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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…

When I went to NYC, Moto told me that he started drinking RedBull from time to time to get the much needed energy when he has tight deadlines. So when I started coding for this crazy Flash project, I asked Grace to get me a couple of cans to try them out… Unfortunately, it didn’t do jack for me, much like coffee, Mountain Dew or any other highly caffeinated drinks… As a bonus, my body decided to make me even more tired after drinking something that’s supposed to keep me going…

So what does one do when external stimuli fail as miserably as the mental will to stay awake? Cold shower…. Never fails (but only for a couple of hours until that “freshness” wears out).

After a few days of 4-hour sleeps, my neck started hurting like hell. Only a few more days to go before this sucker is over… well, the deadline was supposed to be this past Friday, but they neglected to communicate how certain features should work to me, which made this already bad experience even worse… But I digress… On the bright side though, nothing beats having a client pay you to learn something you’ve always wanted to learn but never had the time to… I think I picked up more Flash in 2 weeks than I ever did with the only Flash class I ever took as an Undergrad at SCAD. Good times.

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…

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…

Developers who write apps for the Mac OSX Platform never seizes to amaze me with their innovative approaches to how things ought to work…

The Delivery Status Widget is one of those apps that’s just way cool. This is something I’d never expect seeing having written on the Windows camp (the snobbish Apple side of me speaking)… On Windows, I used to hate having to install unnecessary applications because you just have no idea what it’s doing to your system (”fantastic” DLLs, “awesome” registry keys… etc). Sometimes uninstallers even screw up the system… But of course, that was back in 2004, how much has changed… Now Windows is more stable than EVER before… (yeah, right).

Speaking of widgets, it seems like Vista has some cool stuff going on albeit being just copies of the Mac OSX Dashboard widgets in looks and functionalities. But it’s like this… what do you expect out of Redmond nowadays anyway. Chee-hoi claims that “under the hood” Vista is going to really kick ass. That may be the case if whatever Microsoft promises can be fully materialized before people just start walking away and do themselves a favor by getting a Mac…. that or before Microsoft’s bloatware and vapor ware just implodes.

Yeah, I know… It’s Wednesday… and my snobbish Mac side has already taken over… Bad Mac, HEEL!

via [Gizmodo]

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.