Let It Go Butterfly

Date:  Aug 23, 2015

One day, Blue Blue, my blue eye cat, was caught playing with “something” in his paws and mouth.

When you get close to see it, it was a bright green caterpillar, may be drop from the leaves in one of the pot in our balcony garden.

My wife thus place teh caterpillar into a plastic container.  Of course, we place some leaves and water in it.

Few days later, the green caterpillar ate quite some leaves before turning itself into a pupa.

Another few days later… which is today.

Jay suddenly shouted and say “Mommy, mommy, the butterfly has come out…."

And there you go, the butterfly that we saved from Blue Blue’s paw.

As it is just came out from the pupa, the butterfly is learning how to flap its wings.

It is actually quite a nice butterfly.  Very pretty.

She still flapping the wings.  And she is ready to fly.

So, we have decided to “let it go”.

So that the butterfly can find a new home in our herbs garden downstairs.

We let Kay Kay do it.  So, Kay Kay will let the butterfly go, and let her has her freedom.

She was a bit scare in the beginning, but as soon as she flapped a few times of her wings, she flew off.

Bye bye butterfly.

Of course, I did not waste this opportunity for Jay Jay to learn his Chinese Composition.

So, I quickly draw out my iPad and ask him and the brother to think about the Butterfly event, and write a small passage of it.

So, the journey from home to Millenia Walk is only 15-20 minutes. 

As you can see, this is what he comes up with.  Not too bad.

I recon that this will give him may be 5/10.  So, thru out the day, we discuss about the whole event.

Instead of “my cat”, I asked him to think, where is the cat?  Where he (the cat) finds the caterpillar?

Instead of “let it go”, how he fly away?

What about the conclusion, any thoughts he wanted to write down?

During lunch time, we talked about it.

After he took his Taekwondo grading, we talked about it.

While going from Millenia Walk to the Turf City, before the drawing class, we have another 20 minutes or so, for him to work on it.

And this is the revised version.  

Much longer version.

He knows learned the important thing of “describing”.

Describe our cat is naughty.

Describe where our cat found the caterpillar.

Describe why the cat is naughty?  See the caterpillar, wanted to bite it.

Describe the how he tell mommy about it.

Describe how the butterfly is scare and don’t want to fly out.

Tell who is the one brought the butterfly downstairs.

Describe how he touch the butterfly and make it fly away.

Describe what was his feeling?  Happy.

Describe why?  Because he let the butterfly regain his freedom.

This is a very short event.  But writing it down involves constant thinking and asking questions about the 6 “Ws”.

Who?

Why?

When?

Where?

What?

How?

And after we have done with the Chinese composition, I will let him speak out from his mind in English.  Again, asking him to “describe”.

He won’t learn it straight away. 

But I am sure, thru the training, and exercising, he is more confident and grabs the concepts of writing.

Writing is about describing.

Writing is about asking the 6 “Ws”.

Why I love to read the Hardy Boys Junior Files for them every night.

That is because these Hardy Boys books focus in asking the 6 Ws to solve crime.

Hardy Boys: http://miniliew.blogspot.ch/2015/07/hardy-boys.html

And I show him a way how to use technology, the Dragon Dictation to quickly jot down the chinese sentence thru speaking.

First you learn how to pronounce things correctly.  Second, you quickly write down the Chinese senates.  For words you don’t know, as long as you can read, you can use the Han Yu Pin Yin to find the words.  In P3 Chinese composition, they are allow to use the dictionary.  Be it hard copy or electronic.

Hopefully, thru these methods, I can help my boy to improve his writing in both Chinese and English.  Yeah, Dragon Dictation can change the languages to English or Mandarin.

Quite cool.

Dragon Dictation:  http://miniliew.blogspot.ch/2015/08/learning-chinese-composition.html

And lastly, you notice that the brother Kay Kay is sitting besides.  Do it in front of the siblings so that he or she can be inspired and wanting to follow his brother.  :)

????My sons, if you guys can make it for your Chinese, don’t forget about the efforts your daddy put in to teach you guys.  :)

SG50 National Day Observance

Date:  Aug 9, 2015

Today is Singapore’s 50th National Day!

Happy Birthday Singapore!

Early morning, we are heading to the National Day Observance event @ Teban Garden.  

We tried to ballot for the NDP, but we did not get it.  We got it in 2013.  I guess there are too many people balloting for it.

We are are on red top today.

Some friends ask me, “I thought you are Malaysian?"

Well, my wife has converted to be Singaporean for our children sake.

And both my sons are Singaporeans already.

One of the thing that I teach my son is “You have to love your country."

That is why as a father, I will have to go all the way to support the Singapore national day events, and make my sons to be as patriotic as possible.

After all, they are Singaporeans.

No point to teach them politics.  Just ask them to be a good Singaporean who love their countries.

When national day comes, there is no line drawn.  No PAP, no ??? (oppositions).  All is about loving your countries.

This is what they have to know today.

When they grew up, and when they become older, and they can think, then, they will think for themselves and they will make their own observations, and make own judgement which side they want to choose.

Quite cool they decorate their HDB like this.  At Teban Garden.

So many Singapore flags.  Must be here la.

A lot of people are here already.  The band is from Commonwealth Secondary School.

We don’t know what is National Day Observance.  

Oh…. oh….

It is a small parade.

There are uniform cadets marching, etc.

More and more people arriving.

Here come the guest of honour, Ms. Foo.  The MP.

Shaking hand with all the residences.

Oops… She spotted both Jay & Kay.

Then, she put here hands on Jay’s shoulder, and ask her guys, “Let’s take a photo here!"

Too much publicity.  Don’t like. hahaha

Raising the flag.

They are broadcasting the Mr. Lee Kuan Yews proclamation in 1965 live across the whole Singapore at 9am. 

Then, the MP gave National Day speech in 3 languages.  Wow, I am impressed with her Malay.  Click below to listen a bit.

https://instagram.com/p/6JJryLsk--/

She also get to inspect the uniform groups.

Jay Jay was happy to be here.

The cake is here.

Kay Kay also very happy.

My two boys.  They have grown so much.

The three Singaporean at home.

3x S and a M.

Let’s light up the cake.

Got flag, got SG50.  Its perfect.  Let’s take a photo.

Happy Birthday Singapore!

How I Manage My Digital Photos

Date:  Aug 2, 2015

[For Apple Mac Users only]

This is always a hot topic.  

But I think I have finally crack it, and I know what I should do to manage my photos and videos.

In the past, we use this.

Every time you have a camera in your hand with either 24 film or 36 film, human being knows what to do, by instinct.  

We post for the photos.

 

When digital camera, smart phones camera comes in….

We took tons of photos naturally.

That means we took a lot of photos in sequence.

And all these photos are now sitting on your Photo App on your iMac.

Then, you will take lots of lots of photos.

kids drawing, you take.

iPad games, you take screen shots.

Every meal you have, before the meal, you feed your smart phone camera.

You end up with a lot a lot a lot of junk photos.

It is good to keep some of these sequences of photos.

Because it tells you about what happen in the event.

But seriously, 10 years later, do you really take a look at these photos again?

And if you end up > 100,000 photos like me, where do you even look for the photos?

Where do you even start to look for? 

I don’t know about you, but this has got to be stop.

So, I am still processing my photo events and album.

But I would like to share what I did.

I have almost 400Gb of photos in my photo app.  That is about > 100,000 photos plus videos.

So, I am going thru every photos.  Year by year, month by month.

It is going to be a long process.  But I am starting some where.

For example.

We went to Botanical garden on May 30, 2010.

It is great to have all these photos here.  Almost 90 photos were shot during that day.

But seriously, do you need to keep all these photos on your Album or Photo App?

Some photos are not focus.

Some photos are blur.

Some photos are not relevant.

And these the the photos that clog up your Digital Photo Album.

And sometimes, you run out of disk space because of you keeping so many photos.

Before you do this.  

You need to have a proven method to do backup for your photos.

All these photos are your precious photos.

So, you need to copy it somewhere that is safe.

But that some where is not really safe if you are talking about digital storage.

1.  I setup a Synology NAS (Network Area Storage) with the usual RAID 5 settings.  If anything wrong with the hard disk, simply pull out the hard disk which is at fault, and plug in a new hard disk (compatible one), the RAID 5 system will auto repair and populate all the data back.  Let’s call this Diskstation 1.

2.  I setup ANOTHER Synology NAS.  Called Diskstation 2.  Exactly the same way.

3.  All those photos I decided to keep, I will place it on to Diskstation 2. 

4.  I will create a YEAR directory.  i.e. Photos/Year 2010

5.  I will create a folder with date on it to describe the event.  i.e. Photo/Year 2010/2010-05-30 Botanical Garden with Terrence

6.  Take note.  You don’t any how go and upgrade the Synology firmware on both Synology NAS.  This is very dangerous.

7.  Whatever photos I need to keep, I will copy it onto this directory on the Diskstation 2.

8.  At mid-night, I run a cron job or backup job to copy the photos and videos directory over to Diskstation 1.  It is a dump copy.  

9.  Like this, I am very sure I have 2 copies of the photos I want to keep which is safely kept on the two NAS I have which doing daily backup.

10.  I also have a 2TB hard disk (those portable one) connected to my iMac.  And that is my Time Machine. It is doing daily routines backup on all my softwares on my iMac.  So, if something goes wrong, the first place I will look for is this Time Machine.  From time to time, I will but a new hard disk and plug it in to create new Time Machine.  Then, I will keep these old one.  Well, if something really goes wrong, you know you won’t lost every thing.

11.  Now, you can start editing, deleting the photos that you don’t want.  Only keep those that is very important to you.

12.  Guess what… after all the deleting…  I left with 18 photos that I like to have it in my Photo App.  There rest of the 70+ photos all removed from the Photo App.  But these photos are still in my Synology NAS.  So, you are not deleting it away permanently, instead you make a copy, and you delete it from the Photo App.

13.  If you can do so, you will be happy to see your total hard disk space for your photos are reduced may be 1/2 to 2/3.  That is a huge savings on hard disk space.  And my aim is to reduce the total photos down to 20,000 may be… for the last 10 years.

14.  Wait, we are not done yet.  Since you are editing and deleting these photos.  Mind as well tag it.  Tag your favourite, give it a meaningful tags.

15.  Then, you go into individual photos and try to tag even more tags.  Why this is important, because, it helps you to find the photos fast.

16.  So, now, if you type “cute” as a search item, Photo App will show you all the photos you have tagged “cute"

17.  It is an easy way to organise your photo, and do a quick search.

That concludes my latest thoughts on how to manage your digital photos.

I have done a few months starting year 2010.  There are a few more years to go.

Especially during the birth of iPhone.  

You cannot believe how many “Bad photos” or Blur photos I have taken.

Tons of it.

And I need to get rid of them.

Only choose up to maximum 5-10 photos for each even.  Longer event of course you can have more photos.

But only choose then that is relevant and that is good quality.

I will update again once I have completed all my photos for the last 6-8 years.

And will proudly show my achievement.  hahaha