It is the "BIG DAY" for my best friend, Jean. Sandy, Grace and I promised to be the "SISTERs" for her. We need to reach her place by 7am. So we got up 6am in the morning to get ourselves ready. This is a very interesting and happy day with so many stories.
First, Grace got some problem with the clothes she prepared to the wedding. So we tried to dig out something from my wardrobe. Amazingly, my paints and shoes are just nice and fit for her. Guess we two do not need to bring too many clothes over when visiting each other next time. : ) After that, we rushed out to catch a cab to Jean's current house. We reached there on time and started to discuss with the other three "SISTERs" how to play tough games with the "BROTHERs" and tried our best to make the whole process of marrying the bride an unforgettable experience for the groom. To be frank, this is our first time. We three didn't really have a good idea about the whole thing. Luckily, there are 2 very experience sisters prepared everything already. However, the groom and brothers were late "purposely" to tried to get us out of job because we have limited time for all the games as they need to catch the registration session soon. Anyway, this was a very interesting experience and we can see that the groom is really trying very hard to get through us but please us at the same time because we are the important "SISTERs".
After that, we went to their church for the registration session. That is normally for relatives and very close friends. We are very honored to be invited and witness their vow. That was a very touching moment as I can see they really love each other and they are so happy to be with each other for the rest of the life. Jean, I am really happy for you. : )
Here comes the 3rd part of the day. We went to another church for the wedding session. This is my first time attending friend's (at the similar age) wedding and it's my first church wedding. It is a very different experience as that was a very well planned wedding with all Jean's church friends' help. From the program, the presentation that the bride and groom prepared. I can tell that they really spend a lot of time on this. All three of us were so touched that we cried when we saw the presentation they did for each other and the happy & satisfied smile on Jean's face. Though it's a tiring day for the bride, she was still so happy. Congratulations! Jean and James! Hope we would have another gathering for your first baby soon. : )
P.S. James is really a very good salesman for Lexus. That bridal car is so impressed when he drove us back on Friday. The look and color are so nice and the facilities insde are also very good. Ya.. Ya.. I know that is the very premium brand car. All I can say is that James really made me set Lexus as one of my targets. I love the 2 seaters SC430 with the Blackish Red
Jean, one of my best friends and my ex-colleague, is going to get married tomorrow. We have known each other since Aug 2001 when I joined Systech. At that time, we had 4 girls: Grace (Hong Kong), Sandy (Taiwan), Jean (Singapore) and I, working in the marketing department for the 2 major products in Systech. We were the youngest group in the company and the most noisy one also I think. : ) That was a very enjoyable period of time as 4 of us working very hard together and that was also the period of time I started my current mission. We went to Crystal Jade, one of our favorite restaurants, for lunch today. It's like back to 4 years ago. We went out together, ate together, had fun together and enjoyed together. That was a very good lunch with the good food and good friends around. Also thanks for Grace's latest gift from Hong Kong Disney Land. Planning to visit Hong Kong this year and enjoy my first ever trip to Disney Land. 
Sorry! My beloved Clefs. Sorry to leave you in the dirty, ugly and uncomfortable taxi in JB. Sorry that we would not be able to see each other again FOREVER!Lost my favorite coin pouch today on the way to my hair salon in JB. I was trying to dig out the small notes and coins for the taxi fair and I left it on the back seat I guess. I only realized it 10 seconds after the taxi left. I always have a habit to check out the seats before I left the taxi. Unfortunately, I made a mistake today. The first thing I realized is I lost my beloved coin pouch and the second is my credit card. It took me 5 minutes standing alone the road and realized that I would not be able to get them back at all. So I called the bank to cancel the card.However, what surprised me is I overcame the whole sad feeling of losing my favorite pouch in 20 minutes right after I started my hair treatment. Everything is back to normal around 7pm today as I got the replacement of my coin pouch, credit card, and ezlink card.I would say I am lucky that I lost something money can buy back. There are too many things in the world that money can not get at all. Lucky me that I have not yet lost things that I can not get back but I would not be so lucky forever. This makes me start to treasure people and things around me more.
Today we finally finished the first 2 parts of the project with SingNet. They are doing promotion with one of our hottest products, RANGER ZP Pocket Harddisk, which is also the product category that I started with RANGER. So I am actually very proud of my team. We have a great colleague to secure this project and a whole team of aunties and mommies to finish the production in such a short period of time.For those who are interested in signing up broadband service or to renew your contract with SingNet, you may want to visit their promotion for 1500kbps Unlimited and 512kbps Unlimited. Then you can also get one RANGER ZP Pocket Harddisk 40GB, the hottest item in town. ; )
I am a supporter of Breast Feeding as I believe that is the best for both the baby and the mother. However, I was quite shocked today in the train to Orchard. There is a mother breast feeding the baby in the train. She actually has a special cloth for this activity. So her son was trying to dig out that cloth from her bag and signaled her that he was hungry. Then the mother just put up the cloth and got ready for the baby. I think I'm not the only one who got shocked as almost everyone were looking at her. It was actually very normal in some part of Europe or Africa. However, I just found it a bit strange in Singapore especially in a train. Guess I won't let my baby have the habit to "eat" everywhere he or she wants if I'm going to have one.
Thanks for Ying Ying's sharing. You have been very inspiring to me lately. After reading this article, I am more firm with what I'm doing now. : )Speech by Steve Jobs - Founder Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs saysThis is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of thefinest 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, unwedcollege 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 hiswife. 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 floorin friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5?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 instructionin the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on everydrawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphyclass to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san seriftypefaces, 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 Ieven 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 toApple, 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 Idid. 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 keeplooking 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 thel ast 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 intomy 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 innervoice. 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 afellow 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 withtypewriters, 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 hitch hiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "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.
Got my first handphone in early 1999. So I have been using handphone for 6 years. I have changed 4 phones from the very beginning. Three of them are Nokia and the last one is Sony Ericsson.Just found out some interesting things when I send in my Sony Ericsson T610 for repairing yesterday. The microphone of the phone is not functioning. So the other side can't really hear clearly. First, I thought those contacts in the phone book are very important to me, but not really. I thought that might be the only way for me to reach out the world. I have about 450 phone numbers in the phone book but the Sim Card can only save up to 250 contacts. So I was trying to go through the phone book and picked out those important numbers that I may need to use during the repairing. After going through 100 plus numbers, I gave up. I realized that there are only a few numbers that I might need to use very frequently and I either can remember them or I can reach those people via other methods such as e-mail or MSN. So the conclusion is the Sim Card Back-up product that I am looking at might not be so popular.Second, I was considering if I should send in the phone for repair as the officer informed me that it might cost up to S$70 if they need to change a few components inside. If not, I also need to pay S$15 for the diagnose. I was thinking if I really need to pay S$70, I might as well buy a new phone. However, the problem is I can't find any phone that I really want. I might end up buying the same phone. Then I must as well repair this one. In the end, they informed this evening that it costs S$42.5 to change the microphone and the labor cost. I think it's still more cost effective to repair this phone.Handphone has become a very personal thing and consumers start to become very picky on this. I want a good design with all the features I want. However, I haven't seen the design that satisfy me yet. Hopefully, the new 3G phone would be really interesting with the sleek design and all the features built in. Guess I am quite a techy person and would like to have a really "good" phone which suits my need.
Thanks for Ying Ying's gift, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, on Nov 12th 2003. That was the farewell party for both of us. I was going back to Taiwan for my three months study and preparation for my master degree application and she was going to Sweden for her traineeship. Both of us were starting our journeys to look for our destinies and this book is actually talking about how this shepherd found his destiny also.I always believe everyone got his or her own destiny. Their existence must make some difference to the world. The difference could be big or small depending on how his or her existence would affect your life but everyone must have a value in this world. So here I am to find out my destiny and my value. I believe everyone has his or her own dream or the goal to achieve. I guess I just started another journey to look for a different life, but this is a painful decision as it affects and hurts people around me. However, just like the shepherd in this book, I need to be persistent in searching my destiny. Though it would be a tough way to go, I must not give up until I found my destiny. The result could be very ironic that I just give up the best I can find, but I need to prove it.
