Not a coffee… and it’s my newest blog tenant. I first learned about Holger’s blog when he linked to one of my posts on leadership. He is interested in many different topics, servant leadership being one of them and at his blogs, you’ll find various topics about Christian living, music and others.

Holger has one of those jobs that allow him to play with techno-toys and be paid for it. Cool! So, go check his blog out and let him know you are visiting from …in the outer… (Don’t forget to actually click on the comment link and add a comment or two as this is what bloggers love, right?)

Technorati Tags: blogexplosion, blog rental

Yesterday, my family was enjoying a nice meal of dim sum (or yum cha which is what Aussies call them, from the Cantonese phrase which literally means “tea drinking,” a reference to the aromatic teas that accompany the dishes of delicacies served during such meals) at one of the many Southern Californian restaurants that serve up this ubiquitous sumptuous fare. This was the first time we went to this particular restuarant and the quality of the food was really quite good, and we were also rather hungry to begin with so we tucked into the delicious steaming dishes without much conversation initially.

When most of us have had our fill, the conversation started up, and halfway through it, one of my teens started talking about an exercise that he suggested my wife ought to practice. He described it in detail and as soon as he started I recognized that to be the Kegel PC muscles toning exercise. The thing is, my son, a high school freshman, was attempting to teach his mother how to do it! I found that Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: teenagers, conversations, dimsum, family, sex, talks, listening, question-asking

In the classic scene in A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson, playing Colonel Jessep shouted, “You can’t handle the truth!” when grilled about the extent of military coverups, secrets and leadership knowledge about wrongdoings in a military base. The unspoken understanding, apparently, is that leaders have privileged access to the truth, so they have a responsibility to guard it, to act (or not act) upon it and only they are appropriately situated to appreciate it.

Leaving aside the questionability of this seemingly widespread assumption, I would like to ask a related question: what happens when leaders do not know the whole truth? What happens, that is, when the system fails them and they have lack of access to the information, or when those “in the know” hide the truth from them? Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: truth, misrepresentation, leaders, knowledge, enron, awb, corruption, food-for-oil iraq, alexander downer, transparency, accountability

Recently I received a comment at my old blogsite to a post in which I highlighted the popularity of Sun Tzu’s Art of War as a business manual. I cast doubts on the use of this ancient manual for wholesale and uncritical application to contemporary business because I think fundamentally the dynamics in war (or military conflicts) are diametrically opposed to those in business. In that post, I ended with the following thoughts:

If we approach business as we approach all of life, with a view that everyone we touch should come out of that experience a better person, that they derive some value from the relationship, then it would make for a better world. No, methinks, business is more than merely warfare, in which there can be no real winners, but in which there are only losers in more ways than one. Business is more like a long-term love affair, where there can only be winners.

My commenter, however did not agree with my post and here is what he has got to say: Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: business, art of war, sun tzu

It started as a trickle. I noticed that I was receiving one or two spam emails via my ‘contact me’ page. Then it started to grow. At the rate of several a day and then several an hour. So, after I cleaned out the latest culprits, I went looking for a solution.

My first stop through the WordPress support site search engine was on this page. Through this insightful post and discussions in the comments, I found a possible solution in Bad Behavior, a plugin designed to block spammers from reaching a site. So, after intrepidly reading through the instructions, I downloaded and installed on my site.

So far so good. No more spam emails! At least not in the past twelve or so hours! I hope it doesn’t block out other good stuff in the process!

Technorati Tags: spam, spam filter, bad behavior, wordpress plugin

TheWriteJerry is an interesting blog. The tag line says, “Odd views out of sync with what the rest of the world might think…” and he doesn’t mince his words in his posts. He has an easy writing style and his blog contains a good mix of topics. He is my latest BlogExplosion tenant for the week, so pop over there now, drop him a comment or two, and let him know you came from …in the outer…!

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogexplosion, rent-my-blog, blog tenant

Recently received an email from someone who is contemplating moving away from Blogger. Since I did this almost a year ago now, and without much fanfare, I might add, I guess I have some experience with this and can make some comments.

Have I been happy with the move? I think so! Initially, when I was on Blogger, I could not do a few things that I saw others did with their blogs. I thought they were cool tricks and wondered how I could do it for my own blog as well. I was not knowledgeable enough about html and css and whatnots, and wanted something that would be flexible enough that I could find and use tools or extensions that one can just clip-on and utilize.

Also Blogger sometimes was rather finicky and the service was far from reliable. Several times, I lost posts when I tried to publish them (and had forgotten to save an off-line copy before I hit the publish button).

In my hunt for new blogging tool, I Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogging hosts, blogging tools, wordpress, blogger

Initially when I wrote my earlier piece, I was thinking about my ability to express certain kinds of emotion. I was thinking that I used to cry a lot at one time in my life, and then I went through a long period when I apparently lost the ability to cry. It was so bad that there was a time when bad things were happening around me, for example, the death of my mom, when I lost the ability to cry. Then, apparently, years later, I seemed to regain this ability to shed tears again.

Reflecting further on the post and also the comments from my readers have helped me think through a little more about the issue. I now realize that my expressions of sorrow during that time were mostly triggered by other people’s suffering. Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: crying, emotions, depression, spiritual healing, tears

Just read this entry on Cat’s blog about crying. She shared about her bottled-up and mixed-up emotions welling up in tears:

I felt ridiculous for some time but realize that with all that I’ve gone through, this crying was no big deal. It’s just my emotions having built up and finally releasing over so many years. I always held in my sorrow and anger…and now at times it comes out in spurts like temper tantrums and crying fits.

I relate to what she says about crying. When I was younger, I used to cry easily and often. Then one day, I stopped. Maybe because I realized that crying doesn’t really help the situation. Or maybe because I found that crying doesn’t ease the pain. For a long while I just didn’t cry. For instance, I couldn’t even cry when my mom passed away. I yelled, I screamed, but the tears didn’t flow. Not easily anyway.

Then a few years ago, I started to sob like a baby. Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: crying, emotions, depression, spiritual healing, tears

A while ago, at a gathering of parents of teens at my church, we were talking about how to relate to our teens. Someone shared that as parents we need to talk to our kids about what is right and even if they don’t appear to be listening, what we tell them today will come back to them.

Someone mentioned that even though they are now grown up and have left home for many years, that their mother still talked to them as if they were still at home and a teenager! Everyone nodded and laughed in agreement.

I interjected wryly, “Yep! Don’t I know it! My mother too still talks to me … and she died more than seven years ago!” Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: mom, mother's day, memories

“Go home! Get out of here! Haven’t you heard? Run! They are killing you people over there!”

I panicked. Stunned! Terrified! I turned and ran as fast as my short legs could carry me. When I arrived home, I found that my father’s shop had already closed. I ran through the doors, slamming them shut and fastening the wooden clasps of the doors firmly. Then I ran upstairs to my parents.

In those days, home for me was a shophouse in a small Malaysian town. Shophouses were designed with a shopfront and living quarters at the back. Sometimes they also have an upper level with bed and living rooms. Ours was such a design. Our family of four lived above the shophouse in three large bedrooms and very spacious living areas. At the back of the shop, on the ground floor, was our kitchen and dining room. In the small backyard my father has built a couple of artificial ponds where he kept some gold and other tropical fish. In the corner of the backyard were steps leading up to a “out-house” toilet. We still had the “bucket” system then, and each night so-called “night soil collectors” would come round to collect the buckets of waste. I always wondered where they dispose of the waste. Read the rest of this entry »

What does blogging mean to you? What attracts you to blogs? Is it about the voyeuristic aspects of reading someone else’s most intimate thoughts? Or is it a medium of exchange of ideas or of opinions?

We all blog for different reasons. Probably one of the main reasons we blog is this need to connect. To connect with all those others who probably do the same thing, and we hopefully find someone else out there we can converse, debate or perhaps just “shoot the breeze”.

Some of us do this better than others. Perhaps it is because they write really well and they get a readership quickly. Perhaps they are already well known and many others like to read what they have to share. Perhaps they have a good story to tell and their stories attract the readership. Yet others, well, let’s just say that they don’t do this too well.

Sometimes our blogs take on a totally new persona and we find that the personality of our blog seems to take over. Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: blogging, personality, persona, identity