Disillusioned and uplifted

The opening screen reads 'don't be disappointed when God doesn't give you what you want... for He knows the best time for you to have it'.

Sigh...

Monday I was whinging to Steph,
Tuesday I wrote the entry on my blog that started "In a perfect world," which basically was asking God to fulfill all my prayers/dreams.
Wednesday I was riding the MRT to rockclimbing and the thought hit me that I should surrender my dreams/wish list to God. Like how Abraham was asked to sacrifice what he wanted (his precious son).
Thusrday (today) Steph sent me a comforting prophecy she heard and gave me a Youtube video which touched her. It didn't for me, but it played thru and then I hit the next video and there it was, my answer.

the sufferings of this present time are as nothing...

I was whinging to Steph earlier this morning and then guess what today's first reading is,

Rom 8:18-25

Brothers and sisters:
I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing
compared with the glory to be revealed for us.
For creation awaits with eager expectation
the revelation of the children of God;
for creation was made subject to futility,
not of its own accord but because of the one who subjected it,
in hope that creation itself
would be set free from slavery to corruption
and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God.
We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now;
and not only that, but we ourselves,
who have the firstfruits of the Spirit,
we also groan within ourselves
as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.
For in hope we were saved.
Now hope that sees for itself is not hope.
For who hopes for what one sees?
But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait with endurance.

The Pope reaching out to the church of England

I was also a skeptic initially, the new Pope is too old, too austere, surely not in sync with modern times?

But Benedict proved himself different.

From his red Prada shoes to his new style of leading the catholic church.

Telling Anglicans that they are welcome to be catholics? Wow...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/opinion/26douthat.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

At least he is proving to be respected church leader that the church of England lacks today. With the US epicopals allowing gay pastors, and the rest of anglican church leaders remaining silent on that... Surely that is not the Christ way of doing things. But I don't want to judge, I do however, salute Benedict for reaching out with wisdom, decisiveness and love.

In a perfect world...

In a perfect world,

- Grace is cured of cancer, completely.
- Ian has a great job he enjoys and pays well.
- Michelle is expecting a baby girl and they will name her Felicity after her aunt.
- the Elmo is happily attached to a CEO
- Steph and Felicia both find a perfect guy and get married
- Gi and Alex gets married
- Taiwan's politicians stop quibbling over the inconsequential and work for the greater good of Taiwan
- Zi gets a reinforced body where she can never overstrain any body part into injury.

Sigh...

Everybody wants to rule the world..

This is how it feels like working in a multi-national organization sometimes. When you go cross country/culture/continents.. 1 thing remains - the need for power.

Relaxed on a Monday night

Sitting here just before our routine monday night call with our Houston counterparts. Have Enya playing on my computer...

Kinda relaxed. I know, not the right mood for conference calls with Texas. I'll summon up aggression in just a moment - usually I get into the right mood with anger :)

Right now, it's nice. Beautiful blue skies and it's a cool 22degrees out. Nice. Almost too nice to have to be doing something as mundane as work :( I almost wanted to walk up the hill behind the office for a picnic.

Pity I had to miss Saturday morning's Nike Human Race, 10k. It was still raining from a typhoon that was veering away from Taipei. I just didn't feel it was worth it to run with the rain in my face and not enjoying it a bit. Should've been Sunday morning lah.. Sunday weather was excellent.

Time to jump on the call. Sigh.

Inside Steve's Brain

Written by the Wired's editor, it gives a pretty good account of Steve Jobs and Apple. Being in a product development team, it often hits me how different the Apple world is from our Wintel world (Windows and Intel stranglehold on the PC world).

Like this week, we quibbled over a plastic box to hold a stylus pen - how can we further cost down to save us a dollar at risk of looking er.. cheap. Fortunately, the marketing product manager, me, remembered the book I've been reading and so put my foot firmly down. No cheap look, no cost down. We'll take the $ hit. Sigh...

Stark different worlds. Of course our profit margins are also starkly different. We ship millions of notebooks versus iBooks, but their profit margins are also many times what we make.

Enough intelligent reading... my next book is on rockclimbing. Hee hee.. I only really have 2 loves in life - the catholic church and rockclimbing.

Rocking Woes...

No, not rockclimbing, not rock music either, nor rock on, baby!

The notebook I am working on right now has a balance issue. It's a touchscreen NB and if you poked it's screen, it rocks on its haunches. Poke it hard and it might even flip totally over. The engineers have no alternatives other than adding dummy weights to the other end to counter-balance it.

Hello, this is a thin and light, mobility NB - no extra weights just because you screwed up!

Perhaps we should really consider the idea of suction cups instead of front rubber feet. Ala fruit juicer machines.

Or more drastic measures

It's days like this that you sit in geekdom and wonder why are the geeks here all idiots?

Which C-sport - Cycling or Climbing?

I really like this editor from the Rock and Ice magazine. Pity I can't get a subscription into Taiwan and it's not available in the bookstores here (nothing in English here, it sux). But I get their regular emails whenever Andrew writes, it absolutely kills me. Now don't get me wrong, I love both - rockclimbing and cycling my bike. But he puts in such a manner, it's a blast!

No Respect

By Andrew Bisharat

I admired the perfectly crafted cappuccino before me, especially the artful mocha brush strokes through the white foam. The warm Sunday morning sun and dry air made the roast’s aromas and chocolate smack all the more piquant. The patio of an Italian café is a fine place to begin any day in Boulder.

The tranquility of the moment deformed like the foam in my drink when I suddenly found myself surrounded by a gang of extra-large lycra-clad road bikers. The incongruous sight of bulbous, sagging flesh in XXL spandex instantly razed any impression that this was an athletic lot, yet here they were, stretching their old groins, mindlessly chattering and feeding on coffee, juice and croissants, which I assumed would fuel a ride of some insignificant distance.

“Gawd, these people are disgusting,” I said to my friends Sam and Emily. It was an awful thing to say, but they agreed that the jiggling belly fat, pizza-dough man-teats and sausage-and-meatballs spaghetti-crotch — all squashed into a body-condom covered in company logos — was at least a little unappetizing. It was not their fault, per se — no one looks good in lycra, not even me (two obvious exceptions, of course, are Megan Fox and, my favorite, Giada di Laurentiis).

I studied the rotund roadies, which is not to say that I looked at them, but rather that I analyzed my own feelings about these carefree boomers, their glasses affixed with protruding rearview mirrors and their $8,000 carbon-fiber frame bikes, which I overheard one guy refer to as a “steed.” These people were like everyone else: just looking for an outlet — social and perhaps even physical — to somehow fill a gap in their lives. It’s like the old saying, “Biking: it’s something to do.” I actually don’t know if that is a saying or not, but it should be. Who can blame them for that?

What was most interesting to me was not the padding that makes it look like you’re smuggling a loaf of crap in your pants, but how at ease these people were with it. Lycra is part of the biking community, and it makes them feel comfortable in the same way that European climbers wear manpris. Who cares that no one else shares their aesthetic?

But at what point does exchanging the mores of mainstream society for the queerer set held by your fringe community make others lose respect for you?

One thing I’ve recently realized is that if people respect you, you can get away with a lot. Lose that respect and suddenly, nothing is permissible any longer. For example, one friend is down on his luck. He has joined the “Lost Generation” of young, bright, overly educated 20somethings that is experiencing an astronomic unemployment rate of 18 percent. As such, he’s adopted a “certain moral flexibility,” as he calls it, which permits him to steal food and clothing that are not his. It was no shock that my respect for him diminished, but I was surprised by how this decline directly correlated to how funny I found his already immature humor.

Soon, the roadies were off on their ride, and the café was once again peaceful. Twelve hours earlier, I was on a flight home from the Red River Gorge and had the pleasure of sitting next to an attractive woman. That had always been a dream of mine—every time I get on a plane, I pray that Giada boards the flight and takes the open seat next to me and we spend the rest of the flight making plans to crush juicy tomatoes together—but the hairy human dregs that smell of broiled meat have always been an abrupt and cruel end to my fantasy.

This girl was no Giada, but close. After telling me all about her giant diamond engagement ring and $40,000 wedding, she asked about the “gross” scars on the back of my hands. I explained what gobies were, and what rock climbing was all about.
“Look at your fingers!” she said. “They’re all knobby and swollen.”
“Yeah, if you think my hands are bad, you should see my toes,” I said.
“Ewwwwww!” she said. “Oh, yeah, my fiancé tried rock climbing once. He had to squeeze his feet into these tiny little girly ballet shoes!” She seemed tickled by the memory of her masculine Venezuelan boyfriend doing something so effeminate as rock climbing.

I thought about it and realized that climbers aren’t much less odd-looking than lycra-clad roadies. We’re a bunch of messy-haired and smelly weirdoes with the perpetually scabby, gross hands of a leper. We even wear harnesses that accentuate parts of ourselves that should never be accentuated—no different than bike spandex.

Maybe this is why, like Rodney Dangerfield said, we can’t get no respect.

A good hike

Over the weekend, I went with the HP mountaineering club to Wuling Farm - nestled at the foot of Snow Mountain. I was here last year as well, we had this aborted attempt to climb Snow Mountain - 2nd tallest in Taiwan. No permits were issued that weekend because of a nearby typhoon even though the weather was perfect then. Sigh, beaurocracy... *shrug*

The weather this time around initially didn't bode so well, even as we drove in on Saturday it was heavy mist (didn't help that I was just watching this horror movie called the Mist on HBO).. But it was perfect on Sunday - climbing day.

Had an ex-Houston based colleague who's now working for a Taiwanese software company in town and he wanted to join too. Except he had a meeting til noon on Saturday. So we arranged a separate car (which cost a ridiculously exorbitant cost of 5000nt!), it was a nice Mercedes Benz (a little old though, with a driver that kept getting lost!) and I offered to ride with him since I speak Chinese and also means that I get to sleep in a little and not have to leave with the HP folks at 7am :)

Our driver got us to Wuling Farm by 2.30pm (he was in a rush as he didn't want to drive home alone in the dark and in the mist - chicken shit! and I suspect he feared getting lost as well).

I skipped the shower (hey, I was in the Mercedes Benz for most of the day anyways) and we were all in our sleeping bags in our tents by 9pm. I shared a tent with 2 other women (slim, petite) who snored like men! Both of them! Yes, I caught no sleep all night. Sigh.

Waking up at 4am, we started for Chiyou Mountain 池有山which is one of the 4 biggest mountains in that range. It's also a 百岳, a list of 100 best peaks in Taiwan. Not that I'm bagging peaks, but this makes my 3rd 百岳.

It was perhaps a 7km walk to the foot of Chiyou, and then a 4km hike up, sounds easy? This 4km plus 1km elevation means it's a steep hike. It's also mostly rocky, pebbly path, so it was a slow slog up for me. We took 8hours to get up, and 4.5 hours down. Yeah, we walked for 12.5hours.

Frank was really nice, patient, we walked slow and he was really good about it. And we rested a lot too. Took numerous pictures. I could enjoy nature and the walk up... It was really nice. At a rest spot, we were surrounded by 黃鼠狼 or Chinese mink or weasel. They ran around us, but were too shy to come close when we tried to bait them closer with food.

We had excellent views of Snow Mountain, Daba Mountain and all the beautiful peaks surrounding us - most of the way up, which helped as a distraction when your legs are so tired.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8062670@N07/sets/72157622615968746/

Thank you Jesus. This will be the last hike of the year, I was going to say last tiring activity, but then Blues just MSN asking if I wanted to go Palau, Dec 5 to 12? Hmm...

Waiting on the Lord...

Sigh.. I feel like being in a holding pattern.

"They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint." [Isa 40:30-31].

Faux pas

I like to believe that I've been in Taiwan long enough (2 years and 2 months) and that my language skills have come a long way since...

Then I discovered my reading skills are er.. not quite there as well. Sigh.

Honda had asked me via MSN to look out for a "拉鍊的粉袋"

while in Singapore and to buy it for another person at the rock gym. He mentioned that I have one of those... I somehow read it as a chalk bag with chilli design (Red Chilli has one just like that), but it's er.. actually, a chalk bag with a zipper mouth.

Sigh... So chilli and zipper looks alike to me. I think I just can't read the traditional chinese character too well. In anycase, fortunately for me, I didn't find the chilli design chalk bag.

I found out after I came back and was explaining that the chilli design is past fashion, what's fashionable in Singapore are the Prana branded chalkbags.. blah blah.. but they kept asking about zipper. I'm like, what's with the zipper questions.. and then it dawned on me.

living by the river

Decided in Jun that I wanted to move, to stay by the riverside.

With Taipei being such an urban city - read cities, scooters, cars, buses... too much pollution and noise. I wanted to live close by and yet be by a riverside.

It's actually quite possible considering that the rivers crisscross much of Taipei and that there are a lot of vacant apartments. Just a matter of sieving out what you like and how much you can afford to pay in rent.

I think I started viewing apartments in July and yesterday, Oct 1, I finally saw something I liked. (alright, so I was in Singapore most of Sep), but still, it's been a lot of apartment viewing.

This one I like not because of the apartment, but because of location. It's right by the riverside (I mean beside!) and it's just a 10min taxi ride into office which means it is not in the boondogs. http://rent.591.com.tw/rent-detail-333447.html

Alas, the lady wanted too much in rent and refused to budge.