Own Pick!

I want this! So I can punch my own guitar picks with my name on it even! ho ho ho

One and Only

You've been on my mind
I grow fonder every day,
Lose myself in time
Just thinking of your face
God only knows
Why it's taking me so long
To let my doubts go
You're the only one that I want

I don't know why I'm scared, I've been here before
Every feeling, every word, I've imagined it all,
You never know if you never try
To forgive your past and simply be mine

I dare you to let me be your, your one and only
Promise I'm worthy to hold in your arms
So come on and give me the chance
To prove that I'm the one who can
Walk that mile until the end starts

I've been on your mind
You hang on every word I say, lose yourself in time
At the mention of my name,
Will I ever know how it feels to hold you close?
And have you tell me whichever road I choose you'll go

I don't know why I'm scared 'cause I've been here before
Every feeling every word, I've imagined it all,
You never know if you never tried
To forgive your past and simply be mine

I dare you to let me be your, your one and only
I promise I'm worthy to hold in your arms
So come on and give me the chance
To prove that I'm the one who can
Walk that mile until the end starts

I know it ain't easy
Giving up your heart
I know it ain't easy
Giving up your heart

(Nobody's perfect, trust me I've learnt it)
I know it ain't easy, giving up your heart
(Nobody's perfect, trust me I've learnt it)
I know it ain't easy, giving up your heart

I know it ain't easy
Giving up your heart

So I dare you to let me be your, your one and only
I promise I'm worthy to hold in your arms
So come on and give me the chance
To prove I'm the one who can
Walk that mile until the end starts
Come on and give me a chance
To prove that I'm the one who can
Walk that mile until the end starts.


Adele told The Sun "That one's just about someone I've known for years who I've always loved and I think he's always loved me but we're too scared to be with each other in case that's it."

Once...

...when I was younger, I'm such a bookworm that I even read newspapers like an old man. Mostly I'll flips through all the pages first even when I saw some articles that I find interesting because I knew that once I started to read it, it will take me ages to finish since I have the habit of really reading from start to finish never missing one word and that's not going to help me get over the next page.

It has been a few days since I have been discharge from the hospital and I have been taking all those well wishes seriously. The resting part. Like really really resting. I woke up early now though for breakfast, because I need to time the medicine-eating right. Then after that I will either be dragging my body to bed and lie down or continue sleeping until lunch or I'll do some mild surfing on the internet and sometimes watch movies - everything done from the bed.

I tried cooking for dinner yesterday and half way through eating, I feel dizzy (pening-pening lalat). I knew then that I have been resting too much and my body is weak. So today I drag myself out of the house and go for my schedule hair treatment at the shop nearby. At least it's nothing heavy, just sitting and I bring a book to read. So while in the midst of it all, I saw a newspaper and decided to look through the articles.

Interestingly, The Star newspaper is currently putting spaces here and there where it will put all those old archive news or what used to be in the newspaper all those years before. Some kind of trudging down memory lane I guess. Imagine my delight when I saw a few of my old time favorite sections being published in a newspaper again.

The section that caught my attention the most was the Pen Pal section. I remember looking through that list when I was a young teenager and skimming through all the names, ages, location and the best one is the hobbies. I would usually pick someone who's really from far away or some boys name whom I thought might be cute judging from the name. Ha ha ha

I had fun looking at it again which from the looks of it were scanned and printed to that page and I really wanted to take pictures but then the phone's camera was being difficult so I end up with no pictures. Sad. :(

Then I came across the Comics. Oh I really love them back then. I remember having a scrap book and I would cut those that I like most and paste it on the book. I think I did that back when I did not really understand English that much. But then again, most of the comics were pictures and less words so I think I was giving it my own interpretation and picked those that I thought were funny. And the pictures were cute too. I wonder where's the book now. We move houses way too much when I was a kid I think there's not much left of any old remembrance at home now.

And of course one more section which hold dear to my heart was the Crossword. If I'm not mistaken, it was the Borneo Post Crossword that have this A to Z series of crossword that you have to finish to win the money. One alphabet will have a few crosswords to it I think. Like A1, A2...up until I can't remember actually. I tried a lot of times but then imagine how hard it is to get one crossword right. This one you need to get all 10 or 20 of them correct. Thinking back, I'm actually amaze with my passion and of course patient with that contest. It was a very nice memory indeed.

Only those of you who were a kid as exciting as I was during those time can relate to this. Or not. No matter. He he he

By the way I watch the movie Once yesterday and Wel said all my movies were ganjil-ganjil. I was like...wtf...ha ha ha..kidding! I have just finish watching Jane Eyre before finishing this post and I enjoyed it very much. Honestly, that one is not weird, yes? Oh well, like I care. LOL

Good night everyone. :-)

Oh The Pain!

I'm writing this post in a hospital bed with the hospital wristband in my left hand and the drip infusion needle at the right.

The pain is lesser now after the medication and I'm hoping to be discharge this morning. I couldn't really understand what the doctor was saying when he did the diagnosis so I looked at my medicines and google up the names. Typical me. He he he

So I figure out this much at least. According to Google, I have this Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) in which the stomach contents (food or liquid) leak backwards from the stomach into the esophagus and cause heartburn and all those pain that I have been having for the past few days.

This is my first time admitted to the hospital, infused with glucose drip and undergo the Esophagogastroduodenoscopy (why do they have to make the term so long and non-pronounceable to mere mortal like me I could never understand) which includes inserting a thin tube with a camera on the end through the mouth and the tube is then passed into the esophagus, stomach, and small intestine, snapping pictures of how my internal organs are doing in there.

While I was being pushed down the corridor to the ground floor for the scope (that's what the nurses call it), my eyes stared pass the neon lights in the ceilings and on both my sides were the staff and nurse keep telling that it was a simple procedure-that I'm not going to feel anything etc...I almost feel like I was in one of those movie...he he he.

Being sick is of course not a pleasant experience and I hope this is going to be my last visit to the hospital. The doctor and nurses are very nice people but I just can't stand the pain and the fasting and the needle and the lying around all day. Plus I don't want to make Mom and Nanak worried. Nanak called me and almost cried when I told her that I was in a hospital. Bless her for keep sending me text messages saying that she miss me. :)

Now is waiting for Wel to visit me and the doctor to say I'm free to go. Hehe

On Staying Hungry & Foolish

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, it's 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 it's 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.


Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says.
This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

Of Fire & A Pot

My hand is still shaking. My heart still beating fast even after an hour. Everything is alright, I know. No real damage done but the thought of what could happen still scares me.

Now I can cross the last item on my to-do lists during holiday because this is the first time I almost burn down a house. It was my mistake. I know. Things happen right. I'm sorry. I don't know why but I just feel the need to apologize for my carelessness. Isk.

I heated up the oil in the pot and while waiting, I went over the living room and flip through a few channels. It was the pretty white gown and black dresses shown in E! that got me carried away. By the time I remember that I have put a pot full with oil on the stove and run to the kitchen, the pot was already burning up and the fire is as high as you can ever imagine. Luckily despite being scared and almost panicking not knowing what to do I didn't splash water on the burning pot over the stove or else I wouldn't have been able to handle what might happen if the whole thing catches fire and explode.

I took a cloth for the handle and bring the burning pot over to the sink and let the water put out all the fire. I'm not sure if there's other way to do it but pouring water into a burning oily pot only make the fire goes bigger. It didn't occur to me at that time. All I can think of is I don't want to burn the house down. It was really big, the fire. It almost reach the kitchen's ceiling. I can only stare at it in panic and luckily after what feels like forever, the fire died away leaving only thick black smoke behind to permanently mark the incident. It was all over the wall and the ceiling.

I called Wel and Jew after that. Crying. I don't want to but I can't help it. Jew said it's okay as long as I'm alright and to not think too much about the kitchen but I feel guilty because now the kitchen look bad and blacky.

I have clean up the mess. It took me quite some time to get started because I dreaded the look of the sink and the stove and worried if I might touch something and there will be fire again. I gave out a sigh of relief after I finish with the cleaning and saw that I was just shocked over what had happen but overall, everything was still intact. Although I can't do anything about the wall or the ceiling or at a few stuff that are now smoky in color. Or the pot. The helpless pot.

:( :( :(