One day a father of a very wealthy family took his son on a trip to the country with the purpose of showing his son how the poor people live so he could be thankful for his wealth.
They spent a couple of days and nights on the farm of what would be considered a very poor family. On their return from their trip, the father asked his son, “How was the trip?” “It was great, Dad.”
“Did you see how poor people can be?” the father asked. “Oh yeah” said the son.
“So what did you… See and learn from the trip?” asked the father.
The son answered, “I saw that we have one dog and they had four. We have a pool that reaches to the middle of our garden and they have a creek that has no end.” “We have imported lanterns in our garden and they have the stars at night.” “Our patio reaches to the front yard and they have the whole horizon.” “We have a small piece of land to live on and they have fields that go beyond our sight.” “We have servants who serve us, but they serve others.” “We buy our food, but they grow theirs.” “We have walls around our property to protect us; they have friends to protect them.” With this the boy’s father was speechless.
Then his son added, “Thanks dad for showing me how poor we are.
How poor we are!!
It is more blessed to give than to receive
A student was walking one day with his Sheikh(spiritual guide). As they went along they saw lying in the path a pair of old shoes, which belonged to an old man who was working in a field nearby. His work for that day was nearly done.
The student turned to the Sheikh saying: "Let us play a trick on the man: we will hide his shoes and conceal ourselves behind those bushes and wait to see his response when he cannot find them".
"My young friend" answered the Sheikh, "we should never amuse ourselves at the expense of the poor. You are rich and may give yourself a much greater pleasure by the means of this poor man. Put a coin in each shoe and then we will hide and watch how this affects him".
So it was and they hid behind some bushes. The poor man finished his work and came to the path where he had left his coat and shoes. While putting his coat on he slipped his foot into one of his shoes. Feeling something hard he stooped down to feel what it was and he found a coin.
Astonishment and wonder were upon his face. He gazed at the coin, turned it around and around looking at it again and again. He then looked all around but could see no one. He put the money in his pocket and proceeded to put the other shoe on; but his surprise was doubled on finding the other coin.
His feelings overcame him; he fell upon his knees, looked up to heaven and uttered aloud a fervent thanksgiving to Allah Almighty in which he spoke of his wife, sick and helpless and his children without bread whom this timely bounty from some unknown hand would save from perishing.
The student stood there deeply affected and tears filled his eyes. "Now" said the Sheikh – are you not much better pleased than if you had played your trick?"
The youth replied, "You have taught me a lesson which I will never forget. I feel now the truth of these words, which I never understood before: "It is more blessed to give than to receive".
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
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, its 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 its 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.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much
(courtesy : zuhaib hayat )
Apple's iPhone OS 4.0
Apple's iPhone OS 4.0 is now live and available for download, giving users the chance to test out its much-vaunted multitasking capabilities for themselves.
The latest iteration of the iPhone operating system brings with it more than 100 new features, and in excess of 1,500 individual changes to the API. The download is free of charge, and compatible with the iPad and all but the first-generation models of the iPhone and iPod Touch.
However, you'll need at least an iPhone 3GS or the latest iPod Touch to take advantage of what is seen as the killer feature of the new OS – multitasking.
While applications native to the iPhone such as its music player have always been able to multitask, OS 4.0 opens up the possibility for third-party apps to do the same for the first time. As demonstrated by Apple boss Steve Jobs when showing off OS 4.0 for the first time back in April, double-tapping the Home button opens a newly introduced multitasking menu displaying all applications currently running.
This list can be scrolled through with a sideways finger swipe, and switching to a particular application is simply a matter of tapping its icon.
Multitasking is ultimately limited to seven basic app services – audio, VoIP, GPS, push notifications, local notifications, task completion and fast app switching – which need to be shared between any apps being used in order to protect system resources.
Aside from multitasking, other highlights introduced by OS 4.0 include a unified email inbox, folder creation and management, digital zoom, home screen wallpaper, iBooks and the ability to create playlists.
A single inbox with support for multiple Exchange accounts and the ability to create homescreen folders to avoid endless scrolling through icons are features iPhone owners have been crying out for – and users of other devices have had – for some time. Folder creation is versatile and flexible, but to a limit: while you can add as many folders as you like, each can only hold a maximum of 12 apps.
The iPhone OS 4.0 download requires users to first update iTunes to the newly released version 9.2. The latest versions of both pieces of software will already be pre-loaded on the iPhone 4.(By Martin James)
iPhone OS 4.0 can be downloaded from
http://www.apple.com/sg/iphone/softwareupdate.html
However iphone is only multi tasking, still need to wait for multi programming, which will be very useful
Multi-tasking means doing more than one task at a time; such as printing, burning c.d's, etc. all at the same time.
Multi-programming means running more than one program at one time; such as Microsoft word, AOL, Windows Media Player, all at one time.
Multi-processing means that your computer can process more than one thing at a time.
Tioman Island.Malaysia
One of the nice island in malaysia is Tioman. The natural beauty of the island is its biggest attraction. The waters around the island are filled with corals of all shapes and colours and home to a vast diversity of sea creatures, including two species of marine turtle. There are a few excellent beaches on Tioman, and these curves of golden sand are usually tucked away at the edges of villages or fronting one of the many resorts.
Singapore have total 9 long weekends in 2010. Following are still more to go.....
National Day – 9 August (Mon)
Hari Raya Puasa(Eid-ul-fitar) – 10 September (Fri)
Deepavali – 5 November (Fri)
Hari Raya Haji (Eid-ul-adha)– 16 November (Mon)
Christmas Day – 25 December (Sat)
Sand & Stone
Though this is very old, but still i like this very much
A story tells that two friends were walking through the desert. During some point of the journey they had an argument, and one friend slapped the other one in the face. The one who got slapped was hurt, but without saying anything, wrote in the sand:
The friend who had slapped and saved his best friend asked him, "After I hurt you, you wrote in the sand and now, you write on a stone, why?" The other friend replied "When someone hurts us we should write it down in sand where winds of forgiveness can erase it away. But, when someone does something good for us, we must engrave it in stone where no wind can ever erase it."
LEARN TO WRITE YOUR HURTS IN THE SAND AND TO CARVE YOUR BENEFITS IN STONE.
They say it takes a minute to find a special person, an hour to appreciate them, a day to love them, but then an entire life to forget them.
Don't be serious, be sincere
Don't just have career or academic goals. Set Goals to give you a balanced, successful life. I use the word balanced before successful. Balanced means ensuring your health, relationships, mental peace are all in good order.
There is no point of getting a promotion on the day of your breakup!!!.There is no fun in driving a car if your back hurts. Shopping is not enjoyable if your mind is full of tensions.
Life is one of those races in nursery school where you have to run with a marble in a spoon kept in your mouth. If the marble falls, there is no point coming first.
Same is with life where health and relationships are the marble. Your striving is only worth it if there is harmony in your life. Else, you may achieve the success, but this spark, this feeling of being excited and alive, will start to die.
One thing about nurturing the spark- don’t take life seriously. Life is not meant to be taken seriously, as we are really temporary here. We are like a pre-paid card with limited validity. If we are lucky, we may last another 50 years. And 50 years is just 2,500 Weekends.Do we really need to go so worked up?
It's okay, bunk a few classes, scoring low in couple of papers, goof up a few interviews, take leave from work, enjoy with your friends, fall in love, little fights with your loved ones.