Ode To Our Father
In response to my previous entry - Ode to My Father-The Unspoken Love, my brother FK had posted his comment which I thought was too precious to be left just in the comment box. So I decided to share it here..
He was a good man. I am where I am today because of him.
I was five or six maybe when we went to Yaohan together. For some reasons I can't remember, I asked him to buy me some tools. So he bought me a red toolbox, a couple of big screwdrivers with yellow handles, pliers and a set of interchangeable saws. Real tools, not toys. And the fun began.
Not too long after that I came out with my own invention. "Pembakar belacan" I called it, intended to replace the tudung periuk my mom used to grill belacan. Nothing fancy. But looking back at it I thought it's pretty amazing that I came out with it at such young age. See there was a problem, there was the thought process on the possible solutions, there was the fabrication of the most cost effective solution, and there was testing performed (and a little bit of marketing after that). That's engineering alright, crude as it may have been.
Maybe it's just talent, but it was thankfully nurtured. Back in college, I decided to work on my senior design project alone unlike most other students. Needless to say, the workload was overwhelming. With 5 other classes to take, for the project I had to learn advanced digital electronics and assembly programming language all by myself in a course of one semester. By the time the learning was done, time was running out. The real device had not been created yet. The existing mechanical system had not been fixed yet. Boy was this part of the work easy. Everything that required the use of tools and machines was a breeze. Ideas to fix stuff came naturally. Why not, I had been doing that for as long as I could remember.
And then came this award. http://viterbi.usc.edu/news/news/2006/news_20060504.htm. School was very time consuming, I didn't even have much time to think about other stuff (I even missed the email inviting me to the ceremony). But when I learned that I was awarded, what it's about and later had that announced during graduation ceremony, it really got me looking back and thinking, "I was raised correctly".
p/s: Credit to my mom too for buying me a soldering iron when I was 10. Having been using it for a long time made soldering so many small components to create a compact circuit board so much faster and easier.
I was five or six maybe when we went to Yaohan together. For some reasons I can't remember, I asked him to buy me some tools. So he bought me a red toolbox, a couple of big screwdrivers with yellow handles, pliers and a set of interchangeable saws. Real tools, not toys. And the fun began.
Not too long after that I came out with my own invention. "Pembakar belacan" I called it, intended to replace the tudung periuk my mom used to grill belacan. Nothing fancy. But looking back at it I thought it's pretty amazing that I came out with it at such young age. See there was a problem, there was the thought process on the possible solutions, there was the fabrication of the most cost effective solution, and there was testing performed (and a little bit of marketing after that). That's engineering alright, crude as it may have been.
Maybe it's just talent, but it was thankfully nurtured. Back in college, I decided to work on my senior design project alone unlike most other students. Needless to say, the workload was overwhelming. With 5 other classes to take, for the project I had to learn advanced digital electronics and assembly programming language all by myself in a course of one semester. By the time the learning was done, time was running out. The real device had not been created yet. The existing mechanical system had not been fixed yet. Boy was this part of the work easy. Everything that required the use of tools and machines was a breeze. Ideas to fix stuff came naturally. Why not, I had been doing that for as long as I could remember.
And then came this award. http://viterbi.usc.edu/news/news/2006/news_20060504.htm. School was very time consuming, I didn't even have much time to think about other stuff (I even missed the email inviting me to the ceremony). But when I learned that I was awarded, what it's about and later had that announced during graduation ceremony, it really got me looking back and thinking, "I was raised correctly".
p/s: Credit to my mom too for buying me a soldering iron when I was 10. Having been using it for a long time made soldering so many small components to create a compact circuit board so much faster and easier.
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