Recently in Job Category

It’s terribly embarrassing, but I had a colleague point out to me that I still use “we” when talking about my former employer, even in the present tense. I’m aware that I do that quite a bit, and my convenient excuse is that my current organisation is a statutory board under my previous organisation, so technically, we’re still one big happy family. I think I’ve gotten my finger on what it is:

It’s a case of classic elder-sibling mentality, where most of my relationships are strongly rooted in a natural tendency to protect and nurture. Even now I feel for my ex-colleagues at times when they seemed swamped with work, guilty that I’m not there in the trenches with them. Like Andy Croll once commented, I seem to have an overly developed sense of “duty”.

Letting go of things past is something I’m still learning, and it’s always easier to pretend that everything stays the same and our divergent pathways in life won’t change anything. I’ve let friendships slide over the years, but whenever we meet up there’s this half-truth, half-play-acting that we’re still close even though Facebook status updates and a shared past is all that holds the pieces together. As the years pass, we collect more and more of such pieces, eventually having to lay some of them down in order to move on.

It’s been a while since I was in school, but I remember those days as the absolute best in my life. There’s a camaraderie you will only ever find in school. It is untainted by the hidden agendas brought about by status and station in life. Everyone is a student on this transient journey of self-discovery.

So when I took up the camera to document Temasek Polytechnic’s Freshmen Orientation, it was hard not to be drawn into the sheer energy of youth; exhibited in bold cheers as students of the six different schools within the Polytechnic rallied around their collective identities.

What the freshmen didn’t know was that while I was documenting their induction, I was learning about the institution I had become a part of only one week before. For the first time, I saw the students perform the traditional mass dance and go absolutely nuts cheering on their dragonboat team.

In the midst of the screaming, the shouting, and the tears they shed after orientation ended, I remember thinking to myself: there’s something special here.

There’s something special here.

It’s the end of week one here at the new workplace. I’ve so many ideas, and the environment seems so perfectly charged to create amazing things. As with any workplace, we will inevitably meet the boundaries of what can be done, but it is in these constraints that we find a definition in design. Contrary to popular belief, total freedom is detrimental to design; the lack of constraints represents a lack of problems, and design is meant to solve problems.

That’s my design philosophy anyway, and I’m hoping to bring a little more structure into this fantastically creative team. It’s ironic that my previous job at MOE was bringing creativity into an overly (my opinion, anyway) structured environment. The time there has really helped solidify what I do, and I will always be grateful for the 4+ years spent there.

Guess I’ve jumped a little ahead of myself.

I’ve joined Temasek Polytechnic’s corporate communications team and will be overseeing most online communication efforts. My first mountain of tasks involve an overhaul of the online communication infrastructure. Content will likely be migrated across servers, central online services set up and put into play, the establishing of some formal processes — stuff most folks won’t think of as fun, but necessary for a robust platform for some flat-out gorgeous storytelling.

It’s the calm before the storm here at TP. The school term officially starts near end-April, but you can almost feel a tangible energy in the air. Some freshmen orientation programmes have begun, and it has been so liberating to be able to run down the hallways, Canon G9 in hand, and casually filming the power and volume of youth.

The school is located next to Bedok Reservoir. I’ve always remembered it as a drab gravel-covered path around a body of water we were forced to run around once a year during my secondary school’s annual cross-country run. But oh my goodness, the reservoir is gorgeous. TP’s rowing teams train in the water and there’s a huge regatta next Friday marking the end of the freshmen orientations.

The talent and tapestry is so extremely rich here at Temasek Poly. I’m truly blessed to be able to capture and tell the many stories crafted here in this oasis.

This is my last week at the Ministry of Education. It’s been a little over four years, and I find myself in a very different place from where I envisioned four years ago. My time in the government has been a most serendipitous and amazing journey, and I am indelibly changed because of it.

I used to participate rather actively in the great Singaporean pastime of government-bashing. I despised the way the government worked - it was easy to find points of agreement with the cab driver: Singapore is fraught with hidden taxes that makes living very expensive; the politicians earn way too much; the government is full of bureaucracy and doesn’t care for citizens.

All the points are valid of course. But the greatest lesson I took home with me is this: the government isn’t a faceless machine. She is made up of fellow citizens. True, some are self-serving. Some are in it for the money. But no more and no less than in any other large organisation, private or public. As citizens we should not waste our time here; we should be looking to nurture a culture of selflessness and empower noble intent. Rather than be mired in a never-ending spiral of self-despair and finger-pointing, we should engage in a constructive relationship with the government.

Web 2.0 ushers in Gov 2.0, and Gov 2.0 cannot exist without Citizen 2.0.

A friend from another country once asked me why Singaporeans complained so much but did so little. It really hit home. We could attribute it to fear, but to be perfectly honest, we complain because it is the easiest path to take.

I joined the government 4 years ago with the intention of changing the way Singapore government agencies create websites. To my surprise the people at the ministry welcomed my ideas and were willing to let Selwyn and I build the corporate website from the ground up. It was then I realised that the ministry was made up of real people, many of whom genuinely want to improve the lives of people living in Singapore.

The line between the government and her people is an imaginary line, and contrary to popular movie wisdom, neither has need to fear the other. Citizens who want to change Singapore for the better should not hesitate to join the government and effect change from within.

The Road Ahead

I have grappled with this decision for about a year now. It has become clear that it is time for me to move on. The entrepreneurial dream is something that burns within me and many of my friends.

But it has dawned on me that entrepreneurship is not so much a working arrangement as it is a state of mind. The entrepreneurial spirit is one that doesn’t tolerate the status quo simply because, but constantly questions and endlessly strive through continual iteration to improve processes, products and people.

I have decided to continue being an intrapreneur. Come April I will be joining the folks at Temasek Polytechnic. I was totally blown away by how much the organisation valued me as an individual rather than a unit of resource, and the hiring process was thoroughly outstanding. I am excited at the possibilities there, and thankful that God has provided for me and led me down a path filled with peace.

It’s the end of the year, and as 2010 approaches, it is the time for change.

I’ve done the unwise - leaving my job at the Ministry of Education without first securing another, but somewhere in my heart I know that it is the right thing to do. It is both the fleeing from the inevitable apathy that comes with dogmatically sticking to a set routine, and the embracing of possibilities.

And all I have at hand are a set of vague plans.

As with any plan, there is a need to pray, and ultimately the surrender of our plans and submission to God’s. Guess I’ll come clean and say that I don’t know what He has in store for me either.

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”

J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye

This resonates so, so much, and so deeply.

“Don’t make work your life”, I’m often told. The alternative offered is to view work as a means to an end — that work is somehow mutually exclusive from the activities one would associate as “having a life”.

I find it impossible to separate work from the rest of my life not because I live to work, but because we shouldn’t be spending so many hours in the office working to death.

Our work should enrich the lives of the people we serve.

There’s a dichotomy when it comes to what we expect of our public servants. We expect them to be:

1. Competent

   I mean, no one wants stupid public servants. On an operation level, we’d like our public servants to serve us with an acceptable level of efficiency and get the job done. On a strategic level, we’d like the bigwigs to be smarter than most of us and make decisions that will help us all. So our economy will stay healthy, our children will have a bright future, we’ll all find great paying jobs that we love, we can stay out without fear of being mugged and our reservist stints don’t include real war.

2. An average Joe

   Our public servants should be one of us. They shouldn’t be sitting on an ivory tower, aloof and cold. They shouldn’t be seen driving expensive sports cars. Most of all, they should be making a decent living at best - no over the top salaries that’ll alienate them from the struggles the rest of us face on a day to day. God forbid those that make it to the top of the public sector be paid a salary similar to those at the top of the private sector.

I’ll be honest here. If I have the chops to make it to the top of the public sector, I’ll probably want to buy a sports car. A Tesla Roadster. Wouldn’t you? If a public servant ought to emphatise with the common man, isn’t he allowed to fulfill the common dreams?

It’s 4am.

“What’s wrong, can’t sleep?”, Faith asks.

“For the first time in a long time, I’m lying here, wide awake, thinking about work”, I reply.

“Wow, that’s great”. She heads back to slumberland.

I am so blessed to have a wife who understands exactly what I mean, what I feel and loves me knowing exactly the person I am.

It has been a long time. Since the redesign of the MOE Corporate website half a year ago, we’ve shifted into the necessary maintenance mode, quashing small bugs and ironing out processes to keep the website stocked with up-to-date information.

The initial days of the redesign were an amazing high for us. We had a ton of feedback, both external and internal, from colleagues in other departments who had problems finding information that sat on an entirely new information architecture framework to journalists who couldn’t navigate the new site. It was an amazing experience to be able to address all their feedback in real time as we morphed the homepage, tweaked navigation and made important information more accessible within minutes of receiving emails. The response time in which we were able to react turned many frowns upside down (hate the cliché) and shocked many users who weren’t expecting immediate response from government web team.

It was also a high because we received numerous emails thanking us for bringing a Singapore government site into the 21st century. The geekier ones (some of them are you guys reading my blog) loved the underlying code and gave us suggestions with which we used to improve the online experience.

We were designing something collaboratively with our audience and it was amazing.

That was then.

Maintenance mode is an iterative process that goes on perpetually. As we comb the website for possible improvements, our audience had also gotten used to our design and adapted to our flaws. Innovation was exercised in the publishing of new content, like the insertion of flickr photographs and online video into speeches and press releases.

There were ideas I could offer, but for the most part the audience seemed happy with the information they were getting. There was very little impetus for change, and it would was hard to expect colleagues to put in extra work to cut information a dozen new ways simply because I thought it would serve our audience better.

We missed you.

I missed you.

Editor’s note: This post pertains to the day job, and is probably boring as hell. It is also posted on the MOE Web Development blog.

The dream job of any designer is one that gives the flexibility to design a product exactly the way the designer wants it. The best-case scenario is where the designer’s vision matches what the users want. Users may not want pretty user interfaces and this is where designers need to learn to tame the designer ego.

Designers, on the whole, deal with a whole lot of constraints other than just ego. Even beautiful products such as the Macbook is constrained by cost and availability of materials.

While walking down Orchard Road yesterday morning with Faith and Anne in tow, we encountered wave upon wave of Secondary school kids carrying tins, asking for donations to St. John’s Ambulance in return for some stickers.

They come in all shapes and sizes, but a few stereotypes stand out:

• The can’t-be-bothereds. Often in groups, these schoolkids are the ones you’d immediately describe as “recalcitrant”. They walk about with their headphones on, and the stark emptiness of their tins don’t bother them - they’re just passing time.
• The frazzled. Walking around like a bee on steroids, they wear the frown of a stockbroker after a market collapse. They buzz around, inspecting everyone to see if they’ve pasted the stickers. When faced with a potential “victim” who doesn’t sport the sticker, the frown intensifies, they step towards their target, then chicken out at the last minute.
• The shy. They’ll be seen at the corner, considerately staying out of your way but constantly hoping you’ll come over and do your good deed for the month. They occasionally gang up to take out people at the fringe of the crowd.
• The enthused. I’ve never seen this type until yesterday. This girl popped up from behind us and chirped, “please donate”, and flashed a big smile. When we told her we already had donated, she smiled, thanked us and went to the next person. Her cheerfulness was very contagious.

I’ve come to realise that I care for these kids a great deal - all of them. It could be the day job at the Ministry of Education. It’s getting to me.

Heather, Michael, Jennifer, Ryan and Geoff. I’m glad we didn’t rotate around different tables like we were supposed to. That’s the toss-up at most workshops and conferences, isn’t it? Network more broadly or more deeply? I think we chose well.

Over the duration of the 4 day event, we got to work on fictitious websites, designed imaginary devices and cracked countless jokes. It was liberating to shed my Asian shell and get in there guns ablazing - after all, I only had 4 days.

On the first day, the most important thing I learned came not from the speaker but from Michael who sat beside me. He said managing working relationships was the same as crafting a user experience. What do your bosses need, what are their motivations, and how do you make it easy for them to close the “transaction”? How do you align what they need as a person with what the project needs? While the topic of managing bosses isn’t new to me, the juxtaposition of that and user experience was highly interesting.

Another interesting tidbit we had from the casual chat at the table was the differences between relationships with Americans, Europeans and Asians. Michael mentioned how Americans are quick to bond, but devote only the relevant slice of themselves - you may get to know them fast, but just the work part of their being, or the parent if you happen to be the teacher of their child. You don’t get the full person. His observations were that Asians were the other extreme. It took forever to get through the outer shell, but when you get past that, you get the whole person.

I suppose that is accurate to a certain degree. We tend to think of people as whole persons rather than functions. My mother has always drilled it in me to understand that people are more than their jobs. They are parents to their children, children to their parents, and that creates a fuller way of looking at people. Maybe not as efficient, but certainly more organic and less mechanical.

The workshops proper were grueling. I learned a lot from the design strategy, design research and interaction design workshops. The information architecture workshop was a little too rudimentary, but it probably helped those who didn’t do IA for a living.

There’s a chill you get when the air-conditioning’s too cold. It’s an unnatural chill. When it’s cold out, the cold feels liberating; everything is crisp and fresh. Not so with the cold that comes with refrigeration. It chills to the core, as if the inside of your bones were ice-cold.

It lasted for hours even after I left the office. It’s been like this for a while, and it drains me. Tracing back, I think it comes from exhaustion - I had an extremely tight deadline moved back 4 months. While the extra time was welcome, it felt like having a sprint turned into a marathon just before the finish line. There’s little left in the tank but a whole long way to go.

The ball game’s different when things are for the long haul. Where the other cogs I needed to get in place were once responsive, the time extension has put everything in a freeze. The sense of urgency is gone. The adrenaline rush has worn out. The river turns into a glacier.

Cold. I feel cold.

It’s the time of the year when everything you do feels like a slow trudge uphill. Significant inroads have been made on the upcoming redesign of the Ministry of Education’s website. It’s due for launch 1Q 2008, but has to undergo some IE-proofing. Thank you, Microsoft, for making web design a lot more tedious than it has to be.

Anne has been acting up lately, waking up in the middle of the night and taking a really long time getting back to sleep. She’d demand that we scratch her “itchiness” (she made that word up for wherever itched), or pat her back ad perpetua.

My prayers have become so mundane, and I’m learning what it means to pray for one’s daily bread. It always seems more “right” to pray for things like knowing God better, or growing in His likeness or submitting to His will - the higher, nobler things, but I find myself praying for bread and butter issues like “please help Anne sleep through this night, Faith really needs the sleep”. It seems so primitive and base of me, and I wonder if it’s a sign my faith has waned, or if God’s breaking me down to the bare essentials.

Every two months, the guys at work celebrate birthdays of all the people whose birthdays passed. It’s not a huge party or anything - just some food.

Hui Lih, who’s away with her husband in Idaho, expressly stated on her blog she “decided her birthday was best kept a private affair”. Being the rebels we are, we put her blog up on the big screen and celebrated her birthday, along with Jeanne and Jenn’s, anyway.

Many requests were made to have her on video-conferencing, but it was 4am in Boise, so a photo of her family would do.

There’s the imaginary brick wall, when the immense weight of the task before you materialises out of thin air and bears down upon you. The taste of fear - that this time round you’ve possibly bitten off more than you can chew.

Then you take a quick, short, shallow breath and battle on. Time is short and you cannot afford the luxury of doubt.

But what if the imaginary brick wall isn’t, you know, imaginary?

Tolkien had it down pat when he created Frodo, the quintessential archetype of the overladen worker. Frodo was burdened by a ring - a small innocuous object that couldn’t have weighed more than a gold coin. And so it is to those around, left scratching their heads wondering why employee x, stay-home-mums and school teachers complain as much as they do.

You really won’t know how heavy the ring is unless you’ve carried it.

Work has risen to a fevered pitch and I find myself working on the clock, off the clock, and pretty much any clock I can get. Even while patting Anne to sleep during her numerous nightly tantrums I devote spare processing cycles to work.

It takes a lot to produce good work, and even more to make its production look effortless. The catch-22 is that should you succeed, the people around you actually believe that it’s easy. The fact that you even had time to blog about it at 5 in the morning confirms their belief.

“It’s just a friggin’ ring. What so hard about that?”

It’s so hard to stop yourself from laughing out loud when the vendor tells you that he needs to “go into his back end” for an online demonstration.

I’ve trained in combat all my life. The mastery of 7 weapons, 5 styles of unarmed combat, advanced equestrianism, pin-point accuracy with countless projectiles. I can’t say I’ve learned everything there is to know, but you could say I’m better equipped on the battlefield than most. Even before my adolescence, there has always been a great desire to learn the ancient techniques and modern adaptations that have made me the soldier I am today. The desire, while strong as the day of its birth, has come under a shroud of doubt in recent days.

One soldier can only do so much. This is the divisive fact that separates history from legend. History remembers individuals who guided their civilisations to glory while legend favoured heroes who overcame herculean obstacles through their own skill and ingenuity. Gone are the days where battles between nations were settled by pitting their best fighters, like David and Goliath. Battles are won through the management of numerous troops. It is slowly dawning upon me that I might serve my country better this way.

Just as most VCs do not even read an iota of code, most generals wouldn’t last two minutes in a one-on-one fight with a brutish footman. But the general, whose only skill is moving these footmen around, is revered throughout the land while the footman is celebrated only in the small confines of the local tavern.

I used to loath these generals, wondering how they felt qualified to lead an army to battle without ever having seen the carnage of frontline action. And it is awkward that I should now see their role as the greater, and my years of training as naught.

Maybe it is pride that prevents me from being that which I once despised. Or the inevitable atrophy of skills that had taken me a lifetime to acquire. Did I really walk down the wrong path?

Anyone can sit back and move footmen around the battlefield…right? Would the potential to do the greater good be worth my personal sacrifice?

I don’t remember how old I was when Ms Teo Ser Lee represented Singapore in the Ms World pageant, but I was old enough to know she was hot, and naive enough to believe in the Disneyseque hope that we could win the whole thing.

I came one step closer to the awkward, blushful (I’m inventing the word) and adolescently thrilling experience of meeting a real life beauty queen: I had dinner with her brother Teo Ser Luck, along with quite a few of the other gahmen bloggers.

Maybe I haven’t been in the civil service long enough to appreciate how “surreal” (as Walter continually reiterated) the experience was. What I do see is the changing of the guard from the older generation of government officials whom our parents placed on a pedestal, to the younger generation of leaders who are more elder-sibling than silver-haired statesman.

Ser Luck proved that he could hold his liquor with the best of them while still talking sanely about serious matters such as BlinkyMummy’s boyfriends.

He told us of the launch of the p65 blog, a collaborative blog by Members of Parliament born post-1965. While I look forward to posts that help humanise them, I am more interested in their motivations for joining politics and the different views they have on national policies. Though I know it is important for the government to put on a united front, I would like to know the people behind the policy making - their ideologies and beliefs. I think I speak for many of us when I say that I feel a lot more comfortable putting the future of my home in the hands of principled but fallible people than a cold, efficient machine.

The site isn’t up yet, but a great idea would be to have Sylvia Lim as an author. She is… young enough, right?

Vanessa and Damien have pictures of the event.

In the Forbes article Secrets of the Self-Made, 14 self-made members of the Forbes 400 were asked a bunch of interesting questions. I found one particularly intriguing.

“What is more important: the idea or the execution?”

For starters, the grammar of the question is erm…in question. But I digress.

While some of the entrepreneurs took the middle ground saying that one without the other is worthless, the statements of those who took one over the other were quite insightful.

Those that chose execution over ideas assumed that there was an abundance of ideas. Those that chose ideas seemed to have no problem finding people who could bring it to fruition. Or they’d say that an idea without execution is worth nothing. Alternatively, there is no execution without the initial idea.

Personally I think that what defines a good idea is when it lends itself to solid, compact execution. Ideas are aplenty, but good ideas - ideas that are simple and earth-shattering at the same time - are few and far between. It is impossible to perfectly execute an idea if it is vague and its benefits ethereal. I’m sure you can relate to having been involved in projects where the only benefit it provided anyone would come from its completion and quiet death.

Jorge Perez sums it up best when he answered, “The idea is more fun and stimulating but the devil is in the details”. The line between idea and execution is a fine one. If I have a great idea, then proceed to sit down and elaborate on it a little, would that still be part of the idea or its execution?

Oh and by the way, if the guys at Forbes.com are reading this, putting all the questions on a slideshow is terrible execution of a bad idea.

You’ve spent your whole life jumping over puddles. More often than not, the puddles are easily cleared with a good hop. There’ve been times when you did not get the lift you needed; sometimes it was because you slipped just before you leapt, or the continual rain falling on your face distracted you. Your pair of white canvas school shoes, streaked grey, tell of those times.

The rain produces a multitude of small puddles, but it’s the huge one in the middle that catches your eye. You want to jump it just to see if you can, because you’re not quite sure. You don’t even know how deep it is, and whether it’d just be your shoes that get wet should you fail.

You prime yourself for a running start, but stop short just before the edge. You now remember the weight of the schoolbag on your shoulders. Much as you’d like to put the bag down to give yourself a chance, placing the bag on the sodden ground would most certainly land you a whipping when you get home.

You glance at the large puddle one more time and a nagging thought crosses your mind: can you jump over the puddle, schoolbag and all? The dichotomy between the hope of flight, however fleeting and momentary, and the constant burden on your shoulders tires you.

You turn and head home; the mundanity of gravity has won today.

I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about work: how different aspects of the website we manage could be made better: both frontend and back, human and computer processes, the acquisition of tools and the training of skills required to use those tools.

It’s not that there’s an award up for grabs or anything. The problem is simply this: I do not know how to turn it off or put it on sleep mode.

I carry a sketchbook almost everywhere I go, logging down ideas on the commute, at my desk, while shopping. I’ve caught myself crawling out of bed to scribble a thought from a dream, and they usually turn out to be solutions to problems I never could solve while conscious. I wish there were more hours in a day, because there are so many ideas to try out and so little time.

Some people have pointed out that I work too hard - and that it isn’t as if I were still running my own business and that I should relax. But I find myself with no tolerance for mediocrity or lack of trying.

If there is something worth doing, some improvement that can be made, some problem that can be solved; if there is excellence to be attained, there is no reason why we should not expend our energies to do so.

The nagging spiritual question here is, where does God’s desire for us to take care of what we are entrusted with end (Genesis 2:15) and the pride of Babel (Genesis 11:4) begin?

The major academic junctures in my life play out like reruns of a bad movie: There I’d be, waiting for the result slip of the major examination I spent the last few years preparing for. And when I finally held it in my hands there’d be that tinge of excitement, fear and uncertainty. I’d walk out of school a little zombified, my finite mind trying to compute the infinite combinations life presented me at that point.

Months would pass before I realised I never did thank my teachers for the years they had to put up with me. While I had invested years of my life into the rather selfish pursuit of my own education, they had invested years of their life hoping we’d make it in life, whatever that meant.

They are our surrogate parents, the ones who bear the weight of educating us, often never seeing the fruit of their labour.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been slaving night and day, getting the site ready for launch. Unlike most of the other sites I’ve worked on professionally, I had a personal stake in this one. It was my way of saying thanks to all the teachers I’ve ever had in my life.

I invite you to leave your own note of thanks on Teachersday.sg. We’ll be running the whole hullabaloo of radio and print ads as well.

After a tough day at work - getting my perfectly validated code torn to shreds after emailing it to a vendor to put it up - getting on a crowded train really doesn’t lighten my mood. I don’t mind standing the whole way. I’m sure there are a lot of people who need the seats more than I do. It’s the idiots you meet on the train that you feel like killing, but haven’t the energy to do so. Yes I’m talking to you, the muscleman in the World Gym tank top sitting in front of the very pregnant lady.

Then at the entrance of the train there’s the Secondary school kid who insists on sitting on the floor, blocking a third of the entrance. He refuses to get off his butt and looks around when people have problems getting in and out of the train.

Oh, and there’s the pole dance. Here’s a photo to utterly kill your appetite and help you lose weight.

I was minding my own business, holding on to the pole so I wouldn’t accidentally fall on the stupid boy sitting at the entrance, when this woman decided to align her butt crack with the part of the pole I was holding. I was this close to chewing her head off.

I probably need to up my thyroid meds. Or migrate.

Oft in one’s work you endure, waiting for the ginormous project to end - the one you’ve been grinding out day after day after day. Then when the fateful day comes and you passed with relatively flying colours there’s the huge sense of relief; you can finally get some much needed sleep and take things a little easier from here. But like rainy days, you don’t see this one coming. A ginormous-er project hits you hard across the forehead, with the usual deadline-was-yesterday crapola.

Love for the work can only take you so far. Sometimes you need to take time to be a little depressed. It didn’t help that Faith will be home late, and I’ll be returning to an empty home with plumbing to fix. It doesn’t get more depressing than

And the curly fries aren’t even good. With every bite I know I’m closer to making my heart go into cardiac arrest. I look around me and it’s all similar depressed people eating McD’s on a weekday night.

I head home, got the pipe fixed and waiting for the return of my Faith, and I mean it both ways. Thank God she came home earlier than I expected.

Then somehow life isn’t so bad.

I managed to squeeze in a day’s leave, declaring my absence for a whole day’s worth of meetings. We’ll be taking Anne swimming in a few minutes. Pictures to follow.

Things have been close to crazy around here.

The farmers who had been preparing their crops for the harvest had everything ready, only to find out that the carpenters in the village planned to tear down the barn where the grain was to be stored. It wouldn’t have been so much of a problem if the farmers had adequate time to find other places to store the grain. Everything…everything that the farmers had been working towards now meant nothing if the grain couldn’t be stored for the winter months. What is worse, some of the carpenters were helping out in preparing for the harvest. It didn’t even occur to them that the tearing down of the barn, which they too were a part of, would affect their co-workers so adversely.

In other news, Anne has begun to choose walking as her primary means of locomotion. Everything happens so quickly; life happens so quickly. She walks a few steps, then the next few days we receive word from our parents that she walked more than twenty steps unassisted. We’ve stopped counting. All this happened in a span of a few weeks.

Faith has been thinking of maybe working part-time to spend more time with Anne. Much as I enjoy my job, the reality of it is I am quite significantly underpaid for the kind of work I provide. Money hasn’t been an issue thus far, but it would help if the compensation matched what the stuff I bring to work everyday. I’d love to be able to give Faith the option of spending time with Anne during these formative years.

God has been faithful in big things and small. We just have to trust.

Now standing on the other side of the fence, I realise that while clients pay vendors for their expertise, there are cases in which expert advice can be misconstrued. An experienced vendor may be able to point out ways to save costs and effort, sometimes steering clients away from what can be a blatantly stupid idea. I know, because there have been countless times I’ve asked clients to settle for the more efficient solution. I didn’t realise that some clients perceive such advice as the vendor trying to shirk away from hard work.

Though it is quite typically Singaporean to squeeze every drop of blood to get a good bargain, I must admit that I was totally oblivious to the possibility that sometimes all clients want is a work-horse.

Just do as we say, don’t question our decisions. Even if you were sure we couldn’t smash right through the brick wall, we’d like to see you break your head on it because we told you to.

Because to some of us, that’s value for money.

Nothing like a little Bossa Nova on the iPod to make the gargantuan workload dissipate a little faster.

Van’s already on the plane to the US and flying SIA too! I’ll be flying JAL early Thursday morning. Last I checked on their website, the onboard entertainment seemed rather dismal. I bought myself a battery pack for Eponine (my 5G iPod) and stocked up on Season 2 of Lost. Now I just need a 20-pack of AA batteries and hope I last the flight.

I’ll be working till really late till the night I fly. And Faith’s birthday is the day before I fly.

I miss you already.

It is exciting to hack away large chunks from a giant block of marble, seeing your David take shape. But there comes a time you need to put away the sledgehammer and pick up the soft brushes for the more intricate work.

And then there are times you’re expected to hack away large chunks with your soft brush because it’s been so long, and people have become accustomed to the huge rectangular chunk of marble standing in the middle of the Louvre.

Wow. It’s been 2 years and 2 weeks ago when I tried preaching web standards to the business director or a large local IT solutions company, and failing so miserably it was blogworthy.

Now armed with 2 years more experience but equally naive, I rambled on about how designing in line with web standards streamlined the entire web production process. This time, the shell-shocked victims of my enthusiastic onslaught were my new colleagues.

We’re a small group, and we manage both the internet and intranet of one of the largest organisations in Singapore. We spend a lot of time trying to get content to “look right”, employing all sorts of presentation hacks. Maybe if I slot two <br>s, or &nbsps into the empty table cells. That sorta thing.

The audience makes all the difference. Web standards, till today, is still a hard sell to the businessman. They just want their site up. They don’t really care how you do it. Sure, higher pageranks and faster product development cycles are good, but hardly quantifiable in dollars. In Singapore, an online presence is thought of as little more than a namecard. It’s terribly shortsighted, but we aren’t known to be very forward-thinking a people.

Here, to this audience, web standards offered something very, very prized. Less work, more control. And here in a government organisation, consistency in presentation is paramount. Web standards offer all that. A perfect fit.

I have much to thank God for. And I know that He is telling me to be as, if not more, enthusiastic about my faith as I am about web standards, my Macs or photography. After all, all these mundane details mean nothing if we haven’t found the purpose of life itself.

Wore a pink shirt to work today. Faith said some time ago that it takes some measure of self-confidence for a guy to don on pink. I kinda pushed the envelope by wearing pink into the men’s locker room before heading to the gym during my lunch hour. You could almost hear the crackle of static electricity in the air as I walked in.

Meg becomes a chef. She speaks the words my heart doesn’t dare whisper, but I find such a striking resemblance to who we both are, and where we both are at.

I studied Management Information Systems at the University of Arizona back in 2000 because my mum casually mentioned that she wouldn’t pay my way if I did English, which would have been something I wanted to do for the longest time in my life. I knew she didn’t mean it, but the fear of not having an “economically viable” job scared me. I loved the word and I liked computers. I guess “like” would just have to do.

If you’ve been reading Tribolum for some time, you’d have concluded that I’m bloody idealistic. I’ve had a few people who left comments, basically telling me to suck it up, and that most people don’t have jobs they like anyway. Even though the words were harsh, they were true.

I just want to be The Catcher in the Rye. Maybe that’s why I identify with Holden Caulfield so much. We know what we want to do, but.

Thanks, Meg, for having the courage to go where many of us dare not tread. Thanks for being an inspiration.

I quit my job at the non-profit. It was a hard decision to make, and many of you will probably think it was the irresponsible one, with the baby coming and all. But I believe I made the right decision.

I’ll be freelancing for a bit, mostly photography and web design. If you have any of projects needing these skills, do contact me.

Network Guy: I can’t do this. I don’t know what she changed in her configuration.

Colleague of absent computer user: But she doesn’t know how to change the configuration settings.

Network Guy: Yeah, that’s exactly why I can’t do this.

Most people, when asked if their current jobs had anything to do with what they studied, would say there is little or no correlation. I’m three months into my job, and have applied what I studied and what I learnt along the way. Now that the site’s done I don’t know if the rest of the job (the cyclical routine part) will involve the amputation of what I know or what I enjoy continually learning about. Compounded to the problem I seem to have more responsibilities toward a lot more other people than I ever fathomed.

It’s a combination of putting my nose to the grindstone and doing what I truly enjoy. Do you learn to like what you do, or do you do what you like? It’s a chicken and egg question.

I just fear looking up forty years later to discover the plough I was so labouriously pushing hit a solid brick wall thirty-nine years ago.

It is easy to detatch ourselves from the real world, especially when you spend hours upon hours coding. It reality of a colleague leaving hit me when I coded his particulars onto a “Contact Us” page, and then realised I would have to take it out in a month.

The feeling sucks.

There’s a reason why I’m not a network engineer, click yes or one of those hardware “go-go-gadget” click yes fixit types. I absolutely hate troubleshooting click yes computers.

It’s like resurrecting a click yes dead body. Most computers die because click yes people don’t take care of them. It doesn’t help that every click yes idiotic software click yes manufacturer wants their programs installed in a directory named after their own companies. Do we really click yes need the root directory clogged up with folders ranging from Sierra (which holds a click yes now empty Leisure Suit Larry folder) to DJ450 (which contains expanded printer driver files)? Don’t you just hate click yes having to reinstall everything when a click yes computer dies?

I’m running dry. Dry of ideas; dry of inspiration.

I bend the knees of my heart and I’m just so thankful for writer’s block. Somehow, at the bottom of the ink well, when my strength is all gone, I know that I must find God in all of this.

Yearning is painful. But what love has no yearning?

It’s been a few months already, but I don’t think it’s ever too late to announce a site launch. Kavanagh Dance is a fully standards compliant site that even has multiple stylesheets and a customised one for printing (ie. you won’t get the background and graphics when you print, saving you lots of ink).

Looks fine in all the browsers I’ve tested, including the extremely picky Opera 6. Fire away, people.

Farming analogy.

I sold off my farm and used the proceeds to purchase an artificial biosphere with the neighbours. They said that this would be more productive. Not wanting to be left out of the collective, I changed my entire life.

I found out that I was the only farmer in this biosphere. There are goat herders, carpenters, and even the odd money-changer. I never realised this, but my neighbours don’t eat much of the rice which I produce. In fact, I wasn’t included in their master plan at first, but they thought it wise to have a farmer on board to do the tilling. Keep the soil fertile and all.

It is done. After living on two hours of sleep for the last three days, the site is finished. Rather than port the existing design from Flash to XHTML, I redesigned, handcoded and validated. I’m probably getting paid peanuts for the job, but I did it mainly to help a friend out.

It was about three years ago I first designed the very same site that has been keeping me up the last three days. I used image maps and Microsoft Frontpage (you can all ostracise me now). Now smarter and wiser (somewhat), I stand on the shoulders of giants. Tabbed navigation by Douglas Bowman and Faux columns by Dan Cederholm. Combined by me.

Check out the new Allegro-ems. I bet your life you’ll find bugs. Just be sure to tell them to me.

The Web Standards mailing list recently discussed how some web designers worked solely on Macromedia Flash, and how the web was so much more than that.

Working on Flash alone is a tempting proposition. There is no need to study browser quirks or utilise hacks and workarounds. But there’s always the inherent danger of putting the world into the hands of a single corporation, not to mention the accessibility issues of a totally Flash site. It is the pointing of the middle finger to the visually handicapped, to bookmarking, to Google.

Having received a call from a friend to assess a prototype of a site she received, I laid out the disadvantages of having an all Flash site. Not to mention the initial .swf file on the homepage is more than 2 megabytes in size. That’s pretty much inaccessible to anyone with something better to do.

Flash is a wonderful tool. It is great for use on CD-Roms or even booths and possibly automated teller machines of the future. WHen used on the web it has to be tempered with a lot of care.

So after a frantic redesign on compliant XHTML and CSS, I submit a cleaner, less cluttered design. It just got rejected. They preferred the Flash. So now, after having only a few hours sleep the last few days, I’ve to do a port from Flash to XHTML.

Sleep is a much sought-after luxury at this point.

I met up with a web solutions vendor some time ago as a technical advisor to a friend who was their client. My friend hadn’t arrived yet. You could almost hear an audible old western tune in the air as three of their top honchos hovered around me. We engaged in some “casual” chit-chat whilst waiting, but you could bet your life every word I uttered was prodded for signs of weakness. I couldn’t be bothered, really. It was a non-paying gig and whatever ego I had had long been diluted through hours upon hours of housework. It was only through Faith’s gentle manner that I held in me a calm sense of mere security.

They asked me what tools I used to make my websites. “BBEdit, Notepad or whichever text-editor is at hand,” I answered. They all laughed. I didn’t catch the joke.

“If you use notepad, I use the command prompt!” one of them said, eliciting more laughter from his band.

I blinked hard, the laughter still ringing in the air. I sat there half in shock that the idea of using a text-editor for HTML seemed so foreign to them. I swallowed, unable to think of something civil to say.

It was a good thing my friend arrived shortly. I may have been made more of the fool I seemed to be.

If you are looking for a technical job, remember that the initial point of contact between you and the company is normally from human resources. Don’t bury him or her with jargon only understood by those in your specific field.

And the 5As. Always Avoid Acronyms And Alliteration.

There are times when I still wonder if what I did was the right move.

Back in August, I was hired in a manner one could only describe as a godsend. Two days into the job, I realised that my employer was paying twice-over for his website to be done. He had hired an external IT vendor, and then there was me, to work on the interface which the vendor didn’t seem to think was important.

Part of being an employee (to me a least), is having the company’s best interests at heart. At that time I did a quick calculation and realised that the best interest of my employer was to renegotiate the payments with his vendor if the vendor wasn’t producing good work, which in turn required him to hire me. I voluntarily stepped out of my job.

We met up with the vendor, a three headed organisation consisting of the technical, logistical and business directors. The first two seemed keen to pass it on; it was the third that refused. And that was how I talked myself out of a job.

It was never my intention to make a quick buck by pulling the project from under the vendor. I was hired because the customer had doubts that the vendor could pull off something satisfactory. Last I checked, the site-in-progress still doesn’t display in Safari or Mozilla. It’s a problem because Macs are huge when you’re doing web design for a photography house.

When I tell folks about it many of them voiced out that I should have just taken the job and kept quiet. It was still “money in the pocket”. True as that is, I want to produce work that contributes. If there’s anything I learnt from the army, it’s that there are only so many chances to prove yourself to yourself, and skiving off measures your quality. You can hide it from your employer, but you’ll always live with the knowledge of what you’re made of.

I tried selling web standards today. He was the director of an IT solutions company and I was the small fry recently returned with an overseas education. It basically boiled down to a “what can you do for me” kind of discussion. The final outcome was nothing short of downright ugly, but I came out of it with some valuable lessons.

Being all excited about speaking to the director of a IT solutions company, I delved right into how the XHTML and CSS helped separate content from presentation, and how semantic markup made websites more than just the visual displays they now are.

Halfway through my diatribe he turns to me and says, “I’m not a programmer. I don’t code. I’m the businessman”. Maybe he didn’t say it as succinct, but those was his point. It’s important to know who you’re talking to.

Businessman. Right. Having read Jeffrey Veen’s article on The Business Value of Web Standards I tried baiting him.

“Do you conduct cross-browser testing?” I asked, hoping to draw him into admitting to code-forking. I’d have him on the ropes then, I thought.

“We don’t really care about people who use macs”. Well, that’d be me, I thought silently to myself.

Still listing the quantifiable value of using web standards I told him that the separation of content and presentation would normally bring down file sizes, reducing bandwidth costs. He was hardly impressed - the costs were miniscule.

“Smaller file sizes would result in shorter loading times for your users”, I urged.

“Broadband is so readily available.” I wanted to tell him the a large majority of web users around the world still use <56k dialups. His company’s site had markup uglier than a hydra: it had two <head>s and three <body>s. Didn’t think arguing over the value of semantic markup would help.

While I emphasised the need for usability, he countered by saying that no one knew the user better than the customer, if the two weren’t one and the same. Nothing seemed to hit. Curveballs, fastballs, slowballs. They were all flying past me as I was quickly striking out.

He concluded that he was in business, and being in business meant being pragmatic. Being pragmatic meant making money. Making money meant lowering costs. Semantic markup is usually more work than generating table layouts in an outdated version of Microsoft Frontpage.

I left the building with the sinking feeling that I was no good to nobody (the double negatives do not cancel themselves out here). During the bus ride home I even thought that maybe all this semantic shit (pardon the alliteration) was an adult’s version of IRC or some role-playing game. That coding semantically is all fine and dandy, but it ain’t so in real life.

I know that there’s a move towards more intelligent markup. I’ve seen it in diveintomark.org and so many other semantically rich sites. I just don’t know if I’ve the strength to sell this same vision in a local web design industry that applauds shortcuts and getting away with sloppy work as profitability.

It is true that businesses are set up to make money, but it is not something I believe in. I believe that businesses are set up to serve the community, and I treat my clients that way. I’m not in it for the big bucks or the fancy car. I just need enough to get by and to know that I gave of my best.

I spent a great deal of time learning about agricultural techniques. Though I hardly regard myself an expert in the area, I have developed a deep affinity with the land. The smell of the fallen rain as it makes its cyclical pilgrimage up to the heavens, the feel of the soil as I clench my toes; I have grown attuned to the fields.

I had not my own.

It was a few weeks ago that I bumped into the town artisan on my way home from the market. He mentioned briefly his intention to convert the plot he owned into a farm and invited me to take a look at it. He had hired a trio of farmers from out of town to work the land.

The soles of my feet were calloused from the distance of many miles over many years, but I felt the parched earth the moment I stepped into his field. The crops, though green, stood stalk-thin and malnourished. There were no irrigation channels - the hired hands had foregone the hard work of laying the land and the seeds they scattered had fallen on shallow, sallow soil.

A pulsing sense of wanting to right the injustice surged within me, but I restrained myself, for it was neither my seed nor my field. But the artisan was unhappy with the state of his field and the work of his hirees. He arranged a meeting with them and brought me along as a go-between.

The trio were quick to size me up. I understood their adoption of a defensive stance, but I made it clear that it was not my intention to threaten their livelihood but to make sure that the artisan, my friend, got the quality of work he paid for.

The artisan had little confidence that they could grow crops bountiful enough to reap any profit and asked me to work on the irrigation, an aspect of the job which the other farmers had neglected to do properly. This meant that the trio would have to give up part of their wages. Two of the three farmers seemed more than willing to lease out the back-breaking work, but the last (who coincidentally was physically the largest) was adamant that their “territory” be protected. My friend the artisan could not convince him otherwise, for the contract had been signed and the wages paid in advance.

I spent the latter part of the day talking to the artisan, sharing dreams and visions over cups of tea. The loyalty I felt to him was partly due to our friendship, but a large portion of it was my obligation to the land. It cries to me.

Maybe it is time for me to find my own little plot, and toil in the manner I know how.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had that much data to absorb in a condensed period of time. My brain ran complex physical models to understand how light rays were manipulated by tilting the lens board of a 4 by 5 camera, memorised what each and every knob did, composed mental ERDs (Entity-Relationship Diagrams) in attempts to produce a more streamlined method of data organisation for the half-completed website, and still found time to explore visually aesthetic site layouts while planning out the CSS elements.

All this in a day. And a night (I had homework). It’s would have been easier if I had a clean slate to work with. Now with a work already in progress, I feel restricted to work within the given parameters, even if a different perspective and style was chosen. I don’t necessarily agree with what has already been done, but am too nice to take the sweat and toil of other people lightly and discard them. I am aware that it is these compromises that result in half-baked websites.

The thought of starting my own web-design company has lingered on my mind for the longest time. I’ve seen so many terribly coded sites (not that mine is perfect; I’ve so much CSS to clean up) that something stirs within me to evangelise compliant standards. Many Singapore web designers are still coding multiple versions to suit various platforms and browsers, and some are (gasp!) using Microsoft Frontpage.

I know I’m ranting incoherently. I don’t know whether or not to strike it out on my own. The possibilities both thrill and scare me.

The contract that would put me on the path of the safe and sure remains unsigned. Where do I go from here? Where does God want me to go?

Handed in my portfolio of studio shots to the company today. I was dressed in a pair of shabby shorts and my decade-old nike sandals. I had expected it to be a simple delivery run.

But things aren’t always as simple as you plan them to be. I was asked to stay back a little while to explain the rationale behind my shots: why I shot the way I did and how. Like I mentioned beforehand, it is one thing to shoot opportunistically - you shoot because it was there, and another to create an image out of nothing. I had opted to take photographs of my Powerbook, my iPod, and my Victorinox Swisstool. Even non-photography buffs will tell you that shiny objects aren’t the easiest to photograph, but I wanted to play with highlights, treading somewhere between producing something with nice strong lines, and being burnt because my iPod was too reflective.

I walked out of the conference room employed, not as a photographer but as a web designer. I guess God does work in His own mysterious ways. I ended up with a job that paid better than the one I applied for, and something I feel definitely more comfortable in.

So come Monday, I join the rest of the herd in heading to work. God does provide, and He does so wondrously.

You should have seen me. I was like a kid in a candy shop for the very first time. Multi-coloured gel filters, giant softboxes and an army of lights had me spellbound.

An unfortunate side-effect of being spellbound is paralysis. I spent quite a lot of time just standing there, unsure of what to do. Though I’ve read up on product photography, I was a total n00b (l33t for newbie, and don’t ask me to explain what l33t is; it’ll just explode into more g33k terminology) when it came to the hands-on. While most of my photos involved making use of what was already there, studio photography involves more creation and less opportunistic photography.

I decided to stick to basic lights, though I now regret not having played around with the gels. It’s amazing how beat-up my Powerbook and iPod look when under the close scrutiny of a lens gone macro. Dust seems to be always prevalent and my heart aches every time I discover a small scratch that doesn’t disappear despite my best efforts to rub it off with my t-shirt.

I probably won’t land the job. I have no qualms about the experience, for I now know more about the industry and the job, not to mention the two hours of studio-use I just enjoyed.

Every now and then Singapore surprises me. It is not too bold and sweeping a statement when one says that Singapore behaves like a big city, complete with the characteristic hustle and general irritability. It is especially so for the inexperienced job hunter; one who has little to offer except a body and a thin ego as a corporate meat-shield.

But like I said, there are exceptions to the rule. I went for an interview with a photography house for the position of a photographer. I entered into it with the slimmest of hopes as it was hardly my field of expertise or education. After looking at my portfolio they decided that I needed more studio-type shots in order to better ascertain my abilities.

I spent that day itself looking for studios to rent, and though they weren’t too expensive, a dollar saved is a dollar earned when it comes to the world of the unemployed. I emailed the interviewer to ask if there were even a snowball’s chance in hell that I’d land the job, and if it were worth the investment to rent the studio in order to beef up my portfolio. Instead of asking me to move my amateur behind out of the way, they offered the use of their facilities.

There’s no doubt that it’s going to be extra scary working under their eye, as opposed to doing my own thing miles away in isolation, but it’s a form of job training if anything. After all, I’m as unsure as they when it comes to figuring out if I really have what it takes for this line of work.

I’m excited, and I can’t say I have been this intrigued for some time. It’s good to be excited about work, potential or otherwise, right?

Went for a job interview today. Amongst the questions laid out in the questionaire, there was “List five adjectives your closest friends describe you as”.

1. Serious.
2. Funny.
3. Seriously
4. funny.
5. Seriously.

Ok, so I chickened out and didn’t write exactly what I wanted to. But “serious” and “funny” were right in there.

When I play ball, I’m not the kind likely to engage in fist-pumping or trash-talking (well not THAT much anyway). I like to play a solid game quietly and have my contributions speak for itself.

Listing things down for my resumé is easy, but I’m stumped at the “personal profile” part. Am I an excellent communicator? Do I write well? Do I have a good grasp of usability? Heck, I don’t know.

On the courts you make a free-throw to join the team. Out here you have to talk about how you could have made the free-throw in order to get a chance to shoot it.

I’m just uncomfortable tooting my own horn. I’m too darn afraid I start learning how to breathe daily through it.

More farming analogies.

With the burden of now having to grow barley weighing heavily on my mind, I took a walk in the field and stumbled upon a small patch of marijuana at its edge. Apparently the customer planted its seeds over the winter and neglected to tell me. Now not only do I have to grow barley in record-breaking time I need to have the marijuana and barley co-exist.

It stinks that I can’t do the job as well as I’d like. I’m inclined to simply throw the barley seeds on the ground and leave. Two farmers with different intentions working on a single plot of land simply will not work.

Taking a page out of Vaya’s baking analogies, I’ll use farming analogies when it comes to talking about work. This comes from my frequent urges to actually work the land and lie in a barn.

After months of cultivating wheat on my field, my customers do an about-turn and now want barley instead. Nobody wants the wheat now and on top of that I’ve to literally push the Earth round its orbit so that the seasons can cycle faster, enabling me to harvest barley in the shorter time I now have. My customers aren’t starving. They just chose this time to be fickle.