WeeKee Today

Life is full of ups and downs. Looking at the current situation, it seems like there are only downs, with no bottom in sight. Thankfully for me, there are simple pleasures in life that keeps me going. A simple meal of half cooked blood cockles, sambal kang kong and a bottle of Tiger beer at Newton Food Center is the best therapy for me.

To make things better, my wife is one of those rare female species that actually knows how to enjoy cockles, making her an ideal companion for these therapeutic sessions. Well I am not sure if the above combination is really healthy but it sure warms the cockles of my heart! 

How about you? What are your life's simple pleasures?

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Today was a terribly disappointing day for me.

It has been a desire for me to go back to doing software product management once I graduate from school. I was interviewing for a position as a product manager in one company that I really like to start my new career in. After 6 interviews over 4 sessions in the past few months, today I got the official notification that I was not selected.

The funny thing was that my mum seems to have this strange forecasting ability. This morning she suddenly said to me, "Are you stress about getting the job? It is alright, don't think too much about it."

Later in the day, I got the result through email. The disappointment is really unbearable. It is something that I really wanted. It feels so near yet so elusive. I keep having the thoughts that i should have work harder but then again I am also not sure what else I could have done that might result in a different outcome.

Thankfully I got really great support and encouragement from my mum, my wife and some of my friends which really makes a difference.

The best thing to do now is to try and sleep off my disappointment. After all, tomorrow awaits.

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This is the first time that i ever found the posterous site inaccessible with the below error message.

A flock of birds might be able to lift up a whale or a monkey might be fixing the downtime problem, but beer and hard at work definitely don't go together! :P

What other interesting downtime messages have you came across?

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Apple recently their new range of MacBooks which is more of incremental upgrade rather than something revolutionary. One interesting benefit that they actually highlight was the following:

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My wife and I finally made our first visit to the Singapore Night
Safari, a pretty embarrassing fact considering the fact that we are
Singaporeans. Then again, the place also don't really give a damm
whether you are Singaporean or not. You are paying the same tourist
dollars, S$22 for the admission plus another S$10 if you want to take
the tram.

I was pretty surprised the place was packed with tons of visitors. I
wasn't sure if that was the normal weekend crowd or because the safari
was having a Halloween special. The staffs were dressed up in various
"scary" costumes and busy having their pictures taken with the
visitors.

I was expecting lots of actions from the Night Safari such as watching
a lion hunt down a prey or animals running wild considering that these
animals were supposedly to be active only in the night.

It was pretty disappointing in this aspect. Most of the animals were
just taking it easy and lying around. The most "exciting" thing that
happened was a tourist having a giant python over his neck during the
animal show. I guess my expectations were unrealistic perhaps due to
seeing those exciting animal actions on National Geographic. Or maybe
the Night Safari use the same set of animals from the daytime zoo and
those poor beasts are simply fed up.

Nevertheless, i think the trip was worth it. While it is hard to
expect those wildlife actions that you see in documentaries, the Night
Safari is still pretty amazing. I don't think any other place is as accessible as
the Night Safari to allow large groups of visitors to enjoy seeing these animals
in a natural setting at such close proximity and comfort. 

Not only that, we had a really great guide by the name of JaJa. She
has a really good quality of voice. She really made the trip more
enjoyable as we listened intently to every word she said as she went
about describing the various animals and the different parts of the
night safari.

To emphasis the Night Safari educational approach to wildlife
conservation, she quoted the following,

"For in the end, we will conserve only what we love. We will love only
what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught."

Make sense doesn't it?

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Photo by passionfly

Bus and MRT fares are up again which again mean more guaranteed profits for public transport companies. Perhaps this is nothing new considering most people expect it to be a regular affair. After all the plot is pretty standard. Transport companies want fare increase. PTC action a bit and fight to reduce the increase. At the end of a day there will still be an increase. Then PTC convince everyone that the increase is good and necessary. Everyone sucks thumb and live happily ever after till next year where the story repeats.

This year story goes like this. The current flat fee of 67 cents will increase 4 cents to 71 cents. Of course there are the so called “benefits” from the reduction in transport transfer charges which are suppose to make us once again better off. The savings in rebate is additional 15 cents. So we actually save 7 cents! Lets now suck thumb and live happily ever after.

But wait, how true is that? Given a choice, taking a direct route is definitely still a more economic choice for transport. Every time you make a transfer, no matter what is the rebate, the fact is that you incur another flat fee! I don’t understand why the transport company are so proud that they are providing a rebate. In the first place I feel “penalized” because the transport system is not capable of linking me directly from one point to another. That is not considering other nonsense like waiting 25 minutes for a bus and being pack like sardines throughout a half hour trip.

Furthermore, if the changes are really that good to us and the transport companies are absorbing lots of cost and whatever nonsense, then my challenge to them is lets not increase the fare then. The fare increase is a zero sum game. No matter how many smoke grenades you throw, the fact is that someone must take up the cost. Who ends up taking up the cost, I think the answer is pretty obvious.

To me the issue isn’t so much of the increase because at the end of the day, I believe the majority of the commuters can bear with it. However the concern is how these increases are justified considering that these public transport companies are highly profitable and exercise a high degree of monopoly. I have nothing against companies making money but without a competitive market to keep things in check, how can we be sure that our interests are not exploited? Furthermore how well can a company serve the public if its focus is making profits?

Some may say that PTC is there to do the job of regulation but again this raise more questions? Who is there to make sure that PTC can be trusted and has the crediblity of protecting our interests? Will PTC be there to safeguard our interest or is it simply a double face organization trying to paint a story that is appealing to both the commuters and the public transport companies?

Without addressing the fundamental structure of how public transport companies operate, we can save the talk and just mark on our calendar to watch this annual wayang show by PTC and the public transport companies.

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