60

I am not a birthday person, the thought of people getting together putting you in focus throwing good words at you for no reasons other than it's your birthday always makes me feel a little uneasy, to tell the truth.

But it's not all about you, you over-bashful, self-conscious dude! Here are four different flavors of birthday celebration I experienced in one past week:

The serene

On Monday, my weekly meditation day, my wife and I invited the group to our home for an extended meditation with birthday celebration for me and another meditator whose birthday was just a few days apart from mine. We enjoyed a delicious dinner my wife prepared, the birthday cake and cookies and ice cream some of them made, some folksy music videos I arranged, then a 20-minute group meditation under the stars in the back yard...

A delightful night of peace and quiet sharing with my "Club Med" extended family of 5+ years.

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The festive

A group of similar-aged friends of ours have been celebrating milestone birthdays for each other for years, and on Thursday (my actual birthday) it's me and another guy's turn (we both share the same birthday, he being one year younger than I though). We reserved a private room in a classy Japanese restaurant in Newport and enjoyed custom-ordered gourmet food all together ... A feast of the decade (last time we did this was when we turned 50)!

The gaudy

Though I had long pulled my birthday info from my social media profile, words still somehow got out and one of my junior high school buddies set off a flurry of birthday wishes over our high school alum chat line that included a tacky "birthday gift" photo such as this:

That gift, live bodies if they were, would help cure the chronical foot problem I have by accompanying me strolling through Southern Californian beaches each day, as I joked with my boyish friends online.

The unexpected

Paul Lo was my true heart-to-heart friend in college and one of my yearly must-meets in northern California, except I didn't get to see him this year when I was there and he was out of town a couple months ago.

On Saturday morning I noticed he had tried to call me through a chat line then left a well wishing note after I failed to answer. I called him right back and had a short but precious chat with him, a pleasant surprise that can only seem so timely for a lifetime friendship.

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So I just turned 60, how does that feel? Not much really, in comparison to when I turned 50 (half one-hundred, that's a shocker), or even 55 (when I discovered for the first time I could be categorized as senior citizen). Or maybe my premeditation on yet another epical age to come months before has done its job of defanging that the advent of it has lost its sting on me.

60 is a round-up number In Chinese calendar, and we also like to call it the year of turning "easy ears" (耳順), in contrast to 50 when one begins to "reckon what on earth am I here for" (知天命), both quoting from Confucius.

If I were to interpret "easy ears" to mean "whatever my wife says is like music to my ears" ("yes dear") and combine it with the reckoning of what my life's for when turning 50, then I should say by now I should have realized that the purpose of my life is to take whatever my wife says as music to my ears.

That in turn would be music to my wife's ears, wouldn't it?

Maybe 60 is a year of turning around, after all.

May we all find our turn-arounds in life, times to rekindle our love, renew our vows, re-adjust our priorities... to relax, regroup, and relaunch, into the next round of life, all the time!

kara ok

Ever thought about setting up a karaoke system at home so you and your friends can have fun singing happy tunes together when having a house party?

I had that thought a couple times before. The last one occurred some 5 years ago when we moved into this new house of ours and were installing a built-in audio/video system. I did some research but found it a bit complicated and pricier than I thought and ended up not pursuing it.

But I like singing and lately we had a bunch of music loving friends coming over for party, thus the thought crept up on me again. 

A quick survey online showed a full-blown commercial karaoke system with mixer, microphones, speakers, etc. still looks unwieldy and can cost up to $1000 or more, not to mention the installation hassle. With my intuitive belief that consumer electronics pricing is constantly going downward and new technologies should help make setting up things easier, I went on to explore alternative solutions for a simple karaoke system with decent performance at reasonable cost that I can build on my own.

One of the first low-end karaoke equipment I found online was some all-in-one "karaoke microphone" that combines microphone and speaker in one little hand-held piece that transmits the music through bluetooth wireless and shows lyrics on your smartphone or tablet screen, for about $30. I bought one for trial. It worked as it said, except its tiny platform and limited power were more suited for self-practice and close-up groups than the grander scheme of things I have in mind.

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Continuing searching from bottom-up, I found this other simple package: a mixer with two wireless microphones, that costs just a little over $60:

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I got it in two days with Amazon Prime shipping and got right on to it. The mixer was a tiny box but looked solid and sturdy. The hook-up was easy in theory: Pair it with your iPhone/Android or iPad/tablet through bluetooth wireless for the music input, and connect its audio output to your existing audio system for the back end. It's the latter that would take me some work-around to do, for I have a somewhat complicated (don't we all nowadays) home entertainment system that includes 9 ceiling/wall speakers, one big screen TV, DVD, Blu-ray players, FM/internet radios, a now-defunct cable/satellite TV input, divided into two zones, wrapped around a slew of receiver, amplifier, master console boxes, etc.

It took some analytical thinking, and a few trial and error fumblings with the wires, but I got it right eventually, and tapped the audio output to my 5 ceiling speakers in the family room. It's a pleasant and triumphant feeling hearing those nice, clear surrounding sounds coming out from the front and back of the room again, a couple years after I terminated my satellite TV service that simultaneously cut off those speakers due to the original wiring design by my A/V system installer!

The bluetooth pairing was easy and almost automatic, found its connection with my Android device the moment it's turned on. Same were those two wireless microphones, connecting instantly with the mixer, with impressive volume and echo controls!

Then came one last sticky point of the hardware setup: Instead of having people reading lyrics from one tiny smartphone or tablet, I want to connect the music video to my TV so all people--the audience and the singer--can see the lyrics and the video on the big screen while singing. How do I do that?

The easy solution was to hook up my Android device--the one that was hooked up with the mixer wirelessly already--with my Chromecast dongle attached to my TV, also wirelessly. What I found, unfortunately, was once that Android device was connected with the TV through Chromecast wirelessly (WiFi), it lost its wireless (bluetooth) connection with the mixer's audio output, or those precious 5-speaker surround sounds coming from my room ceiling. Bummer!

Fortunately, I have an old Android tablet that has an HDMI port that can connect directly, through wire, to my TV, and such wired connection won't destroy the audio connection from the mixer to those speakers. Problem solved!

Hardware all hooked up, now comes the soft side of things, i.e., where and how do I get the karaoke music content to sing along with?

Here is where the beauty and omnipresence of today's internet technology come into play: There are plenty of (free) apps with plenty of karaoke music to choose from online. I downloaded and tried out a couple of them. App 1 has good song selections and quality sound effect, except it has incessant ad interruptions that's borderline intolerable and the song selections are somewhat limited; App 2 is really a YouTube layover, getting all its songs through YouTube search for you, and has longer than usual streaming latency that could choke up the songs badly.

So why not go directly to YouTube for the music, I said to myself, and I did. YouTube has a fantastic trove of karaoke music videos: English, Chinese, love songs, pop songs, oldies, contemporaries... you name it, you probably can find it. They are from people who love singing, apparently, and some karaoke music production houses that want to attract people to subscribe or buy and download their stuff. I easily collected over 50 karaoke music videos I like through random search on YouTube during my spare time in a couple of days.

YouTube does push ads between songs too. If you are a singing purist and want absolutely no interruptions between songs, you can sign up with their paid service, YouTube Red, for $9.99/month. Not only will that eliminate all ads, it allows you to download the music videos to your device, so you can play them offline, not worrying about internet connection or any signal hick-up whatsoever. You can terminate the service any time you want, and keep the videos you've downloaded for your permanent karaoke collection, I suppose.

So my friends, I hope I have not bored you to death with all these mumble jumble, techie nonsense--they are not important. What's important, is you tell me what songs you like to sing, and I'll find and save them for you, and we'll sing them together next time you are in my home!

Try this one for starters:

https://youtu.be/gd4mB-zUcO8?list=PLt2lQv4kg5fDwQbqhtfire-lLmDdKghUJ

summer fun

Here are some online joshing between me and my pal on our college alum group chat line. Unfortunately the fun can only be picked up in Chinese:

前文：自加入 LINE 群組以來，在南加州經營"回春院"的盧偉X同學（帳戶名0.1，藍色字幕）本著友愛同學之情，不斷熱心提供"再春"建議，但日前開始要求同學們繳納會費。以下是我（帳戶名David翁朝宏，棕色字幕）與他的對話：

0.1:
會費優惠延至月底， 少數還沒有交的同學請速匯美金二百元至 weilu@paygal.ru， 否則之後就是二百五。

David翁朝宏:
@回春院長0.1，我的二百五會費上回已經誤繳給一個俄羅斯詐騙集團了，你若幫我要回來，你留二百，剩下五十還我就行！

0.1:
好厲害的俄羅斯詐騙集團， 連精明的翁員外也被騙了， 真是可惡。 不過據我了解， 詐騙集團的成員並不都是壞蛋。 有的是誤交需索無度的小三， 有的是肉體被她人控制， 更有的是為了籌措女兒的學費。翁員外家財萬貫， 我看這區區二百五十文就當善款， 算了吧。

雖然被騙，但會費還是要補交的。上次那個帳號已因故作廢， 請速匯至新帳號 weilu@paygal.ng， 謝謝。

David翁朝宏:
@0.1，說來慚愧，翁員外臨老糊塗，除了被那俄羅斯詐騙集團騙了兩百五，還被另外一個奈及利亞詐騙集團也騙了五百兩，看來又得勞你出馬追討了...

但你說的沒錯，人做壞事都是不得已的，咱們就不跟他們計較，我重新再繳會費兩百五給你就是

只是你的帳號為什麼長得跟他們的那麼像 ...

各位同學，如果你也有類似的疑慮的話，可以把你的會費交給我，我再當面轉交給偉哥

我的帳戶是 david@honestwong.com

偉哥收到會款後會有感謝紀念品，比如說銀杏，回春院藏書之類的寄贈給大家，你就知道你的會費沒有白繳了

謝謝大家！

0.1:
糟糕！這幾天比較忙沒有上賴， 今天一看才發現被駭客盜用了。 這個駭客不但思路敏捷文筆流暢， 而且格調高雅談吐不俗， 有如我的分身一般， 因此把大家都騙了。幸虧我及時發現，更改密碼，否則後果不堪設想。

穎悟松根和翁員外， 你們雖然被騙但是會費還是要補交， 請速匯至 weilu@0487.com。 謝謝！

David翁朝宏:
還是回春院長英明，閱人無數，一眼便識破駭客的分身技倆。這位超級駭客不但駭了院長的賴帳戶，也駭了我的，實在太厲駭了，我到現在還搞不太懂他怎麼做到的，但是各位同學不要為此傷腦筋，也別再懷疑，只要認定現在跟你們講話的這位是真翁員外便行

凡事都有假，只有回春院需要大家的會費是真的。我跟院長搶在駭客之先，登記了一個新帳號，請大家配合，在帳號再度被駭之前，盡快匯款到：

PresidentLu@HuiChunYuan.org  

.org是經過美國政府核準的正字標記，不是俄羅斯的.ru，也不是奈及利亞的.ng，所以大家可以放心，一次多交幾年的會費，兩百五，柒佰伍，一千兩百五 ... 隨君所欲，無上限

事實上，預測到大家的心聲，我跟院長連夜加改了組織憲章，加設"永久會員及贈品"一欄如下：

若有一次繳納1000的，除了成為回春院永久會員外，還可得回春院藏書xxx寫真集一冊

若有一次繳納5000的，除了成為回春院永久會員外，還可得岳憲同學香港Franki大師所做的襯衫一件(請岳憲同學盡速將襯衫寄到 250 Fools Circle, Con City, USA)

若有一次繳納10000的，除了成為回春院永久會員外，還可得香港Franki大師為美國大統領川普所做的西裝一套（若因為您的政治取向，視川普的衣物如糞土，可改換成岳憲同學香港Franki大師所做的襯衫兩件，或回春院藏書xxx，yyy，zzz...寫真集十冊）

至於一般繳兩百五的同學，我們還是會贈送盧院長家裡親栽的金橘10顆，芭樂5粒（再次證明我是真的翁員外，才可能知道盧院長家後院種的水果種類)

我們收美金，台幣，人民幣 ... 黑錢，白錢，只要是能到菜市場買菜用的，就是好錢

感謝同學們踴躍配合，我們回春院一年一度的 fund raiser 插播，就到此告一個段落

盧院長

翁員外

下台一鞠躬!

all we need in life

We learned it at kindergarten already:

Share everything
Play fair
Don't hit people
Put things back where you found them
Clean up your own mess
Don't take things that aren't yours
Say sorry when you hurt somebody
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together

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On Guidance:
 
If you're sincere, praise is effective.
If you're insincere, it's manipulative.

Everybody says they want to be free. Take the train off the tracks and it's free--but it can't go anywhere.

Many marriages would be better if the husband and wife clearly understood that they're on the same side.

The more you express gratitude for what you have the more you will have to express gratitude for.

Kids go where there is excitement.
They stay where there is love.

Duty makes us do things well,
but love makes us do them beautifully.

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Just prior to the revolution in 1917, a Russian Orthodox priest was traveling from his residence to the home of a poor parishioner. As he passed a sentry, the startled soldier jumped to his feet, raised his weapon, pointed it at the heart of the humble clergyman and asked three questions: "Who are you? Where are you going? Why do you want to go there?"
 
The priest stopped in his tracks with his arms in the air and regarded the earnest soldier. After a moment he asked the man in uniform: "How much do they pay you to perform your duties?"
 
"Twenty kopecks a month," he responded, without lowering his rifle.
 
The priest paused and reflected on what he had just heard. Then he said in reply: "I'll give you fifty if, every day as I pass this place, you ask me those same three questions."
 
Who are you? Where are you going? Why do you want to go there?

summer lites

You won't tell me your age? OK, I'll figure it out this way:

1. Pick the number of times a week that you would like to have dinner out. (Try for more than once but less than 10)

2. Multiply this number by 2. (Just to be bold)

3. Add 5. (for Sunday bonus)

4. Multiply it by 50 -- I'll wait while you get the calculator...

5. If you have already had your birthday this year, add 1767... Otherwise, add 1766...

6. Now subtract the four digit year that you were born.

You should have a three digit number...

The first digit of this was your original number (i.e., how many times you want to have eat-out each week).

The next two numbers are ..........

YOUR AGE!

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What do you see in this image:

​Research has shown that young children cannot identify the intimate couple because they do not have prior memory associated with such a scenario.

Children see 9 dolphins.

On the other hand, adult’s mind is rather “corrupted” so adult person may have problems spotting 9 dolphins at first eye glaze.

If you have trouble spotting dolphins in the first 6 seconds, then your mind is heavily corrupted, and you are seriously obsessed with sex! … 

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A man runs into the vet's office carrying his dog, screaming for help. The vet rushes him back to an examination room and has him put his dog down on the examination table. The vet examines the still, limp, cold body and after a few moments, tells the man that his dog, regrettably, is dead.

The man, clearly agitated and not willing to accept this, demands a second opinion. The vet goes into the back room and comes out with a cat and puts the cat down next to the dog's body. The cat sniffs the body, walks from head to tail, poking and sniffing the dog's body and finally looks at the vet and meows.

The vet looks at the man and says, "I'm sorry, but the cat thinks that your dog is dead, too." The man is still unwilling to accept that his dog is dead, so the vet brings in a black Labrador. The lab sniffs the body, walks from head to tail, and finally looks at the vet and barks.

The vet looks at the man and says, "I'm sorry, but the lab thinks your dog is dead too." The man, finally resigned to the diagnosis, thanks the vet and asks how much he owes.

The vet answers, "$650."

"$650 to tell me my dog is dead?" exclaims the man.

"Well," the vet replies, "I would only have charged you $50 for my initial diagnosis. The additional $600 was for the cat scan and lab tests."

Happy Summer!

a tripful

For the past several years we've been making trips to northern California (usually during late summer) almost yearly, visiting old college/high school buddies whose friendships I treasure and enjoy keeping.

We decided to move ahead our trip plan this year after receiving an invitation to the wedding of the daughter of one of our northern cronies that was set for last Sunday. 

The now seemingly routine drive north on Interstate-5 was smooth and took only about five and a half hours from Beverly Hills--where we stopped by for lunch and a side meeting--to my high school buddy Michael Lin's home in Saratoga, without the dreaded Friday evening traffic tie-up, before the sky even turned dark. 

After a pleasant late night catch up with Michael and his sweet gentle wife and a good sleep at their immaculate home, we went out the next morning to meet Sophie and Sean, a friend couple who also drove over from LA yesterday, to visit their dear friends Gohan and Jiafen, with whom we also got acquainted through the Rhine River cruise we went together two years ago.

Gohan has been fighting lung cancer for over 3 years, but is still as feisty and healthy a hunk as we first met him. He was surrounded these days by his son and daughters and grand kids who came over to celebrate his birthday, besides his super-strong super-loving super-woman wife Jiafen. We chatted and sang a few inspirational songs together as Sean and Gohan's son serenaded us with their violin and piano.

Then we left to meet JK and his wife for lunch. JK had been one of my best friends in junior high but we had not stayed in touch until about a year ago. He's been a successful and well-known lighting designer/artist in Taiwan but started his residency in northern California a couple years ago just to be with his two teen-age kids who are going to school here. He shared his life-after-high-school stories with me on how he dropped out of college after his mom's untimely death and went for his first job as a professional rock singer at restaurants after the military service and then to New York City to study design for 6 years before going back to Taiwan to start his own business... 

I was amazed by his resiliency and persistent love of rock music and soccer, which we both shared when we were teen-age kids but he's the one who has kept them going. He just finished publishing a CD of his own rock songs and plays soccer three times a week with macho amigos in his newly adopted resident city of San Jose, while continues to support a youth soccer league he founded sponsoring disadvantaged kids in Taiwan.

Back to Michael's house we met another high school best friend of mine, Joseph and his wife Peipei, both permanent members on my yearly must-see list. We went out to a Taiwanese shaved-ice place in Cupertino where Sophie and Sean came rejoining us for a late afternoon dessert chat time, then went back to Michael's for some delicious Chinese tamale, in commemoration of the Dragon Boat Festival that just went by last week. 

After dinner, Michael's autistic but musically gifted pianist son Jefferson, along with our troubadour violinist friend Sean who carries his beloved violin around when traveling, entertained us with impromptu music and songs for a melodial closure of the day.

Then came the wedding Sunday. It was my college friend Ching-Cheng's daughter and her med-school sweet heart tying knot on a sunny scenic hill not too far from the UC Berkeley campus. All proceeded swimmingly well, as a charming and jovial wedding should be, with the high light being Ching-Cheng's choking give-away speech and the father-daughter dance that must have touched many would-be fathers-of-the-bride's hearts.

  

I sat at a table designated for our common college friends Ching-Cheng invited. Some of them I just met a few months ago in Taiwan, some I haven't seen for years since the dot-com days when I was making trips here for my startup, and some for the first time since our graduation decades ago... Time truly flies!

The trip back to Orange County Monday was as smooth as going north, the only road hazard being the doze attack on straight-as-arrow I-5.

 

All counted, I've encountered 15 buddies and friends, oldies and goodies, fun and felicity during this short long trip. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, I say 10+ friendships are worth an 800-mile round trip a year! 

mindfulness

Some little sharing I had with my meditation group the other day:

It seems on the surface there are two schools of ideas regarding the way of meditation: One says to go into a state of absolute nothingness, without a specter of thought or image, spending as little effort as possible, into the state of total detachment from anything and everything; the other, called "mindfulness", on the other hand, is to focus as intentionally as you can, on every little thing you are doing at the moment.

My meditation practice has been mostly on the former: Every morning I spend 30 minutes sitting in silence "trying-without-trying" to be calm and letting go and into the state of effortless flow of equanimity...

My mindfulness--or "living in the moment"--practice, on the other hand, has been pretty lacking, even though conceptually I understand the importance of it, I realize more and more that I am not doing it much.

For example, my wife has been criticizing me that I eat too fast, and I've been ignoring that criticism thinking that's just a matter of opinion (I think she eats too slowly), until I realize the reason why I eat that fast is because I am using my mouth like a food processor, my brain busily dictating it to mingle potato with meat, salty food with bland one, so to speak, in the most efficient way possible, to finish up the job fast, instead of slowly and truly savoring the taste of food or enjoying the process of eating.

And I read an article yesterday about how the Japanese people have long ingrained the mindfulness practice in their culture: From the train conductors announcing out loud every maintenance move they are taking (and statistics show this does dramatically reduce the rate of mistakes happening) to the ritualistic respect they pay to their tea ceremony, flower arrangement, cherry-blossom viewing, etc... 

I think these two practices are two sides of a coin, not contradictory to each other. Maybe I'll call the practice of mindfulness "meditation in action", and the other "meditation in segregation", since it requires segregated time and environment to do so. And probably because of such conspicuous efforts we make, it becomes the "formal" one, or the one we focus on. 

But the reality is 99% of our day is spent in action--eating, walking, talking, working, thinking, etc.--whether we like it or not. So maybe the practice of mindfulness meditation should be at least as important as the segregated, formal one, shouldn't it? At least that's what I am telling myself now.

Just a little "mindful" sharing with you