Nevertheless, this has helped me shaped the new year today. It helped me set the momentum and an idea of how I should tackle 2012.

I took about two months to think about and prepare for 2012. I spoke to different groups of friends to listen to their opinions. I changed my plan again and again as I need to consider the amount of time I need to spend with my wife and our new-born baby coming in March 2012. The first half of 2011 has cost me a lot of time to spend inefficiently on the partnership agreement where I could have focus on productivity of the project. A lot of time has been spent on human factors such as lack of dedication and motivation to bring this big thing forward. It took me great pains before I decided to disband everything and start all over. That’s because a lot of communications has been made and it is such a waste to put a stop to this.

This year, 2012. I have set my new year resolution.
1. Learn all the web technologies out there.
2. Apply the technologies on my upcoming project.
3. Spend time with my wife and baby.
4. Bring my full-time job to the next stage.

This is all that I am focusing on. And I pray to God as I put my focus on them…

Other than my usual full-time job that I have, I have my online hobbies (as you know): They are the Android Phone Tips, Foodflag, Singapore Profile, and a few more others.

In my last army reservist recently, I spoke to one of my army friends about how I should tackle 2012.  He recommended me to take one step at a time.  I thought so about it as well when I can also see the two paid communities that I have joined (i.e. Third Tribe Marketing and Problogger Community) are also losing track of their work as the founders are overwhelmed with many of their other commitments.  I wouldn’t want my web communities to end up like this, as they are slowly deteriorating.

I need to set my new year resolution, and to get my priorities straightened.  Some of the things that I am learning right now so as to get myself equipped are: Android development, Facebook app development, PHP object oriented development, AJAX and HTML5/CSS3.

Just now, I watched Brian Tracy’s most recent short video on time management.  It is really useful as it is all about working on the most important things and eliminating the least important ones.

It’s 27 Dec 2011… 4 more days to finalise my new year resolution…

Today, I happened to speak to a friend who is starting up with his own website to sell properties.  This whole idea fired me up and I tried to teach him as much as I could on how he should turn himself into a property guru to help his clients.  But when I look back at my websites, they are probably quite outdated already.  Except for the fact that I have focused a lot more on Food Flag specifically.

This reminds me a lot about teaching.  The more that you teach, the more that you get to learn as well.  It is beneficial to both sides actually.  Perhaps, I should find more students to teach so as to discover more about myself…

Mentality

First of all, they believe that they must have the mentality that they are very poor, and that they have to save money for their “future”.  I may not know what kind of future that they are talking about, but they actually continue to have this mentality until their ripe old ages.

Even if they have a lot of money with them, they always find themselves poor and they wouldn’t bear to spend the money on their life.

Save and scrimp

Next, it’s all about saving their money.  They tend to save a huge sum of their money every time they receive their monthly salary.  They believe a lot in savings accounts, fixed deposits and certain kind of insurance.  Hence, they will only spend on their daily necessities, and they may spend a little from their savings on occasional cravings for branded goods and other expensive items.  The lesser that they spend on their occasional cravings, the more money that they have in their bank accounts.

Every cent being spent out is like tearing their skin apart.  They can even quarrel with you over that extra charge of 50 cents.

They like to prove that they are right!

In order to show you that they are right, they like to tell you how much they have saved for the day.  At the end of the month, they can be proud to tell you that they have saved an extra $50 to be deposited into their bank accounts.

And when they know of someone who is even more formidable than themselves in being the king of saver, they tend to treat these people like enemies.  It’s probably because they can’t prove that they can save more money than the “king”.

Opportunity cost means nothing to them

You either spend time to save money; or you spend money to save time.  They would rather spend time (and not money) to get what they want.  Time is not precious to them at all.  They have the mentality that they are going to live forever, so time is not important to them.  And because they are going to live forever, they must continue to save the money for the rest of their lives (just in case they might use the money, which they will probably only use it once a blue moon.)

They think that having a job means security and happiness

Nowadays even though we know that jobs are not as secure as we wanted them to be, they believe that they only need to have a job so as to be happy and feel secure for the rest of their lives.  In fact, we tend to see a typical job seeker takes on a couple of jobs in their entire lives.  Is it really secure?  Is there really happiness in a job?  But there is no doubt that a job means immediate injection of income in our lives…

They think that their house is their one and only precious asset

Over the years, they have spent a lot of money on their house.  And when they can sell their house, they make probably up to about $500,000 for their house.  Then, they probably try to buy a cheaper house at about $400,000 so that they make a “profit” of $100,000.  In my opinion, this kind of profit is probably just money that they have spent previously in the house… And they might even need to spend the money away for renovation and others… Is the house really an asset?  But I think this is the last part of the money that helped them to have a total of $300,000 in their savings…

I have been a bookstore lover for a very long time.  Whenever I am at any shopping centre, I tend to check if there is any bookstore for me to take a look.  It is such a standard procedure for me that my wife is already used to it.  In the past, we used to quarrel about where to shop as I love to shop at bookstores while she will do her window shopping for clothes.  I can spend literally hours in the bookstore, enjoying myself buried with the books and magazines.

It is not a surprise for me that a bookstore is closing down as it struggles to keep up with the digital media.  Many of the people tend to argue that they love the feeling of going into a bookstore (just like me).  But for myself, I tend to go to the bookstore to check out for the latest books and then I will buy them from Amazon because it tends to be cheaper and I have saved a lot of money just like that.  It solves my craving for going to the bookstore as well as owning the books that I yearn for.

For many years, a lot of people has been saying that it is impossible for an online store to make more sales than a traditional brick-and-mortar store.  I believe these people have not seen the power of online influence whereby it has the strength of TV influence and even more.  Online is not considered as a media actually… In fact, we are doing disservice by coining this term “social media”.  It is actually a “telephone” whereby we can talk to literally hundreds of thousands and even millions of people out there!  This “telephone” basically allows you to speak in your own voice, and also to hear what the other parties have to say in their comments.  It is so powerful that if you have a great product out there, you can prepare yourself for great reviews and enjoy more sales.  Whereas for a traditional brick-and-mortar, it depends a lot on the people who are going to the store, and attracting the passer-by crowd to come in to buy.  Out of 100 people who came in, there might be only 1 or 2 who will buy something!  Moreover, it has to bear high rental costs, high maintenance of the books and to make losses for tempered books, manpower to store the books, and everything else!

The power of having an online store is that the books can be purchased as they are being sold.  The store owner don’t have to deal with customers directly.  Manpower cost is extremely low, except to pack for purely sales.  Rental cost can be extremely low or even nothing if you are creative enough.

Now that one of my favourite bookstores is closed, I am praying that Kinokuniya will continue to be strong especially the one at Orchard.  Yes, I do buy books at times just to support the stores.

I have just removed all the files in this blog, while retaining the contents that I have blogged since June 2007.  Now, I felt that it is a fresh new start for Charles Lau dot Com again.  I am using Genesis framework in this blog now (previously using Thesis).  There are quite a significant difference between the two premium WordPress themes.  One very obvious thing is that I can choose a suitable child theme in Genesis, and I can configure right from there.

Why am I revamping the site when it is looking fine previously?

First of all, the backend is quite messy over the years.  And somehow my wordpress text editor is quite buggy with the links.  After I have a clean install of new wordpress, it is now alive again.  And since I am re-installing my wordpress, I might as well take the chance to take advantage of the Genesis framework that I have purchased.  It looks pretty good here actually.

I will also be installing WordPress on a couple of my other domain names too as I told you that I am building up my personal brand online right now.  Stay tuned!

As I keep striving to be better than yesterday, I have seen a couple of resistance due to the usual unspoken rules.  Nevertheless, I am here to change the situation and to make a better place for everybody.  It is a known fact that social media is here to stay, but how much can we do to collaborate internally so as to show a personalized reply to everybody in a consistent manner?  We have been so used to work in silos, and it is time to break that ice and unite ourselves.

When I am home, I am pleased to see my team working really hard to strive a new future together.  They have done their best to get everything started up properly.  I must also be abreast of things in the business plan to make sure that things are getting in place.  This recently, I am looking into setting up a social media blog, specializing in catering to the corporate executives like myself who are striving to make a better working place in the corporate world.

This blog that I have is going to be the place for me to talk about myself as it is named after me “Charles Lau”.  I will be setting up a social media blog pretty soon to focus on the topic of social media, hoping that it will be useful to the corporates out there.  Currently, I have two communities managed by my team.. They are http://facebook.com/foodflag and http://facebook.com/androidphonetips.

Let’s see what I can accomplish by the end of 2011… 2012 will be a year of new “surprise” for me and I will work even harder to bring in the income for my family.

There are some mobile phone companies who actually sell different mobile phones with different operating systems, and they are marketing the phones as though they are individual (like a feature phone).  That misleads the customers a lot when they found out that they have bought the wrong phone (For example, they might have gotten themselves a Windows phone by mistake, and they are actually thinking that they have gotten an Android phone.)

It goes the same with many of the websites out there.

The point I want to make is that the Android is taking over the world slowly, and that the mobile phone companies should embrace the fact that they are actually Android phones (some are just hiding this fact, and focus on what their new models can do…)

First of all, I have been spending time reading and writing sponsored reviews requested.  It has been fun to write because I have quite a lot of personal experience using its competitors’ products.  Hopefully by the end of the week, I will be able to come up with a nicely written review on my blog.

Then, it was my first time to have caught a Facebook virus here.  This virus must be triggered by a human being so that it can be sent simultaneously.  It’s quite scary actually because it is sending a message which will trigger even more of my friends to do the same.  I closed the browser immediately because this virus is spread through javascript and I have no other choice to end the task.  Shortly after that, I sent massive messages to apologise profusely to my friends and to stop the thing from happening.  It did help a little, but I hope the rest who have not replied me will not trigger it!

Subsequently, I was writing my documentation for a new project that I am working on.  It is called Foodflag.  This new project can be found at http://facebook.com/foodflag.  This is something that I am really proud of starting as it has tremendous potentials to help the world to flag food everywhere to learn and to share.

Also, I got onto my TweetDeck and started to communicate with a lot of old twitter friends… They aren’t really old but it’s just that I have not communicated with them on twitter for several months.

I also spent the time to clear my bookmarks… I have more than 700 bookmarks which I cleared it totally and start afresh!  They are too many and I didn’t really bother using them because of the massiveness.

I also start to see a lot of RSS feeds on my Google Reader getting outdated.  I start to think that there are a lot of feeds which I would rather go straight to their websites.  Start to sense how to work out quality time on the Internet.

Hopefully, things will start to get better!

A lot of you are probably commenting to get a piece of the commentator’s link.  And it is really taking a lot of effort to be a fan of a blog because you have to log in, and to read and to comment… Unless you are a real fan of any particular blog, it doesn’t sound logical to give that kind of time and effort.  Another exception will be your friends who are looking at your blog.

The best comments that I have received so far is from my own facebook actually.  Most of them are my friends who are doing their own websites, and they give their thoughts as my blog RSS feed pushes information to the Facebook.