The 14th of February is coming again and it’s not because I don’t have a steady relationship I hate Valentine’s Day, it’s really the commercialization of the whole event. This may sound stupid coming from a 25 year old but where are the days a simple postcard and a kiss on the cheeks was enough. Nowadays the retail stores want you to believe you have to send as much postcard as you possibly can to all kinds of people you know and you need a huge box of chocolate or a huge bouquet of roses. And weeks in advance they start sending out folders with their ’special’ Valentine’s Day actions. I’m immune for it but other people seem to expect what they see. But it’s not only Valentine’s Day that’s ruined, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas to name a few are completely ruined in my opinion. Really, I think we completely lost the big picture in all those events. It should be about small gestures and not about who can buy me the biggest present. I will stop ranting now before I make an even bigger fool out of myself but I hope you get the point.

Happy Chinese New Year Everyone!

Last week I had a small chat with a colleague of mine, who was making the opening animation for the Chinese-New-Year-themed promo's. He told me that this will be the year of the ox. And since he was born in that year he will begin his "third generation".

The chinese zodiac has 12 signs, according to my colleague each cycle is called a generation. He said that the chinese believe your "third generation" is the right time for your life to change. To make career, to change your environment. The "fourth generation" is where you'll settle down.

This year will bring some drastic changes in my life. And not only my environment is changing, I'm also trying to change personally. To try to look at the world from a different perspective. The word "change" has become quite personal theme to me, and I just found it funny how that word kept reappearing in conversations or even in the media. Since Obama is president of the USA, "Change" is the keyword in most articles (beside that other key-thing like him being the first african-american president)

Change, it's the only constant in life. Yet, for the first time in my life, I realize it to be true. The world is constantly changing, evolving, creating anew. People change their morals, create new perspectives, change of hearts. The morals we held yesterday, have evolved into the morals we keep today. Tomorrow will bring even new insights.

After writing this all down, I feel adding an other new year's resolution. "To always keep an open mind". To not get stuck in morals, ideas, and perspectives. Wasn't it Socrates who said: "All I know is that I know nothing". What's the point in fighting over your morals, if they will change in time. And who is to say your morals are right. I hope that even when I'm turning grey I still have an open mind. Age brings the illusion of time and experience, it can make you feel arrogant by thinking you know everything.

So maybe I'm even wrong about having an open mind If that's the case.. just forget everything said above

SexySammy

No, this it is not about the revive of Syndicate Wars but post syndication, aggregation or just simply put: Stealing posts from other blogs and putting them on your own. Just a quick update to let you know you might see posts here that are not entirely mine

I decided to include the blog posts that my friends make on my own blog. I came to this decision after Sammy and I had a little discussion on this topic on his in the discussion area of his blog. I proudly present post syndication so I don’t have to write anything anymore and you don’t have to read my crap anymore.

I hope they don’t mind

Just like how Jeroen inspired me writing my own new year's resolution, Eric inspired me to write this post. Actually I don't have anything special to talk about, but this blogging-virus is just so contagious . I quite enjoy reading the blogs of my friends. Maybe it's because we all are living miles away and blogging gives us an other way of communication.

Ok, I know there is such a thing like MSN or Yahoo Messenger, but communication on those platforms is different. You are usually at work, and don't really have time to chat. Now there is also such a thing like email, but the advantage of blogging is that you can share some of your thoughts, and your friends can choose for themselves if they want to read it and comment on it. Where as with email you might annoy someone with your silly stories, and he/she might feel obligated to reply the email.

Now I know the guys have found Jaiku as a platform for small talk. But I really hope we will continue this trend of blogging, and hopefully Alfred will come with his own system (like me ) and not use wordpress like the others.

SexySammy

As a proud iPhone owner I find myself browsing the Apple App Store from time to time to see what’s available. Most of the time I find some application that look very nice at first sight but after using them they turn out to be horrible. Not the application I found the last time which really solved a problem I have and I think with me a lot of other’s too. How many times are you driving and on the radio is a really nice song but you can’t remember the title, therefore Shazam comes into play. This application ‘listens’ to the song for a few seconds, analyzes this and gives you the title and a link to the iTunes Music Store and even a link to YouTube for a clip. I tried it a few times now and I’m really sold, it performs really well. And the best of all it’s completely free.

After reading Sam’s inspiring blog post I had to think of my own New Year’s resolution. I will actually have to do something to keep myself on track to make this new year’s resolution. I still didn’t finish the book Reality Check by Guy Kawasaki. This book is good and when a book is really good it takes time to read it well. It’s a near 500 pages book and I am exactly on page 250 right now.

Reality Check quotes and talks a lot about other books. The book iWoz by Steve Wozniak one of the founders of Apple is one of them. This is the next book on my list I plan on reading. I just hope I can find it here in Puchong. After iWoz I will hold of on the Apple related books for a while… I might start reading some thrillers or mafioso books since reading next to being informative and fun should also fuel your imagination and business books for a big part take away a large part of that imagination.

Two days ago I released the first version of Inscorta and I plan to work on this a lot during Chinese New Year. Another New Year? Time for another New Year’s Resolution! Any suggestions for a good New Year’s resolution?  Also my birthday is coming up(It’s already tomorrow) and this again is a New Year. Damn those New Year’s resolutions. Who was the idiot(I am just kidding) that had this great idea to put three New Year’s in such a short time span?

I have better things to do then to worry about New Year’s resolutions all day. I am busy with work and I cancelled my trips for this New Year’s Holiday to work on Inscorta, Launch poetsplaza.nl and write a report(which I almost forgot about) for my school.

New Year Resolution

Hi guys,

It's been a long while since I wrote a post on my blog. I felt inspired to write this post after reading Jeroen's Blog. It made me want to write my own new year's resolution.

This new year will bring a lot of changes in my personal life. I feel like I'm starting a new chapter. My new year's resolution will be: "To be more aware". I know it sounds pretty vague, but let me try to explain.

I am a dreamer, I dream of a perfect life. I dream of happiness, I dream of what could be and while I'm dreaming, I put my "real" life on auto-pilot. I do the things that are required of me, but without thought or conscience. Now, don't get me wrong. It's not like I'm brain dead, it's not as if I don't enjoy my life. But for a big part I go through life without thought and take everything for granted.

Lately, I have tried to put myself in a state of awareness, by trying to heighten my senses. I do this by focussing on one of my senses. For example I try to listen to every sound, and just this act has opened a whole new world to me.

I know it sounds weird, it sounds pointless, but somehow it felt important to me. To be more aware of my surroundings, to use my senses more often. To take a moment and look around, observing every object, each texture, each reflection, to take a deep breath and smell the air, to feel the warmth of the sun.

Now I know your thinking: "What possible benefits would this bring you?" And though I cannot answer this with scientific proof, I believe that by standing still from time to time observing my universe, I will experience my life more intensely, appreciating every detail that life is giving.

This year will bring a lot of joy in my life and I want to enjoy every moment of it. I don't want to fall back to a life where I just live, do my stuff and take every gift for granted. Life is wonderful, in every detail..

Have a wonderful new year

SexySammy

Since everyone is doing a top 10 list of greatest things here is my cut. If you don’t know about the tipping point:”It is the moment things get momentum or die out (something like that anyway)”.

My tipping point top 10:

1. Learning Mandarin. After a few months with Chinese people I am starting distinguishing and perceive more sounds. When I first arrived at this place I never had a clue what they were talking about, nowadays nothing has changed except: I hear more, A lot more… Somehow before I was deaf for this Chinese language. I did not experience this with German and Bahasa Indonesia.

2. Dropbox, Twitter and Jaiku for being great services but with lousy business model. Don’t get me wrong these are all great services and they should be cheap. But they have no way to get paid… Almost nobody minds paying for something good but these services have almost none or no payment plans at all.

3. Digsby and Google Chrome for almost being great applications. You guys will be great when you are available for OSX(and Linux). How can you expect to bring something revolutionary when you bring it only to windows? Hurry up with the versions on OSX…

4. My fellow blogger Saiful Rizal with his plan to inspire us all. He is a bit late with the twitter thing but this also tells us twitter still has momentum. He made a list of youtube videos that I found motivating, this made me check his blog once in a while.

5. The book Reality Check of Guy Kawasaki. It is the book I am reading now and it is really good so far and if all the books were this interesting and fun to read at the same time the next point won’t be a problem at all.

6. My plan to read one book a week. My New Year’s resolution, it’s HiDef

7. Arie.nl werkkleding & werkschoenen, Poetsplaza.nl, Baliday.com and some other projects I am working on.

8. Inscorta is the name of an open source project I am starting. It is actually the code behind Arie.nl & Poetsplaza.nl. Until now the development has been done solely by me. It turns out to be a great software package but further development is slow and difficult since I am do it all. That is why I decided a long time ago to make this software public so everyone can use it and help to improve it.

9. Me turning into something usually named blogger. This is not a New Year’s resolution, I just enjoy it. 

10. Me turning into an Apple Fanboy! Like the attack some M*$*&*F*#^%*rs did on my villages in Tribalwars, I am afraid there is no stopping to this Bill and Steve.

Ok, this is not exactly a tipping point list.

“Whaddaya gonna do, life goes on” (My favorite quote from The Sopranos)

After months of waiting I finally have a unibody Macbook I spend a huge amount of money on this baby and the next day I broke it trying to convert the keyboard layout to dvorak. The day after, super glue came to the rescue! And now I have a very unique dvorak unibody Macbook. This photo actually made me do the conversion. During the rearranging of the keys I cursed myself for doing it but now I am really happy with the result(it looks the same, only a slightly different layout).

Christmas is coming and I can have 5 days off taking only one day of leave. I think I’ll make a trip to Bangkok. My idea is to go there by AirAsia and come back over land. Even more trips are coming up. In the end of January I have another week off and I might make a trip to Bali(again), I am not entirely sure what to do… Any suggestions are welcome Also in the beginning of January I might go to China for a few days but I fear that will not go through since I had some difficulties getting a visa for this trip.

Last weekend we had a company trip and we went to play paintball. This is really exhausting but really lots of fun to do. Also a good opportunity to talk with some people I hardly spoke to.

Life here is still relaxing and without worry. In the morning I still wake up late, go to the office grabbing a delicious Roti Capati on the way as breakfast. When I come home it is often 11pm+ but this doesn’t bother me at this moment.

I gave away my pocket camera so don’t expect any photo’s of things I’ve done. But I’ll try to get a new camera and then I’ll snap some shots for you all

Seems Solace is a popular word now-a-days. I’ve read a couple of blog post using that word so I thought let’s follow a trend Of course this is all because the movie Quantam of Solace. Supposed to be a good movie. But I wrote Bali Solace because Bali was once a great. I met up with Eric, Alfred, Sammy and Shanti. I also met a view people I hung around with before which is always fun to do… It was only for 5 days I was in Bali which is better than nothing but just too damn short.

All though I only had a couple of days in Bali I wasn’t busy doing trips and seeing cultural things. I spend my time enjoying the nightlife. During the day we also celebrated doing nothing and Eric was always there to support me with doing nothing. Alfred, Sammy and Shanti did go see some cultural things and enjoy the beautifull Bali sunset but I just enjoyed the beautifull Bali Bintang(means star in Bahasa) which is the biggest Indonesian beer brand.

My air carrier was Airasia and I was surprised how ok it was. It sure isn’t as good as some people make you want to believe but it isn’t bad. They just bring you from one location to the other and you have to pay for all the things on flight. But come on, it’s only a three hour flight! There were people eating, drinking and complaining about the prices and I was just sitting there reading my book and having a meal four times as cheap and many times better, on the ground… In flight food is only good with the really expensive airlines anyway.

Well it’s no fun without any pictures so you can find them on my photo site. And here is another youtube videos I found recently which is really funny (sorry, Dutch only…)