Goodbye

I got a very early morning phone call from one of my aunts last Tuesday and she informed me that my grandmother had passed away.

Initially I felt sad and grieved over her death, but as the day passed and the more I thought about the circumstances in which she had gone, the more I see things differently. She's lived to a ripe, old age of 94 dying peacefully in her sleep, virtually free of disease - no hypertension, no diabetes, normal cholesterol levels, no 'fong sap' and is a great grandmother many times over. Most of us will be lucky to achieve that these days. When my plane touched down in Penang that night I had fully accepted the fact and was ready to move on.

The only regret that I have is that I didn't get to know her better. There was this massive language barrier, us with our laughable command of hokkien, we probably sounded to her like Phua Chu Kang talking 'engrish' with a foreigner. We knew her through our parent's stories of her days back in China and all, but conversations between us were few. The only words I remember her directly addressing to us the grandchildren were to 'study hard and succeed in life.'

There are no excuses though. Language is a barrier yes, but not insurmountable. My wife, ever a beacon of support, summed it very nicely by saying in her consolation that there may be regrets but its time to move on holding the important people in our lives closer. I couldn't agree more.

Moon

I was walking to my car after work on Saturday and saw this massive halo around the moon. I've heard about the moon being the brightest and biggest that day but I didn't expect to see the ring. It was awesome! Some people, when faced with such a beautiful sight like this, would be overcome emotionally, or feel a sudden desire to write poetry. Maybe even call a loved one and share the experience together. All I could think of was "Tripod! I need my tripod now! And a wide angle lens!"

After a very quick drive back, I was fumbling with the keys to the house before I realized that that the moon was going nowhere that night. In fact I didn't need to rush, I would later spend more than 10 minutes under the moonlight in the garden, experimenting with long shutter speeds and generously feeding the mosquitoes.

There is beauty everywhere, even in the ordinary and mundane, if you care to look for it.

Unrolling A Film

I shot one roll of film through a camera last week before realizing that the shutter did not open at all. Now I've read about unrolling the film from an already wounded roll few years back, but never had a chance to do it. What I did is take another roll of unwanted film, lick it and stick it into the film canister. The saliva is supposed to snag on to the film leader and drag the film out to be reused, but trust me this is harder than it sounds. I managed the feat after half an hour.

Here are some tips that I've learned.
1) Never lick the film. Uggghhhh! The unwanted film had already been developed and the chemicals tasted terrible. Spit or rub some saliva on it, but never lick it!
2) Make sure you insert the unwanted film deep enough. A good measure of how deep is when you see the film canister rolling (the pic below) in response to your pushing, then you know you've latched onto the film.

3) Try turning the film around in the canister. Sometimes when the film has been rewound, the leader has gone too far inside and its difficult to latch on to it. Turn it around a bit and try again, if the leader is in the right position then it will come out easily.

Decision Making

I saw some polaroid cameras for sale last week on an online camera site and it threw me into a dilemma. Buy? Yes? No?

Well money's not an issue here, it will just set me back a couple of hundred bucks but a voice deep behind my kneecaps said (well the voice used to be in my head, but I banished it somewhere else so I can overrule it more often than it can do me) I should not just buy for the sake of it being cheap. Then I realized that we're talking about a polaroid here, a legend in its own right! Having this is my collection will be awesome! Ok hang on, will I have the space for this? Or even the time to use it? I mean look at it, its bulky! While it may not beat my Olympus Trip in weight and ease of use, but surely I've seen the wonderful photos it is capable of producing, right? And not to mention the instant photos I'll be able to file in my journals and all. Oh ho ho, I say that but will I be able to get the films easily? How many vendors carry that nowadays?

Deadlock.

So I tried taking my mind of it and did some mindless net surfing, and as fate would have it I came upon this Newsweek article titled 'The Science of Making Decisions.' In short, it mentions the importance of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC, the part of the brain behind our foreheads) in making decisions.

The more complex the problem, the more activity there will be in the DLPFC when looked under a fMRI scan. But with too much information and overANALysis, the DLPFC short circuits and that's when people are more prone to making errors and bad decisions.

So with this information, my next course of action was to sleep on the issue and not give it too much thought for the time being.

END RESULT? After a few days I decided that I really didn't need the camera. What I have in my collection is currently more than enough for me. Ok truth be told, they sold out all the models already...crap! So in a way, this sleeping over the problem thing does help.  Now iPad 2...hmmm....

Jerks

So there's this really interesting article about jerks...

That unintelligent people on average die faster is common sense and proof of natural selection. So the world is constantly getting 'smarter' and more competitive with time. So how about jerks? Is the world a nicer place to be in now than a decade ago? Stupid people die young but how about jerks?

You know we all mostly say we hate jerks and mean people, but nothing can be further from the truth. We worship them.

Yaaa...as if you watch American Idol because of Randy Jackson

A jerk made American Idol the way it is. The jerk has left and so have many of the audience.

Some have said that American Idol based its panel of judges on a tried and tested formula of the personality of presenters at Top Gear, a jerk, a pretty face (prettiest among the lot) and a boring person. And it works very well. Top Gear would not be the same if there were three James May.

This fella needs no introduction. His words may have been responsible in a restaurant owner's decision to commit suicide.

So back to the question, is the world a nicer place to be? Not really. One thing's for sure, jerks may die young but they are getting richer.