I am the map you use to find her

Recently I moved away from paper maps.  Instead I use the map in my phone.  It's funny how in this age of interconnectedness, it's more natural to see someone with a phone in their hand.  If someone has a phone in their hand, they could be reading facebook, checking messages from their friends, trying to figure out their next appointment.  If you have a map in your hand, you're a tourist.

My friend from the MBA program (SW, if I ever remember what this initial stood for.  He's the Daytona driver who got us safely through the gorge in South France) also introduced me to the wonders of GPS.  Now instead of peering at street signs, I just move the winking blue dot that is me along the black line that is the direction of where I should go.  No need to know what is right and what is left either - you can orientate the map to turn as you turn.

I kind of miss navigating by paper maps though.  There's something physical about reading a road sign and comparing it to your map to see where you are.  There's something about making the wrong turn, realising it fast enough and making a backtrack.

It's like how I get a little upset with my friends who play with their phones while they are on the train.  The landscape rushing around you is gorgeous.  You will never see it again because you are a tourist.  Yet you keep looking at this little device in your hand.

In the same way, I suppose I should take my own advice.  I should stop looking at the computer screen and the phone screen and go out and experience real life.  But the phone is useful for getting a direction to start walking in...

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Some other thoughts that I had was that I should start something like what I had in secondary school.  Like how Literature lessons with its hidden computers were a sign to start typing in this blog, I need a similar trigger for blogging now.  There are so many thoughts that I have in my head, and some of them need to be recorded before they disappear.

Writing diaries

I visited the Anne Frank museum today and if anything it cemented my resolve to document more of the things I experience. A diary can be a record of who you really are at that point in time. Even Anne Frank's father didn't know the real Anne Frank, although she trusted him enough to let him keep her diary in between moments when she was writing it.

It was also nice to realise she was a scribbler like me, writing short stories about people she knew and herself. I don't know if I want to read her short stories though.

What I do want to do is improve my handwriting, because hers was miles better. People don't handwrite things anymore.

Catch a Body by Ilse Bendorf

Salinger, I’m sorry, but “Don’t ever tell
anybody anything” is a string of words
I would like to wrap up in canvas and sink
to the bottom of the Hudson, or extract
by laser from the ribcage of all of us
who ever believed it, who felt afraid
to miss someone, to be the last one
standing. “Tell everyone everything” is
not exactly right, but I do believe that if
your mother looks radiant in violet
you should tell her, or when a juvenile
sparrow thrashes its wings in dustpiles
and reminds you of a lover’s eyelashes,
you should say so. We are islands all of us,
but we are also boats, our secrets flares,
pyrotechnic devices by which we signal
there’s someone in here we’re still alive!
So maybe it’s, “don’t be afraid.” We can
rewrite Icarus, flame-resistant feathers,
wax that won’t melt, I mean it, I’ll draw up
a prototype right now, that burning ball
of orange won’t stop us, it’ll be everything
we dream the morning after, even if we fall
into the sea—we are boats, remember?
We are pirates. We move in nautical miles.
Each other’s anchors, each other’s buoys,
the rocket’s red, already the world entire.

The Waiting Place

This is a lovely quote I would do to remember:

The most destructive thing smart people do is spend their lives waiting. Even people with lofty dreams and aspirations get distracted by the inertia of ordinary events and subconsciously store their goals in the waiting place.

from DCurtis

I know I am waiting for a lot of things, but I have pounced on others too.  I just have to make them all happen, one at a time.

Changes

I had told myself that I would change this blog for a long time. There always seemed to be one reason or another preventing me from moving on. Maybe I hadn't saved my pictures that I slaved over. Maybe I wasn't doing something right. Maybe there were too many things to do and change the layout was one of them.

Then I read an article called The One Thing I Wish I knew At 17 and found this term "What would you do if you weren't afraid?" It's not a new term - apparently it's from Who Moved My Cheese?  - but it really resonated with me at this point in time.  I have not done many things because I am afraid.  I wish I could be better about these things.

So right now, I will stop being afraid of changing the layout of my blog.  I can conquer my fears, one step at a time.

Words of wisdom

A poem by Rudyard Kipling, emphasis mine:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream — and not make dreams your master;
If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim,If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings — nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,And — which is more — you'll be a Man, my son!

— Rudyard Kipling

A new beginning with nostalgia

I've been keeping a journal of good habits I'm trying to follow for two years now.

I didn't realise it had been that long until I checked my other blogs - the last post I made about this change was back in Dec 2010. Since then, I haven't talked about it online. I didn't see the need to, for I developed these habits in conjunction with some very personal goals, and I don't think that I've reached some of these yet. I still need more time before I can really say that I've achieved these goals.

The smaller things however I think are getting there. One of the things was to keep in touch with my close friends. I think I've managed to do that. I also exercise more than I used to, and even though my weight hasn't dropped I apparently grew a bit.

I'm also going for further studies at the end of the year. I have a fuller post that I want to write on that, about reconciling uprooting myself with travelling, but the point is that I managed to complete a huge undertaking by using my daily journal of habits. This journal keeping has been really useful.

So far, I've been making weekly lists that I make score marks again, and leave a lot of space for writing reflections. This week, however, I have changed my journal style to focus more on daily lists than reflections. I did that because I wanted to get back into the habit of studying, and I knew that if I didn't put in on a daily list, I might not be able to make myself study.

When written on a daily basis however, it really seems like there is a lot to do! Every day I fill up a page, and sometimes I don't think I do as much as I used to do. Or maybe it seems that way because I can see exactly what I do on a page, whereas previously I tracked by how many times I changed to a new item? I don't know. I do know that I am doing a great variety of items, because I can see what I have been repeating from day to day. Even writing this blog post was a specific item I put in to break up the monotony. =)

So this is a note to tell myself that I have changed my written journal style on this day. It's not been a week yet so I can't tell how successful the new list has been, but I can safely say that I studied every day for the last 3 days. Will I be able to met my other goals? Only time can tell! Maybe I will do more reflections in this blog to tell you about it.

The Impact of Apple

Let me make 3 things clear before I start:

1) This is a tribute to Steve Jobs

2) Apple has had a profound impact on my life.

3) I've never owned a single Apple product.

Before you get angry and start yelling at me for point 3, let me tell you my story.


My first interaction with Apple was in my teens. Computers were new at that point - I didn't even own a computer and the only thing I was previously allowed to do on my old school's PCs was to play word games. Somehow or other, I ended up in the computer multimedia design club.

By some serendipity, the multimedia design club teacher was an Apple fan with sufficient clout. So the first thing that greeted me when I joined the multimedia design club was an entire computer lab of Apple computers.

Since then, Apple has been synonymous with creativity in my head. When I think Apple, I recall large clunky monitors with superior graphics. I think about the funny mouse with no right click that I did magic with. I think about the drop down menus at the top of the window that let me flip through my creations.

In the same year I joined the multimedia design club, the iMac was introduced. The teacher-in-charge wasted no time in adding some iMacs in the shades of the rainbow to her flock of Apple computers. Even though the iMac was a creative leap from its predecessors, it did the same things in a pretty package. But packaging apparently did the trick - everyone was raving about the computers, and even people who didn't need to use the lab would sneak in to use the computer. I'm not sure whether they sneaked back out after discovering that it didn't run on Windows, but it was still amusing to see.

Out of all the iMacs, I had a personal favourite - the purple iMac. I would always come early to make sure that I was able to sit at that iMac. I remember the position of that iMac clearly, because it was just in front of the door - as I sat there, I would be able to watch people going in and out of the lab. This has shaped me too; I still love people watching.

With a personal iMac at school, you could say I got lazy as an Apple fan. When my parents expressed doubts about getting a Mac, I gave in. Besides, they already found Windows difficult - what more a Mac?  After resisting that initial push, it's been easier to resist the others.

But I was already an Apple fan and I watched the roll out of all their products eagerly, even if I could only dream about getting them. But I was sure that there were creative things still being done on all those Macs out there, even if I wasn't the one doing those creative things. I resigned myself to living vicariously through others.


Being in Singapore, I had the unique opportunity of seeing the initial Zen ads. Zen music players had been created by a Singaporean company, Creative, and released before Apple's attempts. Creative tried to play up the music experience. Their ad, however, was either too "creative" or not enough - it featured a panda flying through the clouds, and then, at the end of the ad it had a forgettable slogan, but the general gist was something like "Panda Symphony (the name of the music), brought to you by Creative Zen."

"I don't want to be a panda, thanks," I told my friends, and that was the end of that ad.

Then Apple came along, and they had a product with the same basic idea - music experience. But Apple, being the creative force they were, knew exactly how to push that experience.

I still remember the ad on my tv - watching the sillouhettes with white ear buds dancing against backdrops of bright colours. I said to my friends, "I don't know what that is, but I want it."

And then I saw that the company was Apple, and it all seemed so obvious to me. Of course it was Apple - they were the company that signified creativity after all. Of course they could come up with an innovative product like the iPod. It didn't matter that I loved my Sony Walkman, the Apple product was still amazing.

I nearly broke down and bought an iPod, but Sony let me have a huge discount on their version of an "mp3 player", so I relented and stayed with Sony. But it didn't stop me from eyeing the iPods with a whole bunch of envy. If I were someone who cared about what people thought of me, I would have bought an iPod already. After all, it was what everyone wanted.


And then came the iPhone. And the iPad

I'm still thinking on those. I haven't bought an iPhone or an iPad yet because in all my years of following Apple from the sidelines, I know what it is Apple does. Apple gives you things you want until you need them. It creates: products; desires; trends. I'm not quite ready to want something so badly.

Still, looking back on how Apple has impacted my life, I have to say this: Thank you, Steve Jobs and Apple, for bringing me products I never imagined. Thank you, Steve and Apple, for giving me the option to indulge my wants. Thank you for being a part of my growing up process.


RIP, Steve Jobs. You will be missed.

How to copy only the folders in an Outlook mailbox

I realised that I do quite a lot of extraordinary things on a regular basis, but don't write them down for posterity.  Take today for instance.  My colleagues asked me a question "I have organised my folders nicely, and I want to copy just the folders to my archives, without any emails. How do I do that?"

A quick Google search revealed that no one had managed to just copy the folders alone.  One method was close, but it required deleting all the emails after that. What a bore! So I looked at the self-help out there, and came up with this brilliant method, for use in Outlook 2007:

1) Find out what is the date of the oldest email in the Outlook mailbox/archive you want to copy.

2) Go to File -> Archive

3) Select the radio button for "Archive this folder and all subfolders"

4) Select the Outlook mailbox/archive you want to copy

5) Just below the white box with all the Outlook mailbox/archives, there should be the option to "Archive all emails older than".  Select a date before the date of the oldest email in the Outlook mailbox/archive you want to copy.

6) Click OK

7) If all goes well, you should have a new archive with only the folders inside!

The best part about this is that you can now share your folder structure with other people by copying the .pst file you've created.

I feel like such a genius =D