First Public Music Performance
On Friday night, May 30th, I performed with my company Samba Services band at Retro Music Hall in Prague.
I didn’t expect the warm welcome and cheer of the crowd, many of which were probably our colleagues.
[Retro]
Samba Services “Afoxe” leaded by Flavinha Torga
Samba Services “Samba” leaded by Flavinha Torga
Samba Services “Olodum” leaded by Flavinha Torga
Playing Samba
After a few months of practice on how to make noises on Brazilian instruments: the sudo, tamborines, shakers etc. my colleagues and I finally performed at our company’s Salsa party at Vysehrad Congress Center. I play the shaker.
My ears are keen on melody but not rhythms, and I don’t feel so much for rhythms. I’m doing it to develop my musical ability and to balance my brain from my daily routine at work: procedures and technical details. If you care about left- brain and right-brain, you will know what I’m talking about.
After the shaker, I plan on playing other instruments. Let see!
I’m having trouble uploading .avi file to youtube, thus you have to wait to see the video of our performance.
Chill out before the performance
Our 15 min of fame
Winning the Company Women Squash Tournament
I didn’t buy any new sporting outfit to intimidate my opponents; I didn’t need to anyway as I won the women tournament wearing my old workout clothing and the same old, ridiculously long pants which I shortened neatly.
There weren’t many female participants anyway and the games were easy, but I was happy to win something. The prize was a dinner voucher for two at Hiton Hotel’s restaurant. Cool isn’t it?
Mind Mapping – Thinking and Organizing Creatively
Mind Map’s mastermind, Tony Buzan, developed the concept of Mind Mapping out of frustration for the ineffective traditional note-taking which was difficult create and review. Jotting down speaker’s words line by line or even summarizing keywords are done linearly and chronologically, meaning that notes relating to the speaker’s point X somewhere on page numbered Y can be on another page numbered Z. At the end of the lecture, we might not even remember the connection among related ideas. I have years of collection of useless college notes to backup this claim.
With Mind Mapping, a big-picture snapshot of your thinking process, your brainstorming session or your summary of a topic is laid out on one single piece of paper. Key points and important ideas are recorded in a way that show their ordered and connection to one another. The seen diagram is a summary of Michael Faraday.
I have applied this Mind Mapping technique to brainstorm my travel, to prioritize tasks for flat moving and to learn the grammar of a foreign language in addition to taking notes of horribly boring technical and procedural presentations at work. My work productivity increases as rehashing my knowledge and looking up forgotten points take only minutes.
I currently use are Concept Draw Mindmap, Mindjet Map Manager and free-version web-app MindMeister.
/>> See more samples of mind-map diagrams and view a list of mind-mapping software.
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Dress Like a Pro
It takes only sports-specific clothing and confident body language to cause an opponent’s resolve to waver, according to a study in the journal Psychology of Sports and Exercise.
Three weeks ago, I tried out Karate at a friend’s club. Having no uniform, I wore a T-shirt and a horribly long and loose pair of sweat pants. I could not kick nor move properly because the damn pants kept getting on my feet no matter how tightly I tried to fold it above my heel. I felt so embarrased in this piece of clothing that I was not entirely focused on practicing the move, instead I let myself wander to “Don’t look at my feet…Where should I go and buy nice sport clothing?” Fortunately, this was only a casual practice. It would have been a disaster if I had to spar with someone while thinking about the next sporting shop at Wencelas Square.
It’s true that if we suck at our games, an impressive Wilson and Nike styled clothing closet will not save us from embarrassing defeats. However, if we and our opponents are on the same level, maybe a professinonal brand sportswear will boost our confidence, and this is all we need to win.
My squash tournament is coming in two weeks. Let see if a pro sportswear is going to save me.
[Link]
Formula for Success – Very Brief
Successful Outcome = Perseverance + Passion + Creativity + Talent + Luck
[Link]
Flickr – Show off Your Pictures and Get Paid
Up until now, Flickr was simply a photo-sharing site where I showed off my pictures until out of the blue, Pricelss.com contacted me and asked to use some of my photos taken in France.
Wow! Was that for real? For a while, I’d been searching for photo competition and submitted my pictures to a few sites and did not get any response from them. Then now, without any effort searching for buyers, I earn from those photos enough money to pay for my Flickr hosting around 20 years.
Many of my friends have better cameras and accessories than I do, cost up to thousands of dollars. They also have far more technical skills and knowledge. However, in this information era, skills and talent though important but do not matter as much as the ability to marketing oneself. My photos on Flickr have far more chance to be noticed by interested parties than my friends’ photos which sitting on their computers.
Not only Flickr is an exceptionally cool photo-sharing website, it is an increasingly popular internet marketing tool which you should definitely try out.
" by Robert Holden]Google Click Click and Tick off MSN
Google’s newest 1 billion-plus acquisition has been splattered all over the news. On many blogs I regularly read, I saw variations of “Google Bought Doubleclick.” The speculation, analysis and sizzling discussions reminded me of Google’s buying Youtube not so long ago. I did not care about this news becase at the time, it wasn’t relevant to me. Then I recevied a newsletter from Performics, an affiliate network I have recently promoted, spreading the same news and disclosing that it was owned by Double Click. (No matter what you do, there is Google. ;-D)
MSN, like Yahoo!, is desperately trying to compete as if they can even catch up with Goole when it comes to online advertising. I occationally read news from MSN site and sometimes peek down to the bottom of the screen to behold their ads. These financial-oriented ads are nowhere irrelevant. The much-anticipated MSN’ Contextual Ad Program has not yet opened to public.
So what was MSN’s next step? Well, it brought an … antitrust case against Google. Ummm, do you see the irony of this action or want me to spell out to you?
For the moment Microsoft is being a sore loser. Along with AT&T, it was quick to cry antitrust wolf upon hearing that Google had won the bidding for DoubleClick-sweet irony, given that Microsoft and AT&T have both fallen foul of antitrust regulators in the past for abusing their monopolies. “Advertisers don’t want a Wal-Mart-isation of digital advertising,” where one firm (like Wal-Mart in retailing) becomes so big that it can dictate prices, says Tom Chavez, the boss of Rapt, a firm that analyses online-advertising data on behalf of publishers and advertisers.
You might think that if other software and hardware companies could plays (they did) the same antitrust card against Microsoft and won handsomely, why can’t the former defendant do the same thing now?
Of course, they can. However:
That said, Mr Chavez adds, Google is still far from becoming a Wal-Mart-and even Wal-Mart is not facing an antitrust investigation. Unlike AT&T and Microsoft, both of which exerted a strong technological “lock in” over their customers, Google operates in a more open market that is easier for competitors to contest. Regulators will scrutinise the Google-DoubleClick deal, as they should. But Google is not a monopolist-just a company that is, for the moment at least, ahead of its peers.
I am not sure about the non-monopolist statement, but a deserving winner, definitely.
[The Economist, Apr. 21 Edition]
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