I just had to blog about this, if you have watched the latest Hulk movie, remember the part when Bruce Banner pretended to be pizza boy in order to sneak into the lab? The security guard he gave pizza to, was the one who played the Hulk in the TV series during the 80’s. More amazingly, I could actually recognize him the moment I saw his face!

I started blogging since 2000. Sometimes I amused myself when I looked back at what I had written in the past. Out of fun, I decided to bring back some of those old posts for your viewing pleasure. And this particularly is (shamelessly) my all time favorite.

Some background before you read on. In my earlier years of using the internet, I spent a lot of time hanging out on IRC chatrooms (I bet most of you did that too), some times I came across nice people whom I can chat with all night, yet some times, I came across losers like the following one. This guy is such a big loser I had decided to blog about it. But of course, I don’t do this all of the time (unless the person is as lame as this one), otherwise I’m still a safe person to chat with ;) Enjoy the rest of the story… Read rest of story…

… I would be so rich.

Seriously, if I knew I would enjoy so much doing what I’m doing now, at the same time paying my bills with it, I would have just started doing it a long time ago. Instead of going through all the wrong turns, trying at the wrong places, getting stuck with the wrong people, suffering the unwanted ordeal, and shit like that.

But then again, that’s just an idealistic thought. We all knew, we can’t have our life just the way we wanted it. Read rest of story…

Couple of friends initiated a chat with we after they saw my Facebook status. They were asking why was I not happy. It made me realized there were people who care. With all my heart, I thanked them for asking.

It’s true I missed being happy. I missed the day when I had someone to share the good things and bad things with me. I missed having someone around for me. I missed having someone to work hard for. Basically, I’m not happy because I feel alone.

But saying not happy doesn’t mean I’m crying pity. I am still the same Dean Loh who everyone knows. By night I may cry and whine about all these shits which were going through my mind, but that’s only a way for me to flush out whatever I did not wish to carry over to the next day; and by the sun rises again, you would see the Dean who is full of energy and ready to hit the road again.

To my dearest friends who are reading this, thank you for caring, I’m really Ok. If ever anyone asks if you have a friend, who never says tired, who never gives up and never sees failure as option, you can tell them that you do know of someone. Tell them my name.

One of my client-to-be, a husband and wife team who tried to start a business in Singapore, was turned down by registrar of companies initially for they being foreigners. So they went ahead and applied for permanent residents status. Two days ago they received the approval letter, jumping joy the wife wrote and told me the good news.

So I wrote back to congratulate them, and all of a sudden it reminded me of the day I received my PR approval, it was in October of 2001, at that joyous moment of my life, the person whom I cared a lot happened to be there standing next to me; which made a perfect double-happiness!

The kind of joy I had, was the kind of joy I would feel like crying. The kind of joy when I could not stop giving myself a pat on my back. The kind of joy I wished I could dash out to the street and yell out to the world: “I have made it!!!” The kind of joy I will remember even years later.

The kind of joy I miss so much. The kind of joy I have never had since then. The kind of joy, I wonder if I will have again, ever…

And I miss being happy.

“But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.”
- Matthew 6:33

I should update the status of my hiring.

Because I got so little responses from my ad in Facebook (see
Web Designers, Where Art Thou?) I turned to Monster.com.sg and JobsDB.com for help.
Within a week, I received like dozens of job applications, one of them happened to be my first customer for hosting service 3 years ago! To make it even more exciting, she seems to have the skills and attitude I want, so very quickly I called her for interview.

Prior to the interview, I emailed her three test questions for her to work on, and I told her to explain the solutions to me when I meet her. I didn’t care if she could find the right answer actually, I was more keen to find out if she would put in the effort to find answer (in case you didn’t know, this is how exactly I become who I am today.) And, to my biggest relief, she did put in the effort to learn about the issues, and got me not just one solution, but multiple solutions!

On the spot, I offered her the job.

This is the moment I want to thank God so very much for sending her to me. All I need to do next, is to make sure to offer her the best environment to work, and to grow her career.

June 12 Update: On the day after I offered the job to her, she came to check out my office where she was going to start working in, together with her father and sister. When I opened the door for them, the reaction on their face was: is this where she’s going to work in?! The father was complaining non-stop about the distance they had to travel to get here (they live in the west, and my office is in the east.) The sister couldn’t believe I could live in the same place where I work (home office, of course.) And of course, the girl who was supposed to work for me, seemed like she was going to listen to what her father had to say. So true enough, she wrote in the next day to turn down the job, despite my added offer to compensate her traveling expenses.

I was upset for sure. What I couldn’t make sense out of this, of the dozens of applications from people all over the continent, majority of them from India, Philippines, Myammar and Malaysia. Some of them would do whatever it takes to get the job, yet I offered the position to her without second thought, and what I got in return was the complaint on the distance she has to travel to work, from central-west of Singapore to central-east of Singapore (22.9km to be exact.) As much as I hate to blog about this, I have to say, you Singaporeans are way too pampered.

I was back in Ngee Ann as guest speaker for the second time (the last time I spoke there was December last year.) This time I was speaking to about 60 students; some are in second year, some are in final year. What puzzles me is they are actually engineering students, but they are also taught on web publishing and some programming stuff. Maybe that’s why the course they are taking is called “Multidiscipline Engineering”.

I was hoping to see a bunch of young women and men who are eager to hear what I had to share with them, Read rest of story…

I discovered this new funky web service that allows users to interact with various popular web applications, such as adding task, set events, record expenses, even to post a blog entry like what I’m doing now, and this, is to find out if it actually works…

I put up advertisements on Facebook, looking to hire someone who is good in HTML/CSS, who can help share my workload, so that I can have more time for sleep.

In two weeks, the banner showed up 171,487 times, in which, got 42 clickthroughs (i.e. the banner was clicked 42 times, possibly by 42 different individuals.) Out of the clicks, only 3 wrote in to ask about the job. That is like 7% of conversion rate. But I was not very happy with the result, I thought there should be more people who might be interested in the job, if the click throughs were so low, the only explanation is there are already too many web designers out there.

To find out the answer, I put up a poll in Facebook which would collect data from 100 users, with the question asking “Do you have a friend or relative who happens to be/claim to be a web designer?” To my expectation, more than half of the respondents claimed that they do have friend or relative who happens to be a web designer. Only thing I’m not sure is: is the web designer whom all these people know are the same person, or there are indeed so many web designers out there?