About

What about Don’t Panik?
 
What’s behind the name Don’t Panik?
A long, long time ago, in a company that treats employees better than its customers and of course no longer exists, was a big, bad-ass, iron-clad server by the name of Don’t Panik. The name of course comes from the Douglas Adam’s book, the Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy. Soon after, it got registered on the world-wide web. Obviously substituting the ‘k’ for the ‘c’ means that it was readily available!
 

About me, the author.

Born in some decades ago in a tiny town which became a city much later, Eugene has a strange attraction to expensive activities. His first computer was an Apple IIe which later became the IIgs. Windows came much later… and so did the World Wide Web.

To cut the long boring story short, it can be condensed to FTP – Food, Travel, and Photography. That said, web development can also be thrown into the mix since his first homepage was sitting on a Sun Solaris cluster in the basement of the University of Wisconsin-Madison‘s computer science lab. That was 1994. The first big website was www.webaperture.com which he has shutdown in 2012 after being online for around 8 years with over 5,000 members worldwide.

A gadget fanatic, he’s been building his own PCs and servers since 1991 and he is a Mac & Apple fan.

He has always loved traveling and he put 90,000 miles on his trusty Ford Taurus in the 3 years he owned it in the US. Returning to sunny and warm Malaysia, He still travels to places such as Europe, Asia, China, South-pacific and North America. While there’s a long list of countries that he’s like to be in or visit like to go to… home is always the best.

Food, well, being Malaysian, food is always a part of life. Being of Chinese heritage means food is definitely a key part of culture and life. So, obviously during the course of any travel, sampling the local cuisine is part of the adventure. He also can cook up a storm of sorts. Oh, was it mentioned that he’s a dessertarian. 

The photography genes seemed to have been there all along. Eugene’s late grandfather owned both a Leica III and a Contax rangefinder and assortment of lenses. Although he passed on, Eugene still has his large collection of 35mm chromes although most of them are in pretty bad shape. Despite some surfacing during the teenage years, the genes exploded in 1998 with the purchase of a SLR – a Canon 500N. Soon after, a whole series of lenses and cameras followed such as Canon’s EOS-50, -50E, EOS-30, EF16-35, EF70-200, etc. His first digital camera was the EOS-300D which was upgraded to a 20D within 6 months. He’s currently moved over to mirrorless cameras and video.

 

In a nutshell (or tweet nowadays), Eugene is a visual explorer, geek, travel & culinary adventurer, educator, barista, coffee-fanatic, customer experience advocate and leader, sustainable future enthusiast, focused on building communities and local coffee farmers with sustainable initiatives and overall sustainable, fair business. 

He is married to one wife with one son, lives with DID and ADHD and believes that the worth of any individual is not in dollars or gold but in how they serve others and contribute to society. One life, one goal, leaving the world a bit better than you arrived.

Supported Charities & NGOs:

American Cancer Society, Malaysian Cancer Society (NCSM), Hospis Malaysia, UNICEF