Hacking the Good days…

‘Mommy what do you do?’

Pure awesomeness.

Truly inspirational,

Hi peeps, another forwarded email that I like to share but you all know that I don’t like forwarding email, so I’m posting here as I thought you may like it, too.  Enjoy.  Oh and kindly let me know if you find where to attribute. ;)

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A group of professional people posed this question to a group of 4 to 8 year-olds, ‘What does love mean?’
The answers they got were broader and deeper than anyone could have imagined See what you think:

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‘When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn’t bend over and paint her toenails anymore.
So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That’s love..’
Rebecca- age 8

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‘When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different.
You just know that your name is safe in their mouth.’
Billy – age 4

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‘Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other.’
Karl – age 5

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‘Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any of theirs.’
Chrissy – age 6

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‘Love is what makes you smile when you’re tired..’
Terri – age 4

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‘Love is when my mommy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before giving it to him, to make sure the taste is OK..’
Danny – age 7

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‘Love is when you kiss all the time. Then when you get tired of kissing, you still want to be together and you talk more.
My Mommy and Daddy are like that.. They look gross when they kiss’
Emily – age 8

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‘Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.’
Bobby – age 7 (Wow!)

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‘If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate,’
Nikka – age 6 (we need a few million more Nikka’s on this planet)

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‘Love is when you tell a guy you like his shirt, then he wears it everyday.’
Noelle – age 7

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‘Love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after they know each other so well.’
Tommy – age 6

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‘During my piano recital, I was on a stage and I was scared. I looked at all the people watching me and saw my daddy waving and smiling.
He was the only one doing that.. I wasn’t scared anymore.’
Cindy – age 8

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‘My mommy loves me more than anybody You don’t see anyone else kissing me to sleep at night..’
Clare – age 6

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‘Love is when Mommy gives Daddy the best piece of chicken.’
Elaine-age 5

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‘Love is when Mommy sees Daddy smelly and sweaty and still says he is handsomer than Robert Redford.’
Chris – age 7

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‘Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left him alone all day.’
Mary Ann – age 4

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‘I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and has to go out and buy new ones..’
Lauren – age 4

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‘When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you.’ (what an image)
Karen – age 7

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‘Love is when Mommy sees Daddy on the toilet and she doesn’t think it’s gross.’
Mark – age 6

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‘You really shouldn’t say ‘I love you’ unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget.’
Jessica – age 8

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And the final one
The winner was a four year old child whose next door neighbor was an elderly gentleman who had recently lost his wife.
Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went into the old gentleman’s yard, climbed onto his lap, and just sat there.
When his Mother asked what he had said to the neighbor, the little boy said,
‘Nothing, I just helped him cry’

Nerding out on the packaging then write a blog post about it.  :)  But bear with me, this might be the next big finding after optical fibre…

One key thing I learnt over the holiday is that health is the most important thing and it’s like most projects, a-little-TLC (Tender, Love and Care)-a-day is way better then regrets towards the end of the ‘deadlines’, quite literally.  One of my uncles in Hong Kong has been advised by the doctor that he should start watching his cholesterol, and having porridge would help lower the cholesterol level.  Which, by the way, I always thought that was just marketing scam to make us buy more porridge.  But having seen him between half a year, with his mild exericise and regular consumption of porridge, his cholesterol reading was really coming down and he was looking really good.  So I decided that it’s a lovely habit and it’s probably not too difficult to start young, plus what’s better than a bowl of lovely hot porridge in freezing winter that keeps you full for longer!  (Oh for those who know me, yes I can eat A LOT in the morning… enough that slightly scared my developers friends back then in Yahoo!) :)

Yummy porridge aside, as a geek I study nutritional information of packing intently.  Always.  And I found the most peculiar thing on the Jordans’ packaging.  Would love to see if you think that’s a genuine typo, or, porridge is really this magical:

Sorry for the image quality – it’s taken from my iPhone.  Now the fun part, as you can see, a 100 gram of Jordan’s Porridge is only 135kcal more than a 40 gram of it.  Good news for the calories-conscious, no?  BUT the best peculiar stats – wait for it – the MORE porridge you have the LESS sugar and saturated fat there is (Sugar: 1.0 g  per 100g porridge versus 10.3g per 40g), (Saturated fat: 1.8g per 100g verus 3.1g per 40g).

Wow.  Must. Eat. Porridge. Daily.

Or maybe I should just ring up Jordan’s and see if it’s just a genuine mis-print on the packaging?  My curiosity is killing me.  Anyone?

NOTE: kudos to @NeilCrosby: it’s not a paradox. The 40g serving includes milk, the 100g figure does not. See the asterisked statement at the bottom.

Ain’t I silly!!!

This is very slick from MIT.  It’s pretty accurate, too, except I’m not sure where the yellow sport tag comes from unless you count yoga as a sport?

Would you please track back if you are blogging your ‘MIT’ characters, too?  I am curious about how the analyser works on you as well :)   So excited! /geek

1. I hate not being able to keep up with my thoughts.
2. Not being able to keep up with my thoughts means that you think more than you will ever be able to share and articulate the signals among the noise
3. Too many ideas go wasted because of that
4. Wouldn’t it be great if we log all of ideas down as stubs and open it up so that other people with a different personality inclination (convergent versus divergent) can pick up and create something cool out of your ideas?

Was flicking TV channels and was stunned by an old man talking about life as a flow of energy, he asked us to think about this,

‘Try recalling your favourite childhood memory. Yes, try… Now you may even think that you are part of the memory. But I have shocking news to tell you. You are not. None of ‘you’ was. None of the atoms in your body today was from the 5-year old.’

We all have regenerated, we are all fresh start. We come to being, we vanish. How cool is that?

That reminded me of someone complaining what’s the point of being alive when we all going to die?

But the question should be, what’s the point of living if we all never cease to die?

*I really didn’t get the poem recited at Obama’s inauguration.  Was it me or was it the poet?

One obsession/passion I have  is Yoga (they’re borderline shifting back and forth, depending on how much time and how lazy I feel). When I talk to my geek friends on yoga, I tend to get two distinct reactions:

1) Noooooooo way, I’m totally unfit and I am not flexible. Or in Codepo8 words, ‘I’m too competitive to not be competitive’. Haha.

2) Yeah I love to try /I’ve tried it and love it! So good for the spine and the joints.  But I probably should do more.

Now since this conversation has happened for numerous times, I decided to just blog about my responses here specifically addressing to my dear geek friends. (note: I followed 43folders definitions of geeks, check them out here).

Why Yoga is good for geeks:

1) Yoga is not about stretching or doing difficult positions.  Yoga is about looking inwards, listening to your own breathing, your body, and your heart. It involves (if you go to the right studio and have the right teachers) medication, warm-up and different positions and then follow-through with a bit more meditation.  For geeks we are by default slightly happily suffering from attention-deficit (just think of how may tabs you are browsing at the same time, or apps), and rarely have time devoted to just check how our bodies are doing, not unless something goes wrong…  Yoga is good because when you devote an hour to yoga, you are actually devoting an hour to listen to yourself and assess what’s working and what’s not.

2) Yoga is a complicated, multifaceted doctrine.  You can never be perfect, but you can be better than your yesterday’s self. Numerous opensource-related sociological research (e.g. this one and more here) has identified that top motivators for hackers include the strive to skill improvement.  Yoga is a great medium for one to improve internally, where it is on the awareness of how to breath, on how you move your muscles, and even ultimately how tune in you are with your internal emotional energy, that can heal and grow souls around you, and most importantly, yourself.

3) Geeks spend a lot of time in front of our computers, this means that we’re always crouching forward with our shoulders hinging forward, spine compressing, and we mostly suffer a bit of shoulder strain if not back pain.  Yoga releases your spine compression and ignite muscles, tendons, strength that you never know exists.  As simple as lying down on the floor facing up and grab hold of your knees in front of your chest can release much of the compression on your back!  If you want a bit of massage you can gently rock left to right, and front to the back.  Try it tonight, or after long hours of staring at the screen.  Then we are talking ;).

4) Yoga is inward-looking, but it is very challenging for geeks to not compete with others in a room full of people.  Hence, Yoga is a great emotional exercise for us to focus internally and let go of our egos.  No, we don’t need to prove ourselves in a room of yogis – it’s about doing what *feels right* for you.  Now that’s something not we can do for a full hour outside the distraction of the hustles and bustles!  Enjoy the ’self-indulgence’!

Okay for now I’m tired from my first Bikram [Hot] Yoga class (yes Yoga is like programming languages, there are many of them and it’s up to what to need to fit that into your life!).  So I’ll stop at these 4 points.  Do you have more to add?  Any questions on this?  I’m by no means experts but am happy to share thoughts on this.

Finally for someone who has never tried Yoga, it is indeed a bit daunting to identify what type, style, location, even clothing you should be considering.  All in all, I’ll recommend newbies to enroll in a 4-8 weeks (1 day per week) beginner course as you might risk hurting yourself going into a class without beginner-needed attention as a beginner.  I wish someone has told me that when I first started because I do a lot of position in correctly and it takes more time to fix than to learn.  Remember the key is breathing and internal focus, and try not to compare with anyone else.  Also, don’t rush yourself.  It took me a couple of years to distill point 1-4 and when i first started Yoga I hated how unflexible I am, blah blah blah – but hey, once you switch you just don’t care externally (how other people do better) aymore then that’s the fun begin… Hope you’ll enjoy yoga!

Let’s have some fun and do a genderanalyzer meme – I’m a man – according to this GenderAnalyzer,

We created Genderanalyzer out of curiosity and fun. It uses Artificial Intelligence to determine if a homepage is written by a man or woman. Behind the scene, a text classifier hosted over at uClassify.com has been trained on 2000 blogs written by men and women. In our lab it seems to works pretty well, we want to see how it performs on the web! We hope you like it!

Well obviously I must be thinking like a man, at least when I blog,

I have defied the text classifer that has been derived from over 2,000 blogs.  See they might either need to include more ‘extreme’ users, or maybe just lady-geeks in general.  :) Are you a man or a woman?  Trackback here! :)  Let’s get the meme rolling!

Am at a conference Social Tools and IBM’s Luis Suarez is sharing his musing on thinking outside the inbox.

From an average of 30-40 emails to his inbox a day, Luis has reduced that to 20 emails a week and now is a *zero* inbox.  There are 2 main drivers for Luis to shift his information collaboration hub to social software such as wikis, twitter, internal facebook or even IM:

(1) Content is dead – one you hit the publish button your content is outdated already. Information moves fast – we need to train ourselves and our system to filter signals from noise, and email is not helping at all.

(2) Young people – ‘emails are for grandparents’, they are the champions of Instant Messages / live communications.  In the age of where firewall no longer applied to companies with staff armed with increasingly powerful personal phones, companies will become obsolete if they do not accommodate these new medium of communications.

So as a social computing evangelist @IBM, Luis shifts from

*me -> my email -> fighting my way through corporate membrane*

to

**me -> my social network -> my community -> getting the work done*

What I concur the most is that email does a very bad job in collaboration, but I am not sure if wiki can be a complete substitute.  As although I identify with the fact that focus should not be tool or business (process),  but people; it is a challenge to have the confidence to shift your work-social-network to another medium given the vast diversity of technographic profiles of your workmates.

Key takeways:

We live in a post-firewall paradigm, so don’t even think of controlling information access for next generations of workers.  How can companies build and continue to evolve a fluid and effective knowledge system for now and the future? Think about open collaboration, many-to-many resolutions, and infrastructures that encourage reciprocity of knowledge management, e.g. Visibility of internal facebook-software, colleagues chime in when you’re on holiday.  But start from you – and others will follow.  Have the guts!  ;) hah.