Rest Of The Week One January 2026

Last Wednesday, we went to UPM Health Center to get my stock of medication as the ones I had is almost finished. Like before, the doctor that saw me this time is different from the previous one.

Even with the records available online, I had to explain my health problems to the doctor particularly about my back pain problems (and hence insisting to get Tramadol as the doctor wanted to give me a milder one). Told the doctor I had taken up both Gabapentin (for the nerves) and Tramadol the night before because I needed the pain relief. The doctor was surprised since these medication will make me extremely drowsy, but I told him that I take Tramadol only when necessary. Had my blood sample taken that day (four tubes!). The doctor asked if I could come next week but my other half had arranged an appointment at Pantai Hospital in Melaka for an echo heart test next week. There was a relatively cheaper package for this test and my sons offered to pay for the expenses. Thus, I replied that I could not come the week after due to this and will come back one month after to get the blood test results.

In the evening, my eldest gave us a dinner treat at the local Middle Eastern restaurant since my second son Ihsan is going back to JB the next day. Forgotten to take pics at the time since most of us were very hungry. Late afternoon the next day, Ihsan went back to JB as he will be having night-shift work for the week after.

Also on Wednesday, my younger colleague told me that our paper has appeared online. We knew that it was accepted sometime in July and was waiting for it to appear. The paper was based on the work of my former PhD student. It was a problem given to him earlier in his PhD studies before I retired. Parts of the work I had also presented during the SQST conference in December 2024 with generalizations (also was mentioned briefly in the paper). Despite the ad-hockery criticism during the conference (most quantum works have ad-hockery elements), the work has good potential to be explored further within this traditional quantization framework and there could be some interesting physical implications. 

On the whole, there is much t be learned about this problem and one should not be overly satisfied with the current achievement/paper published. In my opinion, we have gradually gone through the phases I have mentioned in my speech long time ago:

In my humble opinion, we have yet to establish ourselves within the last phase and we need to work harder (creating more intense research ecosystem) to achieve this. Exploring the work along this direction might just get us there.