Holga has a new friend......

And her name is Chelsea! This is a Golden Half camera which uses 35mm film and produces much smaller frames compared to ordinary film cameras due to its size. Essentially a roll of film with 36 exposures can produce 72 shots or half frames so it's very pocket-friendly and cute at the same time. Its body length barely fills up a guy's palm. And yes, it also has a hotshoe (at the side) for the holga flash or any flash for the matter to be mounted on. I have been carrying around whenever I go out and just shoot randomly, partly because I have a lot of shots to expend! The images produced by Chelsea is supposed to look similar to those by Holga, except that the frames are half the size (probably explains the name). Will of course load some nice shots up once I finish my roll!

Nice artwork on the packaging too. Comes with a roll of film to start straight away!

I got Chelsea from 8storeytree.com which also has a retail presence at Sunshine Plaza #01-32 at Bencoolen Street called Thirtysi36. It's run by two passionate folks who founded Lomotion.sg, the online community forum for lomo-lovers.

Workaholics vs Peak Performers

This is a useful checklist to keep in mind, especially with bosses constantly at our necks yelling for results and we are feeling maxed out and asking "what the hell am I doing?". Luckily for myself, I check most of the boxes on the right, although I would probably still need to do more to delegate and take more vacations. The latter is however constrained by the number of days of leave in the company policy, which means to fill that box with a firm tick, I would need to quit or work out something that allows me to take time off more often, or better still telecommute/work on a project basis and help me achieve my major objective of maximising mobility (i.e. freedom) while generating income to survive. Still trying to work things out but with optimism, courage and maybe some luck, I can hopefully achieve my goal.

via The Joy of Not Working, which btw is really a joy to read.

Sherman!

Click on image for large view.

Typical Sherman - Current, Funny and Thoughtful. And I was just fiddling with my iPhone 3G and thinking of getting the iPhone 3G-S when my telco contract ends this Dec...Mmm, maybe not.

via JS Online

Managing

Below are some excerpts I got from an NYT interview with Yahoo!'s CEO posted by SY on Facebook. In this article, Carol Bartz talks about leadership and managing people. I am highlighting some bits here, a small part actually, about her views of what business schools should teach, because it resonates with what I have been thinking about for a while now, that education in schools are lacking in some vital aspects. What I mean is that schools are not teaching skills to manage the two most important things in life: one's self and one's finances. What is more important than yourself and money in your life? The usual way is to learn the hard lessons by fumbling about and making mistakes and hopefully learning from them.

We are never taught to work through complex and fundamental questions like who we really are, what do we want etc in a systematic and deliberate way, questions whose answers are the guiding posts for how we manage our lives. If we cannot manage ourselves, how do we manage others? The same goes for managing money. We are taught the importance of money and how to make more money (all those Masters in Applied Finance/Economics/Accounting/Financial Engineering courses come to mind) but we are never really taught how to manage our wealth. Making more money doesn't necessarily increase our wealth; if expenses exceed income, however large that income is, one is still poor.

Of course, I am not blaming the schools for all this or shifting parental and individual responsibility but I believe our education system can do more to help prepare our young to live a fuller life, and more importantly to lead a life that they want. To know what one really wants in life, there is no escaping from answering the question of who we really are and what is the ideal self that we want to attain. Then life is a not journey whose destination is death, but a pursuit of ideals and how we can grow in every way, spiritually, morally and mentally, to become a better person. As for money, it's simply there as a means to keep us alive and sustain us on this lifelong quest for those ideals. Nothing more, because more money will not help us grow to become a better person in any way. And if a person does not grow, he/she will never be happy.

October 18, 2009
Corner Office
Imagining a World of No Annual Reviews
This interview with Carol Bartz, chief executive of Yahoo, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. How would you say your leadership style has changed over time?

A. I’m calmer. I think that just comes with confidence. I would hate to describe the C.E.O. I was in ’92. I think I was pretty pathetic, actually.

Q. Why?

A. Well, I thought it was such a big responsibility. I had public shareholders and I had a board and this is one step you take that’s a pretty big step. There’s a progression in management. The first step you take is when you’re a people manager, and then the next step is when you’re a manager of managers. And then there’s that step when you are on top. And who are you going to complain to now? Because everybody likes to complain to their boss, or their peers.

I think the biggest steps in that progression of a manager are the first and the last. The last because if it’s a public company, you say: “Wait a minute. I have shareholders. I have a board. I have press. I have all these things to juggle and I’m supposed to run this company. And how do I set my time and how perfect do I have to be?” You get that weight of the world on your shoulders and so I think you overreach. I thought I had to know answers that I didn’t have to know. I thought I had to be the biggest cheerleader, and so it just saps a lot of energy out of you because you’re the person that has to be up and on. It’s just a big responsibility.

And then you settle in over time. So I made some people mistakes — like I tried too hard with some people who should have gone earlier. You just make a lot of mistakes that you probably know in your gut are mistakes, but you’re not sure how to twist the organization around. You’re just not as confident. It’s that simple. So I actually wouldn’t have liked working for myself back then.

Q. You came out of retirement to run Yahoo.

A. I was so bored when I retired that I lost that whole section of my life. I mean I could keep reading, but I missed that whole people interaction. I’m somebody who loves politics — I mean politics in the company, as in, how do you help and enable people to get along? It’s not a dirty word. It’s how you organize. People say, “Oh, we don’t have politics.” Everybody has politics. And so be an expert at it. Figure out how to influence people to get things done, as opposed to running and ratting on them.

Q. What should business schools teach more of, or less of?

A. I think there ought to be some classes for people to get more philosophical about who they are and what motivates them, and therefore why they act like they act.

Some of the most fantastic training I’ve had over the years is the tests and the feedback I’ve gotten on what drives me as a person, and to sort of face up to it. What’s important to me and therefore why would I make certain decisions? For instance, I grew up dirt poor. I am constantly in fear of being poor. I’m so far from being poor, it’s crazy, but I’m constantly in fear of being poor. And I know that drives a lot.

Now you could say the dark side of that is maybe that would drive me to make risky decisions that I shouldn’t make. It actually drives me the other way. It drives me to be more conservative, so I’ve had to teach myself to get out of that conservative zone.

It also turns out that I’m an introvert. You would not believe that, would you? And I know I am because introverts have to refuel by being alone. Extroverts — Bill Clinton’s a famous extrovert — have to go to a party. At the end of the day, he comes home tired, and he wants to party. I come home. I suck my thumb and don’t talk to me. I learned how to get down time. Even an hour by myself feeds me.

What motivates you? What are you scared of? Knowing that will help inform how you lead, how you make choices, how you face the day. And I don’t think we do enough of that.

Q. What else?

A. I also think people should understand that they will learn more from a bad manager than a good manager. They tend to get into a cycle where they’re so frustrated that they aren’t paying attention actually to what’s happening to them. When you have a good manager things go so well that you don’t even know why it’s going well because it just feels fine.

When you have a bad manager you have to look at what’s irritating you and say: “Would I do that? Would I make those choices? Would I talk to me that way? How would I do this?”

When people come to me and say, “I can’t work for so-and-so anymore,” I say, “Well, what have you learned from so-and-so?” People want to take a bad situation and say, “Oh, it’s bad.” No, no. You have to deal with what you’re dealt. Otherwise you’re going to run from something and not to something. And you should never run from something.

Happy Holga on a Day Out

Time to visit Uncle Mike again to get the photos out.

Dungeons and Dragons!

Our first DnD session started on Sunday and it was thoroughly enjoyable. Kudos to Alan who makes a great DnD master with his vivid story-telling, eloquence and sense of humor. Summary of the session (also written by him) is captured below.

Ahh… Waterdeep. The City of Splendours. A city where dreams are realized, fame earned and riches hoarded. A city governed by a perfunctory, if not symbolic puppet administration, whose true rulers are widely known to be the mysterious Lords of Waterdeep. The Lords have governed for centuries, away from the common eye and wielding unrivalled power. Regarded even by Waterdeep’s numerous political enemies as extremely powerful, the Lords have been the famed city’s source of stability, prosperity and prominence. It is certainly without a shadow of a doubt in anyone’s mind that the Lords’ position is unassailable. Or is it?

Five intrepid adventurers who grew up on a diet of tantalizing tavern tales travel far and wide from their homelands to the city they have heard the bards sing so much about since their days of youth. But all is not what it seems as they finally set foot upon the cobblestoned sidewalks of this sprawling metropolis. A nascent disquiet hangs thick and ominous in the air. Citizens scurry about their daily business with furtive sidelong glances as though a stray dagger thrown out from the side alleys might just ‘accidentally’ find their backs.

Soon enough, posters spring up across town summoning all who deemed themselves brave to gather for special missions commissioned by none other than the mysterious Lords of Waterdeep themselves. The summon attracts the attention of our five adventurers who promptly sign-on for duty. Their names read:

- Sherobeth, a flail-swinging, loud-grunting barbarian of half-orc descent
- Tzaremus Comidel, a half-elven sorcerer who enjoys frying his enemies from afar with showers of magical missiles
- Moonshine, a berries-loving human druid who wields, albeit self-consciously, a wicked looking spear
- Pavialo Rittales, an elven bard who speaks (and sings) with a terribly affected accent
- Gabriel, an ambidextrous human lady ranger with childhood gender discrimination hang-ups

Issuing the summon on behalf of Waterdeep’s South Gate district is one of the lesser Lords, who introduces himself as Theodore the Brown. Through him, the adventurers learn of the troubles currently plaguing the city. A number of the Lords of Waterdeep have mysteriously gone missing, with some feared dead. Even Khelben Arunsun “Blackstaff”, the most prominent and arguably most powerful of the Lords, has not been in communication with the other Lords in months, which is highly unusual and most disturbing. A string of other seemingly unrelated but nevertheless destabilizing incidents have also shaken the citizenry of late. The Times of the Sword Coast, Waterdeep’s most widely read daily, has been reporting news of marauding goblin bands committing organized acts of assault in broad daylight, as well as blatant sabotages of key city infrastructure, to name a few.

The adventurers first task, therefore, is to investigate a recently sighted goblin encampment to the south of the city, just beyond the Rats Hill. To prepare them for this expedition, The Shining Hand (who serves as Theodore the Brown’s spymaster and combat strategist) and Kitiara (an immensely graceful elf who serves as mission coordinator) put our eager but inexperienced adventurers through several days of intensive training.
After the rigorous boot camp, which culminated in the humbling Simulator training module, our adventurers are finally ready to set off…

Yours truly is Tzaremus Comidel and yes, I did enjoy the rather effortless showering of magical missiles on my enemies. My statistics read: 1.8m, 60kg (rather willowy I am) male half-elven sorcerer with lilac eyes, ash-blond long straight hair and pale skin. I only wear silk.

Future sessions will be recorded here. The blog is also listed under links on the right.

80-20

I was inspired to read more about Pareto's 80-20 principle after watching Wong Tze Wah's 2001 performance on video a month ago. Yes, one could actually learn a lot by watching Wong, a stand-up comedian I had mentioned in my earlier post and whose show I would be attending in December. Richard Koch, who claimed that he wrote the first book dedicated to the application of Pareto's 80-20 principle, surfaced during my idly trawls online. His claim to fame was through applying the principle, whose essential message is 80% of results are achieved through 20% of efforts, in not only business but also in managing money and personal relationships, and reaching for happiness. In short, he advocates a total lifestyle approach towards practicing the 80-20 principle. What it means is to be very clear about where one's strengths lie and leverage them, and devote effort, resources and time to 20% of those activities that produces the greatest impact on every aspect of our lives, be it in work or personal life. It is more than being efficient; it is about being effective which means getting more of what we want with less. The principle is powerful because what it advocates is counter-intuitive but evident everywhere.

Conventional wisdom says input=output (or more commonly, garbage in, garbage out). 80-20 says - the doctrine of the vital few and trivial many:

• There are only a few things that ever produce important results.
• Most efforts do not realize their intended results.
• What you see is generally not what you get: there are subterranean forces at work.

One of his many suggestions that stuck to me and which I have interpreted and applied consciously and diligently is that whenever I do something, it must fulfill the two requirements:

1. It must be unconventional. Not radical or earth-shaking, just slightly different from the herd. I believe that doing things differently may not guarantee success but successful people are always different.
2. It must promise to multiply effectiveness.
   

The results are amazing and sometimes quite unexpected. This is probably because the principle requires me to look at and think about things differently. Kind of like taking photos from an unusual angle and being surprised at what you get.

Stairs

140-tonne Kauri log-turned-staircase
via Ancient Kauri

Book shelves + steps
via Levitate

Very Jenga-like (without the wobbliness)
via TAF

My Saturday afternoon

"Most great achievements are made through a combination of steady application and sudden insight...Achievement is driven by insight and selective action. Insight comes when we are feeling relaxed and good about ourselves. Insight requires time - and time, despite conventional wisdom, is there in abundance."

The 80/20 Principle - Richard Koch

Encouragement

Here are two of the most uplifting books I have come across so far. Self-Help books are mostly over-rated and highly repetitive but these are worth a read, especially 4-Hour work week which for some reason resonates strongly with me. I have put some of Tim Ferriss' advice into action and I feel a change immediately from my own feelings towards my actions to other people's reactions towards my behaviour. An action could be as simple as really telling my boss firmly and authoritatively a big NO just because I feel it ought to be a NO. Or refusing to pick up the phone because it intrudes into whatever I'm doing and breaks my concentration. If it's that important, the person will call again anyway. There is nothing more precious than my own time, than me. This alone is a huge shift from my thinking before this, especially in my line of work where networking is crucial to survival and conventional thinking is that you jump at whoever is open to get connected with you. Even my boss felt the change in me too (he has to, with my big NO ringing in his ears). Not in a rude way but really as firmly as one can get without being offensive. I don't remember the last time I experienced such a tangible change in myself after putting down a book.