I have a phone call with my dad this evening. We talked about some issues in handling of family properties. At the end of the conversation my father mentioned sometimes he feels he is counting days. He is in his mid-80s so it is not a complete surprise. Since my mother passed away last year my father is living alone. Actually this is something already on my mind, perhaps subconsciously. But we have seldom talked openly about it.

It started when my mother was departed after a short struggle with cancer. I feel I have lost a part of myself. I have not lived with my parents for quite some time. When I was young I want so much to get away. I moved out to the dorm when I went to college. I was so happy to have a place of my own. Later I started working and I have moved across the Pacific to San Francisco altogether. I was mostly focusing on myself, seeking a good career and to make the most of my life.

Often people don't think much of something until you lost them. Parents are always there. I can always go back to them once in a while. Well now my mom is no longer there. And many conversations between us will not happen anymore.

I have never regret coming to San Francisco. It is a fulfillment both careerwise and personally. After spending almost 1/3 of my life in this city, I come to see it as my home town even more than my birth place. Most things I have done I will not choose differently if I were given the choice again. But it is also true that by moving away I have become somewhat cut off from my family and relatives. My mother was often the bridge between myself and my relatives. Now that she was gone I become even more isolated.

My uncles and aunts are all in their 80s and 90s. They are all going to depart fairly soon. Our redemption is in the next generation. But the picture is grim. I have written about low fertility rate on a macro level. On the personal level, it means several of my cousins have well passed marrying age but have remain single. We were once children growing up together. Now it seems we won't have enough children of the next generation growing up together like we once did.

Having say that I must not complaint too much. Having Tatchee is already a great blessing for us. But if one child is good, then two must be better. But it seems the prospect of Tatchee having a sibling is diminishing. My system engineering side tells me that we should have redundancy. What if he contacted a deadly disease? What if he were hit by a car? What if Tatchee does not has a child of his own? I am looking ahead to the day when I die. Would that leave him as the end of the gene line? Who is going to burying him when Tatchee too has aged and die?

Back in my childhood in Hong Kong my mom has given me a rich network of family ties. Something I've never learned to appreciate until recently. And what do I provide to Tatchee in my turn? To think about he will inherit my social isolation, and not to mention a world of global climate change, I start to feel ashamed.

2009.12.28 [personal] - comments

Monday is Tatchee's preschool's day off. I brought him to my office for a few hours so that I can work there. I brought the Totoro DVD to entertain him. And I also brought along some toy cars. One of them is his favorite police. I was worrying about its siren and the sound it can make. I warned Tatchee not to make noise it in the office. Once he was there he understood that noise is not appropriate and voluntary put this car away. Finally, I bring him along to an hour long meeting. He played quietly in the meeting room the whole time. People are fairly impressed by him. I'm happy that the day turned out quite well and he wasn't too bored.

Later I talked to my neighbor about this. She told me when she was very little her mom brought her to her office one time. To this day she still have a vivid memory of that trip, like the typewriter that impressed her. I'm writing this down so that I can chat with him when he gets older to see if he remember this day :)

2009.11.30 [personal] - comments

I am off to a vacation to Perú shortly. I was hit by flu in the last few days. So my preparation is somewhat interrupted. I hope the trip will be smooth from now on.

2009.10.31 [travel, personal] - comments

Last Saturday I have joined WalkSF in their annual Peak to Peak Walk. We gathered the starting point at West Portal. It was sunny when I took off from the east side. Who would have expected it was actually drizzling in West Portal! We headed out to the wood in Mount Davidson and then Twin Peaks and over a series of hills in San Francisco. When we have arrived on Twin Peaks, we were right at the edge of the morning fog. The scenery change from instance to instance. One moment we saw the Sutro Tower floating in the air, a moment later it was hidden by fog. I find such scenery magical. I have also visited the beautiful campus of USF for the first time. The walk ended in Coit tower where we have a small picnic.

I was also using this walk as a training opportunity for my upcoming trekking trip in Peru. I carried a backpack with 20 pounds weight the entire day. I don't know if this is a significant factor, but I was really tired at the end of the day.

2009.10.27 [travel, San Francisco] - comments

Jean de Florette / Manon des Sources (1986)
Director: Claude Berri

It was those tragedies, those tragedies so filled with sorrow and irredeemable regrets that it will wrench your heart. On the hills of Provence, where serene farms surround quaint hill town, where life is tranquil and air is fresh, this heartbreaking tale has unfolded.

Papet and Ugolin are the prominent Soubeyran family in the village. They plotted to take over the neighbor's farm in order to control a hidden spring in the property. The Soubeyrans were about to start a carnation planting venture. In this arid region, access to water is vital. This spring was critical for their carnation’s irrigation.

When the owner has died in an accident, they believe they can buy the land cheap. To their great astonishment, its heir did not sell out. Instead they have decided to move in themselves. Jean Cadoret, a tax collector from the city of Crespin, was the owner's nephew and the son of the Florette, who has left the village to marry to a blacksmith when she was young. Jean bring along his wife and young daughter Manon to fulfill the dream of his life, to start their new life in the country.

Jean has a great plan for the family farm. He brought along capital, tools and modern agriculture knowledge from the city. On top of that he toiled tireless with unwavering determination. But his crux is water. Once the drought has set in, he saw his hard work withering away. Ugolin has befriended Jean on his arrival but contrived to sabotage his effort. Above all, he has done everything to ensure Jean would not discover the hidden spring, those water under his feet that would have absolved all his problems. For all his passion and diligence he was undermined by the merciless nature, the devilish neighbors and his own faults. The pain ended in little Manon's unforgettable shriek.

The story continues in part 2. After losing the farm to Soubeyrans, Manon has run away and stayed in the hill. She made a living by herding sheep. The carnation planting has bought financial success. But Papet was worried that Ugolin has not fathered a descendant for the clan. When Ugolin finally did fall in love, by fate he falls madly in love to Manon, who has then grown up into a young beauty but an elusive spirit. Manon would become the avenging star to the Soubeyrans, making them pay for the crime they have committed. Once again water shortage has inflicted great distress on the farmers. This time it was the Soubeyrans on the edge. Their punishment has come down on them so hard that, by the end, I have grown compassion for the sinners.

2009.10.18 [movie] - comments

Yesterday's storm has caused quite a bit of havoc for me. It wasn't the first time we were out of power during a storm. But this time I saw the electric pole in front of my house exploded in a blindingly lightning. It continues 4-5 more times in the span of half an hour. Firemen has closed off our street because live wires were still dangling from the pole. We went out to the street with trepidation because we have to pick up our son from pre-school. I found there was a one foot deep flooded pond to wade through in order for us to go out. We are stopped from returned home for another hour until the PG&E people have arrived. The good things is PG&E restored the power by 9 pm. Also there seems to be no injury other than the damaged equipment.

Meanwhile I'm tallying the damage in household electronics and our power system. One of our cell phone charger that was plugged the wall has exploded. We first noticed this when we are puzzled to find an object that looks like a shell of a capacitor on the floor. Other equipment damages may end up causing us a few hundred dollars.

2009.10.14 [personal] - comments

Last night I was in this unfortunate incident. I was walking in Mission when a young man behind me suddenly fell down, knocked himself unconscious and was bleeding on the street. I called 911 for an ambulance. This was perhaps the first time I use the emergency service. I gave the dispatcher my location. It was an small alley, those name I only come to know for the first time despite having walked by it many times. Nevertheless, the dispatcher immediately identified the street. This is all more impressive because I have mispronounced the street name. She sent an ambulance to the scene. It takes less than 5 minutes from the time I picked up the phone to the arrival of the ambulance. I saw the young man was getting help. I hope he was only drunk and suffer no more than a bruise on his face.

The professionalism of the personnel in the emergency services deserves my praise. It gives me a warm feeling that whoever run into trouble, help is always at hand. I also happen to know this is a hot button budget issue beacause each time this team is dispatched, it costs the city a good deal of money. And certain population with chronic issue is abusing the service disproportionately.

This brings to the question, how much do citizen willing to pay in tax and what level of service do they expect. I am disappointed that people seems unwilling to acknowledge the connection between the two. Government are facing a lot of budget issues lately. People are adamantly against tax raise. On the other hand they also react strongly to any service cut, be it for school, transit or parks and recreation. There are always a constituent to claim the service is essential and to fight vigorously for the cut.

So what should the government do? Cut waste! They said. I am certain that the government is not working nearly as efficiency as it should be. But it is also a huge bureaucrat resistant to change. Its hands are tied in many ways, often by the rules set by the constituents themselves. But the fatal fault is the thinking that budget problem has an easy solution. People expect this to be painless. "Waste" is something that shouldn't be there in the first place. And it is the only thing that stop people from getting what they are entitled.

Cut waste was the popular solution Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed in his bid for the California Governor in 2003. But how much waste has he managed to cut? A quick glance at the State Budget document shows that the total budget has raised 30% during his term to the peak in 2007, only to be forced down sharply due to the plummet in revenue after 2007. As the Schwarzenegger government themselves have acknowledged, "for much of the last decade, state spending grew faster than population and inflation." So much for the cut waste fantasy.

Many people believe that our government is broken. It probably is. But I believe the democratic process being practiced is also broken. After all it is our process that created this government.

2009.10.07 [politics] - comments

The title of this precentation Data and Capital Markets in Money:Tech 2008 is not very obvious. It is actually an excellent presentation on the state-of-art of database design. Dr. Michael Stonebraker is behind a series of database innovation for several decades from INGRES and Postgres up to his current work on StreamBase Systems. In this talk he has criticized the traditional RDBMS as something woefully outdated. He has presented several new directions in database design that he think will soon upstage the current generation of RDBMS systems.

2009.09.28 [tech] - comments

I've mentioned that I'm reading Richard Florida's Who's Your City. It explores the finding that innovation and creativity are often concentrated in certain region. The location a person lives has a great impact on one's life but people have often overlook this factor. I'm so interested in the topic that I have pick up some other related books as well as some book I've read in the past. I plan to do a summary on all of them shortly. [more...]

2009.09.23 [book] - comments

You may have aware of the media buzz around the British government has made an posthumous apology to the mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing, who despite of his contribution in World War II, was dishonored by the conviction of being gay in 1952. The government's apology is perceived as fair an uncontroversial, given Turing's monumental contribution to computer science and that gay is not longer considered a crime today. [more...]

2009.09.22 comments

I'm reading Richard Florida's 2008 book "Who's Your City". In this book he asserts that the location where one lives has significant impact on every aspect of one's life. Therefore one should give it major consideration and choose it consciously. [more...]

2009.09.14 [book] - comments

今天好辛苦地從網上找到一堆中國方言的例子，紀錄下來跟大家分享一下。我只懂粵語，所以好不容易才找都其他方言的紀錄，如有什麼地方弄錯請見諒。 [more...]

2009.07.19 [language, chinese] - comments

I have done some performance benchmarking for Python's ctypes library. I am planning to use ctypes as an alternative to writing C extension module for performance enhancement. Therefore my use case is slight different from the typical use case for accessing existing third party C libraries. In this case I am both the user and the implementer of the C library. [more...]

2009.07.16 [python] - comments

When I first started blogging, I have a lot of geeky posting about software development. The idea of blogging is to write on short subjects frequently. It is different from writing a long article, which is so burdensome many people end up not doing it at all. But in practice, I have not lived up to expectation of a prolific blogger. Sometimes the gap between postings can be a few months. [more...]

2009.07.12 [python, tech] - comments

8pm in the evening, it was those time of the day when sunlight shine horizontally from the west. Looking out of the window, it illuminated distance objects in a glowing golden light. The crown of the tree outside was highlighted today. A little bit of drizzle coming out of nowhere has just passed. There was just enough moisture in the air for a rainbow to emerge. For a few minutes a beautiful picture has appeared in front of my eyes. I feel thankful for a having a good day. [more...]

2009.07.11 [personal] - comments

Just to follow up with more fun with Google Earth. I have captured another picture a short distance to the northeast of Angkor. The are many dots scattered in this territory that look like bomb craters. Unlike the fields to the south, there seems to have little trace of human in this area. What are these dots really? [more...]

2009.07.05 [geography] - comments

I have spent this evening travelling in the ancient city of Angkor. Unfortunately I am not able to set foot in this land yet. Instead I have visited Angkor virtually using Google Earth from my home. It is a small pity that I wasn't going there personally. But what an incredible experience does Google Earth provide! The aerial image gives me so much intelligence on this distance land that even travelling on the ground cannot achieve. He go here. [more...]

2009.07.03 [travel, geography] - comments

Yesterday the car free event Sunday Streets was held in Mission. A section of 24th St and Valencia St were closed to traffic so that people can come to the street to play. Since I live nearby, I just rolled down the hill on my bike to check it out and then have lunch and go for a movie. [more...]

2009.06.08 [San Francisco] - comments

While I have ridden my most favorite Golden Gate Bridge bicycle route great many times, today I have extended my range to the Larkspur ferry terminal. What promoted me to go is because bicyclists are offered free ride on the ferry in the weekends of May. This gives me a great excuse to explore the part of Marin County that I have not been to before. It delights me to find a bike path that goes nearly all the way from the Golden Gate Bridge to Corte Madera. The path goes through the mud flats along the bay. While it is not as spectacular as the Golden Gate Bridge, it offers me a quiet and nice diversion. [more...]

2009.05.23 [San Francisco] - comments

Paris je t'aime (2006)
Director: 18 group of directors [more...]

2009.05.21 [movie] - comments