Do What You Love, The Rest Will Follow

A detailed and long-winded but very interesting essay by Paul Graham on "How to do what you love". Here's a short excerpt:

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally the things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing wasn't– for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun. Continue..

James Blake enters world’s top ten

Yay! My favourite tennis player James Blake has moved his way up the ATP ranking to be in the world’s top 10 male tennis player. He played an exciting match against Nadal, ranked no. 2, at the Indian Wells Pacific Life Open Championship. As always it was really fun watching James played tennis, the way he ran for the balls, even the difficult and random shots. Rafael Nadal looked a bit pissed off at times when James managed to get a shot that I thought was almost impossible to get. He really is unpredictable. James is currently no. 9 right now, up from 14 last week. Even if he was downed by Federer in the finals, he had proved himself a great tennis player to break into the top 10. This from a man who fractured his vertabrae and was temporarily paralysed on one side of the face which affected his hearing and visionary senses as recent as 2004, and who had to wear a back brace 18 hours a day when he was a kid due to a severe spine complication. It is amazing what he has achieved today, and his success is nothing short of inspiring.

2nd Update to the Art Folio Page

I’ve added new artworks (if you can call them that) to the page. They are mainly pictures I’ve taken recently and I’ve tweaked the colour effects a bit. Also included is an untitled collage done years ago, probably in 2001.

A point to note

Ong Sor Fern wrote an excellent article yesterday, 14th of March in the Life! section of The Straits Times. It was a review and an insight on the slew of recent independent films that managed to potray one major point which Hollywood always fail to respect and acknowledge: The living and real side of faith and religion, especially that of Islam.

all the things i want to do

I don’t want to wake up one day
And find out it’s too late
To do all the things I want to do…

A favourite poem

The Arrow and The Song by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.

p/s: I dedicate this poem to Hibbbiieeeeeeeee. You certainly are one in a million.

The new A level syllabus

Guess what? The new Singapore-GCE A level mathematics syllabus introduced this year will not have any trigonometry topics at all. Trigo was one big chunk of a chapter under the old A level maths syllabus, comprising a handful of subtopics including 3D trigo, problems involving the trigo function, identities and formulae, angle approximation and graphical interpretation (which were like 2-third of all formulae in A level maths). I was so weak in the topic i had to take extra private tuition to get more coaching on the topic and i still got a bad grade for math. Its like I’m too dumb or something.
What does this new change mean? What is the ministry of education (moe) trying to say? They said they wanted the students to have more breadth in their studies and have a holistic education, rather than a narrow concentration of certain subjects, each with considerable depth. Students now have to take subjects from a variety of fields like humanities, arts and sciences. No longer can students choose to take all their A level subjects from one field only, such as all humanities subject. The aim now obviously is: A little less depth, a little more breadth. This change in policy is definitely called for, and probably a little overdue. It does leave people like me, the old hags of the A level, feeling a bit bitter, cuz I feel like all the load of effort and time put into studying trigonometry (countless of nights and early mornings spent cracking my head) were all wasted effort.  Apparently the moe now thinks so too. Otherwise, why would they have scraped the entire trigo chapter out of the syllabus if it was an important one?
For what is worth, at least the next batch of students and the future generations dont have to go through what #*&@! that i had went through, and then realized it was not all that important afterall. Good for them. God bless.

bite this

"Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

(Albert Einstein).

This piece of quote has been stuck in my head since the past week. Imagination encircles the world. knowledge is limited. imagination encircles..and this saying is really circling my mind every now and then. What is imagination? Is it creativity? Is it daydreaming? Imagination is definitely boundless, but where does it lead to? What was Einstein talking about, man?

Art Folio Update

New photos of artworks posted on the art folio page.

Pumpkins, completed on 7th May 2005.

Wild Flowers, done Batik style on cotton cloth using hot wax and batik paints. This is the only batik painting of mine which survives, the rest are all ruined due to spilled hot candle wax. It is really tricky doing Batik painting because of the need to continuosly heat the wax while simultaneously drawing patterns on the cloth before the wax turns solid. Once, I almost caused a fire in the kitchen while trying to heat the candles. Not to mention the injuries one may get if the steaming wax happens to spill on the skin. This is what makes Batik painting a real challenge but at the same time a rewarding artistic adventure even if it turns out like such a mess as the purple painting above.