Aug 16/17

• OPQ 16 July 2007: University of New South Wales

  from Siew Kum Hong

• A simple Idea

  from BEYOND SG

• ST Forum is what it is, thanks to ______?

  from To Fix a Mocking Peasant

• Singapore’s way on the ageing population.

  from My sketchbook

• Time travel via our roads

  from Yawning Bread Sampler

• The Problem with Social Mobility

  from The Kway Teow Man

• FEER answers Singapore Defamation Suit

  from AsiaSentinel

• Uncensored Singapore Lures The Young

  from SingaporeSurf

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The Art of Agelessness and Timelessness in an Ever Changing World – The 20/80 Rule.

You know what? It just dawned on me. There are a few things which are iconic to only “me.” Well not actually the ‘me’ that I am even remotely conscious of – rather it’s the “me’ that others just associated with me.

The stuff that usually provokes the trite expression, “it’s so him, isn’t it?”

One of them has to be my venerable Hewlett –Packard 12c which I never fail to whip out to mark out my boundary on a conference table. I am sure you all seen that prehistoric Soviet era paper weight. Born at an age when microchips where vomiting and struggling to say, gu-gu-mama. These days when my HP 12c sits alongside the likes of modern PDA’s cum phones, camera’s, GPS navigator etc, it just looks like a prehistoric fossil set alongside space age high tools.

But you know what, it doesn’t bother me. For one it’s a dream to use and through the years you’ve be amazed what I have managed to do with this little baby. For one it’s a winner with its easy-to-use layout, crispy buttons with just the right tactile feel, a clear monotone one-line LCD display and the best thing, its discreet, not like the modern ones that all regularly dole out ring tone torture.

Yes, I know these days, one can probably get something that’s roughly a million times better than my trusted HP 12c, but that’s hardly the point of this article – I am asking a very fundamental question here; why do some things endure? While others just go the way of the dodo bird? To paraphrase, why do some things remain ageless and timeless well beyond their age? While others can hardly even maintain their foothold as they’re swept away into the garbage heap of “has-been’s” I guess you could ask the same for monuments, sculptures, music, film stars, relationships, firms, philosophies, ideologies or for that matter anything under the sun.

Have you really wondered, what’s the winning secret that separates a winners from a loser?