kevinleemelife happens. how will you adapt?

If you share my positive views of innovation and change, then there is a high chance that you consider living in this time period of endless technological advancement an absolute privilege.

My mother was gifted an iPad several days ago by a college friend of mine who is currently living at our house for the summer. Now I’ll be honest, although my project this summer deals entirely with tablets, I still don’t necessary find any specific “need” for this product (I do think there will be a need down the line and I could spawn a whole post about this but not now). Regardless, it’s an amazing piece of hardware with one of the best user experiences I have ever seen. I had just watched Toy Story 3 for the second time in theaters (absolutely amazing movie; Pixar really knew how to strike that childhood sentiment chord) so one of the first applications I downloaded from the App Store was a Toy Story visual book. Thinking that the application would be a 2-D book similar to any digital book you’d read on an e-reader, I opened the application only to find a rich interactive visual experience. Each page of the book was wonderfully animated with pictures that panned in different directions as the narrator read the book aloud to you. Words would highlight yellow as the narrator read, so you could follow along, and you could even touch a page which would instantly turn the page into a black and white stencil that you could color in. Heck, there were even short movie clips and mini-games that you could watch and play in between reading.

My description might have been a little information overload but the point I am trying to make is that several years down the line, I can envision myself sitting in bed with my child reading this visual book and playing toy story minigames on a touchscreen device. Interaction with content is one of the main forms of engaging students and there will eventually be so many more educational uses for new technologies such as the iPad. I’m still going to make my kid read REAL books and I will still read tangible books to him/her but technology has come such a far way that we would never have envisioned ten years ago.

“Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.”

I struggle daily thinking of how I will raise my own children. Will they work hard for everything they own or will they reap the benefits of my successes? Should they be encouraged in their youth like Cameron Herold to find ways to make their own money or simply be privileged to play in the sun during the fleeting years of their childhood?

What is considered the right way to raise a child?

In middle school, most of us might have blogged on Livejournal and Xanga, focusing on posts regarding our personal lives. If we weren’t talking about specific events throughout our day, we were ranting about our parents, teachers, and “anonymous” people we were angry at. And even though other people’s lives had nothing to do with our own, we soaked in this material because we were curious and we had nothing better to read.

As time goes by, our lives are complicated with technology that has allowed us to drift further and further away from reality. Every day, content is thrown at us in the masses. If you aren’t busy finishing work, you’re scrolling through the newsfeed on Facebook, watching related videos on Youtube, and reading the most popular news articles on Digg.

There simply isn’t the “time” to read about someone’s daily life on their blog anymore. Unless that content provides some sort of value to the reader, it simply becomes a filler.

A minor bump in the road that is forgotten as soon as we drive by.

Just like this post.

Yesterday at work, I watched Ranajit (employee who sits across from me) work on some slides involving a training powerpoint that he was trying to standardize among all Intel employees. The powerpoint training had to do with product pricing, an area that Ranajit did not focus on in his daily work.

I asked him, “Ranajit, why are you trying to create a training powerpoint involving a field that you have no expertise in?”

To which he replied, “If I were an expert in this subject, why would I waste time creating a training around it? Sure it will be a challenge to learn something completely different from my field of work, but I chose this subject of product pricing in order to force myself to learn.”

To often we seek comfort in the subjects we already know. I know many Asians who take Chinese as a language in college even though they grew up with the language in their homes. They study abroad in Shanghai, a familiar place with familiar people. We study a major in college because our parents tell us it is safe and job guaranteed.

The burden we face by immersing ourselves in a completely new environment pays off tenfold in the long run.

I had a middle school friend who always sacrificed the present by worrying about the future. If our families went to dinner together, and his parents wouldn’t let him come play at my house afterwards, he would be gloomy the entire dinner. If he knew that we only had 3 hours to play games together instead of 7 hours, he would spend all 3 hours begging his parents to let him stay that extra 4 hours.

Fast forward to 2010 and every day I find myself in the exact same situations. I constantly worry about my future and where I want to end up. I sacrifice the quality of my lifestyle eating cup noodles, thinking that saving that extra buck will add to my savings in the long term. And in the process, I forget the most important lesson: Enjoying life as it goes by day to day.

“We’re so busy watching out for what’s just ahead of us that we don’t take time to enjoy where we are.”
- Calvin & Hobbes

I have always, and always will admire disruptive new technologies/innovations and the utilities they bring to consumers

Although I have a Macbook, iTouch, and an iPhone, I’m not what one could call an Apple Fanboy. However, what I do appreciate is the new cultural revolution that Apple has brought to this world with the iPhone. Over these past few years, we have seen Apple revenues shoot through the roof with its smartphone release and watched as people all around us began to adopt this revolutionary new piece of hardware.

This morning, my mother came into my room raving about the iPhone 3GS that her friend had showed her. When I first bought my iPhone 3G, my mother wasn’t too impressed; she was more excited about receiving my iTouch which I would no longer need. However, my mother’s friend conveyed such excitement and passion for her 3GS that my mother couldn’t help but feel a need to purchase one for herself too.

And this is what Apple does best. Create such amazing products that people can’t help but act as “fanboys,” thus spreading this infectious “fanboyism” to fellow colleagues.

Focus on an amazing product, and all the rest will follow.

My project at work this summer revolves around tablets and I’ve delved so far into my research that I’ll probably go crazy if I see another tablet. The 2 opposing views that everyone is currently debating:

1) Tablets will eventually replace netbooks and notebooks

2) Tablets are just a fad. Something that everyone wants, but no one needs.

What do you guys think?

My dad told me an interesting story today.

A husband had a wife who would always cut off both ends of a sausage before cooking them for breakfast. When he asked her why she wasted perfectly normal pieces of meat, she simply mentioned, “I’m just following what my mom alway used to do.” Later that year during an extended family dinner, the husband watched his wife’s mother prepare sausages in the kitchen and noticed the primary removal of both ends of the sausages. Again, he asked his mother-in-law why her and her daughter would waste these pieces of meat. And once again, the answer was the same. “I’m just following what my mom always used to do.”

Curiosity got the better of him, and the husband decided to call his wife’s grandmother to ask why exactly this tradition had been passed down for so many generations. He called the grandmother, asked her the same question and received the following response. “Oh that tradition? I only cut off both ends of the sausages so that they would fit in my pan since it wasn’t big enough to hold a full sized sausage.”

Sometimes we blindly follow traditions and beliefs without truly understanding the reasoning behind them.

For most corporate jobs, all employees have some sort of badge or verification item that they have to wave across a scanner in order to access a building. At Intel, we have a badge with a bar code that we wave across a sensor which then blinks green and unlocks the door. For about three weeks I’ve been clipping my badge to my pocket and then removing it to scan each and every single time I walk past a sensor. Then after I finish scanning the card, I have to fumble around and reclip the badge to my pocket.

As you can imagine… it’s a huge waste of time. Especially if I’m holding a binder, laptop case, and a drink. Very hard to hold 4 things at once. So I went to the Intel museum store and bought myself an attached clipon extender which lets you clip your badge to an extendable/retractable string. It allows me to pull my badge as far as I want to scan it and then release it upon which it retracts back to the clipon extender. Very convenient.

It only took a few steps to walk to the store, spend $1.00 and now I’ll have a hassle-free summer. What a great ROI (Return on Investment).

While this seems like a no-brainer, it’s strange that I can’t apply this concept to the rest of my life. I’ll leave a dish out after I finish eating and watch as weeks go by and it begins to look absolutely disgusting when I could have simply washed it right away and had a clean dish and a cleaner room.

Sometimes we have to sacrifice to get a decent ROI. But no one likes sacrifices. We’d rather take the lazy way out.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the worth of reviving this blog and I realized that too many days pass by where I learn some valuable life lesson or I experience a great memory and I have no where to record it.

About a week ago at work, a man named Ranajit who sits across from me told me that his father always said, “Ranajit, if only I could somehow give you all 50 years of my mistakes so you don’t have to go through them yourself.”

If anything, I am reviving this blog so that I can pass it down to my children for them to understand and read about my life. I’ll probably wait until my children reach their teenage years because those are the most rebellious years; the years we tend to shut our parents out for no particular reason. I’ll want my children to understand that I went through the exact same phases they did and hopefully they’ll understand that I want to be part of their life during those tough identity crisis years.

Son/Daughter, if you’re reading this right now, it’s Monday, June 14th and I’m a 19 year old sophomore entering my junior year in college. I’m still a young guy; I understand you