Off a slide Tuck Soon tweeted while at a design thinking workshop. It encapsulates a lot of what I think are extremely relevant skills for the current and next generation.
This whole cycling everywhere business has gotten me excited, especially to find out what other park connectors NParks provides.
The NParks website is extremely slow, despite the fact folks have given them feedback more than a year ago.
So rather than wait for them to fix it, I’ve traced all the park connectors into a single Google Map.
Enjoy.
View NParks Park Connectors, Singapore in a larger map
February and March was supposed to be a time of rest before I head to the new job, but opportunity often knocks on the door when you least expect it.
When I met Mark Surman in Singapore last December, I had no idea I would eventually become involved in shaping the Open Web Career Track Drumbeat Project along with John Britton and Philipp Schmidt.
It was one of those requests that made me feel woefully inadequate, but I felt a deep affinity to its cause of providing accessible education to inculcate skills within the tech community — skills necessary to keep the web open and non-proprietary. John and Phlipp were extremely patient and kind to bring me up to speed.
So when Mark asked if I could present the Open Web Career Track project at Mozilla Developer Day in Bangalore, I agreed.
It is regrettable that I’ve never really traveled within Asia, and it would be my first time to India.
The crowd that showed up for MozDevDay was amazing. A full-house of about 300 people, on a Saturday, some coming from quite a distance away.
It was an eclectic experience: we talked pretty cutting edge tech in the hall — thanks to Arun — and ate sitting down on the grass patch under the noon sun. It was a departure from the sterile environment Singapore tech meetups are often held in, where the main complaint was always “why no wifi?”.
It was a blast speaking to the audience. The Indian and Chinese cultures share so many similarities it was easy to point out (and subsequently joke about) our common idiosyncrasies.
I’ve learned so much from the amazing people I met. In a land where there are places in poverty, open-source software means so much more than “why does OpenOffice mess up my Powerpoint slides?”. It is a means by which the poor can make themselves relevant in an increasingly technological world; where the oppressed can broadcast their plight to the rest of the world despite the best efforts of the oppressors to silence them.
The web has changed the way in which we communicate and connect with each other. It has the potential to be a lot more than a giant corporate marketplace. We need to consciously keep it inclusive and available to everyone.
For Faith, Anne and Caleb.
I miss you already.
To our sisters Audrey and Louelle who couldn’t join us for the Chinese New Year festivities. Thought I’d give you guys a summary of stuff we did this year.
Continue reading Chinese New Year Rundown »
It’s hard to imagine I started this blog 10 years ago.
It was the weekend of Martin Luther King holiday, and all the dormitories were empty then — everyone had gone home for the long weekend. The weather was cold, and I was suffering from the worst fever of my life. I had back spasms; it hurt to stand up or to lie down and my whole body was trembling non-stop.
There, thousands of miles away from home, I seriously thought I was going to die.
I wanted to tell the folks back home of my plight, and instead of calling home, I decided to haul my very sick body on to my chair, learn HTML, and wrote my first blog entry. The first design had notepad lines and was adorned with animated Calvin and Hobbes gifs.
Blogger hadn’t existed yet, so we all coded our online journals by hand.
The seemingly stupid decision to craft HTML instead of seeing a doctor that day changed my life. More than the fact it led to my current profession, the small blog community was close-knit. Folks like Nick Pan and Jimmy Liew were my first comrades into the field of web standards. Nick’s wife Pearl drew the most stunning illustrations at Pearlpan.com. Dawn Mikulich had the most subtle and beautiful minimalist blog “A Life Uncommon”. There used to be a young teenager named Sarah who always left comments of encouragement in my guestbook (we didn’t have comments then).
It’s really been a while, and we’ve lost a lot of great bloggers along the way.
The blogosphere feels different these days. You could say that the loud blaring voices of PR agencies killed what we had going. When blogs hit the mainstream, followed by social media, it heralded the end of the living room and ushered in the marketplace.
At the risk of sounding too geeky: I miss how real and authentic online connections used to feel.
“Are we in Singapore or on Singapore?” Anne asked last night while in bed.
“In Singapore, I guess.”
“If we’re in Singapore, why is it we’re on earth?”
Whoa. My 4-year old just set me up for a tough question. I struggled with that one, not because I didn’t know the answer, but I didn’t know how to explain it in a way a 4-year old would understand.
You know, maybe I didn’t have to dumb it down. After all, she was the one who asked right?
So here goes.
When we say we’re in Singapore, we refer to its national boundaries which we remain physically within. We do sometimes say we are on the island of Singapore, which would refer to the actual piece of land we stand on.
Likewise, when we refer to Earth, we do not mean an invisible boundary (not until we start parceling out plots of space for condominiums anyway), but the planet itself. Therefore we are on the planet and not in it.
Unless we’re spelunking.
You think Anne’ll understand spelunking?
This is my last week at the Ministry of Education. It’s been a little over four years, and I find myself in a very different place from where I envisioned four years ago. My time in the government has been a most serendipitous and amazing journey, and I am indelibly changed because of it.
I used to participate rather actively in the great Singaporean pastime of government-bashing. I despised the way the government worked - it was easy to find points of agreement with the cab driver: Singapore is fraught with hidden taxes that makes living very expensive; the politicians earn way too much; the government is full of bureaucracy and doesn’t care for citizens.
All the points are valid of course. But the greatest lesson I took home with me is this: the government isn’t a faceless machine. She is made up of fellow citizens. True, some are self-serving. Some are in it for the money. But no more and no less than in any other large organisation, private or public. As citizens we should not waste our time here; we should be looking to nurture a culture of selflessness and empower noble intent. Rather than be mired in a never-ending spiral of self-despair and finger-pointing, we should engage in a constructive relationship with the government.
Web 2.0 ushers in Gov 2.0, and Gov 2.0 cannot exist without Citizen 2.0.
A friend from another country once asked me why Singaporeans complained so much but did so little. It really hit home. We could attribute it to fear, but to be perfectly honest, we complain because it is the easiest path to take.
I joined the government 4 years ago with the intention of changing the way Singapore government agencies create websites. To my surprise the people at the ministry welcomed my ideas and were willing to let Selwyn and I build the corporate website from the ground up. It was then I realised that the ministry was made up of real people, many of whom genuinely want to improve the lives of people living in Singapore.
The line between the government and her people is an imaginary line, and contrary to popular movie wisdom, neither has need to fear the other. Citizens who want to change Singapore for the better should not hesitate to join the government and effect change from within.
I have grappled with this decision for about a year now. It has become clear that it is time for me to move on. The entrepreneurial dream is something that burns within me and many of my friends.
But it has dawned on me that entrepreneurship is not so much a working arrangement as it is a state of mind. The entrepreneurial spirit is one that doesn’t tolerate the status quo simply because, but constantly questions and endlessly strive through continual iteration to improve processes, products and people.
I have decided to continue being an intrapreneur. Come April I will be joining the folks at Temasek Polytechnic. I was totally blown away by how much the organisation valued me as an individual rather than a unit of resource, and the hiring process was thoroughly outstanding. I am excited at the possibilities there, and thankful that God has provided for me and led me down a path filled with peace.
Dearest Faith,
I opened my eyes, escaping slumber for that brief moment, comforted by the fact I lay beside you, a place better than any in my dreams.
I love you.
This morning my 4 year-old daughter Anne picked up a small notebook that had a flower on the cover.
“This is for girls”, she stated.
And that’s how my notebook became hers.
“What would be on the cover if the notebook was for boys?” I asked. “A ball? A toy car? An aeroplane?” I suggested.
A cheeky smile spread over her face.
“Trash.”
The weblog of Lucian Teo, husband to the most beautiful wife, father to the most amazing kids. Photographer, storyteller, all-round nice guy [citation needed].
Recent Comments