I read in Presentation Zen yesterday on the essence of simplicity in your presentation. Garr Reynold shared a fish story sent by one of his seminar attendees, Deepak. This story was heard by Deepak while growing up in India.

I thought, hey this is an interesting story, and here is what Deepak said:

When you talked about reducing the text on the slides, I was reminded of a story from my childhood in India.

When Vijay opened his store he put up a sign that said “We Sell Fresh Fish Here.” His father stopped by and said that the word “We” suggests an emphasis on the seller rather than the customer, and is really not needed. So the sign was changed to “Fresh Fish Sold Here.” His brother came by and suggested that the word “here” could be done away with — it was superfluous. doing?” Later, his neighbor stopped by to congratulate him. Then he mentioned that all passers-by could easily tell that the fish was really fresh. Mentioning the word fresh actually made it sound defensive as though there was room for doubt about the freshness. Now the sign just read: “FISH.” As Vijay was walking back to his shop after a break he noticed that one could identify the fish from its smell from very far, at a distance from which one could barely read the sign. He knew there was no need for the word “FISH.”

– Deepak

The story hits me with flashes of my experience in software development life-cycle. Somehow users or developers alike tend to have i-want-this-i-want-that-also attitude, trying to cover the widest range of features that they can possible think of. A simple system in the beginning may end up like a mini Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

Project development time will stretch, the cost will increase. The longer the project stretches, the higher it will go and the hardest it will fall. It ends up everyone misses the basic ideas why the system was needed at the first place.

I too sometimes have that kind of attitude, and I willl just step back, and ask, “Is the extra jazz really required?”.

Today BookJetty is two-months old. So far it has clocked 7,134 unique visits, 46,507 page views and 302,188 hits. On average bookjetty has more or less 110 unique visits each day.

Since it’s an ausipicious day, I can’t help but to thank those who have sent in their feedback, be it a suggestion, a bug-report or some words of encouragement. I also want to thank my mother, my father… (hm… something is not right here). Anyway, those emails are the ones that keep my adrenalin stays up high. Thank you guys.

So what’s next for bookjetty? I’ll be working for a new feature to keep track of the search keywords, something like what Technorati site has. Top searches of the week, something like that. If you are like me, you must be “kaypoh” enough to know what is HOT right now, aren’t you?

But looking at the current size of the crowd (110 visits each day), the Top Searches list may not be an accurate reflection of Singapore’s most wanted books in the library. Let’s hope that the crowd will pick up, but I’ll need your help to spread this site to your friends. I believe they’ll find this site useful just like you and me. Don’t you? ;)

You know, once in a while you will bump into interesting people in your life. And recently I bumped into Yusuf Hashim from Clubsnap photography forum.

I visited his site and read through his amazing, inspiring, and breathtaking travel around the world. What striked me most was he travelled on his bike or 4×4, he understands and remembers the culture and history of the places that he has trodded, and he writes really well. His writings somehow give you a soothing, national-geographic feel, and combined with the beautiful shots (such as the one shown on the top — Dust and Dusk in Sahara), his site is not to be missed for those who have high dose of adventures in their blood.

I envy him for being able to spend so much time and money on the things that he dears most. He was from the corporate world, he once worked for Shell. Then corporate restructuring left him unemployed, but amazingly it ignited his passion that has streered him around the world with sponsor from Petronas. Who said corporate restructuring is always bad? :)

For me, I learned two things:

• Passion is the seed, it gives you the courage
• Passion drives you to tend the seed into a big tree and will one day be fruitful

Life I agree, should not be imprisoned by work alone, but also embellished with the beauties of this world; one way is by travelling, the other way is by taking great pictures that you can enjoy with your family and friends.

… Prior to my Sahara adventure I went backpacking to Bangladesh in the winter of 2003. Why Bangladesh ? My friends asked. And why not, I answered. Nobody has Bangladesh on top of their list of places to visit, which made me all the more eager to see that country. There are tens of thousands of Bangladeshi immigrant workers in Malaysia and I was curious to see what that country was like. And I have to say I wasn’t disappointed, although I did come home from Bangladesh with a runny nose from having to wash from an icy cold pond in the mornings, and with a runny rear end from the food which wasn’t very agreeable to my tummy. …

- Yusuf Hashim