I was born in Singapore in 1971, and am a 2nd generation Singaporean. My generation’s pretty small by Singapore’s extended family standards- I’ve got nine uncles and aunts (only) right now, and ten cousins (only). I’m also ethnic Chinese, and also a Hainanese- the ethnic dialect group famous only for Hainanese Chicken Rice, and for being a generally pleasant people.

Funnily, though I’m the bloke in the family who actually got round to following this “Great Tradition of Teaching” in the family- there was at one point in time nine language teachers amongst the entire generation of aunts and uncles- I’ll probably also be the one who’s gonna make less money than either of my two brothers. And to top it off, I’m married to a teacher! Little ironies of life? There’s really no money to be made in education.

So how did I land up in this teaching thing? It wasn’t parents who suan-ed (or “influenced”) me into teaching. In fact, having to hear since young mum bring home all those horrible stories of amok primary school kids made me resolve never to be a teacher. That was the way it was, until two incidents changed that. The first was a deep spiritual prompting after going through a rough relationship whilst I was in the University. The second- the really big one- happened two years later when I met my Godmums, also an educator, who taught me everything I know about communicating with people and being a teacher. Such that when I graduated, the first thing I did was look for a teaching job. The biggest school I could teach in was Informatics, so there I went for the interview for a new lecturing position at Tanjong Pagar-ADCS in November 1995. I lectured there for just over 7 years, eventually attaining the position of Principal Lecturer, and academic head. I left the school in Feb 2003, and headed to Perth to pursue my Ph.D at Curtin University. I completed the program in 2006, and since October have been lecturing at Temasek Polytechnic - Temasek Informatics & IT School.

I’ve also been bumming around the net for quite a long while now. I first started with Email in 1992, moved on to local news conference and the newsgroups in 1993, and have been on the World Wide Web since 1994. The web, as we know it, has come a long way since the days of ye olde text-based Lynx browsers. This personal web site went online on the 11th January 1996, and has gone through five major revisions since then.

I listen to music from a pretty varied range, though the traditional classics (i.e. Mozart, Tchaikovsky etc.) make up something like 80% of my 500+ CD collection. Outside these folks, David Lanz, David Foster, John Williams and James Horner would top my list of musicians I listen to the most often. Check out my Music page for some stuff on my own compositions. I’m also an avid photographer, especially in animal portrait photography.

Here’s the most recent family picture, taken in November 2006 at our wedding. Both of my parents are retired Mandarin language teachers. From the left, my elder brother who works at the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and Jasmine who works at the Corporate and investment arm of a European bank. On the rightmost is my younger brother, an MD who works at General Surgery at Changi General Hospital, and Sharon, a Post-Doctoral fellow at the National Neuroscience Institute. Ling and I are the uncle and aunt of three nephews (Danyel, Issac, Jonathan) and one niece (Natasha) too who’s not in the picture. The little lass at the front of the picture is Gwen, Danyel and Issac’s cousin.

The both of us worship at Wesley Methodist Church, and now attend the early morning traditional hymn-singing services at 7:30 a.m. with Ling. It’s not hard to spot the two of us - we usually sit near the podium, and is often the only semi-young couple in a crowd of mostly older worshippers. Ling likes contemporary worship, but I have this thing about singing hymns accompanied with a rich sounding church organ.:)