Monthly Archives: July 2006

I want…

It’s a strange thing. You meet lots of people who say they want to be a millionaire.

“What will you do with a million”, I ask.

“First I’ll buy a car, then the entire collection of movies I’ve always want, then take a year-long vacation to Europe, I’ll eat in the finest restaurants,” they said.

“And then?”

“Then I’ll… I’ll….Hmm” and they look confused.

“Ok, I’ll put the rest in the bank”

“Sounds like you need about $100,000. Why not work towards it then?”

“Well, I would like to. But it’s too much work”.

From what I see there’s two issues.

First, if you don’t know why you’re doing something, then you’re not likely to achieve it.

If my friend only needed $100,000, why’d he wish for $1 million?

On that note, why not wish for $10 million or $100 million.

Second, if you’re not committed to achieving something, and you’re not motivated to achieve it, guess what? If a goal/dream/hope true, it’s only because of:

  • your direct effort
  • luck

Luck, in this case, refers to scenarios like winning the lottery, having a distant relative leave you something from their estate, have something truly miraculous happen that makes your wish come true. You’re looking at odds of one in a million, or one in a billion. Not impossible, but highly, highly unlikely.
On the other hand, direct effort leads directly to the goal. However, between what you’re doing and what you plan to achieve, there’s a monster of a time navigating through obstacles, setbacks and disappointment.

Chances are you’ll be push against the wall, and more than once you’ll want to give up. You’ll also question your sanity in wanting to achieve the goal, you’ll also be asking yourself whether it’s worth the sacrifice in your family time, time you could’ve be watching a rerun, gaming on the net, sleeping or simply doing nothing.

the one reason why some people succeed and others don’t is because the ones who succeed sometimes do because they have no choice. They’re dead broke, out of a job, and making that next sale is the key to putting food on the table. That’s the situation, the “World’s Greatest Salesman’ Joe Girard found himself in many years ago. And in relating the story, this strive towards personal excellence has remained with him.

Another way is to make a commitment to someone whom you can trust to be ruthlessly committed to helping you achieve your goals. Give them all your cash and ask them to hold it for you. If you fail to achieve the tasks for the week, they can then donate the entire amount to charity. Rinse and repeat. See how far you are along within 2 months. I guarantee you’ll see a difference.
If you’re left with no choice but to go up, there’s only one direction you can move in.

school daze

ok, the unthinkable has happened.

in singapore there is a phenomenon where parents do crazy things to get their kids to school, even to the extent of submitting their resumes to the school in hopes of getting picked…to volunteer of all things, to do free stuff to benefit the school.

so you have high power criminal lawyers going down to primary schools to give talks about the law.

I mean, isn’t this an abuse of the schools authority?

here’s the sad part.

i’ve become one of those parents who is willing to do crazy things to get his kid into a good school.

Since my daughter, bianca, was born, i’ve been thinking through various options to get her into a good school.

Bianca Weeshould i go with my goal to become a high power internet entrepreneur, hopefully dazzle the school’s administration and get her in on celebrity?

should i enroll her in classes, get her on the math olympiad team, beat everyone else in the asia-pacific and get her in that way? or should i, should i….. darn, there are so many options, so little time.

just as i was about to do something silly, my wife tells me she’s called her alma mater and our daughter qualifies for priority entry into Henry Park Primary School (one of the premier grade schools in Singapore).

Now to figure out how to get those letters out of the mailbox before the mailman comes for the pickup..

crash boom bang

the past few days have been a trying time.i’ve switched webhosts, moved about 8 domains over to my new host.

getting the blog up was quite a nightmare.

couldn’t figure out what to do about the SQL databases.

luckily, i got some help from this page.

I’m planning to update this blog regularly, so stay tuned faithful readers!

Something stinky about this

The Straits Times, Singapore largest English language daily has a ST Ink forum, popular referred to as the Stinky forum.

Just the other day a user, katchykid put up an interesting post

Relook at the rules
Before sex education even begins, the government should perhaps relook at their laws.

In Singapore, the official age to have sex is 16 years old.

The official age to see RA movies is 21 years old.

So someone can actually have sex at 16 years old but cant watch RA movies at 21 years old. Okie now this is the catch, suppose if 2 teens do a tammy, they cant watch themselves after(provided their handphone dont get stolen).

Tammy is the infamous Nanyang Polytechnic student who decided to capture a moment (10 minutes worth) of physical intimacy between herself and her male friend (relationship unknown).

While there will continue to be stalwarts in the island republic who will vehemently protest everything they see on TV, radio, movies, the Internet, it’ll be more challenging for the authorities to mediate between controlling ‘undesirable’ content, while attempting to cultivate an arts and media industry (which traditionally thrives on stretching and sometimes breaking boundaries).

Granted, we could go the way of Iranian filmmakers and produce movies with innuendo and analogies, however, I feel the lack the severely repressed environment to create such expression. and let’s face it, most Singaporeans (myself included) are:

  • too lazy (because everything else has been spoonfed to us)
  • too tired (because we’ve pulled an extra long overtime shift at work, coming home at midnight, instead of 9pm)
  • or too indifferent (bochap) because we feel that things will not change regardless of whether any action is taken.

I’ve always believed in one tenet, that is, if nothing is done, nothing will happen. if something is done, something will happen.

The question is whether we have to wait for the teenage posters of the stink forum to grow up and change the world around them, or if we will do it now.

Waking up nice and fresh

It hasn’t been easy over the last month or so. The hours have been a killer. I have been sleeping only 4 hours a night.

But then on the other hand, I have been having the time of my life.

Each afternoon and night I spend trawling the Internet, checking out forums, websites, user guides, all in the quest towards creating a new career in the area of Internet Marketing.

There’s always a learning curve involved in every new venture and this definitely is no different.

I can remember sitting in front of a Unix box for the first time, knowing only the commands “ls” (to list the files in a directory and “chmod” (to change the read/write permissions for files).

Beyond that, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.

I can empathise with those guys who might be stuck for inspiration.

Well, there’s always the ‘idiots’ and ‘dummies’ guides in the bookstores and I refer to them all the time too.

The first time I saw a “C++ for Dummies” book, I was like “what???”

I couldn’t imagine being able to make such a complex language accessible to newbies.

I was wrong.

I bought the two volume set and it was done in a very accessible manner.

I checked out Amazon and saw

  • HTML 4 For Dummies (Html 4 for Dummies) by Ed Tittel and Mary Burmeister
  • Creating Web Pages for Dummies, Sixth Edition by Bud E. Smith, Arthur Bebak, Bud Bud Smith, and Arthur Bebakblogging for dummies screenshot
  • Html for Dummies Quick Reference by Deborah S. Ray and Eric J. Ray
  • Blogging For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)) by Brad Hill
  • Syndicating Web Sites with RSS Feeds For Dummies ® by Ellen Finkelstein
  • Starting an Online Business For Dummies, 4th Edition by Greg Holden
  • Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies (For Dummies (Business & Personal Finance)) by Rob Snellwebsite for dummies book cover

So there’s no shortage of stuff to borrow from the library or buy from the bookstore (these are priced about $15-20, a great buy!).

Go forth and read!