Some happier time

Click here for my niece and nephew pictures from the Macau visit.

Wasteful

What a waste! The Chinese Taoist ceremonies and post-funeral rituals. All those paper being burned and all those food for the offering. There are lots of hungry people out there. And to have the relatives totally being useless. And they "instructed" the monk to prepare a cup of instant coffee for offering every morning, with specific instruction of volume and quantity. Right.

The monastery where we are holding the temp service for the next 21 days, turned down the paper offering we received at the funeral home. Too toxic. Go figure that one out huh? If that is the case, how much toxic fume is being released into the air. One death over one night, can burn boxes and boxes of paper.

To have a plaque at the monastery is MOP 90,000. The whole thing from start to end was about MOP 250,000.00; could be less if someone didn't order extra paper offering of MOP 7,000.00 and then the flowers.

Double whammy

Getting ready to spend time at the funeral home for the Taoist ceremony is bad enough; getting ready for bed and discovered the entire purse gone missing was worse. I spent half of the night calling credit companies, changing passwords, suspending mobile numbers, calling police stations, filling out online police report, all until 4am... Iron-wife misplaced the purse on the ferry after docking at Macau. No hope of finding. There went the Nokia and iPhone.

Good thing replacing the ID card was easy. And people that we called to cancel stuff were very friendly and helpful. For once, I have to say good to have all CCs with HSBC Premier service. Got all the replacement cards started the next day without us going to the bank personally.

It wasn't the cash that made me said; it was the loss of mobile phones with personal data. Well someone had a hay day with the cash.

Only in China

1) There was a fire in a paint shop in Guangzhou, after the fire was put out by the firemen, they discovered they were being locked inside by the owner! The firemen had to use their axes to free themselves! Go figure huh?

2) There are 440 Shanghainese tourists reported still in Mexico where swine flu originating; and they have no plan of coming home early! They should just stay there; if they develop problem after returning, they would just spit and hack all over town. With the dust and wind all over, epidemic time. Yikes!

Passing of the last grandma

At 4:36pm this afternoon, my grandma finally passed away. The last month and a half her condition deteriorated so fast I was shock. Since her recovering from Shingles, her health pretty much was on a downhill path. We will be in Macau for the week starting tomorrow after sending Agnes home with her family.

97 years old. She was hoping to be able to play with Agnes' two little kids; unfortunately, it was not meant to be. Too bad Agnes and her family were not in Macau in February during the Chinese New Year. She was much healthier and "sharp" back then.

A feast

Wow... I was stuffed to the bone even though I did not sample every dish available. There were suckling pork, BBQ duck, Soy chicken, roast pork, sushi galore, 6 different types of Chinese noodle soup, pumpkin soup, Portuguese spinach soup, lamp, sirloin, grilled sea bass, Bak Choi, three types of cold salads, potato salad, grilled chicken livers, baked eggplants and six different types of desserts (Chinese and Western).

Here are the pictures from last night's venue:

"Modernized" view of Macau water front


Water Front view


Another view


This is the entrance to Taipa; the third bridge which is "typhoon-proof"


Look, we got a big deck


This was the main action

To go cup

Here's a picture to show you all North American how typical Singaporean "To Go" drink accessory. A tiny plastic holder. Take a look here. Wonder where those plastics go?

My first real IT training course

so to speak. First day of iPhone Application Programming course. Wow.... First time in 7 1/2 years I could concentrate on learning during my class. No more fending off my Blackberry, emails, problems with website performance, or managing several Portal portlet application development projects!

Or perhaps, I was actually getting wiser and more mature at 40's. Could focus more and kinda semi-retired learning stuff I WANT to learn. Or perhaps, my geek has finally broken thru.

This iPhone course is run by a guy (Wei-Ming Lee) that has written several technical books on programming languages. He was quite down to earth and very organized. Typical Singaporean. Don't get the casualness fool you. His watch was the most expensive stuff. An aviator watch with that little computer... at least CAD 15,000.00.

Anyway, the course was really hands-on! The way I like it; after an hour of talk and demo, he turned us loose. He had the same "theory" as me "if not try breaking it, you would not know how it works". Besides paying my course fee of about SGD 680 or so for this two-day course, everything was included. In typical Singaporean fashion, I got the Singaporean coffee and egg/ham on toast this morning at 10am. Then, for lunch, he took us to a Japanese restaurant. He said "order whatever you like". I asked "are you paying". He said "Yes, part of the course". Wow... Then in the afternoon, coffee and cakes - South East Asia flavours and of course, fattening too. ;-) But hey, Durian flavour, I was in!

Day 1 was good. Let see how tomorrow goes.

JinQiao 8-K run

We joined in the annual JinQiao 8-K run in the Western Getto. There were lots of people and different events: 2-K, 8-K, and corporate relays. Good thing the organizer did not start everyone off at the same time. We had three start times for respective events. Didn't take any pictures as I was one of the many participants. Now my Arthritic ankles are screaming at me! Only 8-K!!!! Whimps (back to my ankles). It was quite a nice and sunny day. Warm too, about 20C. The only problem was at the finishing line. The men went one way and the women went the way. Guided to a shoot so they can record the time. Right, a line-up formed even before the finishing line. I just went thru the rope and skipped the time recording part. No point as I already knew my time. Slowed by Arthritis, for 8-K, I managed a 40-minute run. Next time, I am going to double up my meds, my coffee before hand. Ha. Right, just remember I did not have any meds the night before..

Shan Zhai (山寨）

"Shan Zhai" means "Imitation". It's a totally new industry in China. Factories are cloning the real electronic products for sale. The most popular one is the imitation iPhone. It costs about RMB 600.00. That's less than CAD 100.00. People from HK are snapping this little thing up just across the border. The real McCoy in HK is suffering a sale slump. Price drops.

The imitation not just work; but of very good quality. Just cannot believe. Here is a a video clip comparing a Shan Zhai Nokia phone with the real thing. Take a look here:



And to top it off, there is a website specializing on reporting and reviewing Shan Zhai electronic merchandise. Take a look here if you want to read some Chinese. ;-)

Plugged in

Think my life must be closely connected with the Internet; without it or my iPhone, I felt a major part of my life is missing; ok except maybe iron-wife. Heehee... Anyway, I was never so happy to see my MSN Messenger signed in with all my contacts listed. You see, when I came back from ordering my computer chair, I could not signed in to MSN Messenger (from China at least). Maybe the C0Mn!e router had problem taking my plain password, recording it and then passing it properly over to Microsoft Live.

Now it's working. Hurray.

Finally a proper chair

After two years, I have custom made desk. Now, I am getting a proper chair. Funny, the chair is twice as expensive as the desk. Desk hand-made, chair from Europe somewhere half machine, half man. This is the chair.



Purchasing was an experience. I went to Steelcase with a friend. Apparently, Steelcase is prohibited or not licenced to sell to a person. It must sell to a company. The receptionist was so dumb, she could not think outside the box. Like suggesting, if you have a company or if your friend has a company we can sell you one. She just flatly said "NO". Good thing there was another girl working in the back overheard and just said, "o yeah". Just think, this dumb receptionist could have cost the company a sale. Tisk, tisk.

Was going to only get one for myself after over 8 months of harassment from iron-wife. But after I showed her the picture, she wants one too ;-) a matching desk, a matching chair. We stopped there! No matching shirts or T-shirts running around ;-) She might not like the chair, so today we shall go to Steelcase and have her try it out.

Hole

We feel like we are living in a hole. With the World Expos directive of beautify this city, our 90 plus year old building is getting a face lift and then some. Basically a cleansing inside out. Our entire building is wrapped in scaffolding and green mesh. Do not even know if there is sun out there. Sitting in here working sometimes seem I am living in space. With a big reno like this, we should have moved out for a few month. Not healthy breathing in here. Started a few days ago, the workers have boarded up all our windows. They are pressure washing the exterior wall. Right, what use of that to look nice for a few months and then the street pollution will screw it up anyway. Should have done something for the car pollution instead. A better effective way! Then, this is still a C0mM!e country.

Anyone?

Imagine a Marathon in Mongolia, 42K of the freshest air and nicest view. Of course, you can sign up for the 100K instead. We are talking about the annual Mongolia Sun rise to Sun set race. And yes, we ARE going! Another family will be doing the race too and then stay on for another week for a horse back riding trip.

Iron-wife did this race before. Years ago. It was fun so she's getting the itch to do another one.

eBooks....

I am not going to buy anymore paperback computer related books. Instead, I am downloading them to my iPhone via an iPhone app called Stanza. It has discount program with O'Reilly, a renowned computer/technical book publisher. I can read my book anywhere without packing a lot of things. And my purchased eBooks come in 3 different electronic formats and they are eternally stored on O'Reilly website for me to download whenever I want. Now, that's cloud computing. Things store on the web and you don't have worry where they are.

Building custom bookshelves. Ummm.... I might be able to delay it. 7G of space from the second generation of iPhone. Lots of space for sure.

Really liking this

this new Windows 7 that is. I have installed Chrome, the Google browser to use in Windows 7. No problem. Fast and easy. This latest Google browser is rated far more "security safe" then Firefox and Internet Explorer. The current security conference going one right now has a competition to see how fast and which browser can be broken first. Well, within seconds... IE, Safari, Firefox were broken. Chrome was last...

Take a look at the screen shot below with Chrome just fired up. It displays all your most frequently visited sites right away. Maybe it is a good feature for a family computer if you know what I mean ;-) On the right side are the gadgets from Windows 7. Yes, currency converters; you can have more than one gadget of the same kind up. Information is updated live.

So far so good with this operating system. No blue screen of death! But rumours have it that Microsoft is tingling with this operating system because its big customers are asking for "backward" compatibilities. I hope the company is not going to give in. Otherwise, it will be a temporary high for me to like this OS and put a foot in mouth by recommending this OS to people.

local market

Wow, how cheap and fresh but are they "of standard" to eat. We found a local market just down the block from us on a street that we never venture to; no need and not on our normal routing. Couple weeks ago, I walked down there just for kick. Found a local market, took iron-wife there, the rest was history.

Today, it had cost us RMB 12.00 for 10 eggs, two fresh bundles of veggies and a veggie chicken. Normally, just a dozen eggs at the supermarket we frequent would have cost RMB 20.00; then the veggie chicken would be RMB 3.50 then each bundle of the same veggie would be RMB 7 to 12. Do the math. Wow. And from the local market, we don't get that much plastic as waste after preparing.

Speaking of waste, the Shanghainese gov't is doing a trial in town with some restaurants: make sure people don't over order food. There were tones of wasted food usually. Chinese way of thinking. People don't pack leftover home specially after inviting guests for a meal. And they always over order to "show off face". This practice will come to an end. Apparently there will be some discount in the food bill somewhere.