Here are some of the reasons why I am keen on staying strong, living my life to the fullest,
he’s so tiny, and cute.
she makes bland food look good, and giving birth a breeze.
and she made everything possible.
"The Pursuit of Happyness"
Watched a great movie on our proposal anniversary, and the timing for that movie couldn’t be more amazingly coincidental. The title is ‘The Pursuit of Happyness’, by Will Smith.
It is based upon the life of Chris Gardner. He was a struggling salesman in the 80s who went through hell to get to where he is.
Talk about a wake up call for me. What is the price for success? Will I be willing to pay it?
Right at this juncture of my life when I am deciding when to quit my safe, comfortable job, the timing for this show couldn’t have come at a better time.
Chris had a child. He went through countless fights with his wife over making ends meet. Debts were piling. At one point, he was literally homeless, and he had his son with him all along.
His break came in the form of a job opportunity to be a stock broker at Dean Whitters. But he had to undergo training without income, and for a job that wasn’t even a certainty. There was only one vacancy, and he had to the best out of 20 interns.
I have quite a ‘safe’ cushion in terms of finances, I should be able to function without disaster for Hwei Min and I without any income for at least 2 months, and I have a considerably much better network than Chris had. It is still a little intimidating to imagine going without a pay check for training… Which I planned on doing.
Going to ‘S’ in the cashflow quadrant had been my plan all along, on my path to ‘B’. But now I am making the first ‘bridge burning’ decision.
The movie was nice, but as Tony said, if I had to model after someone, I have to get inside his head, and understand how he ticks. So I am looking for the book now. If I can find the book in Singapore, that will be great, meantime, I found the book at amazon.com.
Here’s a video of the actual guy…
Miss Potter – Movie Review
Just watched Miss Potter yesterday.
Yes… I went blur too. Potter? Harriet Potter? No lah… its the author of Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter. Sounds a little more familiar?
“The Tale of Peter Rabbit” is a children’s tale wonderfully drawn and written by Beatrix Potter. Her art has become one of the most well known icons for merchandise from Great Britain.
We both found the movie to be quite good. Sweet and simple, moving in some parts. not enough to cause us to tear, but good enough that we felt for the characters. It’s been a while since we watched Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor act together in “Down with Love”. Their chemistry just works on screen.
We were quite lucky to watch the movie in an empty cinema at The Cathay. Quite scary, actually, when I tried to book for tickets for this show, there were many occupied seats shown on screen, but when we arrived, the cinema was empty. Spooky…
Yes… Once again, it is a story about an author who writes… fantasy. Well I consider stories about clothed rabbits fantasy. I remain inspired… but still trying to get my story down. Hee hee… lots of excuses.
Eragon … Movie Review
“Eragon” is based on a novel by Christopher Paolini. The story’s about this young farmer boy by the name of Eragon. Grew up with his uncle, lost both his parents somehow. Found some special powers, uncle dies. Swears revenge… Old mysterious man becomes his mentor. Saves a beautiful girl. Fights an incredible evil king who has a mysterious magic wielding henchman.
Do I have to Force the imagery further?
You want to try harder? There is no try… only do or do not…
Ok ok… you get the point already.
Good? OK lar…
Worth
S$6.00 (mostly for the visual effects)
Movies in Singapore are from a range of S$6.50 to S$9.00 depending on the day and time you watch it on.
There have been many comparisons made between Eragon and Star Wars (for the plot), Lord Of the Rings (for the fantasy world) and even Harry Potter (for the popularity)… I don’t know if I am affected by all these reviews… I probably am. I could not help sniggering when I saw a scene of Eragon in the setting sun sitting by a field, orchestra music playing in the background.
Still… Keeping my mind open, I thought that the movie lacked depth. Running less than 2 hours, the movie tried to do too many things in too little time, sometimes making ridiculous shortcuts just to smoothen the plot. There was not enough time to develop the wide array of characters in the plot, Eragon (Ed Speeler), his mentor, Brom(Jeremy Irons), his dragon Saphira (Rachel Weisz), his future love interest (Sienna Guillory), two antagonists King Galbatorix(John Malkovich) and Durza (Robert Carlyle) and additional characters like Murtagh etc…
Though the cast included some great actors, they were not really allowed to shine… with some corny lines, especially from John Malkovich,
“As long as I am King… Disloyalty will be punishable… by
DEATH…”
and lousy plots, for example, Murtagh was imprisoned for being suspicious one moment, and 15 minutes of running movie time later, he gets accepted as a comrade??? Its these kinds of shortcuts that were a little hard to swallow.
For the recent Harry Potter movies, I was able to appreciate the movie a little better even though it felt like there was a lot crammed in as well. That was because I read the Harry Potter books, so I was able to take the movie as a short visual tour of what I got from the book. It probably felt empty for someone who hadn’t read the book too.
Regardless, as a movie, I felt that the directors and script writers could have done better to keep the pace going while giving a reasonable amount of coverage for the wide array of characters. I think Peter Jackson and his team did a fairly good job with LOTR. Thus I was quite amused to read an interview of the director Stefen Fangmeier, where he commented that he felt frustrated that the last episode of the LOTR trilogy took too long to end. Well… I think with his visual effects expertise, he would go far if he just learnt a little from Peter’s story telling.
So the saving point? The wonderful visual effects. Of course, the director is the expert. (He comes with experience from ILM with a string of movies under his belt as the visual effects sups). Saphira the dragon was wonderfully rendered. The interplay between life action and effects had been merged so seamlessly I did not stop to wonder how they did it.
But why did they have to waste Rachel Weisz as only a voice actress!??
ICT Day Three/Four : Training – Appreciation
Past two days were spent doing basic engineering tasks. Not too bad, mainly refreshers, we forgot most of the procedures but our past knowledge kicked in shortly after ‘hands on’.
As usual, though, lots of time spent waiting. The standard SAF motto, “Rush to wait, wait to rush” applies all the time. It seems no matter how much planning you put into arranging your tasks, so as to speed things up, SAF just seems to break everything back down and slow you down. It’s very interesting, you know?
Once you put on the uniform, you suddenly become a little more stupid, and time seems to flow slower.
However, someone put things into a very positive perspective yesterday.
We were in a training shed, and it just happened to be breezy. That guy (i can’t remember who) said that he treated ICTs like a retreat, a time to reflect. It’s true… The training shed we were in was in the middle of a field, and when I heard that observation, the trees, the grass, the breeze quite suddenly become quite surreal.
After being introduced to it by Kok Boon, I watched a movie called “The Secret” not too long ago. (www.thesecret.tv) It describes the secret to success. I shall not reveal too much, you can take a look at the video at youtube, but having watched the movie, I found that ICT served another purpose.
The Secret
ICT takes away things I take for granted. Things like freedom of time, ability to keep clean, having a nicely cooked meal and all the other comforts of modern life, but much more importantly, time with family.
It is a part of human nature that we take things for granted after having it for a while. From what I recall from studying psychology, that’s how our brain functions. Our thoughts and sensations being ‘electrical signals’ in the brain… after many times of repetitive ‘signals’ of the same kind, our brain builds a huge trunking line between the parts of the brain that are involved in that signal. This is so to make our brain process this information faster, and allow more of the adaptive parts of our brain to take in new information.
In short, we are wired to just accept certain sensations as the norm, after repeating it too many times.
The problem with that is that we tend to forget what we already have, and we tend to focus on things that we do not want. We then complain about things that are now not going on too well in our lives.
The more we focus on the things we DO NOT want, the unhappier we become, and the more the things we do not want become a reality.
To me, we need to constantly remind ourselves of the things we already have, the things that are going on well, and have been going on well. We are thus, training our minds to become in-tuned with the things that we DO want.
Sounds cheem? I think not. Think about it and I think you can find dozen examples of people who are unhappier and unhappier, and are thus becoming unhappier and unhappier still. Nothing mystical about that!