dip me!
29/04/2007
If you know Seth Godin, you know Mr Purple Cow was probably responsible for putting those same creatures in the lobbies of the Big Why corporate office. Boy do I feel like we’re a purple cow in a tech lobby.
So now Mr Purple cow is on my favourite evangelist’s blog, talking about his new book. I have to say I’m not a fan of Mr Purple Cow. Yoyodyne? What’s that – sensitive teeth toothpaste for kids?
Nonetheless his new book seems interesting. It’s a little book that teaches you when to quit (and when to stick). Sometimes I love these self-helpesque books, cos it’s like writing down common sense, embellishing a little – I read it and agree and feel better thinking I now know better and I’m smarter than the average bear. Other times it’s a little annoying that someone’s re-telling me something I should know, packaging it and re-interpreting it, and trying to rip me off for it.
Blah.
giraffe
27/04/2007
I’ve had a long week. What about you?
And it’s not over!
I’m really liking that song they made Elvis sing with Celine Dion on American Idol tonight.
always something there to remind me
20/04/2007
Found another gem (or pearl, if that’s more your thing) on Guy Kawasaki’s blog again. In his entry Violin Monday, he describes how in an experiment, Joshua Bell spent 45 mins playing Bach on his $3.5 million dollar Strad, and no one noticed it was him.
I love how he summarises this episode:
Don’t let the absence of trappings and popularity make you believe something is bad.
Don’t let the presence of trappings and popularity make you believe something is good.
Don’t pass by life much less let life pass you by.
Don’t let the absence of trappings and popularity make you believe something is bad
This is a hard one to overlook, especially at work. While we are willing to queue for half an hour at the humble-looking fish soup stall at Amoy Street Food Centre because it’s good, back at the office we’re more inclined to pass over the less vocal, shabby-looking, unassuming geek.
Don’t let the presence of trappings and popularity make you believe something is good
Ah, our favourite catch-phrase now: the empty restaurant. I’ve no idea if it’s meant to denote something really pretty but kinda empty, or if it just means we’re starting from scratch because it’s new; the definitions and the usage varies daily. But yeah, while we don’t succumb to the lures, however tempting, of a beautiful though empty restaurant, the slick self-absorbed, buzzword-spewing, sound-and-fury wielding, uptown looking business dev, marketing, maybe a combination of both-type prima donna often gets heralded as the next wunderkind since Mozart.
*roll eyes*
Don’t pass by life much less let life pass you by
I go home wondering how such gross injustices persist, spread and infect each nook and cranny of the organisation, like cordyceps slowly eating away at the host.
The frustration is tiring – and at the back of my mind is the sneaky suspicion that life is passing me by.
I seek change. This is not my destiny.
getting it done
16/04/2007
I had a productive day today. I set out and did something I was putting off for a bit at the office – well, make that two things – and then after that I headed to the gym for about an hour. I’d say it’s a good start to a new regiment.
I’m trying to stay motivated, trying to focus on a new goal – to fit into some of my older clothes – so I don’t have to buy anything new for my cousin’s wedding next month. You know it’s starting to go downhill from here when your younger cousins start tying the knot. As always, I take my hat off to anyone who goes the whole nine yards with a wedding ceremony and banquet. I think Nature intends that there will always be a few brave souls who’ll give the rest of the world an occasion to celebrate because a selfish b***h like me won’t do it. 
Been keeping up with the latest season of The Apprentice (you can now watch full episodes on Yahoo! TV) and it’s great to see a slightly more promising bunch than the previous season (the one Sean won).
My favourite to win this season is James. He reckons himself an internet man, but what’s impressive is that he runs his own site. Ok, so it’s yet another social networking site, but hey, at least he’s trying. I’m always partial to geeks, so hey – hope this one makes it!
Ah – the wonders of the internet.
Washing up
15/04/2007
Every weekend I try to avoid having to do the housework. Unlike Lilmomma, I don’t enjoy it all that much. There is only so much mopping, sweeping and vacuuming I can withstand, so I like to try to keep the occurances low.
However, when I do try my hand at cleaning, I can’t do without Castile soap. Basically, castile soap is soap made from vegetable oils, and the popular oils now include peppermint, olive, hemp, jojoba and coconut.
I got my first bottle of castile soap from Trader Joe’s, but most people are more familiar with Dr Bronner‘s famous Moral ABC soap.
While castile soap looks innocuous enough and usually smells great, with a PH of 9 to 10, I really reserve it for cleaning around the house, and try to keep it off my skin. But it works great. It’s great for floors, for the kitchen, so I’m slowly switching all the cleaning products (except dishwashing liquid and laundry powder) to castile. A little tends to go a long way.
Anyway. If you’re into this kind of stuff, Dr Bronner‘s is now available locally. In tempting scents like Lavender and Almond, it’s really tempting.
Enough stalling, time for me to get cracking. Blah.
me likey weekendie
14/04/2007
Yay. Passed our first Friday the 13th of the year. Nothing really happened, and it’s nice to make it to the weekend in one piece.
I’ve been obsessed with earrings lately. Ever since Mismads and I found that cheap earring shop at People’s Park Textile Centre. Gotta love cheap earrings, and the search for earrings has extended to Amazon. Gotta love Amazon. And Target too. What would shopping online be without Amazon?
Sad, that’s what. Anyway. Many earrings = happy Qoo. And a happy Qoo is a content Qoo who will attempt to complain a little less in the coming week. 
Word of the Day: Banal
10/04/2007
No, it’s not a really long yellow canal.
ba nal [buh-nal, -nahl, beyn-l] – adjective
devoid of freshness or originality; hackneyed; trite: a banal and sophomoric treatment of courage on the frontier.
Over the weekend while sniffing around a really good blog I came across this article: The Banality of Heroism. It’s a good read, but first you’d have to know a little something about one of the guys who wrote it.
Philip Zimbardo orchestrated the The Stanford Prison Experiment. The experiment was a study on the human response to captivity, especially the effects of imposed social roles on behaviour. He sums it up in the article nicely: “The idea… was to see what happens when you put good people in a dehumanizing place.“
To do this, he hired undergraduate volunteers to play the roles of guards and prisoners in a mock prison constructed under the Stanford psychology building. In the end, the experiment ended abruptly, because each group quickly took on behaviours and identities associated with the roles, wardens used increasingly more degrading forms of punishment, and the prisoners let themselves get more and more victimised. People lost objectivity because of the situation.
It’s often compared to the Milgram Experiment, conducted by Stanley Milgram, which was a study of obedience to authority. The subjects were made to think they were performing a teaching study, and were required to act as “teachers” and administer an electric shock to the “learners” if the “learners” got answers wrong. An authoritative person in a white lab coat told them to administer the shock, and an actor posing as the learner would act out his pain and desperation and getting shocked at levels that are potentially lethal. So despite the “learner” pleading, writhing in pain and even acting dead, the “teachers” continued to administer the shocks at the request of the person in the lab coat.
Joseph Dimow – one of the subjects that objected and dropped out of the experiment early – wrote Resisting Authority: a retrospective of the situation.
We’ve come to understand through studies like these, the “banality of evil” – that under certain conditions and social pressures, ordinary people are capable of committing otherwise unthinkable acts.
But perhaps we should consider the possibility that the flipside – the “banality of heroism” exists. That concept would suggest that we are all heroes in the making, waiting for the moment in life to perform the deed. I like that idea. There have been cases of these, and you can read that in the article. It goes on to make a case for the re-definition of what we think of as heroes and the definition of a new kind of hero; not the knight in shining armour, not Aragorn nor Frodo. But someone who would otherwise be pretty ordinary. Someone who could sit next to you in the train or bus tomorrow. Someone who probably won’t have his bust cast in iron and left in a museum. Someone who might not even be written about in the paper tomorrow.
But someone who will stand up to social norms or rules and buck the accepted behaviour for the right thing to do.
I love this idea. I really do. It’s such a simple ideal.
That there’s a hero in all of us. We just have to do the right thing.
