Commercial In Disguise

I was watching this music video and halfway through I felt something strange. I noticed that the MV focused a lot on the female lead's silky hair. Then I saw some product placement shots, and eventually I realised that this is not just a MV, but in fact a commercial for a hair product. Enjoy.

Rock On, Piano

My latest music album project is finally going to be released, according to my agent. The moment I got hold of the cover design images, I promptly created a web site, as I always did for all my other albums, Timeless and Piano Spa series. These are not official websites from the record label, but it's important to establish a web presence to let people search for album information on the web.

The web is really a powerful platform. Everyone should make a small effort to post information of their own products and services so that anyone can find information about them. Whenever someone tells me of a product, a service, a shop name, a person, a news, the first thing I do is to search online for information and validation. So if I can't find anything on the Internet regarding something, I will cast doubts on it.

This is my first commercial album on songs are not my originals. As the title suggests, this 24-track album features some of the most popular rock songs on the planet. But, instead of the "rocky" style, I re-arranged them to my trademark piano instrumental style. Some arrangements are totally unlike the original, while others carry similar feel.

If you enjoy these rock songs and want to enjoy them in a more conducive and less rocky feel, get this album for an alternative listen. If you hate rock songs, get this album to enjoy piano music.

What songs can you expect? Here's the track listing:

Disc One

1. Love Of A Lifetime
2. More Than Words
3. Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough
4. The Flame
5. Winds of Change
6. November Rain
7. Love Will Keep Us Alive
8. When I See You Smile
9. When The Children Cry
10. Carrie
11. When I'm With You
12. Always

Disc Two

1. Was It Nothing At All
2. More Than Words Can Say
3. I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing
4. Listen To Your Heart
5. Alone
6. High Enough
7. Every Rose Has Its Thorns
8. Love Is On The Way
9. Wonderful Tonight
10. Where Are You Now
11. Faithfully
12. To Be With You

Visit http://rockonpiano.chester.sg/ for a sneak preview of the album.

Blog vs. Portal

For over 5 years, I have maintained a portal that contains news, reviews and insights about products and services. Then one year ago, I started a blog on a separate site. There were times when I asked myself why I should maintain 2 sites that basically does the same thing: to share my thoughts.

Then after my previous post, it became clear. I was right to separate factual information with casual remarks. My portal.chester.sg contains reviews and opinions that are referable. My blog however is just a diary of private thoughts that belonged to me. I needed a platform to share my carefully-researched information, and the portal provides my readers this assurance of a reliable source of information.

Today I found a photography service for babies and families that is very affordable. It's by funshotz. I know by sharing this information, I am potentially losing customers to them, but if someone else can do something better than me for cheaper, why not share with people? I always believe in offering information to people and let them decide themselves, providing an environment of perfect information and perfect competition in economics terms. I would be most interested to evaluate how they can offer at such competitive prices and maybe I should revise my prices. As the ingenious saying goes: you can choose only 2 of the 3 traits - good, cheap, or fast. Think it through yourself and see if it makes sense.

People requests me for photographic or music assignments because they see value and quality in what I offer. I trade in second-hand goods because I see value and so does my buyers. The time when I know I can no longer offer my services is the moment when no one wants my services or when I decide that the reward is not worth the effort.

Decisions are never binary or measurable. Not everything is about price or time. There is the intangible element of the human interaction, something that sometimes is worth paying for.

Out Of Hand

I think the Internet community is getting out of hand. More and more people are making insensitive, crude and lewd remarks on forums and tag boxes of blog sites. It's almost certain that these people do not behave like that in the real lives, but on the Internet world where they can create a virtual identity, they think they can simply be wild and inhibited.

This is quite serious to growing adolescents, who might be easily affected by these remarks. Others who have grown strong to ignore these criticisms could also become insensitive themselves and apply this attitude in the real world.

We get influenced easily by the things and people we encounter. We imitate TV culture, we look up to role models. Today, we spend more time over the Internet, where everyone talks in a bold and thoughtless manner. People then pick up all these communication styles and use it habitually in real life. They might think that it is 'cool' to talk back and be rude, a show of power and control.

Blogs and forums are mostly unmoderated for grammar and content, except expletive phrases. It is like allowing anyone to publish a badly-written book and sell it at bookstores. When people read these personal sites, they got misled by either the grammatical errors or the incorrect facts. Worse, these posts will stay online forever unless the website implements archival policies. Bloggers these days will do anything to increase traffic to their websites in order to entice advertisers to pay for ad space.

With the proliferation of personal content sites, it takes a lot of caution when searching for information, to identify the facts from the fictions, the truth from the fallacies. Young bloggers use their blogs to voice their complaints, only to demonstrate their lack of maturity in handling life's issues. Curry-favourers easily show their support by leaving positive remarks, whether they mean it or not. Provokers can easily sabotage the site by leaving negative comments, perhaps just for the fun of it. The question is: who do you believe?

Then there is the computer virus that lurks out there. Now, even legitimate sites could be infected, so there is no way to claim 100% safe. The irony is that, if hackers and spammers succeed in destroying the Internet, these people would have nothing to live for. They have killed the hand that feeds them. Now that computers are getting so cheap, it probably makes sense to buy a dirt-cheap computer for Internet surfing, and a powerful computer for serious work.

And perhaps one day, when every single human being needs to register a virtual international identity profile to validate his or her authenticity, we will behave ourselves better on the Internet.

Quiet, Don't Tell Her the MP3s are here

I've been doing so much photo taking and editing that I have not touched on my music side of me for the past month, so I decided to arrange 2 pop songs.

"Quiet" 安静 by Jay Chou, is a favourite song to many many people out there. I remember my cousin asking me to teach her how to play this song a few years back, and she only had electone organ training which she stopped for a hundred over months. My arrangement uses the warm pad and strings as accompanying instruments to my piano.

The other song I did is "Don't Tell Her" 不要对她说 by Jeff Chang. A 1995 oldies by pop song standard, songs like this are worth reminiscing. I was reminded of this song when I saw one of Huirong's blog post.

The songs can be listened on my IMEEM playlist at the top right of my blog.

Everybody Loves Mayenne

These days, everywhere we go, we get lots of attention. Passers-by look towards us, relatives swarm around us. Yes, Mayenne is the attraction.

After 5 months, we are getting a hang of Mayenne's behaviour, her likes, her dislikes, her routine. One thing we still haven't figured out: she loves to turn to her tummy, yet after she did that she would be upset and would cry. The only explanation we have now is that she feels immobilised as she has yet to learn how to crawl properly. We try not to put her on her tummy too often for it would most certainly result in a mess of her puke, usually just a spoonful. What we fear is the occasional catastrophic "merlion" effect gives us extra washing and smell.

We also find that her legs are getting very strong, thanks to her persistent leg-stretching exercises that are often so violent that she hits hard objects yet without feeling pain. When we carried her up in the air, her legs would stretch out and lock so tight that she would be able to put her feet firmly on the ground while we support her underarms.

Angie's mum is recovering very well, and she can't wait to hold and carry Mayenne once again. But that has to wait for a few more months until she fully regains her health and mobility. We have also engaged a foreign domestic worker (FDW, a.k.a maid) to care for her mum, and later Mayenne. The FDW should be arriving in a week or two. Meanwhile, my mum has been giving us tremendous help in taking care of Mayenne at times when Angie and I are busy. Thanks to Mayenne's good behaviour, everyone is happy to spend some good times with her.

Here's more good times captured on pixels.

Private Life?

I haven't been blogging much about my private life, which is, um, private. But basically my life has undergone extreme re-configuration after Angie's mum was hospitalised. Since then, the situation is being brought under control, but it will be a few more weeks before we establish a new routine.

That's the beauty of mankind - and every living organism. We evolve and adapt. Humans adapt faster than any other complex living thing because we have a highly-evolved brain to help us analyse and adapt. But often, we try to outsmart ourselves and ended up with detrimental results. Or we may have too many choices and what-ifs and resulting in delays in decision-makings. Other living things are more lucky. They only have one set of responses to follow. Call them stupid, but at least they know their purpose in life.

Look at our baby girl as she grows, we are gradually introducing her knowledge so that she can make decisions. For instance, if she is hungry, initially she could only cry. Then after a while, she finds a new option: to shout for attention to be fed. Very soon in the near future, she will be able to choose to tell us in words and phrases, or any of the above, when she's in a foul mood.

Turn Left, Turn Right

Do you see the figure turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?

I found this post from a blogger, Averal. Basically, if you see clockwise, then you use your right brain. If you see anti-clockwise, then you use your left brain. For more explanation, vist her blog and look for the post dated 30 Oct 2007.

I found a way to 'switch' directions. Just focus on the shadow on the legs, then bluff your brain into believing that the legs are rotating in another direction. It took me a while to get it right, and after that, switching was an ease. I guess it's also a good exercise to switch your brains. Maybe you should watch this animation and force yourself to switch to that desired direction in order to use that part of your brain. For instance, if you are undecided about something, and you want to think logically, then look at the animation and force yourself to see the anti-clockwise.

Updated 11 Dec 2007: some readers still think that the animation above is fake, that is, the animation actually changes direction on itself. I've attached a screenshot of the animation sequence here. Click to see. There are 34 frames in this animation and it loops. So whether the dancer turns left or turns right depends on how your brain sees it. This is no trickery: only your brain is tricking you.