Dang

So, I found an e-book that has a LARGE screen at last.

https://www.dadirect.com/books/iRexDR1000S.asp

This thing is massive! The screen is 10.2 inches. That is much larger than my current reader.

This thing would be perfect for reading PDF files that cannot be converted to fit nicely on my small reader.

Too bad it is NOT cheap. Even without the baby coming I would not want to pay the money this costs!

The link above prices it at 1599 Australian Dollars. Google shows:

1599 Australian dollars = 1 483.2324 U.S. dollars

So. . that is one damned expensive book! I would love to have one, but there is no chance of that. It costs too much.

Rhythm

Since Siew is staying in Penang I feel like the rhythm of my life was completely disturbed.

I have a lot of adjusting to do. I have been spoiled by Siew. She has always helped by taking care of the house, preparing my lunch, washing clothes, preparing something for dinner or things for me to cook straight away when I get back. I already appreciated what she did for me, but I did not realize how much her help helped me on a daily basis.

Now I barely have time. I get back late, have to cook, try to relax, try to sleep (which I was never good at, but now it is a bit worse), I TRY to get up and get something for breakfast (I pretty much never eat breakfast anyway, yeah, I know I should) and TRY to make something for lunch. . . but there is not enough time.

It all comes back to rhythm. Once I get my daily rhythm restored, then I will be able to manage everything.

I guess it is all kind of like riding a bicycle and hitting a bump that knocks your feet off the pedals. You are still moving, but now you do not have control anymore. Until I can get my feet on the pedals again I am floundering wondering what the hell is going on and why all of the bumps in the road are hurting my ass all of a sudden.

Well, damn

Ok, so this has been a strange weekend.

First, we drove to Penang on Thursday night. We went to immigration and got my visa, but they have not given me the work part because I need an "offer" letter from my company. We have to go back later and get that.

Second, Siew is remaining in Penang until after she gives birth and possibly a month after that for her "maternity" month. Around the time that she is to give birth I am taking a couple of weeks off from work so I can try to be there when she goes into labor.

Third, I drove back home and unloaded things. I went to change something on the wireless and found that the pc has developed a problem. The problematic 1.5 TB harddrive is showing a BAD status for S.M.A.R.T. which most likely means this drive is going to fail, very soon.

To combat that failure I just made a backup of data and have contacted, hopefully, the person who called me from Seagate to follow-up on my very bad experiences with their drives recently.

I am going to be going to class soon, even though I am damned tired. Maybe that will help me settle my mind a bit with everything else that's going on.

It is going to be weird sleeping alone for the next few months or so. Siew and I have not been apart longer than 1 night (2 different times) since we got married. I know that she is feeling worried and nervous, and it is not helped that I am far from her.

Hopefully her mother and sister can hold their tongues while she is at their house. If they cannot they will probably hate and be frightened of me for the rest of their lives.

Ok, I have to get going. I need to stretch and change and go to class.

Ouch, again

So, last week at Bujinkan I re-injured my left leg.

Years ago I was being stupid and dropped into a full-front split without warming up at all in order to show off. When I did that I tore the muscle in my left leg. It has bothered me over the years. But I thought it was ok.

It turns out that it was NOT ok! I went to practice last week without warming up or stretching. I was fine until a short break that I decided to stretch and went too fast into a stretch and re-tore the injured spot in my leg. I felt it pop.

I wrapped it with a bandage for a few nights and thought it was mostly ok.

Today, however, we were practicing something pretty strenuous and I managed to injure it again.

I put some cold water, in a bottle, on the injured spot and I will have to wrap it again. I read some things about healing scar tissue using massage. It seems I need to start rubbing my thigh every night to get rid of the scar tissue and remove this long-term problem.

It is funny to think that I injured it when trying to show off and it is coming back to haunt me even after 7 years. There is a moral to that story!

Well, that blows

Malaysia is a tropical country. Computers are like dust magnets. In a tropical country the ambient temperature is murder to a very clean computer, let alone a dirty one that has poor air-flow.

I had noticed that the pc temperatures had started to climb up a little bit. I have been planning to get something to help clean the dust out from the computer. You can not wash it, of course, so most people use compressed air to blow the dust out.

Now, this being a tropical place, you might think that it would be easy to find pc cleaning tools. It is not. Instead, do it yourself is seldom done here, so the tools needed to do that sort of thing are almost impossible to find. Almost NO ONE here cleans a computer. They wait until it dies and then replace it, wondering the whole time, "What happened?"

I decided that I need to do something about it. I went to ACE Hardware (an American hardware store chain that has several locations here in Malaysia. I looked everywhere in the store and found nothing that would help until I was about to leave. Then I spotted something that might work. A work-bench blower. I looked at it and decided it would do the trick, but did not buy it. I wanted to look at other options first.

What I really wanted was an air compressor. No one seems to sell them here though. Apparently that is just too specialized to find just anywhere.

So we went to Tesco. There I found a shop vacuum that I thought might do the trick. It can vacuum wet and dry and more importantly it can also blow. Shop vacuums are usually pretty powerful. It also had some attachment tools, including a crevice tool. That did it for me. This gave me a blower, a multi-purpose vacuum and the crevice tool to increase the air pressure to near the speeds that I would have with an air compressor.

I brought it home and cleaned the pc out carefully. Do not let the fans spin unless you disconnected them, they are generators if they spin and that can cause damage to the pc!

Now the pc temperature is back to where I want it. This computer runs about 8-10 degrees Celsius over ambient temperature. That is not bad at all. If I were in a cooler climate this would be one cold machine.

So, now I can clean my computer more easily and I have a tool that can help clean up potential messed made by our soon-to-be-born child.

Bujinkan, acrobatics or martial arts?

So, I have attended 3 classes of Bujinkan so far.

In the first class I learned how to do a very strange running evasion technique, how to do side rolls and how to do backward rolls. I was already pretty good at rolling from all of my years of playing at acrobatics, so I only had to learn minor variances on what I already knew.

In the second class I learned how to do forward side rolls and a basic stance/evasion stepping combination. They covered forward rolls, but I already knew how to do those. The instructor likes to skip you past things if you already know how to do them, so I did not have to practice what I already knew.

The first two classes were in an indoor, open-air, location on a hardwood floor.

The third class we trained outside in the grass (much to my joints' mutual relief!). We worked on ukemi, falling techniques. I am pretty good at acrobatics, but not at just simply falling to the ground, I found out.

We started with forward falls. The way that it is done in Bujinkan is a little different than other styles. Your arms are in front of you, but your elbows are pushed as close together as possible, you land on your palms and lower your elbows to the ground after that to absorb the shock. At the same time you thrust your legs out behind you, pushing up on to the balls of your feet so that only your arms, hands and toes are touching the ground.

Then, we worked on backwards falls. This involves rocking back on your back, and slapping your palms and then arms, again absorbing the shock, pulling your knees to your chest as you rock. Then you rock back forward, drop one foot to the ground and kick out with the other foot as though you were kicking someone in the leg.

After that, we worked on side falls. To start we knelt with one leg up and one knee on the ground then rolled onto our hip and then to our back, throwing the same side's palm to the ground and throwing the same side's leg to the ground parallel to the arm while pulling the opposite side's leg up so that the foot is resting on the ground with the knee in the air.

Then we started doing the falls over a human target. One person would fall into a ball and we had to use them as an obstacle to help us with our falls.

We practiced rolls for a long time before we started doing side falls downhill, using the same technique as before to stop ourselves from rolling down the hill.

I have not learned any attacks yet. But, that is expected. I have to learn how to protect myself from harm before I can learn to harm.

I am enjoying the class quite a lot. I feel better, despite the lumps and bruises from each class, for doing this. I want to make it my habit to practice what I learn each day at least a little. That way I can improve and get a lot more exercise than what I had been getting in the last few years.

I would really enjoy losing about 10kg of fat. That would make me thinner, but still not super-skinny like I used to be.

Continued practice of Bujinkan should help me a lot and later I will be able to pass what I learn, and what I know, to our child. That should be interesting and fun at the same time. I have quite a few crazy things that I can teach to our child, hopefully Siew does not want to kill me for doing so!

Drivers

Here in Malaysia I have been driving for several months now. I have to say that overall. . the driving culture here is terrible.

It is a lot like Kentucky's driving culture, ironically.

This is my overall review of the driving here:

1. People seldom use turn signals to indicate the direction they want to go. They MIGHT use it AFTER they start to change lanes, however.

2. People seldom obey the speed limit. They also become angry or irritated if you obey the speed limit.

3. People never drive in a way that helps protect themselves. If they would just look ahead and behind themselves and adjust to the things around them, they would be safer.

4. Lanes are optional. People do not seem to understand that it is beneficial to stay inside the lane you are currently in. Frequently you will see drivers driving ON the lane lines.

5. Functions of the vehicle are NEVER checked. I can not believe how many cars I have seen that do not have correctly functioning lights.

6. Headlights are not necessarily important at night. I have seen a fair amount of people forgetting to turn their headlights on. Or, there are many cars with the bright xenon bulb type of headlights that I hate.

7. Flashing headlights behind you. Here people like to flash their brights at the person in front of them to show that you are in their way and you really need to get the hell out of their way, now.

8. Distance between cars. People here like to get too close to each other. Way too close. Even at highway speeds people still tailgate, including semi-trucks and buses! It is really scary! Even in wet conditions, or downhill conditions, they will stay too close to each other.

9. Rain does not affect driving speed necessarily. People seldom slow down much (if at all) in rain.

10. Cellular phones. I see lots and lots of people talking on phones or text messaging while driving!

11. Attitude. Here is the weird part. People here actively complain that the driving here is the government's fault. However, they do nothing to correct their OWN driving. Driving schools here take shortcuts to get you a license. I have heard it is a standard practice now to bribe the driving examiner, but this is not confirmed. It is also, I have heard, customary to bribe a police officer who pulls you over. The police force here is small and seemingly underpaid. In a small country with a small population this should be acceptable. However, when the people blame the government and the police for their own actions, that gets me. Even if the government makes a law, not a lot is done to enforce it, they do not have the manpower to pull it off.

This country has low taxes, so they do not have the funds to pull in more manpower like some other countries do. This is not necessarily bad. The only thing is that BOTH parties are to blame. The government should do its best to enforce the rules and prevent corruption, but at the same time, and more importantly, each driver should be doing their best to make THEMSELVES as safe as possible.

That all being said. I have been taking pictures of people who I considered to be driving exceptionally badly while I was out and about. Most of the pictures here are from when I was a passenger. A few are from when I was not. However, I took the ones when I was driving, when I was at a complete stop. :-)


A very bad bus, pushing people on the road at highway speeds!



The same bus from the side.















Sometimes the worst drivers you see on the road are taxi-drivers.

An odd event

Yesterday I went for a walk during one of my breaks during work. I walked past this closed down Burger King on my way to Plaza Mount Kiara. When I was going there, I did not see anything special.

On my way back from PMK I saw this:

 

This place has been shut down for quite some time, I think. I wonder if they started the fire to try and claim insurance money?

Blister

I have to show this:

 

Here is a nice picture of my toe from when I finished my second martial arts class at Bujinkan. As you can see, I have a rather nasty blister. It is awesome!