ThinkingNectar

Bing is the latest (dated June 2009) search engine from Microsoft. Spotting a much lighter (loading) interface than the previous live.com. At the moment there is nothing much to say about it. For the time being, I will still stay with Google for search.

Bing.com Search

Saying so Bing have clocked some impressive growth according to Alexa and Compete.

Numbers aside, what I find interesting about bing.com is xRank. In short, it is like Google Trend, showing what are the popular search that was carried out. And the focus tend to be on personalities, namely Celebrities, Musicians, Politicians and bloggers. Surely there are more information beyong personalities? How about trends and news based xRank?

Strange that the moment that the FAQ on what is xRank is not pointing to anything meaningful.

The other search with Bing have is Image and News. Both of which serve to be rather decent alternative to Google Image and news search.

Some things are worth the effort to find out and here are the Mottos of some well known English Football Clubs and their Latin Mottos.

Arte et labore
By skill and hard graft
Blackburn Rovers

Pro rege et lege
For the king and the law
Leeds United

Supera moras
Overcome delays
Bolton Wanderers

Vincit omnia industria
Hard work conquers everything
Bury

Audere est facere
He who dares, wins
Tottenham Hotspur

Consilio et animis
By wisdom and courage
Sheffield Wednesday

Nil satis nisi optimum
Nothing but the best is good enough
Everton

Superbia in proelio
Pride in battle
Manchester City

Victoria concordia crescit
Victory grows from harmony
Arsenal

And for those who do not know, I do enjoy playing (futsal) and watching football. And I support Leeds United for the record.

Distinguished Guests;
Graduands, Parents;
Ladies and Gentlemen,

A very good morning to you. I thank you for being part of this memorable occasion. It is an honour to address all of you on behalf of my fellow graduates. I wish to extend my heartfelt thanks to the School for granting me this privilege.

As I stand here today, I can’t help but see a pretty picture of a group of artists waiting to exhibit their works of art to the world.  And how is that possible?  I must say that the School, our parents, lecturers, mentors, sponsors and friends have taught us all the right strokes for a career in healthcare.

And now with this diploma, I believe we stand proud with our paintbrushes and palettes (dramatic pause) ready to colour the lives of our patients and clients we meet each day.

Lecturers, tutors and clinical instructors, we have much to thank you for.  You have inspired us to create a unique and beautiful picture each day.  You have injected life and laughter into the lectures, tutorials and clinical placements, and have graciously welcomed every question we had.

You carefully catered the lessons to our needs, just like how a master painter would painstakingly blend the colours to suit the mood and tone of the subject he was painting. You told us to pay attention to the lighting, the shadows and the careful mixing of colours.

Our learning gradually took on shape and life of its own, a form that we could make sense of. Your patience and dedication as our “master painters” have spurred us to create our own masterpieces, and these we cannot wait to show to the world.  So long live the master painters!  May you continue to touch the lives of your future students.

Special mention goes to our families and loved ones. You have stood by us in our pursuit of a healthcare profession.  For your encouragement and support, we record our thanks.

Fellow graduates, let us now pick up the paintbrush and deliver quality healthcare in fine deft strokes like a much celebrated artist.  The colours we use may be bright eye-popping candy colours or warm muted shades.  But whatever colour you choose, may the picture exude nothing but warmth, care and excellence.  And no matter how bright your colours glow or how large your canvas of achievement is, always remember to paint a beautiful world.

Ask your patient or colleague this question:  “If I could have done one thing better in working with you, what would it have been?”  Find out and then deliver.  Ask:  How can I create a more meaningful experience for my clients?  How can I connect with them?    Find out what makes an ideal world and work towards it.

To quote the artist Pablo Picasso “There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun”.   So be that painter Picasso spoke of, the one that can transform ordinary into extraordinary.

Class of 2009, it’s your show now.  The curtains have been drawn, and it’s time to put on stage your gorgeous works of art and dazzle the world.  I wish all of you great success in your future endeavours.  Congratulations once again to everyone.

Editor : Special thanks to Samantha for allowing permission to post this well written speech.

I cannot help but to overhear the deafening slience on this blog. Saying so, will and time does not allow for a indepth post on several topics that are brewing in my head. Hence a short and light hearted post to chase the virtual cobwebs away.

Uncovering a closet t-shirt designer:

Nice Red T-shirt

The design can be found over at RamboTan’s CafePress shop. And if Rambo Tan is kinda familiar, he blogs (very rarely now) over at Rambotan.com.

I enjoy meeting good developers. It is a bitter sweet experience most of the time. Firstly bitter simply because there are way too many good one out there and I am nowhere near their abilites. Sweet simply because a simple conversation with them allow myself to learn a bit more about how I can become a better developer.

Back to the topic, I had this view on good developers, and good developers who are out there doing startups.

The picture should be a better guide:

Developers into doing Startup

Of the pool of graduate yearly, a portion will be from the Engineering Faculty, or Maths. Of which another fraction will be doing computing or have experience in coding or software developement. And of this numbers, a group will be deemed good developers. And of these good developers, there is this crazy few who are willing to do a startup.

Of course, of the crazy few, not all can do a startup upon graduation. If the student graduate with a study loan debt, it is unlikely that he will be doing a startup which can hardly service the debt.

Likewise, many good developers are not attracted to doing startups simply because the banks and such pays better. Given the odds of finding a developer who is willing to do developement for a startup, it should be even harder to assemble a core team of such developers.

Good developers who are willing to run a startup are hard to come by. And for the few that I personally know and the others who are out there, I applaud  you all.

Decided to write links of interesta regular basis to share interesting links from around the web. Simply because my bookmarks list is getting really log with a backlog of things to read.  And the quick list of links here will get me to quickly scan and decide which have more useful content. A skill that is ever more important with the influx of information.

• Best Entrepreneur Stories, a selection of 10 podcasts
• Finding a Business plan for your startup
• YouNoodle: Startup intelligence and information
• Doostang: Anyone on this?
• Pycon 2009 Event Schedule
• 10 lesser-known HTML tags
• A writeup on pun at NYTimes

To establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society, and work to their heart’s content.

Masaru Ibuka

Why did I not come across such a tool eariler?

Just Ping

just-ping.com provide a very nice service of pinging a domain/IP address  from 35 network point worldwide.

The countries include:

Singapore, Japan, South Africa, China, USA, Denmark, Israel, India, Australia and even New Zealand.

It should give webmaster a clue on how much latency global users are experiencing while accessing their particular site or service.

The service checks for network access speed. Not the server response time. After all, it is a ping service from what I can understand.  The will go a long way in helping webmasters to decide where to site the new server to best serve the current overseas user base.

Some guys over at hacker news are really funny.

First, PG cited that the site is slow due to “coverage” in more mainstream media. Hence there is higher traffic. He too requested that the regulars to make the site “extra boring” to tone down the traffic. In his own words:

We’ve had a huge spike in traffic lately, from roughly 24k daily uniques to 33k. This is a result of being mentioned on more mainstream sites. I hope this spike will subside, like past ones have. In the meantime I may temporarily hack a few things to make the site faster, like putting fewer results on threads pages.

You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang than women who create sites to get hired by Twitter.

And the hacker news community responsed and the following was really funny! (click for bigger image)

Erlang Shen. WTF!

The link here.

The next talk I went too was organised on the spot at barcamp and will be the most interesting and controversial. Well, at least part 2 of it. Previous coverage of part 1 here and part 2 here.

The talk was title Non-profit 2.0 and Religion 2.0. Seems to me the title is to game some attention but I feel it is more like due to the lack of a better title.

Jointly presented by Kelvin Quee and Meng Weng Wong for non-profit and religion respectively.

Kelvin Quee in Action and Meng getting Ready

Non-profit 2.0

Kelvin Quee is known for running Interesthink in Singapore and in his own words:

A cheap TED copycat

His presentation centers around the inability of non-profit in Singapore to gain substainable traction in terms of having sufficient volunteers to run the different programs.

He highlighted some pointers on achieveing something substainable:

• Go Volunteer: Have to start somewhere
• Don’t do direct service: Do not do the ground work unless you are good at it. Do what you are professional capable of and see how of service can you contribute
• Set Direct Goal: Goals that is beyond direct services
• See it through: Execute the goal

He cited an example of creating a Craiglist for non-profits where service providers and volunteer can find non-profits to service. The Craiglist style site will start with listing to match services and needs, followed by a starting pad for events organisation and finally moving on to projects.

Religion 2.0

Meng presentation on Religion 2.0 is a mix mash of less conventional business ideas from a VC point of view. Please read on with an open mind and plenty of objectivity. And yes, despite the chatter around room one and Meng rather soft voice, the audience were very much captured by Meng’s presentation from what I observe.

To start, there was a concept presented that school taught people to be rule. There are some teachings that encourage students to engage in socratic dialogue. Which in other words, to be disagreeable.

I did not get the core idea of the first part and that is my bad.

But moving on, Meng topic turn interesting as he explains how different religion seems to be selling the “same product”. And citing Christianity, Islam and Buddishism as examples. With a number of religion having a “God” figure while a number without. The main take away here is to appreciate that religion to a certain and certainly extend, defines the ethnics of a believer. And this is fundamental to the business idea that he is going to proposed.

He compared submitting of tithes to churches as equivalent to paying of taxes to a state. And with this comparision, the churches seems to enjoy “tremendous vendor lock in“. Much to the laughter of some members of the crowd.

Next pictures of Anthony Robbins and David Allen of GTD fame were shown. The take away here is that such “Guru” advocate a type of lifestyle for consumers to engage in. Such lifestyle in turn governs certain ethnics of the consumers who bought into the idea.

Self Help + Guru + Lifestyle

Now, imagine that such characters enjoy guru-ish status and attract a following will be able to fly under the radar of some countries that are sensitive to religious movement. The followers will gladly pay year in year out for conferences conducted by such guru when they are on speaking engagement tour. It is a business model worth considering and it pays to be on the lookout for the next trendy and guru-ish personality to invest in.

Speaking of taxation and the state, Meng also mention that if the Internet is a state, it is a failed state. As a state collect tax to pay for public good, like infrastructure, security and education. The internet on the other hand, have spam and such  which is not in the control of any. Who pay for antispam then?

Still on the concept of a failed state. If a child is born into a failed state. Let say a corrupted African nation where the child is unlikely to lived to the age of 18, and if so, do so without access to proper education, water and basic medication vaccination. The question here is to explore the possibilities of such child to have a contract with an alternative supplier of public goods?

Imagine an organisation that can securitize a portion of this child future income. And the child in return gets access to modern medical vaccination, water, education shelter that ensure that he become a economical viable entity. The child enjoys a longer life with a better standard of living. While the organisation gets a viable source of income, much like a state collecting taxes.

After giving it some thoughts, it does sounds like slavery? Also no child can legally or morally made such a decision to securitize his life income to an organisation, not at a young age. And if the decision is not made earlier, the child might not lived to be old enough to make that decision, or too old to be educated to make the whole venture economically viable. It is a tough world.

I believe I not doing justise to Meng’s presentation but that is the best I can recall, from both my memory and my trusty blue notebook.