This is originally drawn on the cover of a notebook that I carry in my pocket. It serves as a reminder to me to capture all the thoughts and ideas I had, which may pass by me at any moment.

It was a really a pleasant surprise to me when President Obama had released a video for It Gets Better: a video project to gather encouraging messages to LGBT youths whom are often harassed, bullied and ostracized for being homosexual.

My thought after watching the video? We need more LGBT role models out there. Maybe it’s just me that the scars may have carried over until adulthood and LGBT have to bear with the fears and psychological burden: living way below what they are truly capable of. We really need strong personalities and influencers which teens could really look up to: the world really needs more Ellen DeGeneres and Adam Lambert.

As I am thinking in the space I’m in now, I really wondered how many successful entrepreneurs and startup founders who had …

This art is greatly inspired by Dr Jill Bolte Taylor’s phenomenal TED talk: to be more specific about it’s the second part of the talk when she tries to express her out-of-the-world experience during the time when had a stroke.

I really wished that I could expand further what transpired me during those mesmerizing moments listening to her and coming up with this piece of art. My own inept attempt to describe it is that I hold on to the concept of “me” (the ego), that I’m separate from other entities within this plane of existence. However, I’m having a belief, or rather a hypothesis if you would put it that way, that there indeed exists a collective consciousness that bind us as a unifying whole, or wholeness.

There’s no …

No matter how frugal I am in real life to a point of borderline stinginess, I gladly pay a premium to any mind-blowingly awesome and highly valuable stuff.

And I’m really glad to pony up some money to donate and support TechZing: a weekly tech podcast that I have followed since the beginning.

Honestly the donation I made is really minuscule compared to the value that I had gotten from my personal top-five great interviews on the show over the years (in chronological order):

1. Peldi Guilizzoni, founder of Balsamiq (Episode #4, Episode #14)
2. Jason Cohen, founder of SmartBear Software ([Episode #12][ep 12], Episode #14)
3. [Pete Michaud][peter] (Episode #38)
4. Rob Walling, serial micropreneur (Episode #56)
5. Derek Sivers, founder of CDBaby (Episode #70)

What I really liked about the podcast is Justin’s and …

Back in primary school, we have a subject for life skills and one of the practical lessons that I remember most is woodworking. We’d have one workshop that situated at a remote corner of the school compound, which is built out of wood and looks a little out-of-place among the concrete buildings that surrounded it.

In there, there are lots of cupboards with toolboxes, rows of saws, hammers and other larger woodworking tools hanging on one side of the wall. The floors are totally covered in saw dust which never seem to be completely swept away cleanly no matter how much effort one have to put into sweeping it.

One of the projects is to build a small wooden stool. We’d first need to saw out pieces of wood into symmetrical polygonal shapes …

“Overwhelm is a sign of misaligned priorities.” was what I tweeted a while back.

Especially if you fail to say no, delegate tasks or have an inability to postpone certain tasks if need be. This reminds me a lot of Steven Covey’s First Things First (if you constantly find yourself putting out fires, something’s terribly wrong) and David Allen’s Getting Things Done (the importance of being able to immediately categorize incoming tasks and file them away somewhere if it doesn’t need to be handled immediately).

Getting myself organized and getting things done are two of the key skills that I constantly need to learn and improve upon. I really loved how David described that it’s like going to a dojo everyday, where constant ritual practice is crucial to master the …

Before starting the project:

Got a great project idea, feel really pumped up about it and getting ready to make that first dash.

Read Seth Godin’s Linchpin and liked the ideas that linchpins ship. Decided to follow Seth Godin’s advice of setting a deadline and ship no matter what.

“Let’s make something out next week then! Just this small tiny feature will do.”

Feel good about being so decisive and get to work.

One week later…

Staring at bits and pieces of stuff that has been hacked together. Everything seems to only barely being able to support itself while it wobbles around like jello. Worse, it does practically nothing while all it does is just taking space.

There I was: dejected and frustrated, staring blankly at the piece of junk that’s …

Have been going through a rough patch for the past two weeks, and it’s comforting to see the first milestone among many that guides me towards the destination.

For two weekends I have worked on a new feature for Mutual Tracker after a year since it’s inception. It was a rough ride considering how much stuff that I had to learn about PDF parsing and scraping data off ASP.NET pages.

I still have yet to tie everything together and delivering them live. Hopefully I could achieve it by next week. Take it as a publicly announced deadline that I had set for myself.

Speaking of development, I have tons of fun with my iPad and even more recently the Kindle 3. Having too much fun, perhaps. By physically interacting with the device …

What better tool to do iPad application mockups than using the iPad itself? Drawing out mockups using the PC/Mac always seemed awkward to me as I have to second guess the physical dimensions of each UI elements that I have drawn on-screen due to the different pixel densities between our monitor and the iPad.

With free drawing tools like Adobe Ideas on the iPad, I could draw out the UI elements and know exactly how large it’d look physically. The only problem is that… you start with a completely blank screen. Knowing the best practice of having UI elements with 44 x 44px height, a grid background would certainly be helpful in sketching things out.

I have created a set of three PNGs having a 22 x 22px grid that you can import …