My daughter and I worked on this children picture book over the summer. The story came about when Elysha lost her first tooth two years ago. We decided to add cartoon figures to the story after visiting Disney World when we all took a 20-minute class on how to draw Dell, the chipmunk. This stroke her curiosity and further her interest in cartoon. Along the way, we learned from the cartoon books on how to draw cartoon figures. Jenny, the watermelon girl, was Elysha’s personal creation. I’m proud of her and our accomplishment. When her teacher asks her what she did over the summer, she can proudly say, “I published a book.”

Please click on the following link to read the book: Jenny – The Watermelon Girl

Very enlightening talk about why we cheat and steal. The “personal fudge factor” is a function of whether we’re reminded of the honor code, distance to the true “cash” value of the gain, and whether our peers are “cheating” makes it OK to cheat. These are all related to the current banking, financial crisis of today. Question your and others’ intuition. They could be wrong!

Wow, the following TED presentation by Willie Smits is simply amazing. There is still hope that we as the guardian of the earth can make a difference in saving the rainforest at a sustaining basis. Willie’s recipes to save the orangutans that includes local people in his equation are simply amazing.

I always enjoy Mike Rowe’s Dirty Job on the Discovery Channel. His talk on this particular dirty job shoot on castrating a sheep really re-defines what direct jobs are. Some things are not what they appear to be until you start doing it yourselves. Is doing a mundane job well and consistently all that bad? How do you explain why the workers are as happy as they can be? Perhaps, fancy jobs that you’re passionate about may not cut out to be what you think they are? How true!

Just finished watching this wonderful presentation by Sylvia Earle. The often neglected ocean needs to be protected if we want to preserve our own, by not overfishing and prevent pollution into the seas. Those video clips speak volume!

Very nice talk about the next frontier of satisfying consumers’ want – rendering authenticity. The two dimensions are: Being true to yourself. Being true to what you say you are.

Recommendation to business: 1) Don’t say you’re authentic, unless you’re authentic, 2) It’s easy to be authentic if you don’t say you’re authentic, 3) If you say you’re authentic, you’d better be authentic.

For us, what really make us happy is spending the time and money satisfying our desire to be authentic.

A few weeks ago, I accidentally clicked on Oxygen Channel and watched an episode of the “Snapped” show, then I was hooked for the last few weeks on Thursdays and Sundays, when the half-hour episodes are broadcast one after another for several hours. My Toshiba DVR really helped to get rid of the commercials. Today, I discovered that you can watch all the episodes on the Oxygen website where 3 seasons of “Snapped” episodes are on-line. How wonderful!

For a long time now, I discovered that I really enjoyed watching or reading murdermystery stories including “Law and Order,” and many other special investigations into some of the sensational murder cases – like the Polk case. My wife told me that I have a sinister side that comes out when I watched this kind of shows. “It’s not healthy,” I was told. But I believe everyone has a sinister/evil side that just might “snap” when the time, and circumstances are right. Some people just snap or “choose to” resort to violence more easily compared to others but everyone has a threshold. It might have something to do with the upbringing, and even genes. As it turns out, most of the killers or suspected killers in the “Snapped” episodes are women. Perhaps, women tend to be victims of domestic violence by men and perhaps more prone to emotional swing or even devious plots that cause them to kill as the “only” way out. I must admit that some of the acts were so obvious and even to the point of being ludicrous that I just don’t know what they were thinking how they’re going to get away with it. For example, there was one case that the wife killed her abusive husband in the bedroom and kept his body in the bedroom to rot and still managed to live in the same house for a year. It’s bordering insanity.

As a way to snap myself out of this “Snapped” addiction. I’d like to summarize the common themes among all these episodes:

What caused people/women to kill:
1. Money (greed): usually it’s the insurance money or some sort of inheritance for kids to kill their parents.
2. Love/hatred – getting rid of people in the way of love/affairs. It could be heterosexual or homosexual relationship.
3. Delusional about the only way to get out of or avenge a abusive relationship is to kill their spouse. In other words, taking laws into their own hands. It usually takes a sympathetic jury to acquit them of the guilt. Some of them went free, citing self-protection or insanity of sorts.

Most of weapons used in the murders are guns. The other weapons include knives, blunt objects, poison, and etc. Upon committing the murder, the killer would either leave the scenes as they are or tried to cover them up by making it look like accidents or making the bodies disappear. Eventually they all got found somehow.

Overall, watching the shows allows me to see people’s frame of mind and how they chose to commit the murder act. The line before people would cross the line is very blurry indeed.