Been quite happy with Site5’s hosting service so far, which is why I have placed a link banner on my site. Well, anyway, see for yourself for their attractive offers!
Harry Potter 4
Watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, with some friends about two weeks ago. It was quite enjoyable, I must admit. The plot is getting more intricate and children’s-story feel is definitely much less for this episode.
Now, while the long wait between movie releases has been worth it in my opinion, I am nevertheless getting rather impatient to find out what happens next (given the annual release cycle for the movies). So, I did what any intelligent person would do under the circumstances, and sought out the print version, which is up to Book 6 by the way. 🙂
I immediately started with Book 5 – Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – and I am about 1/3 of the way through now. The story is getting very interesting now and I can see why it is so appealing beyond its original intended audience of teenagers/young adults. The story is reasonably uncomplicated for an adult novel (good vs. evil, rising to great heights despite early hardship, prophecy and the destiny of a “chosen one”, etc.), and the setting is a world where magic and the “real world” co-exist side by side. At the same time, for Book 5, there is the usual teenager’s growing pains concerning loyalty and discovering the opposite sex. Sure, not your typical sophisticated thematic fiction, but I think it is unexpectedly entertaining so far.
Eric Meyer on CSS
Bought these two books recently. Initially bought one but because currently running into some issues on CSS dropdown menus and happened to see that the second book covers this. Very good source of reference. Clear and hands-on approach. However, only gripes is that no detailed discussion on font-size selection, in particular advice on choices for resolution-independent fonts.
Splitting hairs
While reviewing some of the past entries I wrote on this blog, it seemed that the heading “Knowledge” was not really very appropriate. As of tonight, I decided to split up the “Knowledge” category into “Reading List” and “TV/Movies” which, frankly, more accurately describe the posts. Hopefully none of the past entries have been bookmarked by someone out there – because the URLs to the entries belonging to the “Knowledge” category will be changed – else there will be some disappointed souls… By the way, because of self-linking I will also need to use a crawler to ensure there are no broken links on my own site! I normally use Xenu for this.
Stop running away…
Stop leaving and you will arrive.
Stop searching and you will see.
Stop running away and you will be found.Lao Tzu, Chinese Philosopher
Where we are
Once we understand where we have come from, why we are here, and where we are going, we will realize what we must do.
Ostad Elahi, 1895 – 1974
Iranian Philosopher, Musician and Jurist
Cultural roots
The past week saw two big religious festivals taking place in Singapore: the Deepavali for Indian Hindus and Hari Raya Puasa for the Muslims. As a result, every where you went, it was easy to spot the traditional costumes for these two cultural groups. However, believe it or not, come Chinese New Year time next year it will be extremely difficult to see a similar array of traditional Chinese costumes on the road, except among the elderly.
Super action
Simply could not resist posting this online after I received it by email!
Let’s see how many of these characters you can recognize??
Leadership and creativity
Learnt a few things about leadership from a very a knowledgeable colleague today.
It seems that as early as the Ancient Greek days, Plato had laid down a recipe for team/community motivation:
- Ethos: Make people feel that they belong to the team – in fact there is some recent psychological studies which indicate that IQ can be affected by this sense of belonging.
- Pathos: ‘Create’ (or, most of the time, just point one out) a common enemy – take for example all the war propaganda both in the past and the present.
- Logos: Use logic to round out the corners – by now, you have done all the hard selling.
Secondly, as a result of Larry Leifer’s work at Stanford University, it seems that the number of unique noun-phrases interspersed in our daily written or oral communications can be a good gauge to the quantity of creative ideas.
Now thyself
This has a rather Zen feel to it.
What we should do is not ‘future’ ourselves so much. We should ‘now’ ourselves more. ‘Now thyself’ is more important than ‘Know thyself.’ Reason is what tells us to ignore the present and live in the future. So all we do is make plans. We think that somewhere there are going to be greener pastures. It’s crazy. Heaven is nothing but a grand, monumental instance of the future. Listen, now is good. Now is wonderful.
Mel Brooks
Amen to that!