Could He be the Next Bill Gates Microsoft?...

Growing up in an Asian country, I had dreamt about being a doctor when I grew up. My father is a dentist; two of my uncles are dentists and so is my grandfather. Naturally I thought I would follow the footstep and go a step further into the medical field. Unlike other Asian parents, my parents actually didn't push me to become a doctor. They didn't put much pressure on my academics. I suspect it is because they didn't want to put more stress on me since I was always sick when i was a child. They wanted me to finish college, get a job, get married and live a stable quiet life. I on the other hand had very different thoughts. I loved reading about great people such as Alexander Graham Bell, Benjamin Franklin, Issac Newton, Galileo and my all time favorite Christopher Columbus. I had aspirations to do great things, a great inventor, a great writer, a politician, a lawyer and etc. My dreams were big, bold and borderline unrealistic hence it was only a dream. Sadly having grown almost half of my life already on earth, those goals remain a distant dream. Well..maybe I still have a shot at being a great writer.




I didn't grow up in the age of computers. The closest electronic box I had was playing with my neighbor's Atari console. The first computer language I learned was Basic and I was already in the United States. I believe if my readers are under the age of 30, they may not even have heard of BASIC. What a contrast it is today for my son. We are in the age of super information technology. We saw the rise of the dot.coms in the 90's where overnight millionaires became broke the next year. In this digital world, we could waste so much space by taking unlimited pictures on digital cameras, and harddrives have gone from a normal 40 gig hardrives to terabyte drives. The common catch words are Ipods, Iphones, Wii, BlackBerry, VOIP, Myspace, Facebook, MSN, Windows XP, Vista, Youtubes, Yahoo.... I just can't believe "google" is actually a dictionary word!

My son actually watches youtubes more than TV and uses MSN Messnger to communicate with his grandparents in Hong Kong instead of dialing it up the traditional way. On Youtube.com, he is able to watch Chinese programs for free. I came home the other day, my son was watching his favorite program on youtube.com, my wife was watching her favorite chinese series on another tube tech which is 56.com and I turn on the TV to watch sports. It's like having three TVs in one household.

I often thought about what my son's future and pondered what would he become when he grows up. At the age of four, he is already telling me "daddy, I want to check my email" even though he doesn't even know how to spell his name yet. He spends a lot of time on online computer games. He thinks he is working or doing homework everytime when he opens up Microsoft Excel since he sees daddy working on his Excel reports so much. He would type randomly and pretend he is doing work. We even have a name for all our computers at home as a way of personalfying them in order for him to treat them gently. We name our laptop "Lappy" and our destops "daddy desky" and "mommy desky." He is always interested when I try to fix the computers and would play the role of a tech support. The funny thing is he would always grab his doctor's kit because he thinks lappy is sick. He is also fascinated with anything that has buttons. Since he has seen us using ATM machines with the touch of buttons, he thinks any machine with buttons would spit out money when he presses one.

I am not sure what would he be when he grows up but he sure does show a great affinity toward computers and perhaps who knows, he may become the next Bill Gates and create his software empire..., but we would let nature take it's course. (mommy's comment after reading this post--"dream on Dad!")

Stay tuned for more.