Journal

Closure

2010-06-15T00:49:00.000+08:00

I will be discontinuing this site and start a new site at taysoonee.blogspot.com. Personally, I think this will be a rebranding exercise for myself. I hereby invite you to visit my other site.

Thank you.

Diversion for time-being

2009-08-23T23:54:00.002+08:00

Recently I’ve been overwhelmed by the task at hand and am now finding hard time trying to catch up with blogging.
However, I like to invite all visitors to check out the current discussion that my classes are having. I will post up an article there on weekly basis.
Check out : http://sites.google.com/site/businessethicsgroup/Home
I will revert back to this blog once the classes are over.

What is your #1 priority in life?

2009-07-14T01:31:00.001+08:00

Why is wealth a bad choice for #1?
Look at the current’s world economy. If your priority is wealth and your entire life is built around it, then it’ll be quite impossible for you to rebuild it again since you life-long goal has been increasing wealth. When you reset it back to zero, so did you life. Carlos Araya knows this best.
What about family? Can my life revolve around just my family?
On the surface, this looks like a great priority. Using family as your bearing in life is easy. After all, that’s the benchmark you starts out your life with. However, what happens when you’re given a glimpse of heaven and you realized that you’ve been living in "hell” all your life? Azharuddin Ismail falls ill after he has tasted “heaven”. or realizing that the way your dad treated you was NOT acceptable by social norm? What about the Fritzl’s Case. (Kindly note that I’m not saying you shouldn’t put family as 1st. They are equally important to me. I’m just saying that there must be MORE important things beside family being first.)
What about Religion?
All over the world, there are numerous cases of conversions from one religion to another and then back again. Next in line will be cults that ranges from mildly misleading to outright destructive. Just to be cynical, with so many religions in the world, can we have the one true god? Is your god better than mine? (Again, religion has been very important ranking as priority in life but it should not be the #1 priority in life. Think of the differences in decimal of 0.01. Hopefully this will appease those sensitive minded from flaming the site)
What about having a cosmopolitan mindset and think of the world globally? Protection of environment or World peace?
Personally, I truly admire people like Al Gore for his life-long pursuit in trying to create awareness in the global climate change and how to spearhead a movement alongside Greenpeace and TreeHugger, Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks for founding TED in 1984, or the Zeitgeist Movement (and the movie) by Peter Joseph. However, currently I still am not ready to share their enthusiasm in changing the world yet. Why is that so? Maybe it’s because of my selfishness. I have not enjoyed the world enough to start caring for it at the level they do. Maybe after my MBA I will.

Apart from reason #4, the number #1 priority in life ought to be the pursue of independence in life. As per Maslow’s Hierarchy, we need to fulfill our most basic needs. Our individual survival is utmost important above all else. Once this has been fulfilled, we move on to the next stage as per the pyramid below.

As each level of fulfillment is achieved, we become more independent in life, all the other aspect and priority listed above will automatically falls into place and it’ll become eventual. Furthermore, upon any setback, we can always take a step back and re-pursue our “independence” toward self actualization.

Creativity Revenge : United Breaks Guitar

2009-07-11T00:17:00.001+08:00

When a company damaged your $3,500 guitar, refused to pay and instead, sent you on a 9 months merry-go-around in a “Not me, check with him/her” loop, what do you do?

Well, if you’re Dave Carroll, you will get over your anger, and sit down to write songs about it. A trilogy one. Below is Song #1 and they’re pretty good.

For further details of the incident, check out his site.

How to embrace Twitter – Beginner edition

2009-07-10T11:20:00.002+08:00

Image via CrunchBase

“Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others' updates, known as tweets.” - Wikipedia

Why use twitter?

It’s REAL TIME.
Its 140 characters limitation forces the message to be short and precise.
The messages can be either private or public
Link your tweets to Facebook.
You can tweet using SMS, 3rd party software like Tweetdeck, and online.

How do you join the Twitter world?

Go to https://twitter.com/signup and fill up the information there. Try to use names that people can relate to easily. Preferably your name. After that, proceed to login.
Before moving forward, fill up the profiles at http://twitter.com/account/settings. Only SPAMMERS are anonymous. Remember to include profile image.
Tweeting alone on Twitter is boring. Go here and see if your friends and family members are already on Twitter.
Once you’ve found them, follow them.
You may also want to consider following news site such as:

Now what? Well, it’s time to learn how to Tweet.

Select a theme for your tweet. Do you want to tweet everything under the sun? Tweet professionally? Tweet politically? Tweet comically?
Learn the etiquettes of Tweeting online. Be nice. If you have nothing nice to say, don’t tweet.
If you want to reply to your friends, include @ in front of their name. For example, if you want to reply to me, you’ll type:

@darklegends That was a nice comment. Thanks

or

I travelled to Hawaii with @darklegends last week. It was a fun trip.

Anytime you include @ in front of my username, it will shows up on my side that you’re referring to me. Note that this messages are viewable in public. Everyone can see this message.
If you want to tweet a personal message to me, just type:

d darklegends Remember our date at 8pm tonight

There is a function to remove your message, but it’s not encouraged. We understand you’re only human. If you have nothing nice to say, just don’t say it.

That’s it. Tweeting is simple and fun. Give it a try.

Oh, you may follow me at www.twitter.com/taysoonee

Books on behavioral economic

2009-07-05T21:31:00.001+08:00

I’ve just finished reading the book “Predictably Irrational; The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” by Dan Ariel.

I’m beginning to enjoy books on behavioral economic. So far I’ve gone through “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” by Steven D. Levitt and “The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor--And Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car!” by Tim Harford

Since then, I’ve been hunting for these kind of books. I find the reference & bibliography part is a bit helpful in guiding me to the next reading materials but mostly they’re quite outdated. Hence, I find this “BookSeer site” interesting in recommending me to the next book.

Got any suggestions on good books?

One Hundred Pushup

2009-07-04T00:15:00.001+08:00

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been trying to keep fit for many years. Somehow it never materialized. There were always some distractions that will come my way. However, for the past two months, I’ve been keeping a relatively good record. One of my goal is to be able to do one hundred pushup. There is a site that helps.

At this site you can follow its training schedule accordingly. There is also a site that track your progress. It’s here. So far I’m currently at Week 3, Day 1.

I have come to believe in the keep track of my progress in life. This includes the tasks that I’ve completed, like for example, what have I done for the past 1 week? What have I done for the past 1 month? So far, RTM (Remember the milk) is my favorite site for organizing my life.

We all have our moment to shine. We just need to wait for such a moment to reveal itself.

2009-07-03T00:07:00.001+08:00

“Hi, my name is ….. I’m nearly 48. Unemployed but still looking… never been married, never been kissed.”

Now, what goes through your mind when you come across this? What a loser huh? Have you wasted all your life doing nothing?

“I’ve always wanted to perform in front a large audience. I’m gonna make that audience rock.”

So you’re basically considered as an underdog… but a hidden gem for 40 odd years? What the heck is going on? Did the society failed to notice your talents? Or you’re just wasting our time.

Q: What’s your dream?

A: I’m trying to be a professional singer.

Q: Why hasn’t it worked out so far?

A: I’ve never been given a chance before.

Let’s enjoy Susan Boyle’s

I personally believed that all of us have some kind of “Susan Boyle” talent in all of us. We just need to patiently wait for such an opportunity.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

2009-06-15T09:08:00.002+08:00

Below’s example is sourced from Dan’s Presentation from TED.com. You may checkout the full presentation here.

Firstly, try to look at a simple subscription form at Economist.com.

Anything wrong?

There are 3 options here.

Web subscription for USD 59.
Print subscription for USD 125.
Print and web subscription for USD 125.

Now, your immediate attention is drawn to the comparisons of option 2 and 3. What kind of idiot will design this kind of options? It’s so obvious that nobody will ever choose options 2 right?

You’re absolutely right if you think this way. After all, 100 MIT students who were asked to choose amongst the options above, the result is as below:

Option 1 : 16%
Option 2 : 0%
Option 3 : 84%

So, why don’t we just remove option 2?

Well, Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist did exactly that and retest the whole experiment again. This time, with just 2 options, the result came back as :

Option 1 : 68%
Option 3 : 32%

WOW! What just happened?

It turns out that when there were 3 options, the option 1 is mostly ignored. Instead, most people will zoom into option 2 (being the lesser intelligence option) and compared it against option 3. Nobody was actually comparing option 1.

Now, let’s start incorporating Option 2 into our life. (Eg. Bring a lesser attractive version of you to the bar and compare it against you. )

Zemanta

2009-06-13T16:14:00.001+08:00

Image via CrunchBase

Zemanta is a great tool to have while blogging. It’s a combination of Mediawiki, Blogspot and Picasa all rolled up in one. Now, I can just fire up Livewriter, and easily attach images onto the blog as well as tagging the relevant links (although most of it is linked back to Wikipedia).

It automatically links to popular sites based on the text in the blog. It also allow me to select images from its photo gallery or my own choosing. Sadly, it’s only Flickr at the moment. Most of my portfolios are in Picasa though. Finally, it also recommend tagging for SEO.

Nonetheless, this becomes a dilemma. I have just fallen in love with Chrome and Livewritter. However, with this, Firefox has just become a wiser choice to switch to again.

How to join GoogleSites via invitation

2009-05-21T00:30:00.001+08:00

First of all, you’ll received an email from Google inviting you to join the googlesites. An example of such an email is as below:

I have invited you to share a Google Site:

Testing Site
http://sites.google.com/site/testingsite/
---

When you click on such a link as above, you’ll be forwarded to a page such as below – assuming you do not have a google account.

Click on “Sign up for Sites” if you do not have a Google Account.

After you have click on signup for sites, you’ll be asked to provide some information in order to signup. Use the email address the googlesite invitation is sent to. This is because only that email address were given permission to access the sites. Any other email address are not allowed to access. Now if you want to change the email address, then you’ll need to ask the person who invited you in the first place to re-send the invitation again.

After you have filled in all the information, you should be able to sign in using the information you have provided earlier.

DO NOTE THAT SOMETIMES GOOGLE MAY SHOW ERROR MESSAGE DURING REGISTRATION. When you try to register a second time, it show that the account has already been registered. When that happen, try to go back to first page and sign in. Imagine, Google site having a bug like that.

Backup Data

2009-05-11T23:12:00.001+08:00

Someone once told me to backup all the data that you cannot afford to lose. What are they? All your assignments, photos, presentations, emails and many other which you may not reproduce again. Well, there are many alternatives available nowadays to backup your data.

Burn them into CD / DVD. I believe this method is beginning to get obsolete as I’ve just recently purchased a 1TB Seagate harddisk. Per GB, harddisk is getting cheaper and cheaper almost at par with CD/DVDs. Hence, even I am beginning to re-transfer all the DVDs back to harddisk.
Cloud storage. There are lots of storage that are available online. The only problem is privacy. If you don’t mind privacy issues, feel free to consider these alternatives:

Gmail (Each email account offers you 7-10GB depending on your usages.) There is even a Firefox add-on (Gspace if I’m not mistaken) that uses Gmail account as online drive.
There are many online companies that provide online storage. So far the best I’ve come across is http://skydrive.live.com. It’s by Microsoft so at least you know they won’t screw around with your data. It offers you 25GB of diskspace. It’s not terribly fast but these is meant to be a great site to store your data as backup. Not something you use daily.
http://picasaweb.google.com is also a great place to store all your images. I’m hooked onto picasa mainly due to its awesome software. I really should start getting into flickr too but until I max out my picasa storage I guess I’ll stick with picasa for a while.

Flash drive. Now this is one device I am terribly worried about. I have personally lost 256MB of data. Mind you that these are text data. 256MB of text data is enormous work and to lose it all like that. Imagine the frustration having to re-search them again. That’s why I’ll only use Flash drive as a transporter. To transport from either office to home or class or another PC. Never use it to store valuable data.
If you’re like me using Thunderbird, you might wanna consider setting your email account to IMAP. IMAP leaves the email in the server and nothing is downloaded. However if you use POP3 account, then you may wanna consider using Mozbackup. Try to backup at least once a month. Then transfer the backup file out of your harddrive onto somewhere safe. Like another external drive? or one of above mentioned.
Gbridge is a wonderful tools to synchronize data in two separate locations. For example, if you’re at work and you would like to pull a file from your home’s PC, Gbridge will works wonder. It’s more technical to set it up but it’s mighty powerful tools to have. Plus it allow you to password protect the folder too. You can download Gbride here @ http://www.gbridge.com/.

Well, that is all for now. If you need further assistance on any of the above, feel free to email me. Otherwise all your comments are welcome too.

War has always been the ultimate economic stimulus package.

2009-04-17T09:15:00.001+08:00

Source : http://www.lfgcomic.com/page/244

Can the CURRENT economic stimulus package helps the world’s economy? The world is running out of time. Pretty soon somebody will get desperate and start getting trigger happy with countries like North Korea, Iran, Palestine, Eastern Europe, Russian, one of the African country,… heck, even Thailand. More and more countries are getting unstable. Civil unrest is expected in China with their short term GDP recorded 6.1% growth. It needs 8% growth to contain civil unrest.

Consumer Mindset

2009-04-14T13:55:00.001+08:00

By looking at this chart, we need to be marketing in the post-consumer era. We need to break down the barrier and expand our influences via word of mouth.

Google's Success

2009-03-30T14:47:00.003+08:00

All about Google

View more presentations from Ouriel Ohayon.

Mini Blog and Micro Blog?

2009-03-30T09:39:00.001+08:00

Time and tide wait for no man. Hence, I have decided to split my time in posting the blogs into 3 versions. Regular blog, Mini blog and Micro blog. Regular blog will resides here in http://1979journal.blogspot.com. The mini blog will resides in http://1979thought.tumblr.com. I find this site to works great in posting short clips, quotes and thoughts quickly. Finally, you may also follow me at twitter here @ http://twitter.com/darklegends.

What is the Value of USD$1 Trillion?

2009-03-16T21:02:00.001+08:00

So, what can you do with $ 1 Trillion? The folks at www.mint.com has some comparisons on the value in no particular order.

What is the size of USD$ 1 Trillion?

2009-03-16T21:01:00.001+08:00

Below is something extracted from PageTutor to illustrate the size of One Trillion Dollars.

Step 1. Illustration of $100. This is the size of the largest US denomination currency.

Step 2. Illustration of $10,000. For most, this is equivalent to few years of their hard-earned money that fits easily into your pocket.

Step 3. Illustration of $1,000,000 (100 x $10,000). Who wants to be a Millionaire? Pathetic in term of size comparison isn’t it? Doesn’t look like a lot of money.

Step 4. Illustration of $100 Million. Now we’re getting somewhere. This is a pallet of money.

Step 5. Illustration of $1 Billion. Now we’re talking. You’ll need a truck to move your billion around.

Finally, an illustration of $ 1 Trillion. This will take you a whole warehouse to store. By the way, please note that the pallet is DOUBLE STACKED!! and the far left blip… is a size of you.

Money as Debt

2009-03-05T00:02:00.001+08:00

What is the history of money?

Why is debt vital for the creation of money?

Will current economy crisis reverse this trend? Or will this be prelude for one global currency?

Best Flashlight in the world

2009-03-03T08:48:00.001+08:00

If you were given a task to design a flashlight, what kind of feature would you consider? Few years back, my friend, Andrew, used to joke about the concept of solar powered flashlight. My my… what a world we are living in now. Hey Andrew! It’s now a reality.

Feel free to check out this company’s website at http://www.sunnightsolar.com/. I doubt it’ll be available in this part of the country anytime soon. Maybe our China counterpart will assist us with a cheaper alternative.

Credit Crisis Visualized

2009-03-01T23:50:00.003+08:00

This is an excellent guide to understand the s**t-hole we're currently in. There are 2 questions that remained to be answered.

1. How do we dig ourself out of this recession?
2. How do we prevent this from happening again? or at least detect the anomalies before the s**t-hole become too large.

The awareness test

2009-02-23T15:40:00.002+08:00

I thought this was a very interesting message to share. Sometime, we need a few moment (say 5 mins a day?) to take a step away from whatever we do and improve our awareness. It's easy to miss something in front of you when you're not looking for it.

How do you instill confidence?

2009-02-20T01:35:00.004+08:00

Answer: TRANSPARENCY!

How I wish more countries and corporations around the world will follow suit. It does not matter if it's truly transparent. It just need to feel transparent. It's the perception at work here. People will follow you till the end when you provide them a convincing "status update" on the current situation.

Visit http://www.recovery.gov/

Silence is golden

2009-02-20T01:07:00.003+08:00

I've always wondered why do the lawyers get paid so much....

Now I know. Never ever get interrogated by police officer alone or you're doomed!

Obama's First Press Conference

2009-02-15T22:13:00.003+08:00