Lawrence and Christine Family Blog

If you are avid trail explorer like me, you will appreciate this web site

Posted in: Travel on Saturday, June 23, 2007 at 0 comments  

A note on how to teach these things: These subjects should not be taught by lectures or textbooks. They can only be taught by setting examples, by conversation, by showing, and by allowing the child (or teenager) to do these things on their own (with supervision at first). Once you’ve talked about the skill, showed your child how to do it, and let them do it under supervision a few times, give your child the trust to do it on his own, and to learn from his own mistakes. Check back every now and then to talk about what he’s learned.

Financial

• Saving. Spend less than you earn. It’s such a simple maxim, and yet very few young adults understand it or know how to follow it. Teach your child from a young age to put part of money he receives or earns in the bank. Teach him how to set a savings goal, and save for it, and then purchase whatever it is he was saving for.
• Budgeting. Many of us dread this task as adults, and suffer because of it, because we lack the understanding and skills necessary to make budgeting a breeze. Teach them simple budgeting skills, and what’s involved, and they won’t have problems as an adult. You could wait until teenage years to do something like this — but it’s a good thing because this shows them why basic math is necessary.
• Paying bills. Give them bills to pay and have them pay it on time, online or in the real world. Learn how to write a check, paper and online, and how to make sure that you’re never late with bills again — either pay them immediately or automatically.
• Investing. What is investing and why is it necessary? How do you do it and what are different ways of doing it? How do you research an investment? How does it compound over time? This is a good conversation to have with your teen.
• Frugality. This is something to teach them from an early age. How to shop around to get a good deal, to compare between products of different prices and quality, to make things last and not waste, to cook at home instead of eating out too much, to control impulse buying. When we go out and do a shopping spree, including before Christmas, we are teaching them just the opposite.
• Credit. This is a major problem for many adults. Teach them the responsible use for credit, and how to avoid it when it’s not necessary, and how to avoid getting into too much debt, and how to use a credit card responsibly.
• Retirement. Is it better to work hard and retire or to take mini-retirements throughout life? That’s a personal question, but your child should be aware of the options and the pros and cons of each, and how to do each. Why it’s important to start investing in retirement when you’re young, and how much of a difference that can make through compound interest. How to do it automatically.
• Charity. Why this is an important use of your money, and how to make it a regular habit. This should be not only a financial issue, but a social one. Show them how to volunteer their time and effort as well.

Thinking

• Critical thinking. One of the most important skills not taught in school. These days, we are taught to be robots, to listen to the teacher and not to question, to accept what we are told and not to think, to be good employees and to shut up. If you’re an employer, you might want your employees to be like this, and if you’re a politician, you might want your citizens to be like this. But is that how you want your child to be? An unquestioning, naive, ignorant citizen/employee/student? If so, carry on. If not, just start introducing the habit of questioning why? And the skill of find out the answer. And how to question authority — there is no one right answer. Conversation is a good way to accomplish this skill.
• Reading. Sure, we’re taught to read. But schools most often make this boring. Show your child the wonderful imaginative worlds there are out there. And show them how to find out about stuff in the world through the Internet, and how to evaluate what they read for credibility, logic, factualness.

Success

• Positive thinking. While critical thinking is an important skill, it’s also important to have a positive outlook on life. Sure, things may be screwed up, but they can be changed for the better. Find solutions instead of complaints. And most of all, learn to believe in yourself, and to block out negative self-thinking.
• Motivation. Learn that discipline isn’t the key to achieving a goal, but motivation. How to motivate yourself, different strategies, and how great it feels to achieve a goal. Start them with small, easily achievable goals, and let them develop this skill.
• Procrastination. It’s a problem we all deal with as adults (and even as kids). Now, I believe that there should be a time for goofing off, being lazy, and having fun. But when there’s something to do that we really need to do, how do we get ourselves to do it? Learn the reasons behind procrastination, and how to address them. How to beat procrastination.
• Passion. One of the most important ways to be successful is to find something you’re passionate about, and do that for a living. Your child won’t know the answer at a young age, but you should show her how to find her passion and how to pursue it, and why that’s important.

Social

• Anti-competition. As kids, we’re taught how to be competitive. In the adult world, that’s how we behave. And that results in back-stabbing, undercutting, feelings of resentment, and other life-affirming things like that. Instead, teach your child how there is room for many people to be successful, and how you’re more likely to be successful if you help others to be successful, and how they’ll help you in return. Learn that making friends and allies is better than making enemies, and how to do that. Learn cooperation and teamwork before competition.
• Compassion. Not taught in the schools at all. In fact, instead of teaching children how to empathize with others and try to ease their suffering, our schools often teach children to increase the suffering of others. Learn to put yourself in the shoes of others, to try to understand them, and to help them end their suffering.
• Love. Compassion’s twin brother, love differs only in that instead of wanting to ease the suffering of others, you want their happiness. Both are crucial.
• Listening. Are our children taught how to listen in school? Or how to talk at someone. Perhaps that’s why many adults don’t have this critical skill. Learn how to truly listen to someone, to understand what they’re saying, to empathize.
• Conversation. Goes hand-in-hand with listening, but the art of conversation is something that isn’t taught in school. In fact, kids are taught that conversation is bad in most cases. But in most cases, a conversation is what is needed, not a lecture. This is an extremely important social skill that should start in the home. Learn to converse with your child instead of talk at him.

Practical

• Auto. Why cars are needed (no, not to look cool), how to buy a practical car, how to take care of it. How the engine works, what might break down, and how it’s fixed. Should be taught to both boys and girls (that should be obvious, but I had to say it).
• Household. How to fix things around the house and keep things maintained. Plumbing, electricity, heating and cooling, painting, roofing, lawn, all that good stuff. The tools and skills necessary to do just the basic maintenance and repairs. And how to know when to call a professional.
• Cleaning. Too many adults grow up without knowing how to do laundry, to clean a house properly, to keep the house clean and uncluttered, to have a weekly and monthly cleaning routine. Teach your child all these things instead of just telling her what to do.
• Organization. How to keep paperwork organized, how to keep things in their place, to to keep a to-do list, how to set routines, how to focus on the important tasks.
  

Happiness

• Be present. For some reason, this extremely important skill is never taught to us when we’re kids. In truth, the younger we are, the more natural this skill is. As we get older, we start thinking about the future and the past, and the present seems to slip away from us. Some skills for living in the present would go a long way.
• Enjoy life. Kids don’t have much of a problem with this, but some awareness of its importance and how to do it, even as an adult, would be helpful. Set a good example of this, and your kids will follow.
• Find purpose. Whether this is a higher religious purpose, or the purpose of making your family happy, or the purpose of finding your calling, having a purpose in life is extremely important. Teach your children the importance of this and show how to do it yourself.
• Develop intimate relationships. The best way to teach this is to develop an intimate relationship with your child, and model it with your spouse or other significant other (within appropriateness). Teach them the skills for developing these types of relationships, talk about the importance of it, and how to get through the bumpy parts as well. There are bad times in every relationship, but with the right skills of communication, empathy and compromise, they can get through them.

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One of the lesser-publicized features of our favorite Windows-on-Mac virtualization software, Parallels 3.0, is its Boot Camp support. Boot Camp is Apple's free software that can boot Windows on your Mac natively. Parallels lets you run Windows within OS X virtually. Now that the two packages can share a single Windows installation, you can choose EITHER to boot fully into Windows OR to just hop into Windows while you're still logged into OS X.

Why would I want to do this? you ask. Well, the problem with dual-booting Windows is the inconvenience of having to restart your Mac entirely. The problem with virtualizing Windows is that it can be unreasonably slow for a prolonged session. Now that Boot Camp and Parallels work together, you can choose between virtualizing or booting into your Windows installation depending on what you have to do. Here's how to get it set up.

Install Boot Camp

First thing you should know: setting up Boot Camp is not a trivial task, since it requires repartitioning your Mac's hard drive and installing another operating system and drivers. Block out a couple of hours for this project.

What you'll need

• An Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.4 with all software updates installed and at least 10GB of free space and a writable CD/DVD drive
• A blank CD or DVD for burning the Mac driver disk
• A genuine Windows XP (no Vista support yet!) installation disk which includes Service Pack 2. You cannot install XP using a disk that does not include SP2 and expect to download it after the fact. Here's how to slipstream SP2 onto an older WinXP installation CD.

Set up Boot Camp

Before you get started, free up as much space on your Mac's hard drive as possible. Here's a handy tool for visualizing and cleaning up all your disk space hogs. Then:

1. Back up all your important data. Do not skip this step. If you're extra super-paranoid and you've got a free external disk, consider cloning your Mac's hard drive entirely. Here are some free Mac backup tools and methods.
2. Download and install the Boot Camp Assistant. Out of the gate, the assistant will prompt you to print out the 28 page user guide. Yes, I groaned and balked at the waste of paper and ink that this would be too. But it turns out the manual was a big, comforting help later on, so do it.

Posted in: Technology on Wednesday, June 20, 2007 at 0 comments  

Corporate can now enjoy a strong alternative in their browsing of the WWW.

It's On Windows

•Resizable Text Fields
Probably the best new feature of the beta (aside from increased speed). If you frequent message boards or use online blogging software you will appreciate being able to resize any of your text input blocks.

•Movable Tabs
Just like Firefox, Safari lets you rearrange your tabs into any order you want. And it even 1-ups its competitor by letting you drag them off and to create their own new window.

•Real Time Text Searching
And taking another cue from its foxy friend, you can search for text in real time throughout the web page your viewing. Although Safari does it in a much prettier way.

•Modify How Long Safari Keeps Your History
We can't tell you how many times we wanted to go check back on a page we visited, only to find that our history didn't keep track that long. Safari lets you decide how long it should remember where you've gone. Just for a day or even a year.

Posted in: Technology on Tuesday, June 12, 2007 at 0 comments  

Steve Jobs surprised the computer world yet again with the announcement that Safari (Apple's trademark web browser) is available for Windows users. Worth a trial though in beta.

Download [here]

Posted in: Technology on at 0 comments  

Computer experts on Monday unveiled a digital reproduction of ancient Rome as it appeared at the peak of its power in A.D. 320 — what they called the largest and most complete simulation of a historic city ever created.

Check it out [here]

Posted in: Travel on at 0 comments  

- a believed conspiracy that emerging translations are eating up the foundations of Christian faith (psalm 11:3)
- king James translation: translated from a group of godly scholars from Greek and Hebrew tongue in 1611. The 1769 "perfected" version forms the basis of most of our KJV bibles
- why jkv in our church?
1. Its a precise, accurate time-tested reference (psalm 119:105)
2. Favored by readers from a mono-language society where English was the first language
- some "reformed" groups exerts jkv-only mentality, classifying others as non-conformists
- use the principles of learning.to guide our selection of bible versions. Start simple.
- add the details later. This should be the approach. Para-phrasing is wise.
- progress later to a more complete picture
- check out psalm 119:97-105 as the principles to guide you

Posted in: Quiet Time on Friday, June 08, 2007 at 0 comments  

Apparently, as Nokia launched the eagerly awaited yet ill-fated N95 smartphone in Asia, several Chinese phone manufacturers were quietly shipping a souped-up version of an identical one named the N99 in many countries including Thailand.

Not only did they create an exact replica of Nokia's flagship phone, they even added a dual sim card module and features that make the $300 imitation a bargain to own!

Interested to see what the big comotion is all about, I was brought to several locations in Bangkok to hunt down this mysterious device. But so far, it remain as elusive as it is named, with me unable to locate a glimpse. Let's see what happened next tomorrow.

Posted in: Technology on Thursday, June 07, 2007 at 0 comments  

Well, as it turn out, my one week stay in Thailand is both physically rewarding to my taste bud and work.

The project went smoothly despite two power outages at the client site for several hours. Cars are like ants in formation along highway as congestion is built into the culture of every drivers. For the past few days, its restaurant after restaurant for meals and I am now on my way to one for dinner. The jam is so bad I could take the time to write this article!

Anyway, let's remember Daisy as she flew out on Tuesday back to the states. Jerrie's family has invited us over on Saturday evening for dinner and I sure look forward to some intreating dishes from south Africa.

One of my good friend has returned for two weeks as they seek to apply for long-term visa in the states. And he is now into full-time pastoral study there. We exchanged many views and biblical states of the two countries and it was indeed a blessed time! I have invited them over this Sunday for the 11am service and hope to see you guys at the second service.

We are almost there now...so update you guys more later. Stomach growling.

God bless.

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Posted in: Quiet Time on Saturday, June 02, 2007 at 0 comments