What makes you feel alive?

No I  am not talking about breathing or eating. I'm referring to something in life that when you do, makes you feel like..... you are a human, you are made of flesh and blood, and you are..... alive.
For me, I feel most alive when I'm feeding my emotional hunger.

I don't know about most people, but when I
- when i watch a sad/touching  movie, I grieve and cry
- when I spent time with my loved ones, I feel content
- when I interact with animals and feel them, I feel warmth
- when I see other living creatures suffer, I feel pain.

All these emotions makes me feel alive.
It always gives me a temporary break from my usually numbed senses (you know what I'm talking if you are working in a large multi national coorperate).

People closed to me always say that I'm negative. But no. I'm always seeking those feeling from watching sad/touching movies, or listening to touchy songs because I want to trigger those senses which reminds me that I'm still flesh and blood, I still have a soul, and most importantly, I'm still alive.

And for others, I can't tell you to do the same thing. Everyone has different things that they need to feed themselves so that they feel alive. For me it's mostly the emotional triggers. You will have to find it out for yourself what is it that really makes you feel alive.

And once you have found it, never ever trade anything else in exchange for it. Protect it with thick moat, make sure that any other parts of your life style never penetrate that moat. Every now and then, revisit those activities so that it reminds us that, despite the fact that we are drawn and drown into all the insensitive and numb daily activities of the corporate world, that we still have a soul, that we are still flesh and blood, and we are still alive.

Bye bye 2014, Hello 2015

Man, I couldn't really remember when  was the last time I blogged. It was like, writing blogs have been a very far far away thing to me now.....

Recalling back on the December's of every year, it has come to the time again to
- reflect on the accomplishment for the year
- and set new goals for the next.

2014
Looking back at the year , it has really been a year full of activities for me.
- it started all the way back from Oct 2013, where I could no longer take the heavy beating of being a people manager, and found a way out to a new company as an individual contributor (IC) once again.
- yeah I admit it. I was actually finding an easy way out instead of facing courageously at the problem at hand. But , having going thru weeks of abdominal cramps,  and later on succumb to sleepless vomitting nights made me clearly notice that I'm definitely not built for this.
- programming life at baysand was wonderful. No bureaucracy, no policies. Everything just got done so fast and so immediate. You don't need to write a 40 page functional spec just to come up with a new nightly built program, because There is only one customer (the tech lead).
- I got to learn a while ton of stuff. I got to own 2 eda tools (crossfire from fractal tech) and (Schematic porting tool from Muneda )
- this gave me the invaluable experience of not only how to deal with vendors , but also the way how a vendor should threat their customers
- I have the opportunity to get myself to extensively work on gnu Make, where I built a nightly regression tool for the company using crossfire, perl and Make.
- I gave up my martial art training (aikido and WingChun) due to my long working hours
- I changed my exercise time to 6am every morning, sleeping only for less than 6 hrs a day, sometimes even lesser
- I joined back my old company (Altera) in 5th May 2014 on condition that I'll be spared from being a people mamager. And once again I'm back at the python camp.
- I'm once again at the extreme end of the spectrum where everything that u do needs to go thru 726 levels of approval, and any code u write will never get materialized until u write the function spec for it.
- Im lunky enough to be able to work with some people from real software background
- and this changed my perspective towards a lot of things
- I have more respect and appreciation o  the things that I once despise ( functional specs and design patterns)
- I understand now that no matter where u work (be it a startup or old fart company), politics is always there to stay. You just can't change it.  The only thing that u can change .....is only your perspective towards each event, and how to react to it.
- with the experience I have gone thru, dealing with people from big companies, as well as CTO from a startup company, I'm more well versed in the language that people in company speak. (But I've got to admit that until today, I'm still not equipped with the balls of steel myionir of Thor to iron thru all this political shit as a people manager. )
- I found a new idol in the late 2014, joel spolfsky. And plan to read all of his blog posts.
- I started changing back my lifestyle to exercise during lunch, and have 7 hrs of sleep a day. And I now can think better and meditate more efficiently, thus keeping my stress level under constant check.
- our lovely poodle Zizi left us .
- then Dino followed...
- and then Simba joined them (kidney failure, stopped eating , then he suffered organs failure eventually)

- we finally changed our almost 10year old sofa, and also added a sofa style rocking chair 

- bee ee and entire family visited us in Penang in October.

- Danielle's family (parents and brother's family) visited us in Penang during Christmas.

- me , danielle and ming got ourselves a Samsung Note3. it was me and Danielle's first andriod device.

2015
- I will once again pick up wing chun seriously.
- my all time financial goal of being financially free by 2015 doesn't seem to be very likely. I will work extra hard and closely towards my extended goal of being financially free by 2020.

- continue to be more versatile in my career, technicallwise as well as soft skilled wise.