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mattchan
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Name: Matthew
Country: United States
State: California
Gender: Male
Interests: To see more clearly,
To communicate more grace,
To do what is right.
Occupation: Computer related
Message: message me
Member Since:
10/27/2003
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| It wasn't so long ago that we were born.
Crawling across the tiled floor,
Digging holes into the damp sand,
Blowing out candles with soft puffs.
Toys stored away in dusty boxes,
Faded photos and old report cards,
Books and shoes outgrown,
Treasured memories for rainy days.
Which of these has the child,
borne and born in love,
brought back to his Father
before he could say "Dada"
Which of these have the parents,
A future planned,
A name whispered,
A day was not enough.
A day was not enough,
A lifetime's love poured in,
A lifetime's tears shed,
A lifetime's prayers offered.
But now that he is gone,
Can I bring him back again?
I will go to him,
but he will not return to me.
He will not return to me,
but I will go to him,
my hope is there,
my hope is there still.
2 Samuel 12
Henry David Wong III, born February 5th, 2009 to family friends. He left us the same day.
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| "The journey of a thousand miles begins with but a single step"
That was definitely not the main thought on my mind as I walked next to my sister and brother-in-law. We were taking a walk around the neighborhood to build back up her body after the surgery in preparation for her chemotherapy. The weather was gentle, and the walk was easy. But near the end of the walk, I could see that my sister was getting tired. The surgery had taken it's toll on her body, and what used to be a simple walk was now something that required a conscious effort. But she knew it for her good, and had decided to do it, regardless.
How often do we take things for granted till they are taken away? When the once-easy becomes hard, what is our response?
During my sister's chemotherapy, I had the opportunity to spend the night in the chemo ward in a fold-open armchair next to my sister's bed. To get water, they had a special water filtering machine in the kitchen outside (everything had to be kept as germ free as possible due to the lowered immune systems of people in the chemo ward). As I walked through the hallways to get some water for my sister, I passed by the rooms of various chemo patients. I heard something I had never heard before. A quailing whimpering rising and falling. Hearing it, you could feel the dread and pain reverberating through your veins. An old lady was undergoing chemo treatment, and her body wasn't taking it well. Chemotherapy is such a paradoxical treatment. You inject yourself with poison, hoping that it kills the cancer cells faster than it kills your 'good' cells. Why would anybody do such a risky and painful thing? But when it's your life on the line, you will do nearly anything to save it. There's this quote from House M.D.:
"Almost dying changes nothing, dying changes everything"
The next time you recover from something, will you brush off the experience thinking "I still have time, I'll change later". Do you want to wait till you are dying before you will take extreme measures to change the things in your life that are killing you?
During the thanksgiving holiday as my sister recovered at home after the chemotherapy treatment, she started making these little crafty turkey favors mounted on top of a card about thanksgiving. Then before we drove up to San Mateo for our family holiday dinner, we dropped by the Stanford hospital chemo ward. The nurses there greeted her warmly and gave her permission to hand out the favors to the patients in the wards. There were so many patients, nearly every single room was occupied. Many of whom would be spending Thanksgiving alone, surrounded by beeping machines, struggling to stay alive. As my sister went from room to room, she had the opportunity to talk with some of them. She listened to their stories, and shared of how her own treatment had been going. One such patient was a young lady who had just moved here from India. A few months after getting married, she found out that she had cancer. Getting hit by the knowledge of this hidden killer within her, stranded in the midst of a foreign country. I think she was greatly moved by my sister's caring that day. That a total stranger would care enough about how she was doing, who truly understood what she was going through, who would spend the time with her in the midst of her lonely suffering.
Each step that my sister took through that chemo ward might have been difficult (what if they reject my present? what if they don't want to be bothered? what if .. what if) But she made the conscious decision, that this was something not about herself, but about others.
There are many rooms in many hallways around you. There are many lonely people dying in them. A single step is where it starts, a single Savior is where it ends. | | |
| Groups, fringes, walking the road of life, short legs vs. long legs, distance, frustration.. all these crowded thoughts left my mind when I saw the sun sparkling off something in the corner of my eye..
Eeeeeeeeeeeeh... what is it?
It doesn't look very practical, and the sign underneath it says "Not a FDC Connection" (looking it up online, it seems that FDC = Fire Department Connection.. but why would they say it twice? Fire Department Connection *Connection*) Maybe it's some sort of joke, or a secret lab's puzzle doorknob. UFO refilling station? Artsy-fartsy piece? Who knows what it could be..
By the time I had puzzled over this and taken a picture, my coworkers were already out of view in the distance. And I was left to walk back to work alone.
Greeeaat.. that's totally not a ending. :\ We need something to tie it all back together, something that takes all the elements and emotions and wraps it up in a pithy moral...
Oh wait.. one more thing.. there's still a Part 3. | | |
| Recently, after eating lunch; I've taken to going for a walk outdoors since the weather has been so nice (aiy! The sunshine.. it burns! :P) It's a good opportunity to stretch my legs and get some fresh air before chaining myself back into the cubicle farm.
Usually I walk alone, but sometimes I bump into coworker triplets (don't ask me why it always seems to end up in triples.. I guess 3's company and 4's a crowd :P) and I kinda tag along during the walk and chat a bit. Today as I headed out into the sunshine, I saw some coworkers finishing up their lunch and getting ready for a walk too. But I wasn't in the mood to be social, and so just started to walk off myself.
I had a good head start, and could barely hear them by the time they started off themselves. There's been a lot to think about recently, so I was taking my time and letting the sun thaw out my air-cond-frozen limbs. Slowly, the droning of insects and whispering breeze surrounded me and before I realized it, I was turning the corner along the usual path I take.
And lo! My co-workers had taken a shorter route, and were now ahead of me. We exchanged vague greetings as we sighted each other and continued our walks. I increased my pace to catch up to them; but weirdly, found myself unable to do so. My long strides and increased pace somehow failed to bring me any closer to the group. I was close enough to hear what they were talking about, but somehow I couldn't draw up beside them. For a moment, I was quite frustrated; wasn't I walking faster? weren't my legs longer? why couldn't I catch up?
As this was going through my mind, I settled into walking a couple meters behind them, not part of the group, but on the fringes of it. Maybe it wasn't that I couldn't physically catch up (If I started running, I felt that I could for sure overtake them), but rather something internal which held me back from merging with the group... or maybe they had noticed my increased pace, and were increasing their own to stay ahead of me.
With such heavy thoughts, my steps slowed, and the gap started increasing again...
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| Run for the hills, and cover your baby's ears. For I am about to talk of all things Apple...
This love affair (if it could be called an affair, it's not like I was married to the PC or anything) started when I was asked during my job interview what desktop I would like to use "A Mac or a PC?". At that time, my impression of Macs were of the grimy abused lab stations they had in the school lab. But since everybody else in my department used Macs, I decided to try it out too.
And what a breath of fresh air it was! Virus-free, Spyware-free, Cruft-free, powerful integrated Unix backend, Well designed software that didn't give me headaches... Where had this computer been all my life??
Oh, and let me get the 'bad news' out of the way. Yes, the Mac does crash sometimes..... like once in a blue moon :P Mostly when I had too much random flash stuff open in multiple firefox tabs (it sucks up all the RAM and CPU), but it's easy to just stop firefox and run it again, without bringing the rest of the system down or needing to reboot. (Look under the upper left corner apple icon menu -> 'Force Quit' : Keyboard shortcut -> Option-Apple-Esc, it's like the Windows Task Manager)
When I'm done working on my MacBookPro (MBP from here on to save on typing), I just close the lid, and it goes to sleep. The softly glowing power LED letting me know that all is well :) Then when the new day starts, flip open the lid, and whaazam! Everything is popping up ready to get to work again. (No need to shut down the computer. I often go months without needing to restart or shutdown the computer at all.)
So what programs do I use most often?
1) Quicksilver ( http://blacktree.com/?quicksilver : Free download) - Mostly I use this for quickly launching applications without having to hunt and search for the icon. But it can do soo much more (Google "Quicksilver OSX" to see what I mean). If you just need to launch apps, you can also use the built in Spotlight search (Default system hotkey is Apple-Space). Just start typing in the letters of the application you want, like "Fir", and it'll autocomplete it for you and have Firefox ready to launch just by pressing Enter. (You can cancel by pressing Esc). A absolute timesaver!
2) Textmate ( http://macromates.com/ : $63) - The text-editor of text-editors... If you code at all, you've probably already heard of this. Swarms of programmers have converted to the Mac just so they could use this editor :P I use it all day long for my work, and am even using it right now to type up this blog post! If you're not a programmer, no worries, you do have a free text editor built into the system called 'TextEdit' (try using Spotlight to load it up! Apple-Space, then 'Text', then Enter)
3) Mail ( http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/mail.html : Free, built in) - The included email application. It can hook up to your gmail account (Google 'Gmail IMAP osx mail'), and all your other email accounts. If you want to try something cool, Create a new message, then click on the "Show Stationary" icon at the top of the message window :)
4) Adium ( http://www.adiumx.com/ : Free download) - IM application that hooks up to nearly all the different IM networks. Kinda like Trillian on the PC. Easily customizable and pretty solid piece of software :)
Then also some For-Fun applications:
1) Photo Booth ( http://maczealots.com/tutorials/photo-booth/ : Free, built in) - Take photos from your built-in webcam! Try out the different effects! :P (Photos are stored in the "Pictures" / Photo Booth folder)
2) Perian ( http://perian.org/ : Free download) - The built in Quicktime player can play a lot of stuff, but a lot of downloadable videos are in formats that Quicktime doesn't support. In that case, you need Perian, which lets you watch and listen to most of the popular video formats out there. (After installing Perian, make sure to restart your computer so that it can take effect.)
3) Comic-Life ( http://plasq.com/ : Free, built in) - The included Comic-Life application lets you create your own Comics with drag-drop simplicity :) Try taking some photos in Photobooth, then dragging them over into your Comic!
There's still more applications and tips/tricks, but I'll have to wait till Part 2 to post the up. Until then, have fun!
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