Dionis on the web.

I absolutely have to blog this little enlightenment tweeting going on at twitter.

I chanced upon a conversation that the 2 brothers doing my office renovation were having.

Bro 1: I going toilet.
Bro 2: Let’s go together.
Bro 1: (Looks quizzically) I’m going to wash my hands
Bro 2: Let’s go together!

Thought it was pretty funny, so I tweeted that short post on twitter.

Vicki then showed me a picture of two toilet bowls and I mentioned that I can much less pee, if there’s someone looking at me.

The funny thing that happened, the conversation escalated into ctham sharing about one guy who was pooping half way and then 3 girls walked in while he was doing his deed.

Then we touched upon the topic of butt enlightenment.

Some quotable quotes.

@thimerosa: My butt recognises my regular toilet bowl

@ctham: Your butt has gained sentience?

@thimerosa: My butt is awakened and on its way to enlightenment. But total acceptance of all bowls, will take some time….

@vickilew: Your butt is self-aware

It’s quite interesting, the kind of things we exchange on twitter. Perhaps that’s how it makes it so addictive. More quotes to come! (Maybe, they will turn up on tee shirts. Haha)

Edited:

Well, right after I posted this toilet entry, a little interesting google ad appeared under….

*End of Entry*

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As some of you might have known, I’ve been on a diet program under a nutritionist /dietitian friend of mine. It was a quest to lose 10kgs. I also made a request to her, I want to lose these 10kgs without exercise, can it be done? She looked at me and assessed my fats, then she said, Yes. Ok, I thought to myself, no harm trying, and so I signed up for her program in Feb this year.

Some of you might ask why do I want to lose weight? I look perfectly fine. However, what a lot of people don’t know is that my BMI was 25.  (I’ve always attributed it to heavy bones)

The truth is, I have never really been of normal weight for the last 20 years. Having been called names all the way till Secondary school, “Fatso, Ah Pui, Fat Fat, pang zi, pang mei, fatugly ….” It was terrible. Alongside with names, I had to endure my form teacher calling my name up year after year to single me out for a check up at the dreaded Ministry of Health. When the teacher called my name, I can hear the hurried whispers of my classmates in the background, “They are calling up all the fat people.”

Do you know what happens at Ministry of Health? They make you go through a urine test, weight test, height test and a fat test. I hated the fat test, where the nurse will take a pair of calipers and pinch the fats on your arms, thighs, stomach like really hard to measure the amount of fats you have on you. After the tests, you’ll be sent to a room with a doctor who will counsel you and tell you that you’ve been putting on weight. Somehow the counselling sessions never made me feel any better, in fact, I never felt worse each time I went through each session.

Of course there was the one story where I met an IRC friend in 1996. Something like a blind date. The moment he saw me, he turned around and started walking away. The naive me thought that he didn’t see me, so I walked quickly towards him. Guess what happened? He broke into a run.

Heh, I’ve so many fat traumas that I can write a book on them. Perhaps one day I would. I gradually put on weight all the way until JC year one where I peaked at 75kgs. Then one day during the start of my December holidays, I had an epiphany. I woke up out of the blue, put on my running shoes and ran 2.4km around the track beside my home. I continued the exercise 3 times a week for 4 weeks and I lost 2kgs. Then my weight started to drop gradually over the course of year and I hit 65kgs. And I stopped there.

I entered Uni and I ballooned up till 67kgs but I kept it under 70kg. It was only when I went to the US that I lost weight till 62kgs. It got really creepy when I graduated from varsity and I saw my weight slowly move upwards.

My last straw came when a friend and mentor of mine kept teasing me about my weight. I wasn’t offended, cause he’s like twice my size and I’m way past those traumas. But I was very present to how I wanted to experience what it is like to be slim once again. Or at least a normal size where I can buy clothes in a shop without the fear of spoiling them. What would that kind of feeling be like? It helped that a friend of mine, EY lost 30kgs under my dietitian friend.

The stars were aligned. Right after my mentor teased me, my dietitian friend happened to be in the room, and so I asked her to help me. That was how I got started.

The diet was interesting, I had enough food to keep me from going hungry, but not overly full. I could eat what I love, just that the portions are regulated. It’s great. I’ve only lost around 5kgs since I started, but I’ve become very aware of how much food my body really needs and I am sensitive to how my body reacts to certain foods.

I was supposed to lose 10kgs in 3 months but my progress is slow because while I am disciplined most of the times, there are bouts of time where my diet gets disrupted. Like going on an overseas trip where I had to eat to entertain my clients. Or going out for dinners with my friends and over-indulging a little. Ok more than little.

However, I’ve survived and managed to lose the 5kg. (5 more to go) I held back on blogging about this as I didn’t want to jinx the progress. But I was inspired to do this entry after I watched the movie, “To be fat like me.”

After many years of struggling with my weight issue, I think I’ve found a way to regulate it via my diet. It is very possible, and not very difficult at all if you can be disciplined about what you put into your mouth.

5 more kgs to go! Please wish me luck and discipline!

Finally can wear a tee that I bought when I was studying at Penn, 4 years ago

Was more than a month ago. This is terrible. I used to be like this blog addict that posts a couple of entries per day. Now? Barely one per month.

Probably something changed in the way I think. Could it be the age? I started my first blog when I was 20, I’m almost 26 now. I’m relegated to self delusion and holding themed birthday parties like, “only for 25s”.

My dear friend Vicki just found a strand of white hair on her head. Is this a sign of age? When I first started blogging, there was SARS, now, it is H1N1.

So many many things happened to me in the past six years that I feel that I’ve aged a decade. Wait a minute, it is almost a decade.

Not that I’m depressed. I’m just present to the fact that time has passed. Mom has a couple lot more wrinkles now. Grandpa is no longer the grouchy patriarch of the family. Maternal grandpa has passed away for 5 years. And me? I’ve graduated from the dreaded education system for almost 2.5 years, being trained to take over the family business with my bro. Time flies and the only thing we can do about it is to treasure every moment.

I started blogging because I wanted to record and remember everything and major milestones in life. I stopped for a while because there were some things I couldn’t share and then I got lazy.

Of course facebook and twitter took up quite a fair bit of my blogging time. Does this spell the death of blogs? Thank god there’s the iPhone that lowered my resistance a lil’

Am inspired once again to blog. More pictures in the next entry! Promise!

I know I haven’t been blogging ever since I came back from Guangzhou and I am so way behind time for so many many things. It has been crazy and I haven’t slept properly every night since I came back!

Finally things have managed to slow down a little (just a little) and I sneaked back up here to do a little posting to record down my thoughts and what has been happening the past 2 weeks.

Vicki has been following the AWARE saga quite closely while I was away in Hong Kong / Guangzhou then just as I came back to Singapore, they held an EGM that particular night where she was following on Twitter. Someone mentioned that it’s a good idea to put the quips on the tees and voila. The tees were born. She uploaded on cafepress – got a pretty good response and it was only till around 11plus  when she saw me online (I just reached home from Guangzhou like few hours before) and she said, hey why not put it on Printeet.

We worked till 4am to get the stuff online and the rest is history.

I’m still pretty amazed cause things have been moving so fast and furious. We have this running joke between the both of us that she forced Printeet into production. We pretty much were almost done researching our tees but this AWARE event really accelerated the whole process.

Check out the tees here: http://www.printeet.com/bioniccreative

shutup and sit down

Some of the greatest things that I’ve learnt is really about speed, efficiency and listening to what the people really want and have to say. I think I’ve finally found a way to work around the family business structure and come up with a viable way to marry technology with brick and mortar type businesses.

Seems like my intention came through… Thank you CLEO magazine

On a side note.. Have been annoyed by the funny requests people have of me. Do I look like I run a money mill?

Far from it.

Some ramblings. Just because my family runs a business doesn’t mean that we are filthy rich. There are a lot of hidden costs – rent, workers pay, cost of goods, utilities, loans and so on that we need to cover… One must always look at the expenses versus the income/turnover. Geez.

How many times did we have to operate on savings and loans because the business was affected by the economy? Pfft.

I am not an ATM! I receive a pay check just like everyone else. I give a portion of my pay to my parents, pay for my own insurance and even pay for my own temp staff from my paycheck. Bah.

And why does TVB keep killing off their characters?! Bah. Made me cry 2 times in a row. This is depressing.

How did this blog entry turn depressive from happy? Ok, enough. By the way I’ve been twittering quite a bit… For more real time updates, check out my twitter feeds. I’ll blog something more substantial the next round.

Trip of decadence. Mexico on train. Met Noel and Cousin. Affluent (like really affluent chinese). Will elaborate on this blog post in a jiff.

I’ve been somewhat of an awkward kid when I was growing up. I was a fat kid who weighed 48kgs by the time I was 10, 60kgs when I was 12 and peaked at 75kgs when I was 16.  I only started losing some weight when I was 17 due to a random epiphany that struck me and made me start running at the stadium beside me. Of course it helped that one of my bestest friends, Pearl, was the National 400m record holder in Singapore at that time and she was sweet enough to care and encourage someone, who was almost like an anti-thesis (because I never liked to exercise) to her existence as a national athlete, to exercise and be healthy. Being a fat kid was tough. I had many dreams and hopes but all of them were smashed to smithereens because of my larger-than-life physique. I would like to share a couple of incidences that I could still remember from my past… (more…)

Spent some time googling for my favourite Adam Lambert videos and I must say I was wowed by his rendition of “Mad World”. I totally fell in love with the song and I absolutely have to get a copy of it in my iPhone!

Check it out here.

Download the full video here.

But what really moved me, literally to tears, was when I watched Britain’s Got Talent’s Susan Boyle. The purity of the human spirit and her fight for her dreams moved me. You can say that her soul, touched my soul, through her singing as a channel. This is amazing. You guys have to check it out.

Sigh, I made a mistake at work today … Hope everything’s gonna be fine and I don’t lose my customer one if the toughest things of owning a business is when you have to shoulder the entire responsibilites of your company.

It is almost like you need balls of steel and hides of thick rubber to insulate the blows that come your way, almost on a daily basis.

Ouch!

And life goes on. Ah well…

I’ve always wanted to blog this entry to share with everyone some of the inner circle stories of being a lady entrepreneur in a techie world but never had the opportunity to do so. Thought that this would make a good angle for this blog. Anyway, now that I’ve a couple of minutes to spare, let me get started on it. As some of you might already know, I’m running a couple of businesses (customised gifts, big john, printing) and non-profit organizations (tdm – tho not so much of this right now all thanks to Howie, Mike and Su Yuen) at the same time, and sometimes one or another takes up all my time and I end up with not much time for myself. But that’s fine, I have no complains about that, in fact the busier I am, the more fulfilled I feel. My only complain is the kind of people that I meet and the remarks they say that really makes my blood boil at 1000 degrees Celsius.

Remark 1
A fellow entrepreneur takes a jab at my business:

Your chatbox on your site adds a nice personal touch to your website, but honestly, it makes you seem like such a mom and pop shop. One man show. Not like ours.

What’s he really trying to say: A back handed insult to bring you down to his level so that you’ll give him a better deal.

Remark 2
Another one comes and say:

We like to work with companies that have huge potential for growth and sizeable market share. Hence, we cannot promise anything to you right now. We just want you to try out our service.

What’s he really trying to say: You are too small for us to consider you as a real customer, but then again, we don’t have enough customers, why don’t you come support us. See, I already came to your office just to talk to you. Even though you’re so small, but we still came, just that we don’t consider you as a real customer.

Remark 3:

Honestly speaking, though this might not land too well on you. You should just come under us.  There’s seriously, no potential for growth for your business.

What’s he trying to say: Since you can’t beat us like EVER in the next 50 years of your existence, you should join us.

Sometimes this is what I really want to do to the meanies...

I mean, we all take pride in the things we do. At least I do. I acknowledge that in these couple of years of growing up, I took one too many decisions that were not too wise, lost money in the process and had to restart the business from scratch, resulting in the online front looking like a one man show. I am working very hard right now to shift the business around and adopt a new model and this time, I think it will work. The “one man show” is only temporary while we shift our internal operations and fully utilise the 10 people that we have in the company. It is painful to hear these comments and still smile and take them in graciously when you know that you’re past your boiling point inside.

While I am pissed at the mean comments that have been thrown my way, it is also a reflection of the holes that I need to plug. I am present to the intensifying need to strike a balance between fun, professionalism and having a personal touch. So, let me try to figure that equation out.

I love the service that I am providing, and I want for everyone who uses our services to walk away happy. I’m in the business of making somebody else smile. I am never selling a product, I am selling an experience, that is what Printeet has been built upon.

It is tough being an entrepreneur, even tougher if you’re a lady, and toughest when you try to run an online business and you belong to techie based social networks where it is predominantly male. There are a whole lot more interesting stories to share

Hope this entry serves as a little piece to share with everyone some insights on what goes on in my life as a lady entrepreneur in Singapore.