The Shocking News
I have a niece who is 5 years old and she is now in the kindergarten. I am totally shocked the other day when her mother told me that she will have to take written exams, and that examination paper will be sent to a centralized marking center.

Seriously? They do that for a kindergarten child now? I don’t know about you, but when I was in kindergarten, all we ever do is to sing songs, dance, learn a few things and spend the rest of the day playing with friends.

Down The Memory Lane
I know it’s not that productive if compared to the children nowadays, but I have a lot of fun. And everyday when I woke up I was very eager to start my day. Where has that gone?

Kindergarten back then was never about examination. It was more on introducing the children to learning environment and teaching them how to interact with other children. The best things that we learnt were never from the text book. We learn about friendship, sharing, flirting etc ourselves and that makes waking up everyday at the time so much fun.

Life Is One Big Kindergarten
Why can’t we try this? Don’t wake up everyday to go to work. Instead –

1) Learn new stuff
But not from the typical lecture notes. Learn how to make a kite maybe, and then how to fly it. We all know the latter is so much harder to learn.

2) Create theory
Create new theory everyday to explain your life. I do this all the time. There may not be any proof to my theory but it makes me open to new ideas. An example of a theory I come up from scratch is – My Theory On Ghost. Enjoy.

3) Experiment with your life
Do you know what makes you laugh? or the kind of jokes that do? How about other emotion? What will trigger your anger immediately?

For students, you can do an experiment on when exactly the best time to study. The time that will make understanding easier.

4) Meet new people
Too many people in one’s life can be suffocating, but there are so many amazing and interesting people out there. The more people we know, the better the chances are that we will find them

5) Contribute a piece of your life
Waking up to give something of yours is a very noble thing to do. It may not be material, the best thing we can give to other person is help and time. I bet when we are done, we will feel more satisfied with our life. And yes.. Happier too

– I wonder –
What else can we wake up everyday to?

———— Personal Note ———-
One of the most memorable memory of my kindergarten is when I get punched the first time in my life. There’s a bully by the name Zam, and he punched me right at the stomach. I’m not sure how I settled that problem though 🙂

Photo Credit – Sciondriver

Ms Diha has asked me a question in the comment section of MBBDDH Attitude. First of all, thank you for the question, I will try to explain my opinion on the matter. To all fellow friends reading, feel free to add in to the answer. Together we can chip in all our experience to help each other.

For those who are interested, there is also an article I wrote on How To Know Whether He / She Is The One. Enjoy.

The question – “(Translated to English) How am I supposed to know that a guy likes me? He and I have been friends since primary school, and we became closer these few months. He seems to care so much about me and always offer to send me back to Shah Alam. Once he took a vacation oversea and he SMS’ed me almost everyday, updating his whereabout. He just recently broke up with his girlfriend and he said that he has given up on her.

So how do I know whether he really likes me, or I’m just a rebound?”

/end question

A disclaimer (as advised by my lawyer) – Everyone is different, and the method described here may / may not work for you. But I still can guarantee you that it will work for about 80% of the population of the world 🙂

That said, here what you should do

Step 1 – Sense the vibe
I’m sure you have pass this step, since you already has a hunch that he is attracted to you. This first step is important. Simply because the heart will be the first to detect if someone else is attracted to you. However, it may not be accurate if you yourself are attracted to him. You will then see everything he does as a sign of his affection for you. Differentiate this first, whether or not the vibe is from you or from him. And then move on to step 2

Step 2 – Ask yourself : Are you attracted to him?
It doesn’t matter if the world’s most eligible bachelor fall for you if you just didn’t have any feeling for the guy. So confirm this first. In your case, I can see that you are attracted to him. So you can just move on to step 3.

Step 3 – Is he worth it?
It’s confirmed. You can sense the vibe from him. He definitely have feeling for you. And so are you. Next you need to determine whether he is ok. You don’t want to be involved with someone who robs bank don’t you?

I admit the 3 steps will not help you to know his true feeling, but still the 3 steps are important to know what exactly you want and whether or not that thing you want is exactly what you need. Moving on..

Step 4 – Watch and jot down the signal
When I say watch for signal, I really mean it. Take a piece of paper, and write it down. If he smile or make effort to “accidentally” bump into you on his way to class, jot that down. I will describe why later.

Some other examples of signals a guy may do

• Going all out for you – When you ask for a call at 11.34am, he actually ask what time is it now according to your watch. And when you are sick, he may buy some hot chicken soup for you. You know what to do right? Pretend that you’re sick and let him know.
• Selfless act – Ask him for help in something he will not gain anything. Maybe pick up a friend at the bus station for you since you are sick 🙂
• Make effort to know you – A real love for a guy is when he actually make the effort to know you. He will notice what you like to eat, and what you don’t. He will take note that you are a flower-lover type or not (He may be planning to buy you flowers later on)

So did you write everything he does down? Let’s go to step 5

Step 5 – Analyze and return EXACTLY how much he gave you.
This is very important. Some guys go all out just for a friend. Some will only do that for girls he like. So how to differentiate this?

Easy, if a guy give you a present for birthday, return the favor by giving him a present during his birthday. and most importantly is to NEVER overdo it. If he send you an MMS, you reply back by sending him an MMS. If he introduce you to his friend, you do the same. EXACTLY the same.

Why the words “exactly”? Because a guy who has feeling for you will take this as a hint and will go all out even more. He will always want to show that he loves you even more. If you give him a present during his birthday, he may start giving present during Valentine, or just “because he thinks of you” 🙂

You will be able to see how exactly he is trying if you wrote down what he did the first time (Step 4). At one time, his action will just give him away and you can see clearly how much he likes you.

Step 6 – Be flexible
When involving human emotion, nothing is black and white. All the advice above may be spot on and solve your problem entirely. Or they can just solve nothing. So be flexible. Remember, a guy who is attracted to a girl will try in every possible way to show her how he feels. Your mission is to give him a push until his action give his secret away.

– I wonder –
Based on your experience, how do you know if someone has feeling for you?

———- Personal Note ————
Appreciate the question Diha, hope this helps. For everyone else, feel free to shoot me an email or ask questions here. I will try my best to answer them 🙂

Photo Credit – LinhNgan

I just heard the news that PC Fair is going to be held next week at the usual place. For my fellow friends reading that’s not in Malaysia, PC Fair is an annual event where you can find the cheapest discounted price for all the computer accesories. I usually go there just to brush up on what’s new in the gadget world.

This time, I have another mission. I read in TheStar the other day about free trial of Wimax at the PC Fair. I want to test it out and see whether I am satisfied with that kind of connection. You should too if you’re planning to change later on

And I have so many questions to ask the representative about Wimax. I actually wrote it down in an A4 paper 🙂

One thing for sure, with this trial, I think Wimax will be launched very soon. And when it does it will be as common as GPRS connection nationwide, plus 100 times faster!

Please excuse my excitement, It’s very hard to contain when you’ve been patiently working on turtle-slow connection for years.

Anyone planning to go there too? If you see me, do say hello. I will be there on the 1st August at KLCC, most probably in the evening 🙂 See you there.

I’m sure you are familiar with Gmail. Almost everyone I know uses it. That should say something about the service. Personally I find Gmail is the best solution to handling your email. It’s really one of the most organized and productivity minded solution designed.

Now what if I tell you that we can assimilate this concept into our way of thinking? Yes, putting a Gmail in your mind.

The mind really is a remarkable thing. We can only guess what it’s true pontetial will be and I’m very sure that it will still be a long way to go before we fully understand it. The problem is never about the mind, but how we interface with it. Imagine we are using a super computer and the only OS available is the DOS (some of you may not even familiar with the OS), it will be such a loss.

The same thing with this experiment I’m proposing. By applying some of the concept in Gmail to our way of thinking, hopefully we will be more organized and productivity minded.

Let’s get started shall we?

1) Gmail has always been in Beta version
I registered with Gmail quite a long time ago, and I remember that it was in its Beta version then. Many years later, for some reason, it is still in Beta version.

Let’s put a Beta sticker to our mind. Let it be official that the work on our mind is always in Beta version. There will always be things to improved. In my opinion, just the acknowledgment that our mind is a work in progress will help a lot. Of course we must be checking consistently on how to improve our mind.

2) Premium location of “Compose Mail” and “Inbox”
Just underneath the Gmail logo is the link to Compose Mail and Inbox. The link is not buried down the page or disguised in complicated flash button. That’s because an email is only about two things – sending and receiving email.

Figure out what are you about? If you are all into money making, than that is what you should put there in your mind. Limit the items to only two.

3) Report Spam Button
Almost all emails have this. Whenever spam emails received, it will automatically be flagged as spam and put in the spam folder. Sometime a few misses and you will have to report the email as spam manually.

Install a Report Spam button in your mind. If at anytime a negative thought comes to mind, immediately flag it as “Negative Thought”. Do this consciously as if you are actually clicking the button in your mind. If you think Gmail is smart to learn from your action, wait till you see what your mind is capable of.

4) Delete Protocol
You must notice that in order for you to completely delete an email, you will have to delete it two times, one in the inbox and another in the trash folder. The philosophy is, it is better to have millions of rubbish emails building up than to lose that one very very important email from your VIP.

The mind work at a more complex level, but the same philosophy applies. If you want to forget something, you will have to do some extra work. It is never as easy as clicking a button and hope it goes away.

I actually put up an entry on how to forget and move on specifically dedicated to a friend who wish to do just that. Please have a read if you are interested.

5) Emails in reply is grouped together
This is one of the differentiating feature of Gmail. And even though it takes me some getting use to, I find it very helpful. Previously I sometimes get an email from a long lost friend and I just can’t figure out what he is referring to as I can’t see my sent email to him. By grouping the emails in reply together, conversation and email make more sense and easy to track.

Interconnecting one point to another is exactly the basis of our brain. We do our thinking this way. We think of one thing for example cars, then you remember to send your car for maintenance, maybe after that you think of what else you want to do now that you are in the town, maybe shopping, which reminds you of the wife who love shopping.

Amazingly that you think of cars first before the wife 🙂 I write more about this in this article – How to Improve Your Memory Using Spongebob

/end list

There are so many more features of Gmail that we can integrate in our mind. For example, the labels, Star, Search and the increasing free space etc. But I’m going to leave it to you guys to figure it out.

– I wonder –
Appreciate if you continue adding what else about Gmail that can be used in the comment section.

———— Personal Note ————-
I am always fascinated with the true potential of the mind. Maybe influenced by a lot of tv series, I sometimes wonder if maybe those psychic things like telekinesis and telepathy can really be done. What do you think?

Photo Credit – Rovlls