Is the world blind?

Idiots.

Thanks to Cody for the stories.

I had almost everything ready to rock until I hit a sudden insecurity in myself — Will people really pay for what I want to charge for my photography? I had all the content thought through, written and even posted, all ready to beg a few friends to proof read them for me. And then I hit the “pricing” page. Then all wheels stopped turning as if someone turned off the steam engine (or snatched the hamster out of the exercise wheel) that was plowing ahead.

So I started to ask people around me to brainstorm on the feasibility of my business model, which is quite a departure from how photography is traditionally priced with other photographers. My core beliefs wants me to do one thing, but the standard practice in the industry wants me somewhere else. I was torn.

So I bummed around professional photography discussion websites for a week. And I spent a lot of time explaining to anyone who’d listen about my ideas and why I felt so confused… much of that time was waiting for people to get online, to reply my emails or just to meet up and talk… Ya know, just talk…

Finally I have arrived at a good place where I feel comfortable in putting up the pricing again. The up side is my original intuition about what I should do was right, but not without some modifications to minimize risks and to address some potential concerns. So I am ready again. And the site shall be fully functional by the first half of this week (fingers crossed).

I have to say that reading some of those professional photography sites also reassured me that I am heading towards the right direction. Some of what those photographers say made me realize that there is indeed a difference between art and ego. By being able to let go of my ego, I can breathe easier and feel better about myself, not to be caught up in a intellectual property fight with my customers. I will probably write another post about this later (or possibly even on my new photography blog). But the “slowing down” of that one week, now I understand, was needed for me to feel the conviction and feel better about myself as an artist.

So. I am back.

BIG thanks to: Grace (Mrs. Pragmatic), Jason and Alicia (the dynamic duo and sometimes my conscience), Brian (my Euro-American half brother), my cousin Alex (for casually dropping a bombshell which required me to address an important issue), and Miho (Ms. GREAT ideas mixed with an artistic twist).

And the following who actually provided advice a few months prior: Mari & Dave (great insights and business sense) and Christy (my #1 spy with insights of a “typical American mom” flavor).

And yet nobody is going to do anything about it because most U.S. politicians are in the pockets of the insurance and drug companies anyway. Having seen SiCKO and listened to this NPR interview I last blogged about, it’s pretty clear that whenever big corporations have too much influence in the policy making process for the well fare of the general public, it’s probably never a good idea. I mean, why would a big company have any kind of genuine interest in the well being of the general public when all it cares about (and mandated by law to do) is to return max profit to the shareholders!?

But I digress. I am not even a citizen here… Caring this much about something I have no influence over and can get no benefits from is probably unhealthy…

One last thing I want to point out is how well spoken and points well addressed by a former Member of British Parliament Tony Benn about this issue.

Contrasting the way he speaks with most of how American politicians speak (except maybe Obama), it’s almost like night and day… British politicians have this graceful and charming way of putting issues in a language that is pleasant to listen to and reflects their intelligence and sophistication on the matters. I especially find Geroge W. Bush’s speeches distasteful and blunt (and in unpolished) to listen to because they always seem to be dumbed down and make no sense at all!

But again, I digress.

And that’s why I get pretty sick of the people running the show today, both in the government agencies and in private corporations, that they are just such hypocrites when they preach one thing and do exactly the opposite (much like many, sorry, self-proclaimed religious people, I know) and still feel good about it. Stuff like “SiCKO” and this latest interview of Mark Schapiro on NPR just makes me sit in my chair at awe wondering just how in the name of this wonderful Christian God of theirs are they doing the world any kind of justice by making those decisions affecting the lives of millions.

The interview is informative, insightful and very educational. But at the same time, it’s scary and sickening to see what the actual “gut” of what’s going on between Europe and the good old U.S. of A.

Anyway… just another day’s rant. Sorry. But DO listen to the interview. It’s fascinating.

Take, for example, one of the credit card companies I have been using for quite sometime. One month, as if they’ve just decided they were going to make their online transactions more secured the night before, they implemented a popular feature: provide an answer to a secret question that only you’d know.

The only problem with that was, their questions didn’t make any god damn sense — one question asks for my mother’s maiden name — as if that’s so secret for Asians… Some countries simply do not adopt that practice and any friend of mine would know what my mother’s maiden name is. Another example is a series of stupid questions that even I don’t have the answers to:
1. My favorite sports team — hell, I do NOT have any! I don’t even like sports that much!
2. My favorite restaurant in college — WTF! I was a fu*king college student! I was lucky to have a warm meal, let alone a “favorite” restaurant!
3. My high school — and this is secure how?

After a couple of attempts, the system got thrown into an exception that the designers hadn’t designed it for…. It simply gave me a blank question expecting me to give an answer to… Seriously… WTF! Finally the system bumped me out and asked me to call them during “normal business hours”…. With all the crazy fees and interest rates they are charging people, they ought to have a 24×7 hotline…

And stupid stuff like this extends to stupid interface designs like the MSN Live Messenger, Internet Explorer 7, Dell’s product site among others. With all the money they have, can’t they just hire some decent usability designers and testers? God damn it!

OK… I feel better now. Just a quick rant on thoughtless designs by idiots… If only they took half the time to do what Apple would have done…

One thing that surprised me (and made me doubt the whole “Whole Foods” philosophy) is the fact that they carry that Fiji bottled water that traveled a gazillion miles all the way across the ocean. I mean, if they were so into this “environment” and “local” thing, wouldn’t they have left out Fiji brand water altogether? WTF? Talk about being hypocritical…

Speaking of hypocritical, we picked up a bottle of Wholezyme and some groceries at Whole Foods anyway. But the sheer size of the new store made me feel a little dizzy — or maybe it was the sheer number of people in the store at the time. On the upside, the store does offer FREE Wifi!

Still no luck in Steve Jobs sighting though*. I can’t really leave California until I’ve seen him at least once, even if it’s from a distance… But then again, at least I’ve already seen the other Steve in person.

* He’s been seen frequenting Whole Foods store in Cupertino.

1. People who bitch about how much gasoline cost seem happy to pay for bottled water, which is far more expensive than gasoline if you got your math right;
2. Very very few people can tell the difference between bottled water and tap water in blind testings;
3. Tap water is tested much more frequently and more closely monitored than bottled water for obvious public health reasons; and the fact that soft drink industry in general aren’t as stringently regulated as tap water, what makes people think bottled water is better water?
4. Buying bottled water, depending on the source, can be environmentally damaging (i.e. DO NOT buy Fiji brand water or anything that has to travel thousands of miles to get to you).
5. I often see bottled water being trucked around being exposed directly to the sun for god knows how long. And in each bottle’s journey to its destination, I can only imagine what kind of chemical reactions are happening to the plastic and the water. I mean, if I often taste the “plastic-ness” in the water, doesn’t that mean something is up with the water? Or maybe I am just being paranoid again.
6. For each bottle produced, how much energy was used to manufacture, transport and recycle that bottle and all its raw materials? All that work for something you can easily get cleanly and safely out of your faucets in America? If you lived in countries where there’s no reliable supply of drinking water, however, bottled water is a good idea though.

Sometimes I think the guy who invented the idea of selling bottled water is either a genius or a crook. Or maybe he’s a crooked genius. Of course bottled water has its purpose in situations where sanitary water just isn’t available (natural disasters… etc). Other wise paying for bottled water doesn’t really make too much sense to me… Just my two cents.

I wasn’t surprised to see Martin Scorsese’s The Departed winning all kinds of awards in the West having known the plot is almost an exact copy of Hong Kong’s Infernal Affairs trilogy. But what I didn’t expect was how The Departed sucked in comparison to the original film that it borrowed ALL of its plot and characters from, but yet it won critical acclaims just because it attached a bigger budget, internationally known director and big shot actors. To be fair, The Departed is pretty ambitious in that it tries to condense a story told in trilogy with just one film. But the resulting movie wasn’t all that impressive given everything that was thrown behind this big budget film. Let’s just say it wasn’t the best work for most of the persons involved in this film. In comparison, with Infernal Affairs, it brought out the best in everyone who participated in the film.

It appears that Hollywood is running out of ideas as of late. They now produce more sequels, stories from old titles and foreign copies than genuinely fresh and interesting ideas (even though the Indies are supposed to take care of that problem, very few of them actually make it to nation wide release with big marketing push).

Come to think of it, this is actually an excellent idea especially for art schools since these designs are originated from students currently attending the college. It really helps to shed the image of “starving artist” and bring more attention to how SCAD actually tries pretty hard to get students to land on their feet in the commercial market with a running start (or I should say, harder than most art and design schools that I know of). Some background info about this partnership with Barnes and Noble from BN’s website:

This item is part of a unique product development partnership with student artists from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). Working with SCAD’s Working Class Studio, Barnes & Noble has produced an exclusive “Back-to-Campus Collection” consisting of nine journals, two pencil pouches, a sketchbook, and a canvas messenger bag decorated with student-designed contemporary graphics.

Working Class Studio is a product development venture of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Each academic quarter, students are selected as interns to form an interdisciplinary design team led by studio directors. The studio manufactures a line of products based on the team’s market research and designs which are then sold nationwide. This innovative concept for an educational institution marries function and fine art to deliver a well-curated mix of cutting-edge design.

SCAD is obviously taking risk on producing and marketing students’ work using its own resources. But I think that’s really a non-risk because SCAD students work have been pretty consistently excellent. I just hope the students who worked on these projects got paid a lot more than the “work study” wages.

What will they think of next? (Now that it’s got its own official day in the State of Georgia, a radio station, a TV station… among others)

Jason semi-made me watch Zeitgeist the Movie a few days ago. And everything that I suspected was wrong but couldn’t link them together now all made sense… Thanks, Jason… Now I am officially a coo coo head.

Basically the movie covers three major, separate but interlinked, sections:
1. Religion (specifically Christianity) and what it really IS
2. Tracing the cause of major wars and American involvements in the past 60 years, including the latest 911-related ones
3. The “real” beginning of the Federal Reserve Bank and why the Founding Fathers actually opposed such institution

I did some fact checking on some of the points made in the film (specifically on #3) since I know something about the history of Federal Reserve from my economics classes. And just prior to watching the film, I also got a chance to listen to a fascinating radio program on Alexander Hamilton and how he was a champion of having an institution like the Federal Reserve/Central Bank (which was one reason why Thomas Jefferson hated his guts; the movie did also mention Thomas Jefferson strongly opposed to such institution). And it turns out that many of the points made in the movie are quite accurate… Or maybe they seem accurate because my mind was slanted towards that way anyway.

In any case, I agree with Jason that you should arrive at your own conclusion and do your own fact checking after seeing the movie. But it does present some compelling arguments for the points it presented.

A few friends have complained that they went to Dell’s website for some cheap deals Dell advertised. But the problem was, no matter how they configured their systems, there was simply no way to get it to the price that was advertised! I have tried it myself, and it was truly an amazing experience!

But I also find it funny that people expect “quality” when they don’t even want to bother to pay for it… Today’s Dell offers awful products that come with awful customer service. You know the old saying, “You get what you pay for.”

So in essence, when a company thought they paid for a cheap machine, they are actually getting ripped off because of the extra time spent reinstalling the OS and supporting its inferior hardware/software. This drives home a point — Windows (and by extension, Microsoft) still sucks three years after I’d abandoned it from my home.

Take, for example, many people I know blindly think Windows Live Messenger is like the SH*T. So they’d use all those weird features on me not knowing they are not supported on the Mac version (a blessing, I must say). So one day, I decided I’d take a look into it by installing it on my PC emulation software. Five minutes after playing with it, I was ready to get a ticket to Redmond and strangle Steve Ballmer for the worst instant messenger app ever written!

I continue to wonder, how can such crappy software, bundled with crappy hardware, keep such dominance in most homes and businesses? Do people NOT see they are just wasting time and money on such crap? Or am I just having a chip on my shoulder being such a Mac snob? Hah!

Nonetheless, simplicity rules — in design, computing or otherwise.

At first I thought the piss-poorly produced ads were a local problem — you know, your typical variation of locally produced bad-taste TV commercials. But then when I saw a similar ad from AAU’s Las Vegas campus, I knew they did it to corner a specific segment of the art and design education market — the idiotic segment.

This begs the question though — how can an ART and DESIGN school be of any high quality when its commercials, the very representation about what the school is, are produced with such poor, anti-artistic and anti-design in quality? Sure, SCAD also welcomes anyone with pockets full of cash to attend it. But, for god’s sake, at least SCAD works for that cash — It prints high quality brochures, fliers and follow-up postcards. SCADtv is no high-budget production either, but there’s no half-assing when it comes to self-promotion and anything that has to do with cosmetically improving the image of the college. And that’s a lesson AAU should take to heart.

How can anyone serious about art and design go to that school having seen their commercials? Seriously.

Out of all the remotes that’s come standard with what we use on a daily basis, we use maybe just TWO of them all the time. Some people have eight or nine remotes collected in a basket or in a drawer in their homes. And I think that’s just crazy that it seems like there’s a remote for everything nowadays:

TV
DVD Player
Fan
Humidifier
MP3 Player
Computer (almost all Macs now come with a remote)
Air conditioning unit
Stereo system (both in the living room and in the car)
Garage door
.
.
.

This reminds me of Adam Sandler’s movie, “Click.”

Michael Dell of Dell Computer once advised Steve Jobs to close the company and give the money back to the shareholders back in 1996…

Squint hard, you might be able to see Dell on the chart somewhere. See whose investors are laughing all the way to the bank now?

This gives me the more reason to believe that Murdza is really a mega-gabillionaire. He still goes to work just to hide his true wealth as an Apple stock shareholder like before the original iMac was even born.

I am not sure if any body’s noticed the deterioration in service from providers like FedEx and UPS in recent years. Ironically the USPS has become more and more reliable in comparison. I remember the days when it was just so easy to blame the USPS for everything…

But now, almost every other package I send and receive through those “premium carriers” is in danger of being lost. Not too long ago, drivers used to ring the bell and wait for someone to answer before leaving a notice on the door. And they almost never left anything of value by default unless explicitly asked to. However, it seems like both FedEx and UPS “conveniently” altered their policies, at about the same time, and decided that waiting for customers to answer the door takes too damn long. So now everything is assumed “signature not required” and can be left by the door. Some drivers don’t even bother to knock on the door or ring the bell to at least acknowledge the recipient that a package has arrived.

Technology is supposed to improve things, but as a customer, sometimes it seems to only make things more stressful when working with FedEx or UPS on package tracking. By far, in my experience, FedEx has been the absolute worst nightmare. To date, my record with them is: one lost package, one lost-scare and one missing package (as of today, they have NO idea where it is). Everybody just assumes that if something is not in “the system”, it doesn’t exist (much like if you can’t Google it, it’s not there).

I printed a shipping label using FedEx’s own online software (which is buggy; what kind of stupid email notification system assumes no dash exists in domain names?), and I dropped the package off at a local FedEx sorting center myself. But soon it became suspicious to me that the tracking number that FedEx had generated doesn’t seem to be valid for tracking. So I called customer service, whose system showed no record of such package (even though it is showing under my tracking history under my FedEx account on FedEx’s own freaking website). Then customer service transferred me to Internet department where they were supposed to know more about web-based tracking: Nothing there either. Then Internet services transferred me again to Billing, whose system, clearly pulling data from the same source, was also not showing the package being available. He then transferred me, guess where…., BACK TO customer service.

Again, no luck. So now I have a package that part of FedEx’s giant computer system knows about but is unable to find its whereabouts. Can they still be held responsible if the package was lost under such circumstance? Unlikely. Now, I haven’t read the fine prints in those long-ass end user agreements; but I have a feeling it’s written against me, the customer who’s paying for their very existence.

Then there are all kinds of different surcharges they add on to maximize their profits. For example, what the hell is a “fuel surcharge”? I mean, the freaking premium I am paying them to delivery my packages, isn’t that, in part, paying for their labor, time, expertise, and, oh, FUEL? And then they charge small businesses for using their website to print labels — HELLO? Isn’t that making everyone’s lives easier if their ground personnel don’t need to manually process each package? Shouldn’t all this be SAVING them money? So why are small businesses charged $11.50 for every week (or was it month?) that the online shipping label system is used? It’s just insane!

Now coming back to USPS, its website is not as fancy, and tracking information sometimes takes days to appear. But as soon as one gets used to those facts, the site is easy to use, reliable and has never failed me (yet). On top of that, USPS gets it — if I print a shipping label and ship via its online system, I actually get a small discount! Considering how much mail USPS processes, how much lower its fees are, and how much nicer its employees are (they always knock, ring and wait), it’s amazing UPS and FedEx are still making so much profit every year as much as they abuse and mistreat their customers.

Forget it… enough rant for today. The lesson here is: Multi-national corporations are inherently evil given enough market share, cash and power. Which is why publicly mandated systems that deliver services to the public under the law should always have a place in humanity — education, postal services, health care… etc. Anyone who’s trying to privatize them just aren’t thinking long term. Remember, corporations answer to investors and maximize profits, not to do what’s good for the general public, and certainly not to do what’s good for humanity.

Aw, damn it… I’ve got to end this here….

Though I have no way of verifying this report, I am sure that in the coming weeks, I can expect to see systems, no matter how low end and ill equipped, are going to be shipped with Vista despite analysts’ warning on how little value it brings to the PC computing platform. On the other hand, I think this is also a matter of economics for most PC manufacturers. The more computers they sell with Vista pre-installed, the cheaper they can get Vista for in bulk. An since Vista is such a buzz word now, it helps to slap that OS on all shipping PCs to qualify for a cheaper volume rate from Microsoft.

I suppose this is another reason why Linux, by the virtue of economics, is doomed. It gives no incentive for PC manufacturers to ship systems with Linux when they can put on another copy of Vista to get better overall rates from Microsoft! Oh, the irony.

Where’s that cat from Apple again? I am ready for it…

I wonder if that’s CitiMortgage’s hidden strategy to intentionally let these problems happen and conveniently ignore fixing them. It’s capitalism — anything’s possible.

Note to self: Not to use CitiMortgage if and when I can afford to take out a mortgage.

Originally I was thinking about getting a car in Canada when we finally make the move. That way, it’d save us the hassle of having to deal with customs and import taxes. But it turns out that Canadian cars, in our unscientific preliminary research are quite a bit more expensive than their counterparts here in the U.S. (that’s including the 6% import tax and all). So the decision has been made to resume looking for a decent used car here in California.

One of the nice things about the United States is that “things”, in general, are relatively cheap in comparison to other places though “cheap” in no way equates to quality. The downside, of course, is that capitalism looks out for investors, not the good of the general public at large. For example, Consumer Reports accuses child car seat manufacturers making inferior car seats that meet minimum standards (a jokingly low 30mph impact) in comparison to similar models in Europe. Though the news wasn’t a surprise to me, it was still sad that my skeptism was proven true. But that’s a different topic for a totally different post altogether.