Vacation in Taiwan

My wife and sons came back from Taiwan vacation. All of them exhausted, yet they enjoyed the indelible 30-day stay in Taiwan. Today is the first day going back to school, and everyone is excited to meet the new teachers, or new school in David’s case. I guess the only way to avoid jet lag is work hard and try one’s best to stay awake during the day time, and hopefully everything will be going back to normal.

My sons told me that everything was so cheap in Taiwan. They bought lots of clothes, DVD, snacks, etc. They especially enjoyed eating Taiwanese foods at a small fraction of cost. They loved to shop at the world-renowned night market in Taipei where they could buy clothes at unbelievable prices. Oh, they also enjoyed the stay in the luxurious house owned by grand- uncle in Taipei, and they miss Kenny, the black dog, a lot. Anyway, it was a good experience to visit Taiwan this summer.

A Simple Rule

Vancouver city workers have been on strike for a few days now. As the result, most of the essential services, like garbage collection and library, are closed during the period of strike. According to precedent cases, this strike could last for several weeks, which could possibly cripple people’s confidence and image toward City of Vancouver. It’s so ironic that Vancouver had been voted for the best place to live on earth several times in the past; however, the city has to deal with the habitual strikes every three to five years, something that the city feels hopeless and helpless in solving the “social” problem deriving from mixture of socialism and capitalism. In this regard, it made me to think of my good “old” days in the United States of America where job strikes were unheard of during my 15-year stay in California. Usually, when someone was unhappy with his/her wage or the condition of work, he or she just walked out to find another job that was tailored to meet his or her demand, there was really no reason to threaten employers to increase wages by striking, because both parties would be losers in the process—no wages for workers on strike, bad image for the employers and no service being rendered to the general public.

In my opinion, the best way to solve the problem of job strike is to consider two folds—the employees should consider to adopt the mentality of “Ask what I can do for my country, not what my country can do for me,” and the employers, on the other hand, are asked to adjust wages periodically in accordance with inflation and consumer index report so that the employees are up-dated in wages and hence lifestyle. If everyone follows this simple rule in this seemingly complicated world, then we’ll have a harmonious society, which is the way it was meant to be when the system was initially set up. Well, life is simple, but we human beings make it complicated. The rule is to go back to simplicity and live happily thereafter, just like a fairytale—-a dream comes true.

A new mind, a new life

After watching the Korean DVD The Full House, it provoked my urgency of mentally owning a house similar to it, which has floor-to-ceiling windows and granite flooring throughout most of the house, and most amazingly it has a naturally shore lined beach for daily jogging in the front yard. Can you imagine that a person wakes up every morning by streams of sunlight permeating through the floor-to-ceiling windows, kind of like an alarm clock to remind him/her for the daily jogging on the sand beach, which is only steps away from his/her bedroom?

Fresh predawn sea breeze, accompanied by bird chirping the familiar songs from the backyard forest, always soothes Alan’s soul before sailing the two-person dinghy to the ferry terminal for the first scheduled ferry to the mainland to work. When Alan gets tired of sailing the boat, he will fly the rarely used float plane to the mainland instead. And this thought especially nags him when it is time to renew the expensive pilot license. Alan has been thinking of dumping the license and the plane from time to time, but the float plane, the dinghy and the island were heirlooms from his parents when they passed away due to old age. They are too special to dump; besides they are memory-laden back from when he was a little boy who grew up in this small island off Vancouver mainland.

The five acre island has all the amenities Alan needs to survive for at least six months before he has to replenish his supplies from the mainland. Alan is somehow eccentric in a way because he prefers the reclusive lifestyle to the gregarious one, considering he is only 29 years old. He rarely brings any companion to the island, and he is planning to be single all his life for an unknown reason. The only thing that triggers his happiness is the chirping sound of the birds in the forest and the mixed sound of wind and water from the sea. Sometimes he sits in front of his house, his eyes gazing into the offing of the sea as if pondering something only known to him. Well, I guess solitude is his forever friend who knows exactly what he is thinking and who can communicate with him by their mutual language. Maybe one day down the road he will be enlightened by the solitude, and he’ll know exactly what he is going to do with his life.

Epilogue:

An isolated island may seem cool and serene, but it is like a mind being knotted thousands of times to the extent of being tangled and deadlocked. The only way to liberate the mind is to find a new mind which gives a new light and a full new meaning of life.

Nanotechnology

She is gorgeous. Sinuous figure with silky blond hair, translucent skin to the extent of a crystal, a pair of piercing blue eyes specialize in taking one’s breath away, these are the partial list of next generation female protocol developed by a nanotechnology laborotory at an undisclosed location. Technology is progressing rapidly, the next technological revolution undoubtedly will be nano-tech. It is just the matter of time and willingness of political power to unleash nano-products to the general public. Have you ever thought about having some sort of cream spraying on your wound, I mean the deep wound something like a gun shot wound, then the cells of your skin in question starts to reconstruct themselves in a way that you can see with your bare eyes, after ten second or so you find your wounded skin in a pristine condition as if the gun shot never happened? Have you ever thought about spraying seeds of plants on the river bank of high-risk mudslide terrain, and all of a sudden a green forest appears, therefore mudslide problems solved?
How about women are able to get pregnant regardless of age by using nano-tech pills?

Anyway, the next generation technology is amazing, but we have to find a way to redefine our morality so that our society will not get into chaos as result of this revolution. Can we human beings constrain ourself so that we don’t develop some technology to upgrade ourselves and kill ourselves at the same time?

The Oldest Blogger

Writing blog is getting popular day by day in this age of connecting hearts through the Internet. Although browsing the net is accessible to all ages, writing blog is mostly dominated by the young people who express their feelings and other things through their windows at home. Different people have different motivations and intentions in joining the blog community, which makes it very diversified and interesting for all to browse.

One of the motivations of writing blog for school- age kids is to communicate with classmates and other friends in school. They could be using their blogs to write their diaries, to show others in connecting with interesting web sites, to upload their pictures to show off their photographic skills in snap shots, or to record their artistic performances by using the YouTube to share with others. Regardless, it is becoming a part of lifestyle for the young people nowadays.

For those who fall in the category of young adults, writing blog could be a very good tool to make like-minded friends. When someone leaves you a message on your blog, it is kind of signifying his/her appreciation of your work of which makes the author elated and gracious as if a soul mate had been found. When one is bored, writing blog becomes a social tool for those being classified as shy or introverted because one needs not to expose his/her picture, not unless one feels confident about his/her impeccable feature and would like to draw attentions from the general public to fulfill one’s narcissism. However, one can always enhance oneself through the state-of-the-art computer-photographic upgrade if one chooses so. Haha, there are no more “sorry faces” in today’s technological world, but it is better to use a less- million -pixels digital camera if one feels he/she has wrinkles due to one’s seniority.

For some advanced bloggers, writing blog can possibly be a way of generating incomes through advertisers and sponsors of web businesses. All they have to do is to keep on writing blog to attract visitors who are willing to click on the advertisers. I am not sure the effectiveness due to this kind of advertising, but whoever puts up the money obviously knows the taste of the soup. In addition to this kind of advertisement, some bloggers even utilize the blog to make connections for their MLM (Multiple Level Management) business. Their intentions are to find as many down-liners as possible through their blogs. Obviously, the business is mightier than friendship. Friendship stops at the same time as business ceases to exist.

For some people, writing blog is strictly to kill time, nothing more and nothing less. It is kind of way to express one’s feelings through the much-sought-after public forum. Of course, it is free of charge, but it requires one to invest some time in it. I have heard that there was a ninety- plus old man who enjoyed writing blog and chatting on MSN in his pastime in Taiwan. Well, when writing blog becomes the trend, nobody can taunt the 90-year-old man as a geezer anymore. The oldest blogger is LOL in the comfort of his home right now.