My latest brain hack is to run something that is timed and useful, simultaneously with whatever task I’m doing. Like boiling eggs while working on a video. Twice the productivity.

Having browsed through some old entries to my blog, thankfully saved by the Wayback machine, I found this video that I thought was interesting to share:

I recently got hit by a malware infection (SQL injection, for the techie types out there, and I have no clue how it happened), and finally I have restored my blog. Apologies to everybody who have been following it all this while.

With that said, this is a prime opportunity to rebuild my website. Nothing from the past is lost (the text is still in a database file I’ve downloaded, and the old site’s files are backed up on my HDD and Time Capsule), and over time, I will curate and re-upload old posts back online.

In the meantime, to all my readers out there, enjoy the fresh start to 2012!

And so another year in my life has officially passed by.

As planned, I crossed the threshold point with little fanfare. Last year, the count was 6, excluding well-wishing from my family and people who recently came to know. This year, using the same criteria, it was 1, and it wasn’t even posted on a public “Facebook wall”.

My goal has well and truly been accomplished. I never intended it to be an experiment when I started taking down 110726 from my profile pages, but by the time I hit university, I started thinking, how many people could remember it without having to refer to Facebook to find out? Also, how low could I have the number go?

I decided to carry out a long experiment in interactive social psychology (call that a term I conjured up in a whirlwind), risking, of course, some degree of alienation, scratching of heads and weird looks. In would insist that I did not do anything overtly special on this day, and that none of my friends do anything special or buy me anything. At most, I allowed myself a special food treat, like a mocha rather than coffee. I was my own treatment group. The only downside was I had no control group – unless you considered all of my normal friends who celebrated their birthdays normally.

A few years back, I wrote a mock-paper on the subject, and found that friends are incredibly forgetful, even with reminder tools.

Combine that with my insistence to keep today as normal and low-key as possible, means that for once, I had a less-than-normal day on the 24th anniversary of the day I was born.

Today looked like this: Go to work, encounter a really bad interpersonal problem at work, try to resolve problem at work, come home with a heavy heart, ask in prayer for peace and wisdom to deal with it, then find a future potential problem.

Breakfast: As usual.

Lunch: A sandwich I hadn’t eaten at the cafe in over 2 months now.

Dinner: A soup invention with noodles; leftover cheesecake from another friend’s birthday dinner for dessert.

What a day eh?

I have decided to stop this experiment. In some respects, risking the scratching heads and weird looks of misunderstanding was worth it. I confirmed my own hypotheses, and reached an unbelievably low number of ‘HBDs’ for the average city slicker. Concealing my own birth date also served to protect myself from the undesirable advances of others who might want to ‘persuade’ me to down ethanol on this day.

But I have found myself also becoming sensitive to the joy and happiness others have when they share their special days with other friends, and I don’t want to risk this sensitivity turning into cynicism and bitterness. That would be simply a big, big mistake.

I still won’t reveal on my public profile pages the day I was born or my age. But I will no longer insist that friends do nothing for me. From this point onwards, I will gladly accept if they decide to do anything edifying (ethanol pushers read: encourage intellectual, moral, or spiritual improvement, so I am saying NO to EtOH still), like having a chat about life over coffee, or learning from seniors how to deal with challenges ahead in school, or sharing about deeply meaningful and purposeful living.

(Side note: I find that the higher I probe in grad school, the fewer deeply purposeful people I can find… and instead, I see a lot more of self-servitude, survival-of-the-fittest scarcity mentalities, and cynicism, be it overt, subtle or subconscious in nature.)

Anyways, it is late now, and is already the next day. Time to move on, and time to sleep.

What do you have that you can give away?

Is it money? Skills? Talent? Time? Knowledge?

More often than not, my epiphanies come from being in the washroom. This particular epiphany is no exception, coming while showering.

We all possess something that can be given away. More often than not, we have more than one of those four things that we can give away.

That is the richness of our life. When we give away one of these things, it shows that we are rich in those things.

If I cling to those things, to my money, to my time, to hide my talent or skills, it tells of an attitude of impoverishment.

Yet the whole irony behind giving these things away is that invariably, the better you steward them for the benefit of others, the more you will receive back. That is called an investment of riches.

On the flip side, the more you try to keep them to yourself, the more impoverished you will be. That is called indulgence towards impoverishment.

We’re all given things with which we can choose to invest in others, or indulge for ourselves.

What will you choose?

“The more you give, the more you will receive.” – Unknown
“Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.” (Mark 4:25 NIV)

Yet again, it comes to the point that I must pack up an leave. My journey continues on. San Francisco was a stop en route to Boston, just as UCSF was a stop en route to MIT. (I’ve been in biotech cities, come to think of it.)

This time, packing is much easier. I have much less gunk than before. My life has been much more streamlined and digitized, save for a few nooks and crannies.

Throughout the process, I have realized one thing, confirmed in a blog post on the Zen habits blog: experiences > possessions. The way I see it, possessions are but a tool – a tool for bringing new experiences or making a continuing one enhanced further.

I hope that in the following years, I don’t fall into the possessions trap, but rather that I come to create shared experiences with my friends and, God willing, my mom and brother as well, for I think we’ve had one to few together.

I diverge. Packing, as a result of being streamlined, has been made much easier. Digitizing paperwork, much of which I hardly access anyways, lightens a ton of a load. Add in a few other hacks to make packing more compact, and that makes for a simpler move.

What have I left to pack? No, I shan’t post a laundry list here. Clothes, computer, and perhaps one or two kitchen implements I’ve inherited, and that concludes it.

And yet again, a post on some practical life matter becomes an excuse to write about philosophical thoughts instead.

Graduation Snippet #1: Funny how today, when I went to Brock Hall to pick up my diploma, I couldn’t find the mouthful to say that word, even though it was right in front of my eyes (on the sign board next to the staff). I asked, “Good morning, I would like to pick up my degree… um, yeah, that sheet of paper…” I’m pretty sure they all gave me weird looks. Pays homage to how socially unadjusted I’ve become.

Graduation Snippet #2: I was about the only person at today’s ceremony clad in black, orange, yellow, green and white. (Black shorts, orange biking fleece, yellow biking windbreaker, green helmet and white t-shirt.) Everybody else had gowns and flowers in black, orange, yellow, green and white.

People ask me why I didn’t attend my own graduation ceremony, but still made the time to get to my friends’ ceremonies. Simply put, I don’t like it when things are about “I, me and myself”, which is what graduation ceremonies are about – “my” time to cross the stage, “I” receiving congratulations from friends, “my” diploma etc. Which is why I don’t celebrate things normal people celebrate, like birthdays, because they are about “I, me and myself”. It’s not my style of doing things. Moreover, when things are focused on the “outside” and not on the “inside”, with unnecessary pomp and procession, that makes things even worse. Just as Hank shivers whenever I speak Chinese, I shudder at the thought of needing to dress up.

I attended my high school graduation ceremony, where we also had to dress up, with tie, dress shirt, formal pants and black shoes. To receive whatever I received on stage from my form teacher, Mrs. Seck (who, if I only remember correctly, only did makeup on two occasions: her marriage anniversary and her students’ graduation)… That was experience enough to go through twenty seconds of fame, and I certainly don’t feel the need, and neither do I see the need, for the pomp and procession of more of the same.

Some people tell me that ceremonies are not designed for “me”, but for friends and family to congratulate me. So the real purpose is really about others to remember my achievement of making it through university, even if I don’t care much for the idea of making it through university. Frankly, I don’t buy that idea – the center of that argument is still the “me” – with “me” as the target of affection, praise and congratulations. Whether or not I like it or not.

Having attended two graduation ceremonies last year, I saw how impersonal and fleeting the ceremony is. I was reciting President Toope’s speech on the second ceremony. The ceremony is but a forgettable marker in time. The high of graduation comes and goes, and all I had thought of when I got home was to sleep.

What I’d truly take away from UBC wouldn’t be the pomp and procession of convocation, nor the words of the valedictorian, nor the words of the President. Rather, what I’d take away from UBC are the lessons learned, both from the classroom and from personal experience, on how to think, how to learn, and how to teach. University Chapel taught me how to be a person. And together, I’ve been equipped with personal traits and skills to bring service and blessings to the world through research. None of this substantial stuff is related to a forgettable ceremony.

The above is why I don’t attend ceremonies. Then, why in the world would I make it to a ceremony not of my own?

The graduating batch of iGEMers are a different story. We have walked a tough final year together, complete with sleepless nights, LAN parties, making each other the butt of jokes, and an awesome road trip to top it off. That makes enduring President Toope’s recurring speech, the pomp and pretence of the ceremony, the crowds and lineups (I hate both) and the rain worth every minute I spent there. They may not share my viewpoints on graduation ceremonies, but I can totally dig that. The photos are for them, because they would like it and would love it.

Congratulations, Hank, Mark and Amelia; wherever the four of us end up, may we never forget each other and the great times together.