Has any of you seen IPTV in action yet? I haven't, until a little more than a week ago, when I volunteered to help man the booth for GoodTV at a revival conference at Costa Mesa Hilton one Saturday afternoon. GoodTV had struck a deal with KyLin TV to be part of their offering, so at the show they are demonstrating GoodTV program live through KyLin's IPTV. What they had is just a plain DSL broadband (with upstream 384K, downstream 1M, they said) from the hotel, connected to a setup box provided by KyLin, then to a regular TV monitor. The picture quality is pretty good, the movement very smooth, just like a real TV program playing. I was impressed.
KyLin is offering a special for GoodTV to promote, ie, for $9.99/month, the customer can get 31 channels, including GoodTV. For people who want to watch lots of Chinese channels and GoodTV, that's a good deal. One lady wanted to
sign up for her Mom who lives in Barstow, where they don't have much TV broadcast, even just for the GoodTV channel alone. She thinks it's worth it.
By the way, do you know who started KyLin TV, an IPTV service network targeting all Chinese around the world and has tens of thousands of customers already? William Wang, the founder/CEO of Computer Associates, the number 2 software company just next to Microsoft back in the old days. They said he's a Catholic and that may have something to do with his network carrying GoodTV channel for free. But I doubt that's the reason. I think GoodTV not charging KyLin for their content is reason enough for them to carry it for free in return, not to mention the Christian audience GoodTV
could bring them.
Talking about another first, I just made my first ever trip on a train today since I got to this country 25 years ago. There is an Internet Telephony tradeshow at LA convention center I planned to go. Instead of driving like I always do, I thought, why not take a train this time? So I checked the schedule and took the MetroLink train at Irvine Station at Barranca, all the way to the Union Station at downtown LA, then took the MetroRail Red Line subway for 3 stops, then transferred to the Blue Line light rail for one stop, and here I am a couple of blocks from the LA convention center. I took the same route back in the afternoon, in reverse order, without problem. The train is nice and clean, punctual and smooth. Though it took a little more time altogether than driving, with all the stops and transfers, but you get to read and work with computer on the train if you want (some seats have table on it), without the hassle of driving. The round trip ticket price is $16, including all the transfers. If you drive, the round trip is at least 100 miles long, using 20 miles/gallon, you need to spend 5 gallons of gas. For $3.00/gallon, you need to spend $15 on gas alone. Add the parking ($12 at the Convention Center), you can see the economic sense of taking train vs driving already. Besides, you get to find your fellow citizens--the Latino passenger and the black custodian I asked questions from--are kind.
There is a new book that created quite a stir lately--Time Magazine did a cover story on it and Newsweek had a long article about it in its Religion Section. It is a book about some previously undisclosed letters Mother Teresa wrote that describe the "silence, emptiness" she feels in her over 50 year journey of faith with God. It's quite shocking for ordinary people to hear such sincere yet deeply painful testimonies from a well-known saint that the world had all come to love and admire. To the anti-religion or the atheists, however, this gives them a God-send opportunity to bash all religions and the Catholic church in particular, such as the Newsweek article did, written by an atheist and author of a recent best seller "God Is Not Great." You can almost feel him gloating in the article. But the Time Magazine's cover story is more objective and accurate, in my opinion. It not only tries to explain it from the secular points of view, but also from the theological, faith-based angle, which gives you even more admiration and understanding of Mother Teresa and her faith in the unseen God under duress. If you are interested, here is the whole story by Time Magazine:
http://www.kendallharmon.net/t19/index.php/t19/article/5290/
Look forward to seeing you guys this Saturday: same time--8:30 AM, same place-my home yard.
"All you are thinking about is yourself!"-- these are angry words thrown at me when I was parting with a former business partner of mine. I was flabbergasted to hear him say so, because I thought I had done so much for him and for the partnership, and if anything, I thought he was the one who had been thinking all about himself. Still, these words kept bothering me long after. Have I been thinking all about myself all the time? Am I a selfish person? I keep asking myself. If not, why do these words bother me so much? Over time, I kind of admit I probably am a selfish person, thinking
too much about myself too much of the time. And I don't like that.
Then the other day I met with a guy with whom I went to the same Chinese church a long while back. We were kind of close, and after lunch and some exchanges, he started to complain to me about not being fed spiritually enough in another church he's been attending for over 3 years then left, and that the pastor there never seemed to care about his presence or not. "Not a single phone call from him after I left, after all those 3 long years." he lamented. What a whiner, I thought to myself, not being very Christian like, I admit. But why do you only think about what you need from the pastor, why not think that the pastor may need you too? Eventually, I told him what I thought, in a nice way, of course. I told him my personal experience is "when I went out and tried to help others, I myself got helped," "It's easy to criticize and think bad of others, when you only live in your own virtual world." I was surprised I felt that way and said those words. I heard such complaints from him before, but I didn't have such strong feelings then.
Pastor Rick Warren did a grand review of his ministry last Sunday, as some of you had heard already. As always, his plain talking and genuine passion touched me. "Why do we want to keep growing," he asked. "Because we love Jesus", he said. If it's up to himself, he said he would just build a 300 member congregation and stop there because that's the size he likes best to minister and can get good salary and then retire and play golf twice a week. But this is not about himself, it's God's ministry he is doing.
Pastor Rick is Pastor Rick because he's great Pastor Rick. But I think what makes him so great is he always has such a big heart for God's business. I pray I have that same heart all the time.
I was "out of commission" for the past couple of days--couldn't read, couldn't work on computer, not even talking on the phone, as instructed by my Lasik eye doctor. This was my second Lasik surgery. I did my original one more than 1 year ago, to correct my nearsightedess. All went fine except it didn't really cure my nearsightedness 100%. They said it's because I was one of those high prescription patients and such result is normal. What I found is this insufficient curing of my myopia actually cured my presbyopia perfectly--I can read and work on computer without moving my head away from the object or wearing reading glasses. Long story short, at the end, I decided to have a "mono-vision" surgery again, one that will leave my right eye untouched, and operate only on my left eye so it can be truly 20/20 for distance vision. That's what I did yesterday.
It's second time around for me, so nothing is really new or scary, except while I was waiting outside of the operation room, I found they have a TV screen hanging above the surgery bed that showed the close-up of the whole surgery process that I could see from where I sat, so I got a free tour of what happened exactly to the patient before me: I saw how the eye's cornea flap got flipped over and tugged away, then the laser gun moved in, "da da da", applying the cutting, then the flap got moved back and "pasted" with a small brush... The whole process took less than 5 minutes. When I went in, the same process happened to me as I could tell, and I smelled the burn when the laser gun blasted on my cornea.
One thing they have you do before the surgery, is to sign a long document explaining that Lasik is not the only way to correct your eyesight and like any operation, it carries a certain risk of failure and you are aware of that, etc... This was probably the most scary part of the operation.
We all treasure our physical well being greatly, as I was signing the paper, I thought. We all want our body to be functioning 100%, if possible, not to mention not wanting any major injuries or the ultimate death to come to us. Yet we all know and learn from the bible and other teachings that this body is only temporary thing, we should not cling on to it too much... Yet we seem to like to cling on to it quite much.. How do we explain it?
One reason I guess is we do get to enjoy certain pleasures, not only physically, but emotionally and spiritually, through this body, that instinctively teaches us that in order to keep these pleasures, or to have them again, we need to keep this body we have. Or maybe it's just because we don't know there is any other way (medium) that we can have these pleasures. The religiously correct answer to this, then, is one day we won't need this body baggage or any medium to enjoy the eternal joy with the Lord any more.
Back on earth and back to now. We'll have our bi-weekly men's group gathering at my home again this Saturday morning. Come on over if you can. Instead of 9 AM, I'd like to move it a notch early, say 8:30 AM, this way we can enjoy cooler air in the morning and finish it earlier (say 10:30) so we all can go home and go about doing our weekend business if need to.
Here is something from an interesting article I just read and would like to share with you:
You probably all know something about quantum physics, the one that says, basically, when in sub-atomic world, the act of observing affects the behavior of the observed. Therefore one can only describe the where-about of a sub-atomic particle in terms of probability, no longer a definitude.
This is interesting enough, and has been proven by many experiments, but here is another even interesting thing scientists found lately with other experiments:
In these experiments they try to observe particles of light (photons) flying toward a screen, one at a time. The screen has two slits. If each photon goes through one slit, they form two bright spots on Venetian blinds beyond the screen. If each photon somehow goes through both slits, however, they form black-and-white stripes when they land on the blinds. Physicists have long known that if a device observes the slits, no zebra pattern forms; it's as if quantum phenomena are too shy to display their magic--one particle going through two slit--when watched.
Now, scientists put detectors on the far side of the blinds. If the blinds are open and the detectors peek at the slits, photons fly through only one slit and no zebra stripes form. If the blinds are closed so the detectors cannot see the slits, photons fly through both and form the stripes. Here's the twist: if the blinds open only after photons have passed the slits but before they reach the blinds, the stripes fail to form even though the photons have seemingly done what they must to form stripes--namely, fly through two slits, as they always do when unobserved. The act of observing alters what the photons did earlier, somehow changing things so they passed through one slit and not two.
There seem to be "many histories" a photon could have, then, such as passing through one slit or two. Or "something that happens now is affected by something that happens in the future", says physicist Jeff Tollaksen of George Mason University. "It suggests that the universe has a destiny--a destiny that is out there and coming back to us from the future".
Amazing, isn't it? Does this also ring a bell, or bring back that image of "a supertrain, shuttling between the past, the present, and the future, all at the same time, whenever we do the communion together," as said in the little book "The Meal Jesus Gave Us" by N. T. Wright that we read a while back ago, Ed, Dave, and Ken?
Back to the present, or the pretty near future, this coming Saturday, the 1st week of the month, date for our men's group meeting. Feel free to come over and have quality fellowship time together 9 AM at my home, like we did last time, if you can. Let me know if you are coming, so I can have my fancy, programmable coffee maker brew 10, 9, 8, 7..., or just one cup of coffee for you and myself.
