I have had this Chinese abacus since 14 years ago.  Every time I take out this abacus, I will think of a person who taught me a lot of things when I was in primary school - my late “SanShuGong” (third granduncle).

The following was the story of how I got this abacus.  I worked at my grandfather and his brothers’ shop during a long school holiday after the PMR exam (Malaysian lower secondary exam).  It was a shop selling non-food groceries, and I helped them at their stationaries corner.  At that time, abacus was NOT popular in primary school (unlike current education system).  It also looked great when I saw my “DaBoGong” (elder granduncle) do calculation using abacus.  At the same time, when I went to a library and I found a book on how to use abacus.  I started to become interested in abacus.

One day, before we prepared to close the shop for the day, I told my SanShuGong that I wanted to borrow an abacus so that I could practice at home.  He said okay.  That evening was the day I started to learn the abacus by myself.  The next day, I told him again that I wanted to keep the abacus and pay him the money and he said no need.

The whole process was carved in my mind, and I don’t think I will forget it.

My SanShuGong not only gave me this abacus, he was a person who take education as the most important thing for the young generation.  He was a teacher in a school.  After he retired, he gave free tuition to my brothers and me for 2 hours every evening and 7 days a week for about 3 years from my primary 4 to primary 6.  Not only that, sometimes he made drinks for us during the short break between lessons.  Sometimes he gave us a long speech to motivate us.

He gave me a lot of stories books (at least 500 books).  I never had to buy reference books or sample questions for the exam since UPSR (Malaysian primary school exam) until SPM (Malaysian higher secondary exam) because he always bought them for me.

On the first day I worked with him in the shop during the PMR holidays.  He brought me to the bookshop near by to buy books until my elder-granduncle complained a little bit.  :P  He knew the bookshop owner very well and he got some discount.  I still remember I bought a Form 4 reference book on Physics subject.  On the way to the bookshop, he told me the old Chinese name for some streets that I never knew before.  The name of the street has changed since long time ago, only the people who stay there might know about it.

Few weeks later, I showed him that I have learned the multiplication from the book, and he also showed me his way.  Both ways were different.  I think he did not understand what I had shown to him.  It is a usual way where a traditional old man always talks more than listens to others.

He passed away 10 years ago and I feel really sad.  I want to thank him for everything he had given me and I miss him very much.

Can you see the label on this abacus?  I had labeled it with an old labeling machine with the date 7. 10. 1995 the day I owned it.  It is a medium size “2-5″ abacus.  On the second picture above you can see its price tag RM 8.50.  Its colour has faded over the years because I had washed it a few times with water when there was a layer of dust on it.

Although I have learned how to use abacus, but now I can only do well in addition.  May be I should have mastered subtraction, multiplication and division as well.

Qing Ming Festival is usually occurring on the 5th of April (+/- 1 or 2 days) every year when the Sun reaches the celestial longitude of 15 degree. Most importantly, it is also the day for Chinese to pray before the ancestors, sweep the tombs and offer food, tea, wine, chopsticks, joss paper accessories etc..

Usually my grandfather, granduncle, father, uncles and aunties would go to “sweep” the tombs of my great-grand parents and great-great-grandparents 2 or 3 weeks before the actual day to prevent traffic jam. My great-grand parents passed away when I was studying in primary school, but I have never followed them to sweep the tomb every year on Qing Ming.

Yesterday (Sunday), I went to the tombs for the first time. The two big blocks of tombs were just next to each other. This year my grandfather and my elder granduncle (my grandfather’s elder brother) did not follow the team because they are too old and it will not be easy for them to climb up a hill. Therefore, this is the first time my brother and I are “invited” to join them this year.

My relatives and my father, my brother and I spent about 2 hours there cleaning the tombs, give the food as offering, and finally we burned the “golden and silvery paper” before we said bye bye to our ancestors.

From the tombstone I saw that my great-great-grandfather was labeled with the 18th generation, and my great grandfather was labeled with 19th generation. Then I calculated which generation I am. It turned out that I am the 22nd generation, and my nephews are the 23rd generation.

Do you know that great-great-grandfather is also known as:-
1. Grandfather’s grandfather.
2. Father’s great-grandfather.
3. Great-grandfather’s father.

For me, I do NOT agree that burning things such as “fake money”, fake clothings, paper houses, paper cars can help the ancestor in the other world. These actions do not make sense at all and create pollution. But most of my relatives are doing that and I can’t stop them.

The most important value of Qing Ming Festival is to remember our ancestors and learn the value of “XiaoDao” (filial piety in Chinese). It is the good and positive value of respect and obedience to parents and ancestors.  It is the basic value that helps in creating a peaceful and harmony environment from the scale of a family to the entire country since thousands of years ago.

This is the first time we saw a green radish.

In Chinese, no matter it is a white radish, purple radish, green radish or even carrot, we called them “LuoBo”.

“HuLuoBo” - Carrot.
“HongLuoBo” - Red radish.
“BaiLuoBo” - White radish.
“ZiLuoBo” - Purple radish.
“QingLuoBo” - Green Radish.

We bought it from a hypermarket.  My mum said that it is uncommon to see green radish here and it must be imported from other country.  My sister-in-law quickly took out a piece of newspaper and show us that there are different types (about 20 types) of radishes and carrots.  The articles with pictures was published in the health section of a Chinese newspaper a few days before we found and bought this green radish.

We were not sure how to cook it, and finally we used it to make soup.  It tastes similar to white radish.  I wonder if the green radish can be used to make Chinese radish cake (”ChaiTaoKueh” in Hokkien - a Chinese Dialect) which is usually made using white radish.  Chinese radish cake is our favorite delicacies.  Yes, it is delicious.

Related Post: Romanesco Broccoli.

Recently I have encountered some bad capacitors on a graphic card of my client.  The user was randomly facing black screen right after boot up until one day he could not solve the problem after many reboots.  Surprisingly the monitor can still show the BIOS detail but show nothing after the operating system has loaded (noticed from HDD LED).  It was tested not the problem of the monitor.

The first picture above shows 3 bad capacitors, and the second picture above shows a good capacitor.

While I was doing some research on why is this happening, I found the story behind.  It is called capacitor plague, an issue that discovered in 1999 but the poor quality capacitors were still being sold or integrated into designs as of early 2007.

[Capacitor plague is involved the common premature failure of certain brands of electrolytic capacitors used in various electronics equipment.  An incorrect electrolyte formula within a faulty capacitor causes the production of hydrogengas, leading to bulging or deformation of the capacitor’s case, and eventual venting of the electrolyte.] - taken from Wikipedia.

It is not easy to detect the capacitor plague because the device such as motherboard, DVD player, or even camera that have bad capacitor may still be working.  This is because the capacitors might still have 50% or lower of its capability to perform its job (but it gets worse as the time goes).  However, the system will definitely shows some funny things from time to time.

I am not sure about DVD player or camera, but for a computer system, if it is showing the following symptoms such as freeze intermittently, blue screen, memory error, fan turning when switched on but nothing happen, system reboot by itself etc., it might be the problem of the capacitor.

However, this type of capacitor (electrolytic capacitor) has a lifespan and its life get shorten as the heat increases. The capacitance may degrade to 4% of the original value (with the problem of capacitor plague), as opposed to an expected 50% capacity degradation over the lifetime.

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The things that surprised me the most is :-

[The root cause of the failing capacitors is industrial espionage gone wrong.   Several Taiwanese electrolyte manufacturers were using a stolen formula that was incomplete, and lacked ingredients needed to produce a stable capacitor.] - taken from Wikipedia.

Human use tools to solve problem, but also create problems while the tools are being developed. - (C) ColinJong 2010.

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The conclusion is that my client chose to use the on-board graphic temporarily and I guess it might be a short circuit instead of capacitor plague.

We did not bring back a lot of souvenirs from Perth for our friends and family, but I did bring back a lot of memories, photos and some valuable driving experience from Perth which I would like to share with you.

Rent a car is cheaper than taking a cab / taxi, but we were forced to study the map and has made quite a lot of mistakes especially when we came to junctions.  The parking fee is quite expensive.  We parked for less than 1 hour and it cost us A$4.30, compared to Kuching, average RM1+ for 1 hour.

The drivers in Perth are more polite, compared to our country.  I noticed most of the cars were moving according to the speed limit.  I did not have to worry that I have to wait for a long time to get out from a parking space or a junction because I am sure someone will give way to me.

There was one day we were at one of the busiest traffic lights in the Perth City and I wanted to take a right turn, but I noticed that there was no chance for me to turn right. I was sure it is legal to turn right, but there is no right turn arrow on the traffic light, when the green lights were on, the cars from my direction and the opposite direction can go at the same time.  On my lane, I have to wait for the cars from the opposite to finish passing the traffic lights.  By the time the cars from the opposite direction finished passing the traffic lights, it has turned red already.  I missed 2 rounds of traffic lights, and suddenly I saw a car behind me over took me, the car stopped in the middle of that cross road, when the lights turned red, it was the time to take a right turn because the car from the opposite direction has stopped.  I have learned that, and I asked one of our friends in Perth, she also said that this is the way to get through this type of traffic lights.

This was the car which we have rented - Hyundai Accent.  Everything was fine except the cushion for the rear seat which was a bit hard.

We almost forgot to take picture of this car with us until the last evening we were there before the sky turned dark.  I suddenly thought that if I did not take photo with this car, we won’t have the chance anymore because it was getting dark and we were going to depart in the midnight.  Therefore, we quickly took the photos with the car in front of an Asian food center.

The car has carried us to many places including SiewPeng’s sister’s university.  SiewPeng and I hope to study again in a university in Australia if we have the opportunity (We are planning to do that in the coming decade).

We were at the Perth city again.  This time we didn’t have to catch the bus.  We bought some key chains, which I have given out to friends and family before I took their pictures.  Key chain is the most common souvenir.  However, the most common thing around us could never be found on the other places on the Earth.

SiewPeng and Colin in Perth City.

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Well, another thing I brought back from Perth was the following food.  It might be the most common breakfast in Australia or other Western countries, but we have never found it in Kuching.

I wanted to let my family test it and tell them that this is the food I ate in Australia.  But they said it is tasteless.

It is called crumpet.

This is how it looks like.

If you want to know more, click on the crumpet link above and read it from Wikipedia.  :P

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This time, I played with my mobile phone, searched for the network operator and found the other two.

Last year I found Telstra only, this year I found Vodaphone and Yes Optus.

The thing that made me curious and tried to search for other network was :- last year, when I arrived at the Perth International Airport, the first roaming network operator was automatically switch to Telstra, but this year while I switched on my mobile phone at the airport, I received 3 text messages guiding me on how to make out going calls, and I saw the operator logo was Vodaphone.  I start to think that other network operators might be cheaper.

It is not cheap for roaming service.  I have to pay even to receive a call.  It was worse when come to Chinese New Year when I receive calls and texts from friends wishing each other Happy Chinese New Year.  One of my friends in Kuching went to a national park and texted me to ask me where the waterfall is.

Each minute is RM3 for receiving and making outgoing calls, and each text message cost me RM2.  :O

We have not planned for our next trip yet, but we will sure be going again.

This post is the last post for our Perth trip on Chinese New Year 2010.  We will make a summary soon in the comment section, and we have written 21 posts for this trip.   Actually, there are more things to write and post, but I have to make it short.

Hope that you have enjoyed all of them!  :D