Pensieve

When ACS, CL Manoj Vasudevan became the Champion of the 2017 Toastmasters World Championship of Public Speaking , it generated a big buzz on the internet and social media platforms. Some people admired how well he spoke and how great his message is. Yet there are some that expressed doubts about the standard of Toastmasters. They wondered how could he won using a  similar speech to the one he used in the finals of 2015 World Championship of Public Speaking ? Curious about how true the allegation is and what I could learn from this spectacular win, I spent some time analyzing both speeches. With my limited knowledge, I speculated 5 reasons why he won the 2017 Toastmasters World Championship of Public Speaking and not the one in 2015. If you haven't watch the speeches, I highly encourage you to watch them below before reading the five points below. 1. Title  The first and most obvious difference is the title. He titled his speech as "We Can Fix It" during his

The New : Sugahut's Coconut Milk Plus Durian When I went to 7-Eleven today, I saw a very interesting new drink on the shelf.  It is a coconut milk + durian drink. Intrigued, I bought one can home. After trying it, I deem that it is not my cup of tea. If you are a person who likes durian flavored soy milk, this might be the drink for you. Or if you are craving for something sweet after your meal, this might be for you too.  The Good : Speaker Leader Champion by Jeremy Donovan and Ryan Avery If you have been following Startupth or my YouTube Channel , you'll remember that I went on a shopping spree and bought 38 books from Big Bad Wolf and did an analysis on how they sell books at such a cheap price . It turns out that one of the books that I bought was a very useful book for public speaking. It is a book named Speaker Leader Champion written by Jeremy Donovan and Ryan Avery. It is a book that will complement your Toastmasters education or it'll be a book i

The New : Feature Creep and What to Do About it. I've read this article from Intercom about feature creep. It is about over cluttered UI and what to do about it. I highly suggest you to read it. If you don't want to read it? Feel free to watch the video above.  The Good : Pull Marketing Done Right Intercom.com did a great job in pulling me to their website and subtly giving me the hint that their communication solution could help me with my communication with customers. It gave me real value. This is why I'm sharing about it now. I think they did well linking their product to a problem faced by their target customers. Bravo! Intercom. 

The New The new thing that I've learnt today is the medical breakthrough that enables doctors to reprogram one type of cell into another type. The procedure takes a very short amount of time and is relatively safe and risk free. We are truly living in an age of advancements. For more information, check out the video below! The Good It is good to see the person that you coach grow. I have been coaching my boss's kid for years and it's very good to see him grow from someone who needs a lot of pacing to someone who can persevere and find the solutions himself. It reminds us that we need to keep learning so that we won't be left behind.

The Good I've finally produced a vlog reflecting the good things and the new things that I've experienced today. Before this, I had a lot of excuses on why I won't do this. Maybe it's because I'm tired or I don't have time to setup the green screen. The key here is that I'm able to reflect on what I've done. Thus I find that the good of the day is that I'm able to do what I want instead of perfect it. If you wait for perfection, you'll wait forever. The New Sea salt caramel latte from Not Just Another Cup The new thing that I've experienced is the a cup of sea salt caramel latte from Not Just Another Cup . I was very excited when I found this coffee because I never thought it existed. I've learnt the existence of this coffee in a story of a couple that's on the verge of divorcing. The wife asked the husband why does he always put salt in her coffee? The husband said because you've always drank it and it's wha

The New I realized that there are 2 types of responsibility from a video shared by my boss 1. Worker Responsibility - One will only do things that's instructed. Nothing more. Nothing less. This kind of responsibility is very popular during the industrial revolution because that's an age where there's only one best way to do something. Workers just need to follow and they'll be compensated by well they followed the instructions and how much they produced. 2. Professional Responsibility - This kind of responsibility is best explained with the example of a doctor. Have you ever cross check how your doctor work or is there anyone who is there to instruct them? No! This is because their work is immensely complex and specialized. They are responsible for the result regardless of what method that they used. For those of you who can understand Thai, please watch the video below.  So which type of responsibility do you apply in your daily life? 

I went to Big Bad Wolf a few days ago for the first time in my life and this happened.  Image credit :  Darunwan the translator I bought 38 books for 6XXX THB. I went back and did a quick search and compare of the books that I bought. If I were to buy to buy them from book stores, it will cost me at least 22192 THB. That's an average of 73% off the books that I've bought! Here's the Google Sheet for those who is interested in the raw data. Note : If I can't find the book's ISBN, I didn't include it in my list.  For those of you who prefer videos, I've made a video for you below.  How do they sell at such a jaw dropping price??? A quick search of Wikipedia showed me that Big Bad Wolf is organized by  BookXcess . A quick search of BookXcess's about us yielded a clear answer to why the books are so cheap. Below is the partial quote from their about us section. Pick up any book off our shelves and you’ll notice that it’s priced at about 80% less than any

When I was finding a cheap solution to enable me to capture the HDMI out of my camera into my PC, I stumble upon Ezcap284 . Compared to the industry standard,  Magewell XI100DUSB-HDMI USB Capture HDMI 3.0 HD Video Capture Dongle , the  Ezcap284  is almost 4 times cheaper! There's one problem though. A quick read in the comment unnerves potential buyers. Some said that you can use it and some say you can't. Searching on YouTube doesn't help because all you get is this video that tells you how to do it instead of showing you how to do it . Regardless, I've decided to take a risk and I've managed to make the video below showing how to make it work.  If you are one of those that prefers textual and pictorial instructions, you are in luck. That's the reason I'm writing this post.  What do you need? Ezcap284 The USB cable that comes with  Ezcap284 Your camera with HDMI Out (shown here : Sony X3000 ) Micro HDMI to HDMI Cable that fits your cam

The New I've just realized that we might have the possibility to VR ourselves. The hard part about creating VR content is that we will need to plan the shot so that only those that's related will be in the scene. Another important part is to have tools to make sure that we will be able to shoot the VR correctly and post process it correctly. The Good Father's love. I'm really grateful that my father helped me create the tool that I could really use in my daily life. He actually helped me patiently drill a hole in my  AKA-FGP1 finger grip for my Sony X3000 . Whith this, I'll be able to leave the AKA-FGP1 finger grip and Joby Micro on all the time as show in the pictures below. This will make my life considerably easier. Thanks dad!

Hi there. Welcome to another post about the new and good things that I've encountered today. Let's go and see what are the new things and good things that has happened in my life. The New I came across a concept/thing called Baby Box while I was reading Ozy's PDB this morning. Baby Box apparently is a box filled with essential stuffs and a mattress. It is supposed to reduce infant mortality rate by providing essential items for the parents and a safe place where the infant can sleep safely and breath freely. It has been introduce in Finland in the 1930s and it has reduced the baby mortality rate from 1 in 10 children to 2 in 1000 children. Now there's an aspiring startup called Baby Box Co  that aims to bring this Finnish tradition to the US. The Good  All of us sometime needs people to remind us who we us when we are lost. This is why we have friends. I have a friend who's quite discouraged because people didn't see the possibility in his idea. I recor

You've just thought of a great idea and you are very excited about it. You went to the closest person to share it but they gave you a lukewarm response. You went to the next person and the person totally rejects your idea. So what do you do? Listen to everyone and give up? If the Wright Brothers  listened to the naysayers that the machine that they build will not fly, we will not have air travel today. If Henry Ford  listened and agreed that people need faster horses and stopped his development of a mass market car, we might be still going around in horse carriages. I'm going to share with you a thinking framework that I've learnt from my boss. Generally, ideas can be divided into 4 types as shown in the picture below. 1. Good idea that everyone thinks it's a good idea   At the time I'm writing this, everyone is thinking and talking about AI. It is a good idea but unless you have a special lead in this, it is going to be a red sea battle. Is it worth clawing you way

This is a new series of blog posts that I'm going to start to share with you what the new and the good that I've learnt in my day. It is meant for both of us to be able to observe the new and good things in our lives. If you've found anything that's new or good, do feel free to share it with me in the comments section. The New I've just realized that MAS Airline's RM 60 Million net income in Q1 of 2017 is absurdly low compared to airlines like AsiaAsia which is raking in an average of 524 million of net income per quarter in year 2016. That's like almost 10 times the difference. Of course if we were to compare it to the world leader American Airlines Group , these two airlines are just speck of dusts. With that said, the numbers stated here are too big for most people to imagine The Good I've learnt about the decision tree that's being used by my boss which I'll share below. To my boss, when there's a a complain, we realize somet

After winning the 2017  Toastmasters District 97P 's table topic contest, people asked me about how to perform better in Table Topics. I feel that it will be beneficial to share the insights generated from those discussion and the contest itself. While the tips that I share are by no means exhaustive, I hope that it will help you prepare better for your next table topic contest. 1. Repeat The Topic This is a great tip that I've learnt from DTM Petra . There are two reasons why this important. By repeating the topic, you ensure that the audience have yet another clear imprint of the topic. The second reason for this is to enable you to have a few more seconds to think while appearing that you've already started to respond confidently.  2. Power Posing I've been practicing power posing from Amy Cuddy's TED talk every time before I go on the stage to compete. According to her, our posture affects our emotions just the same as our emotion affects our pos

It's always frustrating whenever something that you depend frequently breaks down. When my Surface Pro 4 's pen tip broke, it's as if I've lost a finger of mine. If you prefer something moving, please watch the video that I've made below. If you prefer something quieter, read on. 1. Acquire a Microsoft Surface Pen Tip Kit Most people's direct response was to buy a new pen. I'm one of them. Buying the pen tip kit actually costs only 25% of buying a new pen. What's more, it comes with 4 tips with different hardness (I'm now a very happy user of the H pen tip). 2. Slide the broken tip into the clip of the kit and pull When I first saw the package, I marvel at its thoughtfulness. One normally doesn't expect this kind of thoughtfulness from Microsoft's products. Yet Microsoft actually designed this with designers who need to frequently change their pen tips mind. This is why the result is a package of pen tips that an

If you are a Harry Potter fan, you probably what is a Pensieve . If you are not, Pensieve is a rare item in the Harry Potter Universe that enables a wizard to recreate one's memory so that he/she can re-live it once again. When I read about this, I thought to myself, wouldn't it be great if I could have such an artifact so that I could just review and learn about my own life? Then it struck me! The boring diary assignments that I've been assigned when I was young was exactly this. A Pensieve that enables me to relive the memory as much as I pour it in. Thus this is my personal Pensieve that has all the writings, videos and learning of experiences that I have encountered in my life. I hope my words and memories could help you grow as much as I do. Do comment if there's any points that has struck you as interesting or useful.