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Just woke up and late for school or work ? Skipping breakfast ?
 
 
Ever wondered how that affects your day, or in particular your body? Our body needs a good start with the first meal we consume. It provides us the energy to start our day. Here’s why:
 
 
Be it working or studying, we need to either walk or take a transport to our destination. This requires energy. Our body, for the past 6-8 hours of sleep, do not digest any food. That leaves our body with no energy when we perform these tasks. While we walk or stand, energy is needed.
 
 
Once we reach our destination - place of work or school, we start to sit down, communicate, think of daily tasks or attend lectures. Our brains requires nutrients, vitamins and minerals to get things working. Our body needs energy to work and proteins to keep our muscles going. Unless we are super human, we may think slower than usual, get tired easily and affect our performance.
 
 
Some of us here could get gastric or stomach upsets easily. I’m one of them. I have a high metabolism rate so if I don’t eat something for longer than 3-4 hours, I’ll feel uneasy. My gastric juices will be rumbling about, urging me to eat something! This is important, which leads us to the next reason.
 
 
A proper and timely meals is important as well. We’ll talk about the “proper” aspect later. If we set out eating breakfast at this time, we can calculate when our next meal should be. I don’t want to make it sound like you are taking medicine, but it is discipline that restores energy for you and your body, providing enough fuel our mind and body.
 
 
Lets just say you ate at 8:00am, your next meal should be somewhere near 11:30am to 12:30pm. With this example we can calculate the optimal time to have your lunch, which is more important than your breakfast though.
 
 
A proper breakfast as mentioned, is what is made up of. We don’t just eat like we are eating for lunch with high energy and proteins food. Here are some of examples I take for breakfast:
 
 
1) Bread - with peanut butter and cheese
2) Cereals - usually corn food with milk
3) Dry noodles - with egg (rarely)
4) Simple sausage muffin + a cup of milo (rarely) - from Macdonalds !
5) I’ll take in any one of 1-3 + a cup of whey proteins. Thats for my body’s energy
 
 
I usually have lots of 1) and 2) at home, as I often eat them as some of the smaller meals in between. By looking at these, you can tell I don’t eat in quantity, but rather in quality. My meals our often fast to prepare, as I leave my house quickly to rush for the public transport.
 
 
For 3 , it is usually bought nearby, not a very healthy alternative I would say. For 4, I can say it is quite a complete and sufficient for a breakfast. I will eat these when I really do not have the time to make my own breakfast.
 
 
Lastly for 5, it is taken only when I have did some exercising or workout for the past 2-3 days, and I would take these proteins. refer to my post here:
 
 
http://www.dennisquek.com/2008/05/exercising-benefits/
 
 
They fast and easy to prepare. Just mix a scoop of it in water and stir. The ones I got dissolve instantly, so you might consider this when buying. This 1 scoop of whey protein provides the proteins I need for the day, so at least I don’t have to worry about not having enough proteins from food.
 
 
I believe that different people of have different needs in their meal intakes. Some may be more than others, some lesser. Older folks might not need as much as I am, but definitely not nothing !
 
 
The proper breakfast shuould contain stuff more of energy-giving good, alittle of fibre and proteins. Breads and cereals are good sources of energy. Fruits and salads are good source of fibre. As for proteins, it includes milk, meat, egg etc
 
 
To end, breakfast is suppose to give you energy! You may have different breakfast plans that you are used to, but just to add on that healthy food leads to healthy living. And therefore a healthy body and mind. In the next post, I’ll list the different types of food that you should be beware of when consuming them. Happy eating !
 
 

There are many ways to becoming rich, but have you ever thought of it ?
 
 
I’ll list out some of the ways to get rich, be it illegal or not!
 
 
What you can do while daydreaming:

• - Blackmail some rich man’s son.
• - Sell guns and firearms.
• - Sell drugs.
• - Sell sexual related products or services.
• - Steal (from the rich of course)!

 
 
What you can do in reality:

• - Usage of your talent. It can sports, music, or other domain knowledge.
• - Start a business. Always start small, then expand, who knows ?
• - Start an online business! We don’t just live in the physical world, thats why you are reading this !
• - Become a forex trader, investment or private banker in a bank.
• - Become a property agent or insurance agent. Well, provided with good performance!
• - Find the right (rich i meant) life partner, and get married! Become rich in an instant.
• - Inhertit your parents or family’s wealth.
• - Be a professional in either Legal or a General Practitioner (Or areas relating to these)

 
 
These are some of the possibilities but I wont explain in depth…
 
 
Remember, working your heart out won’t bring you anywhere in life if becoming rich is your target. It just pay monthly bills. In the next posts I will discuss what are the key concerns and problems you will face in starting your own business
 
 

Please visit my music page @
 
www.SingWithPiano.com

 
Some of the things you may find includes:

• My youtube videos www.youtube.com/savagemp5
• Music chord sheets / scores / songs tutorials
• Piano learning tips and self-teaching tutorials
• Learn to sing guides, with personal tips and other free stuff

 
 
To all music lovers out there whether you are a singer, a composer, a pianist, a keyboardist, a song writer! Classical, pop, blue, jazz, and or any genres are welcomed !
 
 

If you aren’t sure of what’s Open source software and the differences in licensing, I’ll explain it here.
 
 
What is BSD and GNU GPL license? The GPL license is a copyleft license, used to retain software usage free for others. Source codes must be provided together as well. Any changes done to the source have to be provided as well.
 
 

BSD
 
For BSD licensing, the difference is that source codes need not be provided. Thus this licensing allows developers to use the code and modify it, without releasing the modified codes. Though one of the conditions to meet, is that the author have to give credits to the source where he got its code from.
 
 
Software licensed under the BSD licensing would be a better choice for businesses. After some research from the open source community, we have compared GPL and BSD licensing, and found out that more businesses prefer the BSD license model.
 
 
Firstly, BSD it helps business developers and enterprise customers with a more suitable and sustainable approach to open source software. It allows other people to own the BSD licensed codes, add modifications to it, and commercialized it. This will help other companies to develop their own proprietary software.
 
 
Secondly, it ensures a longer technological advancement, such as the internet’s TCP/IP protocol, HTTP protocol and etc. Engineers and scientists develop these technologies, in hope that commercial companies like Microsoft would use their code, and develop something out of it. These commercial companies are not liable to showing their modifications. This sets a standard among the rest, retaining the protocol, but allows the protocol to be embedded into proprietary software. In this way, Giant software makers like Microsoft can protect their code, package it into their own software and sell it off.
 
 
However, these supporting points may or may not solve legal issues between companies. For example, software licensed in BSD, with codes for distribution, may be copied by some other people, without giving credits to the original writer. As a fact on BSD licensing, its main purpose wasn’t intended to copy protect the codes fully, so it depends on how much restriction and freedom the company is willing to release to the public.
 
 
GPL
 
As for GPL licensing, it is mainly good for developing better software, improving the quality. This doesn’t help in generating profits, as you have to provide the codes to the software you distribute or modified, for free. Companies who wish to modify and placed codes into their own commercial software will not be able to do so. Unless they are fine with showing their source codes to everyone who uses it, profit-orientated business are more likely to protect their code so that nobody can misuse it.
 
 
Even as restrictions set in, GPL licensing do allow businesses to operate, but on a condition. Only service fees are chargable, not for the purchase of software. Serivces offered includes catered technical help, immediate update services, and specialised support.
 
 
In summary, in order for software to stay free, GPL license would be a better choice. This benefits the majority of the open source community users. And as for BSD licensing, it is more likely adopted by corporates and businesses, to serve enterprise users who wish to sell their software as a product, as well as to standardised technology and promote it.
 
 
Without open source software, you won’t get to see PHP in action, along with other open source stuff that are freely avaiable on the market. Remember, its for the community, by the community.

 
 
Things have been fast changing rapidly, with regards to technology.
 
 
Are you catching up ?
 
 
These are what we see and use everyday in our daily lifes:
 
 
1) PDAs
2) Laptops
3) Wireless Technology (WIFIs)
4) Multi-core / multi-thread CPU
 
 
The development of small and faster devices in the industry is quite important. The size of laptops, palmtops, PDAs and other electronic devices will get smaller as processors get faster and greener, consuming less energy.

For laptops, we will see better hardware specification like size and weight getting smaller and lighter, battery-life and processor lasting longer and faster. The LCD monitor will soon be paper-thin width too.

For palmtop and PDA, the functions are getting more and more “complicated”, soon replacing the functionality of a laptop and hand phone. As thumb drive gets smaller in physical size and bigger in storage space, we should expect all hardware to perform standard functions with bigger storage space for cameras, DVD players, printers, MP3 and other electronic devices and so on…

Another technology offered in recent years is 802.11 Wifi (Wireless fidelity) or wireless technology. It has given tremendous convenience to home, office and mobile users. The advantages that it could bring to users include ease of use, great mobility, wire-free and high speed. These make it a very useful tool to get connected online.

For every household, they may need more than 1 PC, and wireless networking allows them to get hook on to the internet fast and hassle-free. As for mobile users, the use of their laptop, with the addition of Wifi enabled hotspots, gives them even greater usage. With their wireless LAN devices, it extends mobility function of their laptop, to go online at any wireless hotspots.

Another recent technology concern all processors. Core 2 Duos, Quad Core, and AMD Athlon 64 X2 are the ever common multi core processors being mentioned nowadays.
A multi-core processor combines two or sometimes four independent computational engines into a single processor chip.

 
 
As technology advances, these processors are fast gaining foothold in modern day computing. The advantages of having multi core processors are tantamount to having more spending power, in this case; more computational power, by running several threading process in a single CPU cycle.

Ideal as it may sound, but not all applications can truly make full use of multi cores processors. There are some limitations on these processors. We need to design more multi core enabled or threaded applications to run on these newer generation of processors.

Here we conclude that the IT technology of smaller, lighter, and faster hardware would be important over the next 1 or 2 years. There are several advantages that we have discussed which bring across to consumers around the world. With smaller hardware, it means lighter, more convenient, mobility. More devices can be built together as one unit and perform more functions.

You’ve got to be using them right now !
 
 

Whats your relationship with your boss ? Friends or foes?
 
 
Age difference
 
 
Smaller age gap
 
 
A smaller age difference means that communications between both parties will be more open . With smaller age gap, communications on work or personal matters would be easier, as good as talking with a friend. It also mean that the respect given to your boss will not be as much.
 
 

Wider age gap
 
 
For bigger age gap, more respect would be given to superiors like your team leads or supervisors. With an experienced supervisor, work delegation and tasking by your boss will be more regimental. Usually priorities are given to work matters only.
 
 
Do you understand your bosses intentions ? What are his goals and what are yours ?
 
 

I shall talk about factors like priorities in life that affects work, in the next post.
 
 

In order to keep your body in good shape, an average working adult should exercise at least 2 times a week.

 
 
A session of exercise should be one where you perform warming up, a main activity, then cool down, that lasts for at least 30-45 mins. It should involve some kinda of aerobics exercises, where your main activity will last for at least 10 minutes in slow intensity(about 50% of your age’s heart rate BPM)

 
 
Lets say you are a beginner who haven’t been exercising for quite a while. I suggest that you can start off with brisk walking. Take 1 hour off a week, get into your loose clothings and jogging shoes, then head out to a walk or just along the streets. You can start off simply without warming up !
 
 
Try walking around 20-30 mins around your neighbourhood or a park, or some places that you’ve never explored within walking distance. After the walk you should sweat alittle. Your very first step to a healthier life.
 
 
Try doing this at least 1 or 2 times a week, and I guruntee that 3 months time your heart rate and stamina will improve. One good benefit of this is that when you go for holidays and tours, in most cases you’ll need walking. This will help you to go the extra mile without feeling exhausted!

 
 
Next, I recommend this for busy adults who want to get their body into better shape and in return get the most benefits for your health. Lets say you work from Mondaya to Fridays in office hours. My recommended routine and frequency is to workout on either a Saturday / Sunday (Weekend) or a Wednesday / Thursday (Mid week). Thats 2 days a week, and most probaby it will be after work at night on weekdays.
 
 
So what can we do ? I suggest a slow jog, swimming or cycling. (I personally don’t like to cycle as I tend to cycle very far, and have problems returning home!). A slow jog of about 15 minutes should be adequate since we aren’t joining a marathon or a 10km race. For swimming, about 45 minutes to an hour would be good. Remember these are low intensity aerobics exercises that you should do regularly.

I suggest everyone to try and at least maintain the frequency, because it will benefit your body and your mind, physically and mentality. Whether you are 18 or 68, its only about that 2 hours a week that matters.

To end, routine exercises tend to get boring. I mean most humans usually do. It is hard to do the same thing over and over again. In my next post I will suggest some other exercises that you can try and mix around, so you won’t run out of ideas, and get yourself in the right gear to start exercising !

Jokes for fun

 
You bluff your boss that you have exams / projects / assignment / important lessons everyday.
 
Then you bluff you class mates that your boss is very demanding (when hes not !)
 
Ok thats just jokes aside.
 

Why ?

 
Coping with a full-time job and while doing part-time studies is not an easy task. There are higher demands from employers who want their employees to be equipped with better qualifications and education. The option for working adults: to study and upgrade themselves through courses while being employed.
 
 
There is already a fair amount of stress in our job. What about studying ? Imagine yourself going through a paper with never before seen questions and given the time limit and no resources, figure out an answer just to pass an exam.
 
 
There will be times where you think about datelines on one of those assignment or project given while you are working. You might be stress about not being able to get to work on time as you are rushing through projects, and thinking about the tasks given by your boss.
 
 
Depending at where you live, a part time post-graduate / master program may be available. There are also trade specific courses in the IT, banking and accounting field.
 
 
In order to attend classes after knocking off, you flexible timing job that allows you to reach class on time, less the travelling time. Depending on your work nature (shifts, overtime, travel etc) you will have to adjust to the course timetable.
 
 

Get support from your company.

 
Show them how you value the chance to study. Most companies should support their staff in the best possible way. Depending on different company, there should be some HR policies in place that list down benefits like scholarships, exam leaves, or oppotunities for you to advance your career.
 
 
I recommend you to tag along some colleagues or friends to enroll a class together. It is easier to have a study partner where you can help each other, motivate each other on studying, group together for discussions and projects, and revise for exams together. More impotantly, GET SOMEONE YOU CAN TRUST!
 
 

Time

Time is the most important factor. When you do two things at one time, something has to give up. It is either your personal or social life that will be sacrificed. Finding time is always an excuse for busy working adult, or is it poor planning ? Quality time should be spent for you and your loved ones. You may spent lesser time with your friends but this is just temporary.
 
 
I shall talk about some other factors when you do consider taking up a course or an academic program, and also on “How to use your time”.
 
 

 
 
I will start off with some of the martial arts I know of.

 
 
These are the most common martial arts we see today:

1. Kick boxing
2. Wushu
3. Taekwondo
4. Karate
5. Judo
6. Jujitsu

 
 
And some other uncommon ones:

1. Jeet Kune do
2. Wing chun
3. Muay Thai
4. Capoeira
5. Silat
 
 
Let me just talk briefly talk about them.
 
 
I defined them “common” and “uncommon” with several factors like
 
 

- Olympics / recognised sports events.
- Popularity among young and old folks.
- Sports to arts ratio, safety aspects
- Organisations and federations in numbers
- No. of people learning it worldwide.

There are other martial arts that I may not have heard, or I just didn’t list it down. I also didn’t include some soft arts or weaponry arts.
 
 

Kick Boxing

1. Kick boxing is more to a sports I feel, with very lethal kick, punch, throw, grappling actions. It focus on strength, speed, and ability to knockout. It is definitely a very good art in case you really met up with some trouble outside.
 
 

Wushu

2. Wushu is in many aspects a soft to hard art. It consists of showmanships sports like the tou lu we see in competition, to arts like san da, which is alittle similar to kick boxing. It trains flexibility of the overall body, mind, and endurance during that long training hours, to reach perfection. With great basics one can excel very well in other martial arts as too.
 
 

Taekwondo

3. This is what I have been learning since childhood. This art transforms your legs into powerful weapons. It is a showmanship and sports art I feel. It gives a learner the feel of a fight, at a safe level. Speed and flexibility are very important, although traditional taekwondo uses the whole body as a weapon.
 
 

Karate

4. Karate is a japanese striking art. There are 4 main schools of karate: Goju Ryu, Shotokan, Wado Ryu and Shito Ryu. Each school emphasizes a different aspect. For example, Shotokan favours powerful linear movements while Goju Ryu training balances hard powerful attacks with soft breathing exercises.
 
 

Judo

5. Judo focuses on hard sweeping and throwing techniques that puts your opponent off balances. They concentrate on having the advantage to be standing firm, while pinning down your opponent and stopping them from making movements. With the right techniques one can easily overthrow someone bigger than him/her. They don’t usually involve any punch or kick motions.
 
 

Jujitsu

6. Jujitsu is a little mixture of all the rest above. It concentrates on the soft art, by learning the weakness points of joints and how to lock them. Also uses the opponents force as a counter to use their force as an advantage. Brazilian Jujitsu is a slightly different as it focuses on ground fighting. The opposite of Judo in fact.
 
 
The other martial arts are those that are not so common, and unpopular.
 
 

Jeet Kune Do

1. Jeet Kune Do is an art that was found by Bruce Lee, in fact he is my idol. I have learnt alot from his book “Tao of JKD”. This art is more than a physical art. It is an expression of oneself, an art that has no limits. It suits anyone, so instead of you trying to become like something, it helps to become what is you. I’m sure one day this art will take over other arts around the world.
 
 

Wing Chun

2. Wing Chun is a chinese art that focus on hands movements, although it has other legs and weaponry skills. It is another soft art that is good for both young and old, males and females. It doesn’t require strong and powerful hands, but rather fast, sharp and flowing motion to get to your opponents weak points.
 
 

Muay Thai

3. Muay Thai is, by its name origins from Thailand. It is made up of fast pace and heavy blows, using punches, kicks, elbows and knees. Similar to kick boxing, the nature of a fight is almost protection-less. Fighting with barely any safety equipment, this art is considered dangerous and not for show or sports.
 
 

Capoiera

4. Capoiera mimics the movement of dances because the body moves along with the music. Its movements are made up of smooth flowing kicks, high and low, jumping kicks, and some aerobics. It usually is non-contact where two players dance around each other, while others plays musical instruments. If used in an unappropriate way, its kicks are deadly too.
 
 

Silat

5. Lastly, silat is a art from Malaysia/Indonesia that is a sports and an art as well. Its fighting style is a little similar to that of an animal, spiritually and mentally calming oneself down before engaging in a fight. Its weapons consists of a wide variety, from kicking, punching, to sweeping. Techniques are more important than charging yourself and trying to hurt someone, which is what i feel we can learn from this art.
 
 
In my next post, I will talk about how martial arts can benefit someone, young and old, with many factors.