Regrets ? oh.. plenty. As explained earlier at the other HOBBY section of how bad I used to find ways to feed my stomach those days, may be I explain a little more here.. BAD in organize my writings, huh ??

Due to financial difficulties I faced during my youthful days, I did not have a chance to complete formal education. I was Chinese educated, when I came to the city to find a living back in the mid '70, and life was very tough and rough then, in a state of survivor I started to realize the importance in the medium of communication. All these years, my command of English has always been a handicap. How bad was it ? Bad, really bad because those days, I cannot even read and understand simple content found in an English newspaper ! Hence, hopefully I enrolled myself in an evening class to complete my lower and upper sixth education and during free time, I just have to rely on a simple English/Chinese dictionary to memorize words, phases and learnt how to apply them in real life. How difficult was that ? Simple, just imagine yourself start learning Mandarin from scratch and you will probably understand what I meant..

I was working as an office boy during day time running around dispatching documents among few financial institutions where my previous employer were dealings with. Naturally, no one would BOTHER how bad a Chinese office boy spoke with his English, huh ? Basically, my English can also be considered as self taught. Fundamentally, my basic of the medium can be considered as very fragile except over the years, I managed to command my spoken English fairly well but still extremely weak in writing. Unfortunately, many years later after I learnt how to use a computer, mastering some basic graphic software, all of a sudden I have to learnt how to TYPE & WRITE - neither ways considered as a favorite of mine.

The early days of the PIM site was bad, REAL BAD. A pity fact I realized was, I can never be a good typist in my life. I typed incredibly slow and most often, I couldn't cope up in speed typing with my flow of thoughts in my mind. That was why you may find some words were missing in sentences and plenty of grammatical errors in those earlier postings. I had only found a perfect feature in my favorite HTML software that there is a spell checker but that was only after two years later and a lot of pages went live without prior checking. So, one reason why the PIM has developed so slowly was I am trying to phase out older write-ups with newer ones whenever I can find the time to do so.

Other than some personal obligations in human relationship with a few opposite sex; one of my regret in life was the messy state of early days of PIM site - it has created some real bad impression on behalf of all Malaysian in the eyes of public! I should have been more responsible and never let the site went live in the first place as probably I may have been the Malaysian that has the worst command of English. But I think human race progresses that way too as I was cornered to learn all the time and picking up how to command. The web traffic of million of hits per month becomes very pressurizing to me now and I am more cautious in developing satellite sites than ever as I know it carries other weights in it.

So, among many other things, as I have pointed outing many sections of the PIM site, I still have to struggle to write properly (& type efficiently). But I have been trying ALL the TIME to improve these skill. If that matters to some of you, then it is just too unfortunate because I have not been able to improve too much compared to earlier days where I started it all although now that I have learnt to keep lines and paragraphs simple to read and understand.

So, with these confession here I hope it can clear some doubts. Do excuse me if you have found my English is unacceptable to your reading pleasure because these pages were not written specifically for a Oxford, Cambridge or a Harvard's graduate - on the other hand, as long as you know I didn't force anyone to learnt and read Mandarin first. Well, if anyone of you feel that you have all the time in the world come and educate an old Malaysian Chinese how to write proper English for the sake of good reading in a camera website - Hmm... please let me know, I am more than happy to send you those few hundred HTML pages for correction and hopefully pick up some good writing from you.

On the business front, my only regret and the BIGGEST let down was an uncherished dream which was once so close in realizing it.

          | close this window |