Some day in the future I’ll be looking back and laugh at myself over this, but that’s OK.

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

Am in a hustling mode these days, spending hours till late to work on two personal projects of mine: Mutual Tracker as well as Fix My Meeting.

Honestly been hitting several motivational brick walls with Fix My Meeting. The act of creating is hard: it’s often a constant battle with my own flaws such as procrastination, fatigue, occasional disinterest, frustration, self-doubt and fear. Seth Godin term such this phase as “The Dip”: the time when the initial enthusiasm peters off and the frustrations starts to kick in.

It’s good that I had several unimplemented features for Mutual Tracker which I had in the back-burner for months. Though admittedly the reason I had features for it being left at the back-burner is the fact that I couldn’t get over the dip during that …

I got my first Moleskine notebook, thanks to the 20% notebook sale Cziplee is having. I’m a nerd when it comes to stationery :).

As I took the train home, just to kill time I start to doodle on the cover page. It started off with some random patterns on the top-right corner of the page. As I go on, it’s almost as if I’m got into a trance: engrossing and engaging in this creative activity. I would then go on adding random basic shapes that don’t resemble anything and the doodles organically spreads out until it filled up the page. By the time when I completed it, the train stops at exactly the station where I’m supposed to get off.

I recall a study mentioning that every doodle reflects a …

Let’s introduce the nutty little friend that inside the brain of every one of us: the amygdala. The little friend of ours are a group of small nuclei in our brain, having the size of a peanut. It may be tiny, but it has been a part of us since the very early days of our human species.

The fact is that this little friend of our is so crucial that, without it, we wouldn’t have roamed the earth till this day. It ensures our very survival by triggering two of the strongest emotional responses we had: fear and rage. With that, our ancestors are able to flee from predators as well as fighting against them. This allows us to conquer the harsh odds that were stacked against us in survival and becoming …