Why Keen?

Uh … pardon me for the very graphic description. Well, poo does not actually smell good, but being able to smell poo is a good thing… does that even make sense?

Anyway, it’s because Harkman is having a little bit of a constipation issue, so having any sign that he is passing motion normally is a good sign. Hey, but the title of this post isn’t that far from the truth, it’s the context that affects the outcome.

Be thankful I don’t have any pictures to illustrate as I usually do, haha.

Our little boy has learnt to use his smile to interact with people. Why Keen had commented that Little Harkman’s smiles’ will melt people’s heart. He had once used his sweet smile to charm his Granny to give him more milk.

Harkman seems to smile more readily to ladies than guys (Why Keen feels more assured that Harkman behaves this way! ).

Looking at Harkman’s sweet smile lets me forget his screams and cries. .

Here’s a warm welcome to my partner, Hwei Min to this blog. (Partner sounds very gay doesn’t it? But wife sounds so passé though.)

I had intended the very first incarnation of this blog, tweak-me, to be about both of us, that must have been 2-3 years ago now, but never actually got her to contribute even a single line to this blog, I am glad she is finally going to contribute!

We’ve just watched an excellent Pixar movie, UP, and I guess we were both pretty inspired by the film. I had to use our dear boy Harkman as a leverage to finally get her to take action by telling her that this blog would serve as a journal about him growing up.

Do catch the movie, watch it with or without 3D, but please do watch! As usual, Pixar is unrivalled when it comes to solid storytelling with a universal message, this is another gem that would last for many years to come.

You know how most of us are thought that 93% of communication is body language, and only 7% is verbal? Well, it’s time to let go of that myth. It’s a classic case of oversimplification and making use of statistics out of context. Here’s a short video to illustrate, watch it, it’s an interesting 5 minutes:-

And here’s more about Albert Mehrabian on Wikipedia, the psychologist whose work is still being misquoted at communications seminar.

One thing I’ve noticed, though, body language does count a lot when it comes to holding the audience’s attention, so the lesson is still accurate as far as I am concerned.

I’ve discovered this little gem on the Internet not too long ago, the TED Talks, an annual event where various speakers contribute new ideas in the form of lectures, often with demonstrations of cutting edge technology.

There are videos of the talks available for free, and this is so much better TV than 90% of negativity we get on TV nowadays. Watching any one of these videos make me feel so hopeful for humankind!

Anyway, found this talk at TED 2004 by Nancy Etcoff about something very close to my heart. The science behind Happiness. Would probably be discussing more later on, so stay tuned.