IF. Live curious. If you are...you are alive...

If you are, you breath.
If you breath, you talk.
If you talk, you ask.
If you ask, you think.
If you think, you search.
If you search, you experience.
If you experience, you learn.
If you learn, you grow.
If you grow, you wish.
If you wish, you find.
If you find, you doubt.
If you doubt, you question.
If you question, you understand.
If you understand, you know.
If you know, you want to know more...
And if you want to know more, you are alive...

Powerful Secret Of Touching People

I’m Inspire by an evangelism model in the book of Luke 10:5-9

"When you enter a house, first say, 'Peace to this house.' If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; if not, it will return to you. Stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house. "When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is set before you. Heal the sick who are there and tell them, 'The kingdom of God is near you.' Ed Silvoso put it out well in his book Prayer Evangelism:

1.)   Bless: Bring peace to them

Speaking peace to people and to the systems that are around us. 
I cannot change what I do not embrace.

2.)   Fellowship: Fellowship with them,

Listening to find out where the pain and brokenness is. 
I cannot fix what I don’t know is broken.

3.)   Minister: Meet their need (Pray for them)

Talking to God about someone else’s problem. 
I connect man’s need with God’s resources.

4.)   Declare: Share with them,

Letting it be known that the kingdom of God is near. 
I confirm that the power and presence of God is “in the neighborhood”.

Story time: Share with you what the LORD has done, As my wife and I collect our laundry we chat with Mr. Phen (Indian) and we ask him is there anything I can pray for you? (Following the evangelism model from Luke 10:5-9) To our surprise he said “I very into Jesus but have not personally know him yet because of his wife.” But we encourage him and ask him to “personally accept Jesus into his life. God love you and your family He will take care of your wife and family.” Praise the Living God he give himself to the LORD that day.

More story: My wife lost her precious camera which has been following her for more than 4 years, last year mission trip. She was looking for it up and down and call people that she can think of to help her to find it. As I writing this email to my surprising, I recall that day before CNY when we buy our new camera, we found “the lost”. Joseph is one of the brother we found in our Treasure Hunt Luke 15:8-10. Is amazing, how beautiful are God plans, as we look hard for the treasure that  precious to us. God also has His precious treasure need us to look for. Luke 15:31-32

Food for thought: 'My son,' the father said, 'you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.'

The King Inside The Kid and The Kid Inside The King

Statistics show that 80% of people who commit suicide in mid-life are men. Often they quit and nobody knows they’ve quit. Men are every bit as emotional as women, but have less opportunity to show it. There are shelves upon shelves of women’s magazines, but how many men’s magazines can you name that do not have sexual content. Many men in the middle of their lives do not feel appreciated. They continue in the same routine day after day until one day they decide they can’t take it any longer. Inside every man there is a battle between the king and the kid. Too many of us men spend a large part of our lives looking for the king, but end up acting like a kid. Our community and prisons are filled with would be kings who won’t wait for their turn or don’t want to share or lash out when they can’t get their own way. These are all traits of kids, but there is hope. Joseph was put in prison, but when the Pharaoh sent for him he left the cell, shaved, changed his clothes and put on the mentality of a king (Gen 41 v 14). The aim of Men’s Fellowship is to equip each other for our role as kings. Too many men coming to Christ, having been saved from the bondage of sin, still act as if they are in chains. The kid is still in control.

If we’re honest many of us men have wandered into things, but very few of us have been aimed. One issue facing us at the present time is raising children. You cannot raise children without making mistakes. Young men need to be trained for the battles ahead which come with fatherhood. We see an increase in gang culture where teenagers through lack of direction are inventing causes to fight and looking to gain respect without earning it!

Unfortunately most men are trying to play a role nobody has prepared them for. They have not had a father to show them how to be a dad or a husband. Let’s use David as an example. He was anointed to be king, but had no expertise of how to behave in a palace. God provided a way for him to gain the skills needed for the next chapter of his life (1 Samuel 16 v 21). Nobody wakes up and decides to mess up; we must prepare our men to succeed.

Usually, when we mess up it is the kid in us taking control. The desire of Men’s Fellowship is to stop the kid from killing the king. I encourage all men to come along and share their wisdom and all women to continue to support us with your prayers.

April 18, 2009 - Filed under cogic uk

So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

…You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something…

My second story is about love and loss.

…I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

…I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

…No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

…Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

This is an extraction of the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

Who writes Wikipedia articles?

Wikipedians who can perform a range of roles -- rather than possess a single expertise -- are key to quality articles.

It takes a village of contributors -- adding paragraphs here, inserting references there -- to craft a quality Wikipedia article, according to a new study that identifies the types of contributors who initiate and dominate the process to separate the Wikipedia wheat from chaff.

"What we found was that there are many different people playing many different roles, and they don't always play the same role in every article," said Sudha Ram, management information systems professor at the University of Arizona, who conducted the analysis with graduate student Jun Liu.

Ram and Liu first identified six types of contributor roles for individual articles, along with casual contributors who made four or fewer edits to entries.

They then analyzed the types of contributors involved and their levels of engagement in a set of high-, medium- and low-quality Wikipedia articles.

Entries largely built by "all-round editors," who are active in all angles of writing, editing and linking, garnered the most top-quality ratings. Those composed by "sentence starters" and casual contributors, which generally lack source references, fell toward the opposite end of the spectrum.

Ram largely attributes this division to all-round editors' self-policing habits of not only spotting other contributors' errors, but also their own.

"Cleaning up other people's mistakes is obviously important as well, but self-policing seems to be really important because when you write something, you want to go in and justify it yourself," Ram said.

While certain collaborative patterns predict different levels of quality, the findings don't undermine the importance of copy editors, fact-checkers and other contributor roles in the Wikipedia universe.

"Even if we limit ourselves to this study, one shouldn't conclude that casual users are of no worth, only that high-quality articles tend to be correlated with all-round (editors)," said Joseph Reagle, an adjunct professor at New York University who has written a forthcoming book on Wikipedia. "An implication then for improving the quality of Wikipedia is to help more contributors become well-rounded contributors."

To that end, the University of Arizona study suggests developing wiki software that would guide contributors through article-specific roles, such as writing or copy editing, and prompt them to justify claims with links and references instead of relying as heavily on peer review.

After all, while collaboration is king in the wiki world, it doesn't always guarantee quality results.

"In previous work we've found that having more contributors is associated with higher quality articles only when they coordinate well with each other," said Niki Kittur, a Carnegie Melon University assistant professor who has studied Wikipedia collaboration. "When they don't, adding more contributors doesn't help and can even hurt."

Cristen Conger is a writer for HowStuffWorks.com.

What makes pornography so addictive?

The reason men look at porn is because they are trying to find validation (Do I have what it takes? Am I a MAN?) and take it to the woman. The problem is that women aren't meant to validate us in that way; our fathers were. Eldredge says this: "Why is pornography the number one snare for men? He longs for the beauty, but without his fierce and passionate heart he cannot find her or win her or keep her. Though he is powerfully drawn to the woman, he does not know how to fight for her or even that he is to fight for her. Rather, he finds her mostly a mystery that he knows he cannot solve and so at a soul level he keeps his distance. And privately, secretly, he turns to the imitation. What makes pornography so addictive is that more than anything else in a lost man's life, it makes him FEEL like a man without ever requiring a thing of him. The less a guy feels like a man in the presence of a real woman, the more vulnerable he is to porn."

One reason why a lot of men look at porn is because we don't have a good understanding of what beauty is and God's purpose for the beauty that women are meant to unveil.

I recommend that you read John Eldredge's books "Wild at Heart" 

KL not dark enough during Earth Hour

SATURDAY night was the second time Malaysia participated in the Earth Hour programme.

From what I observed from Look Out Point in Ampang, some high-rise buildings like KLCC, Menara Maxis and KL Tower switched off their lights.

We should commend such efforts. Kudos to the respective authorities.

Generally however, Kuala Lumpur was a letdown because the city was still bright.

Other cities like Sydney, New York, Tokyo, Paris, Moscow, Johannesburg and London were much darker than us.

What is wrong with us Malaysians?

How can we pledge to reduce carbon emission by up to 40% come 2020?

The ordinary citizen never seems to bother about such events.

We might think that nothing much can be achieved by switching off lights for an hour.

It’s not the time that counts, but the togetherness and the will to do something to make this Earth a better place.

What happened on Saturday might be due to the lack of promotion by the organiser, the WWF.

We must have a will to preserve and conserve the environment for our future generations. We must discard our selfish attitude now.

If you think switching off lights and staying home is boring and stupid, why not hang out with family or friends during the hour?

That way you can kill two birds with one stone.

You can save the planet and enhance your bond with each other.

The people in power, corporate figures and the NGOs should set an example by doing the same thing and asking everyone to switch off their lights.

I am very supportive of Earth Hour and feel we should make Kuala Lumpur the darkest city during that time.

Remember, everything is possible as long as we think of Mother Earth.

It would be good if other cities such as Putrajaya, Ipoh, Petaling Jaya, George Town, Miri and Kota Kinabalu join Kuala Lumpur in such an important event.

excretion from The Star: KL not dark enough during Earth Hour