Jean paid a visit to her mother in hospital in Taiwan

Chenny and I got up at 5:45 AM in order to drive to airport during the busy traffic hours of the motorway and arrived there in time to meet with his mother. From my observation, Chenny is nice to his mother although very often he is impatient with her.

Jean's mother, aged 90, had a fall at home and then lost consciousness during the daytime one day in late June of 2010, and was thus rushed to the hospital. On July 5, Chenny and I sent Jean to airport early in the morning to get on board of the earliest flight of Korean airline for Taiwan to pay a visit to her mother in hospital. Time flies by very quickly, Jean's scheduled returning date is up, and here we are going on the way in the raining dark early morning toward Auckland airport to meet her.

The traffic was not as bad as we expected, so by the time of 6:45 AM, we were already sitting in the waiting room of the arrival exit, while well ahead of the 7:30 AM arriving time of the flight. I estimated Jean would not be able to get through the customs and everything within one and a half hour, so we both dozed off in the waiting zone. Suddenly Jean appeared at the exit with a cart loaded with three luggage on it. Chenny briskly stood up and walked forward to greet his mom with an affectionate hug and a sheepish smile. I found these 2 to 3 seconds Chenny's greeting to his mother was very moving and beautiful, and I regretted I was not able to capture that few seconds in the camera.

After having settled everything at home, Jean told me that once her mother was in a very dangerous state, "mother's face showed great pain, nervousness, horror; hands and legs pushing and kicking as if being horrified or annoyed by something, and everyone of the family was expecting the very worst and showed extreme anxiety." she continued, "Suddenly an idea flashed through my mind that I should go to the pure land Buddhist group nearby to make pray for a peaceful pass away for mother and/or do a repentance service on behalf of mother."

So she told her siblings about what she thought and wanted to do for the rest of the day, and she immediately left for that pure land Buddhist center.

At the receptionist's desk, a female Buddhist told her that they were undergoing a 21 day service called "the three-time reminder (三時繫念法會)" which were exactly suitable to her mother's case. So she enrolled on straightaway and took part in the ritual wholeheartedly through the rest of that day.

Having returned to the hospital, she told her siblings what she had done that day, and then they began to notice that their mothers facial expression radiated peacefulness, and the doctor discharged her from the ICU that night, and every one of the family were greatly relieved and unanimously attributed this dramatic change to what Jean had done in the Temple.

Jean has told me many stories about what she experienced, saw, heard in this trip to Taiwan. To get the cheapest airfare, she flew with Korean airline, and thus had to stop by Seoul airport on both ways to change airplane. On her flying to Taiwan, they were supposed to stay overnight in Seoul and change airplane the next morning. That was her first time in life she had to travel on a journey through which she must use her limited English to solve any problem that could possibly arise, so although she still smiled all the time when she was telling me the story, I believe she must be pretty nervous when the aircraft was descending to land and that would be the beginning of using her English in making inquiries relating to accommodation, meals, and etc..

She said that she could feel all the single female passengers who needed to spend one night in Seoul to change airplane in the next morning were anxiously looking for someone of same-sex to join as a group. And soon there came two ladies toward her, one Asian and one European. They friendly and politely asked if Jean was going to change airplane in the next morning? And so three of them naturally became a group, and they went to the transition desk, to the bus stop, to the hotel, to the check-in desk, to the restaurant for dinner, and etc. together. and Jean's innate enthusiasm naturally made her become the leader of the three member group. The Asian lady was heading for Qingdao, and she had no English almost. The old Europeans lady was to fly to London to see her granddaughter. She was living in Tauranga. Jean's limited English turned out to be helpful to the two nervous ladies during the trip.

In the next early morning after Jean's arrival, I found this e-mail in the inbox when I turned on the computer after I finished my morning practice. The message indicates that mom's condition is still improving. Amituofo!

姐夫與真姐您好！

真姐安全抵達，我們也放心了。

今(8/2)早進病房，媽張著眼睛看我，跟媽講話她會點頭；把手套拿掉，跟她作手部運動，幫她作合十動作說"謝謝妳啊！"，之後她說"謝謝妳啊!"媽就自己拱手了。

今天這些進步都讓我與敢非常驚喜，但媽手上的傷口發炎紅腫，倒是令人耽心。皮膚乾癢讓媽常想抓癢，幫媽剪了指甲，擦了E油，情況緩解。

陪伴中，敢早晚都幫媽作腿部伸曲運動各50次，避免僵硬。

下午2：00遷移到安養中心，照顧雖不如醫院周到但也不錯了，敢晚上可以回家好好休息了，他也夠辛苦了。

你們多保重！

阿健

Another visit to Mitre 10

I had been thinking of wrapping up the hot water pipes of my home so as to retain the heat for a longer time. To do this project, I have to go to Mitre 10 to buy the insulation material which is 2 m long, although not heavy, it is quite a hassle travelling by bus. So this project had been left in my "wish list" ever since until....

One morning on 17/07/2010 when my wife was away in Taiwan to see her mother, and my daughter, Tessie, came back home to look after me. I told her about my wish of doing the hot water pipe insulation project, and she happily promised to go with me by her car to buy the material.

So I had yet another visit to Mitre10 on 17/07/2010. This time, Tessie was my private driver. It was a beautiful sunny day, and was a weekend, so at the time as early as 10:30 AM in the morning, Mitre 10 was already packed with shoppers. As Tessie had to go to office to do some overtime extras after helping me with the shopping, so I had to do a quick buy and go. Instead of browsing from aisle to aisle, I spotted a guy in a red T-shirt with a big "ask me" printed on the back, so I approached him. He is lanky, tall and quite old, I estimate he must be older than 70, and his face seems to be ready to give you a cheeky smile at any time when his eyes are in contact with yours.

"Hi, Mr. Ask Me" I greeted him with my humor, and without any confused facial expression, obviously he knew I was calling them. "Good morning sir, what can I help you?" I gave him the note which wrote the product code and its description.

Seemingly he is a new staff, as it took him a while to figure out where should he guide me to. And when he had finally got the idea of where the product should be, he looked relieved and quite proud of himself. "Follow me sir, I take you down there." He said to me.

We past by another red T-shirt man on the way to the aisle where my product might be in, that guy stopped and said to him, "hey! I hope you are not playing around again." "Hey? I'm not playing around, I'm helping this gentleman to find his product. And I have a name, my name is 'ask me', look! It is printed on my back." he fought back. I knew they were teasing each other.

When we got to the section where he thought my product should be in, I already spot the product sitting on the second level from the ground, but before I walked to get them, he asked me to wait where I was and he was going to find the product for me. But I saw him stood in the middle of the aisle, his eyes scanned up and down and left to right through each shelf, his face was full of uncertainty as a small child got lost in downtown.

I said to him, "look! it is there". "Oh! You know what they look like?", instantly he was relieved and happily followed me to that shelf. He carefully checked the product description on my note against the sticky label on the product. "Ah ha! This is exactly the product you want." He helped me to get three pieces from the shelf. I thanked him, and he happily wished me a good day and walked away to serve another customer.

At the checkout point, I put my hand into the pocket to get some money for the payment, but Tessie stopped me, she insisted to pay for the family. The feeling of seeing children demonstrating their ability and willingness of support is very nice and indescribable.

Outside of the Mitre 10 building, by the entrance was a sausage sizzle stand. Four Westlake Boys high school students were cooking sausage for raising fund for traveling to South Africa. I had not had enjoyed a sausage sizzle for long time, and my last visit of Mitre 10 in April failed me in buying one due to lack of coins, so I asked Tessie to buy two.

It was yummy in the mouth; it was warm in the heart.

When My Wife Is Away

My wife left for Taiwan yesterday to pay a visit to her mother, aged 90, who was sent to hospital urgently a few days ago.

In the past three years since her last visit to her mother in Taiwan in 2007, we had never parted from each other. We saw each other in the day and in the night; we had meals together every day; we talked on children and on life now and then; we helped each other and actually I relied on her more because of my Parkinson's disease. I thought all of these would be just repeated on and on till the last day of hers or mine, but we knew that sooner or later she would have to fly to Taiwan for her mother's sake.

Of course we had many occasions of parting from each other for a few days or even a few weeks in the past 33 years of marriage life, but the longing to see her again was never be so strong as this time. I don't know what's wrong with me.

She is scheduled to come back on August 2, and the countdown process has been activated yesterday at the time when she passed through the departure gate.

My Hands-free Telephone

I call this telephone set hands-free because when I am engaged in a telephone conversation, I don't have to hold the handset and attach it to my ear and mouth throughout the duration, instead, I put on the headset and talk on and on with my hands free for other things like taking notes at the same time.

I know a genuine hands-free device should be something like this.

The first time I saw a real hands-free device in use was from Robbie, my ex-colleague, who is an enthusiast of high technology product. One day in 2005 when we were in a cruise of visiting students, I saw there was a light blue object attaching to his right ear. I asked him what that was for? And he said it was called Bluetooth hands-free phone. He demonstrated for me how that device worked. The device sent the music from the stereo audio of the car into his earpiece with the wireless technology. And when the device detected an incoming call, it switched from music to the call automatically. And when the conversation finished, it came back to music at Robbie's will.

The memory of the encounter with a real hands-free device that time inspired me of making my version of hands-free device when my PD began to affect me with a phone conversation about a half year ago. What happened was when I was engaged in a chat over the phone for longer than 10 minutes or if the content of the conversation was serious, then my hand that held the handset tended to shake and thus the tip of the handset would be taping on my cheek or the temporal area around my ear repeatedly like a woodpecker does to a tree, and that is very annoying and uncomfortable, but it is also uncontrollable.

So I thought to myself if I could convert one of those discarded old telephone sets out in the corner of our garage into one that has two sockets -- one for my earphone plug and the other for my microphone plug. Then when I am engaged in a conversation over the phone, the "woodpecker symptom" will not trouble me again.

When this idea was matured in late May, I started gathering up materials and tools. I had a headset that was no longer in use, so this saved me a lot of time and energy in making one from scratches. I have soldering set and the tin core; I have a voltmeter for checking if the connection is good; I have a set of electronic tools and power drill, and I am pretty sure this project should be a piece of cake and could be expected to be finished the next day.

Then I found I needed to go to Jaycar to buy two mono audio sockets of 3.5 mm. So I made a journey to Jaycar by walk and that was a great struggle. And then I found I had to extend the two pairs of cables to the two desired areas in the phone set where there were enough rooms to accommodate the two audio sockets.

The cables were so fine that peeling their skins on the two ends for soldering was very challenging. I finally found a way to get this job done -- burned the tip of the cable using a candlelight and nipped the softened skin of the cable immediately when it was moved away from the flame.

Then I found I had to do the soldering within a very small space without making the soldering stick contact with the neighboring cable or circuit and get them damaged. That was the most challenging part of this project.

On and on, I could see some progress every day, and I realized that it was not a case as simple as a piece of cake to me and I accepted the reality. A couple of times, I thought I had done all the soldering and assembled the whole thing up, only to discover that it could not work. apparently I had damaged the soldered points, or I had connected the extended cable to the wrong point of the socket. So the process of unpacking, disconnecting, line checking, were all done over again with fingers crossed hoping this time would be a successful one. Unfortunately it was not until the fourth repeat that I could finally see it functioning as was expected.

Seeing me absorbed in the project so deeply my wife suggested many times that she would be happy to buy me a genuine hands-free phone. She could not understand what the self-satisfaction, self-fulfillment and the lot of fun that I had had throughout the process of converting a discarded old telephone set into a model that enables me to be free from the woodpecker symptom in a telephone conversation.:-)

On happiness

I ponder on this topic very often, especially often when I'm getting older.

I am 59 at the time of writing this article. It is said that Buddha began his exploration on this issue from early part of his teens stage, and resolved to find out the cause of suffering. So compared to Buddha, I am late awakened to this issue. I think most of the creatures are late awakened, or are never awakened to this subject.

Some people disagree that life is full of sufferings. "Life is happy! At least mine is a happy one." they would say. But, "are you really happy all the time? Throughout your life?" if you ask them so. "Well, of course not all the time, never it will be throughout our lives. But why do you have to pay attention to those miserable periods and embrace them all the time? Isn't life short, and we should be happy?" they would so argue, and defend their proposition.

But if life is supposed to be happy, why are there so many unhappy, or even horrible news such as homicide, kidnap, domestic violence, divorce, sickness, aging, mortality, having to deal with people whom you dislike, having to part from the people whom you love dearly, and etc. maybe these are just examples of trifling matters. What about the unhappy things of the far more significant incidents? World war, ethnic groups conflict, political conflict, economical conflict, SARS, swine flu epidemic, and many other examples which you are more knowledgeable to help listing them on here.

We cannot ignore the fact that we do have unhappy period of time in our lives despite that it is also true that we have happy period of time in our lives as well.

I'm only trying to sort out why people are not happy; when will people feel unhappy...this sort of questions. Because if we know the answers, then we should know how to remain happy all the time, throughout our life, and even eternally. I believe many other people in the world agree with my logic -- admit that people are not happy, then go to find the answer, then at last we all can be happy.

I searched on the web; I deciphered the thoughts of the authors through reading; I discuss on it with other people who also pondering on this issue, but I have not found any solution that is effective enough to make one happy instantly when he is unhappy.

As a matter of fact, all my effort in searching for solution of making people happy is an unnecessary waste of time. Because what? That solution was already found by the Buddha some 2500 odds years ago. You can be as happy as a Buddha if you are resolved to practice what the Buddha has taught.

He said the cause of suffering is from "the three poisons", and if one drops off these three poisons completely, he attains the Buddhahood, and he will be really happy eternally, and never suffers. How cool this guarantee is! But how to actually shake them off? It is always a matter of easy to say but hard to do.

What are the three poisons? They are craving, hatred, and ignorance. Indeed if we analyze any evil act, we will find there is always one, or are two or all of the three poisons involved in the incident. All the news we read from newspaper are good examples for finding the traces of these three poisons involved in the cases reported.

I want to raise an example about a homicide case which occurred about three years ago in New Zealand. A martial art master killed his young wife, then he took his daughter, three or four years old at that time, and fled to Melbourne. There he dumped his daughter in the railway station, and escaped to the United States. Let's use this example for tracing the root cause of this family tragedy. Obviously a great deal of hatred was in the husband's mind. Of course there were other factors preceding his killing, and logically those factors were unhappy ones. His evil compulsion that drove him to grab the knife to terminate his wife's life had made many people not just unhappy, but suffering, acute suffering.

If we are convinced that the three poisons are the causes of suffering, then we would like to know how to clear the three poisons from our mind?

The answer from the Buddha was the "three trainings" -- precepts, meditative stabilization and wisdom. These terms sound bleak, heavy and very serious. But that is because they are recorded in the Sutra which of course is meant to be sacred and serious in every way, but their actual meaning in today's language is like this -- obey the rules, Mindful of what you are doing, and finally you are enlightened.

Despite that the teaching has been followed, interpreted, and yet only a very few wise beings are enlightened, or enter the eternally happy state, or have completely transformed to be free of the three poisons. Obviously it is not easy to achieve that goal, so what is the point for those compassionate Saints and sages to be preaching this teaching diligently, perseveringly and wholeheartedly?

My understanding is like this. We know it is good to be happy; we were taught the method to achieve the happy state and sustain it; we all agree that the logic of this teaching is true. Now because we see that only a very few mortal beings mastered this skill in the past two thousand and five hundred years, we think perhaps it is wiser to just indulge ourselves in the wordly pleasures. What will be the outcome if this logic is adopted by every single mortal being on the planet? All gone to the hell realm ultimately, the theory points out.

In contrary, if every single mortal being on this planet has at least awakened by the belief that what they are endeavored to achieve is unlikely to come true in this life, but it is a bit of positive effort in the process of evolution toward the divine realms -- the eternally happy state; the non-birth and non-death realm, so he just wades through the difficulties inch by inch, then one day, either in this life or the life after the next, he will attain that state, definitely.

I think this is the only way and the only hope to obtain a genuine happiness -- even if not in this life, but definitely will be obtained when the notion of time is ignored and only the effort of walking on the right path is being focused on.

This concludes my ages long contemplation about why people are not happy-- we all embrace more or less the "three poisons".

The scary machine gun

Machine gun is a very powerful, very dreadful, very scary weapon in battlefield. Yet, when I am invited to chat online, the first sentence I send back in the conversation is usually "a second please, let me get my machine gun..." and my friend on the other side knows what it is; and I can imagine he is warming up himself in front of the computer rubbing his two hands vigorously, staring into the monitor at the chat dialogue box, awaiting to confront with the challenge from my machine gun.

It is my dictation software -- a computer program which turns your speech into text when you speak into a microphone. Once you have trained this program well, it will recognize your voice, take your dictation and type the text out accurately. It is very helpful to people with difficulty in typing. because its speed is three times faster than the average typist, so I nicknamed it "the scary machine gun".

To tell you the story of the machine gun, its background should start from my early teens period .

Starting from late 1960s, children of my generation found that they began to have some pocket money from their parents due that Taiwan economy was taking off. Gradually we were able to expand our after school activities, from just doing extra school study in the classroom or playing basketball in the sport field which are of money saving in nature, to the money spending ones such as having a yummy snack at the canteen or going to the theater to watch a movie which is the most popular option among the school children.

I was a movie lover too during my second and third years in the junior high school. The admission was as little as two bucks, about ten cents of New Zealand dollar today. Most of the movies were from America, so we had learned quite a lot of American cultures through watching movies. Besides all those cowboy stories, the ones that I had the most profound memories were "sayonara", "travelling the world in 80 days". And I don't know why, every time when the movies played the part of which an office clerk was typing really fast following the dictation from his boss, I naturally endow him with lots of admiration. I think that was how I was later motivated to learn typing skill and became the fastest typist in my class in the college.

I believe that I would rather be that wealthy boss giving the dictation, than being that secretary typing his tail off, when I was absorbed in the episode of the movie. However, after I had grown up and entered the work force, I was neither a boss nor a secretary but only a guy pretty capable of typing with high competence in both speed and accuracy in the company.

Whether it is pre-destined or just from my own choice, that in my 15 working years in Taiwan before 1991, all the jobs I were in, required me to be working with typewriter to more or less a degree. I hope you don't say it was just a coincidence. After all I was just a young guy living in a non-English speaking country, am not I?

In 1992, I immigrated to New Zealand. After two years of acclimation in the new land, I could not but yielded my aspiration of starting a business to the harsh reality and chose to work for a stationery wholesaler. My main role there was "office assistant", and here the coincidence fell upon me again, I was required by the job to type various kind of document almost everyday more or less.

Perhaps because of the vivid memory about the episode of people sitting by the typewriter in the office typing mindfully and rapidly like a hen pecking grains from the ground, every time when I type, that mind picture always flashed through my mind, and made my typing more enjoyable to me, and feeling like I was the smart and confident typist in the movie. So I have been enjoying typing since I had acquired the skill at the age of 20.

In year 2005, I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. The main symptoms of this disease are rigidity, tremor and the slowness in movement. Gradually many tasks that normal people can do easily are becoming more and more difficult for me, and typing is one of them. By early 2010, the symptoms were worsening to this stage where I needed assistance from tools, for instance, brushing teeth, I needed an electric brush to do the business. My typing ability was crippled even under medication, and was generally very slow. Sometimes during the tail part of the medication period, especially early in the morning, the hands were just like being frozen and suspended above the keyboard trembling and could not do a single thing.

In an e-mail sent to Robbie in January 2010, I mentioned about why I was writing him far less e-mails then before, and what had caused the problem -- my Parkinson's disease.

He immediately sent me an e-mail briefly asking me to Google "naturally speaking" for more details about the dictation software he would recommend me to adopt to tackle my typing difficulties.

Naturally speaking? I've never heard of this before. And from the Google search, I realized that "Dragon naturally speaking" was what Robbie meant to say, and was the brand name of a widely used dictation software. With this program installed in the computer, the user speaks into a microphone and the computer turns the signals from the wave into text on the screen. That was indeed something I needed and was affordable to me, only $179 for the standard version.

After a few days contemplation in making up my mind, I decided to buy through Trademe hoping the price offered there would be more affordable. It turned out to be true, you could start your bid from $99, or got it straight away by paying a "buy now" price of $129. I chose the latter.

It was February 12 of 2010, I was half way in my morning practice when the parcel was delivered to my doorstep. Without any delay I unpacked it, read the installation instructions, and began the process of installation followed by some training which required me to read aloud some text document about 15 minutes long into the microphone to make the software recogniz the way I speak. Within about one hour, all these were done.

it was time to actually try it out. I was excited and nervous, just like a small boy was nervously practicing riding his new bike, not sure what might turn up.

I started with the most used phrases -- "how are you?"... "haven't seen you for long time." How amazing it was, my words were turned into text on the screen almost instantly after I finished the phrases. I extolled the the inventor smart; I thanked Robbie's shrewd recommendation; I said to myself that I had got a loyal typing assistant virtually.

When I began to try on some phrases of higher level, the nightmare started to emerge. For example, I said "I built a storage shelf", it cranked out "I be you Ward and storage shelf". Then I gave command "correct 'be you ward'", then it popped out a list of choices, but none of them was "built". And to my deepest frustration, when I tried to repeat the command, it erased all the right words of the whole paragraph and made me start over again from nothing.

The frustration grew up to a point which nearly made me pick up the phone to ask them for a refund and totally give up the hope of reaping the benefit from this software.

It began to show its cooperation by typing out more accurate words on the fourth day of its arrival, and that higher accuracy grew steadily every day but very slowly and was still far from my satisfaction. I had been very patient in dealing with this semi-auto machine gun until two months after its purchase when Nuance released an update for this software.

I did not put any hope on this update because I almost had enough with its semi-auto nature. However I just underwent the download and installation of that update. After the process was done; and after I had injected about 30 minutes of training into the freshly updated version, I tried it by writing an e-mail. Alas! The improvement was dramatic -- the accuracy soared to a level totally beyond my expectation. And since then, I happily nicknamed it "the machine gun".

With this weapon at hand, I replied almost every single e-mail, even those only carrying a forwarding and without a message, with not just a couple of sentences, but with three or four paragraphs of message. At the beginning, all the forwarding senders politely replied saying that they welcomed my e-mails generated by the dictation software. By and by, I found that some of the forwarding senders shunned away. apparently my sudden change into being a talkative e-mail writer had scared many of them away. So I re-nicknamed my dictation software as "the scary machine gun".

That's the story of how the originally brand named as "Dragon naturally speaking" was nicknamed as "the scary machine gun" by me.

A Day Out to Takapuna Library

It was May 16 of 2010, a Sunday and happened to be a beautiful and brilliant sunny day.

Sunday has been spared for my day out if the weather promising. Where do I normally spend it? Beach, bush, the roadside café? Nah... Library is my favorite option, and on this beautiful day, the one in Takapuna is the best.

It is the best library I had ever been to, not because of its beauty of the building, or its huge stock of books, but because of its friendly librarians and its location in the town-- beach at its East side within a short walking distance and the business center of the town on the other. You can look out to the beautiful ocean view from the first floor while you are reading.

It was a clear day yesterday, so I left home early to go to Takapuna library. I had a three hour stay in the library enjoying my late acquired hobby of reading. While the book that I am reading now is to be finished soon, so I went to the shelf to fetch the book "to kill a Mocking bird" which the computer said was available in the library. But when I followed the call number to its location, the book could not be found at or around where it should be. This book was recommended to me by our family friend, Michelle, who is a very spiritual type of person from England in early 1990s. So far she already recommended me three books all are very enjoyable to me.

So I approached the librarian on the desk for assistance. I said to her that I could not find a book which the computer said was available in this library. She asked me what was the title. I told her the title and was wondering how she could help as the book was indeed disappearing from its place and I only wanted to report my discovery about this fact to her so that she can update the status of that book in the database. Amazingly she smiled at me and said "it was a very popular book, now follow me please." and led me to another section of the shelves as if she already knew that the book of that call number was not there but she knew that another book of exactly the same title could be found somewhere she was leading me to.

Without much effort spent in her search, she grabbed a book from the cart, and it was exactly the book I was after. I was very amazed by her ability of remembering all the details of a book. Then I turned to her to give my gratitude that was when I noticed that she wore a very thick glasses. I thought she might have read the whole lot of books in the library. I smiled at her saying: "you have a marvelous memory", before I was turning to leave. She asked me to wait a second, and took another book that was a lot thinner than the one I already got from the shelf. She flipped through the pages while telling me it was of the same title in the form of playwright. I thanked her saying "no, thank you, I'm happy with this one and it will keep me going for three weeks." That was her second round of demonstrating her art of book management.

Having got the book, I walked to the first floor, took a seat facing toward the big window which I could look out to the picturesque ocean view. Before I had mentally and physically settled in my seat, I connected my mobile device with a free Internet connection provided by the library, and sent e-mails to my friends, and the text messages to my families of my latest updates. within a few minutes, my mobile device beeped to the incoming messages of their updates in return. How amazing the IT technology is.

Then my mind steeped into the world in the reading. With the printed language being picked up from the page of the book by the eyes and interpreted by the brain, the ideas or thoughts of the author are being screened, assorted, investigated, compared with, commented, agreed with, disagreed with, and etc. of processes by our brain. Wouldn't it be far more amazing then our mobile device? I don't believe that in the near future a super computer equivalent to human intelligence will ever be created.

It was time for lunch. I walked down through the staircases and walked out of the library into the courtyard right in front of the building. I opened my back pack and took out my lunch which my wife has prepared for me that morning. It was water boiled dumplings. After I had consumed three or four pieces of them, I thought why did I not snap a self portrait? So I took out my mobile device and created this profound picture.

After I had finished my lunch and done with my medication, I walked straight away into the library again and to where I was originally seated this morning. I thought while I was passing by the reception desk Takapuna library could be the most attractive place to me that it was able to pull me in right after the lunch.

Time passed by very quickly, unexpectedly people around me began to pack up and a minor commotion arose from here and there. Before long, the security guard walked through every corner of the library swaying a bell. I quickly took out my mobile device, and tapped the following text message "the bell tolls now, and I am going home."

And that put an end to my lovely day out.

Mother's Day 2010

The Mother's Day of 2010 has three features worthwhile to record.

Tessie and Chenny celebrated Mother's Day for their mom on the 8th (Saturday) and 9th (Sunday) of May respectively due that their activities clashed.

Chenny arranged to celebrate Mother's Day for his mom on Sunday. He sent a text message to my mobile asking me to tell mum that he would bought some stuff home in the evening so she should not bother prepare for dinner. It was exactly 7:30 PM as he had specified in the text message when he put two big size of pizzas, one pack of french fries and four bottles of beer on the table. Three of us a great fun time.

Tessie chose Bluebird vegetarian café on the Dominion Road. It was a very small but elegant family restaurant. This restaurant is pervaded with air of peacefulness and tranquility. The interior decoration, the indoor plants, and the paintings on the walls are rich in the belief of Hinduism.

Before long, the course of meal was delivered to our table. Surely we would not forget to snap some pictures to record the joy of the mother. Then, we started enjoying these exotic food with happy chats throughout the time of the meal. A good variety of topics were covered, but the one story that mom contributed made all of us laugh to death.

The story goes like this. To protect the privacy of the main character of the story, let's call her Mrs. Soso.

Sometime in the year 2009, mum was told of this story occurred actually in the public toilet on the roadside of Pearn Crescent opposite the food court of Northcote shopping center. "Mrs. Soso, a middle aged Asian woman, hurriedly walked to the public toilet. Obviously she was in a hurry to get her business done without unnecessary delay. Fortunately the indicator on the doorknob was in a green, so she opened it and walked in." mom said with a bit of mysterious facial expression.

"It must be a great relief to her being in it that she decided to do her job relaxedly, with no rush at all. Apparently she was having some degree of constipation that in almost 10 minutes she still remained on the toilet seat.

Suddenly a string of narrative message of female came out of the hidden speaker inside the toilet. She could not understood any word that was said, so she ignored it and carried on her business. But the speaker was only in silence for one minute before the next bombardment of message shot out one more time." mom started to laugh at this point as she knew what happened next. Tessie and I were still in the cloud. Mom carried on.

"This time she was more uneasy with the second round of narrative message which she also could not understand a word, so she decided to leave the business incomplete as it was. Suddenly, the electric door "Zooooom" slided wide open and made her dumbfounded on the seat. Swiftly she jumped up, pulled up the pants, rushed toward the door side, and pressed on the button trying to get the door shut, but it stubbornly remained open." up to this point, mom spoke on and off in an effort to compress her laughing nerves.

Tessie and I burst into wild laugh when the story was coming to this point. And we both prompted mum to complete the story with the remainder of the episode anxiously.

"Mrs. Soso gathered up her consciousness now, then she heard there was the siren going apart from the passersby throwing their curious eyesights over the toilet which was normally shut. She left the scene as quickly as she could and harbourd at a corner of a shop concerning that she might have damaged the toilet. Fortunately, in about one minute of chaos, the siren stopped and the electric door shut close. Mrs. Soso relieved upon seeing everything of the toilet restored to normal, and resolved to improve her English proficiency from then on."

And that was the end of the story, and was also the end of yet another unforgettable Mother's Day celebration.

The one morning in Mitre 10

Date was the 17th of April 2010 on which the story went.

The night before, Chenny reported a leaking tap to me. I had noticed this problem long time ago and had thought about getting it fixed, but I was lacking of confidence at that time, so I just left it with fingers crossed. But that night when Chenny told me the problem and I went to have a look, I knew I could not just get fingers crossed, I had to get it really fixed as soon as possible. Obviously Chenny tried to tighten up the knob too forceful and had completely collapsed the inner fitting of the knob. So now, not only the washer has to be replaced to stop the dripping, I will also have to find a substitute knob.

On the next morning, I had a quite high level of motivation to travel to Mitre 10 by bus because the weather was promising, cloudy and cool but no rain -- it is a kind of good weather for outdoor activity.

The bus dropped me off at King's Plant Garden Center. Then I continued the remaining 800 m to Mitre 10 by walk. My walk had developed into a funny pattern in the last three months due to the Parkinson's disease. The gait of my walk looks like I am in a hurry to reach the destination that I am sort of running but am in small steps. Muscles of the arms and legs are abnormally tense. And this rigidity consumes a lot of my energy, this is especially worse when I walk along the footpath next to a busy road. The rumbling noise from the traffic makes me nervous and this worsens my balance that I am afraid I may fall to the road. So I have to tell myself to slow down, to be relaxing, but the legs remains in its fast but small steps dashing forward. Walking on the footpath with all sorts of wandering thoughts flowing through my mind, finally the vast Mitre 10 building stood before me.

I felt excited when I walked through the parking lot and marched toward its entrance. The excitement increased steadily while I was a bit closer to it. I thought it is something to do with my DIY spirit which knows Mitre 10 is the home of DIY.

When I stepped into the area that the gate sensor reaches, the automatic sliding door swiftly opened for me. I walked into the building and saw aisles and aisles of product shelves before me. I thought that Aladin must be feeling the same when the genie stood before him when the cloud from the oil lamp faded away.

I got my shopping list out of my backpack. "seal tape, assorted sizes of washer, glue gun, PVC gutter glue, hand tools for repairing electronic device", four or five items totally, but as I walked through the aisles, I was wanting more other items than those in my shopping list. The new design of tools and hardwares on display were challenging my temptation. Obviously my DIY spirit was being childish and ambitious.

On the way to the plumbing section, I saw multi-purpose rope, then my thought went to those overgrown branches of the tall tree in my garden. I should have one of this rope for pulling the branches to be felled to the desired direction. I saw a big range of plastic rollers, then I thought of the sliding doors of our cupboard that needed a new set of rollers to ease the open and shut operation. Now I came to the hand tool section, the desire to buy items like --drill bits set, gutter cutter, plastic welder, plumber's clamp, vice, glue gun, mechanic's tool set, multi-function hand-tool and etc.

I ended up picking up an electronic tool-set priced at $14 and quickly walked away from that section so as to shake off the annoying temptation.

I finally came to the plumbing section, the main purpose of this trip. I searched for washer. If possible I'd like to have a single pack of assorted sizes. There are rows and rows of products displayed on the shelves. I wondered how many stockists will be required to manage hundreds of thousands products of the whole company. Soon I had found the items that might be required by the leaking tap.

If I was not in a hurry to go home to undergo the repair, I would like to spend more time to browse around in the building till they close for the day. Perhaps I should spoil myself by spending in Mitre 10 a whole day in the near future.

I paid for the purchase at the checkout point and walked out of the building unwillingly. Nearby the entrance was a sausage sizzle stool emitting the lovely sizzling onion smell. it was a cloudy day, a cool day, a day suitable to have sausage sizzle, so I thought and walked toward the sausage stand to buy one to please my DIY spirit. And that's concluded my day out in Mitre 10.

Ps. The repairing of the leaking tap went smoothly and was successfully done.

Will the world be better off by 2020?

One of the papers that Chenny chooses to study this year is business ethics. Not long after the term commenced in March, we had a spontaneous chat during the dinner time. Very seldom had we had long, formal and academic talks, but this one was. The chat gradually drifted to his further study on Business Management, then he raised a big question "Will the world be better off by 2020?" and invited my input of thoughts about this topic.

I read quite a lot of news reports relating to this topic in recent couple of years. Most of them predict a worse one, and so does mine. I had a compulsion of writing an essay type document on this subject at the moment when Chenny raised that question. The next day I worked out a 750 word report to at least prove the logical part of my brain is still functional although it lacked supporting statistical figures..

Below is my writing.

The world will be worse generally by 2020. So I believe.

My conclusion that the world will be generally worse by 2020 is based on the following arguments. 1) dysfunctional consumerism, 2) worldwide moral backward 3) technology over dependence.

Consumerism has a bad image nowadays. People seem to have realized consumerism is the cause of destruction in many ways, such as the threat to ecological balance; overuse of natural resources; encourage unnecessary consumption. These are a few examples of the nature of consumerism.

Almost no exception, when any country experiences an economical downturn, its government always turn to the remedy of consumption stimulation. During the worldwide financial crisis in 2008, in order to slow down the recession, Taiwan government issued agreed amount of consumer voucher. Taiwan Pres. appeared in the TV, using the voucher to buy food and goods to stimulate consumption in an attempt to alleviate the impact on small businesses. Other countries in the world also adopted similar ways, though differently, to seek for a solution from consumerism.

Apparently most of the free countries in the world adopt consumerism as an instant remedy of economy stimulation. As a result, this approach to economy stimulation causes a lot of waste on their national resources, and perhaps still see the recession worsening.

Because so far in the world all the capitalised countries have no other solutions than the consumerism approach, and we know what it will lead to. That's why I believe it will not be better off by 2020.

The second point that supports me to believe the world will not be better off by 2020 is the fact that the worldwide moral standard is going backward.

Overall moral standard has a great impact on the country in terms of social cost. If corruption is commonly found in the government, this country will see no future. A nation's social security will be fragile if the moral standard among the people is too low. Read in the news you will see what the overall moral standards is like in a country. Police was attacked; infants were killed; shops were robbed, and etc.

Although it is impossible to erase all crime or corruption from a society, what we are looking at is the tendency of its increase and its severity. And the statistic reveals the worry is not wrong.

And the consumerism will make the issue of moral standard a lot worse. We all can tell this by common sense.

The third point that makes me believe 2020 will not be better off is our over dependence on technology, especially the IT technology. We know that today everything we do is depending on computer and Internet connection. When there is any accident occurred, chaos follows immediately. We all experience traffic jam due to the failure of traffic signals; the long queue in supermarkets check out point; top secrete information hacked, all these result in social cost rocketing.

My arguments sound pessimistic, but I'm only reflecting the truth and facts. The solutions I can think of are on the following.

Setup a ministry of moral education. Teach people to live simple lifestyle.

Largely increase the spending on fine cultural promotion and cultural related tourism development.

Marriage -- Then and Now (part II)

My previous blog post is to some degree in favor of the notion that "marriage is the grave of love affairs". I got to hide that post away from being seen by my wife. To my view point the female agree with this saying more than the male do, but once they got married they tend to bury it deep in their minds and try not to mention it. Because otherwise, what can they do? They are locked up, and so do the male.

It sounds very miserable, isn't it? It is true. I have seen so many real examples including my own case, none of them is free from complaining each other occasionally. I believe when they engage in verbal fighting, the saying of "marriage is the grave of love affairs" comes up their mind. It is a very powerless situation, you just got to be conceded with the reality.

I believe there is almost no exception among all the married couples in the world that throughout their marriage life they never had the thought of getting divorce flashed across their minds. I say so, because it arose in my mind many times, though fortunately it did not stay forever, otherwise if it manifested a step further, it will definitely hurt the relationship and consequently will bring marriage into the grave for sure. If all my friends and relatives say that my marriage is a very harmonious one, and yet, the aforesaid secretive thought of mine still arise occasionally, then you will realize how delicate the marriage life is, and why the divorce rate nowadays rockets year by year in our society.

I'm not saying to my next generation that marriage is dreadful; is fragile, and so they should stay away from marriage, and lead a celibate lifestyle throughout their life. Actually I'm trying to make clear my disposition about marriage as that it is our responsibility to get married and to manage it nicely if we tick yes to most of the following guidelines.

1. Are you healthy physically and mentally?
2. Are you on a full-time job, or in a business that can support your family financially?
3. Do you agree that he or she has certain characteristics that attracted you during your dating period?
4. Do you think that on major issues such as religious belief, political stands, moral values yours are quite agreeable to your partner's?

Give your answers to the above questions honestly, and if all the answers are positive, then, man, especially those with good genes, should find no grounds to stay away from entering marriage, because marriage is a form of guarantee; commitment; duty; actualization to your love affairs. Despite that it is true, we still see a lot of candidates wandering about the door of marriage, being reluctant to enter it, until some new factors emerge and force them into either marriage or flight. And I think choosing flight is the majority.

Why is that? There are many factors that can fire a flight. The most common one, as far as I can think of, is the fading love ingredients. When a relationship gets stuck in this situation, both of them suffer, and I finally realize why there are psychologists or counselors everywhere nowadays.

I'm not a psychologist so I cannot help people in this type of suffering scientifically. But I believe the cure can be found in tradition and in spiritualism. My prescription will be like in the following.

• Avoid living under the same roof, or observe strict celibacy for as long as possible before marriage.
• Spare at least 15 minutes every day to proceed indoctrination, brainwash. Get your preferred passages from Bible, Sutra, or whatever that last 15 minutes long when you chant those inspirational passages.
• Believe in causality. Believe that everything we do matters, even a very trivial deed brings its consequence. So be conscientious in what you did, what you said, what you thought.

Sounds very stupid? But when you paid the bills to the professional and still get no cure, then this is one you should try, at least it is free, and all you could suffer is 15 minutes, but most important is that you have done something to the rescue of your marriage issue.

Marriage - Then and Now

There was a popular saying in the early 1960s in Taiwan, "marriage is the cemetery of love affair" so it said. This phrase was often heard during my junior high school days. Young people, especially female, in that era liked to comment on marriage by quoting that phrase whenever a hot debate or chat on that topic was coming to an end.

As a small boy I, in my early teens, dimly understood what that phrase meant. It was the fashionable way of saying "once you get married, love affairs will be gone" in those days.

Looking back, I am very sure it was because young people at that time was beginning to have more freedom in making friends with opposite sex. Once they began to go dating with each other, they were overwhelmed by the sweetness, nervousness, and excitement that streamed out of their love affairs. But all these honey tastes faded away soon after they got married due to various reasons. Then they concluded, "marriage is the cemetery of love affairs", this must be it.

I remembered it was during 1960s when the romance fiction writer,Qiong Yao won the position of the most the popular novelist in Taiwan. Her stories captured the hearts of young people, particularly girls. Her books were brought to school secretly because the disciplinary authority of the school was very annoyed to see so many girls reading Qiong Yao's fiction during the class time.

I agree that Qiong Yao's fiction has some magic power. I remembered in the summer vocation of my second year in the junior high school, when I was about 13 years old, I found a copy of Qiong Yao's fiction placed on sister's desk.

Before that day, I used to be criticizing her fiction as unhealthy and depressing, and I had never read any of her books. But out of curiosity that day, I picked up the book and started reading it. As soon as I had finished the second page, I was totally absorbed into the story titled "outside the window". It is a story about the love between a high school student girl and her most admired class teacher. I was so deeply fascinated by that story that I read without a break throughout the night and finished it in the next morning in one go.

Therefore under the influence of Qiong Yao's fictions, I witnessed the beginning of what was then called "free love", meaning, unlike their parents' generation in which abiding by match-maker's arrangement was a tradition, instead, they are free to pursue friend of opposite sex whom they admire. Qiong Yao's books brought young people abundant of imageries about the beautifulness, sweetness, excitedness or even bitterness of love.

I think that was why my generation saw most of the young people never hesitated in entering the marriage. That covers across a range of life stages, for instance, pursuing, love-letter writing, dating, engagement, wedding, parenting. And if they are lucky enough, they fulfill their marriage successfully till the end of their lives.

Unfortunately a great percentage of marriage falls in the following pattern.

The sweetness remained growing steadily during the dating period and reached its peak when they just entered their marriage stage. Then the sweetness found in the love affairs started its declining process. Why? Because there are so many factors that may shake the foundation of their love affairs, such as parenting, if they have children right after their marriage; bills to be paid; relationship issues relating to in-laws; and etc..

Most of the marriages are maintained in a functional only state in my generation, only a very few of them are able to claim that theirs are the sweetest and the most successful ones. Though many of them are disappointed with their marriage lives, the traditional values such as mutual respect, toleration and patience and etc., taught by their parents and in school do help them manage to keep their marriage moving forward.

Thirty seven years after I got married, I am now watching how my next generation's marriage philosophy is like. My observation tells me that a majority of them dread the idea of getting married. Why? I think it is something to do with the overall out-of-balance of materialism and spiritualism in the modern society.

The materialism is looked upon as far more important than spiritualism, and this results in herding the young into a logic of material guarantees successful marriage. So, before they reach their preset goal of income, they tend to avoid entering marriage. But the material world changes so rapidly, by the time they reach their preset goal, the income has been devalued or more new stuff are there to tempt their desire, so they have to reset the goal, and it seems to be endless, just like a dog chasing its own tail.

People tend to think that the more money you have the more successful your marriage will be. Most people believe money is equivalent to happiness. But the ancient saints and sages have already told us that is not true. "Happiness comes from within", they said. And this is what the spiritualism is about.

So my advice to my children is to constantly watch the scale of materialism and the spiritualism in the mind and always keep them in balance, and leave the rest of the matter to the hands of Buddha.