A friend of mine has made a vow (to his wife) that for every new toy brought into his home, another old one must go.

This is a hard idea to swallow, and it will definitely stick in your throat if you have an addiction, say, to shopping and costuming yourself.

Making an effort to hold back buying new stuff is never easy; chucking your old collections of textbooks and lecture notes, directories, shoes, toys, comic books, jewelry (or fill in whatever worthy of your

The online puzzle game Scramble has addicted my mind to its fun with alphabets for quite a while. Every now and then I find myself carried away by this remarkable word game, in which we line up the scrambled letters to from a new word.

Although chances are that I am killing time by juggling with the alphabets, there are occasionally good lessons to learn. Trust me, the word game sparkles with amusing examples of life lesson. Think of the word "trust", and drop the letter t – alas,

We spoke about the fashionable buzzwords or clichés during lunch meeting the other day. Like so many geeks, I must admit, I hardly come to fall in love with the new thing. That being said, vogue words can be quite fun and that’s how they got to be vogue words.

Nowhere is the classical language in the Anglo-Saxon times more creative than the new clichés that are born every now and then. Well, obviously new words and phrases have to be born. The

After the Nestle drivers and delivery workers ended a three-day-old strike, we heard a new story from another bank company in Hong Kong. To my amazement, they announced granting a day off for the employees on their very days of birthday. Like many "aha" ideas, it's so simple you wonder why nobody had thought of it before.

Why? You might ask. As Gordon Livingston has pointed out, life's two most important questions are "Why?" and "Why not

My colleague raised questions about the developmental milestones of babies and toddlers this afternoon. Can we imagine what we are able to do after birth? To be honest, not much.

As I reflected on what I managed to do after birth – I had premature birth - I was drawn back to those scenes of National Geographic, where a newborn elephant (not to mention our immediate ancestors chimpanzee) is able to walk with the herd and hold onto his mother on the very first day of life.

To that matter, what

There is no better way to learn making reckless conclusion on hearsay than reading the "stunning" newspaper story in Hong Kong.

Lest you doubt the impact of heart-breaking news among the local media, consider the recent talk of the town concerning patient death after the doctors' attempt to open the blocked arteries with balloon.

The balloon procedure meant to prop open an artery, called angioplasty, is always a high-stakes treatment decision (or gamble, if you like) and in particular so if performed in an emergency

One of my favourite sayings comes from Richard Carlson, author of the Don't Sweat the Small Stuff series, "There's no such thing as bad weather – only different kinds of good weather."

I admit it. There are times when I was too serious about weather, getting myself overwhelmed and uptight.

When I first arrived at Hallstatt in Austria last month, I met all that rain. The city, supposedly rich in pastel-coloured houses casting spectacular reflections onto the glassy water of the lake,

As the saying goes, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. While there may be a grain of truth in this, I am inclined to think the opposite. Whatever your age, taking time off to do something different can be one of the best times of your life.

I decided to learn ice skating this year. The other day, I went to the ice skating rink after work and asked about lessons that fit my schedule. The receptionist at the counter smiled, apparently having already figured out

On my way home after dinner with my first-year medical doctor colleagues, I had a chat with one of them.

We spoke about disclosure of medical errors, which haunt bitterly many of the doctors - young and experienced ones alike. Such stories are always cropping up in the news nowadays. Hardly a day goes by without the press reporting medical errors. What if you prescribe the wrong medication to your patient who gets into trouble? What about wrong diagnosis? Or worse: Should you make immediate disclosure if you cut

The month June comes to an end. That means another new batch of fresh graduates from the medical school.

Utter the phrase "new interns" and the mind envisages the relentlessly action-packed life of a harried and sleep-deprived neophyte, frustrated and surrounded by murmuring patients inside a hospital where he or she knows very little.

Medical intern training is known – and often despised - as a source of stress (and it is), fatigue (that too) and endless crises that need to be resolved (guilty