Heng Yang 衡阳 for 3 Days

Shanghai 2011

It was just a few days in Shanghai but it was intensive! Will miss the folks back there...

南昆山, 云海 and 北江 3 days out!

On a fair weekend, we went out for some long distant driving in ShenZhen, the whole plan was to just go where no one had went... well that was the idea for us. I had no idea what was in store except that we one of the place has some bicycle for rental and we can go explore some newly made tracks left behind from the recent "Games" in China. One of the best thing was that we were in a BMW X6 that went vrooomm!

We went to so many places that it is hard to remember where.. but it was all over China south. We were on waters, lakes, rivers, mountain and spent the night in a very luxurious resort and it did a brief hiking trip around the famous rivers of China

The the final day we went cruising around the mountain areas and found ourselves at a popular cross country region... Too much things too eat and see. Did a bit of fruits picking from a farm and it was all so nice!

Zhuhai to Macau Geocaching

Once more...Zhu Hai beckon us to return for the final cache to be found! This time we were really equipped for we knew there were supposedly 1999 steps of stairs to ascend. And what lies ahead was really a nice cool day all suitable for climbing these stairway of small steps. Did not take us long to get to GZ and once we were there the cache has no-where to hid. We got hold of it and signed our big names on it and declared this mountain conquered. Went up to the summit and looked at a great big coin like monument with a lot of numbers of it... all significant to the return of Macao to China. Then it was all free time, we went eating.... and had Häagen-Dazs ice cream, coffee at a prime shopping estate and eventually found ourselves in a KTV! My very first time in a Zhu Hai KTV joint. Singing to our heart content. These places do not use wireless mic and the sound quality was excellent!

words coming soon

Death wishes?

Five Regrets of the Dying
By Bronnie Ware, Platinum Quality Author

For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.

 

People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality. I learned never to underestimate someone's capacity for growth. Some changes were phenomenal. Each experienced a variety of emotions, such as denial, fear, anger, remorse, more denial and eventually acceptance. Every single patient found their peace before they departed though, every one of them.

When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people have had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.

It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.

2. I wish I didn't work so hard. This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their

lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.

We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.

It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip.  But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physical details of life fall away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It is all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content.   When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.

When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying. Life is a choice.

It is YOUR life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness.

Geocaching Guang Zhou

It was such a long journey, woke up early in the morning and headed off to Hung Hom for a direct train to Guang Zhou. And by late morning, we were at GZ and our friends drove from Zhu Hai over to pick us up at the station. All these for one singular purpose, geocaching!

We wasted no time and headed out to find about 3 geocaches, and soon enough I realized something was amiss... The google map of GZ is offset by almost 700m and all my geocaches plot was pretty off the mark and we had to resort to trial and error on our finds using the map. But it proved to be quite adventurous as we went forth and asked the folks around for the artifacts mentioned in cache stories... Eventually, we found 2 caches and we all were pretty happy and celebrated with a nice dinner! Learned a couple of facts about some poems and a Chinese person named "鲁迅". A scholar/writer/revolutionist in older China! read about it at http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hk/%E9%B2%81%E8%BF%85 . The trip ended in a day and we took the train back to HK and was quite tired after all these journey....

Singapore and Messboy Wedding

Singapore, I was there for a week, yes back in the motherland for holiday. Kind of strange how that sounded. Went back to my hometown for a holiday. Stayed in my brother in law and my mom's consecutively all the days. This time we planned nothing, no visit, no touring, no housecall, nothing. Simply just be back and does nothing. However we still need to eat. And the choices we made are mostly, simple and local delights. Singapore is once again changed into a busier and more crowded country. At 10pm there are peak hour like human traffic running in the MTR system. But one thing is for sure, the food tasted just like I last remembered; and that's the best thing. Nostalgica!

There were countless choices and even after a week, I have yet to try them all. Of all the dishes I had, Chicken Rice ranked top for I had it twice. Tried even the Burger set since Celes was rather interested in this "Branded" and expensive fastfood chain. Met up with a couple of folks this time and spent a little time on Geocaching and managed to find a measly 5 out of 6. It was good time, simple time but good. Nothing funky, nothing glamorous. Even our walk in Sentosa went pretty peaceful and we had an hour watching the "Song of the Sea" performance which I do not ranked highly for the SG$10 spent. One night, coincidentally was the date set by our "MessBoy" for the wedding banquet in celebration for his public love declaration to a lovely lady. It had been years I last met this bunch of comrades. They had all grown a bit, me too. All of us had a good time being together in a feasting mood. It was great seeing the changes as well as remembering some of those things we did together while we were in uniform. "MessBoy" was in extremely good spirit and we all celebrated his BIG day with some mischief but was still something of a civilized level. Just like that, dinner was over and we all said our farewell and it was time to depart... and soon I departed Singapore, back in HK. I would say time indeed flew while this very week. The routine of life resumed in HK as I go about with my work week. And all memories the more treasured. I'm glad it all happened the way it did.

Samsung Galaxy S i9000 improvements

It had appeared that the world most laughed at phone is now almighty in the hands of the "right" folks.

For those using this phone and want it to fly....

- Rooted
- No Lag
- Super Froyo 2.2
- GPS improvement
- Circular Battery mod
- Excellent battery life based on my usage pattern
- Quardrant Benchmark:: 1372 

Go get the ROM V7 and follow the instruction on post 1,2 and 3... and you'll be all fine!

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=817703&page=1

New Toy

Sorry for the lacking of update.. I had been updating at Facebook a lot. It appeared that the new way of celebrating ourselves is via Facebook and doing small snipplets of our happenings... A good thing that happened... I bought a new phone Samsung Galaxy S i9000 (Unlocked) Been really into it to flash/tweak/customize it to be the best that it can be... Perhaps soon I'll be most motivated to blog about the whole thing and summarized some interesting tips and tricks around it.. but in the mean time.. I'm still engaged!

Buffalo WHR-HP-G300N wireless Drop on DD-WRT

Bought a Buffalo WHR-HP-G300N wifi router to capitalize on the low price as well as it ability to utilise DD-WRT roms. But having quite a lot of trouble with it for a few reasons. The stock ROM was pretty much unappealing as well as useless. It has issues with HGC.com in Hong Kong, it would drop the bridge WAN side of the connection after certain period of time. And would also drop plenty of packets.

On the other hand however, the DD-WRT had other issues, due to the use of Atheros WIFI hardware in this router, there seems to be a kernel/driver runaway issue with WIFI ath0 adaptor being offline after certain kernel warning in var/log/messages:

Jul 30 16:06:46 user.warn kernel: ath_node_xmit_single: TID pause count 0
16:07:58 user.warn kernel: ath_node_xmit_single: TID pause count 0
16:08:27 user.warn kernel: ath_node_xmit_single: TID pause count 0
16:26:23 user.warn kernel: Sending cwmmode action frame to ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
16:26:24 user.warn kernel: Resetting; Code: 01
16:26:25 user.warn kernel: Resetting; Code: 01
16:26:26 user.warn kernel: Resetting; Code: 01

The way around the issue after some figuring is to perform a stop/start of the wifi adaptor on the router. Hence here is a cron I quickly made up to check /var/log/message for the string "Resetting" and do a down/up of the wifi adaptor. This can be entered into the DD-WRT "Administration->Management->Cron" Additional Cron Jobs area. It is persistent, the job will still be there after a power reset.

*/3 * * * * root [ -z `tail -1 /var/log/messages|grep Resetting` ] && logger -p info 'wlan ok' || (logger -p alert 'Bouncing ath0' && ifconfig ath0 down && ifconfig ath0 up)

With this the router is all alright till a newer release from DD-WRT come along. Currently: DD-WRT v24-sp2 (07/16/10) std - build 14815

Update A new update (wrt ver 14929) seemed to have solved this wireless issue, still monitoring: http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/support/other-downloads?path=others%2Feko%2FBrainSlayer-V24-preSP2%2F08-12-10-r14929%2Fbuffalo_whr_hp_g300n%2F

Latest Update(11 Feb 2011) can be found here: http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/support/other-downloads?path=others%2Feko%2FBrainSlayer-V24-preSP2%2F2011%2F02-17-11-r16214%2F
Worked pretty well with me router!