Dear all chinese orchestra enthusiasts, I have formed a group called the 21st Century Chinese Orchestra Development Group and you can visit the website by going to http://co21.qqblogs.com/

I have become increasingly frustrated with the way the chinese orchestra music and instruments has developed through the past 15 years as a musician and thus started this group to gather support for the improvement of instruments that have hindered the development of Chinese classical music into the 21st century.

With the lack of innovation and creativity, it's no wonder why we see things like the 21 girl band appearing! This is a sore eye for any chinese classical music lover and something must be done to stop it. Here it is.

Drop a message if you would like to join in to support!

Edit: I striked out the statements below due to my misunderstanding of the International Dollar used to compute PPP. (Thanks JJ!) Essentially PPP is using a normalized dollar value taking into account each country's living standard; e.g. a sushi may cost SGD$2 in Singapore but US$4 in the USA, so this is normalized and if we take sushi as comparison then the "exchange rate" of USD to SGD is 2:1. However, if you take an iPod for comparison and an iPod costs SGD$150 here and US$100 in the US then the exchange rate changed to 1.5:1. But there is a list of what they use called the "basket of goods", which are essentially basic necessities. Sorry for the crappy explanation. Please read Wikipedia for more accurate explanation.

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita

Our GDP per Capita (PPP) ranks 5th and we are above the United States which is now ranked 6th. This means each individual (on average) here has higher purchasing power than a typical angmor, which also means even after currency conversion we are in control of their asses.

This also means at USD 49,714 or the equivalent of SGD 70,653, most of us are grossly underpaid. Calculated including AWS and less employer's CPF, that's an average SGD 4,810 per month paycheque.

This also means that it's time we started shifting our operations to USA instead of vice-versa, because it will be relatively cheaper to hire somebody there?

Am I right to say this? JJ! Your comments again, please!

I'm no economics expert, but just sharing what I think seems to be the start of another downward economic spiral.

People around me are cutting back on expenses, yet prices are soaring. With the recent AIG fiasco, it's just gotten worse. For a history (as a school subject) hater like me, I found myself reading about the Great Depression on Wikipedia and started to link some theories to the current-day economy, albeit superficial.

There are a lot of details and knowledge surrounding economics, but to me the simple basis of supply and demand is enough for a high level understanding of things happening around us.

From a personal perspective, I take property prices and car prices as a benchmark. I know this is not very accurate, but to me that's the easiest thing I can find and relate to because property and car are the two most expensive things people buy in Singapore.

It's amusing that people are still thinking of reaping 30-40K of cash from a 4 room flat sale hoping the cash can tide them over the stormy economy, but hey, nobody's going to buy your flat!

Same thing goes for car prices. When we see the COE prices take a sharp dip, it is a tell-tale sign that consumer spending taken a dip.

If everyone in Singapore cashes out their AIA policies, I am confident that AIA will run into a crisis as well.

With all the soaring prices and reduced spending, things will start to go into a vicious cycle, crashing the economy.

At least that's what I see now, with my very superficial understanding of the economy...

And US is surely in deep shit, whether AIG goes poofh or gets a $85b backing.

Well well, whare are we going to do?

GST credits are as good as useless, although better than none. It can buy you about 30 plates of fried rice including transportation to the hawker center. Time to buy a bicycle!

Again, correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm no economist... JJ?

I'm sure you've said something along the line of "XYZ company should have added ABC feature to DEF product", so why not I share what felt should have been done, but never done (or done a wrong).

Keys on keyboards should be made disposable / replacable. Have you ever joined a new company and made to take over a PC used by the previous guy only to find yourself cleaning the oily keyboard and mouse for the rest of the day? Yes, our keyboard is one of the worst germ container in the office. We eat and drink at our work desks, and who knows if you've been digging your nose?

Portable storage devices should automatically sync with your PC, just like ActiveSync or iTunes. I am extremely puzzled why no proper backup software exists for USB sticks and portable disks to date. The best I've used so far is Toucan from PortableApps, but still lacks a lot of features I desire - especially an auto-sync!

The iPhone should have been unlocked. Apple knows the game of good vs evil, why did they still tie themselves in with Telcos and spend time trying to lock down the phone? Perhaps it might be telecommunication regulatory requirements but I believe if the iPhone was sold unlocked and didn't come with a crappy telco plan, it might have outsold McDonalds' hotcakes by now.

Tailgaters should be fined instead of speeders. They are the main cause of traffic conjestion on the road. Traffic conjestion leads to a lot of other unforseen problems, such as global warming, frustrated drivers returning home and poking their spouses in the eye, so on and so fourth.

Fully sheltered motorbikes or lightweight single-person vechicles automatically guided by electronic systems when on "highways" should already be on the roads! (Think of it as a cable car with detachable cabins on wheels.) With horrendous traffic conjestion in cities like Tokyo, New York and Singapore, a lane dedicated to these mini vehicles travelling no faster than 70km/h might just be the solution for the future.

Arts should be taught as a core subject in secondary (high) school. Isn't it pathetic that our lives revolve around math and science? Imagine if we had no parks to visit, and no movies to watch. The world lacks creative people already.

More coming up... when I get home later

I've just installed a fresh copy of Windows Vista SP1 on my desktop at home. Oddly this rig with a 3.0GHz processor and 1.x GB of RAM gave a Vista score of 1, and I figured out it was because of a weak integrated graphics card.

I've messed around with a few Vista machines now. Recently Eileen's laptop busted and she reinstalled with Vista. Girlfriend's new HP mini notebook also runs Vista.

The experience of using Vista is not as bad as I thought. Initially I had my laptop running with Windows XP installed with Vista Transformation Pack - it basically installs some system files and themes to make your XP system look like a Vista box, but that's terribly unstable, slow, and still lacks some finishing touches of the real Vista.

To my surprise, the copy of Vista I installed was quick and responsive and felt almost like Windows XP, only a little slower but with beefed up graphics.

Surely the new user interface and navigation takes a little getting used to, but once you start getting familiar, it's not that bad - it was the same when we switched from Windows 98 to XP back in the early 2000s.

The UAC (the annoying prompt that asks your permission all the time) is actually a decent feature and I would recommend any non saavy person to use Vista because of the presence of UAC. Without UAC, people don't even know if some malware got installed.

Also, Windows Update now comes with a desktop client. On Windows XP, it was an annoying taskbar balloon that shows a progress but you can never tell it to stop downloading.

However, I do have some complaints about Vista like everybody else.

There's a constant memory usage in excess of 500MBs (yes, I'm talking about a fresh install of Vista without the wham bang Dell/HP/IBM bloatware) and the occassional CPU and disk activity. I'm not sure if the memory was actually active or used as cache - I will check on this later.

On a desktop it doesn't seem obvious, but on portables, the extra CPU and disk activity means shorter battery life and more heat. There's some tweaks available (Vista Battery Saver?) to fix this, though.

There's also a strange network detection thing that figures out if you are on a private network or connected to the Interenet which irks me. I still don't know how it works and don't know how to fix it when it refuses to get on the Interenet.

Before you blast my ass, here's for the Linux fans out there (I'm one myself, BTW) - Running something like Ubuntu with Gnome would suck up equally as much memory as Vista, but it's user experience still lacks behind any modern commercial desktop operating system like MacOS X or even Windows XP. Linux was built to be a multi-user console operating system and should remain that way - that's why I've always installed my Linux boxes without a GUI, and cursed terribly when Oracle's (Java) installer asked for one.

Thumbs up for Microsoft, they have a pretty satisfied Vista user here. I should be migrating more of my computers to Vista when I have time.

If you ever sent mail to my hotmail address, this is what you will get from the auto-responder:

Hi,

You have reached my junk mail account. I do not check this account regularly. If you have an important message, please send it to my active e-mail address at (removed) or my business e-mail if your e-mail is business-related.

Please do not send chain mails to my e-mail account above. I do not care if somebody 100,000 miles away is dying and if the email contributes 10 cents, or if you will get a deposit in your bank account by simply forwarding an e-mail. I absolutely hate junk mails and spam, and I strongly advocate that forwarding chain mails will only contribute to the world's ever increasing volume of spam.
 
If you do send junk to me, your e-mail address will be blocked immediately without prior notice.
 
Lastly, if you ever do send out junk mails to others, please add their e-mail addresses to the BCC list. By including their e-mail addresses in a field other than BCC, you are forwarding their e-mail addresses to people who might harvest these information and sell them for money. And in return of your "good deed", your poor friends will be getting more endless spam.

Your understanding is very much appreciated.

So, please... cure the world of spam. Delete that junk mail and tell your friends off. It's the right thing to do.

Have you ever been in a position where you had to evaluate and compare several products side-by-side and made your judgement based solely on technical aspects, such as reliability, performance and technology used? I see you nodding.

Have you ever wondered why poorly engineered products sometimes sold very well and why well engineered products fail to sell at all? Think of Apple iPod vs Creative Zen, MacOS X vs Windows Vista, iPhone vs Samsung Omnia. Granted, the Creative Zen, Windows Vista and Samsung Omnia are feature-packed, but why aren't they as popular as the other?

Having been working in the technology sector for a while now, I realize that when we make a product design decision, or when we are to write up a comparison (more on writing stuff later) against several products, we tend to derive a product's value from how things are built and not how it will satisfy a need of the customer. Chinese have a perception that if they squeeze as many features into one product, it will be the best because it fulfulls everybody's needs, but that is an unfortunate misconception. If that was the case then phones, cameras, music players and portable game consoles wouldn't exist individually today.

Living in Singapore further accentuates this technology obsession with the modern lifestyle we live in where broadband is available islandwide and technology is seen everywhere.

In my previous job, part of my role was to explore the latest and greatest technology and kick developers in their butts so they will start using them. When Facebook picked up heat in Singapore, we rode the hype and built a Facebook app, but it failed to sell and the uptake was poor. They never figured out why. I even gave a short presentation at the first Singapore Facebook Developer Conference on Facebook API and .NET inter-operability, where a large turnout from the local university (NUS) gathered to learn more about Facebook, but sad to say we have yet to see any sensible developments ever since that event.

A lot of companies I've seen places majority of her manpower in two areas - technology (possibly R&D or service engineers) and sales. While I do agree that the sales brings the money home and engineers do the ground work, the lack of a person who derives a product from customer's perspective is the cause for feature-packed products that fail because the sales guys have nothing they can really sell.

A few days ago, I was at a meeting where we had to finalize the user interface (UI) of a webmail service for a prominent broadband service provider here. The product manager rambled on during the meeting and dictated the layout of the UI and based it off what she saw on Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. "Oh the buttons need to be on the left, and please change these words to xxx." I held back my urge to ask if she had made these decisioins based on her understanding of consumers or it was purely her own idea, but as a new guy in the company on my first meeting, I kept mum.

Francis, a good friend of mine and also an excellent brand and marketing consultant, hates it when people mutter "UI" without understanding what it really means. In his perspective, a "UI" is something that has gone through testing with users and systematic case studies of its usability and friendliness. It's not a designer's work of intuition and creativity, which he coins as a pure "design". When taken into perspective, you will realize why people choose Mozilla - a relatively simpler "UI" - over Internet Explorer 7.

As I left the fateful UI meeting, thoughts went through my mind about how broadband products are packaged and marketed here. The UI aside, I pondered why e-mail services are still being packaged with broadband access.

With prominent e-mail providers like Yahoo! and Google already providing more storage than you can ever utilize, the password slip for the bundled 1GB e-mail service from your provider is just going to be sitting around feeding algae. If you start picking on it's features such as the UI and the reliability [of an entire Gmail grid with hundereds - if not, thousands - of servers compared to just a few servers sitting in a corner of your ISP's datacenter], it's obvious what a consumer's choice would be, be it for personal or business e-mail. (Google Apps, anyone?)

Building e-mail systems for ISPs here don't come cheap either. It's not just two servers running Postfix and another web server with Apache and Horde calling it a day. IDA has strict rules governing all ISP's service availability and these translate into maintenance contracts and SLA agreements with the vendors and system integrators providing the service. Such an arrangement can easily translate into hundereds of thousands of dollars paid out per annum for an underutilized system when these savings could have been passed on to consumers or used to buy more outgoing international bandwidth.

Another problem working with businesses in Singapore (in general) is that communication tends to be very haphazard and slow. It has become a norm for e-mail replies to be short (like an SMS) and take longer than two days for a simple follow-up. Procrastination, laziness, acting busy, really being busy (writing e-mail?), whatever it may be, this will be the doom of our economy as the effect snowballs.

Singaporeans are a bunch of people who have grown up in a place where policies, guidelines and burecratic procedures rule the day. As much as we hate seeing people who keng their day through, we will eventually turn into them as it becomes the accepted norm for working here.

I do it a little differently. Call me naive, stubborn, aggressive, whatever. I will push you, I will bug you, I will get it done, and you will see me at Starbucks with a cuppa coffee reading the papers. I'm not going to sit in the office spending half my time acting busy, replying burecratic e-mails, writing dumb reports, or filling up timesheets.

As much as I believe in working shorter days, I also believe that people are paid based on their work output, not for the hours they are doing. Doing hours are for people in the prison. Professionals and executives are all paid based on their qualifications, and with qualifications come knowledge and quality. Quality is an expensive price to pay and is hard to quantify, but it's where the real dollar goes (think a BMW and a Cherry QQ).

If you deliver better quality than expected, I will be happy to pay more, but if you can't deliver the quality, you don't deserve to be paid, because that's exactly what it is - you won't buy something that sucks, will you?

So with this blog entry, I leave two questions to be answered.

Does your product meet your consumer's needs?

Are you sinking into this pathetic society?

It's time to open up and think again.

After reading yet another news of a young couple passing away due to an accident, I can't help but blog. I have already lost a dear friend to a car accident, and from what I heard the female victim from the recent car accident  that crashed into a tree along Jurong Town Hall Road could potentially be a junior I know from BBSS CO.

It has been raining for the past few weeks, so please, if you drive, drive carefully.

Here's some personal tips I've gathered from driving around on a daily basis over the past few years.

• Stay away from vehicles that are driving too slow or going off-course. Usually this is a sign of unfamiliarity with the vehicle, road, or falling asleep at the wheel.
• Stay away from speeding vehicles. If people tailgate you, just switch lanes and let them pass. Some people are assholes and the will try to overtake you deliberately and jam their brakes at you if the feel that you do not want to let them pass.
• Get out of a lane when a car's headlights dazzle you. To those who love to use your fog lamps and zhng bright white lights, I curse you. European cars like BMW, Audi or Merc have anti-dazzle rear mirrors but not typical Japan or Korean cars. In the rain, your fog lamps reflect light off the wet roads and your white light scatter when they hit the rain, dazzling others' view. Please turn them off. I don't understand why fog lamps are legalized in Singapore. We hardly get fog. Real fog lamps are yellow in color, not white, BTW!
• Drive during peak hours - I kid you not. During peak hours the traffic speed averages 20km/h and at such speeds the likelyhood of you getting into a bad crash is low. If you must drive at night, keep the left lane as much as possible.
• Look further ahead. If three cars ahead hit their brakes, it's a sign that you should hit your brakes too. Pre-emptive driving also helps fuel economy.
• Give way to traffic. It not only makes you a happier person (for having given way to people), it makes people behave more courteous towards you. Not giving way, on the other hand, only forces desperate drivers to take unwanted action.
  
• Keep the speed limit, but also go with the flow. Don't drive too slow or too fast - either way will increase the risk of you involving yourself in an accident. Don't forget, you may not crash someone, but someone else may crash you. Driving too slowly not only causes danger and road obstruction, it may trigger other driver's unwanted reaction towards you.
• Slow down at a bend where you cannot see cars ahead of you. You will never know if the traffic after the bend is at a dead stop. Some places to note: AYE (Tuas) exit to Clementi Ave 6, Clementi Ave 6 entrance to PIE (Changi), entrance from PIE (Tuas) to BKE (Woodlands), exit from BKE (PIE) to Bukit Panjang, enterance from Changi Airport to PIE/TPE.
• Keep the distance, especially in rain. I have been lucky enough to have driven enough different types of vehicles to live to tell you today that wet roads does indeed increase braking distance in multiples of two to three folds. If you drive a modern performance car with good tyres, you may not feel it, but the fact is because your car is heavier, your tyres are grippier, but the physics stays the same - once your tyres go into a skid, it is basically gliding on a film of water. Some ABS systems can only pulsate 20-30 times each burst, so there's only so much ABS can do. Don't push your luck. Keep your distance. If people take that space in front of you, let them be.

Just for the fun of it... set your gears to 'N' and try pushing your car. Let it roll on a bit, then try to stop it. You will realize how heavy your vehicle is and having that 1000+kgs hurtling towards you - even at 20km/h - is no fun at all. Now you realize how much power your engine puts out, so please drive with care. Power without control, is nothing.

BTW, please do this on a flat ground! You may not be able to stop a car rolling down a slope!!!