steve kwan user experience designer

Lessons learned in 2005

(December 31st, 2005 - 5:34PM)

• Skunks smell BAD.
  Source: Herbert, the skunk who invaded my property and sprayed into our furnace intake vent.
  
  
• Never get a doctor who practices out of the same building that you work in.
  Source: The mad doctor in the same building as Eloquent, who I stupidly decided to visit.
  
  
• It's all about human-computer interaction.
  Source: A BCIT degree course, plus real-world experience.
  
  
• It's possible to hack Linux.
  Source: My Linux server downstairs, which got hacked and started blasting out penis enlargement offers to the entire world.
  
  
• Alaska is boring.
  Source: My cruise to Alaska.
  
  
• New Orleans is sinkin' man, and I don't wanna swim.
  Source: The media.
  
  
• Electronic Arts is evil.
  Source: My roommate's now-terminated career with EA.
  
  
• Nine Inch Nails puts on a wicked live show.
  Source: NIN's live show in Vancouver.
  
  
• You can never truly know if your girlfriend's friends like you until after a break-up.
  Source: Some of the friends I shared with my ex.
  
  
• My personality type is ENFP.
  Source: My management course at BCIT.
  
  
• Websites are more important than you'd think.
  Source: Eloquent's new website. As soon as we put it up, we got a ton of requests for information.
  
  
• Always clean from top to bottom.
  Source: My roomate, who taught me this while we cleaned up after our other roomate who is thankfully now living elsewhere.
  
  
• I look good in leather.
  Source: Shereen, Michelle and Shereen's mom.
  
  
• Eating vegetables and drinking lots of liquids is important.
  Source: My body, which informed me that it did not like my diet of coffee and beer.
  
  
• The BC driver's learner license (L) test is HARD.
  Source: My personal experience with the test, which I finally wrote. I passed. You heard right, I have a driver's license now.

I fixed the Girlfriendometer

(December 30th, 2005 - 4:28PM)

I've been restructuring stevekwan.com, and as a result I managed to break the Girlfriendometer. It should be working now.

Review: Brokeback Mountain

(December 30th, 2005 - 1:59AM)

Heath Ledger once again picks up his lance and returns to the big screen. No, it's not a sequel to A Knight's Tale, it's Brokeback Mountain. Picture shamelessly borrowed from Roger Ebert.

(4 / 5 stars)

One sentence summary: It's not spectacular, but everyone should see this movie regardless.

Brokeback Mountain is not your average love story, but you probably know that already. It's forbidden love of a different kind: two cowboys in Wyoming during the sixties. Ang Lee directs (weird), with Heath Ledger (weird), Jake Gyllenhaal (weird) and Anne Hathaway (weird) on the screen. But Brokeback Mountain is all about Heath Ledger, whose portrayal of a reluctantly gay cowboy is exceptional.

Heath's cowboy spends most of the movie grappling between his inner conflict: a gay relationship in a time and place where such a thing could get him killed, versus his expected role as a heterosexual father and husband. It is Heath's ability to bring such a sophisticated character to life that makes this movie bearable. The plot itself is somewhat lacking, but the acting brings the movie alive.

To be honest, any movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal sets off an alarm with me even before I see it. But he's passable as Heath's love interest here. He doesn't completely ruin the movie, which is about as much as I'd ask for him. What exactly Anne Hathaway is doing in this film is beyond me; this is the first adult movie I recall her in.

I like to think of myself as open-minded, but I must admit that Brokeback Mountain took some getting used to. There are graphic scenes in the movie unlike anything you've ever seen outside of gay porno. Not that I watch gay porno. But be ready for it. Although it's a bit uncomfortable, the gay love scenes shouldn't deter you from the movie; in fact, these scenes are part of the big reason for seeing Brokeback Mountain: learning tolerance. If the thought of watching two men have sex makes you so uncomfortable that you want to avoid this movie, then you need to see it more than I did.

The beauty of Brokeback Mountain is that lets us see gay love with all of the strings attached. It helps us relate to something that most of us find uncomfortable, even in today's open-minded society. And it does so without pity or apology; it's a tale of forbidden love, and the fact that it's gay forbidden love doesn't seem forced.

The only major failing of the movie is that it's quite slow and uneventful. It could be argued that this makes it more believable - after all, it's supposed to tell a story of two average guys who fall in love with each other - but a little more drama would have been appreciated.

I highly recommend you see this movie. I recommend you take your kids, if you have them. I recommend you take your parents. It's almost 2006. By now, we should be able to shelve our fears of homosexuality and see movies like Brokeback Mountain.

Back at home

(December 29th, 2005 - 2:40AM)

After spending the past few days with the family in Port Coquitlam, I'm back in Burnaby. I spent a large part of the afternoon cleaning the house, took a nap, and now I'm up and fixing up the website.

I would've updated while I was in Port Coquitlam, but I need access to my home network to make that happen, and my workstation crashed so I couldn't do that. But now I'm updating. Hope you all had a great Christmas.

I made some "usability" changes to the site:

• Links outside of stevekwan.com no longer pop up in new windows. I figured that putting everything in the same window would be preferable to my users.
• Made greater use of server side includes on my site, but that just makes life easier for me, not you.
• Renamed the bio page to "about me."
• Replaced the RSS/del.icio.us/StumbleUpon links with 80 by 15 buttons.
• Made the stevekwan.com logo something that can be changed with CSS.
• Corrected some pages that stretched too wide in Internet Explorer.

Merry Christmas!

(December 24th, 2005 - 2:43PM)

Hope you all have a festive and fun Christmas tomorrow!

I'll be taking off from Burnaby to spend Christmas with my folks in Port Coquitlam. Looking forward to family and food. I'll probably continue to update the site remotely.

I'm not religious, so Christmas isn't a celebration of the birth of Christ to me. And I'm not a lover of corporations, so it's not a celebration of consumerism to me either. But I still celebrate Christmas.

To me, Christmas is a celebration of love and family. It's the time of year where everyone is a little more caring and a little more generous, and we all bask in each other's good intentions. Whether you express that through a gift exchange or general goodwill, the idea is the same.

I'm lucky to have a great family and friends who love me, so this Christmas I'm hoping to love you all back just as much. Enjoy the festivities, enjoy your loved ones, and don't drink too much nog.

January is going to be busy

(December 23rd, 2005 - 9:52AM)

I've been embroiled in demos all month, and I already have three set up for early January. Statistically speaking, we're likely to acquire a good deal of work from all these demos and we might find ourselves in a crunch situation shortly. Of course, that's not a bad problem to have.

Eloquent's fiscal year passed recently, and we had a meeting to discuss the company's performance over the past year. It's so rewarding to see a company doing well and knowing that you had a part in making that happen. I look forward to pushing even further in 2006. So look forward to a lot of posts where I complain about work because I'm under stress!

I've been putting a lot of thought into how our knowledge management products could link into other knowledge management services, like del.icio.us. In particular, I'm wondering if such an endeavour would even be useful. Calling del.icio.us a knowledge management service is a somewhat loose use of the term. But we'll see.

As you've surely noticed, the site is looking a lot like Christmas. In the unlikely event that this will be your last visit to the site before the 25th, I hope you have a great Christmas.

Today is the 23rd, which means that two very special people have their birthdays. Happy birthday, Uncle Len and Shereen!

How I wasted an entire day at work

(December 22nd, 2005 - 6:49PM)

It's called StumbleUpon, and it's fantastic.

StumbleUpon is a Firefox extension that allows you to find random pages of interest, or "stumble" across the Web. You pick some topics of interest, and by clicking a Stumble! button you can find pages in one of those topics that other StumbleUpon users have recommended. I was able to waste most of my work day playing with StumbleUpon. If you're a Firefox user, try it out.

The fonts are bigger! Aaaaaaah!

(December 22nd, 2005 - 3:32PM)

Everything on the site looks a little bigger now. No, your Web browser isn't misconfigured. I've made the change to make the site more accessible to the those with less-than-perfect vision. Since I profess to be a UI guy, I thought it only makes sense to have a friendlier website.

So much fun

(December 21st, 2005 - 9:50PM)

I've been enjoying updating the website lately. You may have noticed that from the barrage of posts.

I think it might be because I've had a chance to play with the technical details behind the scenes, which is a lot more involving than writing the content. Maybe I'll play around more with the server-side aspect of the site, because it motivates me to update it.

#2

(December 21st, 2005 - 2:01PM)

#2: Eve 6 - Here's to the Night

Things were pretty rough for me several years ago. I remember being in a blue funk - girl problems - when I heard this song for the first time.

I was in the Great Hall at BCIT doing my calculus homework when the loudspeakers, tuned to BCIT radio, played Here's to the Night. It immediately lightened my mood.

Here's to the Night reminds me of better times, and reflection on a past which really wasn't that bad. As Alfred Lord Tennyson said, "'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

Yes, I know it's a pop song, and some of you might think it's shallow. But for whatever reason, it resonates with me. That's why it's #2.

The top ten so far:

1. ???
2. Eve 6 - Here's to the Night
3. Matthew Good - Avalanche
4. Def Leppard - When Love and Hate Collide
5. U2 - Where the Streets Have No Name
6. The Waterboys - Fisherman Blues
7. Leonard Cohen - Dance me to the End of Love
8. Dave Matthews Band & Paul Oakenfold - When the World Ends
9. Massive Attack - Angel
10. Stereophonics - Mr. Writer

So what is number one? What's the top song according to me? Keep the hits coming, loyal fans.

Top five message posts of all time

(December 20th, 2005 - 11:11PM)

I've received a lot of posts on my message board. Most are dumb. Some are quite funny. Below are my top five favorites.

ICBC

sorry sir, but we regret to inform you that we cannot procede in giving you that loan you requested. not only does your record say that you have been banned from every major creditcard in this country, but it also says that you tried to pick a dog up by its hind legs and push him around like a vaccuum cleaner. we apologize for any inconvenience.

Dickolas Wang

I went to Korean BBQ today; it was pretty sweet. I've started using a day planner program in an attempt to keep my life more organized; sure enough, it worked, and I didn't forget to go to Korean BBQ.

Currently playing: Hot Hot Heat - "Make up the Breakdown"

I Wish I Were a Cron Job

Does anyone else get annoyed when steve participates in a MSN conversations by sending 5 messages in rapid succesion, then ignores you for ten minutes, before sending another 5 messages? That pisses me off.

bad keane

hi steve im mattis friend and i have been reading this site and your sooo fucking good at this. Call me up and well go for some steak and eggs.

Brad keane 552 my weight

Stevie K

Eggs are nasty. I don't see how people can eat them. Chicken, on the other hand, is delicious.

Show of hands

(December 20th, 2005 - 6:30PM)

Who read and understood the last post? Should I get less geeky on here?

The game plan

(December 20th, 2005 - 5:56PM)

Accomplished so far on stevekwan.com:

• Site automatically downloads and caches bookmarks from del.icio.us.
• Site has an RSS feed, although it's updated manually and doesn't link to a specific page.
• "steve recommends" replaced with "i'm reading/watching/listening to."
• Site is now XHTML 1.0 transitionally valid.

Still to come:

• Transform blog and archives from XHTML into a format that can be imported into WebGENCAT.
• Configure export in WebGENCAT that will build stevekwan.com based on imported content.
• Configure RSS export.

New Minesweeper scores

(December 19th, 2005 - 5:31PM)

Review: King Kong

(December 19th, 2005 - 2:27PM)

Monkey vs Dinosaur. Picture shamelessly borrowed from Roger Ebert.

(4 / 5 stars)

One sentence summary: The most beautiful tale of bestial love you will ever see.

I went to see this beast of a movie with Richard, Victor and Jowen. Richard is an old friend of mine. The other two are "new."

When I first heard that Peter Jackson was making a King Kong movie several months back, I was a little skeptical. After all, it's a movie about a gigantic monkey. Regardless of the directing, acting and CGI quality, can a movie with such a silly plot really be good? I'm reminded of Hulk, a movie with a great cast and crew, but which ultimately sucked because it was a movie about a giant green guy. Can Peter Jackson take such an unbelievable concept as King Kong and make it into a believable movie?

Yes, yes he can.

Andy Serkis, the actor who brought Gollum to life with his body language in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, lends his mime capabilities to King Kong. The monkey looks really believable.

This movie's real success is its ability to capture the relationship between Kong and Naomi Watts. I'm not sure how exactly they accomplished this. I suspect it's a combination of good directing, good acting and good CGI. The premise of a gorilla in love with a woman is somewhat unbelievable, but this movie makes it believable. That's what makes it so great.

It figures.

(December 18th, 2005 - 1:26PM)

As soon as I show my live link to del.icio.us, the site is down for emergency maintenance.

Downloading from del.icio.us

(December 18th, 2005 - 1:00PM)

I've got far too much spare time.

I've written a PHP script that will download the latest bookmarks added to my del.icio.us and display them inline on my site. Check it out below.

I know, I know. I could be doing better things with my time; don't even bother telling me.

stevekwan.com has an RSS feed

(December 18th, 2005 - 12:24AM)

I've added a semi-functional RSS feed to stevekwan.com. It currently isn't updated automatically when I update the site. I have to make changes to it by hand. But then again, the XHTML on this site isn't updated automatically either. This site is manual labour.

One of my pet projects has been to get all pages on this website into transitionally valid XHTML. From there I can import it into a data structuring engine and use it to automatically build my website.

I'm thinking of using WebGENCAT as that data structuring engine. I've used it to build portions of websites before, and I'd like to see how well it can be scaled to mine. I'd also like it to generate RSS feeds for me. Perhaps I'll even have my blog outputting in EAD format. :)

Gallery updated

(December 16th, 2005 - 11:34PM)

I've uploaded pictures of the cabin trip to my gallery.

All alone

(December 16th, 2005 - 3:42PM)

In a timespan of about fifteen minutes, the entire office vacated and now I'm working by myself. Did I cut the cheese or something?

stevekwan.com is del.icio.us!

(December 15th, 2005 - 8:51PM)

I've set up my del.icio.us. Everyone probably already knows what del.icio.us is, because I seem to be the last one to find these things out. But I'll explain it anyway. del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site. You can post your Web bookmarks online, and other people can view them. But that's not what makes it really interesting.

When you bookmark a site, del.icio.us tells you who else has bookmarked that site. From there, you can see what else these people have bookmarked. It's a quick way to travel from one person's bookmarks to the other, which lets you find interesting related websites that these people find valuable.

I've linked my friends, vancouver rocks!, software and archives sections to my del.icio.us. Right now there's not much there, but unless I get bored, there will be.

Attitude is everything

(December 14th, 2005 - 11:32AM)

Yesterday in a meeting, one of our engineers got pissed off, laid into my boss and stormed back to his desk. My boss almost cried.

Not that my boss is perfect, but there's no justification for that kind of behaviour in a professional environment. Why is it that software engineers always have such lousy attitudes? A lot of the time, the only difference between a positive and negative work environment is the attitude of the players involved. It's all about the people.

Being a geek isn't a bad thing. If you get butterflies every time your code compiles, there's nothing wrong with you. But in the year 2005, social skills are perhaps even more important for software engineers to develop than the technical aspects.

Can you beat me?

(December 12th, 2005 - 4:55PM)

Back at work after a long weekend

(December 12th, 2005 - 2:52PM)

I'd almost forgotten how much of a pain it can be to work for someone else. I hate it when other people step on my toes while I'm doing my job.

Anyway, I had a demo this morning - I think it went really well. I was able to demo a very sophisticated part of our software that I don't think any of our competitors can emulate. I hope the prospect saw how useful this functionality can be. I want to see more people taking full advantage of our system.

Currently listening to: The Darkness - One Way Ticket

Enhancing my website

(December 11th, 2005 - 10:33PM)

I've updated my resume (it's been getting some attention lately; more on that later) and cleaning up the XHTML in some of older pages which aren't transitionally valid. I know I'm getting geeky, but this will allow me to quickly overhaul the website in the future.

My gut's been bugging me a lot lately. My mom says I should get it checked out, so I'm asking her to refer me to a doctor.

Back from the cabin

(December 11th, 2005 - 2:45PM)

I'm home again. Wow, what a weekend.

Michelle, Shereen and I went to my parent's cabin for a long weekend - we all took Friday off. The original plan was to go skiing at Hemlock, but apparently the mountain's gone out of business. Interesting to me, because I didn't know that it was possible for a mountain to go out of business. But then again, I'm not a financial expert.

Instead of skiing, we spent most of the time watching movies, reading, eating, and talking. Living the life. I really want to take more time off, because sometimes work can just be so frustrating that you need to put it out of your mind. It's good to spend so much time with your friends.

We took some great pictures, but I can't put them up here until Shereen gets off her butt and sends them to me.

Reviews of The Suffering, Gun and Indigo Prophecy

(December 8th, 2005 - 8:27PM)

I'm going to be out of town for the weekend, so I figured I'd put some content up here to make it up to my fans.

I've got a lot to say, but a lot of it probably shouldn't make it onto the site yet. The problem with a public journal is you have to censor yourself. As much as I want to just run my mouth on here, I have to think about what I say.

I've been finishing games faster than I can review them, which is a testament to my laziness in updating this site. And to how much free time I have.

Reviews for The Suffering: Ties That Bind, Gun, and Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit) are below.

Review: The Suffering: Ties That Bind

Torque is such a badass that it's easy to forget his name is Torque.

(4 / 5 stars)

A sequel to The Suffering, a sleeper hit from 2004. It was a great game with a few minor flaws. The Suffering: Ties That Bind addresses most of the original game's problems and provides a compelling single-player experience.

If you haven't played The Suffering, I highly recommend it. Unfortunately, you might have trouble finding the original a year after its release. Fortunately, you can play The Suffering: Ties That Bind without much prior knowledge of the original.

The game looks good and the controls are responsive. Considering that this game was released for consoles as well as the PC, I'm impressed at how well it plays on my box. I have no idea how it plays on other systems.

The voice acting is decent. Michael Clarke Duncan lends his voice to the game's antagonist. The rest of the characters are decent, but not compelling.

Overall, I recommend giving it a shot.

Review: Gun

Yeehaw!

(3 / 5 stars)

The commercials have probably made it obvious that Gun is a western shooter.

The game has a lot of good ideas and can be fun, but also has a lot of boring, uninteresting missions.

The gunplay is actually quite exciting and the "splat" noise from a headshot is really satisfying, but overall Gun is a really mediocre game with a few high points.

Review: Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit)

He's not Asian, actually.

(4.5 / 5 stars)

Indigo Prophecy, also known as Fahrenheit, is a third-person cinematic adventure about a murder suspect on the run and the police trying to catch him.

The gameplay is stupid, pointless, and boring. The controls are awkward. But you won't care, because the plot is so compelling and the characters are so well developed.

I highly recommend Indigo Prophecy. Not because it's a great game, but because it's a great cinematic experience.

Moody Steve

(December 5th, 2005 - 9:32PM)

My mood has been really erratic lately. One moment I'll be happy, the next I'll be sad, then bored, then sentimental. Maybe I'm turning into a woman.

Currently listening to: Howie Day - Collide

stevekwan.com fan of the month

(December 1st, 2005 - 11:20PM)

The stevekwan.com fan of the month is "Donnie Dynamo!" Or at least, that might be his name.

Let me explain the magic of the Internet to those unfamiliar with how things work. If you are directed to my website from someone else's website, I can tell where you came from. A lot of people link to images on my site, so when you download those images from another site I get a little notification. That's how I found Donnie Dynamo.

I don't know who Donnie is. I've never spoken to him. But somehow (probably Google image searching), Donnie found stevekwan.com. He uses a candle picture from this site as his background. For those who are a little interested in Donnie, here are some things I learned off of his website:

• Donnie is 6'1"
• He attends Leo High School (all boys!)
• He HAS A JOB
• His poetry is copywritten, so don't steal it
• His poetry sucks
• He likes his armpits
• He does not like shirts
• His site has 10,000 hits - the ten thousandth was from me.

If you'd like to learn about Donnie, visit his website. If you'd like to learn even more, visit his other website, which as far as I can tell is quite similar but slightly different.

Donnie, thanks for generating extra traffic to my site. Even if you don't that you're doing it. And don't worry, you'll find a girl one day (who, according to your website, must not be a gold digger and must not be FAT).