Mari kita puji TUHAN!
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Friday, June 11, 2010
Mark and Susan's 17th Wedding Anniversary in Bandung
Every year, we celebrate our wedding anniversary on June 19 and we try to have "couple time", away from the kids and the hustle and bustle of daily city living as often as we can. Our last trip was to Korea 2 years ago. This year, Mark and I decided to go on a shopping spree to Bandung, The Paris of Java, in Indonesia.It was supposed to be the best time of the year to travel to Bandung but it rained every afternoon for the 4 days we were there. The people of Bandung were warm, accommodating and friendly. We had the most pleasant stay at Sensa Hotel which was celebrating it's soft launch with a promotion. It was a spick and span hotel, very minimalist (like this writer) and not at all crowded. Returning to the hotel every evening was akin to retreating into your sanctuary of peace and quiet. There were no kids to fuss with; it was really "my time".
Apart from the endless shopping one might find in Bandung, there were also the sprawling hills to visit where air was crisp and cool. The visit to Tangkuban Prahu was an eye-opening experience even for one as old as I. Never seen a volcano crater before? We were so near to it, we could smell sulphur in the air!
On the way down from the volcano crater, we stopped for lunch at Kampung Daun, a lovely restaurant/cultural gallery built within a jungle. It started to drizzle soon after our arrival but we were perfectly sheltered and dry within the quaint hut where lunch was served. Every hut was beautiful designed and comfortably furnished with flimsy curtains and cuddly cushions to sit on.
The couple at Kampung DaunThe next stop was the Saung Udjo Angklung performance where we actually played a few songs, conducted by the Principal of the performance school. It was amazing how he managed to teach us to play the angklung within a few minutes! We wondered whether he meant it when he said we were the best students he had ever had. Someone seated behind us muttered whether he says the same to every audience. Whatever it is, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience there.
Next destination?
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Starting an Advertising Campaign
Let's face it. Every industry loves it's own proprietary language and the world of marketing communications is no different. Today, marketing and advertising is all about branding, but in its early days it was known as positioning and a key element in the effort to establish a marketing identity - regardless of what you call it - is something called continuity. What exactly is that? It's the strategy and process of coordinating all the elements of a marketing message to achieve a consistent, memorable, overall look and feel for a company, service, or product.
Sounds impressive, doesn't it? It's really all about making sure that everything you do as a company has a coordinated look and feel about it. Graphically, that means creating a standard logo, selecting a corporate color (or colors), a particular typeface, even a photo or illustration style. Content-wise, it means determining key points for your marketing messages that clearly, concisely, and compellingly elucidate your unique selling proposition (there's another one of those industry terms that falls in and out of fashion on a regular basis).
This is not as simple as it sounds. It requires an unfaltering, dedicated effort up and down your marketing chain to avoid going "off message". Time and time again I have seen engineering departments grab logos and typestyles and use them with haphazard abandon on everything from data sheets to PowerPoint presentations. I've seen sales people ignore mandates from the home office and routinely put out their own marketing pieces with not a shred of semblance to the carefully crafted look painstakingly created by their own marketing department. The result is always the same - a dilution of the company's identity and often a related drop in market share in response to the lack of an effective, unified marketing message. That, in turn, requires a needless squandering of precious marketing resources to reestablish the company's former brand awareness in the marketplace.
It doesn't have to be that way. A little discipline and a lot of vigilance can head off these potential image drainers and nip them in the bud before they become a real problem. By paying attention to continuity, your company can reap a multitude of benefits - heightened market visibility, enviable awareness among potential customers, and a more effective use of your marketing budget, yielding the biggest bang for your buck. Overall, a keen eye toward continuity helps you achieve levels of image and branding efficiency unavailable to practitioners of hit-or-miss marketing with little or no image consistency between messages and media.
It starts with your corporate identity.I never cease to be amazed at how casually some companies treat their identity. There's no shortage of firms that use two, three, even four versions of their logo on a regular basis, with no particular rhyme or reason. The same goes for corporate colors - often a victim of one or more employee's personal taste ("I HATE that color, I'm going to use green instead...I think it looks better"). This dilution of image is made even easier by the proliferation of PowerPoint and other tools used by more and more employees. If this is happening to your company, I have three words of advice: STOP IT. NOW.
The longer this practice is allowed to continue, the more it will cost your company. In time, money, image awareness and, ultimately, in market share.
How do you combat this insidious problem? By establishing company-wide standards and maintaining them. Issue a simple style sheet that everyone can understand and follow and then enforce it. That means establishing a corporate color (or colors), a particular typestyle (especially one that is duplicated in computer fonts) and creating a logo that works well in 4-color (the process colors used by printers to print in full color), 2-color (usually black and a particular shade of a color from the Pantone Matching System, identified by a PMS number), and black and white printing. If you create high and low resolution files in these three versions and make them available to the people most likely to need them, you will go a long way toward unifying your image out in the marketplace.
And follows through in your message.Now that you've got your company look under control, it's time to work on your message. This often starts with a mission - or for the more esoteric entrepreneur, a vision - statement. Sure, many of these typically contain a lot of over-heated rhetoric designed to make the board of directors warm and fuzzy, but they CAN be valuable. While others may be long on hyperbolic language and short on real meaning, work to make yours meaningful, concise, actionable, and unique. Be ruthless. Is this who we really are? Is this what we really want to be? Does this really set us apart? Once you've honed your statement to accurately reflect what your company is and what it stands for, it will enable you to create a meaningful slogan or tagline to be used in your marketing messages. Avoid the trite and contrived. "The Leader in (blank)" has been done before. Trust me.
A good tagline will inform every message that follows. It will help flavor copy written for your sales literature, web site, advertising, even internal messaging. It will make generating consistent, focused text easier because it will help set the tone and form the basis of the message. And that message, aided by the consistent visual combination of logo, color, and typestyle - wielded with ruthless discipline -- all combine to create a powerful, memorable marketing impression.
That, my friends, is the power of continuity. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." He was wrong. Consistency, otherwise known as continuity, is the most potent weapon of great marketing minds.
Sounds impressive, doesn't it? It's really all about making sure that everything you do as a company has a coordinated look and feel about it. Graphically, that means creating a standard logo, selecting a corporate color (or colors), a particular typeface, even a photo or illustration style. Content-wise, it means determining key points for your marketing messages that clearly, concisely, and compellingly elucidate your unique selling proposition (there's another one of those industry terms that falls in and out of fashion on a regular basis).
This is not as simple as it sounds. It requires an unfaltering, dedicated effort up and down your marketing chain to avoid going "off message". Time and time again I have seen engineering departments grab logos and typestyles and use them with haphazard abandon on everything from data sheets to PowerPoint presentations. I've seen sales people ignore mandates from the home office and routinely put out their own marketing pieces with not a shred of semblance to the carefully crafted look painstakingly created by their own marketing department. The result is always the same - a dilution of the company's identity and often a related drop in market share in response to the lack of an effective, unified marketing message. That, in turn, requires a needless squandering of precious marketing resources to reestablish the company's former brand awareness in the marketplace.
It doesn't have to be that way. A little discipline and a lot of vigilance can head off these potential image drainers and nip them in the bud before they become a real problem. By paying attention to continuity, your company can reap a multitude of benefits - heightened market visibility, enviable awareness among potential customers, and a more effective use of your marketing budget, yielding the biggest bang for your buck. Overall, a keen eye toward continuity helps you achieve levels of image and branding efficiency unavailable to practitioners of hit-or-miss marketing with little or no image consistency between messages and media.
It starts with your corporate identity.I never cease to be amazed at how casually some companies treat their identity. There's no shortage of firms that use two, three, even four versions of their logo on a regular basis, with no particular rhyme or reason. The same goes for corporate colors - often a victim of one or more employee's personal taste ("I HATE that color, I'm going to use green instead...I think it looks better"). This dilution of image is made even easier by the proliferation of PowerPoint and other tools used by more and more employees. If this is happening to your company, I have three words of advice: STOP IT. NOW.
The longer this practice is allowed to continue, the more it will cost your company. In time, money, image awareness and, ultimately, in market share.
How do you combat this insidious problem? By establishing company-wide standards and maintaining them. Issue a simple style sheet that everyone can understand and follow and then enforce it. That means establishing a corporate color (or colors), a particular typestyle (especially one that is duplicated in computer fonts) and creating a logo that works well in 4-color (the process colors used by printers to print in full color), 2-color (usually black and a particular shade of a color from the Pantone Matching System, identified by a PMS number), and black and white printing. If you create high and low resolution files in these three versions and make them available to the people most likely to need them, you will go a long way toward unifying your image out in the marketplace.
And follows through in your message.Now that you've got your company look under control, it's time to work on your message. This often starts with a mission - or for the more esoteric entrepreneur, a vision - statement. Sure, many of these typically contain a lot of over-heated rhetoric designed to make the board of directors warm and fuzzy, but they CAN be valuable. While others may be long on hyperbolic language and short on real meaning, work to make yours meaningful, concise, actionable, and unique. Be ruthless. Is this who we really are? Is this what we really want to be? Does this really set us apart? Once you've honed your statement to accurately reflect what your company is and what it stands for, it will enable you to create a meaningful slogan or tagline to be used in your marketing messages. Avoid the trite and contrived. "The Leader in (blank)" has been done before. Trust me.
A good tagline will inform every message that follows. It will help flavor copy written for your sales literature, web site, advertising, even internal messaging. It will make generating consistent, focused text easier because it will help set the tone and form the basis of the message. And that message, aided by the consistent visual combination of logo, color, and typestyle - wielded with ruthless discipline -- all combine to create a powerful, memorable marketing impression.
That, my friends, is the power of continuity. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." He was wrong. Consistency, otherwise known as continuity, is the most potent weapon of great marketing minds.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
FRIM Visit
FRIM (Forest Reserve Institute Malaysia). We were there (17th April 2010) with our children church "Kids Vision Club" Here 
are some of the photo taken during the natual walk.
are some of the photo taken during the natual walk.
Monday, April 19, 2010
EASTER DAY 2010 - On the Darkest Day of All
The melodic voices of a mini choir echoes in the morning of 4 April 2010 in Puchong Tabernacle in Bandar Puteri, Puchong. The song was entitled "On the Darkest Day of All" and it carries the message of Easter Day, depicting the story from the tomb to Christ's resurrection. Adults and children celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ on this day which marks the victory of the Son over sin.
It was an eleventh hour request to present an item and a testimony of the reality of Christ in one's life; and as time is so limited, the Bandar Kinrara cell group decided over a week's comtemplation, to present a song. What started as a "simple solution" to "hard-pressed-for-time" members of the cell, became more complicated as members started to compare other cell group's presentation. Initially, some members suggested a skit to go with the song. But in the end, there were no actors or actresses who were willing to come together at such short notice, to practice for the skit. Eventually we settled for just a song which will impact the congregation on that Easter Day. My task was to choose a suitable song and there were plenty of songs we could have chosen. But I was led to an online song ministry called "Resound" and the result of scanning through the songs there was a particular song aptly named "On the Darkest Day of all".
This is a solemn song, depicting Christ's death on the cross, His victory over death and the "Alleluias" that resounded on that first Easter Day. The beauty of this song was that it enabled us, the singers to express our conviction that Christ has indeed risen. It might be a simple song presentation but everybody, young and old, was anointed to be a "vessel" for God's message to be conveyed to the congregation that morning. It was a simple willingness of each individual in the choir to use his or her voice for God's glory.
Indeed, the presentation reminded me again of God's promise that "...Through God all things are possible.."
Truly, if there's one thing that the Bandar Kinrara cell members cannot do well, it is to sing! Most are tone deaf, have no sense of rhythm nor appreciation for the finer details of singing. But on that Easter morning, the voices were alike angels singing praises to our Almighty God!
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Living for Him
My neck aches as I turn to look in the direction where I heard someone calling my name. "Sorry, I have to take a few seconds to turn my entire body!"
I have had better days. Days when my body work with me and for me. Days when I can jump and run and twist my body. This week has been agonizing for me. My right shoulder and neck hurts till a fever envelops me in the late evening as the day at campus drags on. I know I can not have the same body I had 10 years ago. Neither will my lifestyle be the same as it was when I first started working in Kuala Lumpur. But despite these aches and pains that some say comes with age, I now learn to live for Him; my Lord and my God.
Taking one day at a time is what I practice these days. Pressure to perform at work, at home in church and in my social circle has resulted in physical exertion most days. I can see no other way to release these stress other than to commit it to the Lord, each day, each hour, each minute, each second. Living my life just for Him and making a difference in someone's life each day helps spur me on. Living each day for the Lord and realizing that I would not have any other way, inspires me to make each day count, each encounter one that glorifies Him.
I dislike cooking but have been cooking for my family since my friend and neighbour stopped cooking for us. Again, my cooking stint started as a blessing in disguise when I started suffering from food poisoning everytime we ate out. It didn't matter how clean the restaurant was. I could not stomach the food! Each episode left me weaker than ever and I began to lose my appetite. Cooking dinner after work was a struggle. "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak..." I had to rush home daily to be able to put dinner on the table in time for the family. It was simple stir fried in the beginning. Most days, we survive on "one-pot dishes" and simple stir fried greens. But we learnt to live for the Lord and gave thanks each day for the food that laid before us. The stomach started to build up strength and dinner started to improve in its complexity! One day we could have korean soup while another day would see chinese herbal chicken on the table. Thank God my husband and children appreciates my cooking although nothing has changed about my dislike for sweating it out in the hot kitchen. And with that start, I lived one day at a time until the arrival of my Cambodian maid, 5 years later.
Vanna came as a sprightly, young girls, almost petrified by the strange language and culture in our homeland. She was a 19 year young lady with only 3 years of Khmer education in Cambodia from the Siem Reap Province. We had prayed for a relaible and trustworthy maid for many months before finally deciding on a Cambodian maid, after weighing its pros and cons. After viewing the biodatas of Cambodian maids at a local maid agency in Bandar Puteri, we paid a deposit for a young lady. As God would have it, she arrived 2 months later and was declared unfit for work after testing positive for hepatitis B. My 8 year old daughter, Ophelia, when told of the situation replied "Oh, she didn't get an "A" for her test, so she has to be sent back to Cambodia?" Apparently, the girl cried whe she knew she would be sent home. i am not sure whether the tears were more of mere disappointment or from the sheer fear she had at discovering she was carrying a disease that may be detrimental to her in her later life. Anyway, having waited for 2 months, we are left with no maid and were asked to select from a new batch of biodata which was more impressive than the previous. This is how God works in amazing ways!
We selected Vanna from amongst the hopefuls. It was another 3 months' wait before she finally arrived in Malaysia. We took her home 2 days before Chinese New Year. It has been 2 months since she started working for us. I am thankful because as i live each day for the Lord, He has provided us with a reliable and intelligent maid. Though she spoke very little English when she first came, she can now converse comfortably with me over daily household chores. She has since taken over the tedious job of cooking for the family, leaving me with time for my family.
Life would have been unbearable with a sore shoulder and a pain-in-the neck if not for Vanna whom God had blessed us with. That's living life for the Lord for me!
I have had better days. Days when my body work with me and for me. Days when I can jump and run and twist my body. This week has been agonizing for me. My right shoulder and neck hurts till a fever envelops me in the late evening as the day at campus drags on. I know I can not have the same body I had 10 years ago. Neither will my lifestyle be the same as it was when I first started working in Kuala Lumpur. But despite these aches and pains that some say comes with age, I now learn to live for Him; my Lord and my God.
Taking one day at a time is what I practice these days. Pressure to perform at work, at home in church and in my social circle has resulted in physical exertion most days. I can see no other way to release these stress other than to commit it to the Lord, each day, each hour, each minute, each second. Living my life just for Him and making a difference in someone's life each day helps spur me on. Living each day for the Lord and realizing that I would not have any other way, inspires me to make each day count, each encounter one that glorifies Him.
I dislike cooking but have been cooking for my family since my friend and neighbour stopped cooking for us. Again, my cooking stint started as a blessing in disguise when I started suffering from food poisoning everytime we ate out. It didn't matter how clean the restaurant was. I could not stomach the food! Each episode left me weaker than ever and I began to lose my appetite. Cooking dinner after work was a struggle. "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak..." I had to rush home daily to be able to put dinner on the table in time for the family. It was simple stir fried in the beginning. Most days, we survive on "one-pot dishes" and simple stir fried greens. But we learnt to live for the Lord and gave thanks each day for the food that laid before us. The stomach started to build up strength and dinner started to improve in its complexity! One day we could have korean soup while another day would see chinese herbal chicken on the table. Thank God my husband and children appreciates my cooking although nothing has changed about my dislike for sweating it out in the hot kitchen. And with that start, I lived one day at a time until the arrival of my Cambodian maid, 5 years later.
Vanna came as a sprightly, young girls, almost petrified by the strange language and culture in our homeland. She was a 19 year young lady with only 3 years of Khmer education in Cambodia from the Siem Reap Province. We had prayed for a relaible and trustworthy maid for many months before finally deciding on a Cambodian maid, after weighing its pros and cons. After viewing the biodatas of Cambodian maids at a local maid agency in Bandar Puteri, we paid a deposit for a young lady. As God would have it, she arrived 2 months later and was declared unfit for work after testing positive for hepatitis B. My 8 year old daughter, Ophelia, when told of the situation replied "Oh, she didn't get an "A" for her test, so she has to be sent back to Cambodia?" Apparently, the girl cried whe she knew she would be sent home. i am not sure whether the tears were more of mere disappointment or from the sheer fear she had at discovering she was carrying a disease that may be detrimental to her in her later life. Anyway, having waited for 2 months, we are left with no maid and were asked to select from a new batch of biodata which was more impressive than the previous. This is how God works in amazing ways!
We selected Vanna from amongst the hopefuls. It was another 3 months' wait before she finally arrived in Malaysia. We took her home 2 days before Chinese New Year. It has been 2 months since she started working for us. I am thankful because as i live each day for the Lord, He has provided us with a reliable and intelligent maid. Though she spoke very little English when she first came, she can now converse comfortably with me over daily household chores. She has since taken over the tedious job of cooking for the family, leaving me with time for my family.
Life would have been unbearable with a sore shoulder and a pain-in-the neck if not for Vanna whom God had blessed us with. That's living life for the Lord for me!
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