My Blog

        Computer is a necessity almost for everyone today. Among many of the software, these are the must-have because they take good care of your computer.

        1. Antivirus software : The best is Norton Antivirus. I would recommend you to install Norton System Works, cause it has Norton Antivirus, plus many other features like One Button Check-Up, Norton Go-Back, Norton Utilities, etc which will boost up and fix errors in your computer.

        2. Firewall : Windows XP has quite a good firewall, but somehow i still feel it’s not enough. You can download Zone Alarm Pro, which i think it’s the best firewall yet for me. It has security update from time to time, plus spyware scan and updates too.

        3. Spyware remover : There are many spyware removers/detectors which i cant say having just one is enough. I myself use a combination of 3 spyware detectors which are good and famous:Pest Patrol,Spybot Search & Destroy and Ad-aware. These three will not conflict one another after you make some settings to the scan option, and work just great together.Regular update is the key for being safe from the harm of the annoying and deadly spywares.

        4. Download accelerator : I personally recommend Download Accelerator Plus (DAP) because have been using it for a while now. It’s good and efficient, but got ads.You can get Getright, which is ad-free if you feel bothered by the ads.Download accelerator is a must-have for dial-up, as the connection speed is deadly!

        5. Cleaner: Also, there are many cleaning software available online for download, each has its pros and cons. Some cleaners might not be able to clean up your computer so well as they still leave some tracks behind. Evidence Eliminator claims to be the best cleaner as it cleans out everything, including those hidden codes and tracks. You might also want to try out Window Washer, which is another quite good cleaner.

        If you have trouble finding and using these software, let me know.

Movie : Swimming Upstream
Rating : 4.5/5

      I caught this movie, Swimming Upstream, on Astro Star Movies channel. I am glad that i did, because it’s simply an Oscar caliber film for me.

      Swimming Upstreams, based on a true story, tells the inspirational life story of an Australian swimmer, Tony Fingleton.

      Throughout this tale of competition in swimming we are privy to the competition within the home. Harold Fingleton (Geoffrey Rush) is an overbearing, abusive and alcoholic father. His wife, Dora (Judy Davis), a long suffering but heroic mother, has to put up with it to keep their family of four boys and one daughter together. Tony, the second eldest, is least favored by his father who is so consumed by his own demons that he is unable to acknowledge Tony’s success. Dora is always there for her children, especially Tony, eking out a living and soothing the flare-up tantrums during Harold’s drunken states. Overshadowed in his father’s eyes by his brothers it’s only when Tony displays an extraordinary swimming talent that he feels he has a shot at winning his father’s heart, and maybe even Olympic gold.

      Throughout the film, the conversations between a mother and a son provide some of the most touching moments. Dora is always there supporting and motivating Tony when he has lost his directions because of his father, while Tony will be there comforting his mother when she’s hurt by her husband. They are just plain conversations with simple words, yet so touching and beautiful.

      I wonder why this film was not heralded in the theatrical release, as it is one of the finest movies i have ever seen. It is an inspirational and touching story, one that has its rousing moments and also tender, real moments of loss and joy.

       Taiwan artist Jolin Tsai said in her newly published book that if you speak English in your dreams, your English has improved.I doubted it at first, until i had my "English Dream" for the first time over the past 20 years.

       Every now and then,I speak fluent English in my dreams, sort of in an American way–high speed and without "ah, eh, lah", which is kind of a new experience for a person with Chinese education background like me. I am not sure if i can do the same when i’m awake, but i think that shouldn’t be a problem as i now think of a sentence in English(that’s what my high school English teacher used to teach me),and it’s nothing like last time, a direct translation from Chinese to English.      

      Studying in local government universities makes the path of learning English, not to mention improving, harder. Examinations in Bahasa,lecturers sort of "campur-rojak" when they speak, and coursemates from different kind of backgrounds don’t use English as the primary communication language.

      I would say if you want to continue learning English, and improve it of course, watch more Tvs (whether be it a scary movie, a stand for nothing sit-com, a hypnotizing soap opera or a not-so-real reality TV show), and read more books ( it can be hopelessly romance novels, mission impossible sci-fis or horrible ghost stories). They’ve both got something you can learn. Then try to speak to people in English with no fear. The more mistakes you make, the more you learn. When your brain is saturated with English words, you’ll automatically start thinking in English and in no time, you’ll have your "English Dream", pushing your English to a new level.

      My paternal grandmother was a wonderful woman from China. She came to Malaya when she was still very young and fell in love with my grandfather. They made a perfect couple and gave birth to ten children. Ever since I was a child we would go to her house in a secluded Indian Kampong for Chinese New Year celebration. My entire family—aunts, uncles and cousins, would be brought together after a year’s parting, all waiting for the moment of reunion. The adults would sit around the table sipping tea and entertaining themselves with good conversation. We would play different kinds of fireworks, setting the neighbor’s roof on fire and adding colors to the dark and gloomy sky. The happiest moment of all would be when the clock struck twelve, as we kids lined up to accept blessings and most importantly, ang pau from our grandmother. My grandmother was forever smiling and laughing. I can still hear her laugh in my head. I can hear the exact same beautiful, boisterous and extremely happy laugh as I used to hear those Chinese New Years.

      There were a lot of fruit trees beside my grandmother’s house—durian, rambutan, guava, pomelo, pineapple, coconut, mango, sugarcane, etc. She would harvest those fruits from time to time for us. Because all the rambutan trees were so tall at that time, she would use a wooden staircase or a long stick to get to the fruits. Despite her old age, she moved swiftly and agilely and within minutes, all the rambutans started falling down. On the ground, we would stand by with plastic begs to collect her harvest. My cousins and I would run around the trees shrieking at the top of our lungs, but my grandmother never scolded us.

      A horrible stroke some years ago paralyzed my grandmother. She couldn’t move the lower half of her body, and had to sit on a wheelchair all the time. That’s the first time I started to realize my grandmother had grown old. As time passed by, she grew weaker and weaker and had to lie on her bed all day. That was when she started to forget things. I was grief seeing her condition, but nothing compared to the pain my parents suffered. I was glad she could still recognize all of us. Her voice had become weak, her body thin, but her angelic smile never faded. When I visited her, I would talk to her, and she to me. She would always say the same thing to me, perhaps not remembering she had said it before.

      “Your father works very hard because he has no money. You must study hard to repay him.”

      “I know, Gram.”

      When I was 21 my grandmother was getting worse. She couldn’t talk and couldn’t open her eyes. She had difficulty in eating that she grew thinner and thinner, not to mention weaker and weaker. She couldn’t see us so we held her hand while talking to her, making her feel cared and loved. We didn’t know she hear us or not because she could no longer gave responses. One day I reached out and held her hand. I sat there for maybe half an hour just holding her hand and kept talking to her. The amazing thing was I saw tears in the corners of her eyes. I wasn’t sure if she responded to me, but I believed deep down there inside her heart, she could hear me. I cried, but this time it was not from despair.

     "Your grandmother is in her last hours," my father said as he phoned me one day telling me the bad news several months after that. I drove to her house with my mother and sister. We stepped into her room and saw my father, aunts and uncle standing over her bed. There lay my grandmother. She lay there on her bed with her eyes closed, no more breathing. I stepped over to the left side of the bed and then stroked my grandmother’s arm. I held her hand, and my eyes began to water. I tipped my head back so that my unshed tears would roll back into my head. I tried so hard not to cry. I was here to comfort my father, and crying wouldn’t console him, but my tears came anyway as I stood there holding my grandmother’s hand and looking at her beautiful face.

      It has been a year now since my grandmother passed away. Sometimes, I can still hear her angelic voice in my head,

      “Your father works very hard because he has no money. You must study hard to repay him.”

      “I know, Gram.” I answer every time in my mind.

Everybody has fears. Hemophobia, insectophobia, claustrophobia, didaskaleinophobia… you name it. I of course, have fears. I am fear of growing up into an adult.

There isn’t an exact scientific or perhaps psychologic term for “fear of growing up”. The best I could think of are gerascophobia and gerontophobia, meaning “fear of growing old”. They aren’t exactly the match, because growing up into an adult and growing old are two different things for me. I do not fear of old age, just that I’m scared of being an adult. The fact that I’m petrified is because of R.I.W.

1. R for responsibility. An adult carries a lot of responsibilities. Responsibility for being a good son or daughter, responsibility for being a loving husband or wife, responsibility for being a caring father or mother, responsibility for being a sincere employer or employee, etc. For some people, they might have already carrying the responsibility of being a benign grandparent. Responsibilities are building up as you get older and older, which you can’t just shake it off but have to keep breathing and carrying it upon your shoulders.

2. I for imperfection. Being an adult, you must behave perfectly. You must watch your speeches, your actions, your deeds, your appearances…just about everything that could possibly be heard or seen by other people. In children’s eyes, you are the role model for them. Everything you say or do have great impact on the young souls. They might try to speak or act like you. That means you simply cannot do anything wrong without thinking of the consequences. In other words, you lose a part of freedom, a part of freedom that only a teenager has. It’s the freedom to be imperfect. An adult knows what he is trying to do all the time, regains his control when he’s loosing it and fixes things up when they went wrong. An adult is assumed to be a perfect person for children to learn and study from, just like a good mother and a good teacher. An adult simply cannot behave like a flawy teenager, whose behavior is sort of like “i-talk-what-i-want-i-don’t-care-what-may-come” or “i-do-what-i-want-you-don’t-like-step-aside”.

3. W for work. A teenager works for pocket money, an adult work to support his families. That’s another burden of growing up. Now note that it’s “families”, meaning your own family consisting of your parents, and the family you own later which is your husband or wife, and kids. Working isn’t as fun as studying, well except for the getting paid part, because you face a lot of pressures–pressure from your boss for project deadline, pressure from your contenders for customers, pressure from your colleagues for promotion and pressure from your families for money.

Perhaps there isn’t a term for “fear of growing up” does make sense. This kind of fear is actually made up of many fears, as I discovered later. Hypengyophobia (fear of responsibility), atelophobia (fear of imperfection) and ergophobia (fear of work) are just three examples among many of them. I would like to term “fear of growing up” as “adultphobia”, which I think the term literally carries the message of the fear itself.

            Perhaps there are many people who are “adultphobia” like me, but the question is, are you one of them?