Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Dogma

Hey all, just wanted to share some of my thoughts and passion...

Hey all, I came across this article- a speech by steve jobs - and I found that it's one of those gem articles. Don't know who he is? Read on.

To those who knows, I found that line about loving your job and not settling very good. Didn't Solomon said that, it's really a (wo)man's joy to enjoy what he does and enjoy the fruits of it too (last few para of ecc).

We spend the majority of our lives working. It may not be the 'main' way we worship or serve him, but it's surely the way we show how we worship and serve Him the majority of our waking time. Think about it? If you're not happy at your work or if you're not fufilled or not growing or if you feel all the above but not God's call, how is that making our life more meaningful? It's really not adding value to our already short life.

Our serving on the weekends are but mere expressions of our own worship to the Lord of our daily walk, and most of our walk are spent working. Those who went to uncle see lok's MLM talks will also tell you that the word avodah (unsure about the spelling) - it denotes worship AND work in the OT. In other words, we are paid to to work(worship). So if there are any other doubt that we are not in fulltime ministry, think again buddy. :) (awesome, does that mean I can bring a guitar to work? oh yeah, I already did.)

The other scary thing that hit me was this: Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. I was watching Kingdom of heaven the other day. Liping cried because it really happened! Many believed that they could be forgiven by joining the crusade. Don't they read the bible? okay they don't at that time. What about now? Are we able to always bring what we see and hear back to the word and weight it... carefully. Are we doing the things God wants
us to? (for example, why do we give thanks for the food and say 'grace'? it was never mentioned in the bible.. there are tonnes of other stuff we do, think about them.)


Also, here's the articles. (found here: http://joshuachin.multiply.com/journal/item/59) -- thanks josh!

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This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs (one of my heroes in life), CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005 at Stanford University.

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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, its 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 world's 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 retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current rennaissance. 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 its 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 other's 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.

Thursday, June 23, 2005

My dental visit.

My dentist and I are good friends. She cause me pain and then I pay her. Something wrong here.

Lying down on the dentist chair before I start... no problem. I'm cool.

About to start... getting scared.

I must becmoe fear to conquer fear itself

too late...

Yes kiddo, remember to brush your teeth or you'll end up here like me. Even if you brush your teeth EVERYDAY anyway, you'll end up here like me muahahahahaha...

Thursday, June 09, 2005

GT8 vs podXTlive

Would love to hear any views out there on the following:-

GT8 vs PODxt live

There are plenty of forum discussion on both the machines. Understandably they are the 2 hottest effects pedals right now. Both earning great approvals from guitarist worldwide. However, despite the many post on the topic, I didn't find many that were particularly helpful. There are a few that was good but most were very hyped up. Near Godlike worship on either machines. Then, there were the other reviews that swinged to the other extreme.

By the way, the frequent visit on all these forums really make me 'gian' for more gadgets. It's that call that every guitarist hears:- the ultimate tone quest.

I asked a couple of friends what they think of the machines

Johann - I got my GT3 about 5 years ago when they first came out... and I am still using it for gigs now. It doesn't sound as good as analog pedals, and probably doesn't sound as good as the newer digital modelling units. The delay and reverb are more than good enough for me, and I use pedals for my overdrive and wah sounds.

It's a great little "gigkit in a suitcase", and by all acounts the GT6 is an incremental improvement, and the GT8 an improvement on that. The GT8's dual-amp modelling sounds like a fantastic idea.

I've never gotten a good feel from the PODs, although the POD XT does sound pretty good recorded. I still prefer to have some tubes in my signal chain if possible though



Dennis- He says he won't be going for the XTL at all. However, after a long time of chatting, I feel that this dude is more inclined on the GT8.


Timmy- A season rock player, who's into fusion now. I find his playing hard rocking still. He's got an awesome 'rock' tone and currently uses a LesPaul custom with the XT and the Long FBV. This boy is really enjoying his toys. Was playing in church with me last week and he totally cut through the mix.


Matt- Matthew's just happy with his GT6 now.


When Matt lent me his GT6 for a couple of weeks last year I was really impressed with it. The only problem I had with it was that it still sounded digital to me. It has that 'digital' fuzz no matter how I tweak it. When I hear Matt using it, same thing. Here, there's no substitute for anolog stompboxes i feel. Not yet at least, there will come a time when digital tech would beat it but now's not the time.

Then came line6 and POD. My church just brought in the Flextone 3 a couple months back, and I think I'm the only one using all the on board cabs and amps. I am really happy about the tone and sound that I'm getting out from it, from hard to warm, flex3 just works. I'm using a Godin LGX with 3 mini buckers by the way. When I heard timmy with his PODxt, I was quite sure the XTL is for me. The different tone one gets from that tiny box is unbelievable.

Then came the GT8. (Decisions decisions.....) hehehe...

~~~~~
I had the pleasure of testing out the GT8 last saturday. It was a raining afternoon so the music shop was deserted. There isn't a better time to test out a hot gadget! I had 1 hour of uninterrupted time with it. I tested it with a Yamaha Pacifica (didn't see the model, 2nd hand about rm400) and a Marshall MG50FX (I think). I plugged it in thru the input of the amp and set everything to 12 o clock...

I had a great time just playing there in the shop. The hour felt like only 5 minutes :) The GT8 is not only well build - it's a tank! it's easy to use and sounded great. I was going through the preset effects without tweaking and they already sounded great. Lots of usable sound. The dual settings are cool to have and the solo button is useful. Most importantly to me was that it is a marked improvement from GT6 in terms of sound (very important to me) . It even had a 'PAD' effect that I found interesting. Not sure if it was there in GT6 but I bet it'll give the keyboardist a run if i started padding FOR them. To me, the preset distortions are much 'clearer' now and I feel i could use them straight out from the box for gigs. With more time to tweak, I'm sure I'd be able to get more juice out from the box.

Overall, I found the GT8 really really nice. I haven't try out the XTL yet but I'm sure it would be difficult to beat the GT8. At the price of rm1899, I suppose you can say it's 'reasonably' but I'm sure many ladies out there will differ with me. It's all about perspective I say, if you compare that to some boutique setups, rm1899 is really cheap!

Once again, I believe BOSS has set the standard for the guitar multi-effects market.

~~~~~

Finally, months after my gt8 test, I got to test out the POD xtl. I've decided to appendit to this entry because it simply made more sense to read both reviews together.

I tested out xtl at CK music. It was plugged directly into the mixer into speakers (i dunno what brand). The mixers eq are all at 12-o clock so no eq is done at all. Sounds are directly from the xtl to the speakers. guitar used is a jackson- JJCST.

The XTL was slightly bigger than i thought it was as compared in the pictures. It also seem to have less 'dials' and buttons to tweak as compared to the GT8. Things are neatly arranged on the XTL. Though the unit looks tough, the buttons looks a little more fragile compared to the 'tank feel' of the GT8.

The XTL sounds good. I mean really good. If GT8 sounds better as many forums has reported, I don't feel that that XTL is very far behind. I played the famous starting riff to 'for the love of God' (along with the minus 1, I'll explain later) and it sounded amazing close to the real thing. For the couple of seconds, I felt like I was vai. So really, in my opinion, the XTL isn't far behind in terms of sound quality wise.

However the GT8 does have more effects and other edgier stuff compared to the XTL. No solo button, no dual channels, no synth, no many things that the GT8 has. What it does have however are the line6 cabs and amps and a lot of useful and good effects. Nothing fancy, but enough, in my opinion.

On the other hand, for ease of use and a more 'plug and play' convenience, the XTL emerge as a clear winner between the two. I know i said that GT8 is easy to use, but the XTL is even more so. Like plain white paper , anyone with 2 hands and 1/2 a brain can do it. XTL also comes with this pc software and you can do your tweaking from the pc and saves it. Which makes things not only cool (im holding back) and really easy to use. I was adjusting most of the sound from the software during testing instead of doing it from the board.

The pc software also allows you to play a track from your pc so that yuo can play along with it. Kinda like a guitar-karaoke. Which is really cool for practice.

~~~~~

So my final choice of an effect would be inclined to XTL because it's

1) easy to use. I decided that I'm not such a good tweaker and I also don't have the time to learn about it nor read the manual. The pc

2) cheaper. I can't tell you how much I can get the XTL for, but quite a bit cheaper than the GT8.

3) Sound wise it's really good in my opinion. Though GT8 has a lot more effects, I feel that I really don't need them in my gigs. Just good basics will do.

Monday, June 06, 2005

What am I doing now?... nothing

I was having a walk this evening and saw two dogs being 'muzzled up'.. is that what you call it? (when their mouths are closed shut by this mouth-cage thingy)

I was thinking to myself, how are the dogs feeling? Pretty shit I'm sure. How would we feel if someone shut our mouths so that we can't move our jaw.

If someone shut my mouth and ban me from talking.... I think I'll die. I love talking. It gives me joy (and others irritance sometimes) So why not let the dogs bark? Isn't it their nature to do so? What's a dog that don't bark? or show his/her affection to you by licking you (disgustingly) all over?

I think I got the answer! it's a CAT! meow.

of course that has nothing whatsoever with whatever I'm about to write.

Anyway, I'm sitting here at 135am. I should really be sleeping. But I while I am here thinking about life greatest question: what is my purpose here on earth, it got me into feeling this rare sensation....

I feel like just doing nothing.

All of a sudden, watching the fan spin seems like an interesting enough activity. I'm happy, not sad. I don't want to talk but feel the need to communicate. I just want to lie here but am restless about the rest of my life! I don't want to play pc games. I feel music building in me, but I rather be here with the brilliance of silence in my head.

Fascinated. I haven't feel like that for ages! I decided to you give you all this blog entry.