Picatho's causeries

I think most seniors love Gurney Plaza and Queensbay Mall in Penang, even with its cold air conditioning inside. Maybe it's because nowadays the sun is too shining out at our clime and people are dreading stepping outside. Mall walking, or ambling around a shopping center for exercise, has become an option other than the fitness club.

Mall walking began when the first fully enclosed U.S. mall, the Stockdale, opened in Minnesota in 1956 and local doctors counseled patients recovering from heart attacks to exercise there, away from the snow and ice of Minnesota's harsh winters.

Since I've had given up badminton 2 years ago, exercise to me has become less and irregular. Sometimes it's just hard to summon up the enthusiasm to make it happen, sometimes it's a lost track of time, or perhaps the love of home exercise has faded year by year and gradually letting my treadmill be laid for dust.

So walk the mall or ambling around a shopping center has become my main exercise, and as usual, I went for shopping for exercise at Queensbay day before yesterday with my old partner as well as my youngest granddaughter. I walked tier by tier for several km from the south end to the north end. Not only she, my active two-year-old had given me a chance of non-stop chasing around exercise, her occasional annoying preferences to be carried up with demanding directions had also worked up my old bones.

As I think, by walking the mall and at the same time pointing out the things around her, such as the guard wearing uniform or the shop painted in red color, is grateful!

I was recently introduced into Facebook by friends for networking and friendship purposes. Naturally first and foremost the friends finding is a very encouraging thing to do.

Luckily I'm befriended in this circle and most of my invitations were courteously welcome excepted there is one political figure in Penang, a blogger who then turned MP, had given me a cold shoulder. Doesn't he know that I'm not going to rub shoulders with him but merely to hear his political views of which I've had admired to long ago. That's why I contributed few sums as a political donation to him during the 308.

Now it seems that my donation is not even worth a single sen. I do acknowledged my friends' saying that all political people are (my notation: not all) non fuck-able!

Venue: Penang Corner Club
Highlight: Periodic number-check on some of the Chung Ling (Pri) High School 1970's old boys.

Sixth is a significant number to this group of my friends who have known each other since our secondary school. Some of them are already 60, or will be 60 next year. We are no doubt be categorized into "one could pass away any time within another 10 years" category, and unique concerns regarding health & retirement loom in our horizon.

We met together cheerfully on the last Sunday just to show our respective "LP" faces, to twitter on about health and most importantly to exchange greetings. I boosted that now we basically need more shakes of cock for the last drop of urine when doing a piss. Experiences have shown that how you "use" you "brother" in mid-life does contribute to your health status when you are older.

Nevertheless, though wrinkles were significant not only on our faces but certain part of our bodies, yet we all looked positive while associating. This includes our common instinct that we still can't keep our eyes off a pair of big ones of beautiful animals on the street. Don't blame us since British Medical Journal found that men are more than twice as likely as women to be sexually active in old age but good health is the key for both to feeling naughty.

We all knew that to maintain our health, we need to strike a balance in our life, to control stress, to eat and play well, of which are easy to prescribe but hard to do in this chemical world we live in. "So don't take whatever "LP" foods to eat with binge" I suggested. We all laughed and blithely moving on with other issues until we had cleared the table.

I was all the while much skeptical about Ubuntu. I googled and binged for days on how to get the Ubuntu be installed but yet still didn't have the courage to venture a step farther when booting from a live CD. The hesitation or perhaps the fear had dragged me for a couple of days, as if age had stole onward and benumbed me more and more.

Until the last few days when I came across a statement, posted by one of forum's users like this: "Never wade in water you're afraid to swim in unless it's the Linux pond, cause there's always a life ring in the forums." and that had just reminisced about my words of courage to my little grandchild during a pool-bath time the other day like this: "girl, grandpa is holding your hands and don't be afraid to lay down your body into water." So I took both courages in both hands to explore the usage possibility of Ubuntu.

After 2 attempts of installation, I finally got the Ubuntu having dual booting with Winxp installed inside my Compaq notebook. Everything were seemed workable except the Broadcom wireless lan that was totally not listening to the kernel. I clicked and clicked everywhere to try for any miracle to enable the wireless icon be popping out but gradually getting all in a fluster at the end. Suddenly the impression "is that I'd missed something during the installation" drew away my entire IQ and inadvertently reinstalled the Ubuntu again. Only when after I got the similar defeated desktop, then I realized that I was a computer-idiot! This time I was getting smarter and drew a straight furrow to fire up the Firefox for pounding questions on Google. Finally I got the solution thanked to this friendly tutorial.

Next day, I thought of getting my Lexmark Z1420 wireless printer to work with Ubuntu and as usual I'd to bury myself into search engines. I'd searched arduously for clues, I'd spent long hours of laborious effort, yet Ubuntu was still neglected to marry my printer. I could only bemoaned of being on the horns of a dilemma. The trouble is that I have to alternatively reboot into Winxp to perform my print jobs. If someone asks me to change printer, I'll rather making a U turn back to the road of Windows.

I was much encouraged in learning the Ubuntu-ibus to be functioned inside Tomboy Notes and Gedit as well as enabling my Chinese's files correctly be read-and-written. But Ibus failed to work properly; the system prompted - if you can not use Ibus, please add below lines in $HOME/.bashrc, and relogin your desktop. After inputing these 3 lines; export GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus;export XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus;export GT_IM_MODULE=ibus, the Ibus eventually worked by firstly to enable IBus daemon; secondly right click on any blanked area of client's window to select Ibus as input method and thirdly right click on the keyboard icon of Ibus in the notification area to select the desired input method from the combobox. Switching to and from Ibus thus required more clicks and is not easier than using Ctrl+Alt keys in Windows for Asian input.

Using Tomboy Notes and Sticky Notes is found to be not productivity improvement over the using of my Windows version of Cinta Notes and Stickies. Cinta Notes allowed me to make multiple tags on single note and the relevant source url address was just automatically be saved. Stickies have more features and ease of use than the Ubuntu's Sticky Notes.

I have the enthusiasm of ripping audio CD to mp3 and the Audio CD Extrator only gave me ogg format unless a Lame plugin was installed. But once there had been an update to the Ubuntu kernel happened, the Lame plugin was just unknowingly missing.

In fact, there is a lot of Ubuntu things to be learned anew like recently I'd learned to press ALT+F2 keys to bring up the run dialog and type smb://192.168.1.70/Chris's Shared to mount and access my wife's shared folder over my home's network. Just hope that my enthusiasm about Ubuntu would not eventually greeted with dismay!