Category: My Good Life

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Travel Blog

OK, Yet Another Little One Going To Call Me Uncle Soon

From left to right - me, John, Ja, and Cynthia

I need more RAM for my brain. Many friends of mine think that I have lots of friends in Hong Kong but the fact is, before I left the place at the age of 17, I lived my life more or less like a hermit. This morning, I was just going through the list in my head to see who I shall call up to catch up. Out of nowhere, my Thai friend Ja texted me with a Merry Christmas message. I almost banged my head onto the table … (that would have been too dramatic at the dining table in front of a bunch of my parents’ friends over late breakfast).

Back in year 2000, Ja and I and a bunch of friends (then-colleagues) were having a smashing time working at Mauritius. Ja and I kept in touch and she flew into Singapore for business often. Believe or not, I was amongst her first batch of friends who … *evil grin* … interviewed her then-new boyfriend John (now husband). John is a great guy and I attended their wedding at Bangkok with Cynthia and our Filipino friend Barbara (who was also one of the “interviewer” … ha ha ha … so evil). Of course, need not to say, Barbara and I gave John a 5-star rating.

I almost banged my head onto the table this morning because for the last 5 years, John and Ja have been working in my birthtown.  How could I have missed that?! Not only that, their first baby is due in less than 2 weeks! Within half an hour after receiving Ja’s text message, Cynthia and I were at their doorsteps. And we headed to Stanley for lunch. I have not handled a manual SLR camera for donkey years. John surely has some exquisite hobbies.

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Gosh, can you guys believe it? Another little one is going to call me uncle soon! I suddenly feel so …

Let’s not get there. The picture on the right is taken from John and Ja’s apartment in Hong Kong. Nice ya?

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Travel Blog

It’s Christmas Full Of Question Marks

A Christmas tree at The Venetian, Macau

Last night Cynthia issued a rare non-negotiation order to take her to the Cathedral for a morning Christmas Mass. Going to church is something I feel lazy to do especially when it is yet another night of less than 6 hours of sleep. However, it is also something I feel good after I have received my dosage of holiness that lasts … perhaps till the next time I do something terribly wrong. Then the cycle starts again, and again. Okay, I confess that I should have a regular dosage, something for me to work on in 2008.

I often wonder why the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd in Singapore is nowhere near to the Hong Kong Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. The Cathedral in Hong Kong is immaculately decorated, the choir is beautiful, and the sound system is good. I have not heard any choir better than the one in Hong Kong (the Cathedral in Bangkok comes second in my favorite list). Over the years, the choir director and conductor stay the same and they have trained groups and groups of choir members and organists to deliver a performance that I think is as close to the sound of Heaven as we can get. Hymns are supposed to sound like that, in my humble opinion, in order to inspire. I think the vast difference between these two Cathedrals comes down to the location. The Cathedral in Hong Kong is located in an affluent area (mid-level to the peak) and around the Cathedral were surrounded by the Catholic schools (now only one left I think – the one I came from). That could explain the funding as well as the growth and sustainability of the community. Another difference that bothers me much is that in Hong Kong, people are allowed to dip the “host” into the wine during the Communion (hence, the body and blood of Christ) while in Singapore, the celebrant drinks the wine on behalf of all of us. Why is it so? Again, I don’t know.  I am a strong believer in sharing … erm …

Mass, and hymns, and beautiful voices aside, what does Christmas mean to people these days besides just another public holiday, gift exchange, and more reasons to shop? I don’t really know. Inside the Cathedral, I observe that many people were not active participants in the sense that we should all sing hymns together and we should all response during the prayers. Quite a number of them kept quiet throughout the Mass celebration and mechanically stand, sit, and knee as the Mass proceeded. Do they actually believe in what they are doing? Or are they doing what the tradition dictates? I also don’t know. Perhaps all of us should have a refresher course on the meaning behind the Mass once in a while.

Anyway, pardon the question marks in my head, I wish you all a Merry and Blessed Christmas. And for the faithful ones, let’s ponder why Christmas is indeed “merry” and “blessed”.

PS. Picture taken at The Venetian, Macau.

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Travel Blog

Macau – A Visit After 2 Decades

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My only recollection of Macau is as such: I was 10 years old, with my mother, and there was this old wall made of stone. Under which we kids played the tiny white paper wrapped crackers that exploded upon hitting the floor. I was happy back then. That much I remember. The rest are blurry. I wish I could make up stories and make it become my memory. Forgive my vagueness. That was more than two decades ago.

And over these two decades, I have always wanted to relive that piece of memory, with my mother. I certainly cannot say Macau has changed much because I hardly remember anything. But all I can say is that Macau has many facets that I did not anticipate. I always thought that Macau is a city full of casinos and gangsters. In contrary, I see colonial buildings, traditional Chinese houses, streets filled with neon light like Hong Kong, and the grand structures where people gamble and girls dance naked inside exclusive designated areas.

The food in Macau is amazingly tasty and the people are really friendly. Our tour guide, my sister, wanted to take us to taste the famous bean curd (best I have tasted so far). The manager of the restaurant spent more than 10 minutes showing my sister how to get there, a shopkeeper walked all the way out to show us how to get there, and he stopped someone on the way home whom gladly took us to the shop near to her home. And have you heard of the “pork chop bun”? We queued for 45 minutes and those buns worth every single minute of waiting. More journals will be posted together with the pictures taken in the article section once I return to Singapore.

Did I mention the girls on the street of Macau? Those killer boots … and then I realise that there are even more killer boots back in Hong Kong. Holy molly mother of the seven heavens …

My last visit to Macau was when I was ten. My mother stayed in Macau till she was ten before migrating to Hong Kong. My sister, Cynthia, and I followed my mother when she showed us where she was used to buy food from the market. And we visited her favorite park when she was young. That was five decades ago.

Time flies. That much I know.

PS. Picture of my mother, with that old wall I mentioned.

Categories
Travel Blog

Hong Kong, Macau Here We Come!

It seems to me that my birth-town is never short of drama.  While Cynthia and I was making our way out of the airport, somewhere on the other side of the immigration area, an attempted theft took place rather dramatically as accounted by my mother. Gossip works wonder when stories from different eye witnesses miraculously form the story that is passed around to everyone nearby.

One man was robbed inside one of the shops in the airport and immediately, he gave chase to the thief who took away his wallet and passport. Not wanting to lose sight of the thief, the victim without a second thought dropped his luggage and backpack. He managed to grab the backpack of the thief and riped that off the running thief. He then grab the jacket of the thief and that too went off. Soon, the victim was close enough to deliver not one, not two, but three good punches onto the thief’s body. At this point, I am not sure who was the victim, or who became the victim. After pinning the thief onto the ground, he yelled for the police (to the extend of why there weren’t any police around). A few bystanders helped to pin down the thief and the victim retraced his path of destruction and regained his abandoned belongings. As dramatic as it was just minutes ago, the thief was taken away in handcuffs by the police.

We took a bus from the airport to home. Bus drivers in Hong Kong have this superb skill in tackling the sharp bends and small roundabouts with such a blazing speed. The empty beer cans were rolling incessantly from one end of the bus to another. One luggage was thrown out of the designated area and crashed onto the front side of the bus. The owner quickly put it back only to see it thrown out of the rack another time, and another time. Empty food wrappers hovered above the bus floor fueled by some circular invisible forces. I kept staring at the empty beer cans, a special light beer that I have not seen in Singapore. I felt thirsty and I am suppose to be on a detox trip.

Familiar places and there are so much to do here. In just 4 hours’ time, I will have to get up and catch a ferry to Macau. It certainly sounds like fun.

Stay tuned.

Categories
Diary

A Roller Coaster Ride With Hyflux Water Trust

My virgin foray into the stock market is best described in the following analogy.

Once upon a time in a remote village, a young boy grew up listening to the legendary war stories of his ancestors. How those legendary heroes won battles, pillaged other villages, and took home the women as their own. Barely able to shoot anything – set aside to avoid getting shot – this young boy could not hide his excitement when one day, he got to join rank with the rest of the comrades for the battles somewhere far away (does it sound like a number of movies that you have watched?).

The battlefield was nothing like what this young boy has imagined. Suddenly, all the stories of how people got blown up into pieces, the casualties of the war, and the fact that not everyone who joined the campaign came back in one piece made sense to him. Feeling lost, this young boy took cover, observed, and uncertain of the next cause of action.

When I opened the trading account last month, I had no idea what to do with it. One day, I noticed the promotional counter right underneath my office for the IPO of Hyflux Water Trust (HWT). I personally like the branding of Hyflux (as well as Olivia Lum) and I believe that human beings are over-populating the planet. We are not going to have enough clean water for our next generation. Hence, I am a believer of treating water is the way to go. Besides, HWT’s current projects are in China and China is a high growth region. Through the ATM, I subscribed to 11 lots of HWT share that was priced at S$0.78.

I got 3 lots of HWT share that worthed S$2,340 before the trade started. A few friends congratulated me and wished me the best. On day one, the share price dipped and I lost S$210 on paper (-10%). On day three, the share price rose and I made S$375 on paper (+16%). As the US market went down, many counters went down too. So was HWT. Last week, I gathered enough courage to put a buy order of 9 lots at S$0.76. It was not easy to stare at the potential S$7k investment and submit the order. The feeling is hard to describe. It was like my heart beat faster, my mind was preoccupied with tons of “what-if”. Looking back, it is fortunate that the market closed at S$0.765 and my order did not materialized. Today, HWT share closed at S$0.74 (a paper lost of S$120 with 3 lots).

I do not intend to speculate. All I want to do is to stock up a bit more on HWT because I truly believe in its potential. It is hard to decide when to buy and when to sell. At times I wonder, there is no announcement on the progress of HWT as of today but yet, the share price swings up and down. History tells us that if one was to invest S$10k in Cosco or Raffles Education five years ago, one would have been a millionaire today. History also tells us that many get burned in the stock market and some of them now invest in managed funds instead. One thing for sure is that these are the battles I wish to participate. But meanwhile I have to learn how to shoot … and to avoid being shot.

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Diary

Okay, My Today’s Blog Entries Will Probably Read Silly 10 Years From Now

Ever since I changed the blog engine not too long ago, every night I painstakingly convert one blog entry after another. Then I stumbled on stuffs that I wrote 10 years ago and I got goose bumps all over my body. Tempting not to convert those old articles into blog entries but I think, perhaps what I write today will read silly 10 years from now anyway. So I park these old entries in the category of From The Attic. Back in those days, I kept an email group of friends and family and I broadcast my materials regularly, and I received feedback regularly. From The Attic is a tiny potion of what I was used to have (imagine the amount of goose bumps I would have … I could die from it). Looking back, I am amazed in how Internet has changed our lives. The self-managed email group is out, friendly and anonymous traffic are in.

And it was the malicious anonymous traffic that brought down my previous site. I am still in the mist of converting my entries. As you can see from the bar above, after staying till wee hours every night (last night I worked till 5am), it is now 31% complete. Still quite a way to go. I need to go through each entry and manually change all the links, upload all the images into the designated directories at the server, re-size some of the over-sized ones to fit the standard template, and etc. After which, I will think of what to do with some of the timeless entries (a technical term by WordPress to indicate that nature of the entry that is different from the time sensitive blogs, not that they are literally timeless). Perhaps I will put them as pages.  Stay tuned.

Categories
Diary

A Thumb-Up To Samsung’s After Sales Service?

Avid readers of my site may recall my acquisition of a Samsung 22″ wide-screen LCD monitor 3 months ago. One month ago, I saw one vertical line full of dead pixels. I called the Samsung customer service the next morning and I must say, I did find the operator very friendly (unlike the horrible experience I had with SingTel). I described the problem and asked her how the green line could be turned off. She put me on hold for a while and then told me that they have to send a technician on site to fix my problem. I am actually used to their SOP (standard operating procedure). My previous Samsung 17″ LCD monitor has broken down twice. She asked if the technician could visit my home the next day and I suggested the coming weekend instead. It was not a life and death situation. Just one vertical green line of dead pixels.

Then another green line appeared right next to the first one, and another one appeared. Not only that, one line turned red and another one to blue. Pretty funky I must say.

As the technician appeared at my doorstep, we were like … long time no see! He was the same technician who visited my home to fix my previous Samsung LCD monitor twice changing its motherboard because it refused to display anything. I showed him the lines, he verified the problem, and he told me that he needed to order the panel for me. He would have to dissect my two months old monitor and replace the panel. Ouch! I asked if this is a problematic model. He told me that mine was (still is) the first one in Singapore to go wrong. I must buy 4D. In fact, the product quality has gone up so much so that he may be out of job soon, he said.

Two weeks later, the lines were still there and they were getting annoying. So I called up the service line again to explain my situation and suggested a one-to-one exchange. After all, it was pretty new and I reckoned it would be faster to replace the entire monitor than to wait for the parts to arrive. In the afternoon, someone from Samsung called me. I guess she must be pretty senior because of her English proficiency. She verified the problem and I had to wait for their response. In the evening, another person called me and told me that they could not commit to a date when my monitor would be repaired. The most they could do was to loan me a set – not the exact model but something standard. I said, “Look I do have another Samsung LCD monitor at home and all I need is to have my rather new monitor fixed.” He said a one-to-one exchange is not possible because it is more than a week old. I said I wanted to talk to someone who could make decision and he insisted that he got the directive from his manager. “Fine,” I said, “I will write in then.”

I have done some corporate governance projects before and for the sound corporates, letters of complaint usually get routed to an independent entity within the organization that reports directly to the MD or CEO. Moreover, some may have that as a measurement for KPI (key performance indicator). So that was all I did – a very nice professional and mature letter of complaint.

The next day, Samsung called me to arrange a one-to-one exchange and proposed to have the monitor delivered to my doorsteps within 12 hours. Now I am staring at my yet again brand new Samsung LCD monitor. Thumb up to Samsung’s after sales service? I think so. Some friends of mine are curious about what I wrote in that letter of complaint. Here it is just because you ask for it and not anything else.

Categories
Diary

So I Finally Opened A Trading Account

If there are two things I think we all should start doing from young, that would be skin care and to invest wisely. Ironically, I suck at both departments. It is until recently that something suddenly hits me (I am slow, I know). I don’t have the economy background and I often have this negative impression on the financial market (again, ironic that I have been in the financial services industry for years). Stock market used to be a gigantic gambling ground to me. Then one day I realize that buying shares is very much like taking your hard earned money and invest into the future of mankind. And as mankind progress, those who invest their money rather than leaving their resources rotting inside a current deposit account get rewarded. So, stock market is not necessarily evil. And I am not necessarily evil if I participate in this frantic world that so freely and readily embraces capitalism.

Over lunch, my buddy RC – the one who always unfailingly thrilled me with all his wonderful war stories with the stock market – needed to visit the Singapore Exchange for something that was too complex for me to comprehend (something to do with buying a discounted share offset by dividend … huh?!). None the matter. I followed. And impulsively, I have decided to open an account.

Fortunately for me, I have RC with me to explain the necessity. I am sure most of you are aware of how to trade in Singapore. For those who are interested in the process, this is for you. First, you need to open a CDP account. You can do so at SGX or at a security house. Minimum age is 21 (RC asked me to inquire if his 6 years old son can open a CDP account) and all you need is your IC and a bank account. Next, you need to open a trading account – either with a broker or trading via Internet. I chose DBS Vickers Securities Singapore out of convenience. Then you need to link your trading account to your CDP account (another form to fill up). And finally, choose your payment method (I opt for GIRO).

Viola! It is that simple. Stay tuned in what I will do with those accounts (still haven’t decided if I am going to actually trade). Meanwhile, remember … skin care and invest wisely – the two things you should do from young.

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Party

7pm – 5am: Of Dinner And Dance, Butter Factory, And Zouk

Till today, I still think that the best thing I can take away from my nine-to-five is the friendship I make. Some feel that the friends they meet as they get older are not as real or as close to those they met when they were young. The way I see it, as time goes by, we bound to lose touch with some good friends of ours. Actively making new friends and putting time and effort in nurturing friendship – old and new – is likely to be the only way to counter that. Some told me that they prefer to live their lives as hermits. My take is, we all want to be alone at times but none of us want to be lonely.

This year’s Dinner and Dance was different. It was a whole set of new colleagues and amongst them, two were my ex-colleagues. We were like having a mini-reunion during the Dinner and Dance. When the clock struck twelve, we headed to Butter Factory to have a real reunion with friends I met from the previous company. The party was smashing and Butter Factory ranks pretty high in my list of favorite clubbing scenes. After Butter Factory was closed at three, some of us moved to Zouk. Believe it or not, it was my first time stepping into Butter Factory … and into Zouk as well.

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For the Geeks Game Reviews

Hellgate London

“London is in ruins and now Asia must respond”, so it says on the pamphlet. I do not hesitate (especially when Cynthia is out-of-town) and am ready for the challenges ahead. I arrive at Russel Square and the garden square is no longer what it used to be – now a piece of wasteland. From afar, I can vaguely see the British Museum in ruin. Or is it my imagination? The year is 2038 and it has been 18 years since The Invasion. Once again, the survivors of mankind are united and determined to stop the demons from altering and assimilating our world into theirs. We have to close the Hellgate fast.

How I love role playing games. It comes with such a compelling storyline that makes people feel as though they are doing something virtually significant. Before you dismiss computing gaming as a total waste of time, you may wish to know that gaming moderately can enhance one’s analytic skill, problem solving skill, reflects, and etc. It is scientifically proven. Military develops games to train the soldiers. I even read that in one hospital, a group of surgeons are asked to play at least a certain number of hours of a I-forgot-which-one-but-certainly-not-a-medically-related-game a week in order to improve their performance.

Though I have the bad reputation of not being able to finish any game (except Sam & Max!), I think I may actually like “Hellgate London” and have a high chance in completing the game (think moderation!). It has the element of a traditional role playing game whereby you can personalise the ability of your characters. You are rewarded by the demons you vanquish in terms of experience points, currency, and items. But it doesn’t have the tedious battle controls like many role playing games do, which is good. And it also has the element of first person shooter but with a slower pace, lesser surprises, and you can actually dodge a fireball coming your way because it is kind of … slow. That is good as well because you can access the situation and take position accordingly to minimise damage upon you. You can virtually blow up anything lying around you – be it as boxes or gas cylinders. The explosion scenes are modeled well. Oh, did I mention that you will never run out of bullets? The graphic is fascinating even with my rather dated machine (AMD X2 4200+ and 6800GTS in SLi). The game play hardly lags in enclosed areas though in open areas (awesome graphics by the way as I can see buildings in smoke, the red phone booth, and abandoned police cars everywhere), my machine struggles to provide me with a smooth game play. Time to consider a new graphic cards I am sure.

And “Hellgate London” plays like some of the Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Games as well. Kind of reminds me of the World of Warcraft with regards to the quest system. There are also fraction points to gain (each tube station is like a mini-community and you have to gain their trust). The pace of “Hellgate London” is in between tradition role playing games and first person shooter. Most monsters I have seen so far can be easily killed with one shot or two. Except bosses of course. The boss fight can be entertaining especially when you see it charging after you and you have to keep firing at it while retreating (i.e. clear the area before the boss fight). The game is played in real time. Hence no saving and reloading it like many others. I love that because it feels so much more real.

Okay. I shall stop writing such a long blog and go back and save London … sleep. Think moderation!