Three reasons to be proud

Whenever there comes a need for me to reflect on my achievements in life thus far, I always fall back on the fact that I have three smart and responsible sons. I may not have hit my ambition of making my first million by forty. I am not yet a big tauke and I still have large credit card debts to settle. But despite all the problems and struggles, I can still look at my three sons and say that I have at least done that part of it right, the raising of them I mean.

My first and second sons did very well in their studies and are now pursuing tertiary education overseas. Both are taking up medicine.

Yesterday, my third and youngest son Imran Azizi showed that he is as clever as his elder brothers by scoring in the PMR exams. My hope is for him to continue to study well and proceed to the highest level. He has indicated that he is not interested in becoming a doctor but that's okay by me. He can be anything he wants to be as long as he puts his skills and knowledge to good use.

When my son was taking the exams a few months ago, I decided to be the one to drive him to school everyday. This was after hearing advice from a close friend who said that being there for my son would be the best support that a father can ever give. By coincidence, two situations abled or perhaps forced me to carry out the task. Firstly, I was without a steady job at the time and secondly, my wife was still recovering from ailment which caused her to be hospitalised the week before. So like it or not, it was something that I had to do... and I wanted to, anyway. So everyday on exam day for almost 2 weeks, I drove my son to school, dropped him off at the gate, got out of the car, say a short silent prayer before hugging him and wishing him luck. He may not have required it but there's nothing to lose and it feels good doing so.

There was even one day where there was another exam paper in the afternoon which meant he couldn't come home for lunch. On that day, my wife and I bought him his favourite nasi ambeng, brought it to school where we had lunch together. I enjoyed doing that and hope I can do it again some time in future. Pretty soon he'll be all grown-up and there's no more child of school-going age left in the house.


I am sort of going through a rough patch on the workfront since a few months ago but the good results from my son yesterday really brightened up my day... so I hope readers can pardon me for this post of self-gratification. I am pretty confident things will become better for us in the coming days. Thanks also to my better half for helping raise three lovely boys. Most of the credit should go to her...

Effbeeing... a new word to add to your vocabulary

A few weeks back, some of the commenters suggested that I have been away from blogging because I probably spend more time on Facebook. Hmmm.... to a certain degree I guess that is true. Although I have been an FB member for more than two years, the appeal of logging online to this social networking website is still not lost to me.

Effbeeing is different from blogging.... yeah, I know there is no such word as `effbeeing', but I'd like to use it anyway. It is an alternative way of saying `FBing' or `facebooking', i.e. the action of spending time online on Facebook. Some of my friends even use the Malay version of `berfb' (pronounced ber-eff-bee), so go figure.

I'm sure many of you have read or heard stories of addiction to this latest online activity. It has been blamed for non-productive employee hours to the extent that some companies block the connection from their office computers. I am not quite an addict but I admit that I do spend time effbeeing because I like to be connected to friends. And thus the likely cause of me spending less time on blogging...

Blogging really appeals only to writers... because that is what it essentially is, putting thoughts, stories or ideas in the form of words onto paper, or in this case, on a computer screen. And since I consider myself a writer, I don't think I'll stop blogging any time soon. Only that my writing is now a bit sparse compared to when I first started... and to justify this, you'll expect me to say that it wasn't about quantity in the first place. Hehehe... excuses, excuses.. Actually though, there is a more valid reason why my frequency of writing has dropped of late... but I'll write about it a bit later, next year perhaps.

Ok back to this phenomenon of effbeeing... apparently there are more than 500 million users of Facebook today and the company is estimated to be worth USD35billion. Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of FB is the youngest ever billionaire. I recently watched the movie `The Social Network', about how it all started. Quite an interesting film actually, because it does not have the documentary style that I sort of expected. One lesson I remember from the movie is this : When it comes to money (especially when it is a lot of money), loyal friends can become enemies.

The question in my mind now is, after FB, what next? For those of us who grew up with computing from the days of punchcards, writing in BASIC and working with DOS, there have been many revolutions in the IT world. IBM, Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Windows, Internet, dotcom explosion, Yahoo and Google. Some have survived this far while some are now but distant memories. Will Facebook last or will there be another phenomenon after it?

May her patience be rewarded

It was on this day last week my wife received a telephone call from someone at her hometown. It was unexpected news. My mother-in-law has passed away while seated at the living room. Her death was discovered by a neighbour who had come to visit my ailing father-in-law.

I say that her demise was unexpected because it is my father-in-law who is the weaker of the two. He is now 95-years old and has been bedridden for more than 4 years. He suffers from most of the ailments inherent of old age but the primary affliction is prostate cancer that I previously wrote about two years ago, here -> Internal plumbing.

My mother-in-law, on the other hand, was still able to move about on her own and except for her history of hypertension, was comparatively in better health. Actually she was not exactly my mother-in-law... because my original one passed away in September 1998. After a year of her passing, my father-in-law remarried another lady because he felt that he still require the companionship. At that time, my new stepmother-in-law, if there is such a term, was already a widow of more than 30 years. It actually puzzled me a bit why she agreed to marry my FIL, because it was quite clear that the ensuing years would entail difficulties. My FIL is not a young man anymore, he can hardly be called wealthy and he is known to be short-tempered.

Over the years of this new marriage, she tried her best to take care of my FIL. As the old man's health deteriorated and his need for attention became more demanding, the challenges became tougher. There were voices of dissatisfaction from both sides of the family. At one instance, some of my wife's brothers even took the drastic attempt of trying to separate them.

But the will of the Almighty is great... the old couple remained together despite the troubles and my stepmother-in-law did her best in carrying out her duties. She may have grumbled a bit, here and there... but that's to be expected. Taking care of an old and temperamental man is not easy work by any means... but she stuck to the job very well. Only Allah swt can repay her for her patience and kindness.

Hajjah Satirah Bt Omar passed away on 2nd December 2010 at the age of 74. May Allah swt bless and protect her soul. Ameen.

Okay, that's fine too...

I read with interest the news in today's The Star Online about the government's offer to traffic offenders who have outstanding summons. A 50% discount is offered to those who pay up within the first half of this month. The offer then drops to 30% if the fines are paid in the second half of December. After that, there's no more mercy.

On the way home from work, BFM radio station invited telephone calls from listeners who wish to air their views on this matter. A number of those who phoned-in, disagreed with the discount offer primarily because they believe it will make traffic offenders more complacent. Some even suggested that the fines should be increased, otherwise we would never see a reduction in our accident statistics.

We can argue about this issue both ways but personally for me at the present moment, I am all for the discount offer... and I am sure all of you can guess why. I have two outstanding summonses to my name, amounting to RM450. Half of that amount is not an insignificant value by any means of measurement. While I appreciate the reduction, it does not mean that I condone traffic offenders. I seriously believe the reckless drivers should be penalised heavily and this discount offer apparently does not apply to those in that category.

In my case, both my summonses apply to speeding but my gripe is that they occured so long ago and I never received any written notice from the police. The first offence was recorded as happening in 2005 while the second one presumably took place in 2007. I never had any trouble renewing my road tax from 2005 until this year... and that's a 5-year period. I only knew I had unsettled summonses after registering with the MyEG portal two months ago.

The police are probably right about those occassions they caught me speeding and probably I deserve to be fined. But what I am not quite satisfied about is the time and method they took to issue the summons. Actually, if I had not registered at MyEG, I wouldn't have known about it. It shows a lack of urgency on their part for not following up on an offence that was committed five years ago. Alternatively, we can argue that speeding offences are not a priority on the police list and therefore not serious.

Anyway, everything is fine now... I'll just settle half of my fine and then I'll be fine.

Soporific...

A few days ago, I was about to go out on some errands when I was distracted by something being shown on TV. The television was on the HBO channel and was playing a movie called `Wit'. The scene was a hospital examination room and the patient, played by Emma Thompson, was narrating something in a lovely English accent. I ended up watching the movie right to the end and forgot all about my errands.

Vivian Bearing is a professor of English literature who has just been diagnosed of ovarian cancer. She is about to undergo an experimental aggresive chemotherapy treatment and the movie shows her struggles throughout the process. A large part of the film shows Bearing in monologue... and it clearly demonstrates the strength and acting skill of Thompson in handling the character.

Towards the middle of the movie, there is this scene in flashback where Bearing recalls the exact moment when she knew that words would be her life's work. She was reading a Beatrix Potter book titled `The Tale of The Flopsy Bunnies' when she comes across a new word that she does not know the meaning of. Say it in bits, says her father. So-por-i-fic.

It means something that tends or has the the effect to cause sleep. Like certain drugs and medication... or boring conversation... or a heavy meal on a warm afternoon.

The movie is almost pure dialogue with no action scene whatsoever... and I loved it. Indeed, it would ironically have the same soporific effect on viewers who prefer the action-flick movie genre.

Soporific... what a wonderful new word I learned this week. It brings to memory of a time that really fits the description of this word. The year was 1979... and I was in Form 5 of boarding school. The Science subjects are all taught in the laboratory classroom where three long workbenches face the front blackboard. There were 25 students in our class consisting of 9 girls and 16 boys. By tradition, the girls would sit at the frontmost workbench while the boys take up the remaining two rows.

When it came to Physics class, the boys would make it a point to come early because everyone wants to sit in the back row, even if it means squeezing for space. At times, there would be up to 12 guys seated at the back... meaning that only 4 would sit in the middle row. Glaringly obvious and disproportionate. The reason for this is that Physics class is real boring and it is quite a challenge to remain awake. Presumably, sitting as far away from the teacher as possible would make it less likely for him to spot us dozing off during his lecture.

I could not be bothered to rush for a back row seat so most of the time I am one of the minority who sits in the middle row. To stop myself from falling asleep, I began to sharpen my skill in doodling. My Form 5 Physics notebook probably has more creative drawings than formulas or calculations. It still puzzles me sometimes how I ended up doing engineering.

Soporific... lovely word.