2016 Olympic Games

International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge in Copenhagen, Denmark solemnly declared: Rio de Janeiro is the host city of 2016 Olympic Games!

The reason that the voting result is unusual because the International Olympic Committee has given South America an epoch-making opportunity. The President of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, said to be a successful host city of the Games is the good news, but the next few years, the Brazilian people and Government feel the great responsibility.

October 2, 2009, will permanently go down in Brazilian’s history. In the following press conference, the President of Brazil could not contain his excitement, crying and taking out his handkerchief wiping tears. Many reporters on the spot could not help but shed tears.

Chicago, Tokyo, Rio and Madrid, four cities competing to host the 2016 Olympic Games, has worked intensely for 2 days to impress more than 100 IOC members in the final presentation to demonstrate the glorious side of their countries and cities and to present their people's aspirations for the Olympic enthusiasm. It is not surprised to see those who come to give the final speech are the President, the King and Prime Minister-level characters such as Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Barrack Obama, Spain's King and Prime Minister and the Japanese prime minister.

Obama's speech is full of passion, but Lula has impressed the IOC members with his sincerity. The civilian-turned-president has used his love for sports and brief strong language to win the hearts of voters. He remained at the scene until the annoucement of the final results, as opposed to the short moment of stay of the United States President Barrack Obama due to his hectic schedule.

Lula said at a news conference, his life went through a lot of things, and seen countless celebrities, it has never been so moved, crying. He said it is a greatest gift for him to witness Rio to win the host of the Games.


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Chinese Zither - Gu Zheng (古筝)

If you know me as a friend, a closed friend. You will probably know that I love music very much. I joined Chinese Orchestra during my secondary school and it has brought me lots of joys and beautiful experiences. Those things that I learned and I exposed to have benefited me so much till now. I will like to bring to your attention certain aspects of Chinese traditional music.

The Chinese traditional music has undergone tremendous development in the past 60 years. With the influence of western music, Chinese instrumental music has evolved from one style to another.

Today, I would like to introduce my favourite Chinese musical instrument - Gu Zheng. It has more than 2000 years of history. It is probably one of the most popular musical instruments people learned in China because it is very easy to start and people can easily attracted to its beautiful sound. I have found this piece performed by one of the Chinese zheng musician from YouTube. Hope you enjoy.



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Twit, Twait, Twitter!

The first time I heard about “Twitter” is in Times magazine covering news about the Iranian presidential election and how protesters used Twitter as a communication tool with the outside world after the government blocked peoples’ access to several modes of communication. I was curious what Twitter is that time but also lazy to check my dictionary what it actually means. That was back in July 2009.

It was brought to my attention by my internet marketing community in CarbonCopyPro in September 2009 as one of the most effective way and free / low costs advertising tool. That is when I start registering an account with Twitter.

When I get onto this site, I was totally “blurred”. It is very different from other social networking websites that we had been to, such as facebook, friendster, etc. It was also called a micro-blogging website but I don’t personally agree with that. What you can do is constantly (if you want to and not afraid of being asked to stop by your friends and followers) updating your status and whatever information that you want your followers to know. These messages will be sent to them and keep them informed of your condition at that particular instant. Twitter is link to hand phone as well as a result each message we sent is limited to 140 characters so it got to be short and concise. All these messages will be sent directly to your followers’ page on internet or their hand phone (if they link both service to one another). That gives the reasons for certain people to complain about Twitter for being too connected with their friends and also the surging phone bills. It could be quite annoying if your friends and acquaintances keep updating their little trivial things while you are having a wonderful dinner with your loved one.


Twitter is so popular to the extent that the site can actually “down” or experience an outage for overloading messages transmitting through Twitter. The signal for such outage will be a screen picturing an overweight whale being lifted up by some red little birds. Can you imagine how many people are using it and the popularity of the site? To the extent to make it “down”.

You can use the site to keep track of the most popular trend among the Twitter community. But I find that people used Twitter for business marketing purposes more than social networking. More than 50% of my followers keep sending me various auto-set marketing messages everyday. It is so many that sometimes I can receive more than 50 in a second. But it is a great tool for marketing, no doubt. That is why, people are using it to find information and cool stuffs.

If you have ample time and don’t know how and where to use it. Why not join the Twitter community to tweet and re-tweet messages? My advice, do it if you are ready to be overwhelmed by heaps of messages from all over the world.


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Mooncake festival is coming again!!

Hi guys, moon cakes festival is coming once again. Some of my friends have been cracking their head thinking what moon cakes to buy for this annual reunion festival because there are simply too many choices out there in the market (let's don't mention about their price). My personal favorite moon cake is "Nyonya" flavour moon cakes with its ingredient stuffed with deliciously cooked prawn sambal and lotus paste.

I come across this moon cake ad from one of the Hong Kong stores called "Goods of Desire". Do you want to have one of these moon cakes?

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China Trip No. 7 – 13 September 2009 (Day 3) – Shanghai Museum, Shanghai Xin Tian Di (上海新天地), Shopping at Huai Hai Road (淮海路)

It was third day in China and I scheduled to meet up with a friend I know on msn at the end of second day. We scheduled meeting up at Shanghai Xin Tian Di around 2 p.m. Before that, I planed to visit the Shanghai Museum because it is famous, free entrance and has one of the best Bronze exhibitions.

As usual, I took subway line 2 from Jing An Station to People square (人民广场) station. People square station is “HUGE” subway line interchange station. It is just huge. I needed to walk about 20 minutes to reach the museum. Reach there around 830a.m. There was a long queue. Because the tickets giving out are limited, everyone reach there early in the morning. Also because that was Saturday, I was not ready to see a long queue and huge crowd. I waited for almost 30 to 45 minutes to get in. We can only go in batch by batch.

If you stand facing the façade of the museum, you will notice that the building was designed in a “Ding (鼎)” shaped. “Ding” is an ancient round cooking vessel made of bronze.

The museum highlights includes the Ancient Chinese Bronze Gallery, Ancient Chinese Ceramic Gallery, Chinese painting gallery, Chinese calligraphy gallery, ancient Chinese jade gallery, Chinese minorities nationalities gallery, etc. There are so many to see and I took so many pictures even though I am forbidden to take at certain area. I enjoyed the ancient Chinese bronze gallery the most because one of the tour groups are university students which they managed to get the museum in house researcher to explain to them the details, beauty and history of Bronze. I followed them everywhere and enjoyed so much in listening those interesting stories and was really amazed by the bronze making techniques that our ancestors invented. You can see one of the pictures below are a combination of big and small bell-shaped bronze made “Bian Zhong” (编钟). Bian Zhong are bell, which can produce sound and tone as accurate as your piano can made. And same accurate sound can be produce if you hit both side of the bell. Amazing!!!

Since I have an appointment to rush, I was not prepared to stay long inside. There are other tourist attractions around the People Square district, such as Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai Grand Theatre, Shanghai Urban Planning Centre, Yifu Theatre and Shanghai Concert Hall. Of course, the Shanghai City Hall is located in People Square.

I guessed one of the reason why my Shanghainese friend chooses Shanghai Xin Tian Di as a meeting spot is because this represents one of the premier entertainment and shopping areas in Shanghai. Shanghai Xin Tian Di is located within the French Concession district. In old shanghai, it was said, the British in the International Settlement will teach you how to do business, but in French Concession, you would be taught how to live. That remain true, because Shanghai Xin Tian Di are all refurbished “long tang” (lane) buildings that houses many popular boutiques, restaurants, pubs and entertainment complexes. Within the same area, there are some very nice coffee shops, surprisingly I saw “Coffee Bean” too. We met up in Star Buck.

My friend also brought me to certain local shopping area along Huai Hai Road -淮海路 (as compared to the already popular and high end expensive shopping area such as NanJing Road). There was some drizzling that day and I bought an umbrella for RMB10, I am still using this umbrella till now.

It was quite congested that day because there was a parade going on for the Shanghai International Exhibition in 2010. People are standing sideway along the road making it difficult to move. He brought me to some of the local shops only visited by local young people, which is of course unknown to a foreigner like me. The design is quite unique but a bit pricey so I buy none of them.

After our dinner, we went to a local pub opened by my friend’s acquaintance. It was a wonderful night because the atmosphere in that pub was quite “funky” and the hosts are friendly and funny. Because it is small, it appears to be quite intimate.

We chatted till midnight and took a taxi home.

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China Trip No. 6 - 12 September 2009 (Day 2) - Shanghai Science & Technology Museum (上海科技馆), Oriental Art Centre (上海东方艺术中心), Century Boulevard (世纪大道)

It took me less than 2 hours to finish the whole Xing Chang Ancient Town (新场古镇); I still remembered it was around 11:45 a.m. I decided to take my lunch here before my departure. I went into a Fu Jian Snack Shop (福建小吃馆) and ordered myself a bowl of roast duck noodle. The weather is a bit steamy hot; I waited for 45 minutes at the bus station. Since this is a rural area, the bus is not so frequent.

When I reached Long Yang Road station (龙阳路站) I decided to visit Shanghai Science and Technology Museum and Shanghai Oriental Art Centre. These two are located at Pudong area and it is 3 stations away from Long Yang Road station. The other reason is that I would like to attend a concert at the Shanghai Oriental Art Centre since that day is Saturday.

So the first thing when I reached Century Boulevard station was running all I can to the Oriental Art Centre with the hope of getting a chance to watch a concert. Yes, there was a concert that day and it was scheduled to be performed by an Italian Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of a popular Chinese conductor. The ticket I bought is the cheapest but costed me RMB200. But worth it.

The Shanghai Technology and Science Museum located right beside the Century Boulevard. One can reach there at Century Boulevard Station. This museum takes up to 68,000 sq metres of space and costs around US$183 millions to build up this museum with various theme covering man, nature, science and technology. It is a very huge museum and felt tired walking around because I don’t normally see such colossal building in Malaysia. There is an IMAX centre inside too. An entrance fee to the museum is around RMB60. One of the interesting items I saw in front of the Museum is the Celestial Globe (浑天仪) . I came out from the museum around 4:30p.m. Then I took the subway train heading back to my hostel in order to groom myself for tonight concert.

The Shanghai Oriental Art Centre is one of the many performing art centres in Shanghai. It is located right opposite the Century Boulevard and was designed in a stunning butterfly shaped. It is also home to the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. The art centre comprises 3 performance theatre (music, opera and theatre) and an exhibition hall. The design of the building is fantastic. It was a wonderful night.

The concert ended at around 10pm, I decided to take a stroll along the Century Boulevard. The night scene is beautiful and is very quite.

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Oh Bach...........

Bach's works is relatively abstract and purely mathematical. Comparing his music with the music written in classical age, there are essentially different. Classical music mostly represents emotional expression, so it is easy to impress people.

Bach's music represents the highest throughout the grounds, almost detached from the reality.

His music comprises various complex counterpoint, careful composition techniques, which is so complicated that it may deter many people to really understand what it does really means. The music is beautiful and graceful, full of godly light and yet not easily reprehensible.

His music was basically forgotten after his death and comes back as a true renaissance in the nineteenth century.

Listen to Bach's works, hoping surging emotions, is unrealistic. Bach's works represents exquisite delicate process and the pinnacle of Baroque composition skills. Bach left us with a development of a never-ending treasure. Noble, Meaningful, elegant, noble, witty, but it can also be secular.

His music is not written in plain, but once take the hint, but it would be worth hearing a thousand times. This is the wonder of Bach’s works.

This music is played by the internationally renown cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the piece he played is the "Preclude" from the first suit of the unaccompanied cello solo work.

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International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

I first come across this term in twitter, people are talking about it. It is set on 19 September because it is one of the two inventors’ ex-wife birthday, so it is easier for him to remember.

The day was created by John Chumbucket Baur and Mark Summers while they are hurling each other piratical words at one of the sport game. This is how the idea come about. Funny isn’t it? Later the “this talk like a pirate day” was nationally promoted by the humour columnist Dave Barry in 2002 and soon gained popularity thereafter.

But you may ask, what do you need to do? What is the reason to have such a holiday? Do we need it? How to celebrate? Blah, blah, blah… … seems like no point to have such a holiday right? But that is exactly the point and the fun of it. Today, it is well celebrated throughout the world and spawned various events, parties, creative ways to celebrate it, etc. It is a rough idea and also a romanticized idea.

For more information, you may want to visit the official website of International Talk Like a Pirate Day.


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Chinese Ghost Festival <<中元节>>

The Chinese ghost festival is in the 7th month of the Chinese lunar calendar. Chinese tends to restrict / delay / cancel their activities within this month, and warn their friends and relatives to go home earlier in order not to come across some wondering spirits. For many, ghost festivals reminiscent of various scary experiences or memory that we have since young. However, I remember vividly that I do enjoy this festivals as a kid because it has lots of funs.

The origin of Chinese ghost festivals originated from Buddhism. Buddha taught one of his disciples to hold a grand ceremony to provide offerings to various monks in order to save his late mother who is suffering in the hell as a hungry ghost. As Buddhism is widely accepted in China and the festivals advocates the spread of filial piety and dissemination of kindness, which can be well assimilated with the Confucian teaching. It soon becomes one of the many festivals Chinese celebrates yearly. Malaysian, Singaporean and Taiwanese have preserved this culture intact.

Do you know we spent more than RM100, 000,000 just to celebrate the Chinese ghost festival in Malaysia? Yes, we spent that much of money. Who said our economy is down?

Now, talk about the fun things when we were kids.

1) Every 15th day of the 7th month of the lunar calendar, my farther will bring home a huge banana stem. He will then chop into several pieces. After lighting the candles, we will stick the candles into the banana stem so that the candles can stand. What is fun for me is to surround my house and my farther’s shop with all these candles, it looks nice for me. Till now, still not really sure what is the rationale behind that.

2) There will be more than one worshipping, within my house, within the area where our family does business, in the temples that we visited and some other Chinese association that my parents join. Lots of foods and necessity needs to be prepared to be offered during these worshipping for those spirits. As a kid, I only know my parents will bring home lots of foods for me to eat after every single worshipping. I still remember we have altogether 4 worships.

3) Getai (歌台) performance and movie – Not so popular nowadays because it is quite costly to stage a performance. We all know that these kinds of performance are for those spirits, but who cares. We are just too excited to watch it with our cousin and siblings after our dinner. Whenever there is a getai performance, I always want to sneak into the back stage to see what those actors / actress are doing back there.

4) The festivals is often quite lively, most of the time we need to have a road block in order to have such celebration. You will see heaps of necessity (sugar, rice, flour, canned foods/drinks, etc) and other foods offerings piling up everywhere on the table, the huge 5 colour dragon incense, 5 colour flags sticking on the foods offering, various type of paper money and paper gold, papers car, paper ship, paper aeroplane. You name it, they have it. As kids, we are thrilled to see all these; we always steal those 5 colour flags to fight among each others. At the end of the festivals, we also need to help burning those papers made items. You may say I am crazy, but what I remembered is I quite like doing that with other kids.

But time has changed; we have all grown up and are so busy with our own career. Would our next generation have such fun as well?


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Funny Commercials!

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Quotes from Mother Teresa

Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.

Everytime you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.

God doesn't require us to succeed; he only requires that you try.

Each one of them is Jesus in disguise.

I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.

I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn't touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one.

If you judge people, you have no time to love them.

In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.

It is a kingly act to assist the fallen.

Jesus said love one another. He didn't say love the whole world.

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.

Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.

Love begins by taking care of the closest ones - the ones at home.

We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.

Say nothing, but “I am excellent”

Whenever my friends and/or colleagues bump into me and ask me how I am, I usually reply that “I AM EXCELLENT”. What I get in return is the skeptical gaze from them. In courtesy, I ask them how they are and the reply is usually “I am fine”, “I am ok”, “not good”, “not so bad”, etc. To sum it up, the reply is normally less than “I am great”.

I asked one of my colleagues, why not say something great. She explained that we must not say something that is not true. Yup, it is true, but only a partially true statement. People will only reply they are “great” or “excellent” when something great happened on them. But most of the time, our daily life is bland, routine and monotonous. Our mind seems focusing more on the past. Even now, this second, can be past when another second comes. Dwelling on the past makes us giving a mediocre answer.

But we also know that future is depending on what we do now. Why don’t we make a good decision and do something great now? So that by doing something great now, great things will happen later. Therefore, I like to go out there and tell people that “I am excellent”. I have this friend of mine who don’t even dare to ask me how I am because my answer makes him feel so bad, because he always replies “NO GOOD”. Gosh. It costs you nothing to say you are great, for god sake, I hope he changed that.

I believe now is important and critical, so I decide to say “I am excellent” whenever people ask me how I am. Friends, please do so. Believe me; great things will come to you. Put your heart into it and say “I am excellent”, “I am awesome”!!! It does not hurt. So please say it.


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Only in japan!!

When I first see all these pictures, I tell my friends "Waahhhh, like that also can ar?" By the way, I hope you do enjoy these pictures.

p/s: we need entrepreneurs in here.

Is home business your option?

(a) There are about 20.7 million people works from home, according to the latest figures from the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, released in September 2005.

(b) Home based businesses are one of the fattest growing segments in our economy, and that trend will continue, as the age of the corporation now gives way to the age of the entrepreneurs. In today world, working for yourself or a small company is actually the safer route, and working for a large corporation has become the riskier proposition, according to economic advisor Paul Zane Pilzer.

(c) One segment of the entrepreneurship, networking marketing, sometimes called direct selling, is gaining attention from the world's foremost financial advisors. Direct selling is a "turnkey" solution. The beauty of this industry is that it is all done for you. There isn't any startup time; you don't have to create a product. The only thing you need to do is find a reputable company, one that you trust, that offers a product or service you believe in and can get passionate about, according to David Bach a financial planning expert and author of the New York Times Best Seller The Automatic Millionaire.

(d) Anyone can do it. You just need to be a little bit techs savvy to exploit all the benefits of IT to gain more marketing and publicity.

(e) Increasingly, people are realising the most valuable asset is "time" and directly selling presents an attractive alternative, according to Empower magazine.

(f) It is great, and it is also a challenge at time, as you need to be incredibly self disciplined to work for yourself, according to Andrew Cass, VP of Business Dev. for Wealth Masters International. He further states that too many so called entrepreneurs are jumping around from one business opportunity to the next these days hoping for immediate success and the next quick buck. But the winner stays consistent. Consistency wins out all the time. Make a decision and commit to it.

(g) Most people work extremely hard for their employers, but they just can not command the same amount of energy and determination on their own business, Jay Kubassek Co-founder and CEO of CarbonCopyPro.

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Up!!

Carl Fredricksen, a 78-year-old balloon salesman, finally fulfills his lifelong dream of a great adventure when he ties thousands of balloons to his house and flies away and heading to the south - Paradise Fall. Not long after taking off to sky, he discovered an over passionate boy named Russell was actually just outside his house when he untie the balloon.

What unfold after are series of funny incidents between these grumpy old man and restless young boy, just like those kind of relationship that we knew since young age with our grand parents.

Very warm and beautiful music, cute and colourful animation, simple but meaningful story line, I actually shed some tear at the end of the movie. This is definitely a very nice movie that I wish to recommend to all my friends. Go watch it, the movie teaches us to treasure all people around us, especially our love one. Never take anyone for granted. Enjoy every single moment we have with these people. Just like how Carl's wife appreciate her lifelong journey with her husband. It is loving movie. Go watch it before the cinema takes it down.


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American Idiot

American Idiot (Album Version) - Green Day







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CarbonCopyPRO Master Marketing EVENTS

Join us at http://oneyearplan.net/Andrew

CarbonCopyPRO Unveils the Most Powerful Online Marketing System and Business In-A-Box (BiB) For Internet Entrepreneurs

CarbonCopyPRO Unveils the Most Powerful Online Marketing System and Business In-A-Box (BiB) For Internet Entrepreneurs

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Dream home, guess whose is it?

p/s: Realise your dream in here, come on.

China Trip No. 5 - 12 September 2008 (Day 2) - Xin Chang Ancient Town

A visit to canal town or water village (literally called 水乡 in Chinese) is a must when one visit the Shanghai/HangZhou/SuZhou region of China. So, I decided to visit one of them in second day. Most of the water village are outside of Shanghai City, which may take one day to visit. I decided to pay a visit to a not so popular water village, Xin Chang Ancient Town (新场古镇).

This town is one hour away from Shanghai City Long Yang Station. When I reach Long Yang, I need to take a bus to go there, I still remember the bus fair is around RMB5. It is not very well known, those people in my youth hostel information counter can not really tell me where it is because they don’t even heard of it. However, they helped me locate the position of this place in google.

Dating back to the Song Dynasty is perhaps Shanghai's best and most authentic water village, sensitively restored by one of the city's leading preservationists and as yet undiscovered by the tourist hordes.

Xinchang has been largely overshadowed by better known tourist traps like ZhuJiaJiao and Zhou Zhung, which are offered as standard fare on most bus tours to Shanghai's outskirts. But this is a good thing and long may it remain so. Unlike the city's other water villages, XinChang's resident still live in the houses that their ancestors built. Trust me, the house is so so so small, and you can see those inner structure easily when one passing by the houses.

When I reach there, this quiet amostpheric ancient town gives an overall feeling of light green, very refreshing. You can see canal cutting across the village with many small bridge over the river and connecting the whole village. Very few people and I will say not commercialised and you can see the old town struggling to be anew.

p/s: please visit http://oneyearplan.net/Andrew