Some of us may have little secrets of our own that we wished that nobody will discover. I had a few of those myself.

These little secrets may even have nothing inherently wrong in them, it’s just part of our nature, desires or even dreams, and yet we are fearful: as we are conditioned to conceive these as radical or socially unacceptable. Sometimes the fear could be so strong that we perceive them to be mortally so.

Therefore we kept mum, acting against ourselves and clinging on to the thought that by doing so, nobody will know - so that we can blend into conformity. Sometimes we may succeed in deceiving others; other times not so - but those caring people around us decided to not mention about their observation with the best of intentions.

Either …

Mind chatter: the little monologue that runs through the head, trying to get attention. Usually it wasn’t of much harm until they suddenly felt in the mood to gossiping bad things about the host: remarking the many things that the host lacked or the mistakes and screw-ups that he had created.

And occasionally, I overheard the voice in me; and they, noticing that someone is tuning in, only gets more excited to speak more rapidly and loudly. And with such increasing intensity of the voice, it can get quite convincing.

The great strength about humans, though, is the power of our own consciousness and awareness. Yes, many times I have been finding myself in the deep end of the pool of self-doubt, and was suddenly made aware of the situation. With help and resilience …

Occasionally such things does happen to me: especially at times when my own personal problems overwhelmed me to a point which I felt extremely lethargic to even handle it at all. The thing is that as much sleep therapy does relieves the stress and rejuvenates the weary soul, it doesn’t relieve me off my personal responsibility in making decisions and deal with these issues upfront.

So, at the time when I found out that problems looming over my head even when I wake up, I take that as a really serious warning sign.

It’s always good news if you had great parents and friends who are supportive. The bad news is that there’s times you wished that they don’t worry about you too much. It’s all about being able to know what to listen to and what not to, and have the courage to take up the responsibility of accepting whatever consequences that falls upon you for each life decision you made.

Currently am learning [Django][django], which is a popular web framework in Python. And whichever framework I chose to learn, I greatly preferred having my documentation offline as I didn’t really find myself constantly offline (it helps to concentrate on my work, actually). In the case of Django, the documentation was provided in ReST text format (refer to the [FAQ entry][djfaq]) and it’s possible to generate a PDF version out of it.

… Well, until the fact that I found out that there’s no explicit mention on what to get to generate it.

Cutting a long story short (I’ll save the grueling details to myself), now you’d two options:

1. [Download the PDF version here (Aug 1, 2009)][djpdf], which I generated from the recent Django 1.1 package
2. Do it …

Recently I was exposed to Hugh MacLeod, whom is popular for producing cartoons that are drawn on the back of business cards. Apart from the fact that his cartoons are really funny (some of them wickedly so :)), I also liked the idea of drawing behind business cards and really had a strong urge in trying to draw some of my own.

Not to mention that I still have two boxes of “art stock” thanks to my previous employment :-p.

Anyway, this is the card that I have drawn yesterday. Personally have been through quite a rough patch in life and as I was facing the impending challenge ahead of me, I felt small. I mean, after being completely drained out of energy to complete a particularly hard task, the thought of inferiority flooded me as …

Recently I was brought to attention by Eng Lee of a Facebook page that reads “The Felix Leong Fan Club”. Usually that wouldn’t have been interesting judging from the fact that “Felix Leong” was my lame attempt in coming up with an online nickname and there’s lots of Felix’es around. But what he found so amusing is that the group uses my self-drawn avatar as the image for the group!

And the group type reading “Common Interest - Sexuality” and a description of “DJ FeLLIo” added on the laughter it creates for myself and my friends: that’s enough to conjure me having an alter ego of becoming a DJ with a Canadian fanbase… and sexuality comes into the picture for some unknown reason (I’ll leave that to your imagination :-p).

Now …

Personally I’m really a big fan of Marcus Buckingham’s “Now, Discover Your Strengths”, which advocates the importance of focusing on our strengths and harness that in-born powerhouse to achieve greatness. One great thing about the book is that it gave exclusive access to their Strengths Finder online test which leaves you with an accurate profile of five strength themes that you possessed, based on their intesive academic research and a large dataset of individuals who have taken the same test and later studied.

Two week ago, Sam Radford and his readers discussed about my strengths profile, engaging in a discussion as I attempt to explore new territories in explaining how I feel about these strengths and how have I (or have not) utilize them in my own life. In the discussion, I mainly …

Come to think of it, it’s kind of funny that we often tell ourselves to make sure that we live life and yet forgetting about that very advice? We often tell people that we don’t want to live like zombies but yet reflecting back most of us are on the brink of becoming one (well, at least on the weekdays being unconsciously caged in a cubicle facing a radiation source for 8 hours).

What we usually tell people is that “we are earning a living” – sort of indirectly implying that it’s about our own survival. But the irony is that we are working at a living grave towards the grave.

If that’s a scary analogy, well… I couldn’t think of a better way of putting it.

And it doesn’t …

When it comes to stationery, I can get very particular about it - especially when it comes to paper. One of the hardest things that I’m having difficulty buying is pocket notebooks that I typically carry with me to record whatever that was lodged in my head at the spur of the moment outdoors.

So far the ones on the market are typically ring-bound ones (which can be bulky and not environmentally friendly) or flimsy notepads that get easily crumpled whenever they get into the pockets of my trousers, to my greatest annoyance since those were the worst kind of surface to write on.

My prayers for the perfect on-the-go notebook got answered when I discovered this at Kinokuniya: these are wallet-sized, 60 pages notepads made in Japan from Apika (at least the logo says …