Having "Me" Time

Christmas came and vanished in a blink of an eye.  In a couple of days it will no longer be 2011 and I am going to have to rewire my brain to write my dates with 2012 (or in the Buddhist calendar 2555).  So much has happened yet there are still so many things waiting to happen.  Who knows what the future holds? Will the year 2012 be the end of the world or will it bring with it renewed hope? I suppose we will just have to live through it to find out.   I pray though that whatever happens, it brings happiness and that at the end of it all, we can look back and appreciate the year we had. The last few days I have finally gotten into the digital book age with the initiation of my first reading of a novel on tablet.  I never thought I would. (Thank you Alex for downloading roughly 10GB worth of novels onto my tablet!)  I had always been somewhat old fashioned in my preference for paper and having documents printed out.  I like th...

It's the end of August.  This time last year I was in Malaysia visiting a good old friend just before Malaysia's independence day.  This year, I am in Bangkok, and am instead keeping touch with good friends through other high tech means such as Skype, Google+ and Whatsapp.  It really is quite amazing all this technology.  It brings people together.   Yet, it can also bring people apart. You might have noticed that since the advent of BB messaging and chat programs on iPhones, smartphones, androids, many of us (me included) sometime zone out of conversations and instead grin at our phones.  We are living in two worlds at once. One moment, I'm in conversation with the person next to me, the next, I'm in a conversation with someone else on the other side of the phone.  Maybe that person is in another country.  I don't mind it at all, but sometimes I think we ought to put down our phones and enjoy the person next to us.  Enjoy ...

Thinking about how technology has evolved over the years and how I've witnessed these changes makes me sometimes realize I'm not that young anymore.   I grew up in a world of Commodore 64 and 386 computers.  Now I live in a time of iPads, wireless internet and harddisks the size of name cards. I start to feel like a slave to technology. Everything is computerized and stored. Even my entering and leaving the office building is accounted for. Computers back then were rare, we wrote school essays by hand.  It wasn't until high school did computers start coming into schools, and then it was a computer lab for everyone to share.  Games were played on Atari and my Commodore 64 was then top of the line.  Monitors displayed black and green.  Color excited us, and then it only offered a nice blue screen. Printers were dot matrix.  This was already wonderful.  I loved it already then.  I had my extra joystick and information was stored on 5...