Money No Enough 2

Well bite me, I'm slow.

I just watched the show and I have two things to say about it.

Firstly, I think Jack Neo has the knack of sifting the worst out of Singaporeans and throwing it on the table for all to see. I also think he totally went crazy with it this time. Apt topic - the true test of filial piety in hard, unforgiving times such as this. This I'm sure is an issue that plagues many post WW2 old folk (probably shortens their life just thinking about it). And I do honestly wonder how many of my generation nowadays, and indeed those after, would experience the same deep injustice and indignance I felt at the portrayed actions, and how many would absolutely agree with the teen daughter in the film that visiting an old dying lady in ICU is a waste of valuable time that could have been better spent at Zara or Zouk. What worries me the most is that for all the indignance I feel now at the characters' abandonment of their loving mother, I have such a long future ahead of me that I can't even say for certain that 'never will I do something as despicable as this'.

Secundo, my respect goes to the ladies and gentlemen who have let their characters get killed off, act unceremoniously dead, and have their photographs stuck on hearse vans. This generation of people wouldn't be caught dead writing their name on a small brick paperweight because your name on stone means you have already, as they in the army love to say, gone up the lorry. And it speaks of a deep maturity I think, that these older folk recognise that there are values and messages to be communicated to a changing public that trump the most logical of superstitions. For that, I e-salute them.

Flatline

It does get overwhelming at times, when you have to rush through in two days the things you'd have rushed through before in 7. At times I feel as if I'm trying to speed too fast, leaving my senses, my purposes, my principles, all behind. At times I feel an inexplicable immense dissatisfaction, probably that I haven't done this or that right.

They say you don't last three seconds after that last sliver of hope is taken away from you. Sometimes I think that a situation that could come close to comparing to that is quite the other extreme - when you have so much hope, so many ideas you want to put forth and try out, so much to live for, and you're stuck in a place where individualism is possibly the last thing you want to exhibit. I love my country. I accept and believe that 2 years of your life is a small price to pay for the utopian peace and stability that has held us together through various storms. And for that reason I am proud as a Singaporean male to fulfil my duty and obligation, and serve NS. But the military is the military, and self-expression isn't quite in vogue there. You be yourself, laugh and cry, but a full bloom of one's personality is near impossible. Unless of course you're the type who prefers a certain routine order to life, or to let someone else think for you. Not being sarcastic - there are a couple of people I respect who are like that. They're not weird. They're not patriotic. They're just who they are.

And I am who I am. And if the military manages to permanently rob me of that spark inside that drives my entire existence on Earth, then I might well be a sad case of failure.

For now I'll still say, I won't let them.

Oh God confusion reigns my mind.

Method

Due to the stay-in nature of my military life, you can expect a flood of posts on weekends to last you a week, constructed on weekdays and typed out when I get back.

This blog is gonna get more pondersome. I think. I hope. Who confirm?

You lor.

Social Media Brunch 4

The Social Media Brunch 4 just happened yesterday at the URA Theatrette. First of all, I love the way the SMB organizers try to innovate and experiment what type of activities would work best for SMB|SG, and a big thank you again to them for tirelessly organizing them all. I especially admire the fact that the finances are all coming out of either theirs or benefactors' pockets. It's hard enough organizing an event no matter how much funding you have under your belt; it's a whole different level when you are so passionate you are willing to pay for food, stationery, etc. Salut! And ok, I have to stop for one moment and reiterate something everyone's been saying.

Willy Foo and his crew is amazing.

Look at this.


The expressions captured in the photos taken through out the event are magical. It's as if all of them have this shutter-sense when this or that is gonna smile, or laugh, or raise his eyebrows.

I wanna do photography next time. It will probably burn a smokin' hole in my pocket.

This time a panel discussion was held on Corporate Adoption of Social Media, an issue that has been festing on the minds of just about anyone involved in an concern in any capacity about Singapore's social media scene. We all know that companies are reluctant to jump into social media, when here we are dancing in it as if we were swimming in liquid gold, and this discussion gave us a chance to, as I said, bring the thorny issues to the table and hammer it all out. Personally it was a very absorbing discussion, and given the unusual silence and rapt attention the audience in general was giving, they felt the same. You can read the record of major points raised in the live blogging post, found in the link at the top of this article, or you can head over to Tech65 to hear the not-perfect-but-we-did-our-best audio recordings.

After hearing that whole load of stuff, and then talking to Brian Koh and Melvin Yuan, I realised that as someone who deeply aspires to be in the PR industry, as well as loves tech, I should really be reading up alot more than I am now (in other words, next to never) about the whole marketing, PR and social media scene in Singapore, and just for knowledge in SEA and US. So I'm going start that now, and you may expect to see more PR/SMSG related stuff coming from this blog. You may. I leave you to decide.

Define: Netemptation

I twittered about me finally giving in and installing Google's much discussed Chrome browser. While not as hardcore as Daniel Tsou, I am also quite a Google works user. So I'm trying it out to see if it rocks my boat.

While twitting, a word came to me and I put it down - netemptation. So I thought hey, it'd be nice if I were to explain what I felt were the parameters that warranted this new word that I thought of. People who are more involved in the tubes might easily guess what it means, especially since I used it in the most direct context possible.

Netemptation is to me the collective pressure you feel from your sphere of influence online to try, do or get something. If you like to read your friends' blogs, then your netemptations are basically peer pressure online, perhaps 2 start typing lyk dis lols i dun reely knw cos i h8 c-ing dis ughs. If you read indie musicians' blogs, they are your netemptation to perhaps join the music social network that they're on and that they claim is loads better than MySpace because it has ABCXYZ. And especially, if you are a socially connected person, and you have your keyboard in every major social network or 2.0 site out there, everyone you are friends with - your dotcomrades, people you add because you're in the same community, people you look up to or are a fan of - as well as the people they are friends with, and possibly even the people that those friends are friends with, and allllll of these people's influences hobbies and specializations, is your netemptation. If anyone of those people read Engadget, that's part of your netemptation. If anyone of them is a NDS or Xbox360 fan, that's part of your netemptation if you're thinking getting one to actually do so. And finally, of course, the closer they are to you, or the more people in the circle do something, the larger the influence, as with the standard theories of interhuman influence. Given the connections that Web 2.0 and the innovation and expansion of the internet provides, I daresay we are far more likely than not to have a bone-crushing weight on our shoulders. And this is such an arbitrary thesis of it. There are I'm sure a million other factors not yet thought of or discussed.

Now in my case, quite a number of people have been talking about Chrome, trying out Chrome, and in Daniel's case, swearing by Chrome. Everyone's been at the very least discussing it, if not pimping and advocating it, and everytime I meet Daniel, who is in my innermost circle of tech fiends (not a spelling error :) ), and his trusty tablet PC, I will see Chrome, if not already in operation then sitting there waiting to be fired up. Now I'm not just going for Chrome because everyone else is doing it and I'm afraid of being left out or behind... that plain peer pressure. This is not to say that that isn't a factor. Again as with all influence-related theories, that almost certainly has to be a factor, in whatever capacity it exists in. In the case of netemptation, I think that is a minor but nevertheless noteworthy factor. The difference between netemptation and peer pressure is that as you experience netemptation, you ask yourself increasingly deep questions about the topic. Starting in this case with "Is Chrome really that good? Are people talking about it just because it came out of Google? Is it worth my time?" to more searching questions like "What is IT about Chrome that other browsers don't have that would make me ditch my deep roots of customization in my present browser and jump over? It's lightweight on the CPU, but could Chrome have sacrificed some of the functions I have come to expect of a present-day browser to be so?" And of course we know (and if you don't I'm telling you now), as we ponder more and more about and sit on thoughts, it grows on us and envelops us - that's how both convictions and depression occur. For convictions, we finally make the jump and execute what we believe in. For depression, our mind snaps and we do regrettable or irreversably stupid things. For netemptation, we finally make the jump and do stupid things. Ok no we don't, not all the time anyway.

And there's where I think therein lies the power of social media and social web tools. The word why, when it occurs in netemptation, is a start of a lengthy self-conversation delving into the use of further exploring the topic in question. "Who is this William Hung?" turns to "I wonder why he's so popular when he sings like a car horn?" "Should I get a Nintendo DS?" turns to "What is it I like in the DS that the PSP is lacking?" And these questions are answered whether we like it or not by the abovementioned circle we have built around us. And this to-and-fro process carries on until we come to a decision on what to do.

Thus giving into our netemptation.

I'm just spitting stuff out. I don't know if I'm factually right about past theories or not. I don't know if my arguments make logical sense or are randomly ricocheting off each other. So here's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to go ahead and publish this vomit, and you guys are going to come on in, examine it, praise it criticize it talk about it bash it. When you have had your fill, I will rewrite this article to reflect the opinions and changes suggested.

You may start... now.

ED: After having Kevin Lim run through this and tell me how I can improve it, I've decided to rewrite it. But that will be in due time. Meanwhile, I'll leave this published as an open initial draft for comments and critique to continue flowing in.

My Display Shelf

My dad recently drilled my shelf in, the one that I had in my old house but didn't want to drill in here immediately because 1) lazy and 2) there were spatial concerns with my old CRT monitor.

I've turned it into a display shelf to show off my latest collectibles, which indeed they are - only two items you'll see are practically useful, and one of them is temporary. Let's have a look.

Click to enlarge

I have to say I'm most proud of my Sephiroth figurine and lightsaber. They are, and some would argue by no accident, the two most expensive items on the shelf, and are, to some inexplicably, a pleasure to look at everytime I get home from army camp. Domo-kun and Darth Stewie are just there for the cute factor. And the two practical items I mentioned earlier are the wooden katana and the olive oil, of which the latter is the temporary one. The olive oil because I can anoint people or myself; the wooden katana because I can crack it on burglars' heads.

That is, of course, only because I haven't bought my metal katana. Yet.

So just a post to say hi and tell you that I'm still alive. If you read this blog, I can't imagine why you would come back often unless you're a relatively close friend, sorry that I haven't been posting much. I'm already so busy (lazy) without the army, and now that I have it I hardly find incentive anymore to blog.

Ok goodnight. Rachmaninov plays Rachmaninov best.

Just thought you might have wanted to know.

A Cosy Mid-Autumn

So now that we've got much more comfortable and chilloutable facilities, my parents decided that we should go down to the poolside for abit to celebrate Mid Autumn Festival. Even though we ended up only spending half an hour downstairs, it was still probably the best midautumn celebration... thingy we had going on.



And yes, you are wondering what's that blue glow in the pictures.

So there's my brother's lantern, which he got in school when he celebrated MAF a week ago in school, dunno why. And that's the mooncake with the knife, which we saved in the end for another time to savor. That is the durian flavor; the tiramisu flavor used to sit in the empty box. Then there's my phone, just in case, and oh look, what's that? X-Minimax portable speakers. Click the link if you don't already know about them, they're a fantastic local brand producing awesome quality and innovative products.

Mini speakers coupled with my ZEN playing... what else? Traditional Chinese music. I told my mother shamelessly, "Isn't it great? That you have a son so knowledgeable in both music and technology? How many families do you see having crisp Chinese music floating through the air while gazing at the pure white moon and eating tiramisu mooncake?"

Oh, and that pile of things that look like used tissue, that's just pomelo skin.

If you ahem want the album, the title is Meditations on China. Look it up yourself.

Happy Mid-Autumn Fest.

A New Hope

Hokay. So I've decided to wait it out.

While waiting for the Macbook refreshes, my dad's kindly offered to pay for a reasonably priced LCD screen. In the future this will be my secondary screen... probably my SMS (Social Monitor Screen).


As you can see, it's taking me abit of time to get used to relative expanse of space that inevitably comes with widescreen. But as a result of the flatscreen, as many have discovered to their joy as well, my table is suddenly much spacier and neater now.


Ok well not much, but it still is a great improvement.

The Trial of Getting a Mac

Probably the only one who can be blamed in all this is Time. I don't want anyone to mistake this for a lashout at you, because I know that you're all well-meaning, but I just gotta let this out.

Everytime I happily announce that I wanna get a new Mac, specifically my Macbook Pro, people tell me to wait.

First I was shifting house. Then BMT approached and I thought well it's gonna collect dust anyway, why not hang on abit?

But my desktop is giving me increasing problems that are irritating the bloody hell out of me. First the processor can't seem to handle more than 5 tasks without slowing to a crawl, and then now the monitor's fuzzing out on me. So I decided you know what, screw it, let's just get it done and over with, I'll get my Mac now.

But my dotcomrades said wait. There's an Apple event in September, hang on for that before you miss out on great stuff.

Turned out to be an iPod event. (Sleek shit btw the new Touch)

So well never mind, better than taking a risk.

Now my best dotcomrades are saying wait. Announcements due in October. Possibly November. Could be MacWorld '09.

OMFG HOW LONG MORE DO I HAVE TO WAIT???

At this rate I'll be getting my MBP after my ORD man!

D'ARGHH!

My BMTC Experience

So it's the end of BMT, and we were made to write a reflection about our time here, for I don't know what reason. Posterity I guess. Most of them just wrote it an hour before submission time, but I obediently typed and printed it out just like my sergeant instructed, so I thought I might as well share it with you.

Gosh one does have to be OMG careful when writing about the army.

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I can hardly remember 4 months in my life that had passed as fast as these 4 months in BMT have. It seemed like just yesterday that we were morosely anticipating our first book out, and now I have just returned from my second last book out.

In this time, I have accomplished, as many have before me, things I never would have even thought about doing. It has given me a rewarding sense of self-confidence and esteem, which I guess is one of the outcomes hoped for of our training here.

I was just telling my bunkmate the other day, after our final route march, that BMTC should consider changing its motto to “Step by Step”. To me, those three words form just about the entire essence of our training program. Whether the Jacob’s Ladder, grenade throwing, or more practically the route marches, step-by-step training has helped deeply in understanding the necessary techniques. More importantly, step-by-step perseverance has made the impossible possible. Hundreds of thousands have done it before us, but that doesn’t stop us from being immensely proud of ourselves, and of each other.

-Okay, I had to remove this paragraph because it says relatively not-nicer things about the SAF. Anyway it's not about me, so you aren't missing out. :)-

It has been an unforgettable experience in BMT, and I am truly indebted to all my commanders for it. Now we only need hot water showers to make it perfectly unforgettable.