Category Archives: Random Musings

What’s on Your Bucket List for this Decade?

29 Thursday Apr 2010

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If you had no worries or obligations in the world, what would you do with yourself? What are some of the things you’ve always wanted to do, but never got around to doing? I haven’t come up with my whole list yet, but here is what I have so far:

  1. Enter a beauty pageant: This is what I wanted to do when I was a little girl, so I’m not sure if this counts. Since then, I’ve convinced myself that I just don’t have the performing gene. Plus, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t make it in anyway
  2. Make a scrapbook: So many memories to choose from, but where to start? I’ll get around to this one some day……
  3. Go paragliding: I wonder what it would be like to glide through the sky like a bird
  4. Ride on a hot air balloon: Just think of the lovely image that would make!
  5. Write a book: But on what? And I’m awful at dialogues!
  6. Learn mandarin: I really should be doing this one now
  7. Travel: Doesn’t everyone?
  8. Inspire and make a difference in someone’s life
  9. Learn to be poise and a more eloquent speaker in person
  10. Get the CFA charter
  11. Read all the books I bought that I haven’t gotten around to reading, like the Snowball Effect
  12. Write time letters
  13. Redraft my “Falling” article from non-fiction creative writing class Spring ’08
  14. Find my life’s passion: the bane of every twenty something’s life

I have a lot of other more materialistic goals, like own lots of apartments and a haute couture gown, but that’s probably another decade down the line. What is on your bucket list for this decade?

Shoot Before You Eat

10 Saturday Apr 2010

Posted by in Dining, Random Musings

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Back in college, whenever my girlfriends and I went out, we had a ritual. While others pray before they eat, we took pictures of and with our food before we eat. Once the food had been placed in front of us, we’d ask the waiter to take a group picture of us before we proceeded to help each other take pictures with our foods, in addition to individual food pictures. Since then, I’ve cut back a bit as other friends started to give me pained looks whenever I whipped out my camera- especially in upscale restaurants in the US. Apparently it is embarrassing.

As it turns out, I wasn’t being embarrassing but part of the pioneering movement of bringing food blogging/food diaries into America (I assure you this is quite a normal habit in Asian communities already). But alas, I don’t think I’ll be starting a food blog any time soon. Recently, I’ve come to the realization that I simply do not have the talent for food photography. My photos just seem to make the most amazing cuisine appear unappetizing. Maybe from now on I should just let others do the work for me while I enjoy the food!

Why Finance?

04 Sunday Apr 2010

Posted by in Finance and News, Random Musings

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Most people who meet me would not immediately associate me with finance. When they hear about my blog, they’d immediately jump to fashion or writing. Even some of my closest friends and family can’t make the connection. My control freak tendency to plan to every last detail and organize things in the “perfect” order pointed towards event planning or even database management. But never quite finance. Indeed, it wasn’t something I grew up knowing I loved. It was something I naturally fell into through my education and surrounding environment. But having really thought about it recently, I really do feel like finance is the right path for me. And by finance, I mean investing.

Why? Because investing allows us to forecast the future. Not just about the future of the stock market, but about the world. That’s why Warren Buffet is called the Oracle of Omaha- he’s like a psychic! It involves the study of all things, from the technology developments, history, psychology, recent legislations to the latest fashion. All these factors come together to create the future. Investing allows us to study the world, place a bet  behind our convictions and be rewarded for being correct/punished for being wrong. Unlike most occupations where you repetitively do the same tasks to achieve the same means, finance appeases our natural curiosity of this ever-changing world and get paid for it. I’m not saying that finance is not repetitive- I’m convinced it is one of the industries that rely the most on copy and pasting- but the factors affecting the world are always changing and consequently so are the forecasts. It makes for an exciting, broad and enriching life-long learning experience.

Haiti

28 Sunday Mar 2010

Posted by in Finance and News, Random Musings

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Now that it has been a few months, I daresay that many have already forgotten about Haiti, with its lack of exposure in the media. But it was brought back on my radar this weekend when I heard the most bone chilling story from my friend that left me quite speechless. One of her friends had visited Haiti recently to see for herself what the situation was like there and was surprised to find that there was no signs of major improvements. It seemed that billions of dollars in donations are just floating around somewhere in corruption and inefficiency. She found that the aids were on one side of a barrier, while the people were on the other side just sitting there in desperate need of help.

Curious, she walked over to the other side to talk to the people and ask them why they were not coming over to get aid- they felt that they have nothing left besides the piece of land they’re sitting on, and if they move someone might come and take it. And so they were just sitting there, waiting for help. Then she saw a little boy of 4 or 5 years old just wandering aimlessly around. The boy stopped next to another little boy who had a cracker, and tried to take it away from him. Then suddenly, the boy with the cracker’s mother was there and literally punched the boy unconscious! She immediately asked the mother why she did it, and the mother said, “That boy has no parents to take care of him, he’s already as good as dead. If I had to choose between the survival of a stranger and my own child, I’d choose my own child.” Sadly, who can blame the mother? Many more such children are wandering the streets lost, looking for their parents with no protection, making them incredibly susceptible to human trafficking. Efforts to register and track these children are not proceeding nearly fast enough.

With the hurricane season coming soon, the situation is about to get worse. Where are the tents and supplies donated? Apparently they are in an island not far away, but they just can’t figure out a cost efficient way to transport them over without harming their charity ranking status.

Most people forget about a cause once they’ve donated money, thinking they’ve done their part. But hearing about these inefficiencies really gets one thinking, should we be doing more?

The Thing About Touchscreens

21 Sunday Feb 2010

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When I first got the Diamond in June 2008, it was the top of it’s line, the latest touch screen model, and I thought it was pretty cool. The design was sleek and pretty, and the interface was quite cute. Obviously very soon its newness wore off and I started to realize how painfully slow it was (especially compared to the iphone- and I’m talking about the first gen one too!) and how most of the “cool” functions don’t even work that well. Occasionally it turns itself off, this random connection screen pops up every 5 minutes for no reason and the clock doesn’t work (it lags no matter how many times you reset it). Oh and the quality of the voice conversations was also awful. I’ve been told that I sound robotic. Regardless, I convinced myself that it’s not too bad and I worked with it, determined to hold out until the next iPhone comes out this year (fingers crossed!).

Unfortunately, unlike my trusty old Nokia cell, which held out for months after the battery expanded and I couldn’t close the back, when a touchscreen starts to die, it dies a swift death. My touchscreen stopped working and there isn’t much I can “work with” after that. The worst thing was, I called customer service and found out that I can’t even recover my contact list! I was under the impression that smartphones are mini computers, and figured that if hardrives can be recovered when a pc dies, it shouldn’t be too hard for them to recover my contacts. But no, apparently they reset your phone when they examine it and there isn’t some magic the technicians can do to recover it. I am so mad at them and at myself for not backing up my phone (the backup program is not userfriendly). I just spent the whole evening painstakingly going through my contact list manually and typing it into my google contacts (luckily I figured out how to use the few keys on my phone to get me the relevant page). I figured that I can transfer them over when I get my new iPhone (when it comes out). I’m placing my bet on the advance of technology in the last two years and the superiority of Apple over HTC, that this won’t happen again. I’m absolutely never buying another phone from HTC again (don’t know what made me do it in the first place- must’ve been the pretty glass case!). I’m back to my old Nokia in the meantime. Apple better come out with a new iphone soon……..

Image Source: HTC

Happy Chinese New Year

17 Wednesday Feb 2010

Posted by in Hong Kong, Random Musings

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The last few days have been incredibly busy celebrating Chinese New Year. Visiting people and collecting red packet is hard work! After collecting red packets, the second thing I enjoyed most were ironically the flowers, which I never paid much attention to before.

Every year in Hong Kong, impromptu flower markets pop up to sell flowers and random specialty items, very much like how in the States you have random Christmas themed farmer markets. They open around the week before CNY and end on CNY. Most people go in the last few nights when it opens really late (like past midnight late- us HKers are a nocturnal bunch), when it’s absolutely packed. They say that just walking around the market will bring you good luck in the new year. So I must be VERY lucky this year, since I went to the flower market TWICE (it’s a loooong story). But anyways, this is where the flowers generally come from, though you can find them in flower shops too.

It doesn’t look too exciting when you’re at the flower market because  there are so many of them they all start looking the same. But once it get’s home, aren’t they so very very pretty? Each flower represents some kind of good luck, though I’m not sure of the details on that front. The names going clockwise from the top left to the best of my knowledge: a) Japanese orchids (they’re a new breed this year and I LOVE how it looks) b) some sort of red sword orchids? c) bells, because they dangle downwards and looks like a bell d) cherry blossoms, which is suppose to bring love. I think these might actually be better than a Christmas tree because of their many variety and vibrant colors!

In the spirit of the lunar year, many places made special Tiger items to commemorate the year. I paid special attention this year, since the Tiger is my favourite. Prada came out with a Tiger collection that frankly does not look very cute or pretty. But I do think that this Tiger from Swarovski is pretty awesome. Maybe even better than the Dragon one they had back in 2000 to celebrate the millennium.

Happy Year of the Tiger everyone!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

14 Sunday Feb 2010

Posted by in Blogging, Random Musings, Relationships

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I went Artjamming recently, which is a 2 hour session where they provide you with all the tools you need with music jamming in the background, and this is what I ended up with:

Given my limited artistic capabilities and unimaginative nature, I decided to go with a simple shape and work on the color and texture. As simple as it looks, I’ll have you know that I probably spent a little over a hour working on the texture of the heart to get it to look like this. It turns out that texturizing is much harder than it looks and if you are not careful, you will over work it….

….and it’ll end up looking like this, which is neither here nor there. It looked much better in my imagination. It’s a good thing I took a picture of it before I decided to be done with it!

But yes, Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! I would like to take this opportunity to thank all my readers for sticking around in the last year. It’s officially been 1 year and 14 days since I started to blog alone. I was so busy cramming for an exam on Feb 1st that I completely forgot until now. I know there’s been ups and downs, and quite some bit of inconsistency, but I appreciate your patience and I’ll try to do better this year. There’s been quite a lot of changes lately i.e. I finally got tired of Chicago and moved back to Hong Kong, but hopefully it is all for the better. I love you all!

Things you don’t want your BF to know

12 Friday Feb 2010

Posted by in Random Musings, Relationships

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Usually around this time every year, I’ll post a few Valentine’s gift ideas for lost souls wandering around the grounds of Henri Bendels. But I’ve already made one suggestion and I’m sure that the internet is already chock full of such ideas anyway. So I’m going to take a different approach this year and give my thoughts on certain subjects instead.

  1. Chocolate Making: When we say we “made” you chocolate, it actually means we melted chocolate, reshaped it for you using a mold and then refrigerated it. We didn’t actually make anything. It’s almost like playing with play-doh except we did it with food. To top it off, genius stores like Muji also provides us with easy ready-made kits, which includes all the tools/ingredients we need with step-by-step instructions (and even an online tutorial). In all the standardization, there is even room for “creativity” with decorating. Minimal effort with full marks for DIY effort, what more can a girl ask for? Thank you Muji!
  2. “Personalized” Items : Whoever invented sticking one’s picture onto any surface possible was a genius. Who doesn’t like constantly looking at themselves and their loved ones? Plus it allows the giver to appear thoughtful in their gift-giving even though it really just took them a few minutes to upload the pictures from the comforts of their home onto Shutterfly, fill in the form, click submit and have it delivered. Not that I’m begrudging all photo gifts, but I like to think of them as aids for expressions instead of an easy way out. A whole bunch of personalized photo gifts wouldn’t exactly match the decor of my apartment if you know what I mean. On the other hand, my friend got a personalized puzzle for her special someone this year and had it completed and framed as a present. The framed picture is probably nothing new, but the time spent putting it together and all is very sweet (Psst! I hear that in some places they put the pieces together for you).

Running out of ideas?

11 Thursday Feb 2010

Posted by in Random Musings

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It occurs to me that the great god’s of technology these days are running out of ideas. Namely Apple and Google.

Apple came out with an iPad that is an iTouch except bigger. Admittedly they have a few more tricks, like the book reader program. But then I can read ebooks on my laptop. Indeed, there are applications to read ebooks on the iPhone as well. The point of an e-reader would be that it looks like a book, so that it’s not as damaging to your eyes, and can store many of it. I had high hopes for Apple to come up with a good one, but I guess I’ll just wait for the Kindle to come up with a version that has a colored touch screen and a backlight for when it’s dark. It is an interesting evolution of human behavior. Now that I’ve gotten on board with the touch screen thing, it seems intuitive that I should be able to flick a epage over.

Late last year, Google came out with Google Wave and everyone was anxious to be “invited” to try it. As an email, I prefer to see my communications come in order and not all over the place. I do not have the patience to see it replay itself, as cool as the function sounded. As a chat box, it was slow and confusing. Am I suppose to start a new thread for everything sentence I want to say, or reply to a thread? While the auto mapping and the photo sending function was cool (that is if the photo sending worked. The photos I tried to send back in October is still currently loading), the Wave just didn’t catch on with anyone I know and we all quickly gave up. I still have 23 invites. Maybe if they tried to integrate these little functions onto my Gmail.

Speaking of Gmail, I logged on this morning and noticed Google Buzz added to my sidebar. From what I can tell, it is a Google version of Twitter, except worse. It publicizes your contact list and it sends you spam everytime someone updates a Buzz. Molly Wood hits the spot on this one. I’ve already turned mine off. The link to do so is at the very bottom of your Gmail screen, where the small prints and Google View option is. Maybe the folks at Google have been couped up in Google town for too long………

Too Much TV?

05 Friday Feb 2010

Posted by in Books, Lifestyle, Random Musings

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Apparently mom was right, there is such a thing as too much TV. According to this research by the University of Maryland, “unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as ‘very happy’ spend more time reading and socializing.” Indeed, I recently read a book called, Happy for No Reason, where watching too much TV was one of the habits of being happy for a bad reason, because it only provided you with a temporary high.

I must admit, I’m definitely guilty of too much TV. It was one of the few things I looked forward to when I came home after work. At some points I’d watch a whole TV series within a few days! It’s really hard to stop at just one episode once you get started. When an episode ends, the inevitable feeling of emptiness creeps up, and all you want to do is start another episode! That was my ultimate guilty pleasure, and I indulged myself a lot.

Recently though, I’ve cut back on my TV watching. Instead, I’ve been devoting my time to socializing, reading and studying. I must say, keeping busy constructively really does make a remarkable difference on one’s mood. My dad claims that it’s because it keeps me from thinking too much. But maybe it’s because of my reduced TV consumption!

By no means, don’t cut your cable yet just to be “happier”. But maybe this weekend, try reducing your TV consumption and see how you feel. Do report back!