But David’s passing drove home an important point Steve Jobs outlined above — life is too short to waste doing what you don’t love doing.

So this is a farewell to David. And kudos to his grounded approach to life and everything else… something I should start looking into having turned 32 just yesterday…

Two Weeks in Flash Actionscript

This is my second week coding full time in Flash Actionscript. Sooner or later I’d have bumped into things that would drive me crazy… And here’s a small list of what I’ve encountered:

1. XML feeds, masking, embedded fonts, css styles (for the XML feeds) and scrollable areas is a combination for hours of fun headaches. One can easily spend all night trying to figure out why something doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to… Certain things are very poorly documented by Adobe (formerly Macromedia).
2. Flash is most useful when used with Actionscripts… Some designer/coder wannabes try to do Actionscripts but instead have code littered all over the place… It’s just NOT cool!
3. Sometimes what seems easy can be more than a handful when you try to code for it… Simplicity can be deceiving in Flash/Actionscripting….
4. Components are your friends. Use them whenever you can. Customizable ones are totally worth every penny if you had to buy them. Just weigh the time you could have spent on it if you had to code that biatch yourself…

I also learned a couple of client-management tips from Jiann… Even though Brian tried to warn me about some of these things, I’ve had some pretty pleasant clients that I didn’t think running into one of “them” was in my Karma…

1. Clients are always right even when they give you some of the worst designs, features and requirements to work with.
2. Trying to beautify, improve upon or enhance anything this type of client gives you only will give you more grief later… because he’s just going to ask you go fix it back to exactly the way he had it… never mind how stupid, unusable, ugly or impractical the design elements or features are.
3. It’s all about ego, pride and control. Some clients want to feel they are in control and will ask you to do crappy stuff even though they knew your solution was better.
4. Stand up to unreasonable requests and demand overage. Or else feature creeps will never stop if the pay is on project basis. Some clients think they own you if they are paying you… Just say “NO” to abusive clients…
5. Being over-confident in your ability to pick up new programming skills can make you lose valuable sleep and family time… 🙁
6. Never mind that you have just achieved miracle doing something nobody thought was undoable given how short the deadline is. This type of client will always look for the smallest fault and overlook the fact that you just completed some of the most important features of the site.

Ok… now I feel better….

Back to coding…

One Week Developing Flash Actionscript

After having developed in Flash for almost a full week, I can honest say that….

1. Flash rocks.
2. Actionscript is not too shabby.
3. Flash can truly do some wonderful stuff.
4. I am looking forward to seeing what Apollo and Flex can do…
5. If inherited from the wrong hands, Flash/Actionscript is a bitch to maintain and extend… All you Actionscript code “litterers”… you know what I am talking about…. Please freaking code everything in ONE FRAME! Take advantage of Actionscript’s Object Oriented design. Damn it…

Again, I can’t thank Murdza and lynda.com enough for bringing me up to speed so quickly on this…

Back from NYC

So I made it back to California in one piece on Saturday after having discovered there was an “alleged” terrorist plot to blow up JFK Airport on the airplane AFTER it took off…. Good thing JetBlue has free on-flight TV programming…. The weird thing was, the plane stayed on the runway for like 40 minutes after we saw some police cars and ambulances racing by at a distance. I am sure that probably had nothing to do with the “foiled terrorist plot” though…

I met up with all my ex-coworkers (except Kyung) in New York and had a lot of fun talking about our previous employer(s). There were a few things that struck me as “interesting” now that I’d seen New York with a fresh pair of Californian eyes:

1. New York is great for singles and couples with no kids.
2. New York is great for artists and those who are interested in current trends of anything (art, design, fashion, politics… etc).
3. New Yorkers are amazingly more well-informed than their counter-parts in California.
4. Spanish is now everywhere in New York (compared to 4 years ago).
5. There are a lot more scooters in Manhattan than 4 years ago.
6. Chinatown remains as dirty and stinky as ever before.
7. The night begins at 11pm in New York…. compared to everything ends at 11pm in California…
8. It is freaking hot and humid in NYC… Or maybe the good weather in California has made me soft…

I also walked a whole lot for my short stay there for the opportunity to take some pictures with fresh eyes. But I guess the driving culture in California also made my feet soft… I came back with a swelled foot, limping for the rest of the trip after the first day.

On a separate but related news, the college I applied for a doctoral degree to accepted me on the spot after a short interview (which was the purpose of my trip). They totally loved my background as an artist and felt excited what I could bring to the pool of research among the doctoral candidates they are considering accepting… That made me feel good about myself and all that “investment” I made with those 2 art degrees… 🙂

More about the trip will be posted soon (images and thoughts). Stay tuned.

Going to the Big Apple

I will be leaving for the Big Apple on Thursday — my first return to the city after having moved out West almost 4 years ago (WOW!)… Sometimes I just miss that place for the energy and creativity that it offers (which San Jose totally lacks! Or maybe just a different vibe I haven’t able to jived with)…. So I’ve been looking up on the subway maps and stuff to see if there are any changes to the routes and just to familiarize myself with the whole system again. And then I came across the New York City Subway Smell Map:

Gawker's New York City Subway Smell Map

WOW… Yes, many New York City subway stations stink… But this map is pretty damn accurate (according to my fellow NYC inhabitants)… I am so NOT looking forward to that part of the trip…

via [Gawker]

Ideal Freelance Hourly Rates

I have no idea where these guys get their calculation methodologies, but the final hourly rate I came up with certainly isn’t realistic for the San Francisco Bay Area. But I can certainly see how one can live comfortably with that kind of rate elsewhere in less expensive metro areas like Atlanta or Austin or something.

Long Weekend

Last week was a long week; but the weekend seemed even longer… I got do play “wedding photographer” for the event. I even managed to play host without even freaking out…

Lessons I learned:

1. Wedding photography is a physically demanding job…
2. Sorting through and process 700+ RAW images requires a beefy computer — thank god for my MacBook Pro… It was relatively painless and fast…
3. Having to manually edit 400+ images makes you feel thankful of having a good camera with excellent auto white balancing and unbeatable skin tones — even the pro at the wedding said so!
4. Having the honor to document the wedding of a life time for someone who trusts you with the job — priceless (or whatever the total cost of the hotel stay was which the groom helped pay for)… 😉

Melt

It’s becoming a cliché to say this or that about one’s own child. But in all honesty, one look at Bryan makes everything else in the world seem so trivial. At the end of the day, no matter how we are judged or beat up by others, only what he thinks matters. Only he matters.

Of course I don’t expect others to understand this unique emotion a parent has towards his/her own child. But I am sure I am not alone in this.

Tired

Doors

Every month I wonder if I’d made the right choice by staying in the United States with my ongoing battles with immigration issues. As legal as we’ve been, it seems to get tougher to stay that way as time goes by. They say when opportunity comes knocking, you better be prepared. So I’ve been prepared for quite a while now, but where is that “Opportunity” guy? He and I need to have a little chat.

Doors