Phone

Today I brought F to a short walk outside the cafe shop my family usually go for a brunch.

Quite to my amazement, I found a rank of public phones attached to a series of standing pillars of a telecoms company. Nowadays public phones are almost like an endangered species waiting for their ultimate demise. As the growth of mobile phones advances aggressively, people are more used to the disappearing of public phones as part of cityscape. Who would want to insert coins into the slot for a phone dialing that blesses only a few minutes of connection?

Yet the dying species persist, if only at obscure corners of this city. More to my surprise is one phone which provides a composite solution to the use of inserted coins, phone cards, and, well, a modem port.

A modem port? This is quite something that would fire up some imagination of sci-fi characters.

What a beautiful finding for a short city walk!

A Wonder

Sometimes life is full of wonder which simply cannot get rational explanation of how it happened.

I've been working on making an old hacker game Uplink run on my linux-based Eee PC for hours and days. All is to no avail. Finally I gave up.

Then my brother somehow got intrested in the game and started playing it with escalated frenzy. After he called me for some help and shared with me his amazement at the game's simple design yet deep immersion, I decided to give myself another shot.

By my brother's hint at downloading a new patch, I tweaked this and that with a lengthy process of trial and error. Then to my total ignorance, the game finally fired up in my machine. I had little idea how it started working. Yet it did work.

What a wonder!