steve kwan user experience designer

6%

(April 30th, 2005 - 7:26PM)

Merv called impromptu employee reviews with Wesley and I yesterday. We both got raises; mine was 6%. A pleasant surprise!

I suppose this is probably in recognition of our good work and the fact that business is starting to pick up. It's certainly nice to be appreciated.

I did the Grouse Grind earlier today with Michelle - 64 minutes, which isn't my best time. I'm currently waiting for my landlord to come over with some beer. Do I have the coolest pad or what?

Site down

(April 28th, 2005 - 7:17PM)

My crappy router shot out again and led to a day of unscheduled downtime. I'm sure you stevekwan.com addicts noticed.

My roommate was kind enough to reboot the router for me.

So what has been going on? Well, I got my income tax rebate from the governmment - about $1,300. So I'm loaded again. About half of that is going to my mom because I still owe her money for my Greece trip. The other half is going into my savings, but will likely wind up at BCIT.

Life has been pretty good. My boss was out of the office for a week, and while he is away the programmers doth play. In this case, they play Nintendo games on NESticle. Speaking of which, the Windows icon for NESticle is awesome. Download the program and take a look.

I've had trouble sleeping lately. Not sure why. I'll go to bed at a reasonable hour, but have trouble actually sleeping. For the past two nights I've been able to get rest, so maybe it's passed.

I haven't been to the gym much, but I've been doing an exercise routine while watching 24. I finished season three on DVD, so I've finished all the DVDs and need a new show to obsess over.

My Ethics course is fun so far, but the textbook is pretty wordy. Not that wordiness is a bad thing, as long as it's interesting - which it is so far. I saw Hotel Rwanda last night, speaking of ethics...

I found out that my roommate Mario has a record in the Internet Movie Database. Not that he's credited for anything amazing, but it's just cool that he's there. I'm living with a star.

I've been working hard at Eloquent to perfect our EAD export. We want it to be the best in the world. I don't know how realistic that is, but the consultant advising me on development tells me that this is a big deal. I'm hoping I can get it done without any more design wars, because the arguments are starting to stress me out.

I'm not sure if this work will even bring in more money. I think it might be wasted effort. The consultant that is recommending we build an EAD export is in the business of generating EAD himself; I think his self-interest in the subject may be damaging.

Without Teeth

(April 24th, 2005 - 2:08PM)

Seeing as how I've been slacking in my updates, I'll try to add a bit of bulk to this one to make up for those of you suffering withdrawl.

Ryan sent me the new Nine Inch Nails album, With Teeth. I've been a NIN fan since I picked up their last "new" album, The Fragile, several years ago. Those of you familiar with NIN are probably aware that the band only releases new albums every five years or so; in between, a few remix albums might be released, but these mostly contain new versions of already existing songs. With Teeth is the first entirely new full-length album that Nine Inch Nails has released (even though it hasn't officially been released yet) since 1999's The Fragile. With that much time to write new material, and given how much I liked The Fragile, obviously my expectations were high.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty disappointed with the new album. It's very different from NIN's previous work. Not that different is necessarily a bad thing - The Fragile was very different from prior NIN albums - but in this case, I don't think that With Teeth's changes are for the better.

Below are my criticisms of With Teeth:

• The album is more or less absent of the unique sounds that make Nine Inch Nails' work so original. NIN is known for recording oddball sounds (such as car doors slamming) and working them into their songs. Most of the songs on With Teeth are composed of nothing more than guitar/bass/drums/vocals combinations, with some keyboard buzzing (more on this later). This selection of instruments just seems too "typical" for NIN, and the lack of unique noise makes the songs sound bland.
  
  
• There is an irritating keyboard buzzing noise present in almost all of the songs on With Teeth. Nine Inch Nails music is generally heavily synthesized, so a bit of static or buzzing in their songs is nothing new; however, in the absence of richer instrumentals and sound that was present on previous albums, you really realize how annoying the keyboard buzzing is.
  
  
• With Teeth makes it very obvious what a lousy vocalist Trent Reznor really is. I don't know why I never noticed it before. Probably because in prior albums, the songs were more diverse and featured a richer range of sounds. Or perhaps because in prior albums, Trent was so busy screaming that he didn't have much of a chance to sing. In any case, Trent sounds really off-key in most of the songs on With Teeth.
  
  
• Most of the songs are lyrically stupid. Some of Trent's earlier work was almost poetic in nature; most of the stuff on With Teeth sounds like rehashed, senseless "I hate myself" rambling. There are a few songs on the album with flashes of brilliance, but for the most part, them words don't make sense.
  
  
• The whole anger thing seems really forced on With Teeth. It may have worked on prior albums, but Trent is a lot older now. He tries to put on his angry face, but it just isn't believable.
  

The above comments probably won't deter NIN fans from purchasing With Teeth, and they really aren't intended to. Overall, the album is okay. It's not NIN's finest work, and there are certainly no memorable songs like Hurt on this album, but there are still some good tracks on there that NIN fans will enjoy.

That being said, I don't think I'll buy it. I've got a digital version I obtained from Ryan; I think that's good enough for me.

Wow, three days since my last update?

(April 22nd, 2005 - 7:25PM)

It seems that no matter how often I update this website, it's never often enough. Well, here's an update.

Ethics

(April 19th, 2005 - 7:55PM)

My BCIT Ethics course started today. Because this is an online course and you're unlikely to ever meet all of your classmates, you're expected to provide an introduction to yourself on the discussion board. This is what I wrote.

Subject: Hello, World!

Hi everyone,

My name is Steve. I'm enrolled in the Computer Systems Technology BTech program. I'm nowhere near completion, so I don't appreciate the rest of you rubbing it in my face!

I spent two years working as a software engineer for a Vancouver company, and have spent the last several months working for their competitor. Is that...unethical?

I'm taking this course online because I'm allergic to human contact. The mere thought of having to interact with other people gives me hives. No offense to you lovely people, but I'm quite satisfied keeping the Internet between us.

In addition, I like swimming, mountain hiking, trips to the gym, and Fox's award-winning drama 24. Kiefer Sutherland is a god among men.

The following takes place between 9:00PM and 10:00PM.

(April 18th, 2005 - 9:27PM)

Watching 24. The actors are typically pretty and sexy, as you'd expect of any television show, but there seems to be some sort of 24 requirement that you must act convincingly downtrodden.

Some characters on the show, such as Chloe O'Brian and Tony Almeida, consistently look like train wrecks.

What the world needs now is <blink>, sweet <blink>

(April 17th, 2005 - 7:05PM)

Why doesn't anybody use blinking text anymore? Is it because a bunch of hyperactive idiots in the nineties abused the tag and now it's taboo? If <blink> was good enough to talk about back then, what's wrong with it now?

Many of you have your own websites, or websites that you're responsible for. I encourage everybody who is developing a website to make more liberal use of the <blink> tag. Why should we discriminate against <blink> because of its prior abuse?

Internet Explorer no longer supports the <blink> tag. If you're using other browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, you will see <blink> in all of its glory in this post. This isn't the first time Internet Explorer has gone against the grain and created problems for Web developers. Let's make <blink> a commonplace tag again. Let's encourage Microsoft to change its ways.

I also wanted to recommend the use of the <marquee> tag, but Firefox seems to be misbehaving when I use it. One battle at a time.

Not on Safari

(April 16th, 2005 - 11:20PM)

Richard informed me that my website doesn't display properly in Safari, Mac OS/X's wonderful Web browser. I usually take a bit of time to ensure my website is more or less cross-browser compatible, although as long as the site displays fine in Internet Explorer and Firefox, that's good enough for me.

For those of you who are using Safari, I would direct you to this Dilbert comic.

At the rents

(April 16th, 2005 - 4:12PM)

I'm staying with my parents for the weekend - or at least, part of it. A great way to get free food!

They want me to see Sahara tomorrow. I'm not horribly excited about it, but I've already seen Sin City so at least it will give me an excuse to get out of the house.

One wheel

(April 12th, 2005 - 5:47PM)

So I didn't go to work today. I was going to, but things didn't work out.

I woke up this morning and on my way to the shower, I slipped on some water that my roommate had so kindly left on the floor for me. I landed on my bad knee. Now, for those of you who've been in touch with me lately, I may have mentioned that I injured my knee a year or so ago and it never properly healed. I just saw a doctor about it and he says it's probably a misalignment problem that could be corrected with some exercises. He said it should take about three weeks.

Anyway, now that I've taken a fall on my knee, I guess it could take longer than that.

I spent two hours this morning with an ice pack on my knee, and the rest of the day wearing my brace. So when my roommate gets home...

This portion of the posting edited by special guest blogger Quentin Tarantino.

I am going to gut him like a fish and let him bleed all over the floor. Then I will give him a mop and make him clean up the blood so I don't slip on that, too. Then I'll kill him by cutting off the top of his head with his own katana.

Thanks to Quentin.

There's little food in my house, so I'm ordering in pizza. This won't help my goal to get in better shape, but it's either that or starve.

This can't be real...

(April 11th, 2005 - 7:29PM)

...or can it? A Napoleon Dynamite Bill?

Sleep(0);

(April 10th, 2005 - 10:02PM)

So I think my recent stress problems may have been the result of a lack of sleep. Life can't be this bad!

The pathological pursuit of profit and power

(April 9th, 2005 - 1:13AM)

I just finished watching The Corporation with Sarah, Uma and Mirna (my new roommate). An excellent documentary overall; it's especially informative because in addition to raising interesting points about corpoate philosophy, it summarizes the concepts discussed by political commentators like Naomi Klein. For anybody who's ever tried reading Klein's work (such as No Logo), you'll definitely understand the value of having that beast of a book summarized in Coles Notes format.

Be warned, however, that the movie is pretty long. According to the back of my Blockbuster DVD case it clocks in at 145 minutes, but it felt a lot longer than that.

I'm onto the third season of 24, but unfortunately I can't find the DVD I just rented. Blockbuster informed me that I had to pay a restocking fee because I was exceptionally late in returning my previous DVD. I informed them that I wasn't going to pay the fee. I didn't wind up paying the fee. Probably helps that my girlfriend used to work there and she was standing right beside me when I had this discussion.

I've got a dentist appointment this afternoon. It's been more than six months since my last one; I postponed this appointment so it would be covered by my benefits package, which just came into effect. I'm also thinking of booking a massage like Wesley did - it's covered by my benefits package as well.

I just found the 24 DVD. This time, it's biological - I think.

Frustration

(April 7th, 2005 - 8:41PM)

ARGH! Work is stressing me out.

A bit of background: Eloquent has been around for about three decades, which is longer than I've been alive. Obviously, a software company with a track record like that definitely knows how to keep in business. So any young punk like me who decides to come into the company with grandiose visions of change is going to be looked at with a degree of skepticism. The point is, I'm aware that my relative lack of experience, especially compared with the longevity of the company, means that I can't walk in the door and expect my ideas to be accepted immediately.

That being said, I'm thoroughly convinced my boss thinks I won't be able to do my job unless he babysits me.

I'm a big believer in group programming. Before I implement something, I like to talk with the team to see if they have any opinions of my strategy. So this is what I do at work. However, my boss seems to be interpreting this as some sort of weakness. If I pose a question to the team, I'll get comments like, "You don't understand what's going on."

In general, whenever I have to get my boss involved in my work he'll start to micromanage and second-guess my decisions. Worst of all, however, are his snide little implications that I don't know what I'm doing and he is some sort of master.

I'd like to feel that this is far from the truth. The other day, for example, one of our consultants was proposing expansions on our software for generating XML to match a particular DTD. His expansions required massive changes to the structure of our archives software. There was a very problematic area of the proposed design that needed to be addressed. I brought this to my boss' attention, and spent around two days attempting to convince him of the problem. He essentially completely ignored me, and more or less told me that I didn't understand what was going on and how things were supposed to work. The general message was that the consultant was right and I was wrong.

Anyway, I verified with the outside consultant. Turns out I was right. There was a problem in the design. I received no acknowledgement or apology from my boss.

The fact of the matter is that this is the third project I've worked on that has involved this particular XML DTD. My boss, to my knowledge, has no first-hand experience with this DTD. He only knows what people like the outside consultant and myself have told him. So having him second-guess and attack my talent is extremely frustrating and disrespectful. I would expect better.

I graduated with honours from BCIT in one of the most challenging options of one of the most challenging programs they offer. I was then hand-picked out of 700 applicants for a job at MINISIS Inc. I was their number one pick out of the lot. The company experienced a great run while I was on the team. As soon as I joined Eloquent, their several-year decline was reversed and it appears the company may be ready to retrieve some of its former glory.

I am well aware that I'm no genius and there are many engineers out there with far more talent than me. However, I am also confident that I do a good job and contribute well to a team. My track record speaks for itself. As previously mentioned my company is recovering from a several-year decline in which my boss had a hard time keeping a permanent staff. I suppose I'm beginning to see why.

It may seem like a contradiction in terms to simultaneously seek advice from a boss and then complain he is micromanaging you, but the point is I'm just looking for a fresh opinion on my ideas. I'm not looking for directions. And were I looking for directions, that's not a sign of weakness either; it's a sign of understanding the shortcomings of your current strategy.

I know that my boss has been working in this business since before my birth, but all the same, my relatively short track record has been very good. I have no reason to believe that I don't know what is going on, and I certainly don't think that asking for the support of my team in decision-making implies some sort of personal weakness. All I ask is that my co-workers - especially my boss - show me the same respect I show them by allowing me to govern my own projects.

So in the event that some CEO from another company, or my actual boss, is reading this: give employees the freedom to govern their own work. This is a concept Dennis Bakke discusses in his book, Joy at Work - a book that was generally questionable but still raised a few good points.

When I got home, I found that I had misplaced a stack of play discs for Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Far Cry, and perhaps some other games. So in general my day hasn't been great. But I'm looking forward to watching the last episode of the second season of 24 - I have been renting the DVDs from Blockbuster. You're going to have to trust me.

The Blogosphere

(April 5th, 2005 - 11:41PM)

No, I didn't come up with the term "blogosphere." I saw it elsewhere.

It seems that everybody these days has a blog. Richard pointed out to me the other day that I had a blog back before blogging was a word. Touching as this sentiment may be, there are two problems with it:

1. I haven't had a blog for all that long, so where Richard is getting this idea from is beyond me.
2. In the early days, my website wasn't so much a blog as it was a "look at how cool I am because I play online MUDs" site.

In any event, all of my buddies have blogs, as you can see from the "friends" section. My girlfriend has a blog which is unlinked there, because she for some reason assumes that if she doesn't give the URL out to anybody, no one will find it. Tell that to all the morons who downloaded the Velvet Revolver off of my server and generated over 20GB of uploads in a handful of days.

Anyway, let's not lie to ourselves: you don't want to read my buddies' blogs. Even though I've made it so convenient for you to view them with that nifty side menu, you're probably too much of a jerk to read them. So to give you a sampling of what you're missing, here are my summaries of some of the left-listed blogs.

Divman:
"Today my new P84 finally arrived in the mail. Bout time, I ordered 8 of them and this is the first one that came. It's a pretty slick device with 8 drives of MR slotting and seven cones of internal zircot. Check out this sweet picture of it."

Ryan:
"well, the safeway union works are on strike. they want more money which is iridiculos. why should people working at safeway have money? they dont know anything. they cant probabl set up sql 2003 servers."

I was going to come up with some more impersonations, but it's really taxing and irritating to write from another person's perspective. All that research and mental preparation to get in character really takes time.

Like the new scheme?

(April 4th, 2005 - 10:02PM

The colors on this scheme are a little less abrasive than the red on black.

The thing is, red on black has been a staple of this site for many years...back to the days when I was a high school student. That's really the only thing I can think of that hasn't changed. And now I've replaced it with puke brown.

At least I've received positive feedback on the new scheme.

To clarify some comments regarding an earlier post, I received a pay bonus at work, not a pay raise. I'd obviously prefer a raise over a bonus, although we're still at an unstable stage at work and raises can't be guaranteed.

In any event, getting a bonus sure beats being told you'll get a bonus and finding out six months later that your boss changed his mind "for tax reasons." Yeah, it happened to me. And they wonder why I left for the competition.

Anway, take a look at my new 404 page.

Obligatory website update

(April 2nd, 2005 - 1:12AM)

Sin City was good.

On a related note, it looks like we've got Alliance Atlantis (the distributors of Sin City) on board with Eloquent.