既不回头，何必不忘；
既然无缘，何需誓言。
今日种种，似水无痕，
明夕何夕，君已陌路。
逍遥游
意气凌霄不知愁，
愿上玉京十二楼。
挥剑破云迎星落，
举酒高歌引凤游。
千载太虚无非梦，
一段衷情不肯休。
梦醒人间看微雨，
江山还似旧温柔。
More may be added next time. || posted by Julian
Sometimes when I talked to people, the topic of one's future plans would pop up every now and then. Everytime I would answer along the lines of "Oh, I have no idea what I am going to do next time, but certainly nothing related to programming."
Notice that I said programming, I didn't say IT. I don't really hate programming, in fact I think that programming is easier than Maths at times. However programming is not my main interest. Maybe it is for Telong or Jem, but certainly I know my limits. I am better off doing something related to social sciences or business, such as history, economics, anthropology or human resource management. I find them to be very fascinating, and certainly these are things which I love. That said, I also like to study trends in the IT industry.
As Steve Jobs has said, "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking." I really love these two lines, regardless of what some of my friends may say. They can disagree with them, but it is my freedom to believe in what I want to believe, so please do not try and impose your own thoughts into mine. Life does not work this way, it is not black or white. Life is in shades of grey that change with the slightest trigger.
Having said all those stuff, so what is my goal in life? I think it is better if I say my goals in life, because I really have two alternate goals after giving much thought about my life recently.
1. Further my studies overseas (preferably in University of Chicago for economics, others for other majors) to get a Ph.D and become a professor
2. Set up my own business and get it listed. My office should be on the top floor of the company's skyscraper.
I only have big dreams, but I have no means to achieve them for the moment. But I am still going to put them down on paper because life is nothing without any dreams. If I am to be born into this world, then let me achieve my goal or dream in life before I die, including sub goals such as getting rich.
I hope that ten years down the road, this post would still be around. Hopefully by then, I would have achieve one of my alternate goals. If not, I certainly hope that I would be on my way in achieving one of them. Seriously speaking, if I were to die one day without completing my goal in life, I would die with deep regrets.
No one wants to die. I have no wish to die now. I really really want to succeed in life. Life isn't fair, but I am not going to just sit there and do silly things such as buying a HDB flat in Singapore to get married (which is what my cousin is planning to do, by the way). Afterall, the money that one would spend to buy a HDB would be able to buy a plot of land overseas. || posted by Julian
There we go, Steve Jobs with another brilliant creation from Apple, the iPod Touch. But that is not the main point of my post today. This post is just a repost from my old blog. Everytime when I am feeling a little down and feel like quitting, this speech makes me feels good again about myself. I really like this little piece of inspirational speech and I will like to share to those who have not read it before. So here it is, I present to you Steve Jobs from Apple Computer, with his Commencement address delievered on June 12, 2005, at Stanford.
"I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal.
Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5 cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation- the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were thewords: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much."
Steve Jobs
|| posted by Julian
It has been a long time since I posted something. Too busy enjoying myself during the holidays I guess, ranging from eating in fancy chinese restaurants to finishing a bottle of Martell with my friends.
Talking about food, it makes me wonder how many young people actually know how to cook a decent meal at home. I am not talking about instant noodles, although instant noodles require some skills during the cooking process to taste good. My sister has commented that whenever she cooked instant noodles, it would taste like crap, unlike my mum's. In any case, usually I do not cook the noodles with the seasoning that is provided. It is full of MSG and probably not very healthy. So usually I would end up improvising by looking at the items available in the kitchen.
1. One can always use chilli, tomato, black soy sauce together with black vinegar and sesame oil to add favour to instant noodles instead of using the MSG.
2. Prawns are always nice if you are cooking instant noodles with soup. They make the soup taste much better. Dried scallops work as well, if you can find them.
3. If you like Japanese curry, feel free to cook a few prawns or meat by stir frying them. Add in a few pieces of carrot or potatoes and toss in a cube of the curry powder. Add water and boil it for a while and serve it with your instant noodles.
4. Instant noodles can be replaced by rice, spaghetti if you can find them in the kitchen. In fact I think rice and spaghetti taste better than instant noodles.
5. If you have rice that is leftover from dinner, you can always beat an egg and fried it together. If you are skilled enough, you can attempt the "golden rice" by covering every grain of rice with egg yolk so that it becomes golden yellow. Unfortunately this will require a big flame.
6. Fried rice tasted even better if you can make a suitable gravy to complement it. It can be the dark soy sauce chicken which is left over from dinner. Or you can always make your own easily. Just stir fry a few prawns and open a can of tomato sauce or tomato pasta. Pour the sauce/pasta into the pan and toss it a few pieces of chop up chilli or you can replace it with chilli sauce from a bottle (Don't blame me if it tastes crap later) Allow the gravy to simmer before pouring it over your rice.
7. Chilli sauce and mustard can be an alternative to 1.
8. You can always beat an egg and dip your leftover bread in it before frying the bread. Sprinkle some sugar if desired.
9. Luncheon meat, although unhealthy, do taste good if you slice them into thin pieces and toss them into an oven. No oil is required. In fact, things such as chicken nuggets, chinese dumplings, fish fingers etc all can be done using a normal oven (it does not need to be a mircowave). Cod fish, salmon works as well.
10. Cod fish baked in oven taste fantastic with a little soy sauce.
11. Porridge can be cooked easily by putting tiny pieces of carrot, dried scallops and rice into the pot. Boil them together with enough water and put in a few pieces of fish slices, meat and an egg later when the rice is cooked. Simmer it for a while and serve it when everything is done. Best for someone who is sick and needs to eat something light.
I believe that by using a little creativity, you can change an ordinary packet of instant noodles into something different. So if you have always been eating noodles the usual way, do crack your brain a little and you can come up with something unique as well. Of course, it is best to eat a real decent meal whenever possible. I may talk about them in my next post if I am really that bored lol... || posted by Julian
"Apple Inc. ran out of iPhones at more than half its stores less than a week after introducing the combination iPod music player and handset in the U.S. Buyers emptied outlets in 10 states, with 95 of 164 stores reporting sellouts last night, according to a posting on Apple's Web site. Cupertino, California-based Apple started selling two models of the iPhone, priced at $499 and $599, on June 29. " - Bloomberg
An amazing feat, considering the fact that they ain't exactly cheap and some consumers have been complaining about problems activating their phones, problems which are not solved for more than a day for some.
Another pieces of interesting news about Apple Inc. Apparently Universal Music Group is not very happy with their partnership and flat price rate for iTunes.
"Universal Music Group is reported not to be renewing its annual contract to sell its music through Apple's iTunes. The New York Times quoted unnamed executives as saying that Universal had decided to have monthly deals instead." - BBC News
Let's do a little analysis on reasons why UMG isn't happy. From an economic point of view, newer songs should be priced more expensive than songs which are older. This is because new songs are more popular and consumers will be rather willing to pay slightly higher prices to obtain them. Sure, you may lose a few consumers due to the price hike, but I believe that UMG feels that by the loss of quantity can be offset by the increase in prices, ie UMG probably believes that the demand for new songs is inelastic. Personally I feel that it may be true to a certain extent. However the current flat rate of 99 cents per song by iTunes has been proven to be very successful all the while, and I believe that a low price to capture a large market share is a good way to make money for Apple. Afterall, Apple is dominating the mp3 player industry with its iPods (around 70% or more). iTunes is a complementary product to provide songs to the buyers of iPods and there is a network effect.
A network effect simply means that with the large number of people owning iPods, they will be drawn to purchase songs from iTunes. When more people buy iPods, the demand for more songs will be increased and iTunes will profit more. When iTunes becomes more profitable, music companies will be more willing to enter into partnership with Apple to tap on the growing market. With more music companies joining in, iTunes database will grow with new songs and more people will be drawn to buy iPods and download songs from iTunes. You get the idea...
In any case, it will be a challenge to try and break away from iTunes for UMG. The brand name of Apple itself is very strong, so strong that companies like Creative are probably wishing that Steve Jobs will resign the next day so that Apple will lose its market share in the mp3 player industry. It is also the brand name of Apple which draws consumers to buy the iPhone. Apple represents the ultimate geek's dream. In India, the rich show off their latest iMacs and iPods (which are like Coffeebean and Starbucks), laptops and PCs are like plain bread and MacDonalds to them. There is no way to buy Apple products in India except through overseas ordering and thus the coolness factor is high.
I am drawn to iPods themselves, even though I dislike their DRM protection songs and inability to transfer songs from an iPod to a PC (you can only transfer songs from a PC to a iPod). Still, that isn't going to stop me from buying an iPod when my old mp3 player is dead. Speaking of which, where is my hammer? I kinda need it to smash my Creative Zen into pieces...
Was talking to ZY a few days ago and she prompted a remark, "How come you still never update your blog?" And since I got lots of time during hols, I decided to quietly revive this website of mine.
However I am not going to blog about myself. I think that is quite boring. I have once thought of making this blog into a place to upload my drawings, but I haven't been drawing lately. My last portrait was done more than a year ago and I gave it away to the person. So that's out of the question.
How about dancing? I do not consider myself to be a fantastic dancer, but I have thought of making a website to teach people some basic dance moves such as the moonwalk by Michael Jackson, running man by MC Hammer and others including Usher, Justin Timberlake etc. But I don't have a videocam, and frankly I think I am losing my skills and getting fat. So that's a no go again.
In the end, I have decided that I shall just post some misc stuff that I have read, seen or discovered. That will mean mostly stuff to do with IT, economics, video games, soccer and so on. Do check back regularly for random stuff, if any of the stuff which I have mentioned interests you.
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