Here’s a great story for youth and kids! Lolli ventures to Beauty Land as she is led to believe she can be more beautiful there. She ends up trading away everything she loves but then finally discovers the essence of real beauty. A lovely and heartwarming story by Singaporean storyteller Neo Beng Choo and artwork by Neo Beng Poh. Includes Lolli voiceovers by Mikayla Khoo (2+) and a song by Chee Hui Ling.
This full-featured widget also contains a special section for a ‘chat with Lolli’ (ie. the author and production team), reader feedback, and options for buying the actual book (printed by Armour Publishing). The widget is designed to be responsive and really lightweight (just over 100kb for loading up). So enjoy!
Back in the days before the Internet, letters were a decidedly more enduring form of communication. Now with blogs it’s easy to see archives hanging around in theory forever. But somehow more seems less. More email doesn’t carry that same touch or feel - maybe because it’s all been depersonalised into Arial or Times New Roman. With letters that you’d receive once a week or even once a month, you’d be quite happy reading, or rereading them a dozen times. Blog posts don’t have that kind of longevity, understandably, nor email. Unfortunately the only things that come through mail nowadays are bills and sales flyers - and all of them are ironically trying to sell that personal touch.
My Dad’s passing me a bunch of letters, poems my grandfather wrote to my grandmother. He was a librarian and very well read so they must be quite literary. So they’ve been ‘bequeathed’ to me and I suppose I’ve got to take on the baton and do something about family history. I’ve never been a big writer myself as I’ve always liked to say more with less, acting as critic rather than creator (though it’s also true critics write voluminously more on a single point than most authors intend). Here are some ideas I’ve been considering anyhow.
Idea 1: If they’re substantial enough, perhaps they’d be worth publishing with some of Dad’s stuff and mine, as a Khoo family anthology. [four stars]
Idea 2: Develop them as a base for a song and then record matthew in backing vocals as an intergenerational piece. [two stars]
Idea 3: Reconstruct a ’story’ with Dad’s input and turn it into a digital story of family history. I’ve always relied on uncles and aunts to do this: guess it’s time to pitch in. [three stars]
Meanwhile, I’m glad Firefox 3 has finally arrived. Great new predictive URL function and nicely resized backbutton. Let’s see if it proves more stable with Google Apps. Makes me wonder when Opera’s going to roll out the next major upgrade. For all of us waiting for that perfect browser it doesn’t seem so far away now.
The theme for Sunday Sharing this week is ‘What I remember most about Dad’.
“And there where cold winds howl into the mist of morning, fresh with autumn change, and leaves scurry on to warmer domains: in those mulled moments ensconced by family and fireplace, we remember all.” (Life beside the River by Thomas Crooke)
With dad, there’s always the expression of faith to remember. My dad grew up in a Christian home but never encountered God until middle life - and it wasn’t because of a crisis - just a deep encounter with God one day in a meeting. The significance of a personal faith was something I learnt in the many father-son sharing times we had, casual, instructive, sometimes too well-worn, yet heartfelt. There I also learnt to listen to heart and not just words; love, not just well-meaning intentions.
The faith I recall was of personal encounter that led to a life journey of seeking God. For him this meant leaving a job he had trained half his life for as a chartered surveyor, joining a church, then becoming a pastor, then later a missionary. In these transitions what I remember most is a deep humility and purposed conviction that there is more in life in what we can’t see than in what we can. A 200% universe that is underscored with purpose, meaning and design if we cared to look and if we dared to see. The point was, the cost is easy to calculate when you can see what you’re losing out: money, pleasures, prestige. But it’s the cost you can’t see, the possibilities in the other 100% of the unseen universe that can make life unsettlingly unfulfilled: the incalculable unknown potential of what’s missed, or lost, or left unclaimed.
And where the recollection of conversations meld into that expression of faith, it’s turned into a challenge to build something of greater significance. A legacy Mikayla and Matthew might themselves remember as something to treasure. Thanks Dad!
I just joined a blogging carnival and the theme is on Fathers. This week, it’s Father’s Hands so I’m drawing from the momentum here to post something. Hopefully regularly. Technology is cool for professional reasons but then again something closer to the heart is more likely to inspire me to write.
But first, since I’m on lenses, I can’t resist sharing about the most amazing 3-D viewer I’ve seen yet: stunning, fast and effective. Pic-Lens lets you glide through an entire archive of photos and videos in an enhanced aesthetic environment.
I’ve taken my fair share of baby feet, enough to know that this one says it all. Beauty in bite size means you don’t need to do anything to be meaningful, or strive into a new suit of significance. It’s enough that you’re resting in a pair of hands that is willing to do it all for you. And if you share faith, with a God this big, to have created the universe and replicate your life in DNA, doesn’t seem like there should be all that much to be worried about? Feet fettered? Or ardently admired. That’s closer to truth!
And then we all grow up, older, wiser, or so we think. Until we encounter the magic of seeing life from the other side of the lens: and the wonderment of maybe we don’t know it all. Afterall, a few years more of relatively wiser, stronger, bigger becomes no less treasured in the hand of the infinitely transcendent creator.
We’ve released a complimentary key to our new EP on the Peopod main site itself. Check it out! Let us know what you think here.
This new digital music album features full releases with enhanced vocals for ‘Summer of Life’, ‘Skidmarks’, ‘The Tolls of Twelve’, and ‘In Your Eyes’, a song for that special someone!
Step 1: Download the Free Album at CD Quality - 320kbps
Step 2: Access your Complimentary Key
I’ve just put this up on an experimental music page to tap on the power of the CSE. It’s pretty cool. Since free indie music is pretty much a stab in the dark, it makes perfect sense to explore it based on activity or function first and then genre.
This opens up a new window behind the exisiting window (and in IE7, FF and OP, opening a new tab behind the window). If you liked Shift+Click, you will definitely love Ctrl+Click. The full power of this function is revealed when you want to browse a full listing of, for example, the first twenty returns on Google.
Do a Ctrl+Click on all the twenty by holding down the Ctrl button and clicking in rapid succession down the list. You’ll see them opening up behind the current tab (i.e. located in the same window). This saves time waiting for pages to load only after you click them. With all the links open, you can then browse swiftly across the tabs, closing those you don’t want.
Enter something into the Google custom search engine on the left and then blitz away! (you’ll remain on this page)
If you happen to be using IE6 and below, you will need to upgrade or switch browsers to try this out. Between IE7 and Firefox2, I’d recommend the latter as it’s generally faster and more secure but try both out and see.
Activating this on a hyperlink opens the link in a new window. When you’re doing a keyword search in Google or happen to be on a site that contain lots of useful links, use this function to browse the second level of links. By keeping the first page of links open you preserve your focus in surfing deeper and can just close the window when you’re done.
You also save tremendous amounts of time not having to navigate backwards using your back button thereby cutting out all the unnecessary reloading of pages. Nothing can be more frustrating than trying to decide whether to follow a new lead or return to a previous point to scan the other promising ones. Using this function, you don’t have to decide at once. Try it out and see how much faster you’re moving! Browsing through an entire Google list becomes virtually effortless.
Now if you’re running a tabbed browser (IE7 only, FF, Opera) you can try a variation of this with Ctrl+Shift+Click or Ctrl+Shift+Enter. This opens a new tab in front of the previous page instead of a new window. I personally love Opera for leading innovation on many aspects of browser functionality - it’s quite the browser for techies.
Browsers:
Internet Explorer 7.0: Shift+Click (new window), Ctrl+Shift+Click (new tab)
Mozilla Firefox: Shift+Click (new window), Ctrl+Shift+Click (new tab)
Opera: Shift+Click (new window), Alt+Click (new tab)
In an age of information glut and overload, it’s become something of a lifeskill to be able to navigate and filter quickly through lots of sites so that you get the best value for time. If you’ve never really updated your surfing and searching skills since the last century, it’s time to catch up!
Search technologies and facilities have definitely evolved and many of these innovations may not come to us ‘naturally’ unless we are specifically looking for them. In this series I will be covering ten key tips for speeding up surfing, and another ten for searching. So what’s the difference? Stay tuned and find out!
(We will be discussing features from 3 browsers: IE - Internet Explorer, FF - Mozilla Firefox, OP - Opera)
The creative impulse comes from almost about anywhere and we often find a need to express and share it. If you have a blog, chances are DIY music is something you’d have thought about bringing into your personal publishing world. Afterall, words on a page only travel through the visual medium, and music has that strange ability to reach into the soul.
Modern technology can help us express and share our moments of inspiration in some form of DIY music and make it highly accessible. You might be curious about how far you could go with turning fragments of poetry into listenable indie pieces, and it’s not really so tough. But it’s a journey nonetheless to develop and nurture that seed of inspiration.
DIY music is the future less travelled. It’s going from expressing your personality through buying the music you like, to actually learning what goes into creating the music you like. And it might lead to you learning a little about everything from songwriting to miking, designing a home studio to distributing music online.
The best part is, you’d have something that’s personal and performable. Who knows where this might end up?
