Sunday, August 03, 2003

Am reading at the moment Sim Wong Hoo's Chaotic Thoughts From The Old Millennium Instead of your run-of-the-mill autobiographies, where you get the standard "I did this I didn't do that and got to where I am today", the CEO of Creative Technologies chose to compile a random collection of personal thoughts, observations and experiences -- including little magic tricks for kids (his reasons for this are that getting along with children is the best way to improve your EQ and besides, it's his book after all. The result was published before the year 2000 -- in fact Sim wrote the whole thing in 8 weeks -- in a ring binder. The point of the book was to be not a book -- you can start and end anywhere you like and to that effect each entry begins with a list of "links" to other, related entries. Interesting concept. For cost reasons, the ring binder was dropped for the 2nd reprint but this does not detract much from the frank, entertaining and conversation-like nature of the work. Fun to read, enlightening in some respects and just plain random in some others. Perhaps the section on Sim's self-coined "NUTS" or No U-Turn Syndrome is the most well-known of all, but there're some other interesting bits.

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