Privacy... over-rated?

Some people have absolutely no concept of privacy. They thrive on the concept of a totally borderless world; a world where everyone is everyone else’s best friend; a world where you can barge into another person’s personal space (read: home, office cubicle, bedroom, personal closet of hidden treasures) without even at the drop of a hat; a world where it is unforgivable to keep secrets; a world where the simple courtesy of “knocking before entering” is non-existent.

Those who do not understand or appreciate the concept of privacy often equate it to selfishness. They consider it as people’s way of being anti-social and shutting others out of their lives. They think that locking a bedroom door or closet means you have a dark secret to hide, making it all the more reason to pry it out for the whole wide world to see. They harbour no shame in telling their nosey neighbour next door that their niece is sleeping with her university lecturer.

I, for one, believe strongly in the concept of privacy. Call me selfish, but I think there is a reason why God created us without the ability to read each other’s thoughts. In a world where privacy is fast becoming extinct, in a Web-based universe where we can access the most private of information with just a few key-strokes, it is our hearts and minds that remain the final frontier of personal space and sanctuary.

My first lead-climb in 3 years

I had my first lead-climb at the rock-climbing wall in three years today. It was dismal, to say the least. It was just a pokey 15m-high 5C route, and three years ago I could have done it without so much as a struggle. But that was three years ago, and I also had not worked out for an entire week since my recent Shanghai trip.

To begin with, I just wasn't feeling confident at all with the moves. And on top of that, a week's absence from the gym made me feel as if I had lost 30% of my upper body strength. I was stopping to rest at literally every clip-in point!

Here's the capper: I was struggling to clip in the rope at the last clip-in point before the anchor. My fingers slipped at the gate of the caribiner. My belayer Chee Keong heard the snapping the caribiner's gate, and assuming that I had successfully clipped-in, proceeded to give me rope tension - effectively hauling me down! It wasn't his fault at all, really - one normally assumes that a rope clip-in operation proceeds without problems, and this was also Chee Keong's first hand at lead-belaying.

Anyway, the force of his pull on the rope, coupled by my muscular exhaustion, caused me to lose my grip and fall. Now, I weigh 96kg, and that's a good 30-odd kg more than Chee Keong. The force of my body weight yanked the poor bloke towards the wall, and there was probably a split-second when he lost grip of the rope. I plummeted about 5 metres before Chee Keong managed to arrest my fall.

That's not the worst part. In my panic at moment of the free-fall, I made a desperate attempt to grab onto the rope. Not only did I fail to arrest my own free-fall, the force of my body weight under gravity gave me a severe rope-burn on my left hand.

It's funny what an adrenaline rush can do to you. As I said, I was stopping to rest at every clip-in point. But after the fall, which caused me to drop 3-4 clip-in points below, I immediately started off again, oblivious to the seething pain from my rope-burn injury, and prompty cleared the height I had lost during the fall. Too bad, by the time I got back to where I had left off, I was way too tired to complete the climb.

Oh, well... every climber has to experience a hard fall once. In my case, it happened only six years after I started rock-climbing! Well, at least I did not get it as bad as my Penang climbing buddy Joo Biau - the poor guy not only fell, his whole body flipped upside-down, and he came within a nose-hair of crashing his face into solid granite!

Note: For those of you who are unfamiliar with rock-climbing terminology, there are generally two types of climbs - top-rope climbing and lead-climbing. In top-rope climbing, the rope is already set-up and anchored at the top of the route. In lead-climbing, the climber is responsible to bring the rope up on the ascent and set it up at the anchor.

Get your jargon right!

This thread is a tribute to my obsessive-compulsive disorder insofar as correct terminology is employed.

For those of you who still remember high school mathematics, I am sure you would have come across GRAPHS. And in a typical 2-dimensional graph, you will always have a vertical axis and a horizontal axis, correct? Now, what do you call the vertical and horizontal axes, respectively (yes, this is the part where all of you start raising your hands in dire enthusiasm)?

Okay, hands up, all of you who said:
"The horizontal axis is the x-axis, and the vertical axis is the y-axis"

WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.

And why is it wrong? Because the horizontal axis could very well have been, say, the t-axis, with the vertical axis being the x, y, z, or any other dimensional axis (this is known as a displacement vs. time graph in physics). Or just about any combination (any of you remember dy/dx?...yep), not just x-y.

The horizontal axis is known as the ordinate, and the vertical axis is known as the abscissa. So, in a graph of x vs. t, t would be the ordinate, and x would be the abscissa. I actually knew these terminologies from high school, but it took my Dynamics lecturer at university - Dr. Janusz Maciej Krodkiewski - to hammer it into my vocabulary.

And for those of you who did mathematics at university and got this wrong, you ought to be shot.

Hang on... I am not quite done yet...

Okay, let us move on to music. I have often heard people refer to the "G" of a scale or and "F" of a scale, etc. Strictly speaking, that is also wrong by musical terminology, and is about as sacrilegious as the "x-y" terminological inexactitude. What is a "G" of a musical scale? The speaker obviously assumes that the reference scale is C-Major, and that the note in question is the 5th note from the scale's key. But what if the scale in question was not C-Major (which, there is a 1/12 probability of it being so)?

NO, NO, NO.

The correct terminologies for the notes, measured from any given key, are as follows:

First note: Tonic
Second note: Super-tonic
Third note: Mediant
Fourth note: Sub-dominant
Fifth note: Dominant
Sixth note: Sub-mediant
Seventh note: Leading (or Sub-tonic)

So, "G" in the C-Major scale is the Dominant note, but in the G-Major scale is the Tonic note.

My OCD rant for today. I think I'm done. Have a pleasant weekend.

Back to Shanghai

Back to Shanghai this week for a client visit. My first real trip back here since March 2005 (the one in October 2006 does not really count in my books, since it only lasted 24 hours, most of which was spent sleeping in the hotel room). I am actually writing this blog entry on-board my return flight to Malaysia.

My first night in Shanghai was spent in the company of my Shanghai colleague, Jamie Zhu. First, it was a mandatory stop for me at one of the tea shops in 城隍廟 Cheng Huang Temple, to pick up a nice box of tea leaves. We attempted to go for dinner at 南翔饅頭館 Nan Xiang Man Tou Guan restaurant (there is a branch at The Curve in Petaling Jaya), famous for its 小籠包 xiao long bao (dumplings). Unfortunately, the long queue was rather discouraging, so we ended up having dinner near Jamie’s apartment instead. Jamie is a really nice girl, and it is always a pleasure being in her company. The only caveat is that her bullet-speed speech coupled with my very poor Mandarin listening skills, mean that I often only end up capturing half of what she is telling me (ironically, I find that we communicate a lot better when writing in Chinese). Despite that fact that she is an English major, I always resist the temptation to speak to her in English, as a way for me to brush up my Mandarin listening skills.

My second night was spent having dinner with Jamie, my other Shanghai colleague Billy Zhang and his wife Margaret. It was a significant dinner for me, not only because it was my first time meeting Margaret, but also because it would be my last dinner with Billy as a colleague, for that was also the day Billy officially tendered his resignation – leaving the company to pursue his full-time MBA. The two of us had a rough start in our collaboration back in early-2005, but we have come a long way, worked very well together in recent times, and I felt a little sad to see him go – he was truly a real pillar of strength at the Shanghai office. We adjourned for coffee at Starbucks outside the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where Billy shared his vast collection of photographs from his various trips around the globe with Margaret. For reasons already mentioned above, I did not engage much in the conversation. Most of it sounded like Greek to me. I wish I had brought my 555 note book, so that they could write down what they were saying.

(L-R) 粽子 zong zi (dumpling); with Jamie, Margaret and Billy

On the third night in Shanghai, it was back to 城隍廟 Cheng Huang Temple again, this time with Jamie and three of my Malaysian colleagues who were also here on other assignments. This time, I decided that we would brave the long wait at the famed 小籠包 xiao long bao restaurant. It took 30 minutes to get a table and have our orders served. But I figured it was worth the wait, just to be able to say that I have eaten authentic 小籠包 xiao long bao at the xiao long bao restaurant in Shanghai.

(L-R) Jonathan, me, Jamie and Christy at 城隍廟 Cheng Huang Temple; enjoying 小籠包 xiao long bao

I figured that hardly qualifies as a decent dinner, so after the little 小籠包 xiao long bao feast, I suggested that the five of us adjourn downtown for some real food. Off the top of my head, I remembered this restaurant that my ex-colleague PH Lim brought me to – 滴水洞 (literally “The Cave of Dripping Water”), located at the intersection of 陜西南路 South Sha’anxi Road and 茂明路 Mao Ming Road, supposedly famous for its 湖南 Hunanese cuisine. It was quite embarrassing, as I had forgotten how to get there; it took two IDD calls to PH and one local call by Jamie to her friend to locate the place. But the good food made up for the mild fumble! I kind of felt sorry for Jamie, because linguistically, the tables were turned on the poor girl this time. She was in the company of four Malaysians speaking a crude mixture of Manglish (Malaysian English, or mangled English!) peppered with the occasional intrusion of Malay, Hokkien and Cantonese words – simply ghastly to the uninitiated. Well, we did try to accommodate her with some Mandarin!

At 滴水洞 Di Shui Dong Restaurant

A little bit about my hotel room: I stayed at the Four Points By Sharaton, located in 浦東Pudong’s 由由 You You district, and right next to the Shanghai office. The hotel was quite comfortable, except for a few minor niggles:

· There was no bench in the room to put my suitcase, so I ended up putting it on the floor by the door.

· The coffee terrace needs some improvement in guest admittance system for breakfast. On all three mornings, I was greeted by a long queue, with the staff at the front door struggling with the guest list and table allocation. I cannot quite fathom what the problem was, as it seemed to me that the occupancy rate was no more than 60 %.

· The coffee machine seemed to constantly run out of milk and hot water.

· The buffet breakfast selection was identical for all three days.

Well, one good thing is that the room came with an international adapter plug (not that it really mattered, since I normally bring my own, anyway). And there was unlimited Broadband Internet access (Howard-Johnson, the hotel I stayed at previously, charges for room Internet usage by the minute).

Oh, another thing I always enjoy during my trips to Shanghai - listening to the locals speak in the Shanghainese dialect. Especially the taxi drivers. I always get a kick out of listening to Billy and Jamie giving directions to the taxi drivers in the local dialect, and trying to decipher what they are saying. I got into the taxi on Tuesday morning, heading for a client's office in 宜山路 Yishan Road. The taxi driver, a kind-looking lady, mistook me for a local, and asked me in Shanghainese "yi-ze-lu, shi-ve-la? (宜山路, 是否啦?)". I wish I could tell you that I answered her in Shanghainese, but I can't. And it was only much later that I realised that I did know a couple of Shanghainese phrases from my Shanghainese phrasebook at home, and that I could have said "dei, dei" 對, 對 ("correct, correct"), or even ask her "li geh tah me yuoe va?" 離搿笪蠻遠伐? ("Is it far from here?" 離這兒很遠嗎?).

Time check: 2050hrs. I will be touching down in KLIA in half an hour. Will upload this blog entry once I get home. Good night.

When travelling to China...

Lesson for today: When preparing for a business trip to China, you may have all your documents ready on your laptop, all those neat presentation slides and 3D-animations to show to the client down pat, a well-rehearsed speech all memorised, your well-ironed suit and well-polished shoes to create a professional image, and even your flight tickets booked well in advance… but none of it will make a raccoon’s ass of a difference if your darn China visa expired a month ago!!!