I was quite unlucky lately. Just two days before Chinese New Year Eve, I had the stomach inflamation. Diarrhea and vomitting — I can’t remember when’s the last time I vomit, bad feeling. So I was weak through out whole day yesterday and luckily some friend could drive me back to home town in this CNY eve — it’s the traditional family should gather together in CNY eve.

Anyway, the good side and also the bad side, I couldn’t enjoy all the traditional food this round.

Since then I have been following some ISV or MicroISV’s blog on and off. Some people’s success story really inspiring me but I have never taken any actions at all. What are those obstacles stopping me to go further? I have been pondering about it these few days, and here are my analysis of my own fear:

• I have no confidence to start a software business on my own. Ever since I started playing managing roles and act as a manager, I have less and less time putting my hand on any coding. Time flies and I do enjoy the manager role with its challenge and working with group of smart people. But to think about my own capability to start a MicroISV (one or two person ISV), I am hesistate. Despite, age of 33 has gotten me the fear to compete to young people. It looks like full of young and brilliant software people out there, and most of new pattern of success seem coming from young people. So, is it too late to start?
• Lacking of ideas: the question of “what to develop” has been sticking in my mind for months and I couldn’t get myself an answer. Lots of smart people’s blog suggested ideas aren’t the key thing to your product — you tend to find out what’s your strength, do the marketing analysis and following instinct. Well, I am not there yet.
• Security. Still, I have myself and my family to feed. There should have a stably cash flow plan if one got to sustain his/her startup business.

Finally, I have started to do some analysis on my own thought and reason of my procrastination. Feeling good to putting down the words. And from now on it should be the time to target to remove the obstacles one by one.

It means I am disorganized, although I do think the project’s work load is a little too extreme on the current manpower. Lesson to learn, a project signed and started too late is always a bomb.

I hope to back to normal blogging as I did in November. That’s good, no matter if anyone read it or not. Writing itself gave me some satisfaction. The blog entry of half a million ringgit race 2 bring some traffic lately, surprising even bring over one of my ex-colleague. People are still used to emailing good web URL nowadays.

Office’s the incubator for disease. Think about how many people open and close the same door. People cough and sneeze.….So if you’re sick, don’t think about going to work, take the rest and get well. It would help you, as well as others.

It is 6:30am early morning. I am waiting my sister to drive me and my wife to airport - we’re going to Bali. Yes, a trip! It would be totally relax trip, which I’m looking for over last 3 months. My last job stopped 2 weeks ago, and since then I’ve been enjoying jobless: reading, sport, movies.… (err…but didn’t do any blogging at all. It’s weird, when you’re out of one field, you are just.…out…I don’t even read blogs)

The new job would start on Oct 10. I would use this time gap to re-energy myself and regain the rhythm of my life, and my career, and blogging.

Nonetheless, I would like to force myself to keep blogging, even just paste some dummy links would do. My previous blogging ceased when something unpleasant happened. I was just too easy to let go and escaping, on anything.

I would like to try. It’s a good habit to regularly posting to blog, so as a very suitable pratice for my discipline.

Tell you honestly, 9 out of 10 taxi pass by, that’s only one good taxi driver. But 99 out of 100 passengers are BAD CUSTOMERS! They are always picky on the direction you choose: “Hey, why you take this way…” That was once the charge was RM4.90. I told the guy I really don’t have any shilling at that time. He insist to get back his 10 cents! End up I have to give him back one ringgit, by losing 90 cents. All they want is money, money, money.…sigh…And those passengers wearing nice shirts, shining ties ROBBED me with a knife, twice!!

He went on to mention he has only 8 dollars in pocket, but the nice looking young guy robbed him. Well, the ridiculous city. 99% are bad? No, I am a reasonable passenger and not the only one. He didn’t hear my grunt though. It is pathetic. I’d seen some unreasonable passengers , who treat taxi drivers like an enemy (‘coz of mouth-to-mouth bad reputation); there are also quite a number of taxi drivers cheating on their meter, or took you to the wrong way. It’s just difficult to build trust between taxi drivers and passengers, especially in KL. Somehow if we do think a bit of each other, reminding ourselves that we’re both just people trying to survive in this big city, thing would go easier.

Relax, life is tough.

To put the recap: we drove to Ipoh for my sister’s father in law’s funeral. Coming back to KL, I brought my parent a 2 days KL trip. What others I did? Shopping, shopping and more shopping, watching T3 (hence the title), surveying digital camera, driving and more driving, all these exhausted activities distracted me from blogging/Internet.

While I was not blogging, I felt guilty of let the blog frontpage hanging for 4 days. And when I didn’t read blog, I am uncomfortable, feeling like I haven’t finished something I should have before going to bed.

All additive stuff is drug. So do Internet, so do blogging.

Meanwhile, Project Petaling Street v1.5 has officially launched! You could link to PPS if you are a Malaysian and you have a blog. More details here. I didn’t contribute much to the beta testing (shame on me), mostly because of my low spirit and personal events. The beta test is well done. Congrats, Aizuddin.

Here’s come the survey..nope, I am lazy and tired, and hate to surf around to check out which’s good which’s bad — and then confusing myself (always end up to confusion). My choice is limited to a few latest Palm PDA (Tungsten series, Palm Zire 71 or some Sony CLIE models) since Palm seem to be on the edge after their Tungsten series (so Handspring is out. And btw, they’ve been merged with Palm). Blog rocks! I just checked Aizuddin’s survey, compare of Palm Zire 71 and CLIE SJ33, and his review of Palm Zire 71, I have almost made up my mind. Palm Zire 71 would be the choice. Feel good of how helpful is blog.

At last, the only problem is, I am greedy. A Palm, or a decent digital camera? No decision yet. (No budget for both).

It’s a sad day, hearing all these news, and the failed operation? of conjoined twins Laleh and Ladan Bijani. In their last letter, they said:

Both of us have started on this journey together and we hope that the operation will finally bring us to the end of this difficult path, and we may begin our new and wonderful lives as two separate persons.

Nobody could really imagine how they actually gone through all these years. I take my hat off to them, for their courage. And may them rest in peace.

Well, enough grumbling. They are nice people and my good friends. In fact, I realize it isn’t easy to change one’s personality (me too). Most of the times, I would just accept. If it’s bothersome, a bit grumbling could cure. :-)

Oops, but I have just joined the PPS 1.5 Beta project. I am a late-comer to the core team, so it’s good to start with the beta test. Watch out for it, the project has attracted many smart people, and sure it’s enjoyable to read them.

The new syndication format design exercise is well worth monitoring. I have no any big projects on hand ever since my department having a re-org few months ago. But soon I might take up a new challange on some new development, and work with new group of people. The ongoing discussion gave me lots of inspiration.

This is terrible, you won’t like it when coming back and forth between healthy and fever. Doctor said:”It’s OK, it isn’t dengue, not SARS either, just fever”. So that’s it, end the story. I got two full days rest and finally this Saturday I am fully recovered, except the muscle-ache at the shoulder, which came with overslept.

Now I have the determination for my plan of weight control — swimming, jogging, badminton…Healthy is everything, you bet.

Of course there wouldn’t anybody interested in this, just to keep my blog at least once a day. :P

Don’t really know who sent me
To raise my voice and say:
May the lights in The Land of Plenty
Shine on the truth some day.
…

The Land of Plenty, Leonard Cohen.