河國榮, An Aussie in Hong Kong

It feels like we're living in a cloud. The floor takes a long time to dry after being mopped, and envelopes of just-delivered mail are dampish and soft. In Hong Kong, this weather phenomenon doesn't usually occur until the beginning of Spring. In fact, it is normally the accepted indication that Spring has begun. But we're still in Winter and this 'cloud' weather is already here. It's not normal.

For the past few weeks, the weather has wavered between being cool and extremely dry, to being damp as it is today. It's the perfect weather for colds and flu, and many of my acquaintances have already come down with something. I myself caught a slight case of the flu from our Indonesian maid.

I have just completed a 7-day diet, apparently designed to take 7 to 10 pounds off, although not permanently. No real diet is easy but this one wasn't bad. While it didn't take 7 pounds off, it did take a few off and I felt better overall. Unfortunately, today was the 7th day and being Sunday, I was unable to adhere to the diet while my wife and I had a day in the shopping centre.

The mainstay of the diet is a soup made up principally of tomatoes, cabbage, onion and celery. Whenever you're hungry, you eat and drink this soup. It's supposed to burn off the fat. I'm not sure whether it actually burns fat but I can assure you that you'll make frequent trips to the bathroom to release the extra urine.

I have a 200GB external hard disk which has developed serious media problems. A surface scan of the disk produced more than 900 bad blocks with 2 million blocks remaining to be scanned. After three days of scanning, I cancelled the scan. The Maxtor Diamond Plus is less than 2 years old but because it's an OEM, the warranty is only 1 year. Consider carefully before you purchase an expensive OEM external drive. It might be cheaper to buy a lower capacity drive and swap the bare drive for a full-warranty high capacity drive yourself.

Anyway, I had a quandary. The 200GB drive contains full resolution film scans of many of my photographs. The thing which many people tend to forget these days is that digital media can evaporate before your eyes and there's no way to get the material back, whether it be Word files, your favourite music (Apple iTunes music store) or your memories. A lot of people are backing up to CD or DVD believing the hype that the media will last for 10 to 20 years not realising that there are different grades of media, that CDs don't last as long as DVDs, that DVD+RWs don't last as long as DVD+Rs and that with temperature changes and exposure to light, NONE of these are certain to last over time.

For the past 6 months, I've tussled with trying to set up a reliable backup system for my digital photographs and film scans. I have been scanning my photographic film with a film scanner at 4000 dpi. The raw images are around 130MB each and it takes a long time to scan a whole roll of film. My 200GB external drive had numerous scanned images on it and the last thing I wanted was a hard disk failure. A backup was of the utmost importance.

People using computers today are working more and more with digital photos, movies and music and all of these require massive amounts of disk space. Archiving these for protection is not easy. Tape drives are expensive. RAID 5 towers are probably the best option but are also too expensive. That leaves DVD because CDs are too small to consider.

Today is one of the few days in the year that you can park your car anywhere you like. Unlike other countries like Australia and the U.S.A., people can only park their cars in designated stretches of the road. If the sign does not say "Parking", then you can't park there; period.

So what's so special about today? It's the Chinese New Year. For four days, people don't have to go to work. They get to spend time with their friends and family and relax or get bored as the case may be.

Driving is a part of the culture that is Hong Kong. Most people don't drive because they cannot afford to buy a car, and public transport is pretty good even if it is controlled by government and large corporations with self-pointed motives. I have driven in Hong Kong for most of the 18 years that I've lived here and am now very used to it. That doesn't mean that driving here is easy for me but just that it's familiar.

When you drive in Hong Kong, one of the first things you realise is the attitude of other drivers. In particular, everyone seems to be in a rush. It's more noticeable when you return from a relaxing holiday as I just did. After driving in Queensland Australia for two weeks, driving here in Hong Kong just really got on my nerves. The worst thing about it though is that the rush attitude is contagious so even if you intend to take it easy and remind yourself that rushing might not even get you to your destination any faster, you'll still eventually end up rushing anyway. It's extremely difficult to avoid.

I grew up in the country, on the outskirts of a small town in Queensland Australia. It's only natural that I grew up running around the farm and countryside without shoes.

Skip forward 30 years and here I am in Hong Kong, still living in a 'country' area and still preferring to not wear shoes when possible; and getting lots of strange looks and questions when people notice. City people simply don't understand, and they usually have misconceptions about barefoot walking and running.

In 1987, I arrived in Hong Kong to stay, to become a pop singer if possible, without any clue as to how I was going to do that. By pure accident or perhaps fate, I discovered that teaching English was a good way to make money for foreigners staying in Hong Kong and I ended up with a teaching job at a commercial English school called 育城 which literally means "Education City". It was while I was working at this school that a coworker notified me of an opportunity to act for television and I became one of Hong Kong's few television foreign actors.

At the time, I had two jobs; my teaching job and the new acting job. Working for television was not a steady job. How many days you worked at television depended on how much your character involved, and you were never sure when you'd be asked to work until one or two days before the shoot. That remains true even today.

I've been an addict for quite some time, and not just to one thing either. I've been drinking coffee for several years and usually have to drink at least one cup every day, sometimes two or three cups every day. Off and on, I've also been a TV addict, and I'm probably a dog addict but that's still up for discussion. My biggest and worst addiction though has been my computer!

While others get addicted to surfing on the internet or playing online games or participating in online MUDs (are they still around?), I'm simply addicted to my computer whether I'm surfing, checking email, scanning photographs or watching videos. Every morning when I wake up, the first thought that comes into my head is whether there is any email for me even though I receive very few non-spam emails. All through the day, rather than consider useful things to do, it's much easier to sit down in front of the computer and find stuff to do. You can waste countless hours putting all of your computer files in order.

While at the first reading for a new stage play I'm involved in (「香水」 "Perfume" by Springtime Productions to run from May 2 to 11, 2005), a funny incident happened.

I wanted a cup of coffee. While there was a drip coffee machine there, it was turned off and I don't like drip coffee anyway. I'd prefer either instant coffee or coffee made with cappuccino machines. There was a water dispenser but for really good coffee; even instant coffee; boiling water is the best way to go. So I filled a mug with hot water from the dispenser and then placed it in the microwave oven for just over a minute.

I have been running pretty consistently now for almost four weeks. I'm running at least four times a week. The distance is not far. I've measured it in the car and my normal run is just under two miles. This is suitable for my purposes because I need to give my body time to adapt. It has been a long time since I last ran regularly and my muscles and ligaments will need time to develop again.

The blisters which my first run rewarded me with (four on my left foot and three on my right) stayed with me for almost two weeks. I had to puncture a couple of them because they would not flatten out on their own and even the simple act of wearing shoes would keep them alive. All of the blisters did eventually flatten and dry up. Even so, I left the skin there to dry and scrape off naturally during my daily runs. I conjectured that the dry skin might serve to protect the underlying new skin during my runs, and allow the new skin to develop appropriately before it was exposed to the harsh surfaces of the road and sidewalks.

There's a good article over at CNET News.com about Attention Deficiency Trait (ADT). I've seen similar symptoms in my own life. For example, I tend to work on multiple tasks at home; including home repairs; at the same time, moving from one task to the next until they're all finished. I have a hard time completely finishing one task before beginning with the next.

This is a heads up for those of you who might want to leave comments in Chinese. It's not a problem. I can comfortably read Chinese and even reply in Chinese if necessary.

Many many years ago when I was still a young person growing up in Australia, a New Zealand evangelist by the name of Barry Smith used to make the rounds of the churches preaching about the future of the world. In very basic terms, his message was the usual "repent or die with everyone else". Many people did convert and become Christians at the time but the end of the world didn't come. However, Barry's message was much more than simply that the world was coming to an end. He included many specifics, his (divine?) interpretation of the prophecies found within the bible. A few of his specifics may have been wrong but many were correct although they occurred much later than he had predicted. You can't fault him on that. Throughout history, many evangelists and foretellers of doom were very enthusiastic to see the end of the world sooner rather than later. Even now, we really can't be sure how close the end is, and if it will in fact actually occur.

There is no such thing as random. Rather, random is an ordered order, the order of which is beyond our comprehension.

Within the world, everything is the direct consequence of another action and this is true down to the very smallest of the physical and atomic and sub-atomic world. We think things happen randomly because we can't explain them. We use probability to calculate the chances that an outcome will occur but the outcome will in fact be a sure thing if we understand all of the factors involved.

The last time I wrote about the weather here was back before the Chinese New Year when it was foggy and wet. Guess what? It's still foggy and wet. In the last eight weeks or more, we've only seen six or seven days of warm weather with sunshine. Otherwise, it's been foggy and wet. The only difference now is that the temperature is on the way up with average temperatures of mid-twenties (that's celsius for those of you in fahrenheit countries). By summer time, the temperature will be up in the high twenties and sometimes near the mid-thirties. It can get very warm here.

Living in the fog, the humidity is very high. The tile floors inside the apartment and outside the back door are still creating water without any help from us or the dogs. It makes it very difficult to keep the apartment clean when the floors are constantly wet or at least moist.

A few days ago, I began looking at the way my blog was styled and considered methods of improving it or at least making it look nicer. I'm a perfectionist in many ways so placing style information within the actual web page was not the way to go. Instead, I used style sheets (technically known as Cascading Style Sheets or CSS for short). They're similar to the way text styles work in word processors. They were developed by the World Wide Web consortium as a way to simplify and centralise the visual design of web pages but took a very long time to be fully embraced by the web community at large. These days, we're looking at version three of the CSS standard and other than Internet Explorer, almost every browser is on board to fully support the standard soon.

One of my friends asked me how I was getting on with my barefoot running. I had to tell him about the cramps on my last run and how it turned out that they weren't cramps at all. The pain was actually an injury which you could say was caused by not wearing shoes. Does that mean that I'll go back to wearing shoes? No and here's why.

The injury was in the calves of my feet. I say "injury" and "calves" because both calves were injured but the left calf is the one with the serious injury while the right calf has already recovered. The injury was in fact a type of tearing; tearing at the point where the tendons from the base of the ankle connect to the muscle. The calves will need four to six weeks for full recovery. In the meantime, I have to stretch them regularly every day.

I have some friends who I have known for a long time. We met in Australia while attending the University of New South Wales, were together frequently for most of the time I have been in Hong Kong and still stay in touch since they moved back to Australia. We're good friends.

Occasionally, I help my friends out with their Apple Mac computer problems. I've been working with Apple Mac computers since the late 1980's and know enough to be helpful to my friends. So when my friends announced that they were coming to visit their families in Hong Kong, I quickly asked them about bringing me a coffee espresso maker.

You know the weather is changing when the pets change the way they sleep, or rather the surfaces they sleep on. Yes, the weather has finally warmed up here in Hong Kong. The fog has left us and although we still cannot see blue skies because of the nice pollution we get from our large neighbour, the weather overall is great; not too cool and not too hot. We're averaging around 28 degrees celcius, probably warm enough to go for a swim which we probably won't do anytime soon even though we live literally 10 minutes walk from a beach.

When the weather cools, our dogs scrunch up the blankets we provide them and then sleep on the blankets. Now that the weather is warming up, they're choosing to sleep on the tiled floor instead where it's cooler, so cool in fact that considerable moisture builds up in front of their faces on the floor as the moisture in their breath condensates upon contact with the cool floor.

My birthday is just one day away. On Saturday, I will hit the big 40.

Many people know that I'm an avid user of Apple computers. I've been using Apple computers since around 1989 when I purchased my first Apple computer, the IIci. Actually, it wasn't my first Apple computer. The first Apple computer I ever owned was a IIe purchased, used and sold back in 1983 before the first Macintosh was ever released.

These days, I'm using a 'desklamp' iMac with a 17" screen, running Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther". It's very solid. Applications almost never crash and when they do, they have no affect on other applications running at the same time. At this very moment, I have only seven applications running, but there are usually in excess of 15 applications running at any time including email, web browser, text editors and photograph processing applications.

My wife and I have been overwhelmed by the support expressed by the people of Hong Kong and of Chinese people around the world. I have received comments and emails from Hong Kong, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and other countries. The world wide web has really affected the way the world works and communicates. It's phenomenal.

Thank you to everyone who has left comments, written email messages or simply visited this blog. I truly appreciate the support. I'm still digesting everything and the final affect won't be fully understood for a long time to come.

Sometimes, the harder you try, the worse it gets, or rather the harder it gets. I equate this situation to pushing on a door to open it not realising that the doors opens inwards towards you rather than away from you. In such a situation, pushing on the door will obviously bear no results no matter how much energy you use (unless you're superman and you break the door down completely). The only way through the door is to relax and give the door space. You'll then be able to open it (by pulling) and move through.

I've just spent the better part of two days working to make some of my blog available to people with 'handheld devices'; ie, mobile phones.

People could already view my blog from their mobile phones just the way it was but it would be expensive and slow because the blog is large.

I'm currently sitting in studio 15 at TVB City. We've just had dinner and we're ready to continue filming tonight's scenes of 阿旺新傅.

Tonight's filming typifies some of the most difficult moments for an actor. The set is a fashion show involving six or seven primary actors, several supporting actors and more than thirty extras. To complicate things further, the fashion show involves twenty different sets of clothes. We've been filming for three hours and we've only filmed six sets of clothes with fourteen sets to go. It's going to be a long night.

Some people have smaller screens than others. My screen is 1440 pixels wide. Many people only have 1024 pixels to play with. Someone once commented in my blog that the centre column was too narrow. When hopefully that's been solved now with a new layout option.

There are now two layout options: a 3-column layout, and a 2-column layout.

To switch, scroll down until you can see the XHTML and CSS buttons in either the right or left column. Just above the buttons, you'll see a simple statement: "Switch to 3-Col layout" or "Switch to 2-Col layout" depending on which layout you're currently looking at. Click on the statement and your layout will change instantly.

Enjoy.

I had a dream this morning. I can't remember all of the details. Dreams are strange in nature, adding bits and pieces of our lives into a montage that we call a dream.

I was in a man's home. It wasn't an expensive home. It was relatively old with lots of wooden furniture, the type that you can move around, not the built-in wardrobe type. It was open with windows all around; windows with wooden frames. I seem to remember ceiling fans.

At one side of the flat, I was able to through the window see strange things that looked like trees except that they were huge hanging mobiles planted in the ground; very artistic and very typical of the man's nature. A few seconds later, the mobiles disappeared and there were instead tables spread out in a 'U' shape, tables big enough to seat 12 people each. It was a restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, with fanned paper napkins, pink actually. There was a guai lo sitting at one of the tables and a waiter serving him. I suddenly remembered the restaurant that I'd seen downstairs. It was the same restaurant although if the dream was reality, it wouldn't be possible; for the restaurant to be both downstairs and at the back of this man's home somewhere up in a high-rise building.

Since owning the Canon 350D camera, I have been taking many more photographs than I've taken in many years. I have also had to spend an inordinate amount of time loading them onto my iMac, converting to tif and then touching up and converting to jpg (in three sizes). By touchup, I don't mean opening the photos in Photoshop. In fact, I don't own Photoshop. All of my touchups are done with a scanning and image processing software called SilverFast, developed in Germany and sold around the world. A lot of professional photographers know about the software; many non-professionals don't, only aware of Photoshop which by the way is too complicated for me personally; it's true.

I remember back in the days of SARS, the scenery in Hong Kong was fabulous, better than anything I'd seen in all the years I've lived here. I had to wonder why this was so and the only answer I could come up with was pollution. At the time, masses of people were staying at home, afraid to go out. Most people would continue to work to continue providing for their families but going out for entertainment or food was simply out of the question. Combined with the effects of the economic depression in effect at the time and you get a situation where the number of cars on the road at any one time was only a fraction of what would be normal.

The other day, I drove my wife out to the New Territories to see our favourite 'super doctor' (神醫). My wife has a serious case of hives and since western medicine has failed to help her in any way, we're consulting our Chinese doctor instead. While there are many 不外如是 super doctors, this one's the real thing. He's quite amazing. He's also our friend, having visited him many times over the years; at first with my mother-in-law and now with my wife. We smile and joke every time we see each other. I never thought it would be fun to visit the doctor.

After seeing the doctor, we drove back to Tai Po to visit my father-in-law. Being an old person, he refuses to move house to be closer to any of his nine children. Change is always harder when you're older, and a change of environment is the hardest.

( Fiction; ie, it's imagined, made up, invented, sort of, and it's not about me! )

eight fifteen a.m. just enough time to say my prayers before going to the office, only if we cut across the lanes into the exit though. if we had to go all the way down to the bottom and back up the other side to get to the car park entrance, I'd be late for work. crossing the white lines may be illegal but I can afford the fines.

prayers are all done. time to get to the office. things have changed a lot recently. I thought I'd be retiring soon. had to get that big project all organised so that I'd have a decent salary to fall back on after retirement. if it wasn't for all those noisy buggers complaining about the way the project was set up for bidding, it would've been finished by now too. oh well, doesn't matter anymore that I've now got this big promotion coming up. I'd dreamed about it but just didn't think it'd actually happen, or come so soon. all that shoe polishing finally paid off.

Vinegar 醋. Everyone has vinegar in their kitchen. It's a common ingredient in many foods and I for one like it. Many Chinese people like it too, especially the red kind when it's added to 蝦餃 or 麵. Yum!

But vinegar has other uses that many people are not aware of.

The bombing in London has been very high profile news all around the world. It's not surprising. Bombs going off in the middle of London; and more than one bomb at the same time; is very disturbing for most of us. If it happened in the middle of Iraq, we wouldn't think much of it even though we should. After all, lives anywhere in the world are lives and as such are valuable no matter who or where they are. The important aspect about the bombing in London though is the information being provided by the governments and the media.

In acting class, one of the things we are told to remember is that nothing is as it seems. Stereotypes should be avoided. Not all fat people are slow runners. Not all black people have excellent singing voices or are amazing athletes. Not all caucasians eat bread every meal of the day, or even potatoes every meal of the day. And not all politicians are corrupt although it can be difficult to find one who is not.

The price of petrol has just gone up in Hong Kong; again. We're now paying HK$12.66 per litre for normal grade petrol and HK$13.66 for high grade petrol. It's very expensive here but the oil companies don't mind increasing the price every chance they get anyway.

The latest excuse for increasing the price was the world wide cost of oil which recently hit US$61 per barrel, possibly the most expensive it's ever been. It's good and it's bad.

Hello friends.

Just a reminder that you can always the read the latest eight articles in a skinny inexpensive format from your handheld device (ie, mobile phone) by surfing to http://www.hokwokwing.hk/handheld/.

Commenting from handheld devices is not possible yet but if anyone wants it, I'll try and add it asap.

One of our friends left us today. We took her to the airport and watched her leave after being a part of our lives for the last two years.

Asih; that's her name; was originally hired to look after my mother-in-law who with serious symptoms of diabetes and heart disease needed 24-hour care. Shortly after hiring Asih, my mother-in-law passed away.

Our own maid's contract was almost up for renewal and for various reasons including the fact that Asih could speak Cantonese, we decided to let the other maid go and stick with Asih.

My apologies to those of you waiting and hoping for new articles from me. I've been very busy over the last few weeks with computer upgrades and developments. I've also spent considerable time watching Dragon Ball Z and am currently spending every night at TVB working on a new series in which I only have a few scenes but because of the martial arts involved; I'm not the one fighting; require an exorbitant amount of time filming every night from five or six in the afternoon through to five or six in the early morning.

It is quite normal for me to require a rest after a period of being very busy. The computer upgrades and work I've done over the last few weeks took a lot out of me and I've not had the mental energy to write anything for the blog. I'll place more articles here soon. I promise.

Some of you may have already noticed. I've now added captions to my images. I think it's far superior to relying on Image Title parameters (ie, the Tool Tip text popups you usually see) and adds value to the images. I've been developing them for quite some time but couldn't get the images to centre on the page until today when a couple of nice people on the css discussion list gave me pointers. The web community is truly a great and helpful place.

I don't know how they look in IE but they look great in Opera, FireFox, Safari and OmniWeb.

I had already decided not to visit Hong Kong Disneyland for quite some time to come, pretty sure that there would be a rush to get in when it first opened and that there might be all kinds of problems as the park adjusted. But when my friends offered us Rehearsal Day tickets, my wife and I bit the bullet and agreed to go.

I've been to the Florida Disneyland park in the USA twice. My wife has been to both the Florida and Japan parks, so this visit was going to be a comparison trip even if we didn't plan it that way. We were sure that the Hong Kong park wouldn't be as big or as grand as the other parks but we were curious none-the-less.

On Wednesday, I did an interview with the folks over at moShow where they specialise in podcasts and mocasts (I'm not sure if they're the same. Podcasts are supposed to be audio-only because current iPods; where the podcast name comes from; cannot play video whereas mocasts; ie, Mobile-casts; can be played on mobile cameras where video is possible.).

Anyway, I talked my head off and they had enough material for three episodes. The first episode is already available so if you're interested, head on over to moShow and listen in. The other episodes will become available on the coming two Thursdays.

Note. The interviews are in Cantonese.

I've been watching a lot of the amazing "CSI" American television series lately and something occurred to me while watching it. For the justice system to work, a certain assumption has to be made; that all police work can be trusted.

If a case against a criminal is built entirely on evidence collected by the police, then the courts have to assume that the police-provided testimonies and evidence, and everything about the evidence is true. If not, then no case would ever get prosecuted.

Overall, the weather here in Hong Kong has been dismal for the past six months. We've had much more rain than usual and blue skies have been rare. Unfortunately, even when we did have blue skies, they carried a heavy tinge of brown thanks to the increasing levels of pollution coming across from China. There's nothing we can do about the pollution except be grateful for the blue skies when they do appear.

Because blue skies are becoming rare, I sometimes spontaneously run off up the hills and mountains around Hong Kong to admire the view. This happened one fine day in the beginning of July when I took Batty and Siu Bak with me up a near by mountain. I took my camera with me too so I have a few photos to share.

While driving on the expressway to Causeway Bay 銅鑼灣 to make some arrangements for my trip to Indonesia next week, I couldn't help but notice that the sky was very unattractive. It looked pretty much like the skies you'd see in big China cities like Guangzhou 廣州. I really wanted to stop on the expressway and take a few photos but the policemen wouldn't have liked that.

Later on, on my way home, I couldn't resist the urge to try to get a few photographs. I surmised that the North Point ferry pier 北角碼頭 might allow me to get far enough out into the harbour to be able to see Central 中環 around the expressway. I was wrong but the view wasn't too bad anyway and I came away with a few reasonable shots.

Some readers saw my performance on tonight's episode of Healing Hands III (strangely enough almost exactly the same time in both Australia and Hong Kong) and requested that I open a discussion 'forum', so here it is. Feel free to chat away.

Please remember that I'll be away from Hong Kong for several days beginning Sunday. Consequently, there may be fewer updates to the blog until I get back.

(the first of a series of articles related to my trip to Java and Bali in Indonesia)

There are shops all around me but I have nothing to buy.

There is food and restaurants all around but I had lunch only two hours ago, and I'm supposed to be watching my weight so eating just for the sake of eating is out of the question.

There's a movie theatre but I've already seen one movie today and I'll already spend much more time sitting down today than is healthy.

My plane arrived at Bali at around nine pm. Once through customs, I exited the airport terminal looking for any sign of Isah, our helper. She was going to meet me there. It didn't take long to find her. She was standing at the end of the lines of hotel people holding up signs advertising the names of the guests they were there to pick up.

It was great to see her and she looked as healthy and vibrant as ever, if only not as slim as she was when she worked for us. I guess walking ten dogs four times a day really keeps the weight off.

Isah wasn't alone. Accompanying her on the seven-hour "kijang" minibus journey from her home to the airport were her husband-to-be, her twelve-year-old son and one of her nieces; a really nice bunch of people.

Say goodbye to television as you know it.

Just as PodCasts are allowing absolutely everybody to make and distribute their own radio shows, VideoCasts are also allowing the ordinary people to make and distribute videos. No longer will what we can see on TV be controlled by the rich television companies. No longer will we be forced to watch the Olympic Games because every single available channel is showing them.

I don't know what time it is. I've been asleep for a few hours since arriving here this morning but can't be sure exactly how many hours. There's the sound of activity outside the wall that separates me from the markets next door, and there's the sound of hushed conversation outside in the living area. The family's up.

I walk out into the living area. Isah's flat is small. There are two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom and a living area all within approximately four hundred square feet. Under normal conditions, her mother sleeps in one room while Isah sleeps in the other. I'm not sure where her son sleeps.

My wife and I looked at the new Motorola ROKR iTunes phone today here in Hong Kong. We weren't impressed. The plastic used to build the phone was... too plastic! I wondered if it would survive even a single drop to the ground.

My wife who has been using a Nokia 8310 since I can't remember when decided to buy the Sony Ericsson W800i instead. While almost twice the price of the ROKR, I don't think we made the wrong choice and I'm sure it'll work well for her for many years to come.

And it's fully supported by Mac OS X's iSync so what else can I say.

With reference to the TVB soaps, there are a few things I feel I should say, especially after reading the comments to my previous article Hail Hollywood TV.

First. Most of the main actors and actresses are really very good at what they do. Working for TVB is not easy, especially for them. While filming any one series, the average main actor works 18 hours a day and sometimes more, averaging perhaps just 2 or 3 hours of sleep a night. Between scenes or between showers, they have to read their scripts, understand what's going on and work out how they're going to act the scenes. They carry their own scripts around with them (these days usually in an aircraft hand-luggage suitcase on wheels), remember what clothes they wore for each scene and do lots of other stuff that the actors in Hollywood never have to worry about. It is also not unusual to get the scripts only hours before the scene. That makes it very hard for the actor and there's nothing they can do to change the situation.

My next am730 article is just about finished. Part 1 was published a week ago and Part 2 should be published next week. I'll post the full article here after am730 has published it.

This am730 article mentions a teacher I had the fortune to meet while studying at The Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles last year. Her name was Elizabeth and we had a wonderful time together. One of the songs I sang during class that she particularly liked was "The Nearness of You", a wonderful song published way back in 1937. I'm going to record some of my songs and post them here on the blog and I thought this song would be a good start.

I'm guessing it's the hair spray from last night.

A few minutes ago while I was attending to Rose our new companion after reenforcing a suspended cupboard in our kitchen that didn't want to stay suspended, a bee started flying around my head much closer than I would deem normal. If you don't aggravate a bee, it won't generally sting you so I stayed still and let it be, thinking that it'd fly away. I was wrong. Instead of flying away, it settled on my nose! After walking around there for a few seconds, it took off, flew around my head a few more times, landed on my ear very close to my ear-hole, took off again and then landed on my head, just above my hairline. I then walked into the house with a bee crawling through my hair.

When our previous helper left us to go back home and re-marry, she introduced her friend to us who was very eager to work for us. In fact, all of her friends wanted to work for us because we're fair to our helpers. Apparently, many Hong Kong people aren't.

The new helper has proven to be great to have around. She has no problems with our dogs, loves to take them on their walks; even though it requires three trips per walk, two walks per day; works consistently all day without any prompting and keeps our flat cleaner than our previous helper. All in all, we are lucky to have her.

She became sick a couple of days ago; vomiting, headache, dizziness. I took her to a doctor in a near-by clinic. He; a youngish thin doctor with unbrushed long 60's type hair; said it was gastro-enteritis and prescribed vomit-suppression tablets and pain killers. Gastro-enteritis is usually virus related so taking antibiotics would not help. Antibiotics only kill bacteria.

Last week, I had to make a small repair to one of the hanging cupboards in our kitchen. The people who built the cupboard for the previous owner used ordinary #8 screws to affix the cupboard to the contrete ceiling. With three screws along the back of the cupboard and one or two screws on one side of the cupboard all giving excellent vertical sheer support to the cupboard, the builders must have thought that a couple of normal screws into the ceiling to stop the cupboard from slipping outwards from the back wall would be sufficient.

Well the screws worked for a couple of years but finally gave in to the weight of the cupboard and its contents a few weeks ago. We noticed the cupboard slowly creeping away from the wall and down from the ceiling and knew something would have to be done to avoid a disaster: plates and containers all over the floor, a broken microwave oven and perhaps somebody seriously hurt if they were under the cupboard when it fell.

I woke after only a few hours sleep to the sounds of activity outside the wall of my room. I remember walking through the bamboo matrix that is this town's markets just before sleeping. Covered by a roof of galvanised iron with patches of canvas, the markets were quite large. Before coming here, Ipah had warned me about the noise of the markets, worrying that the noise would prevent me from sleeping. She had nothing to worry about. I wasn't affected by the markets at all. Nor was I affected by the sound of motorbikes driving past the front door of her small flat on their way to the markets.

I got up from my bed and inquisitively looked outside my room into the family room of the flat. Ipah's mum was already up, sitting on a wooden stool outside the door watching people come and go. Ipah was up too; probably hadn't slept at all; preparing breakfast for her son and attending to the things she needed to do every day. It was five thirty in the morning and the world was up and active.

A week ago, I had finally decided on what I wanted in my online photo albums. I wanted a design that was simple to use and simple to look at, a design that would show off my photographs rather than distract from them. In html terms, to me, this meant a single page with controls to view the thumbnails and navigate between photographs, a single page without the flashes of multiple page reloads. I knew exactly what I wanted.

So I sat down and began on the design. Structure first; i.e., html, or in my case, xhtml. There was no style information in the structure. It was pure structure, the way xhtml is supposed to be. It looked good and straight forward. Then the style. CSS. I've done a lot of css work over the past year while I've worked on my blog, changing, improving and developing the blog's design. I've become quite familiar with css but I refuse to bow down to tweaking my css for the sake of arrogant egotistic non-compliant browsers. Writing the css for the photo album was not a piece of cake, but it wasn't difficult either.

The other night, I heard a professional singer recording for a music show. He was really good but I couldn't help but wonder if he was singing a song or singing a vocal exercise. The vocal range of the song was extreme with rapid movement between real voice and falsetto notes.

Popular music in Hong Kong has lost any sense of feel. In an effort to differentiate themselves, singers have moved to songs making heavy use of falsetto. First there was one singer, then another and then another. Even Jacky Cheung was persuaded to follow suit. The apparent opinion is that if you can't sing falsetto, then you're not a professional singer.

The bathroom was simple and very different to anything I'd seen before. A square room, tiled on all sides and on the floor. The front half of the small room; barely larger than a closet; was bare with buckets on the floor to one side and a drain hole on the other side. The left side of the back half of the room was the toilet, one of those squatting toilets commonly used throughout China. On the right side was a square water well, a brick and tile container of water, roughly three feet high.

There was no running water in the bathroom. Ipah purchased her water; used both for cooking and bathing; from a nearby public bathroom. Before I arrived, she had to carry the water from the bathroom to her home by bucket; two trips every day. During my stay with her, she purchased a hose and laid the hose down between her home and the public bathroom. Future refills would simply require connecting the hose to the public bathroom's water tap, filling up her well, and then paying the bathroom owner. It's entirely possible that this hose arrangement was only temporary, to be used while I and her other family guests were in town for the wedding. We'd obviously use a lot more water than just Ipah, her mother and her son.

With only eight days remaining before Christmas, I thought I'd better write this now before it's too late.

My wife and I are going to visit friends in Dundee, Scotland for Christmas. We'll be in Dundee from December 26 to 30, and then in London from December 30 to January 1, 2006. Yep. We'll be in London for the new year.

Christmas began early for me.

A couple of weeks ago, I received a parcel from a friend in Canada. Actually, TVB called me to pick it up from the entrance office because the parcel was too big to put into my company locker. Inside the parcel, I found a pair of much-needed safety goggles; thank you; but that wasn't enough. The parcel also contained an insulated very-nice-to-hold coffee mug similar to the ones you'll see at Starbucks but made by a Canadian coffee chain. I've been using the cup a lot recently because the weather here in Hong Kong has become seriously chilly and my coffee cools far too quickly. If that wasn't enough, there were also a few packets and a can of high grade coffee. Unfortunately, I don't own a coffee grinder so grinding the coffee was something to ponder about.

I'm always trying to get good photos of some of the birds around our home. I'd love to get a photo of the owls that live here but I've only seen one of them once in the two years we've lived here, and I've only heard them; a pair of them calling out to each other; once on another night.

Apart from sparrows, there are only a few species of birds living here. There are pigeons which are difficult to photograph because they're so easily unnerved by onlookers, and there is another species of bird, one with red behind its eye and more red under its tail. I find them especially attractive and try to photograph them whenever possible. Both the pigeons and these 'red' birds live in pairs, always with the same mate.

iTunes changed the music landscape around the world, even in places where people were unable to purchase music from the iTunes store because their address was not within an authorised country. Before iTunes, people only had two choices for music; buy it at a music store, or download it from an unauthorised source on the internet. Once iTunes proved to the world that people would legally buy digitised (and medium rip quality at that) music if given the chance, other companies began working out how they could join the bandwagon and divert some of that new money into their own bank accounts.

iTunes allowed people to buy music from a corporately condoned online source. It allowed people to easily search for and sample music before buying it, and in the process allowed consumers to expand their music horizons, discovering new musicians and new genres of music, including those not affiliated with the big record labels. Most significantly perhaps, iTunes has also had a permanent affect on the music business itself.

I've been watching episodes from a TV show I watched as a kid, a show called Bewitched with Elizabeth Montgomery and Dick York. I didn't get to see every show when I was a kid but I enjoyed it anyway, and love it even more now because it's part of my past. That's also part of the reason I enjoyed the Bewitched movie last year with Nicole Kidman who is probably one of the most exceptional actresses I can think of.

True story.

It was supposed to be a straight forward operation, a small one, a simple one. Cut a small hole above the bronchial airway, pull the large oxygen breathing tube out from the mouth and push the new smaller tube in through the hole.

My brother-in-law Joe had a stroke almost two weeks ago. A blood vessel in his brain had developed an aneurism and while walking the streets of Macau, it burst, streaming blood into his brain. He knew immediately that something was wrong and asked a nearby policeman for help. He was transported to a hospital and treated. He had lost consciousness well before getting to the hospital and his situation was serious.

Ok. The blog is back on line on its new home in a new server.

I had to move the blog. There were one or two functions I needed which were once available on TypePad and then taken away; too complicated to discuss here except to say that if I didn't write anything for awhile, the main blog page would gradually shrink until nothing showed except for the sidebars. That won't happen now.

Additionally, I'll be setting up two new blogs. One will be specifically for bird watching so that those of you not interested in my bird photographs won't have to look at them; something akin to being forced to look at a friend's huge collection of baby photos. The other blog will be the story of our pets.

Both blogs are NOT online yet. In fact, I haven't even begun to design them. I've had trouble contributing to this blog recently (busy and sick) so I hope I can find the time to contribute to all three.

In the meantime, feel free to look around as usual and email me if you find any errors in the blog; eg, bad links or missing photographs.

Regards,
Gregory

I've been filming 刑事情報科 at TVB over the last four weeks or so. Before we began filming the series, there was much enthusiasm and a meeting with the head script writer to ensure that we all knew what direction the series was taking and how we were to act our parts. The idea for the series was relatively new and we were pretty excited about it.

Unfortunately, one of TVB's annoyances popped up for this series; late scripts. For almost every shooting so far, we've received our scripts via fax on the day before shooting. For me personally, this is just enough time to get familiar with the dialog and be able to play the part reasonably ok. It is not enough time to fully understand what might be going on within the scene and within the dialog, and then being able to make decisions about alternate methods of acting the scene.

I'm beginning to understand how people with MP3 players that cannot play Apple's FairPlay-protected music files feel, but from a different angle.

In my previous article Hope for a better Asian film/television industry, I stated that we need online stores from which to buy and download Asian-made television and movie content, all without virtual geographic boundaries and all without prejudice or bias to the producers of that content. Only then would the real market emerge, enabling countless talented people in Hong Kong and Asia to do their stuff and create excellent content for the world to enjoy. Two other conditions though were protection of the content to prevent casual piracy and iPod compatibility. The answer to these two conditions was obviously Apple's FairPlay.

This time last year, there was a spider population explosion. Hong Kong is host to a rather large black spider with a golden back. During this period known as 回南 'return of the southerly winds' last year, these black spiders could be seen everywhere.

This year, things are different.

A few months ago, I did an interview with people from Apple Daily for their online education site. Little did I know that it would become quite an extensive interview and writeup, even getting some banner time in the main Apple Daily site.

Overall, the interview is pretty good. The one thing I am disappointed with is the sound recording. Some of the interview was recorded indoors at my friend's coffee shop Prestigio (she also serves fair dinkum home made Malaysian, Singaporean, Western, etc food) in Sai Kung. Some of it was recorded outside the restaurant. Because of the noise from passing traffic, I voluntarily increased the volume of my voice with the intent of guaranteeing a recording that the reporters could take home and hear without difficulty.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally sold one of my Canon lenses, a high quality 85mm/1.2L lens that still looks and operates as well as the day I purchased it. This was my first eBay transaction and it was a learning experience. It took four auctions before I was able to sell the lens at a price I could be comfortable with. eBay made a lot of money out of me but at least I now have some funding to buy a lens that will be more relevant to the wildlife photos I'm taking these days.

I was lucky. The person who won the auction for my lens (a fellow Australian nonetheless) transferred the money to my PayPal account less than an hour after the conclusion of the auction. There was no doubt about getting the money. In return for their promptness, I packaged and shipped the lens the same day. The buyer was very happy.

But not everyone is lucky and there are many many shysters on eBay.

It's a fairly typical day here today in our home, except perhaps for the sun which for the first time in several weeks is shining down bright and hot; whoops! correction... the rain has just begun falling... again... oh well.

Outside, I can hear the chirping of one of our friendly neighbourhood tailorbirds. Occasionally, doves can be heard cooing to let their partners know of their whereabouts. There's also the low continuous rhythmic chanting of one of my wife's sisters as she prays to Buddha.

It's been a while since I've posted any articles here, but you can be sure that I'm still here, and you can be absolutely sure that I've read every one of your comments, even if I haven't responded. And I appreciate the comments. Even if it's not obvious, your comments are important to me and provide an important source of support.

In the time I've 'been away', I've filmed a new series at TVB. The name of the series is 寫意人生 and I'll talk more about that in a later article. It was a pretty busy part, including two sessions of five nights of continuous studio filming involving nine to eleven hours of filming each night.

Six days. That's how long I've been here in L.A. It feels like forever. I can hardly remember getting off the plane at LAX and catching the buses to my motel. Did I say buses? Yep. Three to be exact, but I managed to get to the motel for only US$5.50 instead of US$50 or more if I'd caught a taxi. I'm a student here, and I therefore need to keep my expenses as low as I can although I still occasionally spend a little more for better food.

L.A. is not an attractive city to me personally. I much prefer Hong Kong, or Brisbane (Australia), or the beautiful Blue Mountains (Australia). My home in Hong Kong is surrounded by bush and country. My home in Australia is also surrounded by bush and I grew up in the country so it's only natural that I prefer country to the city. For me, the city is an impersonal place where many people live superficial lives, where what you wear and what you drive (and how large your -silicon- breasts are while the rest of your body remains as skinny as possible) identifies who you are rather than the real person within you, and where people compete nonstop to better each other in financial and status terms. It's not a good way to live.

As some of you might be aware, the notification system I was using before wasn't working very reliably. I personally had two different email addresses registered with the system but rarely received a notice whenever a new article was added to my blog. Not good!

So I did some searching and found a plugin for MovableType that adds notification capabilities. The plugin is called MT-Notifier and while it's not perfect, it's still very good.

After installing MT-Notifier and testing it a little, I copied the email addresses from the old Bloglet subscription list and added all of those addresses to the new notification system. If you were on the Bloglet list, you should have received a new Notifier confirmation email sometime today. Simply click on the confirmation link in the email and you'll automatically receive www.hokwokwing.hk update notices in the future.

One of the nice things about MT-Notifier is that you can now subscribe to a single article and get notices every time someone (including me) writes a comment for that article. I think those of you who like to comment or question my articles will like this function. To get notices whenever new comments are added to an article, simply turn on the Receive notices whenever new comments are added to this article checkbox at the bottom of the comment form before you submit your comment.

If any of you have problems or suggestions regarding the new notifications, please email me.

I came to L.A. to study singing, nothing else, and the studies are coming along wonderfully. I have one-on-one lessons with my teacher once a day from Monday to Friday. Additionally, I attend one Cabaret workshop with other students on Tuesday nights and another singing workshop on Saturdays in a totally different place.

My teacher is simply amazing. Her knowledge of singing is so broad and extensive that I would never be able to learn everything from her even if I stayed here a whole year. For the workshops, she has a friend and partner who acts as the musical director. He is also incredible and I feel incredibly lucky to have met both of these people. Sometimes, you get lucky!

Other than my lessons, I have very little to do, so my days are relatively relaxed in spite of the small hiccups I've encountered along the way (which I'll describe in a later article).

I'm tired!

This morning, I didn't have any chores to do and I didn't feel like going to Starbucks again, so I started walking with a full backpack on my back. An hour and 25 blocks later, I discovered a very nice 'French' cafe Le Pain Quotidien with tables outside on the sidewalk. Inside, incredibly attractive breads and cakes were on display and I knew this was the place I wanted to eat at, so I sat down at one of the outside tables and ordered breakfast: a parmesan omelette and a double-cappuccino.

Everything at this restaurant was 'organic', meaning that any animals involved were treated humanely and any food products were not processed any more than necessary. The omelette was fabulous, the cheese wonderful (I'm a cheese lover). Even the organic butter tasted great. The bread was above average, and the organic Belgium jam, marmalade and hazelnut spreads were also wonderful. The coffee was so nice; served in a large cup without handles; that I ordered a second cup. The food wasn't cheap. In fact, by Hong Kong standards, it was very expensive but it's simply another case of getting what you pay for, and I'm only here for a few more days so…

I'm back in Hong Kong, back home with my wife and our kids. It's great to be back although the trip back was a little sudden and rushed.

Before going to L.A., I was filming 寫意人生 at TVB. Because filming took longer than previously hoped, I had to delay my trip to L.A. until September 16. Furthermore, TVB had another series planned for which I would need to be back in Hong Kong by October 16 or earlier if possible. This placed strict limits on the time I could spend in L.A., but the trip was important to me; improving my singing technique is always on my mind; so I worked around the limitations as well as I could and left for L.A.

My time in L.A. with my teacher was fabulous. My teacher and I clicked immediately, as if we'd known each other for a lifetime and my learning was significant.

My singing has always been important to me. Often, music is a precious companion, the one thing that will always be there no matter where I am or what I'm doing. Over the years, I've tried to improve my singing whenever possible. Through multiple unintentional spans of time when I didn't sing at all followed by periods of re-training and learning, I was able to forget some of my bad habits and learn better technique. In July of 2006, I was still not at the place I desired to be and hungered for further improvement. I needed a teacher.

My previous teacher had taught me well but you can only learn so much from one teacher and I needed more. I needed someone who could take me to the next level. Finding a teacher is always a gamble. You can never know until after you've begun working with them whether or not they'll be good for you but if you don't gamble, you'll always lose. I had to try.

It was Peisha's idea. Almost from the beginning of our time together, Peisha strongly recommended that I have a 'product' to take home with me. She meant that I should record a couple of songs, if only to show the folks at home just how much I had improved.

I wasn't totally sold on the idea at first. It was the potential financial cost of doing the recordings that kept me from committing to the idea, but as time went on, as my voice continued to improve, and as I discovered more and more songs that I loved, I grew more attracted to the idea. After three weeks of being with Peisha, I made the decision to record the songs. It's a decision that I'll never regret, and I'll forever be grateful to Peisha for her encouragement and insistence that I do the recordings.

In show business, people wish each other 'break a leg' meaning that they wish success for the person they're talking to. Perhaps, I've unwittingly taken this good luck wish to a whole new level.

A week ago while walking with a few of our kids, I was walking rather lazily and stubbed one of my small toes on a tree root sticking out of the ground. It hurt but I didn't think much of it. After all, who among us has never stubbed their toe? I continued the walk and an hour or so later returned home.

In my home, we have a table, a chair, a bed, a sofa, a refrigerator, a television and many other household articles. If I hit them, they don't feel pain. If I drop them, they may break but they will not be aware of it. They are simply material objects.

In my home, there are five people. We eat. We live. We cry. We laugh. If someone hits us, we feel pain. If someone betrays us, we hurt. If we are injured in any way, we know. We are aware.

In my home, there are eleven dogs and one rabbit. They feel joy when we return home from a day's work. They feel hunger before a meal. They feel lonely when the people are not home. They feel apprehension when they have done something wrong and see me approaching. They envy those who sit close to us. They speak. They cry. They even shed tears.

Sometimes you get lucky…

The week before last, just as I was leaving home to go to TVB, I noticed a butterfly in the Christmas trees. The colours struck me immediately and I raced back inside to get my camera. Opportunities like these come once in a lifetime.

The result was a wonderful photograph which looks even better when enlarged.

It was Tuesday. My wife and I had things to do at Telford Gardens. My wife and her sister were hungry for something Chinese, and I wasn't, so they went off to their choice of restaurants while I began making my way to Starbucks for a coffee. On the way though, I was side-tracked by a young lady who recognised me from a veterinary clinic I had visited a few times with Rose our rabbit.

The lady was trying to rescue a kitten and asked for my help. The kitten was behind some building materials stacked up against the wall facing the outside carpark and crying out loudly. While the lady used a plank to force the kitten out of hiding, I waited on the other side and grabbed her when I had the chance. Little did I know how much of a wild cat she was in spite of her small size. She instantly spun around and clawed at me with everything she had. She even managed to bite me at least once, but I quickly grabbed her gently and securely, covering and holding her head with one hand and holding her body with the other. She stopped moving but growled angrily from time to time in protest.

The truth is that everyone wants to be happy. The reality is that apparently, most people are very confused about how to be happy.

For years, advertising agencies have been using images and movies of seemingly very beautiful and happy people to sell products, everything from beer to jewellery. The core of their message is that you'll be happy too if you consume or own whatever they're selling.

The reason that this advertising works is a deep-seeded psychological need for people to be part of a community, to be accepted, to be 'one of the gang'. Many organisations use this need to their advantage. Beer and cigarette commercials imply that if you're not drinking their beer or smoking their cigarettes, that you'll not be welcome by others in the community, or at least if you do drink their beer or smoke their cigarettes, you'll have 'better' friends and more of them. Many young people have come to believe these messages.

For those of you who find it difficult to remember my web site's domain, I have registered another one. You can now use either www.hokwokwing.hk or www.gregory.hk. Both domains work equally well for web and email (although the RSS feeds will always refer to hokwokwing.hk for the time being).

I have applied for yet another two domains. I'll let you know when they've been confirmed; quite possibly next week ;-)

My father has the uncanny inclination to talk to strangers. One recent time when he visited me here in Hong Kong, we were up at the Häagen-Daaz shop at The Peak and while I was getting our ice cream, he walked over to a group of Caucasians and struck up a conversation with them. He does this all the time, and with his general knowledge of a wide range of subjects and a humble disposition, he can usually carry on a conversation for quite a long time. Some people politely listen while others are actively engaged by the conversation. It's difficult to think that this elderly gentleman with a non-threatening whitish beard, a soft round tummy and a wink in his eye could be anything other than sincere in his conversation so he rarely gets any negative responses to his invitations to chat.

My wife has commented that I sometimes display the same behaviour, suddenly walking up to complete strangers and striking up a conversation. I'm not sure if I generally actively walk up to people but I am aware that I'm not ashamed to exchange a few sentences with people in for example a crowded elevator.

Dreams don't come cheap. They require sacrifices. It's up to you whether your dream justifies the sacrifices.

"They're Playing Our Song" is definitely a big part of my evolving dream. Stage musicals, although a very small part of my early school life where I was invariably a chorus member, were never part of my goal in life. Singing was first, and acting came second, although more accidentally than intentionally; TVB was an accident, a happy lucky one.

Through the years, my preferences for acting and music have changed, and now I find myself yearning for the satisfaction that can come from a well crafted stage musical, such as "They're Playing Our Song". In recent years, I've participated in three stage productions. I danced in 「上海之夜」 (Magic is the Moonlight) and sang in 「鄧麗君，但願人長久」 (Teresa Tang Forever), but except for 「香水」 (Perfume), I was always a rather large extra in the story. Perfume was my first role as a co-star, working with three other respected professionals, none of whom thought of themselves as better than any other. In fact, in this respect, I have again been fortunate. In none of the stage productions that I have worked with have there been any actors or actresses who thought they were above everyone else, including Cass 彭羚, a world class singer who because of the Teresa Tang musical became a personal friend of mine.

And now I get a starring role. It only took 20 years to get here.

It has the affects of a narcotic but it's not a drug.

When I have it, I'm happy.

When I am about to be separated from it, I feel upset and frustrated.

When I am without it, I am mildly depressed, unhappy, lethargic, restless. I want it back. I think about it. I dream about it. Its influence and its absence can lead me to do things and make decisions that I would not otherwise do or make.

It was just after the new year, early in January.

I was taking five of our kids for a walk up our favourite hill. We turned around the corner at the round-about near our home and began walking toward the bus stop where the trail up the hill begins. Half way to the bus stop, one of the kids needed to relieve himself. I bent down, wrapped his bi-product in newspaper and stood back up ready to continue down the road.

I was suddenly aware of someone standing on the sidewalk just before the bus stop. He stood motionless, dressed in dark sport clothes, both hands in pants pockets, a pastel blue flat soft hat on his head, standing with one leg vertical and the other slightly leaning outward. He was motionless, and he was watching me, intensely.

In January of this year, I was incredibly fortunate to encounter 周潤發先生 Mr Chow Yun Fat near our home. I wrote about it in my "A Surprise Encounter" article.

發哥 called me twice after that encounter to arrange delivery of the photograph he had taken while with me at the time. The first time he called, I was watching a movie at APM and my phone was turned off. I was very disappointed. The second time he called, I was in rehearsals for "They're Playing Our Song" and again, my phone was turned off. I was irritated and frustrated that I had once again missed his call. This time, 發哥 left a message to say that he had dropped the photograph off at a store in our village. I picked the photograph up the next day.

I have just one goal this week, one thing that must be completed before the holiday weekend begins. I must complete and dispatch my application to study a (Postgraduate Diploma or MA) degree in Musical Theatre at the University of London.

Henry (the director of "They're Playing Our Song") gave me a list of institutions that he thought would have something to offer me in my quest to improve my acting skills. I checked all of their web sites and only two offered subject courses which I felt would be appropriate to my current needs. After further consideration, I decided to apply to the University of London.

After finishing "They're Playing Our Song", I needed rest. My vocal chords needed rest. More than a week before the show began, my chords had begun to inflame. I had worked them too hard with strenuous vocal exercises in the mornings followed by rehearsals every day for 8 weeks. When my chords began to feel tight, I consulted my doctor and was informed that my chords were inflaming. I halted the morning vocal exercises but it was too late. For the entire week that we performed "They're Playing Our Song", my chords were straining through every single show. I was only able to perform successfully and get through the ordeal by not speaking between shows, taking anti-inflammatories at night before sleep and using a Japanese powder known as 龍角散 'Dragon Horn Powder' before each show. Still, my vocal chords suffered tremendously; especially during those shows when our microphones weren't working; and they needed rest. I needed to shut up.

The week after the show, I couldn't completely abstain from talking. My parents were here and I don't get many opportunities to be with them so chatting with them was a blessing not to be ignored. Only after they had left Hong Kong and returned to Australia could I really allow my vocal chords to relax; no singing and as little talking as possible.

No talking meant no going out to eat and chat with friends. It meant staying at home.

My blog is a MovableType blog developed by Six Apart Ltd. They also have other blog systems. They're a very smart company. You can read about their products on their web site. Like many other systems, MovableType allows you to add functionality via plugins.

One such plugin designed to implement threaded comments is called MTSimplyThreaded which I installed and experimented with. It could link comments to other comments but it couldn't produce a hierarchical comment scheme so it wasn't what I wanted.

It's been an extraordinary six months since the play finished.

My vocal chords were severely damaged by the over-singing before and during the show. Even with six weeks of minimal speaking to relax the chords, they remained sensitive to exertion of any kind. In August, a friend asked me to sing and my voice was gone and my chords were sore after just two songs. A stressful three to four weeks in September only made matters worse. Things around us have calmed down now and I have begun the slow process of rebuilding my singing voice but it will be at least a month before I can sing anything serious.

Batty had x-rays a couple of weeks ago and hip dysplasia was not evident. He's on muscle relaxants until we can work out what his problem really is, but even with muscle relaxants, he still has difficulty sitting or lying down. When the vet comes back from holidays in his homeland Scotland, we'll look at other possibilities. Who knows? Maybe he really does have spline problems. We'll see.

My health is also being investigated. With my voice easily affected by two or three songs and feeling strained most of the day, I decided to get a professional opinion. When attending Kan's 莫鎮賢 official re-debut at Olympic City, I ran into Anders Nelsson (also a little interesting history about Anders here) and he recommended that I see an old school buddy of his; an ear, nose and throat specialist. At the doctor's clinic, I described the tightness around my throat, the raspiness after singing only two or three songs and the severe cramps I've experienced at the top of my throat over the last several months. He was surprised by the cramps and said that he'd never heard of these cramps in his thirty years of practice, and simply recommended that I find myself a good singing teacher. He was a very nice doctor but somehow I think his knowledge might be out of date. He did however say that my vocol chords were fine after looking at them through a mirror in my throat.

I might be going overseas for three months. I'm waiting for confirmation. I hope it happens but it's out of my control. The departure date though, if confirmed, is January 1 which doesn't give me much time to prepare. It's not the packing that I'm concerned with. It's making sure that everything at home is in working order, that our pet supplies are sufficient and that we have enough medicine for them, that our computers and my MacBook Pro are running well, that I have all the computer programs that I might need while away, that my camera and lenses are in great condition, that I have everything that I might need, that… You get the idea.

Twenty years ago, I was working as an English tutor in the 育成 tutorial centre in Causeway Bay when one day, one of the teachers working with me told me of a poster at her school searching for a Cantonese-speaking Caucasian to act for a TVB series. I called the number she gave me and a Pakistani agent answered the phone. I was very unsure of my chances because at the time, I had absolutely no acting training or experience of any kind save for a few extra roles in high school plays. The agent however was reassuring, and encouraged me to go to the interview. He was reassuring because he could find no one else. I was his only chance.

A little over a year ago, I ran into 發哥 and was subsequently given a photograph of myself taken by this amazing man. It was in fact a chance encounter. 發哥 had not planned it, nor had I, but the encounter happened, and just as he was about to leave, it suddenly occurred to 發哥 to ask me if I'd teach English. If it was anyone else, I'd have immediately replied no, but this was 發哥 and I instead answered yes.

Perhaps it was pre-destined that 發哥 would not be able to contact me multiple times in his earnest attempt to deliver the photo to me. Perhaps this repeated failure to locate me kept me on his mind, so much so that when he needed an English coach to help him with his dubbing work on the new The Children of Huang Shi movie, he thought of me and tried to contact me yet once again. For the first time in 4 months, I was able to answer the phone and we spoke.

In January, having just left TVB, I found myself working with Mr Chow Yun Fat 發哥 as his personal dialect coach, flying business class to a small city called Durango located in Mexico where we lived and worked for just over two months working on the Fox production Dragonball. It was quite an experience but not much fun (acceptable, taken that this was a working trip rather than a pleasure trip).

Most people, at least here in Hong Kong, have the impression that working for a Hollywood film production company is fun, or at least much more pleasurable than working for a Hong Kong film production company. The perception is that the work is not hectic or rushed, the working hours are shorter (and that hotel standard food will be provided). The perception is wrong.

Starbucks' stock (SBUX) is collapsing, and I think I know why. People are drinking less Starbucks.

I drank Starbucks coffee for many years, especially during my years of burnout depression from 2000 to 2003 when I spent just about every morning in the Telford Gardens Starbucks cafe drinking coffee and reading the 東方日報 or 蘋果日報 newspapers. Before Starbucks came on to the Hong Kong scene, it was almost impossible to sit down, relax and have a decent cup of coffee in a cafe. Rents were too high, and coffee was not a common beverage (we're not talking about Cantonese-style coffee sold in the Chinese cafes here), so coffee cafes were not a viable business. The only choices for coffee lovers were the expensive high society Cova cafes or the Japanese styled high-turnover Pokka restaurants; not a great choice.

With Dragonball being my first Hollywood production, I was not entirely prepared for the calibre of the crew. They were quite extraordinary.

The director

James Wong was the director. I watched him carefully. I wanted to see how Hollywood directors interacted with their cast. At TVB, our directors had (past tense because I'm no longer there ;-) very little time to discuss our scenes in detail with us. There was virtually no sharing or exchange of ideas. We simply arrived on set whereupon the director would glance at the set, decide where and how we would move during the scene (what we refer to as "blocking") and then run us through the scene. At TVB, most scenes were 'rehearsed' in mere minutes.

It has been a very busy past week or so, and I haven't had time to update the blog. I apologise for that.

The big news is that I'm now in L.A.. I'll be studying singing with Peisha (she has a new technique to teach me), and scoping around for an agency to represent me too.

I'm blown away by the Apple iTunes system.

I'm getting myself organised for a musical future, and part of that involved converting and importing into iTunes all of the Karaoke VCDs and DVDs we have in the house. When the tracks become part of the system, they're easily accessible, and they'll get listened to. The process of converting and importing the Karaoke tracks took three days of AppleScript scripting to automate and process, along with lots of Chinese typing, but I now have more than 700 karaoke tracks; both audio and video; in my iTunes library. Being a perfectionist, I then proceeded to correct the data for the tracks in my library, and create playlists (unrated, not played within the last month, ≤xGB) that I could use on our Apple TV and iPhones.

The first time I was in Hong Kong, visiting with a student from The University of New South Wales in 1985, we were hit by a #10 typhoon. At the time, I believe I was staying with his family in a hillside home made of tin and concrete next to the now non-existent 荔園 amusement park. It was quite an experience, although the hurricanes in Australia can be even stronger. In my hometown in Queensland, a hurricane lifted a hurricane-proof roof off from a motel and dropped it elsewhere!

Today though, here in Hong Kong, my family and I are staying indoors. No one in Hong Kong is going to work. Everyone is waiting, waiting for the biggest typhoon we've seen in a while pass smack right over the middle of Hong Kong.

When I discovered invisibleSHIELD on the 'net, I immediately knew it would be the best protection available for our soon-to-be-purchased iPhone 3G's, so I went on line and ordered two of the iPhone shields to be sent to our Hong Kong address. The covers were not going to ship until after the iPhone 3G's had begun shipping, and actual shipping of the covers to us here in Hong Kong would take 3 weeks to get here but that was acceptable.

That order was made in the middle of June.

Just a note to let everyone know that I've been invited to participate in the World Series of Mahjong competition! I leave home to catch the ferry to Macau in just a few minutes. Wish me luck ;-)

I haven't been over to Macau for a very long time. Casinos and casino gambling don't interest me. It will be interesting to see how it has changed, and if it has changed for the better. I suspect that a lot of culture and history has been lost which would be a shame. Glass and aluminium can become boring very quickly.

Cheers all.

The Mahjong competition was fun. I didn't get far, but the event was well planned, the rules were great to play, and the people; competitors and crew; were great.

I didn't make the second round of the competition. I carelessly provided the winning tiles for a few games, even when I knew that those tiles might very well be the winning tiles. I won't do that next time. Yes, next time. If I'm free, I'll go back next year although I'm quite sure the competition will be even harder.

The interesting thing about this competition is that it was designed to allow as many people as possible internationally to learn and enjoy the game. To that end, the organisers found a mahjong guru and they designed a set of rules that was the middle ground between Cantonese mahjong which is too minimal and restrictive for an international game, and Taiwanese Mahjong which is way too complicated for all but the fully dedicated players. The rules are available from the organiser's web site. I'm sure a lot of you will find the various 和 sets very interesting.

The competition will be much harder next year because several online mahjong sites in at least three languages including English, Chinese and Japanese have licensed the rules from the organisers and will be launched within the coming months. People all over the world will be able to learn and practice the World Series rules online. It'll make a big difference to the game.

By the way, I learned to play mahjong a lifetime ago in a game centre in China Town, Sydney, Australia ;-)

I can't wait to play again next year.

I recently took up weight lifting again. I have a job coming up where I'll be standing next to attractive thin women, and in my current condition, I would look very large in comparison, so it's the gym for me. I also began running again just over a month ago, barefoot of course ;-)

So yesterday, I packed my sports bag, including the usual things; clothes, shoes, headphones, gloves, etc; and left home. I spent a few hours in a local karaoke first doing song research, and then around 4pm headed off to the gym.

Our car, like most cars, has a cup holder. It's just next to the gear stick. I don't use it all that often, but when I do bring something with me to drink in the car, it's a life saver. When I don't have a beverage with me, I usually place my iPhone in the cup holder instead.

The other night, like most nights, I drove to my wife's office to pick her up from work. I had a few minutes to spare, so I bought a cup of 'Chinese café' tea 茶餐廳奶茶. When my wife came out of the office, I placed the tea into the cup holder and we began our drive home.

I love to sing, but the last several years have been tough.

Quite some time ago, I had a manager who believed in me and worked very hard to find me singing gigs in Hong Kong and China. We found a few, but it didn't last long. There were two problems. First, the people of China were not yet ready to be entertained by a foreigner singing Chinese songs. Second, they preferred shows where the performer was a 'fun' person and the singing didn't matter so much. Unfortunately, I'm more like Frank Sinatra or Michael Bublé, people where the show is all about the singing.

Much of that was happening around the year 2000 when I first encountered severe exhaustion and the depression (possibly burnout syndrome) that developed as a result. That took several years to recover from. On top of that, it was almost impossible to arrange gigs and jobs outside of TVB unless you had inside connections because TVB always had first priority on your time, and they had the legal right to require you to show up at TVB at the last minute even if you had booked a gig months in advance. This was exactly the reason many movie companies were hesitant to engage my acting services, and is also one of the reasons I declined to renew my contract with them in January this year.

My life for the moment is very simple.

I get up in the morning and take our kids for their morning walks; two walks, five kids at a time.

I have breakfast and feed the kids.

I then do my vocalising (singing) exercises. I visited Peisha again in L.A. in June July this year for two-and-a-half weeks. During that time, I studied twelve lessons with her and performed one cabaret. The lessons were all recorded on my MacBook Pro, and I now repeat them almost every day. When I visited her this time, Peisha taught me a new (and tough) vocalising technique, one that I wasn't ready for back in 2006 when I first studied with her. This new technique seems to be producing a very significant difference in my singing voice and I'm enthusiastic about where it'll take me. The vocalising part of these lessons takes anywhere from half an hour to forty-five minutes. Believe me. That's enough. Any more would be very difficult to handle.

Unless you haven't heard yet, I'm going to be one of the MC's at this year's Miss Asia Vancouver Pageant. That means that I'll finally get to visit Vancouver (and Canada for that matter).

I'd like to meet any of you who have time but I'll be busy. The only practical time I can do this will be on Thursday night, December 18. What I'd like to do is meet everyone at a coffee shop with great coffee and fabulous cakes (because fabulous cakes are not so easy to come by in Hong Kong). Please suggest a place or two. We'll all decide on a place and time to meet.

Take care.

We saw "The Day the Earth Stood Still" yesterday. My wife had been looking forward to this movie, probably because there hasn't been a good movie showing for quite some time. The summer releases were overall quite disappointing with Batman being the one exception.

We watched the movie at The Grand Cinema in The Elements Plaza. It's probably the best cinema in Hong Kong. The seats, the screens, and especially the audio are all top notch.

The movie was believable (to me) albeit a little slow in the beginning. I almost fell asleep, partly because I'm fighting an infection at the moment and therefore feeling tired generally. The only things that didn't agree with me were that the people of this earth would change their ways and begin to look after the planet they inhabit, and Keanu's Mandarin dialog. For an advanced alien being, his Mandarin was way too accented. He sounded like a beginner, one who had done his homework, but sounded like a beginner nonetheless. More than a few people in our cinema snickered at his Mandarin. The strangest thing was that he comes across to me as someone with Chinese blood in him. That's weird!

But it was a reasonable movie, much better than most of the Summer releases.

P.S. At least one aspect of the alien technology seems to have come from my favourite sci-fi television series Stargate SG-1. Does anyone remember the dreaded "replicators"?

From TwinCities:

The famous Field and Stream buck won't set a world record, but the antlers of the deer downed two months ago by Bob Decker, of Eau Claire, Wis., will bear another significant honor.

Wouldn't it have been more honorable to let the buck live and watch it thrive? Where's the honour in killing an innocent non-threatening creature? I'll never understand these people...

I have quite a collection of LDs; over 600 of them. I'm considering letting them go although I'll keep them if I can think of a way to get my friend's 35kg professional LD player from Sydney to Hong Kong.

Does anyone know of a place that buys and sells LDs?

I have slowed down somewhat for various reasons, but I'm still progressing with the five languages I set out to learn in August last year. It's not easy. My brain does tire but that's to be expected when you're trying to absorb alien pronunciations, grammar and words. There are differences in difficulty between the languages.

Hebrew has a lot of 'sh' sounds, but the grammar is very similar to English so that makes it a little easier to learn.

Japanese is going ok because I studied it for a few months many many years ago here in Hong Kong. Much of that study still exists in my brain somewhere and that makes learning Japanese now easier.

I'm off today to earthquake-stricken 四川北川 for five days. I've been invited as a guest photographer to accompany a charity group which is raising funds to support the children there. Eleven people in all will be going including a professional photographer, a video crew and other charitable folks. I'll let you know about the trip after my return.

Then on Saturday, one of our kids Beethoven is scheduled to go under the knife with a serious spinal operation. Three of his discs are extending into his spinal canal pressing on the nerves within, one disc taking up as high as 90% of the spinal canal. He still have several years of life left, and he's a great dog so ignoring the problem or putting him down was not an option. It'll be a very nervous Saturday for both my wife and myself as we wait for the results.

Take care all. See you next week.

Back in 2007, I was helping a friend with their computer in their home, which I had done on multiple occasions in return for their friendship and the occasional bowl of noodles. They trusted me and I valued that trust, so much so that I made an effort to not see anything on the computer that was private including messages, photos and passwords.

At the time while testing their printer, I came across a great sporting photo of their spouse. We have a semi-professional printer at home and I thought I'd surprise them by adjusting and printing the photo, so I emailed the photo to myself and deleted the email from the computer to keep it a surprise. Unfortunately, the photo completely slipped my mind and I never got around to printing it out for them.

Today, almost 18 months later having had practically no contact with this friend, I learn that they've been upset with me since that day on the computer. They had heard the 'whoosh' sound of the email going out and questioned me about it immediately. Apparently, I balked for 2 minutes before telling them about the photo and that made them suspect that I had stolen it from the computer ('stolen' would be technically true although in my mind, I was 'borrowing' the photo, to be deleted once it had been printed). When they couldn't find the email, it only confirmed their suspicions. That I never got around to actually printing the photo, well…

On occasion, good intentions can have disastrous consequences. My friend and their spouse believe I stole the photo for personal use, no longer trust me, and are no longer my friends. Ouch! My apologies have been heard but not believed.

Trust is a delicate thing. It takes a long time to build but can be lost in the blink of an eye, or in this case the time it takes to email a photo.

Our new friends from 北川中學 were here for a week. They left this morning. I printed special oversize name cards for them last night, and while doing so, realised that my domain names would not be memorable for our 普通话 friends on the other side of the border, so I registered another domain ;-)

My site is now accessible at all of the following domains: www.gregory.hk, www.hokwokwing.hk, www.heguorong.hk, www.河國榮.hk and www.河国荣.hk.

My email addresses all come to me so you can choose whichever is easier for you to remember: me@gregory.hk, me@hokwokwing.hk and wo@heguorong.hk.

還有啦。今年內，我的網站將有更多中文內容，包括翻譯的和原創的文章。

Take care all. I'll write more later.

For more than a year, I've had this project in my mind, thinking about it, planning it, sometimes writing it down. Now however, Project S has become an actuality.

We've been working on Project S for several weeks. Next week, I'll be flying to L.A. to continue work on it, and you'll begin to see more about it soon after.

It's complicated.

Flying to L.A. was supposed to be relatively easy to arrange. We booked the flight with our agent in mid-late July, a full three weeks before the scheduled date of departure. The return flight was confirmed, and I was put on the waiting list of 4 flights from HKG to LAX. Going online to zuji, every flight of every airline was pretty full. Apparently, people were returning home after visiting the World Expo during the Summer holidays.

I stayed on those four waiting lists until the booking's deadline, and then my agent tried to keep me there because the return flight had been confirmed. It was only a few days ago that I discovered that Cathay doesn't allow someone to remain on a waiting list past the deadline. The rules are that you either 'publish' the ticket by the deadline or lose it, but you're not permitted to 'publish' a ticket if the seat hasn't been confirmed. So, your agent is forced to rebook your ticket each time the deadline is reached, effectively putting you at the back of the line every time. Cathay needs to do something to improve their system.

The Friday before last, I did one of Peisha's lessons at home and then a few hours later sang again in a different kind of vocal training at a friend's place for another hour. This particular lesson of Peisha's was a hard one with close to 45 minutes of gruelling workout. Not long after beginning the other training session, my voice was already feeling tired.

The next day, I was made very aware of my error. I had developed something known as Supraglottal Muscle Tension Dysphonia. The muscles around the voice box had tensed up making speech difficult. The only remedy is rest, vocal rest. So I've not spoken anything since last Wednesday.

Here in L.A., I get around with my newly acquired iPad. Before coming over, I purchased a popular painting program for the iPad called Brushes. Now when I need to communicate with someone, I pull the iPad out and write the words on the iPad using Brushes. It's quick and effective.

The people here are great, showing understanding and patience. There have however been two unexpected reactions. The first is that many people respond by also speaking very softly. Perhaps it's a learnt rule when being polite that you respond in a conversation in a similar volume to your partner. Some of the people talking to me can get very soft though.

The second reaction which I've seen at least twice is that the other person immediately looks for paper to write their response on. The assumption is that since I can't speak, then I'm also deaf. They are of course unaware that I'm not mute, simply on strict vocal rest, but it's an interesting response anyway. What is bizarre is that I've even seen this reaction from my wife who is very aware that I'm not deaf!!!

I'll be in L.A. for another week. Take care all.

Before leaving home for L.A., I took possession of a new iPad. I knew I'd be carrying my computer with me wherever I went, and the MacBook Pro can get heavy after a while. I should clarify that when I'm in L.A., I invariably walk everywhere, only taking the public transport when I have to travel longer distances. It's not unusual for me to walk 4 to 5 miles in a single day while I'm here. Needless to say, my waist is getting smaller :-)

So, I brought the iPad with me. Right from the beginning, it has been a great help to me, especially allowing me to communicate with others when I couldn't speak (I can speak now btw). It's small, light, and the display is great. I have no idea how the PC companies are going to beat it except perhaps in I.T. and geek communities where access to everything under the hood is preferred.

It does have its flaws however.

I've been in L.A. for just over 2 weeks. Unfortunately, I didn't get to do what I came here to do, and that was a very big let down, but I may be leaving with something much bigger.

Shortly after arriving in L.A., pressures from multiple sources combined with past injuries and bad habits led to serious muscle strain in my throat. It was so bad that I had to see an ENT specialist. After prodding from Peisha and another newly discovered friend, I made an appointment to see Dr Nasseri.

Dr Nasseri is not cheap, but when you find the right person, when you find the person with the answers, the cost doesn't matter. Major muscle tension dysphonia was the diagnosis, and the doc promptly informed Peisha over the phone what I needed to correct my problem.

I'll be leaving L.A. on Saturday, Sep 4, heading back home to Hong Kong. It wouldn't be fair though to leave without giving those of you who live in L.A. a chance to chat.

So, I'll be at Peet's Coffee in Studio City from 1:00 to 3:00 on Saturday afternoon. Feel free to drop by.

12215 Ventura Boulevard
Studio City‎, Los Angeles

Stay well people.

I visited Doctor Nasseri again today for one last check up before I return home to Hong Kong. The news wasn't great, but it was revealing.

Over the last week or so, I have been listening to my Pimsleur language courses again. With nothing to do outside of my daily lessons with Peisha, I spend a lot of time walking from place to place listening to the courses. I'm currently learning five languages as a hobby. I realise it has been and will be difficult to learn five (or six) languages simultaneously, and that's ok. I'm not in a hurry, but last Christmas when I damaged my vocal chords, I stopped learning the languages and didn't start again until last week; an 8-month hiatus.

So I started listening to the lessons again, taking care not to speak too much. Sometimes however, it can be difficult to restrain yourself when you're having fun, and on Wednesday in particular, I spoke more than I should have. In addition, I chatted with a couple of friends for an hour or so. Whoops!

What does a Hong Kong actor do when he's on break with his family in Australia? He helps his dad dig post holes :-)

Racism to me is one of the worst evils. It's the precursor of distrust, hatred, genocide, war and many other wrongs.

Racism has been a part of Hong Kong for a long time. High-paid British and American expats looking down on the local Hong Kong Chinese was an accepted part of life in Hong Kong for many years. Only when Hong Kong was returned to China, and when the expats saw their salaries come down while the local Chinese executive salaries went up did some of that racism go away.

Many Hong Kong people that I know will say that Hong Kong people are very fair to non-Chinese races, that racism is a non-issue. To an outsider, and especially to caucasians who are usually treated with respect, that would probably appear to be a fair statement. It is not. Racism among Hong Kong people is unfortunately quite common, and usually targets races and populations who don't make as much money as the local Hong Kong Chinese, or whose home countries rank lower than Hong Kong from a civilisation point of view. Darker races are especially looked down upon.

Sometimes, you come across pure genius. A friend today referred me to this YouTube clip. It's extremely cool.

They are The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. I'd love to see one of their concerts.

Cheers all.

In 1987, I bought a one-way ticket from Sydney to Hong Kong. My dream was to become a Cantopop singer. It's been quite an adventure, but that dream is about to become a reality.

In 2010, we began planning my first Cantonese album. Its name? I'll give you a hint. It begins with the letter 's'.

Stay tuned.

Today was disheartening.

A year ago while performing in China, I damaged my vocal chords. The speaker configuration at the venue was such that the microphone couldn't be turned up very much and I had to sing at a very high volume to be heard by the audience. My vocals were not strong to begin with, and after two nights of over-singing, my chords gave up. I was unable to speak normally for several months, and recovery only became somewhat noticeable in June. Even now though, I haven't fully recovered.

Today was evidence of that. We booked a recording studio to get experience in a recording studio, to see how things are done, and to make sure that the music material we have is compatible with the studio. Everything was great, except for my voice.

It was crystal clear that my voice is not yet ready for 'prime time'. It was broken and raspy. It definitely needs time and work.

So, it is not possible at this time to set a release date for the album. In the meantime, while I work to strengthen my voice, we'll continue to work on the various things that pertain to the album; designing the CD cover and insert, re-designing my web site, arranging the remainder of the songs, thinking about marketing, etc.

There have been many obstacles to recording this album. When it is finally released, it will be a symbol of victory against all odds.

Almost 10 years ago, I succumbed to a debilitating physical/physiological problem that nobody could diagnose or treat correctly.

At the time, I was writing software to aid database developers who worked with the FileMaker database system. I spent day after day working on it for months. Many programmers will tell you that it's difficult to pull yourself away from a project once you get involved, and I often spent 12 to 15 hours a day working on the software. Most nights, I slept only 3 or 4 hours, and not very soundly because one ear was kept open while I slept to listen for fights and incidents involving a village puppy I'd befriended earlier in the year.

After 3 or 4 months of this schedule, my body gave up and I lost the ability to do anything conscientiously. It was a hard time for my family. I saw a doctor and was promptly prescribed anti-depression medication because my ailment was not understood and therefore deemed to be psychosomatic in nature.

We've hired a local design company to come up with designs for the new album cover and yesterday, we received the first draft. I can't show you just yet but it's very cool!

Take care all.

I can remember several experiences over the last ten years that were brought about by my ailment. I can remember them vividly because they were quite severe, and I'll describe some of them for you in the next chapter of this series. In today's chapter however, I'll quickly describe some of the general symptoms I've experienced.

Fatigue was a big problem. I felt tired for most of the day on most days. Even if I slept for an extra two or three hours during the day, I would still feel tired. One result of the perpetual fatigue was that I was almost always passive rather than pro-active. This was probably why I was able to continue my work at TVB, because they'd call me up to go to work and I'd go. It was that simple. On the other hand, trying to actively prepare for engagements, or walk out the door to exercise, or even prepare breakfast was extremely hard to do.

One of our 'kids' is in hospital.

Beethoven follows me everywhere when I'm at home. At night before I go to bed, if I get up from my computer desk and move toward the bathroom, he notices and gets up to follow me within seconds. Except for last night.

Last night, I moved toward the bathroom and Beethoven didn't move. It wasn't until I came out of the bathroom that I noticed he hadn't followed me. I snapped by fingers which is usually enough to indicate to him that I'm going to bed, and he still didn't budge, so I examined him closer.

I'm feeling very tired.

Monday night, I took Beethoven to the 24-hour vet clinic in Mong Kok at one in the morning. I didn't get much sleep that night.

Yesterday before lunch, I was able to bring Beethoven home. He hadn't recovered fully but he seemed chirpier than the night before. The saline drip had definitely helped him. Unfortunately, he was still weak and refused to eat or drink. Last night, I watched him carefully, considering every minute whether to take him back to the hospital. His breathing was heavy and a little quick. I didn't get much sleep last night either.