danny’s space

Crunch. Matt, Nate, Calvin and I turned around awkwardly in our seats to see a red Ford hatchback frighteningly close to the rear window. Foot finally pressed firmly on the brake, the flatline-like tone of the reverse sensors reverberating around the car’s cabin, my heart sunk. Not again! My second three-point-turn accident in North Epping. What a wonderful way to end the morning. After dropping off Calvin, Matt and Nate, I drove back to the scene and surveyed the damage more closely.

The crunch wasn’t wrong. A large furrow in the rear right door of the red hatch, 15cm long, 10cm wide and a few deep. I got out a Post-It pad and pen from the car, took a few deep breaths, and walked up to the house where it was parked. A doorbell and a barking dog later, a man came to the door. I asked if the car belonged to him, and he indicated towards his neighbour. Another few deep breaths and a doorbell. No dog, just a tall friendly-looking guy around my age.

“Hi, sorry to disturb you, but is that red car outside yours? I bumped into it doing a three-point-turn. I’m really sorry.”

Unfazed, the guy replied, “Hang on, I’ll get my shoes and come take a look.”

After more profuse apologising, we inspected the damage together. He leaned down to take a closer look, brushed the bruised door with a few fingers, and stood back up. He managed to get a few words past my blurts of “insurance” and “sorry”:

“It should be fine. Don’t worry.”

The relief. We exchanged names and mobile numbers, and shook hands. I waved to him as I drove past a few minutes later while he was getting into the car, probably just to check it still worked fine.

Forgiveness. Grace. Mercy. I know it’s only a very minor incident, but it highlights these well.

I especially didn’t expect it after my last three-point-turn encounter, that time with a car belonging to a man from the Chinese congregation at church. We’ll call him Peter. That time, there wasn’t even a crunch. Not a sound. The only sound came from Peter’s mouth after he stormed into service, demanding to speak to the person who drove the blue Volvo that one of his friends saw reversing into his car. We inspected the damage, and it was a mere 2cm paint scratch on the bottom bumper. I’ve had grazes deeper and larger than that. Peter, quietly and calmly fuming, demanded insurance and license details and kept emphasising that the bumper looked highly indented while pressing on it determinedly with his hand. He kept repeating what an inconvenience it would be to him to have the car in for servicing, and said that he would contact me with the quote from the repair shop because some internal damage may have occurred.

What a difference! What a shocker was the reaction from the ‘mature Christian’, and what an embodiment of mercy was the reaction from that friendly young man behind the screen door.

Makes you think.

… and our Canon camera is finally fixed. After an unfortunate incident at youth group, the lens was jarred and photos were unfocused. Dropped it off at the Canon repair centre in North Ryde in the first week of March, and after many frustrating calls and delays in Japanese parts, it was finally repaired and functional. Now to make sure that it’s not dropped any time soon. Still can’t believe the IXUS models are so fragile, and that a jarred lens costs that much to fix.

The last proper picture
the camera took.

Thar, she blurrrrrs…

Two months at $288.90 later,
and a focused picture of
the pot plant at the Canon repair centre.

A few of the ‘team leaders’ from the english congregation at church met with one of our pastors this afternoon to have an informal chat. It was a productive time and a lot of things were thrown around for improvement.

One thing that has struck me while serving at a chinese church is the parents of the youth. Apart from being a non-Cantonese-speaking Taiwanese at a Cantonese church, being of the ‘third culture’ generation as one of my friends puts it (i.e. not fully part of the Chinese or Australian culture and so creating our own hybrid one) makes it more difficult to understand the mentality of some parents. Cases in point: (1) pressure your children out of ministry to do well at uni; (2) not fully understanding the idea of an english ‘youth group’; (3) putting excessive pressure on children to perform well at school at all costs.

Now, many parents of youth I know aren’t as bad as I make them out to be. Often they’re appreciative, considerate and genuinely concerned for the wellbeing of their children. Which is hard for their children to understand, but in a few years time they will. Our pastor said something today though about the migrant syndrome which really hit me hard and made me reconsider the flak that I tend to throw the parents’ way.

Many of the people at church are migrants or children of migrants. My sister and I are too. As children who have grown up in Australian society, we rarely appreciate or understand how our parents feel and what drove them to immigrate from Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Malaysia, etc to Australia. Our pastor, however, being a migrant himself, gave a bit more insight into this matter, and you can see the painful logic and reality in his point of view.

Migrants are basically like uprooted people. They are removed from their comfort zone, their friends, their family, where they grew up, where they are accustomed to, where they can communicate readily without feeling like a second-class citizen (or worse). They move to a foreign country, learn the language, have very few friends or connections, and bring up a family, all while feeling insignificant and out of place. What for? Perhaps for a better life for their children - a noble goal which most Asian parents strive towards.

So what would they want for their children? A secure future. How do Asians know best to do this? Through education. Aggravating factors include parents pushing their ideals and dreams onto their children. They want their kids to have what they couldn’t have - connections, comfort, security.

So perhaps it’s necessary for the third culture kids to give way a bit, and for the parents to give way a bit too. Third culture kids are struggling under parental pressures to study, and peer pressures to conform. Rebellion is rife. Parents think they don’t understand their own children, and children can’t understand why parents do what they do.

It gets particularly counterproductive when these struggles affect ministry. When parents view a university degree above serving God by spending time ministering to his children. When parents view the HSC above Christian fellowship and encouragement. When parents ram Christianity down their children’s throats and make them (naturally) rebel, and sadly run from the truth.

Let’s pray for an increased understanding between both parents and their third culture kids. Pray that parents wouldn’t put undue pressure on their children and thus frustrate them. Pray that kids would understand their parents’ hopes and respect them, while having the growing wisdom to choose what to do with their own life.

Apparently if you accidentally cut in front of someone who is rounding a bend at 50km/h and they honk you, and then they perform a near-crash manouver to try cut in front of you again and you honk them, it instantly makes you a blint part of the female anatomy and also a procreating homosexual. Not exactly in those terms of course.

In any case, stay away from VHY-785 and it’s red-P Lebanese driver.

One of the youth from church has been asking for work experience ideas lately, and one of my suggestions was working for a computer manufacturer, much like I did back in year 10. But what computer maker would willingly take on a year 10 kid that they didn’t know? So I decided to look up the maker that I worked for back then, PC Club in Rhodes, because I knew the owner’s family.

Little did I expect, when I googled “PC Club Australia”, the first results that popped up were big headlines screaming “Microsoft wins $1.3m in piracy case”. After clicking around the articles (e.g. SMH and Microsoft), a sinking feeling came over me.

Maybe I should remove this reference from my CV…

Up in Katoomba last weekend with the youth group from church at KYCKstart, a conference aimed at high-schoolers. It was my first KYCK, and it was absolutely gobsmacking to see a couple of thousand youth and their leaders meeting in a big tin shed in the Mountains singing, learning and praying together. Apart from the main session talks, the free time we had with the youth from 180 was just so fantastic for getting to know them better and for everyone to gel.

Unfortunately no photos from me since I only took the video camera (which I subsequently got busted for since you’re apparently not meant to film anything at the conference). But I’ll steal some photos from friends and post some up - thanks Susie!

Highlights include:

• Driving up to Katoomba with Andrew, Matt, Nate and Ringo.
• Getting lost at Katoomba station, taking the wrong turn into a dead end road where a bunch of drunk homies were hanging. Nearly ran one over as he sidled in front of our car as we tried to frantically do a three-point turn to escape.
• Great meals and great times sitting around and just talking to youth.
• Challenging and refreshing talks, reminding us of the cost of following Jesus, and God’s unconditional love for us.
• Capture the flag on Saturday arvo and being stuck in jail with Simon. Our team won!
• Lightning Charades and everyone getting involved. Matt trying to act out ‘birth’ and ‘egg’ one after the other.



• Late-night poker and chilling with the leaders and youth in our house.
• The drive back, getting stuck in traffic on the Great Western Highway and running out of petrol, having to drive back to refuel. Then taking massive shortcuts along small roads parallel to the railway line, basically avoiding all traffic. Andrew being woken up by a nasty gravel road.
• MSN display names or messages from the youth after KYCK, including “Kyckstart was fabulous x100000″, “Take out the knife, make the cut” (a big idea from one of the talks, about sacrifices to follow Jesus), “KYCK was GGGreat, thanx leaders”, and “K is Y the C best K”

Popped down to Canberra for a few days to help train the Aussie biology olympiad team. Feels almost surreal, since I spend quite a bit of time down there with the olympiads. Driving is always fun - I find that I need at least 8 hours sleep to not microsleep on the road. A bottle of V and some Disney songs help.

Lots of dodgy drivers on the interstate roads. Here’s a red P-plater tailgating another car, only 1 car-length behind, at 110km/h.

The weather on the way down wasn’t fantastic, but despite this, skydivers were still in the skies around Picton. This one (on the right) was tumbling pretty fast though and appeared to be spinning out of control. Would have had quite a crash landing I imagine…

And finally what the trip to Canberra was for: the Australian Biology Olympiad Team for 2007, competing in Canada in July against 40-odd teams from countries all around the world. They’re still in Canberra at ANU working hard preparing for the competition. We had a team dinner on Tuesday night with some program staff, a bunch of people from the office, and a good friend and long-time supporter of the biology program, and then drove up Black Mountain after some late-night dessert. Standing next to Telstra Tower in hoodies looking down at a metallic device beeping on the ground probably wasn’t the best thing to do. But how else do you take a nice team photo with auto-timer?

I blogged too early, it seems. My submission was published in today’s SMH Heckler. Cool.

What I find sad, though, is that my first published work isn’t about Christian topics, and not even about biology, but rather a whinge.

Thankfully not much has started in terms of research for my PhD, so I can still have proper weekends. A relaxing day at home, dealing with computer maintenance (that actually relaxes me, how weird is that…) and using my favourite power tool, the chainsaw. Not related of course. Our dog’s sleeping posture nicely sums up the day.

Also, while we’re at it, might as well sum up my n3rdy tips for good computer health…

• Use legit Windows - no fiddling with cracks or the like
• Use Norton Internet Security - and keep it automatically updated to keep most nasties out
• Run AVG AntiSpyware free - do a scan every couple of weeks to kill the other nasties
• Use Windows Defender - keep it in the background to stave off spyware and other dodgy software
• Defrag once in a while - although Windows XP does a bit of defragging in idle time, a defragged hard disk can greatly improve performance
• Run HijackThis weekly, and analyse the log file produced - HijackThis can pick up other nasties that other programs don’t detect
• Back up regularly - invest in an external hard disk drive (300gb+ is the way to go these days) or burn things to DVD - a damaged hard disk can really stuff you up - and instead of doing a scary full-system backup, just backup the Documents and Settings folder, the ’system state’ (in Windows Backup), and your data directories

So, that Office 2007 Ultimate student offer was the real deal! Office 2007 is pretty cool on first impressions. This ribbon thing (the revamped toolbar) could take a bit of getting used to. I like Outlook 2007 - the ability to have multiple colour-coded calendars is great because I can plan my experiments on one calendar and my life on another, and only sync the life calendar with my phone without getting reminders to do PCRs all the time. I urge you all to go forth and buy Office 2007 for $75. Bargain!

In other news, our Canon IXUS digicam broke at 180FM after it took a tumble which surprisingly wasn’t my doing. Took the camera to Canon in North Ryde this morning, and was quoted a whopping $295 for replacement of the lens structure. And this camera is only a couple of months old. Late last year, I took our old IXUS to 180 and that broke as well, costing $220 to fix. So the lesson is either (1) don’t buy an IXUS camera because they’re really quite fragile, or (2) don’t bring things you don’t want broken to youth group. Perhaps the second, because there have been many breakages, not just of my stuff.

• Plastic water pistol: $3
• Pool noodle: $8
• IXUS 50: $220
• IXUS 800: $295+
• Various laptops: $unknown
• Seeing the youth grow in Christ: priceless