As the year come to an end....

There are two more days to go before we say goodbye to 2007. So you still have 48 hours to meet your current year resolutions, if you have any. Not everyone believes in making new year resolution actually. They just have things to do as they go along.
I guess that's fine too. The important thing to remember is that if you don't spend your time wisely, it is gone - forever.

Well, one of my resolutions for year 2007 was to polish up Chinese language. Yeah, yeah, I 'paiseh' also - I feel like a fake Yonex racket. So we approached one of our previous nannies, Mrs Yip, for Chinese lessons. Zoey sometimes joined us too though her eyes barely reached over the table top. The lessons got disrupted because of the holiday breaks. So, this will be an ongoing mission to complete...until we can read what's on the dinner menu at Chinese restaurants.

My next goal of the year - not in order of importance but still important - was to improve my game level in badminton. I think the breakthrough came when I started going to the gyms and parks for body conditioning and self practice during lunch breaks at work. Some of the exercises include skipping rope for 1000 times, hitting (the shuttlecock) against the wall for 500 times, practicing footwork and doing various shadow drills. And not forgetting watching badminton videos as well. I think the most important website (for English-speaking people) for badminton is Kwun's badminton forum. Not only did I get to know the game better from visiting his website,I even learned how to string rackets! And the best achievement of all was to finally beat my rival (and good friend) and neutralize the score! Hahahaha....

As for integrated circuit designs (which I did for a living), I think I have done everything I wanted to do already. Since I was getting bored with the radio-frequency circuits already, having worked on front-end amplifiers, mixers, oscillators and filter circuits, I wanted to learn some mixed-signal circuit designs. I did phase-locked loop circuits (integer and fractional types) and digital-to-analog converters already in previous years. Finally, this year I got to work on analog-to-digital converters. And so, I achieved an important and (yawn) boring ;) milestone in my engineering career. Still, I got fired because I cannot design a lousy operational amplifier - yup, believe me.

And some other forgettable goals like ....... I forgot.

Well, do you need to plan for the year? Or let God plan for you? Sometimes things don't go according to your plans. Regardless, the year end must be a time where you can sit back and reflect on the events that took place. You will find things that make you smile and cry. These are the memories that describe about you when you no longer exist in that spectrum of time (and space?).

If you have watched the movie "Forrest Gump", at the end of the movie, Forrest (the title character played by Tom Hanks), a person who struggles to understand normal people but yet surpassed everyone in achieving honors and success, asked a profound question by his mother's graveside - do you plan out your life or do you allow your surrounding to shape your life? Well, something along that line. And then he answered himself that perhaps it is a little of both. And the movie ended the same way it began - with the feather drifting back and forth and away.

I enjoyed the movie so much that it kept playing in my head for one week. I guess for some people, it is better to have a direction in life (or maybe a sense of direction). You may like to think that you have self-control over your life or perhaps there is always an invisible hand to guide you along. But ultimately what is important is that you find yourself growing in ways that you love.....and learn to love yourself more and more.