Category: Life

Booted from Starbucks

The headline of this article.

The 70-year-old Lisle woman was kicked out of the Starbucks in downtown Glen Ellyn a few weeks ago. She claims it was because employees mistook her as a homeless person, part of a purge the store waged to mollify customers who complained that the coffee shop was overrun with the homeless.
…
When Kilborn refused to leave, police officers responded to make sure she left.

By the time it was over, Kilborn recalls standing outside the Starbucks – fuming.

“I had my coffee in my hand,” she said. “It’s still too hot to drink – that’s how little time passed.”
…
Kilborn says the public needs to learn a little more tolerance.

“People shouldn’t be told to leave after buying a cup of coffee,” she said. “No one should be humiliated like that.”

“Homelessness isn’t just restricted to one county,” said Debbie DeGraw, director of marketing and development for McHenry County PADS.

“It’s an issue for everyone to deal with,” she said. “Yet people are like, ‘not in my backyard.’ Nobody wants it in their communities.”

That’s just human nature.

Legal experts say a public business ordinarily can’t refuse service to anyone. But if a customer is making others uncomfortable, a merchant can ask that person to leave.

However, advocates note, the homeless have rights, too.

When I read the article I just felt compelled to say something about it. Tolerance, our rights and our neighbours. All of us are selfish: we want our space, our rights, our way. It’s human nature. We are taught to share our toys not keep them to ourselves. I’ve heard the phrase “sharing is caring” and in the most part it is true. In a sense optimal benefit is obtained when we share. But our inner most being wants things our way, forgetting that the things or people preventing us from getting our own way are not much different that we are. They are just another human being on this Earth, just like you.

Differences are easy to point out and easy to be used as excuses to not like another person, to ostracize them. Why can’t we all just get along. “Love your neighbour as yourself“: That was what I was reminded as I read the article. Even though you don’t see homeless people in Brunei (which I thank God for, not because that I don’t want to see them, but at least it means there are not that many, if any, suffering with the problem here) the article just reminded me of what am I doing to help out another fellow man. No matter how much you do it can never be enough. Just like the story of a man on a beach full of starfish washed ashore and throwing some back in. It makes a difference to those thrown back in. And in the story, parallels will life can be drawn: some of those starfish will just die out there without anybody to help them. Lost and alone without anybody being there for them.

So as I leave this thought for myself and hopefully anybody else:
Love your neighbour as yourself

Matthew 22:36 – 39
36Master, which is the great commandment in the Law? 37 Jesus said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. 38 This is the first and great commandment. 39 And the second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Of life

So I just rejected an offer from Lucent and decided to keep up with this freelance kind of thing I have going on in my life. You know the saying “you don’t know what you got till it’s gone”; well it seems that I’ve been bitten twice by that saying. And both is in regards to the job offers I’ve had. I guess the thing I value the most right now is my time and being able to do what I want with it. Got another offer from Edaran and the terms are kind of better than Lucent but most importantly it’s giving me my freedom of time. I don’t know been kind of thinking through my future thoughts of ‘working life’, or more appropriately employment life, and I’ve been drifting here and there thinking of too many things and just getting overwhelmed by the possibilities and the hopes and dreams you could say. Frankly in this job search of mine I don’t think I’ve had much support. Sometimes it always comes down to the business bottom line of the money. Sure money doesn’t make the world go round contrary to what some may think, but yes it pays the bills it lets you live. Sometimes I just want to take a measly paying job just to learn and love it and sometimes I just want a job to pay the bills so that I can just come back home and enjoy life.

Went down to Miri last Tuesday to get my laptop fixed. Hooray for 3 years international warranty. Though it left me not going down to Singapore was a bummer but I guess opportunity costs was just too much. So I’m just waiting for their email to tell me when it’s ready for collection then comes another 6 hour driving day for me. Perhaps this time I’ll be able to get some shopping that I want to do in Miri…

Funny thing while trying to spell check “contrary” via Googling it, I stumbled upon God is Love as a sponsered link from answers.com. Funny way that God works. Also what caught my eye was the word “loves” not “loved” as He still does. Even as I set out not to have the “God” category checked in this post here He comes and changes that. Life is hard. Struggles abound. What do you do? What I have done is trying to deal with it, and sometimes it just comes back full circle when you rely on your on strength. I need strength. I need strength that I don’t have. Now I just got a song in my heart and I can’t seem to get the lyrics right. It goes something like

Give me His eyes, Jesus eyes,
Give me His hand, oh Jesus hands,
…..
…..

Give me His words, Jesus words,
Give me His heart, o Jesus heart,
…..
…..

With the …. representing the lines I don’t remember and I’m sure the lyrics might be slightly wrong but I’m sure thats the song of the day. I planned to post a short post of updates, He planned something else. Now I guess the biggest question I have for myself is:
“When will I stop relying on myself, when I know I’ll fail me sooner or later”

Take care everybody and God bless

Hibernation…

is what has become of this site. Been busy with new opportunities and things on going and going on in life. A pretty belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all. Handed in my mission trip report last week and 3 things I took back from it: all you can depend on is God, be born ready and “What can I do?”. There are times when there seems to be nobody around when you need help.

1. There are times in life when there seems to be nobody around when you need help. I’m not talking just about physical sense but just to be there. There are times when you are all alone in every sense of the word and there are decisions to be made. Sometimes that will affect not only yourself but those around you and people in general. What do you do when times like these come? I got some sense of this before and during the trip itself. And some times you are in situations you would rather not be in. You lack the abilities / preperation / experience that would be needed to get the job done well. Not everything can be done on human strength and ability alone.

2.  Being ready or in a state of readiness as I believe P. Andy shared in one of the messages. I lack experience in many aspects of my life as I chose to turn my back on God in my teens years, as I chose to stay in my comfort zone, as I chose to limit my school life to doing things that help me get the grades I wanted but not develop my skills to what I wanted. It’s never too late to start something, so here I am at the ripe old age of 24 learning new things everyday which I should have learnt during my school days.

3. What can I do. I’ve seen the youth in my church. They have so much opportunities ahead of them: they have promise.  Many of them can do things I can’t even imagine myself doing. I desire to see them grow and develop into the person God wants them to be but the biggest catch is here and lies in one word: “how”. How can I help? What can I do? Pray to God to show me what I can do while at the same time actively look out for the opportunities and avenues.

So that was mission trip learning experience. Then came Christmas with the handmime presentation: not only performing but also prep work with the UV lights required. It is no joke bringing 3 UV lights in your car when each UV fluorescent tube costs BND$35. Just yesterday had to perform again for the Malaysian Christmas Celebration.

Not to mention I’ve been busy with some part-time/freelance work that I got. Basically it is system setup and a technical support. So I’ve been driving around setting up the systems with the required software and tomorrow there will be a training conducted by my brother. Doing some other web development for another project I’m working on that will hopefully launch next week. Currently I’m procrastinating by finally updating this blog and after that I’m in for a full day of work.

Got an interview with Lucent, or should I say Alcatel-Lucent, tomorrow afternoon after the training. The job seems good and provides a good learning experience for myself so God if this job is for me, open the doors just as You have opened the doors for the work I’ve been doing.

It’s a new year and it starts off with a long post. Too long for my taste. So next time update more. Shorter posts especially for those with short attention spans like myself. =P

God bless for the coming year and many more to come

Back in Brunei

It has indeed been a tiring, enjoyable, memorable, humbling, sleepy and interesting (and more) week. Quite a bit of thinking to do to process what has been learnt. Courses of action that need to be taken. Things to reflect on. Challenges to be faced. Wish I had the time to do that now but right now I have to go get ready to go out on business (Mom’s business) not I-have-a-job-business.

It’s been a great time guys: Stephen, Jerica, Sherra, Judith, Aaron, Joel, Lawrence, Anand, Rev Alex and Albert. Thanks guys and God bless!

Leaving for Sarawak

The journey starts in a few hours and will be staying Miri overnight before catching a flight on Monday morning to Kuching Sarawak. Supposed to be involved in 2 youth camps. Frankly I don’t feel ready. It has been a lot of a week to handle. More than I could handle. Yet again I am reminded of how weak I am without Jesus as my firm foundation. I’ve disappointed Him as I have done many times before. Yet another lessoned learnt, yet another step to be taken, yet another journey to travel.

Matthew 11:28-30
28“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

2 Corinthians 12:9-10
9But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 10That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

Lord as I cast my burdens down at the foot of the cross You died for all the people of the earth, I pray for strength and guidance for the week ahead. I thank you Lord that you grace is sufficent for me and that when I am weak you are strong.

Loneliness is what I need more of: to get away and get back in touch with God….

My fingers hurt

It’s all the bag’s fault :P
floppybag1.JPG
It’s not fully done but I don’t have any more floppy disks. The idea came from here. I need smaller fasteners (what exactly do you call those things? :P) or need to drill bigger holes or just do it the way as instructed in the original article :P. For the rest of tonight fingers shall rest.

Time… is what I don’t have the luxury of

Day by day I have things I want to do.
Day by day there are things that confront me be to done.
I don’t have nearly as much time for myself as I think I need. I believe this is just a test for me. I remember sharing one time in cell back in Singapore that time was one thing I treasure, well at least time that’s within my grasp that I can ‘control’ so to put it, i.e. being in control of my time. And these days with more pressing things to do I find less and less time for myself. Less and less time for me to do my own thing, to just wind down and relax. What do I do when I’m not in control of my time? Certainly not what I should be doing…
Lord God take control of my time and my life. As I was reminded this weekend that everything that I do is for You. All my time is not my time but Your time. Lord give me the strength especially then things are difficult when I don’t see much encouragement. Encourage me Lord to serve Your purpose for me.

Make me what You want me to be
Teach me Your ways

I lay down my life for You.
Throw down my crowns before You.
Give up my all for Your Name.
My Saviour, how I adore You.
Healer, my heart longs for You.
Jesus, You’re worthy to be praised.

TestDisk rocks

While trying to install a fresh copy of Windows yesterday I noticed something odd. My 80GB hard drive where I keep practially ALL my data was showing something like 30GB which was disconcerting but I went ahead and installed XP on another partition. After the first part of the XP install the computer reboots and I got a check disk warning due to possible filesystem inconsistencies so I let it do the checking and it was having alot of problems. In fact it took more than 12 hours to finish running the check!!! So finally let XP finish installing then I checked my hard drive listing and found my 80GB hard drive which was originally formatted as one big NTFS partition was now a divided into a FAT32 partition and an unallocated partition. Obviously no data could be read from the drive.

So I stuck in RIPLinux (Recovery Is Possible, NOT Rest In Peace :P which was the first thought that came to mind when I first saw the name) and started TestDisk. It found the partition information from the backup sector and restored the partition and now it seems to be perfect =D Hooray for linux and hooray for free and open source software. The only reason I did this straight away was because I was trying to recover another hard drive (my old laptop’s 30GB hard drive) that seemed to just have it’s partition disappear. Sad to say that I still can’t recover that drive. Tried using TestDisk to restore the partition and PhotoRec to restore the file I want but still can’t seem to get it =( PhotoRec is a nice file recovery tool but it does not show you the files it can recover before hand, it just does a bulk recovery which is something I hope they work on in future versions. Even after a few changes I did to the drive from TestDisk data recovery was still no where to be found. For what it’s worth NTFS Recovery from DiskInternals was able to find the lost files (before I made any changes to the drive) but the free demo does not allow you to recover/save the file. And I’m not willing to pay $99.95 (US$ should be) to purchase the program nor am I willing to find a crack for the program because that would just be ethically wrong =p So as the drive lays here on my table I shall wait patiently until the day I want to take some more of my time to try to recover that 1 particular file I want, though I could go back to Singapore and borrow the DVD from a friend and rip it again but I’m just lazy and also I want to find out more of any other free data recovery software and see it work wonders like TestDisk did for my other drive.