Booklist

Few gems i had came across through this course: 

 

7 habits of highly successful person - Stephen Covey

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Habits_of_Highly_Effective_People

 

Psycho-Cybernetics – Maxwell Maltz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-Cybernetics

 

How to win friends & influence people – Dale Carnegie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People

Self-discipline & Sacrifice

 

“See what others do not see, do what others do not do, sacrifice will no longer be a sacrifice.”

 

I thought that this line is very relevant in everybody’s life and something that I firmly subscribe to.There are many times people around me would complain how doing of their homework and the lesson schedule would prevent them from having fun with their buddies or their girlfriends/ boyfriends; Or when working and helping people to complete a tedious task is wasting or sacrificing their time. But the way I see it is just a matter of perception, there are always more than one way to see and respond to a situation; and staying positive is a very good way indeed.

 

Back to topic, today is my final lesson of pearls with Richard for this semester and the topic is charging. One of the reasons I think this name is very apt is because we had already set our vision and short term goals previously; and that there is simply no reason to stay put now. Attendance was not very good for this session as majority of the participants had finance test during the weekend and they were busy mugging, I thought this is good in a way as Richard could give us more attention.

 

We started this lesson with a video clip of some people playing checkers. Player one made several sacrifices to allow one of his piece to reach one end of the board, by then that was his only piece left. How the most amazing thing happened next, with that special piece, he annihilated all his opponent pieces. I will upload the video on a later date but this video clearly showed the essence of planning in advance & making sacrifices.

 

Therefore, after planning our life strategically, it is now time to commit to this plan by maintaining self- discipline (through “sacrifices”). Richard touched on time management first and shared with us about Stephen Covey task management quadrants. By allocating tasks correctly into correct quadrant will allow us to make better decision about daily tasks and helps to relieve undue stress on us; This also helps us to downsize our challenges in life so that they can be conquered more easily.

 

The next thing Richard taught us about was to maintain positive leverage so that we can get the most out of daily situations and allow us to achieve our goals; that are especially true in the corporate world as people for perceptions about you swiftly and are not very forgiving. However, to get this leverage, it is important to be well read, well travelled & well prepared (I think). The lesson is very interesting as we could ask him a lot of questions and he shared his corporate experience with us. He also made us a special offer to help us analyse and give us some guidance provided we did our home work for this course and feed him with information on our abilities, goals and plans- I think it would be a good thing having Richard as a mentor as he is very helpful and sincere. With that we concluded the 2^nd module of pearls- Personal Mastery.   

 

Ever heard of Microsoft Surface? Think minority report.

i dont know if you ever hear about the term microsoft surface, it’s not new stuff and i only heard of it recently. But trust me, it will still blow your socks off. Welcome to a new era of surface computing.

 

various possibilities of the surface

review & explaination of the functions

IT Show 2008!

The IT fair between March 6, 2008 & March 9, 2008 is my first stint selling Wacom tablets which was DARN neat! 

Wacom basically sells LCD pen tablets, Bluetooth pen tablets and normal pen tablets used for drawing, painting, writing and photo editing. They are thus used by artists; designer and architects, among them would be Lucas Film and famous Japanese manga artists. Despite little or no advertisement over the television, it is the best pen tablet in Singapore.  

The 4 days spent working in the convention centre was a very memorable working experience as: 

1)      Part of the job as a tablet promoter is drawing with the product, my favorite past time!

2)      I really believe the product is very, very useful for graphical designing.

3)      I get to use and learn about the different tablets and corel painter , a very big incentive for me.

4)      The pay is commission based and is therefore, very attractive for me.

5)      The staffs of the company are very friendly to new staff.

6)      I got to meet fantastic anime artists whom I learned a thing or two from. 

My performance volume for the fair is average, but that is also partly because tablets are premium it products and are naturally more difficult to sell. But my performance is among the highest in value. The staffs, especially the manager is very nice to me; I would chose to work in Wacom for the next fair if the opportunity presents itself. 

Here are some pictures of the booth:

painting deedlit from record of lodoss war on Cintiq 21″

peripheral solution booth

these are the few products of the tablets:

 dont ask me how the artist did it

focus on the shadings

Back from the hiatus

Finally completed my managerial accounting test which I had been studying for the last few days, the result seems quite promising. And that I will blog on stuff that I had missed out for the last one week in my life. 

PEARLS M2S4 040308. Personal mastery IV Today session touches on visioning and it consist of personal SWOT analysis, setting your goals & creating an action plan for it( very MPish but interesting). 

 

Firstly, I did my personal SWOT whose data was heavily derived from the PEA which I had done 3 weeks ago. It basically consists of my personal strengths, weaknesses, opportunities & threats relative to others. Upon analysing the details, I could put it to good use for my goal settings. 

Goal setting was next, I managed to come up with my short term goals(within 1 year) which are to do well for my studies & work on real estate & POEMS, I was motivated by the short terms goal I am aiming despite the packed schedule. My mid term goals(1-3 years) are mainly graduating from RMIT with a degree with distinction in biz mgmt, managing my team in real estate & making consistent profits from POEMS. My long term goals(3-5 years) consists of diversification of my capital from the property sector & achieving my first million.   

Arranging my priorities in the 6 areas of my life is my subsequent task, namely: family & home, spiritual & ethical, social & cultural, financial & career, physical & health and mental & educational.

-Family & home is mainly about the time and life I am going to spend with my family & the environment which I would want to live in the future.

-Spiritual & ethical is about my role in the christian community  & raising a catholic family.

-Social & cultural is about the bonds which I would want to form with my true friends and the life I would want to live travelling & tasting various delicacies.

-Financial & career is about the development in my real estate & trader career.-Physical & health would be how I go about keeping myself fit & my diet light & simple

-Mental & educational would be to sustain my avid reading habits & pursue my CFA and mentoring people. 

Then, I had to make them Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound before plotting out my action plan.  

Last but not least, control & evaluation would include identifying the skills I need to accquire to achive my goals & the contingencies I have to adopt in unfavourable macro factors in the economy. 

 

I managed to come up with a pretty neat chart which would keep my disciplined and focused towards my goals if I review it daily!

Stocks tabs

here are the few stocks that i have been keeping a tab on:

Banyan Tree 

BUY S$1.32 FSSTI : 3,074.15
Price Target : 12-Month S$ 2.38 (Prev S$ 2.68)
Potential Catalyst: Strong Growth pipeline coming on stream,

Food Empire
Share Price S$0.725
Target Price S$1.01
Upside Potential 39%

BreadTalk Group FY2007
Previous Day Closing price: S$0.595
Target price: S$1.04 (reduced from S$1.07)

Cacola Furniture
Previous close S$0.345
Fair value S$0.630
Share price return 76.81%

all of them have pretty decent PE ratio, bread talk has high dividend payouts and at least 25% ROA within 12 months, sure beats queuing for the microcaps. Of course, i might want to churn out those ratios again to check these darlings’ fundamentals.

Career Fair 2008

Cold and rainy weather today. There was a slight congestion on my way to Suntec convention centre which delayed me considerably.  I was scheduled to be an SIM student ambassador for this career fair as part of the campus working experience. Pay ain’t pretty but my job scope for this afternoon is rather straight forward. I had to replenish and distribute brochures to the passer-bys, handle simple inquiries and to share the campus life in a student perspective for the benefit of the potential parties. SIM managed to get a good spot for the booth’s location and they had nice-looking badges for free gifts which I helped myself:   

 

 

The crowd started coming in at around 4pm but the pace was still quite comfortable as compared to the IT fairs. This is a paranoma picture which I took with my trusty K800i. 

Overall, this fair was a relatively new experience for me as I got to work with my uni’s pals which upped the fun factor and I got to know more about the private education scene( which is vibrant by any standards). As expected, there were middle aged people eager to take up bachelor courses from UNISIM to utilize the higher education subsidy allocated by our Minister for Education: Tharman Shanmugaratnam during the Budget’08.

楊宗緯 aka Aska Yang

i spent the whole night watching 超级星光大道 because i was so mesmerised by his vocals.  By the way, and it was the the night before my MP class test. Damn you 楊宗緯 ! it will be all your fault if i screwed up my test.

楊宗緯’s rendition of 新不了情 

楊宗緯’s rendition of 背叛

on an unrelated note, a spoof of 背叛