Free Download - Auto 3 year calendar excel spreadsheet

I needed a 3 year one page planner to help me to run my business. One that I can make format changes and can compare week by week and year on year basis. So I have created one with Excel.

The excel spreadsheet is automatic. Once we enter the start year say "2009" in the one and only input field, the rest of the calendar can be automatically generated.

You can download it here.

Hope you enjoy it!

Adam Chan and Eve Li

"If Adam and Eve were Chinese, we would still be in paradise because they would have ignored the apple and eaten the snake...."

That's a joke quoted by my friends on facebook.

Happiness, Balance and Progress

One of my friends updated her status on the facebook with "Remember that...frankly...I just wanted to be happy in the first place". I have no idea why she got so sentimental all of a sudden cause she seems to be a happy person to me. Another friend constantly expressing her view on how her boss has been wrong and, in fact, so many other people should have done things the different ways (her ways). She also smiles all the time but deep down she is not exactly a happy soul. Being happy is such a common wish for all of us but many of us seem to have forgotten about it when we charge forward in our career in today's highly competitive world!

People say "let go", "forgive", "forget", "take it easy" and other "Zen" stuff to achieve happiness. I agree. However, in most cases it is at the expense of the progress. I remember one of my friends (a decade ago in the last millennium....sounds like such long time ago lol) told me that he regretted being "happy" and "laid back" that he did not accumulate much wealth to pay for the medical bills for his children and his parents after certain age. That's a very very hard reality in life.

I tend to say that I am insecure and I overwork myself. However, I like to think that I am quite happy because I "embrace", "enjoy" and "accept the consequence" of what I do. I do not "let go", I do not "forget", I do not "take it easy" and I have no right to "forgive" others. Things that I do are simply the things that I think I need to do to balance short term joy and long term objectives survival and sustainability. There is no right or wrong but risk and reward! I joke and label myself a gambler as I make decision in work, home and whatever. The outcome will never be as I expected, hopefully for the better. However, I simply accept the risk of what I do and there are potential negative consequences.

We all need to improve our life not so much in spending and wasting resources but our instinct drive us to prolong our species as programmed in our DNA. Thus working days and nights to invent new technologies to make our life easier, less risker, more comfortable and so forth so the human race life long and prosper is simply something we all do anyway. Just that in the process so far we have manage to over consume what the environment can support. Balance and happiness may not be achieved all the time but at the end new invention, new knowledge makes the next generation better and more progressive. After all people learn and improve all the time!

So let's go my friends! Just go ahead to do what we think we need to do. We, ourselves, may not be the beneficiary of our work but this is just us, part of the human race.

I like to think that I am happy because I embrace life as it is. Be it a hard one or be it a good one. Going through the ups and downs in life is simply romantic (not that I have a lot of ups and downs). Just Embrace and Accept. I think it's better than forgive and forget!

Forest in Fall - Pastel pencil painting

My first painting using pastel pencil. Learned the techniques from watching YouTube. One of the most important value of Internet is about information at figure tips!

For people like me who has been procrastinating for decades to go to classes to learning painting, Internet is really heaven. Just go on to Youtube and, wa la, the demonstration is there! No need to register, travel or wait to go the class. You can also do it whenever you are free (I watched the video at 1:00am when my family was sound asleep!)

Orchid in Poster Color

This Easter Holiday in Hong Kong really gives me a chance to get away from my job. Spending couple of hours to paint this picture of Orchid got my mind cleared from just about everything other than painting this picture.

Picture was done with poster color and color pencil with, again, photos found from Internet.

Painting - Water mill

5 days off in a roll with the Easter Holiday. Our family has no travelling plan but just to stay home to take a rest. I found some quiet time at night alone with wife and daughter sound asleep couple of nights ago. A good chance to do one more practice of watercolor painting.

Again, the internet offered endless supplies of photo. I found a good photo of water mill from google search and made a painting out of it.

The real picture's color is much less strong compare to the image posted here. The reason is that I used my Nikon D40 camera to take the picture and used Photoshop to corp the picture. The lighting condition was not good when I take the picture. So I used Photoshop to make some adjustment. It turns out that the adjusted picture's color is a lot more vivid than the original one. I have tried a few setting and could not simulate near the original painting. So may as well use the auto-leveled one from Photoshop!

Enjoy. Next time I will try to be more bold in the use of stronger color.