the blog: cause normal is for pansies

Look at me on the interwebs.

Date: 6/29/2008 10:42:00 PM [permalink]
Author: yahooza
Entry: How much can one infer from an online profile? Dunno, but Gumption has a good-read about interweb personas.
Again, I don't mean to equate Facebook with [online] dating, but I do think there are strong similarities. Perhaps the key differentiator, here, is that getting someone is not the same as getting along with someone.
Empty those mindless hot-or-not debates and think hard about any Facebook profile. Can you extrapolate a person from their favorite movies, fave books, friends, installed applications, photos, etc.? And is this representation fair and should one be worried? Is Facebook face value? Probably not. And what about lifestreaming services such as Friendfeed, Dipity or Mybloglog?

For m'self, I don't mind the intrusion. Never had a stalker (that I know of) and those who know yers truly, especially close friends, will vouch for m' sanity and righteousness. Hee hee. Frankly, I feel those that pass judgement w/o knowing and accepting the real deal .... well, they really don't matter in the grand scheme of living.

Knock on wood that nothing trapped within the petabyte crevices of search indices, I won't get m' ass handed to me for some silly tweet or Flickr comment o' mine =)

I posted a pic on Facestat.com, a community-based why-don't-you-tell-me-something-about-me-by-this-here-damn-photo website. So far, the results are more humorous than fair: I am an Asian male, btwn 25-29, looks like every other Asian celebrity (Chow Yun-Fat, Jackie Chan), married or dating, somewhat smart, average in weight and most likely listens to Rap music. Yep, not really accurate; however, fun nonetheless.

I do wonder what the 'yahooza' brand means / symbolizes to netizen "consumers" .... good? bad? ugly?
Labels: socialpsychology
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Seventy-one years young.

Date: 6/22/2008 11:16:00 PM [permalink]
Author: yahooza
Entry: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080623/ap_on_re_us/obit_george_carlin

RIP man.

M' favorite quote from thee:
"The very existence of flamethrowers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, 'You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough to get the job done.'"
Labels: death
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Buh-by!e Yahoo!

Date: 6/20/2008 01:48:00 PM [permalink]
Author: yahooza
Entry: http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/06/0619_yahoo/index_01.ht....

Where's MY mugshot and good-bye story?!?!
Labels: yahoo
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Last one out, turn off the lights.

Date: 6/19/2008 10:34:00 PM [permalink]
Author: yahooza
Entry: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/19/it-gets-worse-for-yahoo-delicious-founder-leaving/

See! What did I tell ya? Joshua has cut the cord ....

Heh heh. Nah, I had no clue.

Yahoo! should have spun off del.icio.us, Flickr, Jumpcut and upcoming into Y! Labs or Y! Social Media or something. Give em the freedom, lots of resources, etc. At least they could have said, "hey it wasn't us who fucked it up."

another *sigh*
Labels: del.icio.us, yahoo
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More than bleeding purple

Date: 6/18/2008 09:37:00 PM [permalink]
Author: yahooza
Entry: http://valleywag.com/5017424/stewart-butterfields-bizarre-resign....

Click it, read it. It's Stewart Butterfield's—Flickr co-founder—good-bye resignation note. Simply unreal and hilarious. I wish I had the cajones.

It's an appropriate metaphor for Y!'s 2005 ascent to its current cluster-mumbo-jumbo. It's rather sad because in early '05, Y! began to hire big guns, major frackin' talent. Flickr had just been gobbled up. Soon, upcoming.org del.icio.us and Jumpcut joined the ranks, and with 'em, some extraordinary peeps. Internally, the Y!UI library, YDN network sprouted wings both as critical platforms for Y! properties and external entities in the wide open web. Yahoo! Answers busted its nut in late '05 too, growing to 20 million unique users in 6 months and over a dozen languages. Hack day, Y! Teachers and Y! Photos shone brightly. Man, those were good times. We were all doing some good companywide.

But .... 2007 reared its ugly head and somewhere, somehow the egos and bureaucracy ate into that spirit. Panama's flop and a deteriorating stock price didn't help.

Y!'s bookmarking services is a prime example of "does anyone have a clue?" There's del.icio.us, Bookmarks, and MyWeb, all of which do similar things, but no one has a clue how to offer a complete service. And some of these were supposed to help Search results in the losing battle against the Big G!. Again, never happened. Most of the resources were allocated towards dinky and trivial features, including color changes / reskinnings—except for the del.icio.us Firefox and IE extensions which rose to awesomeness. Overall, if there's one product that persevered the hogwash, Flickr did it best. Best example? Its well-thought out approach to video; otherwise corporate would have probably demanded Youtube on Flickr. Ha!

It's really sad to see the top dawgs go, beginning early this year: Bradley, Ian, Zawodny, Leonard, Caterina, Stewart and many others. (Yes, I'm name-dropping) They're not just any ol' rank-n-files. They were the ones that made you work hard and feel proud at Yahoo!.

*sigh* Too bad.

At least, Joshua still bleeds purple ;) But for how much longer?
Labels: bureaucracy, del.icio.us, flickr, jumpcut, upcoming, yahoo, yanswers, ybookmarks
Comments: 0 +add yours

Firefoxy 3 - hot damn!

Date: 6/17/2008 10:33:00 PM [permalink]
Author: yahooza
Entry: Today, Mozilla released Firefox III, celebrating a rebirth of its browser. I mention "rebirth" because the innards have been drastically improved and performance—faster rendering and better memory management—has propelled it back to being 'teh awesome.' I thought Safari made great leaps, because Firefox part dos slugged web pages crashed far too often, but not anymore.

I reckon y'all should join the party, especially if you're stuck w/ that Microsoft Internet Explorer piece of crap. Seriously, it works and works well. Stable as tombstone.

Download Firefox 3 now!
Labels: firefox
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Tag visualization

Date: 6/14/2008 05:18:00 PM [permalink]
Author: yahooza
Entry: wordle.net has a super dope tag visualization tool. Here are m' Flickr and del.icio.us tags all dolled up:

Click the pics to see 'em more clearly.
Labels: del.icio.us, flickr, tags, visualization
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Finding good things.

Date: 6/11/2008 11:57:00 PM [permalink]
Author: yahooza
Entry: I hadn't heard of The Air I Breathe, an emotional, artsy-farsy indie starring the likes of Andy Garcia, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Forest Whitaker, Brendan Fraser and Kevin Bacon (cameos from John Cho and Kelly Hu), written and directed by Jieho Lee.
A drama based on an ancient Chinese proverb that breaks life down into four emotional cornerstones: happiness, pleasure, sorrow and love. A businessman bets his life on a horse race; a gangster sees the future; a pop star (Gellar) falls prey to a crime boss; a doctor must save the love of his life.
I really enjoyed the slow-paced Haggis-esque narrative, delving into four separate, yet interconnected, story arcs. It is intense—even for me—as emotions hit their peaks and ugly dips; however, for me, there was something missing. A lesson or a message in redemption or salvation, that I felt was ignored, especially from this genre film. Nonetheless, it's worth the rental.

I've also been into 100 Bullets, a comic series about the opportunity for retribution. What if you were offered the chance to seek justice, one hundred untraceable slugs—absolute, no-frills vindication— and the path to achieve it? The stories center around the right and wrong, challenging the reader's moral compass, painting life and the world as much grayer than the absolutes that human beings cling by.

The art is very dark and gritty, similar to Frank Miller's Sin City. The narrative, of course, follows suit: lots of four-letter words and violence. That's always a thumbs-up for me ;)

So two good bits to discover, The Air I Breathe and 100 Bullets. Do it, do it =)
Labels: comics, film, movies, sarahmichellegellar
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My questions are wha?

Date

6/11/2008 10:11:00 PM [permalink]

Author

yahooza

Entry

Two of m' seemingly legit questions on Yahoo! Answers were removed recently. I don't understand why either.

Given a collection of long/lats, how do I get the rect. boundaries in Microsoft's Vistual Earth JavaScript API?
Are there any rumors on a new PS3 model?

Where's the love, man?

Is customer care still in the Phillipines? What gives?

Labels: yanswers

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Brightkite

Date: 6/08/2008 11:32:00 PM [permalink]
Author: yahooza
Entry: I know I'm late to the game, but if you haven't, Brightkite is worth the trial run. I'm here. The best parts are the Twitter and Fireeagle integration. The former displays m' location on m' Twitter page, while the latter updates m' Fireeagle account and provides the easiest way, by far, to update m' location. Go open APIs and the open web!

Note, you need a beta invite, otherwise you ain't cool enough to play.
Labels: brightkite, fireeagle, geo, twitter, yfireeagle
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Do it any which way

Date: 6/08/2008 11:09:00 PM [permalink]
Author: yahooza
Entry: It's been over seven months and I've learned a lot from independent consulting. Mostly, a contractor is hired on a per hour basis, because there is an urgent need for a skillset or simply to fix the FUBAR.

I must admit, it's not m' specialty. Reading others' code is quite an ordeal and I'd rather ideate (is that a real word yet?) or start from scratch. All those great articles from Christian and Dustin can be far-reaching ideals in the majority of web software projects. Douglas Crockford has said it many times that JavaScript is an expressive language and a programmer can craft his code in many ways w/ JS's flexible style.

Case in point is m' current nemesis, an interesting way to mold a web view. Each page first declares a config object (literal). It is the means to which a subsequent JS command (loaded as an src.include) will fire XHR calls to retrieve data, massage it and prepare to load the content into the DOM when it becomes ready.

An interesting means to say the least. It's a different design philosophy and quite foreign to me. Is it wrong? No, not at all. But it has been quite a duel to refactor and separate the code into various modules.

And did I mention the lack of documentation? =) More fun tomorrow!
Labels: programming, softwaredesign
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Prez funnies

Date: 6/02/2008 11:48:00 PM [permalink]
Author: yahooza
Entry: What if movie studios produced parodies of political celebrities. Let's pretend.

National Lampoon's High Clinton Times:

    "Monica, ever see A Christmas Story?"
    "Yes, wha—hey, you shot me in the eye!"
    "Precisely."
Labels: humor
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I want m' MTV

Date: 6/01/2008 10:23:00 PM [permalink]
Author: yahooza
Entry: I just halfheartedly watched MTV's annual movie awards. Man, MTV is the ultimate advertising platform. Hot damn, they own the fun, hip and cool similarly to how Apple has marketed its iPod and Target has extended its partnership w/ its suppliers through its bullseye. Take heed Microsoft, your Zune marketing lacks this appeal and that is part of why its music player is ultimately FAIL!

I used to rag on MTV and how it has productized music, transforming half-beat musicians into mega-rock, sexy entertainers, packaged w/ a bow and spam marketed to the masses. Like replacing sugar w/ a high fructose corn syrup. Sorta. I loved pointing m' judgmental finger at profit margins and corrupting America's youth.

Now, I'm sorta appreciating how much fun the program really is. Celebrities, happy-go-luck pop music and musical performances, all bundled into a 2-hour long fiesta of fun and laughs. Those happy beats had me boppin' m' head. Maybe it's time I put away the angry punk and melancholy tunes and listen to some happy beats =)
Labels: brandmarketing, mtv, music
Comments: 1 +add yours

Normal

Date: 5/28/2008 10:09:00 PM [permalink]
Author: yahooza
Entry: Just one of 'em days, I reckon.

"To be normal is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful." —Carl Jung

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal." —Albert Camus

"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it." —Ellen Degeneres
Comments: 2 +add yours

muxtape embed (not so ugly)

Date: 5/26/2008 11:00:00 PM [permalink]
Author: yahooza
Entry: Hmm, embedding your muxtape page in an iframe ain't so ugly. Sorta.

<iframe width="99%" height="200" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" src="http://yahooza.muxtape.com" style="border:1px solid #666;"></iframe>
Labels: mp3s, music, muxtape, widgets
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Muxtape is good.

Date: 5/26/2008 07:02:00 PM [permalink]
Author: yahooza
Entry: http://yahooza.muxtape.com

I'm late to the game as the rest of Web 2.0-ish nation has embraced muxtape.com. Its best feature is its lack of featuritis, offering a simple (you can do about 3-5 things) and clean user experience.

Neat!
Labels: goodsongs, mp3s, music, muxtape, web2.0
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Growing woes

Date: 5/21/2008 10:57:00 PM [permalink]
Author: yahooza
Entry: http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/i-have-this-graph....

i made the comment today that it's becoming routine that Twitter kicks the can. It would be news, if the site didn't hiccup for a week or two straight.

On the other hand, I appreciate the diligence of the Twitter engineers for providing a fantastic and free service to the masses.

It reminds me of Yahoo! Answers' first slam dunk that brought the house down. Marketing had either spammed the wild world of Y! about or front-page-linked to the first Answers celebrity promotion featuring Donald Trump.

It came out of the blue. Everything flatlined. 4 front-end boxes just said, "fuck it, you don't pay me enough." The quick-and-dirty patch had been to statically link the Don's question to a static file—only the first 30 answers are displayed in the initial view (pagination for extended views). Later on, less short-term solutions involved caching view fragments and dropping extra-hardware bombs.

If you could qualify anything about Web 2.0, it's that webapps have evolved since the dotcom days. It's not just another shopping cart site, and that reading, storing and continuously updating relational data (and not necessarily using a RDBMS) is a 24/7 job and an architectural challenge.
Labels: scalability, softwaredesign, twitter, yanswers
Comments: 1 +add yours

Faced to Faced

Date: 5/14/2008 09:33:00 PM [permalink]
Author: yahooza
Entry: To prove that I am using m' very own Facebook data on my 'About me, cause I'm awesome' page, I've added a little Facebook badge in the northwest quadrant of such web page; upon mouse over, the page will light up w/ data that has been consumed from the Facebook API, and upon mouse out, it shall revert to its original state.

It's like those cute little fireflies that I used to catch and torture whilst I was barely four feet tall. On. Off. On. Off.
Labels: facebook
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Thinking of me

Date: 5/13/2008 10:19:00 PM [permalink]
Author: yahooza
Entry: Citibank sent yours truly a warm-and-fuzzy email:
Dear "consumer",

I want you to be among the first to know about the bold steps we are taking at Citi to be the premier, global, fully integrated financial services firm.

Our objective is to create for our customers an experience in which services are seamless, payments and transfers effortless, and distances meaningless. My commitment - and the commitment of everyone at Citi - is to work tirelessly around the world and around the clock to deliver outstanding value and service as we continue to earn your trust.

We are proud of our enduring strength as a global financial institution, striving to successfully meet the needs of clients like you in more than 100 countries. As always, we look forward to continuing to serve you - wherever you are and wherever you need to be.

Sincerely,

Vikram Pandit
CEO, Citi
Reminds me of the Yahoo! companywide All-hands meetings: feel-good, buzzwordy messages from the top.

I truly feel fuckin' special.
Labels: sarcasm
Comments: 2 +add yours

Todo

Date: 5/08/2008 09:31:00 PM [permalink]
Author: yahooza
Entry: I started a brand spankin' new consulting gig w/ zvents.com this week. Folks are cool, laid back and the office is less than a mile away.

M' boss and I took a walk 'round the block and he asked about full-time employment. Frankly, I don't know what I want career-wise. I don't want to commit to a company if I don't know what I truly want; thus, contracting short-term gigs are good enough.

During interviews, I would tell folks bout m' carrer path, "I dunno. I'll probably be outta tech in 3-5 years." Maybe that's why I don't advance in some interview processes =) If so, then I'd learn to be less truthful and sell m'self better .... uhhh, yeah.

Seriously, I don't know what I want to do. In the past eight weeks of underemployment, I've enjoyed an active and stress-free time-off, enjoying the fun of casual hacking, reading graphic novels (and real ones), swimming and spending time w/ friends. It's been real hard to resell m' soul back to work and the 'urgency' of everything in Silicon Valley.

Well, until I get a clue, I shouldn't fret it and continue to smile at the sun and dip m' tongue in the pudding. Mmmm, tastes good!
Labels: career, life
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