Summary – Our POV is sometimes hazy.. Seek others’

Thank you to all those contributing in the survey held on Saturday. It’s always a good thing knowing where we can further improve ourselves. I still need more feedback to accurately renovate the whole blog.. So for those who have other things to add, I’d really appreciate it.

I believe all of us can agree, that if we are so accustomed to something, doing the same thing day in day out. We will not be able to see anything wrong with it.

Some will be so attached to what they hold to, they are willing to fight for it. Defending it to the end, even though the truth is, the thing is not worthy to be fought for. Wow that’s very abstract of me.

Take me for example, I am so addicted to blogging, that I go to great length with the theme (the boy on the moon). At first it was a mere experiment, trying this and that… after a lot of time spent, I’ve decided that this is just perfect. (I guess the idea of changing the theme will be so tiring, that I convince myself it is perfect).

The truth is, I completely agree with some comments from friends that the theme is somewhat holding me back. It gives the wrong first impression, and there’s not that much room for me to improve. For those who did come up and highlighted this, I salute you.

It is true that every person’s opinion is different. Yours will definitely be different from mine. But now.. that is exactly why I needed to hear your opinion. To hear the other side of the whole story, to see the blog from other point of view. Whether to accept it or not is totally a different matter.

My point is simply this… every now and then, seek advice from others on the matter you believed the most (principles, loved ones etc). Most of the time, it will be very enlightening.

I guess we all have had experience of being blind. So blind that we ignore the truth. (loving someone so much, that we fail to see he/she is a bad person, being so proud that we assume everyone else is wrong etc)

Care to share your similar experience? 🙂

————–Personal Note————-
In my mill, there’s a new assistant started working last March. He used to work in another company. The first thing we did when he reported for duty is to have him go into the mill, and give us 20 things or more which he think is wrong. He came back… presenting to us about 30 items. Things like why some machine sounds weird, why our boiler seems to be very poorly controlled. My manager was smiling. I obviously not. Because those items are happening every day that I’m already so used to it I didn’t notice them anymore.

Luckily the manager also didn’t notice it eheh.

Please scroll down to read comments made by fellow friends visitting

Summary – How can I make LessonInLife.com more useful for you? – A Survey

First of all I would like to say thank you for all the support you gave to this blog. Having you visitting this blog and chatting with you guys has always been the high of my day.

It is my highest priority to improve this blog on a daily basis and hopefully your visit here will be as comfortable as possible. Thus if it is not too much trouble,I would like to ask you to participate on this survey and help me making the blog more effective and better.

I don’t like to lead such discussions too deliberately but I find that the discussion is better if I give a few general questions to stimulate the conversation. So here are some areas you might like to comment on:

1) Topics

• Do you have any topics you would like me to blog on?
• What are hated / loved topics so far?
• Other suggestion?
  

2) Posting / Entries

• Are there too many posts, not enough, just right?
• Is it dull without pictures?
• Is the articles too long?
  

3) Design

• Graphic’s too much?
• Loading time to slow?
• Maybe these keywords will help — layout, right Column, font and colors.. Any comments?
  

4) Blog Feature

• Anything to add that will make our interactivity and your reading better?
• Some keywords to help you comment.. chatbox, advertisement, top commentators and top chatters etc
  

5) What frustrates you about LessonInLife.com?

6) What is it that you like about LessonInLife.com?

7) Services And Tools

• What additional way this blog can be beneficial to you .. services? consultation? community? etc
  

8) Other Ideas and Feedback – anything goes, big or little.

/end survey

Any feedback, suggestions, dreams or ideas that you have are welcome. While I can’t promise to put every suggestion into place I make a commitment to you to read anything you have to say.

All that I ask in return is that you be honest, courteous and constructive with your feedback. I understand that in the end, it is totally up to me since this is my blog. But to tell you the truth, I never consider this as MY blog. This blog has totally no value if there are no friends adding in ideas and share experience. It’s basically ours. I’m just the person with the login password 🙂. So any comments (good or bad) are highly appreciated.

So it’s over to you. Feel free to either leave your feedback in comments below or to share them privately with me via email

————–Personal Note————-
This survey will last for two days (which generally means, tomorrow Sept 16th, I will not be posting)… In the meantime, I can start doing that long time pending tag 🙂

A good friend of mine, Ms Intan had previously asked my opinion on a subject which is “When to give advice?”. Well this is what I think.

The ground rule is you should always give advice. Giving advice is basically another words for voicing your opinion or to remind. In fact I remember there’s a saying in Islam, Do remind each other, as reminding each other is beneficial to mukminin.

However as always, there will be few factors one need to consider before giving any advice.

Factor 1 – The Person Giving

• Must be very sure of the advice. Don’t advise anyone to walk in the dark, when you are not sure where the cliff is

• It is always better if the giver practise the advice first before advising others. However we must know that the advice will always be more important than the giver. A drug addict advises us not to use drug is a good advice. And we should take it irregardless of the giver condition.

Factor 2 – The Person Receiving

• If the person ask for advice then it is almost an obligation for you to help. Who else will help?

• However if the person clearly say no advice needed. we should know what to do. Some people prefer to settle their problem their way, and this is a good quality.

• Sometime pople asked for help, but when we offered the help or advice it’s like “curahkan air kedaun keladi”. He expect us to agree and back him up. Truthfully, I always get annoyed with this people. And I usually just back away.

Factor 3 – The Advice

• It is very important that you believe your advice is beneficial or at least better. Friend A is giving advice to B about how smoking will make him look more cool. Obviously you disagree, (advice against smoking is always better).. it would be wrong if you don’t stated your stand there.

• The advice must be beneficial to the receiving person, not to you. For example, your best friend has a crush on a girl, and he asked for your advice. once you see the girl, you decided to sabotage this friend of yours so that you will have better chance with her. you then advise your friend to run her with a motorcycle… that’s wouldn’t just be non-ethical… that’s plain evil.

I’m sure there’s a lot more we can add to this rule. Anything else that I missed? please help add in.

Conclusion – the rule of thumb when you are not sure is to think with both your heart and mind. you usually will already KNOW the answer.

————–Personal Note————-
There are millions of reason why we should not interfere. But how do we live our life when we see a child learning to smoke in front of us.. and all we do is look the other way. Aren’t we all related?

Summary – First thing in my mind.. wrong answer

When people say Ramadhan or “Bulan puasa”, what are the first things that come to our mind? I try this question myself.. and these are the answers that first come to my mind.

1) Breaking fast with family

I enjoyed this so much.. somehow it will always be last minute, and things will go in a rush. My family often break our fast on the floor in the living room because of the extra space. We can see people going to and fro from the kitchen bringing food. When all the food is served, we will all see with awe the varieties of food, and usually end up with a silent pledge to buy fewer food the next day. (of course it will only be a pledge). And another fact amazes me is how the last 10 minutes are the longest minutes in the entire history of mankind :)… everytime!

2) Bazaar Ramadhan

For those who have no idea, it is a place where all kind of food will be sold especially for breaking fast. You can see some of the most exotic food and “kuih” there. Legend has it, that once the time has come to break fast, all food will be FOC. heheh but this legend had never been tested simply because I never want to break fast there 🙂

3) Morey (pronunced Moray), “Malam Tujuh Likur” etc

/end answer

Truthfully, I loved everything about Ramadhan especially the above. And I have no intention to ask you not to love them… This is our culture, if we don’t stand up to it, who will?

That’s when it occur to me, that I remember Ramadhan only in its cultural form. Ramadhan is actually an “ibadah” (worship), but instead of remembering all the blessing and forgiveness in Ramadhan, I had choose to remember the cultural side of it, which is all the answers above.

We don’t remember Ramadhan as the month we should double all our “ibadah”, cry for fogiveness in the silent night, trying to earn that Lailatul Qadar, or the month where we should train ourselves to be better, and most importantly to continue the better state after Ramadhan.

It’s actually good that we had integrated our culture with Islam. That’s the beauty of Islam.. But the danger will come, when the cultural side had already overwhelmed the true nature of is, we no longer see Ramadhan as an “ibadah”.

What do you think? how do you remember Ramadhan? cultural or from Islam POV? Personally… I still like to associate Ramadhan with our culture 🙂 I think, it’s still ok provided you know what Ramadhan actually is. 🙂