One week in, and my wife still has not finished the deathly hollows yet. The buzz over the price war have subsided and I believe the bookstores have moved on. Popular is giving a 25% discount for popular card members and a free ‘t’shirt (while stock last), general public gets a 20% discount. There were some bloggers who screams the drop of quality read or the death of retail bookstores with this invasion of hypermarts into the book domain. You can read the responses on this site. I believe that those who stood by the sides of the bookstores are truly an elitist and probably have not bought anything pirated nor downloaded anything illegal before. With all these hoo haa, many fail to identify the real ‘bad guys’ here. Yea, sure, the hypermarts were the easy targets, but failed to realize that they did everything within the law and it was mere a business strategy. Many forgot about the pirates. Read about them here and here. Why are there no one crying ‘death to the pirates’? Especially those called for the death of the hypermarts. The ones that really going kill the book industry will be the pirates, in the sea and online. The ones that degrades reading quality are the pirates. And yet, no one seams to care…

When you are young, you think you can change the world,
When you get old, you realize that the world changed you instead.

Kew L. Ang Summer 2007

And now a research to prove that writing down your feelings (blogging) helps you to feel better. This is because the act of writing the feelings down, makes the feeling of anger and pain less intense. Read the full article here.

“When you put feelings into words, you’re activating this prefrontal region and seeing a reduced response in the amygdala,” he said. “In the same way you hit the brake when you’re driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses.”

As a result, an individual may feel less angry or less sad.

This is ancient wisdom,” Lieberman said. “Putting our feelings into words helps us heal better. If a friend is sad and we can get them to talk about it, that probably will make them feel better.”

This is on negative feelings, how about positive feelings, I wonder if you write about love, will you feel less love?

A few years back, there was an “out of the box thinking” class delivered by senior managers from the US. It was an interesting class, and the thing I get most out of the class was the weekly inspiration that one of the instructor sends out. He compiles inspirational stories on his own time and sends it out every Friday, thus the term, Friday Reflections were born. Now, a few years in, his effort has resulted into a book and have also spilled over the internet through his blog, and can be syndicated through feed burner. This week he talks about the creative genius of Steve Jobs, and that his intro of iPhone can replace all corporate trainings on “Out of the box thinking” and “Emotional Intelligence Skills”.

Just like life, the sky is not always sunny. If raining is one end of the spectrum, and denoting the worst, then cloudy is just getting to the worst. And once it rains, the worst has happen and after rain, the sun comes up again. Its rather cloudy in my life now, I wonder when it will rain?