大悲咒 - 齊豫

印光大師

2016 Olympic Games

International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge in Copenhagen, Denmark solemnly declared: Rio de Janeiro is the host city of 2016 Olympic Games!

The reason that the voting result is unusual because the International Olympic Committee has given South America an epoch-making opportunity. The President of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, said to be a successful host city of the Games is the good news, but the next few years, the Brazilian people and Government feel the great responsibility.

October 2, 2009, will permanently go down in Brazilian’s history. In the following press conference, the President of Brazil could not contain his excitement, crying and taking out his handkerchief wiping tears. Many reporters on the spot could not help but shed tears.

Chicago, Tokyo, Rio and Madrid, four cities competing to host the 2016 Olympic Games, has worked intensely for 2 days to impress more than 100 IOC members in the final presentation to demonstrate the glorious side of their countries and cities and to present their people's aspirations for the Olympic enthusiasm. It is not surprised to see those who come to give the final speech are the President, the King and Prime Minister-level characters such as Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Barrack Obama, Spain's King and Prime Minister and the Japanese prime minister.

Obama's speech is full of passion, but Lula has impressed the IOC members with his sincerity. The civilian-turned-president has used his love for sports and brief strong language to win the hearts of voters. He remained at the scene until the annoucement of the final results, as opposed to the short moment of stay of the United States President Barrack Obama due to his hectic schedule.

Lula said at a news conference, his life went through a lot of things, and seen countless celebrities, it has never been so moved, crying. He said it is a greatest gift for him to witness Rio to win the host of the Games.


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Chinese Zither - Gu Zheng (古筝)

If you know me as a friend, a closed friend. You will probably know that I love music very much. I joined Chinese Orchestra during my secondary school and it has brought me lots of joys and beautiful experiences. Those things that I learned and I exposed to have benefited me so much till now. I will like to bring to your attention certain aspects of Chinese traditional music.

The Chinese traditional music has undergone tremendous development in the past 60 years. With the influence of western music, Chinese instrumental music has evolved from one style to another.

Today, I would like to introduce my favourite Chinese musical instrument - Gu Zheng. It has more than 2000 years of history. It is probably one of the most popular musical instruments people learned in China because it is very easy to start and people can easily attracted to its beautiful sound. I have found this piece performed by one of the Chinese zheng musician from YouTube. Hope you enjoy.



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Twit, Twait, Twitter!

The first time I heard about “Twitter” is in Times magazine covering news about the Iranian presidential election and how protesters used Twitter as a communication tool with the outside world after the government blocked peoples’ access to several modes of communication. I was curious what Twitter is that time but also lazy to check my dictionary what it actually means. That was back in July 2009.

It was brought to my attention by my internet marketing community in CarbonCopyPro in September 2009 as one of the most effective way and free / low costs advertising tool. That is when I start registering an account with Twitter.

When I get onto this site, I was totally “blurred”. It is very different from other social networking websites that we had been to, such as facebook, friendster, etc. It was also called a micro-blogging website but I don’t personally agree with that. What you can do is constantly (if you want to and not afraid of being asked to stop by your friends and followers) updating your status and whatever information that you want your followers to know. These messages will be sent to them and keep them informed of your condition at that particular instant. Twitter is link to hand phone as well as a result each message we sent is limited to 140 characters so it got to be short and concise. All these messages will be sent directly to your followers’ page on internet or their hand phone (if they link both service to one another). That gives the reasons for certain people to complain about Twitter for being too connected with their friends and also the surging phone bills. It could be quite annoying if your friends and acquaintances keep updating their little trivial things while you are having a wonderful dinner with your loved one.


Twitter is so popular to the extent that the site can actually “down” or experience an outage for overloading messages transmitting through Twitter. The signal for such outage will be a screen picturing an overweight whale being lifted up by some red little birds. Can you imagine how many people are using it and the popularity of the site? To the extent to make it “down”.

You can use the site to keep track of the most popular trend among the Twitter community. But I find that people used Twitter for business marketing purposes more than social networking. More than 50% of my followers keep sending me various auto-set marketing messages everyday. It is so many that sometimes I can receive more than 50 in a second. But it is a great tool for marketing, no doubt. That is why, people are using it to find information and cool stuffs.

If you have ample time and don’t know how and where to use it. Why not join the Twitter community to tweet and re-tweet messages? My advice, do it if you are ready to be overwhelmed by heaps of messages from all over the world.


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Mooncake festival is coming again!!

Hi guys, moon cakes festival is coming once again. Some of my friends have been cracking their head thinking what moon cakes to buy for this annual reunion festival because there are simply too many choices out there in the market (let's don't mention about their price). My personal favorite moon cake is "Nyonya" flavour moon cakes with its ingredient stuffed with deliciously cooked prawn sambal and lotus paste.

I come across this moon cake ad from one of the Hong Kong stores called "Goods of Desire". Do you want to have one of these moon cakes?

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China Trip No. 7 – 13 September 2009 (Day 3) – Shanghai Museum, Shanghai Xin Tian Di (上海新天地), Shopping at Huai Hai Road (淮海路)

It was third day in China and I scheduled to meet up with a friend I know on msn at the end of second day. We scheduled meeting up at Shanghai Xin Tian Di around 2 p.m. Before that, I planed to visit the Shanghai Museum because it is famous, free entrance and has one of the best Bronze exhibitions.

As usual, I took subway line 2 from Jing An Station to People square (人民广场) station. People square station is “HUGE” subway line interchange station. It is just huge. I needed to walk about 20 minutes to reach the museum. Reach there around 830a.m. There was a long queue. Because the tickets giving out are limited, everyone reach there early in the morning. Also because that was Saturday, I was not ready to see a long queue and huge crowd. I waited for almost 30 to 45 minutes to get in. We can only go in batch by batch.

If you stand facing the façade of the museum, you will notice that the building was designed in a “Ding (鼎)” shaped. “Ding” is an ancient round cooking vessel made of bronze.

The museum highlights includes the Ancient Chinese Bronze Gallery, Ancient Chinese Ceramic Gallery, Chinese painting gallery, Chinese calligraphy gallery, ancient Chinese jade gallery, Chinese minorities nationalities gallery, etc. There are so many to see and I took so many pictures even though I am forbidden to take at certain area. I enjoyed the ancient Chinese bronze gallery the most because one of the tour groups are university students which they managed to get the museum in house researcher to explain to them the details, beauty and history of Bronze. I followed them everywhere and enjoyed so much in listening those interesting stories and was really amazed by the bronze making techniques that our ancestors invented. You can see one of the pictures below are a combination of big and small bell-shaped bronze made “Bian Zhong” (编钟). Bian Zhong are bell, which can produce sound and tone as accurate as your piano can made. And same accurate sound can be produce if you hit both side of the bell. Amazing!!!

Since I have an appointment to rush, I was not prepared to stay long inside. There are other tourist attractions around the People Square district, such as Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai Grand Theatre, Shanghai Urban Planning Centre, Yifu Theatre and Shanghai Concert Hall. Of course, the Shanghai City Hall is located in People Square.

I guessed one of the reason why my Shanghainese friend chooses Shanghai Xin Tian Di as a meeting spot is because this represents one of the premier entertainment and shopping areas in Shanghai. Shanghai Xin Tian Di is located within the French Concession district. In old shanghai, it was said, the British in the International Settlement will teach you how to do business, but in French Concession, you would be taught how to live. That remain true, because Shanghai Xin Tian Di are all refurbished “long tang” (lane) buildings that houses many popular boutiques, restaurants, pubs and entertainment complexes. Within the same area, there are some very nice coffee shops, surprisingly I saw “Coffee Bean” too. We met up in Star Buck.

My friend also brought me to certain local shopping area along Huai Hai Road -淮海路 (as compared to the already popular and high end expensive shopping area such as NanJing Road). There was some drizzling that day and I bought an umbrella for RMB10, I am still using this umbrella till now.

It was quite congested that day because there was a parade going on for the Shanghai International Exhibition in 2010. People are standing sideway along the road making it difficult to move. He brought me to some of the local shops only visited by local young people, which is of course unknown to a foreigner like me. The design is quite unique but a bit pricey so I buy none of them.

After our dinner, we went to a local pub opened by my friend’s acquaintance. It was a wonderful night because the atmosphere in that pub was quite “funky” and the hosts are friendly and funny. Because it is small, it appears to be quite intimate.

We chatted till midnight and took a taxi home.

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China Trip No. 6 - 12 September 2009 (Day 2) - Shanghai Science & Technology Museum (上海科技馆), Oriental Art Centre (上海东方艺术中心), Century Boulevard (世纪大道)

It took me less than 2 hours to finish the whole Xing Chang Ancient Town (新场古镇); I still remembered it was around 11:45 a.m. I decided to take my lunch here before my departure. I went into a Fu Jian Snack Shop (福建小吃馆) and ordered myself a bowl of roast duck noodle. The weather is a bit steamy hot; I waited for 45 minutes at the bus station. Since this is a rural area, the bus is not so frequent.

When I reached Long Yang Road station (龙阳路站) I decided to visit Shanghai Science and Technology Museum and Shanghai Oriental Art Centre. These two are located at Pudong area and it is 3 stations away from Long Yang Road station. The other reason is that I would like to attend a concert at the Shanghai Oriental Art Centre since that day is Saturday.

So the first thing when I reached Century Boulevard station was running all I can to the Oriental Art Centre with the hope of getting a chance to watch a concert. Yes, there was a concert that day and it was scheduled to be performed by an Italian Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of a popular Chinese conductor. The ticket I bought is the cheapest but costed me RMB200. But worth it.

The Shanghai Technology and Science Museum located right beside the Century Boulevard. One can reach there at Century Boulevard Station. This museum takes up to 68,000 sq metres of space and costs around US$183 millions to build up this museum with various theme covering man, nature, science and technology. It is a very huge museum and felt tired walking around because I don’t normally see such colossal building in Malaysia. There is an IMAX centre inside too. An entrance fee to the museum is around RMB60. One of the interesting items I saw in front of the Museum is the Celestial Globe (浑天仪) . I came out from the museum around 4:30p.m. Then I took the subway train heading back to my hostel in order to groom myself for tonight concert.

The Shanghai Oriental Art Centre is one of the many performing art centres in Shanghai. It is located right opposite the Century Boulevard and was designed in a stunning butterfly shaped. It is also home to the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. The art centre comprises 3 performance theatre (music, opera and theatre) and an exhibition hall. The design of the building is fantastic. It was a wonderful night.

The concert ended at around 10pm, I decided to take a stroll along the Century Boulevard. The night scene is beautiful and is very quite.

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Oh Bach...........

Bach's works is relatively abstract and purely mathematical. Comparing his music with the music written in classical age, there are essentially different. Classical music mostly represents emotional expression, so it is easy to impress people.

Bach's music represents the highest throughout the grounds, almost detached from the reality.

His music comprises various complex counterpoint, careful composition techniques, which is so complicated that it may deter many people to really understand what it does really means. The music is beautiful and graceful, full of godly light and yet not easily reprehensible.

His music was basically forgotten after his death and comes back as a true renaissance in the nineteenth century.

Listen to Bach's works, hoping surging emotions, is unrealistic. Bach's works represents exquisite delicate process and the pinnacle of Baroque composition skills. Bach left us with a development of a never-ending treasure. Noble, Meaningful, elegant, noble, witty, but it can also be secular.

His music is not written in plain, but once take the hint, but it would be worth hearing a thousand times. This is the wonder of Bach’s works.

This music is played by the internationally renown cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the piece he played is the "Preclude" from the first suit of the unaccompanied cello solo work.

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International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

I first come across this term in twitter, people are talking about it. It is set on 19 September because it is one of the two inventors’ ex-wife birthday, so it is easier for him to remember.

The day was created by John Chumbucket Baur and Mark Summers while they are hurling each other piratical words at one of the sport game. This is how the idea come about. Funny isn’t it? Later the “this talk like a pirate day” was nationally promoted by the humour columnist Dave Barry in 2002 and soon gained popularity thereafter.

But you may ask, what do you need to do? What is the reason to have such a holiday? Do we need it? How to celebrate? Blah, blah, blah… … seems like no point to have such a holiday right? But that is exactly the point and the fun of it. Today, it is well celebrated throughout the world and spawned various events, parties, creative ways to celebrate it, etc. It is a rough idea and also a romanticized idea.

For more information, you may want to visit the official website of International Talk Like a Pirate Day.


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