Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus

After sweeping and cleaning the floor in the car porch I will normally arrange and organise the shoes in an orderly manner based on type; sandals on one side and shoes on the opposite side of the door way. Then later if the wife happens to clean the floor a second time after me she will typically rearrange the shoes according to gender type; ladies wear on one side and men wear on the opposite side.

One time while browsing some paperbacks in a bookshop, one particular book with the catchy title "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" caught my attention although I didn't buy or read it. 

Come to think of it there must be some truth in what John Gray, the American author of this bestseller wrote about the psychological differences between the genders.

Happy Chinese New Year of the Horse 2014

Today is CNY eve.

It was great to wake up in the morning without having to leave the house for work.

In conjunction with the CNY last week my boss had directed the staff to take 3 days of compulsory leave starting today and ending on the following Tuesday. This means that the company will resume normal business operation on Wednesday next week.

Taking advantage of the off day I embarked on a few chores immediately after my morning tai chi exercise and breakfast.

I swept the upstairs and downstairs floor, emptied the rubbish from all the waste bins in the house and dumped them into the outside storage bin, filled an empty container with new laundry refill and washed the family car.

Done mindfully and unhurriedly I actually enjoyed doing these mundane household chores. More than just chores, I imagine doing such tasks as exercises for my mental and physical well-being.

While I was doing these chores my wife was busy cleaning, cutting, sorting and getting ready all the meat and vegetable ingredients for tonight's reunion dinner. She had scheduled the afternoon to cook up a feast for the family reunion dinner.

It was my wife's decision that starting from this year we should cook our own food and eat at home rather than spend lots of money eating outside in a fancy restaurant. Since we already have a new daughter-in-law it was all the more meaningful to eat at home as a family unit.

Wishing everybody
Happy Chinese New Year,
Gong Xi Fa Cai.

May the year of the Horse bring good health, happiness and prosperity to all.

My first potted plant drawing using MS Excel

All I wanted to do was to google for an online tutorial on how to create column load and moment interaction charts with MS Excel for my office engineering design work, but instead I stumbled upon a tutorial about creating vector artwork using Excel. 

I am sure many Excel users are aware of drawing tools in Excel for drawing common geometrical objects and shapes eg rectangles, ellipses, circles, arrows, straight and curve lines, etc. 

However how to use Excel's freeform drawing tool to create all kinds of artwork is not fully explained in the program's help documentation. 

The picture above is my first attempt in drawing and painting a picture of a potted plant using Excel. And I'm completely awed by this hitherto little known artistic capability of this widely used spreadsheet program.

I am back

Since the day I clocked out of my last employer's office for the last time I didn't imagine that I would ever need the use one of these any more. 

Now that I am co-opted out of retirement back to work in the industry again I certainly need a writing medium for keeping track of my appointments and jotting down technical notes. 

So in the morning off I went to Popular Bookstore to buy myself a 2014 diary book.

Hello and Good Morning!

My wife asked me how come I seemed to know all the walkers and joggers who passed by us on our morning walks. 

I told her that in the beginning I didn't know them but after waving and greeting each of them with a warm friendly "hello!" and a cheerful "good morning" a few times we sort of warm up to each others presence and even exchange small talks. 

"I believe strangers are friends that we have yet to meet," to quote someone who wrote the above line in his blog.

Happy New Year 2014

Tue 31/12/2013 New Year Eve

The stunning night time view of a suburb of Kuala Lumpur seen from the balcony of Chin's apartment.

The two fingers of white light rising from the hills in the distance are the twin towers of KLCC. The glob of light on the right hand side of the twin towers is exploding fireworks display illuminating the skyline.

According to Chin this year's fireworks show is less spectacular and more subdued than previous years, a reflection of the bad time that this nation and its citizens are enduring.

A general feeling of desolation and pessimism

Expectedly Christmas has come and gone with little or no fanfare.

I reckon it will be more or less the same pessimism for the upcoming New Year and CNY celebrations.

Bombarded on all fronts by the escalating rise in the price of essential goods and services few people save the well-offs with deep pockets are in the mood to splurge and celebrate.

Yet amid the general pessimism life has to go on and will go on.

Wishing everybody Happy New Year.

Nothing lasts forever

Time to replace the worn out solar tinted film.

Air bubbles are appearing on the surface of the 6-year old film at the front and back wind screen and also the four glass windows. As a result the air bubbles sometimes obscure my driving vision when on the road.

Three workers took about two hours to install the new tinted films after removing the old.

Paid RM380 to the shop for the service. In return I get a three year warranty against future defects. I was told to bring along the official receipt to show evidence of the date of purchase whenever I make a claim against defects in the newly installed film.

One last fling

When I retired from work I couldn't wait to congratulate myself for getting out of the building construction and engineering industry, a love-hate relationship that spaned about 40 years of my working career.

Due to circumstances and the unseen hands of destiny I am being drawn out of retirement and back in again.

I don't know what lies ahead waiting for me in the shadows but I do know that the coming days, weeks, and months will be particularly challenging. One thing that I do know for sure is the final outcome. 

This will be my last fling at this love-hate affair as I am not getting any younger.

Using the mind and body language to control and lead the attacker

Sun 1/12/2013 Inter-campus combined training Cyberjaya dojo

Katate tori kokyu nage technique.

One girl was puzzled why when she extended her hand forward and started to initiate the tenkan movement the beginner Uke who grabbed her hand just stood there unmoving and frozen stiff. As a result Uke created so much resistance that Tori was stopped from rotating her body by the frozen Uke.

I told her that Uke had no incentive to move because Tori had allowed her partner to grab her hand before starting to tenkan. I told her that she had to provide the incentive for Uke to chase her hand by spinning her body together with her extended hand first before allowing Uke to even touch it.

Aikido is preemptive and not passively waiting for something to happen before taking action. This is what I mean by using your mind and body language to control and lead Uke.

A nifty kitchen tool

This mini manual chopper helped me to prepare one week's supply of chopped garlic safely for cooking and with little hassle.

The old way of doing the same job will require the use of a sharp knife and a chopping block and also mental alertness lest you accidentally cut your fingers with the blade.

Glad to give it away

Uncle Chong,the paper lama man paid RM10.00 only for about 40 kg of used papers, plastics, cans, card boards, fliers, magazines, news papers, etc. Although it is a small amount still we are happy to be able to dispose of unwanted things from cluttering the house.

After the first call in the morning it took many calls later to reach Uncle Chong. We wanted to know when he would be coming over to the house. At first we thought that Uncle Chong was not interested because he did not respond to our many calls.

Later when he came in he explained that he did not response earlier because his hand phone battery was dead and he had to run around to get a new battery replacement.

A feline companion

It was an ordinary morning on a quiet spot along a side lane if not for the presence of a feline companion.

The black and white fur street cat perched on the top of a rubble wall watched with great interest my every move as I performed the Wu style tai chi chuan routine in slow motion. 

It made no attempt to move away probably because it instinctively sensed that this human has no ill intention towards animals. It was still there sitting smugly on the ledge and gazing in my direction after I had moved on. 

I wonder how the readers here are doing this morning?

So forgetful

I left the house about 5 hours ago forgetting to take along my hand phone.

I left the phone plugged to the live charger the whole time I was away.

Some people said that if you overcharge your phone for too long the overheated battery may lead to explosion or fire. Fortunately nothing untoward has happen to either the phone, battery, charger and the house electrical system.

Lost and found

As it was getting late and dark and in my haste to get to my son's wedding dinner on time I didn't bother to note down the surroundings. 

So after the dinner had ended when it took me more than 20 minutes of walking around the block with my irate wife in tow to find the spot where I had earlier parked my car, I began to entertain the unpleasant thought that perhaps my car had been stolen.

The happy ending is that relying on my instinct I finally found the car in the vast open car park.

Selling Memories

The main entrance archway of Memory Lane

The bold capital letters "MEMORY LANE" written in English mounted at top of the quaint archway says it all. It is a street bazaar where vendors peddle second-hand and antiquated goods to the public on Sunday mornings. I suppose long ago somebody in Ipoh City Hall decided to associate the sale of old stuffs with selling memories, hence the quaint and incongruous very English phrase of "Memory Lane" superimposed against the more contemporary "Selamat Datang ke Bandaraya Ipoh banner written in Bahasa.

All kinds of old stuffs eg magazine, CD, calendar, coins, shoes, vases, knives,
watches, containers, books etc laid out on the street

My wife and her sister told me that there was nothing worth buying except junk. I suppose to their way of thinking junk is useless stuffs. To me each item on display has an intrinsic historical value, a memory of a distance past and they are definitely not discarded junk. Many of the items on display are so absolute that they no longer exist in modern time.

There were more male than women visitors. Maybe men appreciate the value of
old stuffs more than women.

While most of the vendors were peddling old items there were also clothing, herbal medicine and some food stuffs on sale. Just as most of the visitors were men most of the vendors were also men, among them I saw many retired senior citizens.

With the scorching sun overhead the iced syrupy drink looks enticing.

The wide range of old goods on sale was so fascinating that I could easily have spent three hours just browsing and going from one vendor to another. But mindful of an appointment at 10 am and other errands to run I reluctantly made my way out of the bazaar. As I was not done yet I made a mental note to visit this morning flea market the next time I come to Ipoh.

Goodbye and have a safe journey Mr Bug

Iwas sitting on a toilet bowl trying to evacuate my bowels in the bathroom when I was startled by the sight of a tiny brownish object slowly inching its way across the wet floor. Instinctively I retracted my legs a bit because I didn't want the thing to crawl up my lower limbs.

The slimy object of my fascination was a 5 cm long millipede. The bug was crawling on the floor at the junction of the floor tiles and the tiled wall in the bath room.

I noted that the millipede was crawling and stopping intermittently and turning its head left and right and top and bottom as if looking for direction with its two antennae. To my relief it made no attempt to move towards the direction of the toilet bowl where I was sitting.

My wife would have freaked out if I had mentioned there was a creepy and slimy bug in the bathroom. I would imagine that the next thing she would do would be to squash the bug with a piece of toilet paper and flushed it down the toilet bowl. No, I would not tell any body about my find. I would rather honour the right of the little fellow's existence rather than to send him to bug heaven.

After finishing my business I returned to the toilet with a plastic box to look for the millipede, half hoping that it would have crawled out of the bathroom. I found it lurking behind the bathroom broom. After gently drawing him out from the sanctuary of the plastic broom with a gentle sweeping motion of the plastic lid I coaxed it to enter the box compartment.

Once inside I closed the box with the lid and headed straight to the drying yard, which is overlooking the back lane at the back of the house. Extending my hand into the air space through the metal grills I turned the box upside down and opened the lid. With a gentle tap on the box the millipede slipped off the box and descended into the air down to the back lane below.

Goodbye Mr Bug and have a safe journey. It was all I could do for you to save you from a quick extinction of being squashed into a pulp and flushed down into the toilet bowl.

Despite the sugar subsidy cut this mamak is holding fast to his old food prices, but for how long?

Waiting for the mechanic to complete the scheduled lubrication service to the MyVi the fragrant smell of curry spices and hunger pangs lured me to the mamak stall next door.

"Berapa?" I asked the stall operator after finishing my order of a piece of roti canai bread and teh o kosong. The mechanic had signaled me that he had finished the lub service job, so I had to collect my car from the workshop.

"Dua ringgit." I paid the same amount for the two items during my last lub service here about 3 months ago.

Since the government has cut sugar subsidy I wonder for how long this mamak is going to hold his price steady. Meanwhile today the Chinese vegetarian restaurant in town lost no time in charging me RM5 for a plate of mixed rice. I remember the last time I went there I paid about RM4 for similar fare.

Skinning garlic cloves

Sitting beside the dining table peeling the skin off the garlic cloves I notice that the flimsy midget kitchen knife that I am using is more suitable for cutting open envelopes rather than peeling garlic skin.

But then my family has been using this small knife with a plastic handle for peeling garlic cloves for a long time. The few rusty spots on the side of the blade are telling of a history behind this cheap knife that my family bought in a time long past.

Since I already have a knife for opening envelopes I shall continue to use this one for peeling garlic skin.

Stiff shoulder treatment

Patients waiting for their names to be called
at the registering counter

The Physiotherapy Department, Serdang Hospital.

Because I and my wife reached the hospital early at 8 am we were able to find parking inside the outdoor parking lot. On previous visits we had to park our car by the roadside and walk a distance to the entrance. Once inside the hospital we quickly made our way to the main entrance. As we are regular visitors we now know the ground floor layout of the hospital by heart.

A showcase of prosthetic limbs greet
the patient at the waiting area

The small entrance to the physiotherapy department opens up to a spacious waiting area. There are at least 6 rows of seats for patients to sit down while waiting for their names to be called. Once seated you can't help but view a glass showcase exhibiting a range of prosthetic limbs. After sitting down for about 15 minutes the nurse then called my wife to go to Room F6.

The small entrance opens up to a
spacious waiting area

There are separate rooms for different types of therapy and Room F6 is for patients with general pain ailments, considered as low frequency treatment. My wife who is suffering from pain due to a stiff shoulder probably belongs to this category of patients.


As I am not a patient I was not allowed to accompany my wife into the room. Looking in from the outside I saw some beds with curtains drawn and the inside appears to be clean and airy.

Room F6 where my wife underwent
therapy for pains in her left shoulder

After my wife was ushered into the room I took the break to walk along the aisle. I noticed many different types of rooms for different types of trauma treatment. Some rooms appear to be equipped with gymn type equipment. One room even has hydrotherapy facility.


While my wife was inside the room I chatted with a 60 year old man and later a middle aged woman.

The old man was there to seek treatment for his painful neck and shoulders. He told me that he had taken a lot of medication prescribed by doctors and consulted healers but all their treatments did not resolve his health problems except for physiotherapy which is giving him much relief. That is why he is repeating his regular visits to the clinic.

As for the middle aged woman she was here to look for relief for her painful spinal problem. However before I could find out more of her condition my wife was discharged from the room.

Asking about her treatment my wife told her a medical therapist demonstrated specific exercises to stretch and relax her shoulder and back muscles. The therapist asked her to do the specific exercises three times a day by her self and gave her a drawing illustrating the different types of exercises that she should do.

The next follow up appointment is in three weeks time.