- thinking and doing things randomly -
I know my site doesnt have direction unlike the more 'professional',more 'accessible' and user-friendly sites lying around the world wide web. But what can this girl do. I have random thoughts and do things randomly. I know it's not a proper excuse but still, an excuse nonetheless :D *wink
Here's a little info about the speaker from YouTube:
Shawn Achor is the winner of over a dozen distinguished teaching awards at Harvard University, where he delivered lectures on positive psychology in the most popular class at Harvard.
His research and lectures on happiness and human potential have received attention in The New York Times, Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, as well as on NPR and CNN Radio, and he travels around the United States and Europe giving talks on positive psychology to Fortune 500 corporations, schools, and non-profit organizations.
Achor graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a BA in English and Religion and earned a Masters degree from Harvard Divinity School in Christian and Buddhist ethics.
Now he is the CEO of Aspirant, a Cambridge-based consulting firm which researches positive outliers-people who are well above average-to understand where human potential, success and happiness intersect. Based on his research and 12 years of experience at Harvard, he clearly and humorously describes to organizations how to increase happiness and meaning, raise success rates and profitability, and create positive transformations that ripple into more successful cultures.
In Shawn's TEDxBloomington presentation, he says that most modern research focuses on the average, but that "if we focus on the average, we will remain merely average." He wants to study the positive outliers, and learn how not only to bring people up to the average, but to move the entire average up.
I think I've visited TED before but I can't remember when and what I watched, and forget it. It was a few weeks back when one of my "children" brought it up again. Since then, I've been watching at least one or two videos from the site and now, here is Steve Jobs commencement speech at Standford University.
" I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.
If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life.It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
I was searching for paranormal videos [well for no purpose at all while waiting for the time, I'll leave at 8PM and its still 7:40] when all of a sudden I ended up with a video on where a man proposed to his girl by the bridge. So now, I ended up searching for latest proposal videos, how men now propose to their girls and here are some of my finds:
This guy was singing while his girl was obviously sitting on a chair. According to the info, the girl was under the impression that it was a birthday shout out for her. The guy was by the way competing in a Karaoke competition. Then all of a sudden [2:24] the guy kneeled in front of the unsuspecting girl and there you were, a ring in hand with roar in the crowd.
Isn't the sweet and well I think original ^^,
I'll find more and this page will be updated as I fill my top 10 ^^,
*updating after a week / 0512
I really cant help but find these videos preferable when I see the men nervous ^^,
2. I find this one really sweet and cute, well the bride to-be is truly cute though, and it's good that the guy did it in English ^^, I wonder who was his accomplished [the people with him]. I mean are they his friends or are they from a marriage-proposal company?
3. The first video was a proposal as Matt [groom-to-be] proposed to his lady, Ginny in a movie theater. I find it funny especially when the groom to-be stopped first and bought popcorn hahaha
The second one was the wedding ceremony itself. I think the groom was more nervous than the bride and it's very refreshing. I love the part when Matt [close, are we not? haha] [3:28] was trying to breath properly and after the "smooch" he said "I love you,sandwich." [4:02] or I heard it wrong?
4. On the other hand, this proposal is really funny hahaha
The guy is a lady killer and I think the bride to be will have the funniest journey in her lifetime. Its very sweet and fun ^^,
YAP! You bet guys ^^, I'm a big fan of Japanese Anime well as long as they write or translate it in English since I can't read any Japanese characters.
I have been reading and watching Naruto series and damn isn't it long.
As in so freaking loooonnnngggg !!!
It's like Dragon Ball Z all over again. Anyways, episode 570 titled Kurama, Naruto and his beast already settled [some of] their differences. Naruto decided to open Kurama's [the 9 tailed fox] cage ^^,
I'm so gonna like this new improvement ^^,
I can't wait to watch it too ^^,
more update next time and maybe, I'll include more of my favorite anime as well.
I have some readings to do now ^^,
.. Linkin Park.
I've been loving these boys from the moment I heard In the End and here they are singing Adelle.
Again, I prefer to upload the one with lyrics so I can sing with it.
I saw the video when they sang on stage and as much as I wanted to upload that one, well I really need the lyrics, guys. I'm no good without lyrics mind you.
Enjoy singing.
Don't forget to clap/tap your hands and play it to the beat ^^,
I was originally thinking how can I post Rusell Peters Red, White and Brown comedy show in full but the only videos I saw are clips from YouTube. While doing so, I checked my facebook and so this video from National Geographic.
Anyways, I just can't help but to post this video. Enjoy the show ^^,
One of my aliens and I were talking about hackers a few seconds ago. This is how the conversation went:
SWHB: What would you do if you found out that one of your friends is a hacker?
Alien: I would love him hahaha
SWHB: Why? [me asking question while reading other things]
Alien: I actually have a friend loves computer and he did me a great favor once.
SWHB: Really? What did he do for you?
Alien: Once, when I was choosing subjects and needed this class but the school don't want to take me in anymore since the class was already full. I told it to my friend who is in the same class. What he did was really funny. He entered the school admin online then kicked one of the students out and typed in my name.
SWHB: hahaha How did he choose who needed some kicking?
Alien: He didn't like the sound of the student's name hehehe
Well, having a lot of friends no matter what they are and whatever size they came in, we have to love them all ^^, we never know when we needed their specialties.
Since I started my second job late in March, the "self-deprived sleeping" sickness didn't start kicking in until last month. I missed one day work, an hour late and half hour late the next few weeks. I lost a lot for being late because I kept of turning off my alarm clock or forgetting to set it on.
Yes, I have time to sleep longer on weekend but its really very hot in the morning and it usually wakes me up but last night WOW! I came home at 2:30PM, I took my clothes off leaving my underwear on then bang! I went straight to bed and slept until this morning. I set my alarm clock at 6PM so I can do the laundry but I was like "the weather seems fine, I'll do the laundry on weekend" mood. I turned the alarm off then went back to bed. I can't remember what time was it when it started to rain but I was like "its good I didn't do the laundry" and the rain made the weather cooler so I slept better.
taken from the VAR Guy.com
I woke up at around 12MN just the make sure I wont be late at work then went back to sleep again. Woke up again at 2AM to check the time and finally at 3:15. When my alarm ticked, I turned it off then went for another nap which is all crazy, anyways I promised myself that I wont do it again for the whole month of May.
I took the bus and saw two of my colleagues on the same bus. We decided to take a cab for the rest of the way and arrived 15 minutes before the time but 5 minutes on my computer time [YES! our timer is 10 minutes late and we don't have any plans of changing it hahaha]
I never felt so refreshed after that long sleep especially in this weather that we are having now. It seemed so long though in reality, its only been a month, since I had a proper sleep like that but dang it was really so good ^^,
I'll try to sleep that long on this weekend. I'll make myself tired for the whole day and hit the hay at 2:30 in the afternoon hahahaha
