The Descent Begins

Age is catching up.
There's no doubting it.
I'm approaching, if not already on, the asymptote of my life and it's a rapid downhill hereon.

I'm listening.

I'm listening to the creak in my bones.
I hear questions from familiar faces in the crowd.
I hear my own history read out.
I hear the 'new' music that's now a golden oldie.

All I did was drive up to Ipoh to speak at a medical conference. I'm exhausted like I climbed Kinabalu. I pulled a muscle carrying Ethan up a flight of stairs and my gluteus still feels like it's been ripped apart.

When I was delivering my talk I saw familiar faces. No, not my colleagues or old friends from med school. They were medical students of mine who, obviously, have completed their housemanship and are now full-fledged MOs. They are attending my talk, not as teeny-bopper undergrads, but mature medical officers. And they are asking me questions about their patients.

I heard my own CV being read out. I did all that? I asked myself while fiddling with the mike trying to look modest. Worse still, it all seemed so long, long, ago in another galaxy far, far away.

iTunes is playing Eric Clapton's 'PILGRIM'. Drowning in a RIVER OF TEARS. It still sounds new. The CD looks like it was bought yesterday. The groove is still real and echoes resound from depths I cannot plumb as Clapton's guitar wails with sorrow that has no words. It was the soundtrack of my housemanship 12 years ago. It still is.

I started the '10 Things I Would Like To Do Before I Die' viral tag on Facebook. A tiny step towards charting the second half perhaps? A bid to redeem the past and create a future? A second chance at it before the curtain closes? Live, learn, love, leave a legacy, Stephen Covey would say.  

Jung, Tolstoy, Shakespeare all had a renaissance of sorts at 37 and their best works produced thereafter. We begin to reclaim all that we sacrificed in the steep ascent of adulthood. We want to relive what we lost. I have come to the place I can not give a shit what others think, not care about pleasing any bosses, and earning a living isn't the all-consuming drive anymore. 

I can live as I believe.
I can live on purpose.
I can start my descent..

New Music and iClip Lyrics

Am chilling this weekend by sampling new music. The stuff I downloaded this week amounts to 248 songs and 16.3 hours of listening!

Found an app to automatically locate lyrics and add them into the ID3 Tag for me on the fly. No more messy googling on the web. iClip Lyrics seems to be free for use, too. Just wonderful!

Birth of the Macha Pan

I love green tea products. Green tea ice-cream, green tea cake, green tea syrup with red beans. But I'm not crazy about green tea. Don't know why.

Anyway, I was thinking to myself this morning: why isn't there a green tea bread? I looked it up on allrecipes.com and there was none. So, to satisfy my desire to see GREEN TEA BREAD, I decided to create my own confection. (I looked it up again and found a green-tea with red-bean filling bun on MamaFami's Spice & Splendor which looks really nice as well.

Here's what I used:
400gms bread flour
280mls water
1 tsp salt
3 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp milk powder
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp vanilla essence
2 tsp green tea powder
1.5 tsp yeast
50gm pumpkin seeds (whole, not chopped)
1 tsp black sesame seeds

Putting it all in the breadmaker with a setting for a 1.5lb dark loaf, this is the result after 3h 45mins:
A very light and refreshing chewing experience. Despite the pervasive green-ness of the bread, the macha aroma is more of an uplifting aftertaste than an overpowering trip to Osaka.
The occasional surprise of a crunchy-nutty pumpkin seed, and the grittiness of sesame made the bites interesting. Overall a nice mix of flavors, I must say. I'm glad I didn't use butter. Olive oil gave the bread the twang I wanted and didn't drag it down with a bovine heaviness.

Ethan was the first to sample it and for the first time he said, 'NICE BREAD!' There is no greater gratification than to have your two-year old pronounce that on your experimental baking.

So there it is, Macha Pan, my very first confectionary creation!

Thinking Out Loud

Serendipitous insights 'happen' upon us uninvitied, unsummoned. Mostly as I'm driving or watching Ethan scamper in the playground. Learning is a dance of reception and reflection.

I'd do well to savor these moments; heed them, learn from them. Grow with them. These insights may be new growths like seedlings piercing through the soil, differentiations - sprouting branches, leaves and buds, expansions - lengthening and enlarging, integrations - merging or intertwining, blossoming of flowers or final fruits.

I can't manage growth (or learning) but I can manage FOR growth and what I do with the new seeds - plant them or eat them? I need to resist the urge to put them to immediate use. Some seeds should be buried in soil to see light in another day.

An insight is most likely neither original or new; the collective conscious of millions of years of billions of sentient beings would've reflected further and deeper than one. But I am entrusted with mine. Knowledge can create pride or engender responsibility. Inflate the short-sighted egoist or humble the truth-seeker.

In thinking and in feeling, I want to be aware of the conscious and subconscious as the subconscious often precedes and exceeds the conscious. But intuitive knowing while being wonderfully metacognitive (ie. beyond the cerebral-rational) can also be irrational. How do we maneuvre such treacherous waters? How do I differentiate nonsense from wisdom? I guess this is where I have opportunity for play. For passion and adventure without limit.

An educational explosion

I've been lamenting the deficiencies of my childhood education. Every time I sit down to play on my synthesiser, pick up a pen to write, or read about religion and philosophy, I become dismally aware of how ill-equipped to appreciate and expressing my passions in these areas.

So I literally gasped when I found these on iTunes! iTunes U has collated a mind-boggling archive of lectures and talks from top universities around the world, offering up their content for FREE. How amazing is that?

Just look at a few pickings I subscribed to today:





Imagine being able to get a university level education without having to quit my job and go back to university. This is what makes the Internet the greatest invention of the 20th century for me. It'll also be interesting to see how so much accessibility will transform the education experience.

If no one needs to GO to a university or PAY for an education anymore, what do you actually enrol in an institution for, apart from the scroll and hat at the end? Educationists are going to need to rethink and evolve what the education experience is when lectures have become a mere commodity on the internet.

For me - I'm going back to school! Hang on.. I think I never left school...

Explain Whales to Me!

Got this in my email today (thanks, Eddy!) - and had a good laugh.
Especially the ace reply on 'Is swimming good for your figure?'

Q: I've heard that cardiovascular exercise can prolong life; is this
true?
A: Your heart is only good for so many beats, and that's it... don't
waste it on exercise. Everything wears out eventually. Speeding up
your heart will not make you live longer; that's like saying you can
extend the life of your car by driving it faster. Want to live longer?
Take a nap.

Q:Should I cut down on meat and eat more fruits and vegetables?
A:You must grasp logistical efficiencies. What does a cow eat? Hay and
corn. And what are these? Vegetables. So a steak is nothing more than
an efficient mechanism of delivering vegetables to your system. Need
grain? Eat chicken. Beef is also a good source of field grass (green
leafy vegetable). And a pork chop can give you 100% of your
recommended daily allowance of vegetable products.

Q:Should I reduce my alcohol intake?
A:No, not at all. Wine is made from fruit. Brandy is distilled wine,
that means they take the water out of the fruity bit so you get even
more of the goodness that way. Beer is also made out of grain. Bottoms
up!

Q:How can I calculate my body/fat ratio?
A:Well, if you have a body and you have fat, your ratio is one to one.
If you have two bodies, your ratio is two to one, etc.

Q:What are some of the advantages of participating in a regular
exercise program?
A:Can't think of a single one, sorry. My philosophy is: No Pain...Good!

Q:Aren't fried foods bad for you?
A:YOU'RE NOT LISTENING!!!..... Foods are fried these days in vegetable
oil. In fact, they're permeated in it. How could getting more
vegetables be bad for you?

Q:Will sit-ups help prevent me from getting a little soft around the
middle?
A:Definitely not! When you exercise a muscle, it gets bigger. You
should only be doing sit-ups if you want a bigger stomach.

Q:Is chocolate bad for me?
A:Are you crazy? HELLO Cocoa beans! Another vegetable!!! It's the best
feel-good food around!

Q:Is swimming good for your figure?
A:If swimming is good for your figure, explain whales to me.

Q:Is getting in-shape important for my lifestyle?
A:Hey! 'Round' is a shape!

Macadventures: I graduated BOOT CAMP!

Windows starting up in Mac

The VM interface

Windows Explorer and Media Player as individual windows in Mac while in 'Unity' mode.


I did it! I graduated from BOOT CAMP.

Virutal Box didn't do it for me. Some old Windows Apps like TextAloud, MS Money, Band-in-a-Box and The IVP Essential Reference Collection are keeping me from a complete Windows-to-Mac migration so I needed some way of running Windows on my Mac. Virtual Box was the first thing I tried. It was magic enough in the beginning to see Windows as a 'window' running on the MacOS. But I soon discovered it was way too limited. It didn't access my soundcard, USB or Mac's HD so that I couldn't share files. Even the virtual networking method didn't work more than a couple of times.

That forced me to use Mac's BOOT CAMP. Boot Camp wowed me. It created a partition and and let me boot the machine from Windows or Mac independently with the stroke of a key (the Option key in this case). With MacDrive installed on the Windows system I could access the Mac HD from Windows, and the Windows HD appears in Mac OS so that cross-access is seamless. But the independent systems are what made it obtrusive. Having to shut down one and restart in another system just didn't cut it.

Enter... VMWare Fusion! Finally, something that does it all!
1. I can run Windows as one separate window in Mac
2. I can run multiple Windows' windows as many windows in Mac
3. I can access Mac's HD using Shared Folders
4. Soundcard, USB, Bluetooth, IR and iSight cam is seamlessly integrated

And.. best of all, VMWare happily 'took over' the Boot Camp Windows partition and made it its own. I didn't have to install Windows and all my apps all over again.

FINALLY. Boot Camp is history. Dual machine operability has arrived for me.

Sign of things to come

It's an interesting start of year. No respite. Slam jam right onto the race track. 5,000rpms non-stop till the radiator boils over or engine gives up. The last one week was particularly adrenalinised.

12 days ago, mom and dad needed to rush to JB to see my sister so I sent them to the railway at a god-forsaken 630 in the morning. I was quite satisfied with myself to have had breakfast and bond with them. There's something about send-offs that make you dig deep and say things you normally don't say. Anyway, I left them at the station and heard the call to board when I turned the key in the ignition. I arrived at the hospital, hoping to have a breezy clinic, only to find out that a maxillectomy was suddenly on because another case was bumped off the list. Without adequate consent and without decisional review of new CT scan findings. The chaos of the morning was nerve-wracking: I had to tai-chi away my clinic, convince the patient I needed to take out his eye - don't worry sir, we do that all the time, you have another eye you hardly use right? - and revise the surgery to a bilateral neck.

That was followed by 10 hours of surgery. Strangely, holding a knife just makes the world seem right. Maybe it's the skill of working through human tissue to extricate filthy tumors and putting it all back together again. Or the sense of control in your hands - everything can be made better on the table, this table, my table. Mostly I think it's the butt-freezing air-cond, the cute scrub nurses who obey your every command, and because no one, I mean NO ONE, not even the Prime Minister can bug me here.

Cancer surgery is brave, bloody and butcheresque. Gladiator-like. That's how I like my surgeries. But it must start elegantly and end elegantly. From inked incisions to 3mm stitches. What happens in between would make an abbatoir look clean and sterile, but it's how you start and how you end that matters. I climbed Mt Kinabalu once. I remember three things - the charged ascent, full of hope and expecation; the agonising inches up the peak at 4 in the morning - who the f*** suggested I do this stupid thing - but the glory of the sun peeping through Donkey's ears and the world beneath your feet under a shroud of clouded mystery would make it worthwhile, and finally the numbed descent, limping into my bed with no sensation waist down. Long surgery is a lot like that. Raising flaps with a vengeance, get the plane, get the plane. Pausing to behold the life force in a pulsating naked carotid. And finally the zombied-brain-dead stitching that never seems to end.

The next day we were on a flight to Singapore. But not without first being denied boarding! This seems to happen to us a lot. The first time was when we were dating and I was sending her off to Kota Bharu. We were too busy saying goodbye and doing the things lovers do to notice that the gate had closed. She had to take the next flight. The second time was much later when she was pregnant with Ethan. Pregnant women were not allowed on board without a doctor's letter to say she's pregnant - I guess the giant bulge, puffy eyes and blown up ankles could've been just one bag of chips too many with salt-retention to boot - even if we were both doctors. This time: it was the expiry date on Joan's passport. It was too soon, apparently. Four months away was too close an expiry!

Yeah, like we were intending to stay in the sterilised pressure cooker for more than 3 days, I thought to myself. 'You really can't put us on board? We really didn't know about the 6-month rule.' No. You can't spit in Singapore. You can't chew gum in Singapore. You can't frigging cross a road without getting a knot in your pants wondering if you broke a law. We went to the zoo once. It's a beautiful zoo. And the animals were either small and cute or large and ferocious. And I'm not talking about furry ones that walk on fours - I'm talking about little tots in their prams and their attending mothers scribbling notes while giving their 4-yr olds their 'O' Levels mock exam: 'IS THIS ANIMAL A LAND ANIMAL OR SEA ANIMAL? I'M ASKING YOU ONE MORE TIME.. IS THIS A LAND ANIMAL OR SEA ANIMAL?' I'm not about to defect to Singapore, for goodness sakes, what's a 4-month expiry?

I was dumping clothes from one bag to another - Joan would stay, I would go on for my conference, eat alone, snore alone, wake up alone. I wasn't looking forward to the trip anymore. I had no one to blame, it was written in the passport, and that made me angrier. But before I could lock my suitcase, the ground staff appeared and announced we could fly togehter - apparently he had persuaded Singaporean customs to let this one through, dad didn't look too happy and could be a threat to lives on board, he must've thought, watching me rip apart my suitcase like King Kong.

Yesterday was Sunday. At last I got a day off. And I didn't know what to do with it. My heart was still racing. My mind reeling from a clinical trial meeting where I'm the PI - I don't know how the heck I got into this and feel like I'm totally in over my head. I was like a beat up car by the highway, bonnet open, steam all over the place - not going anywhere, just fumes, all fumes. It took a while before I could stop clicking senselessly on my Mac, burning CDs I'll never listen to, and clearing up my room just to mess it up again. When I finally fizzled out and realised I should be doing what I really WANT to do, not what I HAVE to do - more, better, faster - it was then that I picked up a book (Karen Armstrong's HISTORY OF GOD), lay down on an inflatable mattress. read a few pages, and fell asleep. I woke up once when my buttock hit the hard surface of the ground, and went back to sleep wondering if the mattress had ruptured a leak under my weight.. I should lose some, I remember telling myself before slipping into never never land.

Today I went to pick Ethan at 630pm. Dad and I ate at the table, as is customary, while mom would run around chasing Energiser bunny; playing hide-and-seek or watching Hokkien soaps, which was a favorite with Ethan. Dad and I had a longer father-son conversation, and a more philosophical one than the usual down-with-BN and curse-all-things UMNO rhetoric that goes between mouthfuls of mom's gastronomic delights. Mom has a strange ability to serve up the most delectable dishes quicker than any McDonald's with all the goodness of China. Mom's a gem. We talked about me switching over from EPF to the pension scheme - an unheard of move in 3rd generation Chinese I would think - and agreed on its insurance value, psychological worry-free benefit, recession-prrofness, and even a pretty good investment move (calculated ROI was about 47.5%! Ok 34.5% after minusing the government's 13% contribution to our EPF.) He seems to like it at my mom's a lot. When I finished chatting with dad, I found Ethan sprawled on a thin mattress, watching a cantonese soap. I tickled him and said: 'Boy, time to go home.' He grinned and said, 'Daddy bye bye.'

The last three weeks are a pretty good sign of things to come, of 2009 I'm thinking. The unending cycles of F1-style overdrive and weekend pit-stops, of adrenaline-overflow and adrenal burnout, of exhilarating achievements and brooding dark weekends. In between all that trying to learn what's important to me - the things that I enjoy, things that enrich, things that empower more self-determination, and things that enhance my skill and knowledge. And finally, growing. Growing old. Growing up with my son. Understanding his nature, seeing what his nature nurtures, nurturing what's in his nature, and simply having frolicking-about-the-park fun. Live, learn, love, leave some kind of legacy in my son, my patients, my students.

Macadventures: Going MIDI

Again, in a few clicks I have got functionality I never could get on Windows.
Above you can see my Korg 01/W has been connected by MIDI to the Mac.


I can educate the Mac as to how the Korg is interfacing with the USB MIDI device (using Romio).


Finally, of course, I gotta try it on Garage Band. It's extremely easy to use and going to provide me hours of jamming.

Macadventures: Podcast Party

I'm from the dark ages. Civilisation has just dawned on me.
I discovered podcasts, discovered that there are more podcasts out there than stray dogs in my neighbourhood, and that I never needed an iPod to use podcasts in the first place.
Yeah, laugh at me. Better late than never right? Not going to waste the rest of my AM (After Mac) years regretting what I lost in the BM (Before Mac).

My love affair with podcasts has gone for skylarking (mischievous spying from afar) to brazen orgy. Look at the mess of podcasts:


The Categories page doesn't help because they come with different tags (News, News/Political, Christian, Religious, etc.) and you can't edit them.

So what I'm doing is to use Smart Playlists to group them, live update them, and select for me the 25 latest in each category. Like so in Medical Science-

Macadventures: ArCHMock?

Archmock is not the ultimate insult or the angel-boyfriend of Mindy. It's yet another Windows-to-Mac wannabe's reservation quasher.

I was recently endowed with a chunkload of Microsoft HTML Help books - the preferred format for many medical textbooks, also known as the CHM file, short for Compiled HTML . I'm not crazy about shutting down and restarting in Windows by Boot Camp or running it on Virtual Box if I can use it right here in Mac OS.

The answer to that? A free downloadble called ArCHMock which can be downloaded for a meager 310kb bandwidth usage.

A screenshot of the trusty OHCM on Archmock:

Macadventures: Simple but wonderful Address Book

The first thing I needed to get working was iSync for my Sony Ericsson P1i. Now I love my PDA phone. It's the first gadget I've acquired in years which I could emphatically say enhances my life. I resisted the PDA-phone and QWERTY keyboard for ages. While I fossilised and the world moved on, my pockets bulged with machines and I was dropping them on the stairs shuffling from one to another (I didn't drop them on purpose you see..)

Finally, when my Tungsten T2 (my 4th PDA since 1997) went into irreversible brain death; I got an O2. It was year of misery, and most of that time spent resetting and waiting between apps. Finally I ditched it for the Sony. It was a big leap of faith, what with QWERTY keyboard with button-sharing alphabets (rock to left - Q, rock to right - W) and software-estranged Symbian OS! But it was wonderful leap, and I haven't looked back since. In fact, sprinting forward, I've gone 3G unlimited access, navigate with Google maps, facebook, do Excel sheets and listen to music with a Sony Bluetooth stereo headset that can control the phone. Not to mention I've hacked it and implanted the Sony's Walkman GUI into it! Well, you get the picture - if my Sony doesn't talk to my Mac.. I'm in trouble. It's like if my wife doesn't talk to my mother? Bad analogy.

Make things worse, the forums are filled with angry and frustrated SEP1i users. All cursing Sony or Mac or both for not looking into this compatibility issue. Well, to be fair,.. come on.. the world doesn't exactly revolve around us Sony-Mac users, ok? Give them a break.

Thankfully, my experience has been a good one. Did Mac follow up the issue or did Sony? I think both.

Firtsly, my Mac detected the P1i on bluetooth instantly and made it its preferred 3G modem in a few clicks.

Secondly, when I tried iSync, it recognised my phone but advised me on its incompatibility. No pretenses. No century-long sync attempts and system hangs.

Thirdly, it directed me to Sony! The Mac directed me to Sony's website, and straight to the page where the plug-in is situated. I downloaded that, ran the patch. And wah lahh.. iSync was syncing.

Now comes the best part. No, the best TWO parts.

1- The synchronising of 2500 contacts took less than 5 minutes. I kid you not.

2- Address Book on the Mac detected the duplicates accumulated over 10 years of mal-syncing between devices and fixed those! In a matter of seconds, my address book was cleaned up. Where the same person had several records - eg. one for email, one for mobile, etc. - these were merged!

What MS Outlook couldn't do (I understand that you have to BUY the patch to resolve duplicates) - the Mac did intuitively in seconds. No fuss.

My leap of faith from PC to Mac has proven to be the best computing decision I ever made. And I'm never looking back.

Macadventures: Using Boot Camp

I've been a fool to use Virtual Box to run WinXp as a virtual machine on my Mac all this time (the whole of 2 weeks.) At first it was full of promise. A minimisable window running Windows, one of many tasks running without every slowing, hanging or going into a coma (like XP does). But I soon ran into problems - the shared folder started to hang and I realised that I can't get USB, soundcard or camera access. (Now why would you need that you ask? I'm a sucker for functionality I guess, either I have it all or not at all.)

Then I stumble on 'Boot Camp' on my Applications folder and remember somewhere in my ask-Google-for-an-answer forays that Boot Camp was one of the ways Windows could be run. And I had it on my Mac OS X all this time?? Darned. I should've read the manual. (And I know I will say that again a few hundred times before I actually open the manual. I love rainforests. Manuals should not have been printed in the first place.) It took me about 5 attempts to get it right, but right now I'm on seventh heaven. The first time I partitioned the Windows drive at 5GB. What was I thinking? Then I partitioned it right but realised that I had no access to CDROM, USB, soundcard until I put in the Mac OS Installation CD, which, courtesy of Apple has all the drivers Windows needs... (Now I wonder why they are being so helpful to us Windows die-hards.) But the next thing I find out is that my copy of Windows has an outdated Win Installer which can't handle the Mac CD's installation files!! I try upgrading to Service Pack 3 which invariably hangs.

Finally, it dawned on me that the partition for Windows can be accessed as a drive on Mac OS. Which means I can easily download Windows Installer 4.5 and slip it into the Desktop folder of WinXP and restart the system. Wa lah!! Problem solved. Installed installed. Mac drivers installed. Sound card functioning. Camera functioning. Video display perfected. All that's just fantastic.. but dig this... DRUM ROLLLLL... With Boot Camp, the mouse is left-click and right-click enabled!! How the heck is that possible with no left and right buttons? Why did they manufacture a mouse with left and right click abilities, hidden-albeit, when the Mac doesn't even use it?? This is plain sinister or am I dreaming? And the keyboard is rewired so that Ctrl is Ctrl and Alt is Alt and the Cmd Key is the good old Windows button! Talk about full Windows functionality.

I have got it made. My PC is going to the grave. The next thing to do will be to install MacDrive so that the Windows system can access all of the Mac's files and vice versa. That way I have two partitions that cross-communicate freely, obviating duplication of data (think 14,750 photos and 80GB of MP3s and you'll get the picture.)

Ahh.. the pleasures of Mac. And the journey's just begun!

Year End Escapades

The end of the year is always a mixed bag and way too fast a way to close the year for me. But like all boring people who aren't out there screaming a countdown and drinking their livers to poop, I'm blogging. Ok, I've got a glass of wine in one hand... but that doesn't count.

The fest-acti-vities begin with Christmas. (Christmas Eve panic shopping to be exact.) A drive to the serene rubber-estate-cum-kampung for a mega Eve bash with the Kong family, their inlaws, outlaws, grandkids and other farm animals. Then comes Christmas day dinner with my family. A short respite in between and then it's wife's birthday (29th) and the curtain drops on the 31st.

I've learnt that panic shopping lands you up with crummy gifts. By crummy I mean you feel really crappy when you open up your presents and find expensive fragrances and such and you remember that you gave them a shower radio or picture frame. I tried to make up for the injustice by treating my family to Dim Sum on Boxing Day.

Christmas Eve

The festivities in the outback of Kuala Sawah on Eve never ceases to impress me. It's always phenomenal - the amount of food, the number of people and the family dynamics. In that order. This year there was so much food I was hoping all the poor and homeless of Seremban would show up; and even then there'd be food to spare. People did stream in till late night, some in their BMWs and Mercedes negotiating tight estate dirt-lanes. And the family, oh my - there's the multilingual pastor-uncle who leads a service, an octagenarian great-grandma who puts the fear of God in all things alive, the 50-something aunt who cycles up mountains for fun and bakes up cakes to live and die for, and the uncle who roasts turkeys... just to name a few stellar characters.

Christmas day

We slept in and crept into the Nepalese service instead of our regular English one. I'm glad we did. We didn't understand a word, but that was not the point. It was celebrating in a way that encapsulated the spirit of Christmas in the most poignant way. Here we were, three Chinamen in the back of a hall of strapping Nepalese men (with odors to match, I might add), feeling altogether foreign. And they were singing beautiful hymns and carols in a language I didn't understand about a God who did understand all human flesh and its faltering attempts to reach Him; about a baby born to live the life we couldn't live; and about the man who died that we would not. Jesus showed us true empathy - entering into another's experiential world fully and sensitively; living our lives, dying our deaths. And I got to taste a tiny bit of the spirit of that empathy for the briefest moment.

Boxing day?
The Yaps basically hunched and slouched around a feast of Dim Sum, gorging dumplings, slurping tea, reminiscing everything from Castlewolfenstein (a PC game which me and my brother spent disproportionate amounts of our childhood on) to I can't remember what.. I was drunk on tea.

Wife's birthday.
Now this is when the stress hormones work overtime. Getting this one day wrong is the beginning of a year of misery. Having a wife who works shifts and gets her weekly roster on Sunday (when her birthday is Monday) DOES NOT HELP. And when you've got a barely-2-yr-old whose meals and baths need to be planned down to the ounce - it's a disaster until proven otherwise. But GOD was smiling on me this time. From the moment I got confirmation of Monday & Tuesday off, I got to work, and things just miraculously fell into place. Online booking for hotel & spa package - click click click done. Call to mom for babysitting - dial, beg, done. Plan itinerary and cover story. Done.


Come the morning, we dropped off Ethan at mom's and he gleefully bade us go and have fun. Didn't she say she wanted to shop at Isetan? So to KLCC we went. Oh, you don't need me to hang around and rather I bugger off to look at gadgets? Meet you in an hour? Great!! In that one hour I sprinted off to Impiana, checked in, got a top-floor room to get a view of KLCC park, confirmed the spa booking, ran back to the KLCC, got flowers.. all in the knick of time. Ring ring.. where shall I meet you? How about Sundanese food darling? Sprint sprint.. hide flowers under the chair, stop panting. In walks the love of my life, I pull her a chair and spring the lilies on her. A symbol of your feminine sexuality, I proudly declare (I got that off Google while crossing the road!) OK.. let's go somewhere else now. As we pulled out of KLCC and onto Jln Pinang (which is where Impiana is), I exclaim, OH NO, I left something at KLCC!! I gotta turn back! And swerve into the hotel car park. It took her all of 20 seconds before she realised that's where we were going to stay.. Well, it was worth the short suspense. The room was cosy and sleek. The massage sensuously amazing (a Balinese massage better than what we got in Bali, to be honest.) And the horizon pool perched over the city with the towers in full view, breathtaking. She was thrilled to bits. 2009 is going to be glorious.

Well, today is New Year's Eve. For the first time in my life I can look back and say I achieved all my resolutions for 2008. And that's because this time last year I didn't make any save one: I resolved not to make any resolutions anymore. That's the secret formula to fulfilment by the way: F = A/E (where F= fulfilment, A= accomplishment, and E= expectation). When E --> 0, F --> infinity. INFINITE fulfilment! Genius no? Well, while the fireworks are banging off and beers are being consumed by the barrel, I'm thumping on my PC which will soon be decomissioned while my Mac is running BootCamp. I've got a Merlot smooth as silk in hand and my wife is cackling behind me reading Tony Parsons. It's a good life, she just planted me a kiss and we wished each other Happy New Year. It's been a mad year but I wouldn't trade it for anything else. Come 2009 - give me everything you've got!

Mac Day 2

Sharp learning curve ahead.

First stop: how to network and share files between Mac and PC.

These links look promising:
Mac-Connect
My First Mac

Will report later on networking.

Next stop: All about Mac OS X

Looks like Wikipedia has got what I need.

Mac Day 1

It arrived in a lowly brown box, dumped on the gravel street, pebbles still stuck to the tape. DHL had no idea what magic they were carrying in their hands. It didn't take me long to pull it out of the box and less to place it on the table, plug in the power cable, keyboard and mouse. I looked a few times in the box - no installation CDs, no motherboard software, no driver CDs, not even a warranty card... Strange. Only two manuals - 'Everything Mac' and 'Everything Else'.

The first delicious thing about setting it up is that it is only ONE piece. No desktop, monitor and one hundred dangling cables and figuring out which goes where. No wifi card, bluetooth dongle, nothing. ONE single masterpiece.

The second thing is ripping off the clear plastic that wraps everything and unveiling the black reflective apple logos embedded on the silky white.

By the time finger hits ON button, my heart is already racing.

Moment of truth. Push. And the universe leaps off the monitor. Ok I'm exaggerating. It's some kind of nebula or something captured by Hubble and stars are dancing all over the place flashing WELCOME in 10 languages or more, I can't remember. I hit BACK a few times just to watch the video and feel this tingling sensation sweep over me.. Magic washing over. Ok ok..

Now comes the wildly impossible experience(s).

MASTER - IS IT YOU?
I'm asked to key in my email and password - the one I used to buy this product online! This machine had traveled across the globe (from HK apparently) to one master and one master ONLY. It didn't have to spend a month configuring it till it becomes specially mine. It was MINE before it even met me. It was made for me. It's one mission is to serve me. My address and phone number appears instantly and I'm asked if anything should be changed and if there are any other users.

MASTER - LET ME SEE YOU
Then I'm told to sit in front of the Mac while it takes a picture of me (with the built-in cam) to get a profile pic without me having to hunt it down from some ancient snapshot on a faraway vacation. Nay.. 1 day old Mac wants to get a good look at his master. Pic taken, identity confirmed, it unfolds itself...

LET ME GET YOU CONNECTED
I'm trembling here. What comes next? Will the exciting welcome end here and the head-banging, hair-pulling, bug-fixing, system-crashing nightmare begin? I'm a wounded victim of years of Windows-abuse you see.. please be gentle on me. Before I hit a key, a screen pops up. GASP! It says, WiFi signal detected. Choose your router. Key in the WEP. You're connected!! What the... Was that all? No Wifi configuration, no PPP dialup codes, no nothing?? No way...

The bluetooth icon is hovering temptingly above. I click it. Detect devices. Sony Ericsson P1i detected. Paired. Ok.. not bad. Hang on, what's that? 3G Modem detected - use it to connect to Internet? Hell YES!! Maxis, WAP, Unet, etc........ CONNECTED. Oh my Gooooddd.... The Mac figured out how to get online through my 3G phone without me even asking it to! What took weeks of configuring and failed connections with the PC, ploughing through Mobile Networking Wizard and m-Router configurations took the Mac a total of 1 minute. WITHOUT any guidance from ME. This is like driving a car without every having to open the bonnet while using a PC is like keeping a trunk full of tools, spare radiator tubings, jumper cables and a few extra spark plugs just in case.

LET US GET YOUR LIFE ORGANISED SHALL WE?
OK. Look here, Mr Cocky Mac. If there's one thing that will make you my best friend forever, is that you can SYNC with my Sony Ericsson P1i. All the forums I've read out there say SEP1i and you just don't get along. Not that you're hostile but the SEP1i is just plain Mac-dumb. Now can you do it?? Start iSync (used the Help to find it). Device detected. Device not compatible. Ok... How about a little help here? Sony Ericsson's website seems to have a plugin available. Download. Installed automatically. iSync again (without rebooting 10 times). Sudden flurry of activity. Synchronising.. it says.. Can this be true? I've been fooled by this endless 'synchronising' spinaround that gets zilch result. The first few times I did it with the PC it took me 2 days, a few meals, a few walks in the park. Don't give me that rotating two-arrow sign. I will not be deceived... What's that? DONE? Whaddya mean done. All 2530 contacts and 190 calendar events downloaded?? NO WAY. NO %^*&#^($#^( WAY. This is when I shudder. This is when a get golfballs in my throat. This is when I want to break into tears... IT IS FINISHED?? In 2 minutes??

I shake my head in disbelief. My jaw drops like my masseters were mush. I stare at all 20inches of messianic magic. Words fail me. There aren't adequate analogies or symbols for this kind of an experience. How can I describe it? It's like being given the keys to a Cadillac after 20 years of riding a beatup Proton that needed to be brought into the workshop every week, whose air conditioning fails in the hot sun, and power windows jam sequentially. It's like being told you never have to look into the engine, you can take off your grease-covered rags and wash off that rust - it's time you drove a real car now. You deserve it.

And this is just DAY 1. I'm just scratching the surface. I'm just playing with the tip of the iceberg. I'm ready to be wowed. I'm looking forward to a life time of pleasurable machine usage and not heart-wrenching disillusionment. Mr Mac. Don't let me down.

Things I would like to do in the coming weeks/months:
1. Get PARALLEL and run Windows apps on the Mac (better than a PC does I hear!)
2. Catalog all my digital photos (6 years worth, some 100gb of it)
3. Get my KORG 01/W hooked up by MIDI and play some serious music along with GarageBand
4. Edit my home and medical videos with speed and style
5. Organise my MP3s on iTunes
6. Discover everything else I didn't even know I could do, and do all the things I never knew I should be doing!

Ahhh... the dawn of a new era for me.

The Little Drummer Boy

Seeing that Ethan has got a real passion for rhythm, we couldn't resist getting him his first drum set.



Since then he's been experimenting various styles of banging, asks for his audience to sit and watch or sing along so he can beat.

Look at him go!


Now I wonder when I can get MY own drum set... What was that?? Sorry I'm a bit deaf.

Family Outing at MidValley

It's great when the whole family can get together and chill.



Our recent outing-pigout at MidValley and landed up stuffing our faces at Paddingtons.

Bali Videos

I've only recently had an uninterrupted connection to upload our holiday videos. Here they are:

Bumbling about in Bali

Trip to Bali started on the wrong foot. We left all our packing to the last day and Ethan was snuffly all night making it very difficult. I went to bed at 2am and Joan probably at 4am, and we were on the road to LCCT at half-past six.


Day 1

From Bali

Flight was ok for Ethan, thanks to Actifed and Oxymetazoline. A one-hour delay getting our room was a slight dampener but the room itself wasn't bad though a little below our expectation after what we experienced in Chaweng Regent, Samui. We needed rest, so the entire afternoon we slept with Ethan. Going out to

From Bali

Kuta square was a jarring and disorientating culture shock for us - a mish-mash of branded stores, bars, boutiques and every kind of night-market hawking all crumpled into tight streets with motorbikes-a-zooming and touts-a-screaming. A compulsory horse-ride (ripoff 100,000rupiah) through Poppies Lane & Legian made it a little better and on spotting the legendary Made's Warung, we stopped for dinner. Large tuna in Balinese sauce, Gado-gado and Sate Babi redeemed the day for me though I had to fend off ferocious mosquitoes the whole time.

Day 2
We didn't sleep.. again. This time because of bed bugs!! Took three calls and half and hour at 2 o'clock in the morning for the hotel staff to change our sheets. Ethan was still snuffly and pukey, waking at least six times in the night. So day two was going to be NO TRAVEL. After mega breakfast (we eat for two meals) we headed off to Discovery Mall - no adventures for today, we thought. Intercepted by some tourism promo boys, we won a prize - t-shirts, free stay at Royal Bali and an island tour!! (I thought to myself - this is a conjob, Joan thought - this is a conjob, but what the heck... let's go see this hotel.) Man, were we conned... An hour of the most annoying and irrelevant sales talk which we had to practically shout to get out of at the end really botched the day. Only redeeming point was the free island tour we won

From Bali

After an afternoon nap, I said to myself, we're going to enjoy our dinner no matter what. So, off to the BEST Balinese haute cuisine in town - KETUPAT! It was well worth the price of some 300,000+ rupiah. Hidden behind an antique gallery on Legian, it was the most exotic looking place I've ever eaten in. Eating gazebos fashioned after ancient royal houses, poolside dining, and Balinese spa music made for perfect ambience for the night. And the food was.. oh my god... orgasmically good. Sate Lilit(check out the slideshow/photos)- pervasively spiced meat rolled around a serai stick, exuding the most heavenly aromas and flavors to titilate your palate - served on barely burning embers of coal. Time stopped as I bit into the succulent flesh made for gods...

From Bali

Ok back to earth.. That night we hung out at Starbucks, Discovery, had ourselves some frappucinos and caramel machiato while Ethan played himself silly over the couches after his meal. MISTAKE. All the excitement and aerophagy just made him pukey, and puke he did.. Trying to save the upholstery and carpets from permanent graffiti courtesy of Ethan, I took the entire load of vomit on myself (see photos). That totally made my day.. It was hilarious - father & son covered in vomit, people opened doors and stepped aside for us to get back to the hotel to be hosed down!

From Bali

Time to cash in our island tour prize. We headed off to Kintamani to see the live volcanic mountain of Batur. The usual stops on the way up - batik, silver, art, carvings, etc. Kintamani was crispy cool, the volcanic crater spouting off a little ash, and the large expanse of Danau Batur serene and sedate. On the way back, the driver suggested we try out the Elephant Safari at Bakas.. MISTAKE. The bloody entrance fee and elephant ride for 3 of us would've cost us 1.5million rupiah!! We said thank you very much, take us home.

Dinner was at Discovery Mall's food court where we had some Soto, Gado-gado and more sate. We decided we didn't need the grime and crowd of Kuta so we did all our shopping at TandaMata - the souvenir/craft shop in Discovery. I'm sure we were paying far too much for the stuff, but what the heck..

Day 4
This was going to be Joan's day at the Spa, and my day with the boy. All was going according to plan. We had breakfast, Ethan was happy watching Bob the Builder, mother bundled off, and I was feeding him on his pram before heading out to Kuta square. Then on his last spoon, he gave me that classic stare which says daddy I'm going to puke, like mega puke.. It was volcanic, like Batur in 1917. Puke splattered on the floor, the walls, and filled the pram. It took me a good hour to hose us both down, lay towels on the floor, and disrobe the pram for washing. Off to the laundry with another sack of clothes and pram covers, and finally back to Discovery for more gift hunting.

From Bali

From Bali

With all that exhaustion, I decided we were not going to do Jimbaran. I didn't want to risk another eruption and didn't fancy the traveling anyway. So, instead, we had seafood at the hotel's beachside BBQ. That was the best decision I made. The food was good, the poolside ambience chilling, and the entertainment - a Tek Tekan dance by a reputed troupe was par excellence. And we got some good photographs with the cast too! So for a stress-free, minimal fuss, great food and dose of local culture - I'd give the evening an 8 out of 10.

Day 5

From Bali

A laidback breakfast, stroll-come-photoshoot around the gardens, and finally packup to go. All in all, a challenging but fun trip. Not the usual see-all, do-all adventure. More of a highly-selective sampling of food, culture, and sights of the island paradise; perhaps an introduction to Bali for future reference should we decide to go again..

Picked up our compulsory cigarettes, brandies, chocolates and fragrances at the airport duty-free; let Ethan do some last-minute flirting with the babes, and off we go on our airplane. Thankfully Ethan knocked out even before we boarded and slept the whole way except for the last half hour.

From Bali

Goodbye Bali. Hold your own.

Getting back on Sunday, we were actually quite happy - both from the trip and to be back home. When I had my shower, I realised we have a little resort of our own right here in our own home. It's great to be home and great to have a home I can call paradise.