hughmacdougall.com

The experience of being a patient in hospital can be quite bizarre. It is an abnormal situation in that it is not a chosen part of anyone’s daily life and the routines and procedures often bear little relationship to the way most of us want our day to go. It is a low stimulus environment, apart from the high stimulus moments when a needle or other sharp object is used to penetrate the skin. In such an environment small things assume inordinate importance.

Meals are a highlight of the day, breaking the monotony of lying in bed hour after hour waiting for the next nurse or doctor to come and make ‘obs’, observations often accompanied by the aforementioned jabs to extract varying quantities of blood or insert a quantity of a healing substance. Bless ‘em, they’re only doing their job of trying to save ones life! I became hyper aware of even small things and had to tell myself it would be inappropriate for me to get angry when I found the butter was missing from my meal allocation twice in a row. My anger management technique was to start saying to myself mentally, ‘The king told the Queen and the Queen told the dairymaid, I do like a little bit of butter to my bread.’ That’s a misquote from A.A.Milne’s ‘Christopher Robin. Eventually I made it an opportunity for communication by telling the meal delivery girl that I would have to request a Commission of enquiry into why there was no butter on my meal tray twice and recited those lines to her. I also told a really beautiful young doctor who was one of the team looking after me. They both loved it. I guess hospitals and their rigid routines can be boring for staff too and a friendly patient can help make their day. I hope so. Glad to be of assistance.

I tried to put both of these photos on the New Year Message but they didn’t both go. Here’s the Ballantyne’s with a couple of my lovely Chinese ‘dongxi’, things.

It’s New Year’s Eve and a sunny but cold day in Wuhan. It’s my habit to celebrate New Year in the traditional Scottish way, as much as is possible for me in Wuhan. This year that comes down to drinking whisky so late this evening I’ll have ‘a wee dram’. I bought a 12 year old Ballantyne’s about a month ago and will drink some of it tonight in memory of my Dad, who worked in the distillery as an electrician before we emigrated to Australia in 1963.

I’m also doing the traditional thing in that I am reviewing some aspects of my life and thinking what I can do with my future as I move towards my sixties, won’t be too many years now. Will I find a way to travel on and fulfill my dream of seeing many countries or will I content myself with China for a while longer and then go back to have a quiet life in Oz?

Can I learn from my mistakes and make myself a better person? I am happy that I have done some good things in this world but have a strong desire to continue and continue to learn and maybe make more contributions and help at least some lives happier. That will also make mine happier. I wish the same for all of you.

May you learn from your past and never be afraid to see your faults so you can grow in wisdom. May you take care of yourself and eat and drink wisely, learning to look after the wonderful vehicle you call your body so it will carry you comfortably for many years. May you have lots of friendship and love in your life, including friends who will tell you openly and as gently as possible when you have gone astray from your best path, then support you in making amends. May you see behind the curtains of this world to the greater reality behind it all and may your path be governed by that reality. May you always dedicate yourself to peace.

Happy New Year to all of you.

 Hi everyone.

That means my old friends, family, young friends, Chinese friends I have collected in my travels, my newest friends (my students and the staff of the University), and blog friends who I haven’t even met. My oldest friends are my most neglected friends but they are also the ones who know I never forget them and will always turn up again one day. I love you all and Christmas is a great time to think of you all and try to communicate how precious you all are to me. If people could put their friends in a museum and display them to the world I know I would have the best museum of all. Thanks.

Well, maybe it could. A news item in the Brisbane Courier-Mail tells the story of a young Czech speedway driver who woke of after a crash to amaze ambulancemen by speaking perdfect English. He had begun to study English but had not made much progress. He lost his new found skill but he believes the language must be imprinted on his unconscious and he can get it back again. I wonder if a bump on the head could help me learn Chinese and my students learn English. Do you think I should try it? Here’s the website  http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,22422260-5013016,00.html

Critical or other comments, so long as they are genuine, are always welcome. Readers, please watch out for sploggers among the comments. They are people with small brains who spend their time wasting the time of others. In this case they have decided to waste yours by putting nothing at all in their comments except a link to sites that offer nothing of value to you. You can pick them by their silly names. I will delete these comments when I notice them.  Just click on the ‘no comments’ or ‘comments’ link to leave your contribution. Sploggers, if you want to make a lot of money from the internet and think it would be great to attract links from sites like mine, and if you are so unintelligent and amoral as to be unable to understand what a nuisance your unprincipled greed is to me and my readers, just go away and think about the consequences to you if I ask the powers-that-be on the internet to track you down and ban you from the entire net. They can do that.

It is traditional to celebrate one’s two hundredth of something by talking about it but in this case it is talking about blogging. Blogging is talking! So I’m talking about this form of talking. I’ve come to like it a lot since I began earlier this year and learned a lot about what I don’t like about blogging too. I am very reluctant to talk about how to make money blogging because it seems to me to be a thing that lacks integrity, to talk about how to make money blogging in order to make money from blogging. Most bloggers are in it for the cash and I am very glad that temptation led me along that path so that I could find out that I enjoy blogging for itself. I would love to know how to make it more obvious how people can reply to my blogs on this site because that would be a bit of a thrill, too, having friends and strangers tell me how they feel about what I write, how they feel about the contents of what I write, and how they can add to what I have written. It would even help me keep going because I am getting a bit of a guru high lately as if I were becoming an authority. Well, I am not an authority but maybe I have something to say and it would be good to get some feedback so I don’t get a guru ego but estimate myself reliably in line with something St. Paul wrote. I feel good about blogging and it has launched me into the world of website building and if you feel inclined to find out more about the mind of this peculiar being whose words you are reading just get into clicking on my weblinks on the right hand side panel and find out more. You’ll see more examples of my writing and ideas on the sites and maybe there you will agree with me. The secret of commenting here is to click on the words, ‘no comments’ so that you can help others because the words will change to ‘comments’ after you write one. One of those real computer talking people over at Wordpress came up with that good idea. I think it is a bit confusing but maybe that’s because I like English, not geekspeak. I’m going to keep blogging and it will definitely be here for now though components of the site might well migrate soon. Don’t worry, I won’t go far and maybe this one will just change form. I can’t wait to find out what my next two hundred blogs will be about. Comment and maybe you will inspire me.

I’ll blog here about Wordpress. First the good stuff. It’s great software and this blog would have been nothing without it. For people to make such a product available for nothing is laudable and I thank all the people involved with its creation and distribution very much for their generosity. There is one very big problem, however. The people at Wordpress don’t seem to understand that the language of the computer world is a complete mystery to most of us. I accuse them of computer elitism. They have a forum and help areas that leave me gasping at my own ignorance instead of being a great place to find out how to do what I can’t do. As a result I can’t use the programme to its full advantage and cannot find out how to use all the marvellous plug ins and improvements and easy shortcuts that apparently can be attached to Wordpress. One day I will change this site completely using a very easy programme called Site Spinner which is the free web building programme I built my other sites with. Now I have figured out a way to use it for blogging with the help of Personal Brain, a wonderful neural networking programme I have used for years and that has recently reached new heights in the latest version. It is one programme I have no hesitation paying for. The help section is wonderful. As there is no manual specifically for Version 4 yet, I had to ask them some dumb questions and received personal replies in less than a day. Now if Wordpress were like that you would understand that ‘no replies’ is where you reply or I would have changed it to ‘respond here’. I would also have more ads and have them in the right places on the pages. Thanks again Wordpress, you are a great thing for computer linguists but one day hugh@macdougall.com will have its own style because you don’t speak my language. I’m an English specialist.

I think there is going to be a flood of comment on Windows genuine advantage. My question is - Is this software guilty of hijacking? I bought a computer with genuine Microsoft Windows XP Pro and have no complaints about it. It came installed in the computer and for some reason the company, Sony, didn’t give me a disk with it. However, perhaps because of continuing virus attacks in China and perhaps because of resource competition between software and perhaps because of mysterious computer stuff my computer eventually began to do strange things. It had trouble starting up and was subject to other strange quirks. I downloaded the best free fix programmes I could and tried them all but nothing fixed the problem. Of course I checked for viruses and hijackers and pirates and all kinds of nasties and none were found. The only thing that worked was to use system restore and that worked for various periods until the problem resurfaced each time. English language Windows is very hard to locate in China so when a friend offered to give it to me free i said Yes Please! He located two and only one worked so I used it. My Windows is now repaired but it turns out that the disk I used to repair my genuine Windows does not pass the ‘Genuine Advantage’ test. I can be working on something and what I am doing will freeze and a pop-up will tell me my computer is at risk and I ought to get an approved version of Windows. Causing my computer to freeze and interrupting my work is hijacker behaviour, isn’t it? Isn’t that illegal?

Something I never heard in a western country is that pumpkin is a remedy for diabetes. When my health went out of control at the beginning of the year I asked a Chinese doctor about ku gua, bitter melon, which everyone told me was good for my health. I even found it on a natural medicine website as a remedy for diabetes. He told me that bitter melon is good but pumpkin is better. In fact, he said, everything in the gua family is good for diabetes, the gua family being such things as melons and cucumbers. Maybe we could call it the gourd family of vegetables and fruits. Every week I make sure I eat at least one large serving bowl of pumpkin soup and I do believe it benefits me. Do any of you know more about this? Do you have any information about any other natural remedies for this problem? I even found a website where the author claimed ku gua cured his diabetes completely. I think he was from somewhere in South-east Asia. Bitter gourd’s properties are known in countries other than China. It’s such a shame I can’t stand it, euyuch! No doctor in the west and few in China say that diabetes is fully curable. Renee, are you reading this? Can you say more? Just click on the comment or no comment box below. (Renee is a lovely Chinese doctor friend of mine.)