This happens to me every now and then; a new season, a renewed spirit, and a fresh tone. Fickle? Maybe. I get to see things from different perspective.

Like the new rain of spring,
Nurture seeds to flowers,
Let out spirit be yearning,
To know Him of all powers.

Standing in Holy of Holies,
People of priest and praise,
Falling down on our knees,
To Him worthy of our gaze.

Discern this time and place,
Generation of tempt and trial,
Discern this season and haste,
Let audacity reigns and be real.

For in righteous defiance,
Though enemies in dozens,
We will stand among giants,
We shall slay our thousands.

A little over a month ago I went on a road trip in peninsular Malaysia. The entire journey spanned close to 800 miles and over 22 hours of driving.

Starting out in Kuala Lumpur, I went up north to Penang and Kedah before heading eastward through a mountain range to Kelantan, Terrenganu and then Pahang before completing a loop back towards my point of origin.

And I immediately found a novel liking for life on the road. If anything, it taught me that truck drivers are not necessarily grouchy all the time. Life on the move — literally moving — can be enjoying especially in the hills and countrysides.

En-route to Kelantan from Kedah — the road least traveled — I almost drove into a herd of cows. They were huge. Maybe they were buffaloes, I couldn’t tell. When my car stopped, one of the animals looked at me straight in the eyes, and I stared back. They gathered in pack right in front of my car. A sane person would have pressed the honk but it was the last thing on my mind. I enjoyed my little communion with the animals, and it seemed like a minute passed before they cleared the road.

…

I encountered interesting caution signboards in these remote places: Livestock crossing; Wild boar crossing; Deer crossing; and Elephant crossing. Like, seriously, they had an image of an elephant on the signboard! Wish I could’ve caught a glimpse of an actual elephant crossing the road. That would’ve been something.

I started out on the journey with no intention of going east coast. The Malaysian east coast highway is not as developed as its western coast; journey times are longer through the eastern route to anywhere with exception for Kuantan in Pahang, but I’ll get to that later.

What started out as a weekend break in Penang Island and rendezvous with couple of old friends turned to be an escape from the office for me. I developed suicidal thoughts after what could possibly be my 200,000th line of codes and had a glimpse of defects in the Matrix world we live in. I thought for the first time that everything can be easily explained if the following statement is true: God does not exists and humans are basically evil.

Let me first explain the number. Assuming I work 5 days in a week for 11 months in the past 7 years, I would have written 130 lines of codes daily on average. This is a logical figure since many programs that I work with in a day would have around 200 lines of codes written. I could be wrong, but this blog entry doesn’t call for precision.

Now let me explain the statement. It isn’t true. There are times I wanted to believe that God does not exists — purely because then I could choose to do whatever I want — but my firsthand experience with the unexplained, unseen, supernatural dimension has taught me that certain truths are undeniable even with science. There is definitely something out there and cognitive dissonance doesn’t go along with evidence.

Penang is a beautiful island city. I went to the beach and tried the local food for which Penang is legendary. The island could have been like Singapore if it wasn’t for the federal government of Malaysia’s armpit treatment to every other state that is not within its political party’s wing. For all it’s worth, Penang is still one of the relatively nicer state.

…

Allow me to explain a little on Malaysia’s muddy political state of affairs. It is a racist state; one that the government denies but continues to improve. How could one race be given special rights and privileges when others in this multi-racial country sweats and bleeds for the real improvement of the nation? The Malays did not win their independence, no; The British liberally granted it, with condition of power sharing among the races. Yet today, a capable Malaysian Chinese or Malaysian Indian will not even be given the second post in command.

It is something that many Malaysian has possibly come to accept. Reluctantly. Citizens with rights, has given up hope to fight for such a cause seeing that the present day government liberally amends the Constitution to keep themselves in power; over 600 times in 40 years. In comparison, United States in its 200 years history only has 27 amendments.

Freedom of religion? They can throw that page in the gutter. A Malay cannot officialy embrace any religion other than Islam; which is funny. While they claim there is no compulsion in Islam, one cannot leave the religion without getting thrown in jail or receiving death threats. And these are not even the extremist among them. The victims are people with basic human rights, born into a Muslim families and were never asked to choose. It is a shame that Malaysia designed its flag based on the Star Spangled Banner, because they do not imitate the very cradle of freedom and justice that United States represents.

And we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

There may be no end to this inequity; Malaysians are after all, in my encounters, peaceful people. The only way this nation would heal is that, if one day the Malays wake up from their slumber and realize their actual worth: Less. Japanese came to invade and they couldn’t defend. The communist took over and they couldn’t fought. The British came and liberated Malaya. The Malays don’t deserve this country to themselves; they owe it to everyone else. Simply, what one cannot defend one do not own. Then maybe, just maybe, they’ll stop bickering for welfare treatment, get smart, see the world, acquire wealth instead of spending it, and start treating others as they’d wish to be treated.

I digress. Normally I would restrain from political comments, but having been here long enough and losing all faith in the conscience of men, certain things must be said. A friend of mine said, “the world needs a good spanking” and everyday I see this proves to be true. Our society is not so different from the Romans whom fed gladiators to the lions purely for entertainment. Even people whom are perceived to be cultured, driving Mercedes and Jaguars displaying success, spits and throw garbage out their car window and occasionally fails to flush the toilet. This is mankind’s endsville. Monkeys in pants and suits.

The journey from Kuala Lumpur to Penang is a little over 4 hours. Kedah to Kelantan close to 7 hours, and for 2 hours I drove through the mountain range in rain, fog, and complete night darkness of the surrounding. Not a gas station in sight. If I busted my wheels and stopped, I would probably be raped by some giant chimpanzee for invading their turf.

…

All the time I was heavily relying on my Garmin GPS loaded with maps from Malsingmaps.com website. I had an external high-gain GPS antenna placed on the car’s rooftop and that got me through all the way.

Without my GPS, I could have taken a wrong turn and ended in Thailand. At one point the GPS showed that I was only 13 kilometers away from the border. Since Kedah and Kelantan borders with southern Thailand, I guess it’s possible that one could enter Thailand through the dense jungle. One thing for sure, it won’t be like crossing into San Diego from Mexico.

I reached Kota Bharu in Kelantan past midnight. My original route when I started deviating off-course was from Kedah to Dungun in Terrenganu, but that journey itself would take another 4 hours. I had driven over 6 hours without food and rest. I had to check-in for the night.

The following day I plotted my course back to Kuala Lumpur on my laptop. I was shocked to find that I had a 10 hours drive ahead of me. I immediately regretted not heading back south from Penang, but the sigh over didn’t last long. Driving had become a passion.

So, 6 hours into my journey from Kota Bharu I made a stop in Teluk Chempedak in Kuantan. The beach is small but clean. There are some restaurants but primarily McDonalds and KFC with outside seatings.

The east coast roads thus far had been country roads or local trunk roads serving as primary north-south route, but from Kuantan south-westward to Kuala Lumpur it’s a nice open highway. I left Kuantan around 9pm and cruised at 120kmh to reach my destination just after midnight. And I even raced with another vehicle on the highway for about 30 minutes! I’m too chicken to drive beyond 140kmh, so in the end I had to let the nincompoop drove past me by.

And oh, I played country tunes and truckers’ songs like East Bound and Down for most part of the trip. I feel like a semi-truck driver!

Epilogue.

Having returned safely from my road trip, I examined two facts that came prominently to my mind: (a) I traveled alone; and (b) I pondered about life. While I did not hear from God as I hoped I would, I remember a poem I drafted last year. It’s really about God.

Your words are like the depth of Uzboi Vallis,
In the broad of Crater Holden on Mars,
Your words they can take me to my knees,
In the broad of horizon into the stars.

Ironically, I wrote it when I was courting a girl whom couldn’t appreciate anything at all. Not flowers, nor diamonds, nor gifts.

And being alone with my gadgets isn’t as fun as it used to be.

I think it’d be really nice if I can take someone with me next time on my road trip. Someone whom shares the adventure, time spent together, and hopefully money for the gas tank too.

The universe and its matrices,
A marvel feat of creation,
It is never short of vexes,
One simply need to find a vocation.

I’ve gone places in my youth,
Been both a shrewd being and a fool,
I’ve met people whom are uncouth,
But they drive cars that makes me drool.

I’m attracted to the unattainable,
Being drawn by intimidation,
Trying to piece together the unsolvable,
Stumble and setbacks by inevitable frustration.

I’m weary of the unfathomable,
Anxiously endure the wily and shady,
Resigning to my fate is not acceptable,
Never before find myself so needy.

I recently came across a pristine rose,
And for a moment I wanted to believe,
That there is a purpose in life I suppose,
Even if it seems impossible to achieve.

I have seen much and I have grown,
Time to mend my hurt and set out to atone,
Yet I wish I have someone to call my own,
No one should be cast down and alone.

I live a life that keeps me on my toes,
Knows not what lies ahead in this journey,
Guess I’ll have to see how far it goes,
In the mean time I could really enjoy a turkey.

After dozen of interviews I’ve come to the conclusion that it is not legal to enjoy interviews. It leads to frustration, disappointment, evil loads of paperworks, and the birth of a black hole.

I’ll get straight to the point.

There are times when you meet a reputable candidate. The kind that claims to be able to write in 5 different languages (one of it is Klingon), a little hubris on the technical end with some sweet gravy when it comes to economic sense, but insist that it only takes one byte to store a pointer! Just where in the world did you get your degree from?

I was about to close a deal one time, and this chap seemed like a nice kid. He talked about his church, his grandmother, and how hard he works in his present job despite being underpaid. Then I asked the magic question: “Can you work late and occasionally travel around the region?”, to which he replied, “I got to be home by six to feed my dog.”

Another example. I interviewed this girl that seems to have it all; the brain, the looks, the brawls. She’s any typical male geek dream girl. The cutest moment was when she said, “If I don’t get this job, I probably won’t be applying anywhere else.” Hiring her would probably mean distraction for most programmers and would lead to productivity breakdown. But she got hired, performed her duties, and excelled in her own domain. The decisions that an interviewer has to make gets tougher everyday.

So they’re not all bad encounters with the Darwin-kind. If humans are indeed God’s big budget sequel to the monkeys, they ought to be endowed with something more than just charisma to make up for their inability to walk around naked and carefree among their own species. It’s so important that it distinguishes us from apes in pants. Ready for it? It’s called a brain.

I’m looking for someone who can deliver codes, not just copy it from the Internet. I want someone with enough initiative to learn new skills without being told. I need someone to get off their programming seat once in a while and ask the other guys whether they have a need for new tools or complex solutions. And then code it!

So here’s what I’m concluding: Try not to interview experienced programmers. If they’re on the job market, the chances that they’re worthless is 70% (a figure plucked from the wind) of the time. Good programmers are usually harvested fresh from colleges and do not remain on job market often because they have a goal of where they want to work. And they’re usually well taken care of by their employers too.

If you really have to interview experienced candidates, do it first over the phone. This will save your time and theirs. Try to gauge whether this guy or girl is really the material he or she claims he or she is by asking down to earth technical questions. If that works out all right, then call the candidate for a face-to-face interview.

Real programmers are not intimidated by hard facts. They love statistics and raw codes.

Personally I enjoy hiring fresh graduates more. They can be trained and they’re always eager to please, which leads to them taking more initiative than their experienced peers.

There’s this tale about a senior engineer and a newcomer. The senior engineer was given a task and said it can’t be done. The newcomer on the other hand, has no previous experience to say it can’t be done, so he just took it and worked on it. And he did it!

A lesson out of interviewing programmers is the same old sound wisdom our K12 teachers taught us: Do not judge a book by it’s cover. I’d say, do not judge a candidate by their talk but by their codes.

Lesson learned.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been slacking a few hours here and there from my duty as a Product Manager to a more mundane, less-appreciated, mind-numbing task. Namely, writing great software that actually works.

Cubicle dwellers are usually ranked in hierarchy by their geographical floor plan. The bigger your desk is, the higher you rank in importance. On a normal day I’d be running from my slightly bigger desk from one end of the office to the other end at top speed. Think of a cat running back and forth on a newly waxed slippery floor. It’s just a fun thing to do.

It wouldn’t be long before Human Resource starts putting up a sign that says “Walk, do not run” but that’s not due until the first casualty occurs. Most likely one that involves a cup of hot coffee on a deserving crotch.

Great office environment is almost non-existent in most software companies. They tend to treat programmers like factory workers on a production line, and for most part the people they hired deserves to be treated that way because they’re the below average developers whom only take instructions. Software companies like these have a philosophy that they only need 2% of employees to be brilliant and the rest are, well, code monkeys that feed on bananas and can be trained to perform tricks but not come up with a better one.

In my elite team, I tend to filter people out throughly. My colleagues tend to disagree because they say my standards are too high, but that depends where their benchmark is coming from. They took 7 years to figure out that they need a log file on the TCP/IP modules while I figured that out 7 years ago and actually implemented them.

It gets worse. When I called a meeting to plan out improvements on our documents and technical design, they said I can’t do that because then the other teams would clearly be seen left out and our customers would make unsatisfactory remarks on the quality distinction between modules. Guess what guys, that already happened and no one was harmed in the process. If anything, it should stir competition and desire to become better, not quench their spirit unless they’re genetically defective or a supporter of a Democrat bill for that sort of thing.

Which gets me back to talking about running in the office hallway. It’s an expression of freedom. In an office where great programmers, deserving prima donnas who should have been treated to a private working space behind a closed door, companies like these thinks that all programmers are equally monkeys that love to socialize.

For most part, I don’t blame them. There are too many pretenders; prima donnas wannabe that have tarnished the reputation of these authentic coders of codes that actually works. They claim credit to works that they copied from the Internet and whenever it breaks they usually blame it on a third-party, buying their time to fix a problem that would take a mere 10 minutes to fix if it weren’t for their stealthy incompetence.

Just this past week I had to steal (corporate espionage is one of my skills) a nebulous source code from a different team (where they refused to show their codes) to convince them where they’ve gone wrong.

Granted, some people are smart but they’re just no good at programming. They’d be better of doing something else, like management or marketing or taking the trash out but the problem is that these are weasel-proned jobs, and weasels are plenty in the programmer’s department since the Internet boom. Not all weasels get a promotion, and incompetence usually goes unpunished. Which also means competence is hardly recognized.

Good programmers are hard to find, and those that I have in my team, are the ones that I want to keep. They work great on their own without supervision, and I allow them to take sometime off from official tasks to work on something they like; RCP and GEF, for example. In the long run, it pays off because they work on acquiring new skills themselves.

While the office space may be beyond my control, I grant freedom to those that write excellent codes in the same way my VP says nothing about my deadly high-speed running around the office while humming Smurf tunes.

Life should be more like Haagen Daz, different experience everyday but nonetheless sweet like ice cream; or like Starbucks ice blended drink or lemon meringue pie. Although at some point it would probably taste like diabetic causing stuff, but it takes a while.

I’m blessed with a good surveillance, and by that I mean last week I was given an executive advise to stay at home and not come into office for the day to avoid getting more unnecessary work. How many people get that kind of career tipoff? Not very many I would think.

For most part, it leaves me enough room to do things right at home. Any hardworking software developer can be a good coder, but to be great, one has to be lazy. A piece of code written light and reusable goes a long way. And it would only be sweeter if you treat codes like a game of puzzle. This is how I wish to end up like some day.

…

Simplicity and elegance in codes seems to be a thing of the past nowadays. Couple of weeks ago I was in Singapore trying to fix a broken DES algorithm. Sad thing is, not only the DES was broken, the simplest XOR function wasn’t working.

Makes me wonder how those kids graduated with an IT degree.

Close to a month ago we had an Australian business partner came down to one of our project sites. I don’t know if he have any angst towards Stingrays (*cough* Steve *cough*) but he flew home pretty pissed. Probably because some idiot on our side didn’t know what database indexing was when they accused his product of being performance defective.

Yes, their incompetence frustrates me, but as long as it’s none of my own team members, the sun is warm and the grass is green.

I’ve learned that there is no use getting all excited and pumped up of every idiosyncrasies and shenanigans that drops by my cubicle. On Haagen Daz scale, yesterday might be a Chocolate and today could be Butter Pecan. Tomorrow could be Strawberry Sorbet, who knows? If I start thinking Haagen Daz, then life would be sweeter.

…

Really, I have no clue why I’m writing this post. My iPod screen is dead, I had to send my digital camera for repairs, and my Macbook PMU is kaput. Yet I’m trying to believe that out of all these incidents, something still serves me right.

The fool is known by his multitude of words. I should stop raving now and have a Haagen Daz while it remans sweet.

Found this drink Whatever and Anything in Singapore. The flavor varies from one to another and you can’t tell from the label except if you read the ingredients.

It was funny. “What can I get you to drink?” the waiter asked. “Whatever…”, I replied. And Whatever can be Anything. It sheds a whole new perspective to being indecisive and irresponsible of your diet at the food table.

With each can, you may get a different flavor at random. So far I’ve not managed to order the same taste twice with Anything.

And while I’m at it, I might as well make it my new culture.

Someone argued with me to change a line of Java code from int a=1 to int a=0x01. Like, wow, that makes a whole lot difference. The next time this happens, I could just go Whatever. Or maybe when someone thinks they can get me to say yes by posing the same question in a different manner though the answer is still no, I could just go Anything.

Maybe what they should come up with next is a Nevermind drink. Perfect for their neighboring Malaysians whom practice the tidak apa (nevermind) mindset and attitude made popular by the decadent Malay race.

It may not give them a clue, but hey, Whatever. They may not like it, but like Anything ever? And most of the time, they go Nevermind anyway.

Finally, I can bring forth my sarcasm literally. And it quenches thirst too.

Most programmers claim to understand but can’t explain it. The vendors I dealt with in China and Dubai claims to able to do it, and then repented.

I don’t get it. What is so hard about IBM packed fields?

Packed field is an efficient way to store numbers, maybe not as efficient as an int but it’s commonly used on the IBM AS/400 platform.

Digits 123 can be represented in ASCII hex 313233 or in EBCDIC hex as F1F2F3. Packed field stores the number directly as hex 123F, which is neither ASCII nor EBCDIC. This shortens the size required to store digits. The last nibble (half of a byte) can be either D or F representing a negative or positive integer.

The obvious benefit is of course, if you’re paying your bandwidth by the number of bytes you’re transmitting, you’d want the data compressed. Packed fields keep numeric fields’ size small.

Someone asked me, assuming you know it’s a packed field with certain length, how do you test for a valid packed value?

This is what I came up with in ILE RPG:

 *
H BndDir('QC2LE')
 *
D getHex          Pr                  ExtProc('cvthc')
D                                1A
D                                1A
D                               10I 0 Value
 *
 * Use with entry parameters
D pValue          S             20A
D pResult         S              1N
 *
 * Use with working fields
D                 Ds
D  xHex                         40A   Inz(*Blanks)
D  xHexS                         2S 0 Dim(20) Overlay(xHex:1)
D  xHexA                         2A   Dim(20) Overlay(xHex:1)
 *
D xLen            S              5U 0 Inz(*Zeros)
D xPos            S                   Like(xLen) Inz(*Zeros)
D xVal            S                   Like(xLen) Inz(*Zeros)
 *
D cNumeric        C                   Const('0123456789')
D cYes            C                   Const(*On)
D cNo             C                   Const(*Off)
 *
C     *Entry        Plist
C                   Parm                    pValue
C                   Parm                    pResult
 *
C                   Movel(P)  cNo           pResult
C                   Eval      xLen = %CheckR(' ':pValue)
 *
C                   If        (xLen > *Zeros)
C                   CallP     getHex(xHex:pValue:%Size(xHex))
 *
C                   For       xPos = 1 By 1 To xLen
 *
C                   Eval      xVal = %Check(cNumeric:xHexA(xPos):1)
 *
C                   If        (xVal > *Zeros) And (xPos < xLen)
 *                  Not last byte and value contains non-numeric.
C                   Leave
 *
C                   ElseIf    (xPos = xLen) And
C                             ((%Subst(xHexA(xPos):2:1) <> ‘D’) And
C                              (%Subst(xHexA(xPos):2:1) <> ‘F’))
 *                  Last byte and value contains non-acceptable
 *                  non-numeric.
C                   Leave
 *
C                   ElseIf    (xPos = XLen)
C                   Move      cYes          pResult
 *
C                   Else
 *                  Try to ridicule the compiler.
C                   Monitor
C                   If        ((xHexS(xPos) > 99) And (xPos < xLen))
C                   Leave
C                   EndIf
C                   On-Error
C                   Leave
C                   EndMon
C                   EndIf
 *
C                   EndFor
 *
C                   EndIf
 *
C                   Return
 *

So the final else condition isn’t really necessary, but I never did test this piece of code and I rather play it safe.

The code should be self-explained. Convert the value to hex, and start comparing byte by byte whether it contains valid numerical digits. Except for the last nibble, it must have either hex of D or F. Anything else is invalid.

Program returns true if given value is a valid packed field candidate.

I’m currently in Singapore attending an advanced session on OPCAT (Object Process Case Tool), a modeling tool based on OPM (Object Process Methodology).

A recent OPCAT upgrade from version 2.xx to version 3.00 also requires a JRE upgrade from JRE 1.5 to JRE 1.6. As of Mac OS X 10.4.10 the standard is still JRE 1.5. Mac OS X users would need to download Java SE 6.0 from ADC website.

After installing JRE 1.6 you need to set JRE 1.6 as the default Java Runtime version. To do this, go to Applications -> Utilities -> Java SE 6 and click on Java Preferences. Under Java Applications Runtime settings under General tab, drag Java SE 6 to be the first one on the list. Your other JREs are still on the system and you may revert if necessary.

Next, having installed (proper .exe decompression) OPCAT in my Windows VM I copied the entire folder to my Mac OS X environment. Since OPCAT is written in Java it would run cross-platform, but unlike previous OPCAT version some minor tweaking is required to get it running smooth on Mac and Linux.

There are four environment variables that must be set manually. If you ran OPCAT installer on Windows, check your system variables and you should see the following:

OPCAT_BACKUP_HOME=C:\Program Files\Opcat

OPCAT_COLORS_HOME=C:\Program Files\Opcat

OPCAT_HOME=C:\Program Files\Opcat

OPCAT_PROJECTS_HOME=C:\Documents and Settings\…

To set environment variables in Mac OS X, you could run command shell and use env command. For lazy bumps there’s a free RCEnvironment utility which allow users to control their environment variables in GUI from the Preferences pane.

I have mine set like this:

OPCAT_BACKUP_HOME=/Users/datacrush/Opcat

OPCAT_COLORS_HOME=/Users/datacrush/Opcat

OPCAT_HOME=/Users/datacrush/Opcat

OPCAT_PROJECTS_HOME=/Users/datacrush/Documents

If this doesn’t work for Linux users, here’s a clue: The OPCAT Java class responsible for loading paths is using System.getenv().get("OPCAT_HOME"). Go figure.

Of course, you’re free to move your OPCAT folder anywhere you want on the system, even under Applications if you wish. I would recommend that you keep OPCAT_HOME and OPCAT_PROJECTS_HOME separated to simplify any future upgrades. Just make sure your environment variables are set accordingly.

A system restart is not necessary at this point, but recommended. A simple user logout and login would suffice.

To run OPCAT on a Mac OS X or Linux you may ignore opcat2.exe file and click on opcat2.jar or run java -jar opcat2.jar from your command shell instead.

Be warn though that presently some paths inside .opz files are hard coded to point to a particular directory, say file://C:\Documents And Settings\... which would cause OPCAT to fail on a Mac with a java.lang.String.subString error when loading such .opz file. This isn’t a major issue since I’m able to manually edit an .opz file with a text editor and fix the erroneous file paths. I believe future version of OPCAT would resolve this problem.

OPCAT 3.00 has taken OPM concept a step further, having improved in areas of teamwork modeling and simulation. While the previous version had an Academia look and feel, this latest update to Prof. Dov Dori’s OPM arsenal reflects a more professional commercial product.

Also, OPCAT 3.00 look and feel blends seamlessly with Mac OS X. Cool!

It was another morning in Egypt. For almost two weeks my friend and I had been traveling from Upper Egypt down to Alexandria and parts of Sinai. This day was our last day in Egypt.

We had breakfast in the executive lounge of Cairo Marriott and Omar Khayyam Casino where we stayed. It was on a very top floor and we could see the whole city from the glass window of our breakfast table.

The hotel concierge offered us a four door sedan and a driver-cum-guide who would take us around the city for 125 Egyptian Pounds. He’d take us to three major landmarks around the city in Coptic Cairo, Islamic Cairo and the city center itself. My wife declined.

For our duration of trip in Egypt, my friend had been assumed by the locals to be my wife. According to the Bible, when Abraham was in Egypt he denied Sarah to be his wife and claimed she was his sister. From the Bible we know that didn’t go so well, so for her own good she might as well be my wife rather than a sister or just a friend.

…

We walked for about 20 minutes instead until we reached a subway station. Part of Cairo mass transit system is underground, and it’s something totally unique in Egypt. It almost felt like Chicago, until one passenger started reciting Koran verses out loud. In a different country such act would have triggered an alarm, but in Egypt, it’s probably a daily occurrence.

Taking the train was easy, although you may wish to know that there is a dedicated woman-only car. We didn’t actually see it, but it’s supposed to be there according to our guide book.

Our first stop was Mar Girgis, in Coptic Cairo.

Coptic Cairo houses most of the Orthodox Christians and Jewish community in Egypt. There are numerous small churches in the area and at least one synagogue. We were there at the right time to follow a church service; Sunday morning around 10 a.m.

The church procession was somewhat ancient. They sung hymns in a language I couldn’t decipher; not even sure whether it was Arabic. And they burned incense during the service; something modern churches don’t do. Their reverence amazed me, but I did not feel the presence of God nor was there a sense of liberty in the place. Maybe it was just me. They’re orthodox.

…

While I found my faith in solitude and quiet time with God in His presence, my church atmosphere is somewhat vibrant, loud, and youthful. I used to attend churches like City Harvest in Singapore, various generic non-denominational International Christian Fellowships around Asia and Assemblies of God in America. I’ve always thought of the Orthodox to be more like the Catholics, but this visit shows they’re not.

Not all the churches in Coptic Cairo are open to tourist visitation during their service however. One usher actually turned us away, even though we were just standing at the back row and weren’t distracting the procession.

There’s also a peaceful cemetery amidst the plethora of worship sanctuaries in Coptic Cairo. Most of the tombs have lavish decorations on them, with carving of cherubs and other artistic form of Christian icons. Some of the tombs dated back to early 1900, and there’s a hint of Greek Orthodox influence in the way the cemetery was done.

…

We took a cab to Islamic Cairo where we visited a Citadel. It was huge, but nothing impressed me. We visited a mosque and a couple of national museums within the Citadel itself before heading back to the hotel.

We spent less than 20 Egyptian Pounds for transport. Budget indeed.

Checkout was horrible, for a Marriott standard. We needed to book a cab from the hotel to get to the airport. I didn’t have time to take care of the details because I had to sign for checkout, so for one last time, I used the wife reference to my friend. I told the concierge, “Please book me a cab, my wife will take care of the details.”

And we left for the airport. There’s a small immigration counter next to the check-in counter. Most people don’t know this, so there’s no queue at all as compared to the line at the rows of immigration counters before the gates. We boarded our plane. The end of our Egypt trip.

Epilogue.

When I got back from Egypt, there were two things on my mind. First being the recovery of burns I suffered in the desert excursion. It wasn’t bad, but I just needed to get it off my head. Then there’s the line of wisdom from When Harry Met Sally (1998). “Men and women cannot be friends”. It’s somewhat true. Attraction gets in the way.

Since then I’ve discovered that I can write poems and I began to adjust my lifestyle. Some say I’m a changed man, but that’s what journeys do to people.