Life, Travel, GRACE

While in Murni Restaurant last week, we "discovered" a new dish there. It's Dragon Pizza. Looks like a sleeping dragon but inside it's chicken with mushroom (was it?) and gravy. Taste ok. Retail price: RM10. Thanks to our future bridegroom HJ to have the "tipping" discussion there.

Open house for friends. We did steamboat again. Special guest from the States with James K.

How often when your time has been squandered, by other people? Literally you have wasted your valuable time because of someone else. This happens especially at work place. People call meeting and believe there are some of the attendees are not required or irrelevant for the meeting. So you stuck in the meeting hour and hour. What should you do? Leave quietly? Luckily, for some companies, some employees are given laptop and PDA or whatever berry. So in the meeting, people talking and you just do your own stuff on your laptop / PDA or play Sudoku. You become multi-tasking. At the end, we have a culture of disrespectful during meeting. That’s the norm in his previous company. But you get to finish your job fast.

You can never get an ultimate technology product. It keeps on improving from time to time. Take for example, iPhone (again?) just launched a 3G phone at US199, less than its previous model. What's the take? Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) did mention this: There is always change and improvement, and there is always someone who bought a product before a particular cutoff date and misses the new price or the new operating system or the new whatever. This is life in the technology lane. If you always wait for the next price cut or to buy the new improved model, you'll never buy any technology product because there is always something better and less expensive on the horizon. So get one tech-product today. Or you'll wait forever.

For sure I'm not worshipping technology (or iPhone ). But it was just a mere excitement. Again, the heart is deceitful. There seems to be some kind of replacement in our life. We have put God aside. ...the success of twentieth-century technology in providing us with convenience, comfort, speed, hygiene, and abundance was so obvious and promising that there seemed no reason to look for any other sources of fulfillment or creativity or purpose. To every Old World belief, habit, or tradition, there was and still is a technological alternative. To prayer, the alternative is penicillin; to family roots, the alternative is mobility; to reading, the alternative is television; to restraint, the alternative is immediate gratification; to sin, the alternative is psychotherapy; to political ideology, the alternative is popular appeal established though scientific polling. There is even an alternative to the painful riddle of death, as Freud called it. The riddle may be postponed through longe...

After waited for 2 weeks anticipating the new gadget, finally he got it on last Friday. It was an iphone . Very fun to play with. It’s elegant too. He had it hacked. Otherwise, the phone will not be a phone. So he had it as a real phone for ONE day. Then this morning, it dropped. The display went out and couldn’t be powered up. It’s a gone case. Sadly….. It’s like you spill your coffee on your laptop OR have the car banged OR being robbed off few hundred bucks OR some other bad things. Mixed feeling of sad, anger, hopeful, praying for mercy. But a friend of his also had it dropped and it was ok. A check in the internet also pointed out the phone will work well even after numerous rigorous drops. A new hope, perhaps. Alternative plan is to have it restored or send for repair. Otherwise, it’s a gone case. What a great day to start with!! Every event comes with a good thing in disguise too.