Enough whining about how our education system is not preparing kids into the real world, the following short video from The Seattle Times shows a glimpse of the future of education:

[Source: Fifth Graders Make Paper Houses from The Seattle Times]

In this video, Joe Bailey-Fogarty, a fifth-grade teacher at Frantz H. Coe Elementary school, talks about a week-long project to build houses out of newspaper and masking tape. This video really strikes me with absolute brilliance when he explains how the project works: students need to take out loans to buy building materials, draw architectural plans, work together to build the house and keep the accounting paperwork in order.

It get even more interesting when at the end of the project, students are able to sell the house for more “money” (points) for having …

I can’t really remember since when I have been drolling for a Mac: probably it’s as soon as I saw the very first iMac in fruity colours. And now, a decade later, I finally get to own my very first Macintosh: the humble Mac Mini.

And for the whole week, I have been staying up until three in the morning getting to know this new baby of mine: awed by the simplicity and beauty of the thing and OSX as well as banging on my head over its little differences and quirks. (I still can’t get over the fact that I couldn’t Shift-Delete files)

Having gone through and used all three major operating systems, namely Windows, Linux and OSX, I’m pretty surprised how similar all these systems works and certainly …

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 …

First of all, just wanted to say that thanks a lot for those who have been following my updates through this blog.

As you noticed the long hiatus, lots happened for the past three months (actually it’s just me transitioning back to my old job, literally) and it’s has been an excruciating time for me as I find myself doing a very deep soul search all over again.

As previously said, the seventh chapter is forthcoming and hence I felt that today’s the day. No poems, but a simple goodbye. Goodbye in the sense that I’ve decided that I’ll now continue to blog in my personal website - this is mainly due to the fact of my intent to change the intent of my posts and to graduate from the small …

Am addicted to Project Euler: math can indeed be addictive when you know there’s an absolute answer that you need to solve ;).

Now 9 more to go to achieve Level 1.

Today I have shared this concept with one of my friends about the limited value of income as opposed to time, which is the tombstone principle of time management or personal development ideology.

I used the concept as presented by [Timothy Ferriss][4hww] in various talks to illustrate one application of your own hourly rate. I think the illustration would be starking enough to rethink about your concept of income and working overtime. (also as a very good reminder to myself :))

Now, assuming you are a highly paid but overworked personnel, overworking yourself to a schedule of 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. You earned a handsome salary of $8000 with an additional management incentive of 2.5 months for your good performance and effort. Doing the math:

• Time spent (based on 50 …

As part of the revamp exercise, I have ported my manga tutorials over to this new site. For one thing I’m greatly grateful is the fact that the time I invested in clean HTML does really pay off at times like this. Hence porting stuff over was a breeze without worrying about HTML clutter.

Saying so, I still need to do some minor tweaks - hopefully completing them by today and continue with my other personal projects soon :).