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rePost::Philip Guo – Understanding and dealing with overbearing Asian parents

I’ve always wondered how overbearing Filipino Parents are compared to other Asian American Parents. Care to enlighten me? Interesting read!!!

When your parents were growing up, the only people who lived somewhat comfortable lives were either corrupt government bureaucrats or the well-educated elite who went to top-ranked colleges. Chances are, your parents didn’t have insider connections to government bureaucrats, because otherwise they would’ve been living a comfortable life back in their home country and wouldn’t have wanted to get out of there. That means, in their eyes, there was only one path that could lead to a comfortable life in the future: Doing well in school and getting admitted to an elite top-ranked university. This isn’t just idle speculation, either. Your parents actually saw what happened to their classmates who got bad grades and were unable to get into a good college — they are now ass-poor, living in unhealthy wretched conditions.
Seriously, this is no joke. When your home society doesn’t provide any opportunities for personal advancement, the only way to make a decent living is to play by the rules of the establishment. And when the establishment relies purely on grades, standardized test scores, and college reputation for assigning jobs, then no wonder your parents are so obsessed with those things! They don’t realize that in America, the C-average students who went to community college can actually live a decent life rather than rotting away in sewage-ridden slums. No matter how many times you tell them that you won’t be homeless even if you don’t attend a top-ranked college, they will never genuinely believe it; their traumatic childhood experiences left a far more powerful impression than your words ever will.
via Philip Guo – Understanding and dealing with overbearing Asian parents.

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rePost::Google takes on Apple

Meanwhile, rumors swirl that Apple is planning something involving a black turtleneck and “one more thing” on Jan. 26 [13]. Then again, maybe the company is finally bringing the Beatles to iTunes. Or maybe Steve Jobs will announce he’s had the rest of his internal organs replaced with cybernetic equivalents [14]. Still, a lot of Apple fanboys are hoping their dreams of an Apple Tablet will finally bear fruit.
The most interesting part of all of this — again if those persistent Web rumors are to be believed [15] — is that Google plans to offer an unlocked, unsubsidized version of the Nexus One (or whatever it’s called) to consumers. In other words, Google may be entering the consumer hardware biz, thus competing directly with Apple.
In other words, forget Microsoft, Yahoo, or MicroHoo [16]. The battle for world domination will boil down to Apple vs. Google — with a few minor players like Amazon in there to raise the ante.
Oh they won’t be alone. Like a wildebeest at a watering hole, Microsoft will eventually stick its nose in the air, catch a whiff of what Apple and Google are doing, and strong-arm its hardware partners into producing their own Windows Live Tablets — two years late and burdened by a slow, complex-yet-condescending interface. Sony will quietly release a product that does almost everything people want, price it too high, market it poorly, and totally fail. A few minor players will jump in, and eventually tablets will become a commodity like everything else eventually does.
The real innovation, though, will come from a no-holds-barred catfight between the Googlers of Mountain View and the Appletons of Cupertino. That ought to be fun to watch.
Will all this really come to pass? We'll know in just a few weeks. Probably.
via Google takes on Apple.

The blog’s going to get noisy, I’ve had it with delicious not letting me save as much as I want!!!

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rePost::The $12 Startup That Was Sold On Twitter For About $100,000 – with Sean Percival | Mixergy – Online Business Tips from Successful Entrepreneurs

This is a story about how an entrepreneur can build an internet business on the side. The business Sean Percival launched wasn’t meant to be the next Google. He was just trying to make some money and improve his business skills.
Sean built a site that sold customize European license plates, the kind of plates you might see on cars speeding on the Autobahn or cruising down the Champs-Elysées. As you’ll hear in this interview, he spent $12 to buy the domain, customeuropeanplates.com. Then he built the site using a free ecommerce platform. To fill and ship his orders, he partnered up with a company that was already in the business of selling license plates online. And he got customers by teaching himself search engine optimization and developing link partnerships with related sites.
He ended up selling the business — which was profitable — after Tweeting that he was thinking of selling it.
We talked in this interviewed about how he built the business, and how he built up the kind of social capital online that helped him sell his business for about $100,000 via a Tweet.
via The $12 Startup That Was Sold On Twitter For About $100,000 – with Sean Percival | Mixergy – Online Business Tips from Successful Entrepreneurs.

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rePost::Who Will Grow Your Food? Part I: The Coming Demographic Crisis in Agriculture : Casaubon's Book

Who Will Grow Your Food? Part I: The Coming Demographic Crisis in Agriculture
Category: Collapse • Peak Energy • agriculture
Posted on: January 4, 2010 9:00 AM, by Sharon Astyk
Note: This is the beginning of a multi-part series on agricultural education, the farming demographic crisis and the question of who will grow our food – what the problems are, how we will find new farmers, how they will be trained. To me, this is one of the most urgent questions of our time.
A quick, Jay Leno style quiz for the man and woman on the street.
Who will grow your food in the coming decades?
A. My friendly neighborhood agribusinessman will grow my food on a plantation the size of Wyoming using nearly enslaved non-white folks who are deported minutes after harvest. Or maybe there will be robots involved somewhere. Yeah, robots are good.
B. Farmers, of course. You know, those dumb people in the flyover states that we tolerate because they give us dinner. Where will they come from? Well, don't they grow in the ground upside down like raspberries? Or do I mean zucchini? Well, either way, I think they reproduce by spores.
C. Food grows? You mean in the ground? With DIRT on it? And bugs? Ewwww.
via Who Will Grow Your Food? Part I: The Coming Demographic Crisis in Agriculture : Casaubon’s Book.

Interesting read. Maybe agriculture could be a way out of poverty???

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rePost::Comparing the 1990s and the 2000s: What Our Movies Say About Us | /Film

I was thinking of my – what was my favorite movie of the decade? It was “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry. And I was trying to think what that film thematically says about the…aughts, and I think that the idea of the tension between reality and fantasy has gotten more pronounced in the last decade, and the ways in which – the movie is sort of like a Philip K. Dick paranoid fever-dream wedded to a screwball romance. And there’s no way it could happened, the technology wouldn’t have allowed it, and the sensibility wouldn’t have allowed it in any other decade.
via Comparing the 1990s and the 2000s: What Our Movies Say About Us | /Film.

read the whole thing its a time sink with links to such excellent lists and articles!!!!

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rePost::When Situations Not Personality Dictate Our Behaviour | PsyBlog

If people are not doing the right things; If people are less kind than what we know they can be; If people are more selfish or self-centered that what we believe they should be; Maybe what’s wrong is that we are not letting them have the opportunity , the situations to show the good they can do. Whenever I fall in the trap of thinking myself as good and decent I step back and tell myself; How lucky I am that I have the opportunity to be good, to be decent. This is because I haven’t faced something that was big enough to push me to the limit. This keeps me huble.

In a hurry, can’t stop
Here’s what happened. On average just 40% of the seminary students offered help (with a few stepping over the apparently injured man) but crucially the amount of hurry they were in had a large influence on behaviour. Here is the percentage of participants who offered help by condition:
* Low hurry: 63%
* Medium hurry: 45%
* High hurry: 10%
The type of talk they were giving also had an effect on whether they offered help. Of those asked to talk about careers for seminarians, just 29% offered help, while of those asked to talk about the parable of the Good Samaritan, fully 53% gave assistance.
What these figures show is the large effect that subtle aspects of the situation have on the way people behave. Recall that the experimenters also measured personality variables, specifically the 'religiosity' of the seminarians. When the effect of personality was compared with situation, i.e. how much of a hurry they happened to be in or whether they were thinking about a relevant parable, the effect of religiosity was almost insignificant. In this context, then, situation is easily trumping personality.
via When Situations Not Personality Dictate Our Behaviour | PsyBlog.

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rePost::How Other People’s Unspoken Expectations Control Us | PsyBlog

When independent observers listened to the tapes of the conversation they found that when women were talking to men who thought they were very attractive, the women exhibited more of the behaviours stereotypically associated with attractive people: they talked more animatedly and seemed to be enjoying the chat more. What was happening was that the women conformed to the stereotype the men projected on them. So people really do sense how they are viewed by others and change their behaviour to match this expectation.
Now this experiment just happened to be carried out by manipulating the stereotype of attractiveness but the same rule applies to many different areas of life. Think of any of the standard stereotypes about class, race and nationality. Each of these create expectations in other people's minds, expectations that are difficult for us to avoid playing up to.
via How Other People’s Unspoken Expectations Control Us | PsyBlog.

This is powerful because it shows another mechanism in which people who think negatively or suspiciously of somebody/something affects how that someone acta/reacts towards them.  Does this mean I need to expect people would be kind and giving towards me? I don’t know , maybe. Read the whole thing to see how they setup the experiment.

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Favorite TV Series of the Decade 2000-2010

I have a tendency to be anti social sometimes.
I tend to not watch something if it is in the fad (big exception when people whose taste I trust recommend it).
These are the series that I loved!!!!!

I Haven’t Watched But Would Love To:

Best Drama Series For Me:

  • The Wire

Close Second :

Best Comedy Series:

  • The Office

Close Second:

  • Frasier (I’m a sucker for niles  and daphne’s as much as I am a sucker for jim and pam’s)

Most Watched Series:

  • The West Wing (3X at least each episode)
  • The Wire (2x at least each episode)
  • How I Met Your Mother (3X at least each episode)
  • Serenity (2X)
  • The Office (3X at least each episode)
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Favorite Films of This Decade 2000-2009

I haven’t seen but would love to see:

  • Amorres Perros
  • Mulholland Dr. (Come on david lynch)
  • Anything Lar’s Von Trier (Haven’t seen anything from this director)
  • Jonah Hill‘s recent movies
  • Up in the Air
  • The Hurt Locker
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Requiem For A Dream
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rePost::The Good Fight « Paulo Coelho’s Blog

The Good Fight
Published on January 3, 2010 in News. 92 Comments
In 1986, I went for the first and only time on the pilgrimage known as the Way to Santiago, an experience I described in my first book. We had just finished walking up a small hill, a village appeared on the horizon, and it was then that my guide, whom I shall call Petrus (although that was not his name), said to me:
– We must never stop dreaming. Dreams provide nourishment for the soul, just as a meal does for the body. Many times in our lives we see our dreams shattered and our desires frustrated, but we have to continue dreaming. If we don’t, our soul dies
‘The Good Fight is the one we Fight because our heart asks it of us.The Good Fight is the one that’s fought in the name of our dreams. When we are young our dreams first explode inside us with all of their force, we are very courageous, but we haven’t yet learned how to Fight. With great effort, we learn how to Fight, but by then we no longer have the courage to go into combat. So we turn against ourselves and do battle within. We become our own worst enemy. We say that our dreams were childish, or too difficult to realize, or the result or our not having known enough about life. We kill our dreams because we are afraid to Fight the Good Fight.
“The first symptom of the process of killing our dreams is lack of time. The busiest people I have known in my life always have time enough to do everything. Those who do nothing are always tired and pay no attention to the little amount of work they are required to do. They complain constantly that the day is too short. The Truth is, they are afraid to Fight the Good Fight…
“The second symptom of the death of our dreams lies in our certainties. Because we don’t want to see life as a grand adventure, we begin to think of ourselves as wise and fair and correct in asking so little of life. We look beyond the walls of our day-to-day existence, and we hear the sound of lances breaking, we smell the dust and the sweat, and we see the great defeats and the fire in the eyes of the warriors. But we never see the delight, the immense delight in the hearts of those engaged in the battle. For them, neither victory nor defeat is important; what’s important is only that they are Fighting the Good Fight.
“And, finally, the third symptom of the passing of our dreams is peace. Life becomes a Sunday afternoon; we ask for nothing grand, and we cease to demand anything more than we are willing to give. In that state we think of ourselves as being mature; we put aside the fantasies of our youth, and we seek personal and professional achievement. We are surprised when people our age say that they still want this or that out of life. But really, deep in our hearts, we know that what has happened is that we have renounced the battle for our dreams-we have refused to Fight the Good Fight.
“When we renounce our dreams and find peace, we go through a period of tranquility. But the dead dreams begin to rot within us and to infect our entire being. We become cruel to those around us, and then we begin to direct this cruelty against ourselves.
“What we sought to avoid in combat-disappointment and defeat-came upon us because of our cowardice. And one day, the dead, spoiled dreams make it difficult to breath, and we actually seek death. It’s death that frees us from out certainties, from our work, and from that terrible peace of Sunday afternoons.”
in “The Pilgrimage”(1987)
via The Good Fight « Paulo Coelho’s Blog.

I’ll keep on posting this til I’m in the think of The Good Fight!

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