Valorous Halcyon

I never had the habit of journaling, and it was never my thing. You see, I had a hard time polishing my language skills. Having grown up and educated in a Chinese primary school and surrounded by Chinese-speaking community at least two third of my life, I had the tendency to speak and think in Chinese. English was out of my realm of mastery. Mandarin Chinese is my mother tongue after all. Ironically I have been widely misunderstood as being a 'banana' - a Chinese who only speaks English.  It seems I do have a 'banana' look. I have been told that I speak and write English better than my Chinese sentences, which the latter often seems to be awkward and to some extent, trying too hard. Can't really blame me right? I have not been consistently writing Chinese for the past 10 years. But this is blatantly deceiving! My English proficiency has not always been acceptable. Reading back my blog posts even just 5 years ago brought myself to embarrassment. In short, I d...

If there is a single word that can sum up what owning a turbocharged car for the past one and a half year has taught me, it will be this — humility . I have quite a number of people telling me my car is cool, fast and what not. But instead of getting all boasted up, I can't help but to be humble at my slow car. Slow car? You wondered. For a hot hatch making well above 234 horses on the wheel with 270Nm torque, this Neo turbo boosting 1-bar (14.5 psi) is producing more than double a stock Neo CPS is making. This is certainly not a slow car by any conventional family car standard. But with this comes a hefty price, in terms of time and money. The maintenance cost is not cheap, as it is the case with any other turbocharged car. Turbocharged vehicles are more prone to component failures just simply by the fact that there are a lot more things that can fail within the complex system, as compared to a much simpler naturally aspirated mode.  I have educated myself with how a...