十五分鐘，陰與晴

今早早餐後望望窗外，無雨但灰濛濛。內心掙扎了一會：是否出車呢？按早兩日的觀卦，似乎不宜出，但觀望態度很快被搏一搏心態蓋過！馬上全副裝備上身，一踩到街口，即見濃霧籠罩，感覺頗為不妙；但出了車就很少回頭，開燈硬著頭皮上吧。幸好十五分鐘後，天氣豁然開朗，踩到上山，不但霧已散，雲也剩下不多，實在是踩單車的理想天氣！難道有時真要信信gut feeling，衝一衝再算？

Good books 好讀 2011

閱讀一向是我的頭號興趣（雖然花在看電視的時間亦不少，但我媽媽好proud的說她兒子之所以近視是因為小時候太多時間在光線不足情況下閱讀！）去年尾開始讀的是入選好讀網世紀百强的白先勇《台北人》，尚未讀完，容後再談（題外話：記得那些年追女仔扮文化人就是送她一本白先勇作品）之前寫過This is Your Brain on Music的讀後感；今次也介紹一本小說、一本音樂書。

小說是近年我追捧的日本推理小說作家（作品包括《白夜行》《嫌疑犯X的獻身》）東野圭吾的《使命與心的極限》。日本推理小說的案情佈局奇詭不在話下，不過其真正特色是借奇情剖白人性及社會現象等等，這本小說是最佳示範：本來各不相干的名醫及電機工程師，但作者就有本事巧妙地把他們拉在一起，探討醫者醫德，大企業社會責任等等。

另一本則是我在2010年第一次買的Amazon Kindle電子書，Tim Brookes寫的《Guitar》。 讀了年多才讀完，倒不是因為內容欠吸引，只是書在電腦電話入面，通常都是在無法上網的情況才會打開解悶。其實對於結他迷是一本相當有趣的書：本書的形式是兩條主線梅花間竹，一是結他幾百年歷史，由發明講到今時今日；二是作者本人訂造一支結他，專訪師傅製作過程，由零開始講到完成。兩者我都讀得津津有味；雖然聽結他音樂多年，有很多細節還是令我大開眼界。

風地觀

今日初三赤口，本地無車公廟，要占卦，唯有DIY，找來三個洋紫荊香港一元，起了一課，得風地觀：盥而不薦，有孚顒若。全卦均無變爻。僅一個「觀」字已經很有啟發，明顯就是要抱持觀望態度，謀定而後動。

Warrior (the movie)

One "behavioral change" for me in the past decade is definitely that I watched much less movies. Most of the movies I watched are at movie theater to bond with my kids (ok. I mean killing time when they have breaks from school :P) There are very few movies that I really want to watch instead of spending the precious 1.5-2 hour on other more "worthy" activities. For 2011, the must-watch movie for me was the Transformers: Dark of the moon. (and to a lesser extent, 那些年，我們一起追的女孩) However, there are occasions that watching movies was the best thing to do. You know what I'm talking about? Taking a long flight of course! I would not have been to the theater or even borrow from the library for the 2 movies I watched during my flights between US and HK! However, to my surprise, they turned out to be very entertaining. I picked Warrior near the beginning of the flight and I fell asleep quickly. Nevertheless, I gave it another chance when I woke up and I glad I did. You might think it's a typical movie about fighter, who begun as an underdog and became the unlikely champion eventually. Warrior is kinda like that except the story has 2 main characters who were fighters. So each of them had his unique backstory and obviously they can't both win so the ending was still a suspense. A couple of interesting points:
1) these 2 are MMA (Mixed Martial Art) fighters instead of the more familiar boxer (i.e., Rocky) I am a huge MMA fan and this is the first MMA related movie I watched. Of course there were many fights in the movie. Those were pretty good fights.
2) The school Physics teacher turned fighter theme actually happened in real life: Rich "Ace" Franklin was a Math teacher before he turned professional fighter. (He has a Bachelor in Math and a Master in Education!) I read that another movie will be made based on Franklin's life story.

The other movies I watched was Captain America. Again, the plot was your good old superhero vs superevil but it was still fun to watch the superhero struggled in the beginning (being used as a promoter of the US government bond propaganda) It's ironic.

Day 1 of the year of Dragon

In the age of Facebook, everybody posts greetings to others regarding Chinese New Year. I'll try to write some other feelings on this blog post instead. To be honest, there isn't really much CNY atmosphere here in the Bay Area unless you try hard to look for it. This New Year day is a Monday so it's a work day for me. I won't have anything special to do if I take today off anyway. However, I was told that it's a Chinese tradition to take off New Year day. The purpose is to prevent one from working all year long! Well, there's something new to learn every day! And my Chinese New Year resolution is to try updating this blog more often. For some reason it gets pretty good traffic so I gotta put up something new more often so as not to disappoint my readers!