Start by doing what's necessary..

then what's possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible. - Francis of Assisi

Every now and then, we all need a bit of a motivational talk.. this is from the current Monash faculty newsletter..

restaurants

Little did I know the the major shareholder behind Auckand's oldest Japanese restaurant Ariake was the Japan Airline. Now, after 30 odd years in business, it folded after the airline went bankrupt. Ariake will be missed, the sushi from there, from the the cheapest variety which I love - tamagoyaki to the exquisite scallop sashimi, were the best in the town.

Same can't be said about the New Orient. Despite being the city's oldest Chinese restaurant, the food was probably as good as food from any takeaway joints. If a restaurant cannot keep abreast with the changing macro-environment, it odd to at least serve good decent food. New Orient failed on these two counts.

Finally!

Home made food from dani, who needs "My kitchen rules"??

Yes, Peking duck at home, at my grandma's.

We finally have a new picture to hang on the wall! One of our favorite photo on our wedding day, done by "block mounting". It is not canvas, but the finish is really nice.

Health care reform

I really don't know enough about the debates on the US health reform to comment.

The NSH model of healthcare is the only one I knew as a child. If you're acutely sick, you go to the hospital, get treated promptly, and pay nothing. If you're not so sick, you queue up at the local ED, where a department would typically see around 500 patients a day. In the midst of it all, the sick ones still get sorted, the not so sick one, well, you just have to wait for hours but eventually you too would go home with some cough mixtures, if you're really not that sick. Having said all that, we never had to trouble the public hospitals. Mum would take me to the GP, and pay up front. We were lucky, not least to say none of us have any chronic aliments.

So, if the Obama reform means more (95 vs the current 83%) Americans will get health care coverage, it has to be a good thing. Even if it means even heavier healthcare spending in country which already spends to much in health.

It is the system that needs to be tweaked, no the fact that less people should be covered, I would have thought.

show me the money

Scanning today's news headline I can't help noticing there is a common theme to all the news piece.. money. Well.. that's how journalists pick a story to write I suppose?

1. A house in Toorak (I think it's like Remuera in Auckland) sold for 14.5 mil in Feb 2009, now sold for 25 mil.. the buyer is going to bulldoze the old house, and build a new one.

2. Theresa Gattung got about 3 mil a year when she had the top job at Telecom. Her successor, happens to be a guy.. currently gets around 7 mil. Oh.. and you guessed it, her former partner had an affair with a friend when she was the chief exec..

3. A GP in the UK gets about NZ$230,000 a year..

4. JAL shares closed at One yen before it went bankrupt in Jan 2010. This is shocking really. Reminds me of the book Corporate Collapse I read a few years ago, during the aftermath of Enron. oh.. apparently their uniform fetches for around NZ$4300?

5. No, I don't suppose money is everything because happiness is priceless.

Melbourne

Thanks to the the ad they put around train stations, I get to know it's only 11 days till the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival.. not that we'll have time to go to any events this year but the program is indeed rather impressive. Shame most of the events I wanted to go are sold out anyway.. better luck next year, if I can stand the Aussie accent till then.. just why can't Aussies say "sIck" properly?!

Little did I know there are at least 20+ Farmers Markets in Melbourne...so.. even if we go to one every month...

After we've exhausted all the eateries in near-by Glen Waverley I guess we'll turn to this website for more inspiration.

In the mean time, Dani's kitchen is the best.

..that internal medicine is much more than a job..

Is internal medicine much more than a job? may be this New York blog will inspire you to think it is. I myself haven't read it yet.

Having just started my research based job here in Melbourne, our job is currently our life. Forget Valentines day, forget Chinese New Year.. there were really no real celebrations on the Sunday just passed. Very sad really. It's our first CNY away from home and our greetings to my folks on this all important date on the calendar lasted a little more than 30 seconds over the phone. Pathetic really.

In the middle of all this endless "researching" using Ovid/PubMed and of course google now, my hidden spiritual curiosity guided me to this website, looks good, punchy title at least. http://www.allaboutthejourney.org/ Have I read it yet? Save for later.

Tribute to Pauly Fuemana

Apart from being the man who "broke cultural barriers and put South Auckland on the map for all the right reasons.", I have many reasons to feel sad that the singer of "How Bizarre" died, among which..

- I was a Seventh Former in 1995, they just started to call it Year 13. We have a new common room for "seniors" at St Peters just the year before. How Bizarre was playing all day long there.

- I started using Windows for Workgroups 3.11 to get on interent.. people still buy CD, as burning an audio CD takes about 45mins on an 1x CD burner.

- In 2006, I got into medicine. How Bizarre.

South Auckland lost one of its greatest sons on 31 Jan, 2010.

sit back, relex, and enjoy your sleep

Now thanks to Air New Zealand - sleeping flat in cattle class is soon becoming a reality.

a great loss

I heard that Dr Black, one of the most astute physician in Auckland, died on Sunday at home.

He is arguably one of the most outspoken doctors in General Medicine at Auckland. His views often polarize his contemporaries. He is a dedicated doctor, with work ethics that frankly don't exist among the Generation Y era of doctors. He is a smart, bright and keen teacher. Every doctor who graduated from Auckland in the last 10 years would have learnt their pharmacology from him.

I worked with and for him as a first year registrar few years ago. I always thought it would be a privilege to work with him again, when I'm older, wiser and hopefully understand more of what he tries to teach. Sadly, that'll not happen.

The everyday practice of Medicine challenges our own mortality. It is with profound sadness that I learnt he departed us today.