(continued from previous post)

I reached School of Information System at about 10:35am, I was early, registration starts at 10:30am, competition starts at 12:00pm. Many people were already there, eager and ready to get started.

I found a corner, sat on the floor, shortly after three familiar faces walked into the briefing area, I stood up, and it was strange that we greeted each other from far, we knew each other’s name, though we had never met before. Well, the power of blog and mailing list, they are the Malaysia Ruby Brigade guys, Kamal, Azizat, and Ke Gan, the RSB Team. Glad to have finally met them in person.

Soon, the briefing started, and minutes before the competition kicked-off, I found out that the package given to us after signing in had a slip of paper with the competition theme. And I was stupidly oblivious to it, no wonder, I saw people were busy brainstorming, drawing diagrams with their group members. “Shit”, I said silently. The theme was Hospitality and/or tourism services in a participative society.

In no time, the competition started, 73 teams in total spread across different seminar rooms, I was in room 2-1, glad to have a front row’s two-seater desk, not much distraction.

Plugged in my iPod, and blasted my favourite songs, I started to brain-storm, 45 minutes passed, I wasn’t still very sure what to do, panic started to kick-in, I quickly decided on one, working on the idea for the next two or three hours, it was getting worse, I knew something was wrong, the functionalities were not clear, there were just too many things to do and too little time.

I thought, I’m dead, this is not going to make it. I seriously thought of just packing my stuff and go back, I have lost too many hours.

Then I got an SMS from my wife saying that some of my friends said ‘Cia Yo‘ (meaning don’t lose your spirit). I was glad that it came at the right time, then I told myself to relax, Herry, you don’t come here to win, you come here to try your best and have fun.

I walked out from the room, took a break, took a deep breath, gazed at the sky, when the pressure is out, my brain started to work again, I remembered what Paul Arden said in his book Whatever you think always think the opposite, so I thought of something else related to the hospitality and tourism industry, someting different, yet it is clearer and it is easier to execute, somthing simple and makes sense. Bingo, I said.

I came into the room as a different person, my old self, I broke the idea into smaller tasks, prioritising improtant tasks, took out all the fancy stuff, will do the fancy stuff only when I got the time. Set a targetted completion time for each task, and I worked like a machine, drank lots of water, went out of the room only to fill up my water bottle, to wee wee, to eat and answer phone calls Yeah I still answer my phones. :)

I could not believe that two days ago I was on this beautiful beach, dozed off in a hammock, and now I’m cracking my brain, and typing like it was gonna be the end of the world tomorrow.

Hours passed, it was morning already, I was still fully awake, iPod still blasting, I felt good, for completing a task each time, I felt better when I completed a few more.

Two hours before the dateline, my fingers started to ache, though I was fully awake, but I felt a bit numb and slow, I told myself, It’s enough Herry, just deploy, test, fix and do whatever necessary in the last two hours.

At 12:00 pm, it was finally over. This is crazy, I thought, this is extreme indeed, exhausted, I was glad that I did not call it a quit, I was glad that I have done my very best.

At this stage, whether you win or not, it does not matter anymore, for those who have gone through that very night, give yourself a pat on your back, we all are winners.

The next day I was shorlisted with 10 other great teams, I gave another short presentation, and this morning I received an email saying that I have won the second prize, not believing my eyes, all I could say, thank you Jesus for the second prize.

And not forgetting Ang, who was kind enough to lend me his notebook, to Peter Bohm who had helped many of us with deployment issues, to Chardy for his last minute’s tip, to the organizer, ITSC, and the supporting organisations. Kudos for the job well done, I was impressed with how smooth and well the event was executed. Hopefully this will be the start for many similar exiciting events to come.

If you are wondering what happens to the two cans of Red-Bull? Good question, I totally forgot about them.

It has been a while since the last time I took a break from work, trekking in Cameron Highland.

Last week, after attending a friend’s wedding in KL, I took another break, I thought it is about time, living in old estate in Ang Mo Kio, every now and then I was reminded that life is short.

So my wife and I headed to Redang island, north-east of peninsula Malaysia, a small island with its white sandy beach, and swimming-pool-clarity sea water.

We were there for three days and two nights, went snorkling each day, seeing lots and lots of fishes and corals, and eat and relaxing for the rest of the day.

It was really weird on the first day; weird and strange that life could be so slow and quiet, no checking of emails, no coding, no phone calls. It was just me, the sun, the sea, the sand and my wife. One extreme of life I thought.

One lazy afternoon, I layed on a hammock, hanged under a big tree facing the beach, it was slightly windy, the breeze was caressing my face and my hair, this must be heaven, I thought, so I took out my wife’s point-and-shoot camera, took a snap, before dozing off.

Three days had just passed, I was back to Singapore, after a good night sleep, the next morning I packed another bag, loaded with a borrowed notebook from an angel (mine collapsed), an iPod, and two cans of Red-Bull.

I headed to Singapore Management University (SMU) for code::XtremeApps, a 24-hour programming contest, organized by Information Technology Standards Committee, first of its kind in Singapore and first time ever I joined such a competition, not realizing what trouble I have brought myself into, another extreme of life, I thought. (to be continued…)

When I built BookJetty, I knew that I am not going to stop at just one library, our good home library, Singapore National Library Board. I dreamt for BookJetty to integrate with a lot more libraries worldwide, and to benefit more book lovers around the world.

Three weeks ago, I started the quest to fulfill that dream, and I digged through documents, websites, guidelines related to Z3950 protocol and MARC standards, visiting hundreds of online library catalogues worldwide, and rewriting BookJetty library module to create a facade that can easly link up with more libraries.

And today, I am glad to announce that BookJetty finally goes
international, integrating with 300 libraries from 10 countries, covering United States, United Kingdom, Canda, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Ireland, South Africa, and probably more in the future.

For a start, when you sign up for a BookJetty account, your library preference will be empty. When you try to list books with library search, you will be redirected to your library preferences page.

Select on one or more libraries in your area, you can also filter the list of libraries by country. Click once to add the library to your list, or click again to remove.

On your library list you should see all the libraries you have added earlier. You can also click on del to remove a library from the list.

To sort, click on Reorder, then drag and drop to re-order your libraries sequence. Click Done Reordering when you are done.

When you go back to your book list, it will search the first library in your list. To check other libraries, mouse over to the library name, and select another library name, and it will perform the search without a page refresh, thanks to AJAX for that.

Click on library call number, to view the book holding information or to reserve. Or if you mouse over, you can also click on SMS call no to your phone on a small yellow tooltip, if you need to visit the library to pickup the book. For special integration with Singapore National Library Board (NLB), you are able to view holding information directly from BookJetty.

The library search on the book list is very convenient to check multiple books availability in a library. But if you go to a book details page, you will be able to check if the book is found in all your local libraries.

If you no longer need the library service, you can click on the collapse button on top right corner.

Collapsed state of library search panel, it will stay collapsed when you browse other books until you expand it again.

Now try BookJetty with your local libraries. Click here for the list of libraries supported in BookJetty. If you can’t find your local library, suggest it here, or find out more about library integration with BookJetty.

If you encounter any problem, drop me a note, and I hope that you will find BookJetty useful. There are still tonnes of todo lists to work on BookJetty, your suggestions, comments, and bug reports will be definitely priceless to me.

Thank you.