It was late at night. My brother is now in Germany and Pasha is sitting in his room chatting happily with Masha over skype. I have offered to put him up at my place since he is having some problems with accomodation ever since coming back from his trip around Southeast Asia.
He seems happy now. I am glad he finally recovered from this really bad situation he was in last year. Some times the only paths represented in front of you are shitty ones, so regardless of which path you take you will still need to thread through shit. Yes, threading through shit is always inevitable at some point in your life, however much you attempt to avoid. This is Karma, predestined to happen and written in the stars.
I took my cup of water and looked out of my window at the mulberry plant growing from the pot. This was one of the very few things I brought back from my pilgrimage to the west in 2008. How I came to possess this plant was a really intriguing. It is the result of a whole series of coincidences that occurred that spanned across the entire length of the silk road.
Also I could have just happily sipped my tea, puffed on my cigarette while sitting in the garden behind of Sian’s house and simply ignored it when Sian was working at uprooting the entire root network of this mulberry plant. However, there was something about Sian’s complaint about this particular that told me, this was something I need to bring back to Singapore.
I still remember how she said it “oh, this is a mulberry plant. It grows all over the place like a weed, once it gets into your garden you will have a seriously tough time clearing it out. Try as you might to clear it out, if you didn’t do a proper job and happened to leave even just one inch of root lying somewhere it will all grow back suddenly. Plus the thorns are really sharp and hard.”
Since its migration from London to Singapore, this plant had died and resurrected multiple times over. Each time it would grow and take up the entire expanse of space made available to it. Each time towards the end of each phase some shit will happen in the environment and kill off its entire network of leaves. Each time we define the end of each phase by bringing out the scissors and trimming all the dead ends away. Each time without fail it will grow back still.Each time it grew back, its roots and hold on the soil became stronger and more deeply entrenched than the previous time, with more thorns to protect its main stem system.
Now looking out the window still, I thought to myself, this was indeed a very fitting item to have brought back from my pilgrimage westwards.
It was Saturday afternoon and we were sitting in the holding area of Orchard Central, when Ethan suddenly mentioned that human society has progressed a long way. We first started in stone age, moved on to the bronze age, innovated into the industrial age, leaped right after into the age of Information and we finally landed ourselves in the age of stupid.
“What the hell is that?” I was totally puzzled at first and asked him to explain himself.
“We humans are now in the process of slowly killing ourselves by destroying our environment and depleting natural resources, we all know it but we all choose to do nothing about it.” He explained concisely the summation of this age.
After giving it some thought, I concurred totally with what he said and replied “yeah that is totally true bro. The way I see it now there are only two options available for us. Option one, we achieve a quantum leap to drastically improve energy efficiency in our technology. Option two, we cull off a major part of our world’s human population changing it from its current standing figure of 6,697,254,041 to something drastically lesser. ”
In terms of ecology, our species is relatively high up in the food chain of our environment. Traditionally, the further up the food chain a species, the lesser its population as compared to those lower in the food chain (pictorially represented like a pyramid structure). However perhaps due to unpredicted but high impact occurrence like the discovery of agriculture and fire as a tool, the essence of the human as a species started to evolve somewhere in history. Humans thereafter managed to break free on the environmental constrains that had till then been successful at keep their numbers in check.
If we did an X-ray of our environment today and assuming that humans are finally at the top of the food chain, what we should observe is that while the traditional pyramid structure is still in place (though somewhat leaner now) there is now a exceedingly large flat chunk at the top (represented none other than the human population). Ecologically, this is highly unstable structure. We are in fact exerting a lot of pressure on our environment by imposing such a ecological structure on it.
Contemplating on these two options available and the inability to execute them, I could only sigh helplessly.
Option one while being pursued and evangelized by some minorities is not being progressing as fast as it should as the major bulk of us are spending our time with our eyes glued to our work, slogging really hard to pay bills, meet deadlines or acquire our first POT OF GOLD?!? (in the context of Singapore: that idiot that proposed the 5 Cs as a mark of success and went around spreading this message to the other idiots who bought that bullshit lock stock and barrel should be shot and killed!)
I had the opportunity last year to visit the Shan Dong province of China. Alena and her friends were in the hotel room I was residing in then. While they were busy playing some games using the stack of poker cards, I went and looked out the window. Alena noticing that I was studying the scenery outside could not help but bragged “Wei Fang is one of the most beautiful cities in Shan dong and Shan Dong is economically the strongest province in the whole of China.”
I wonder if she would have made the same statement had she saw the expression on my face instead of just my back view.
“Really?” I finally responded. “Look at the soot being emitted from all the surrounding factories as well as the piles of trash lying around beside streets. Why are the factory owners not taking steps to reduce the levels of soot emitted into the air. Don’t the mainland Chinese government have some regulations to control this.”
“Look you are the only person that is naive and innocent enough to ponder and waste your time thinking about all these useless issues. These people are big bosses. They have lots of money, they drive big car, live in big houses, who gives a shit about what they do to the environment as a result. So long as money keep coming in its good enough. Even if we are not the big bosses yet, here in China we just want to concern ourselves with making money so that we will become big bosses one day ourselves too.”
“Wow. Alena this idiot you brought from Singapore really has his heads in the clouds.” one of her girls comment and everyone broke out laughing.
“Ok then I rest my case. But just remember that all of you are women, you will bear kids one day and your kids will have their own kids. Somewhere along the way this environment of yours will become so screwed up, these kids might in fact come forth to this world deformed, with three limbs or four eyes. They will look like you still but they will be deformed.”
“shh..! don’t interrupt me from winning money. ”
Well, there goes option one.
The notion of choosing option two is totally out of the question unless of course you consider yourself a member in the same league as Osama Bin Laden, Hitler, Mussolini. However upon closer inspection, the existence of such a character might not even be necessary afterall. Just simply observe the trends lately, it seems most areas in the northern hemisphere has been experiencing natural disasters of late, with tons of destruction done to the existing infrastructure in those places. Seems like while mother nature has been very kind and accommodating to our non-sense till now, she is slowly but surely taking steps to cull off our population.
I was just looking through one of the sites that Qiqi wanted to replicate after for her new shopping cart and happen to chance upon their menu. It looks pretty user friendly the way they do their submenus. I have thus decided to do a joomfish replicate of what they did and have the source code included here.For my fellow web developers…. enjoy the codes!
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>
<body>
<style>
#menubar li div{
border:1px #000000 solid;
width:300px;
padding:10px;
height:200px;
}
#menubar li ul li{
display:none;
}
#menubar li:hover ul li{
display:block;
margin-top:10px;
margin-left:-50px;
}
#menubar li{
list-style:none;
float:left;
width:100px;
height:30px;
}
</style>
<ul id=”menubar”>
<li> <a href=”">top bar </a>
<ul>
<li>
<div>contents </div>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li> <a href=”">top bar</a>
<ul>
<li>
<div>contents </div>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li> <a href=”">top bar</a>
<ul>
<li>
<div>contents </div>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li> <a href=”">top bar</a>
<ul>
<li>
<div>contents </div>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>
After some changes to the existing business processes within my company, I soon realized that I have more time on hand now to ponder and consider the deployment of manpower available at hand.
My chief concern now is not getting the work done myself but coming up with a logical and structured method to explain to my collaborators the kind of work that needs to be done. Metaphorically speaking, it is somewhat similar to writing a program that instructs people clearly and concisely what they need to achieve for each particular task assigned to them. Its like playing command and conquer all over again. You have troops available at hand. If you have them deployed wrongly, they get wiped out and the enemy will soon be at the gates. However if the deployment is done properly, the enemy will have problems stepping out of their own gates!
Funny, all along I had this notion in my mind that I play this game of life in the fashion of Baldur’s Gate or Diablo. It is a super cool way to live life. Just go explore what is around in search of quests and vanquish monsters encountered during the adventure, helped some times by Non-player charaters (NPC) of course. Now suddenly, it seems some bloody joker removed Baldur’s Gate or Diablo and inserted command and conquer in its place. I can no longer be myself concerned about finishing a quest, it became a huge campaign.
Counting off hand, I have unknowingly increased the team I am managing at the moment to 11 people split into different groups, each group concerned with the accomplishment of a single quest. Thanks to the possibilities that arose due to the flat world I am getting quite an interesting team. Lets see the head counts thus far:
2 Russians
1 Ukrainians
2 Indians
3 Singaporeans
2 Filipinos
1 American
Blame this on my novelty seeking spirit, but I am absolutely curious which other nationalities will I have the opportunity to collaborate with in the near future…
I was working the entire afternoon at the Great World City on this Father’s day. It was the launch of DBS’s EduSmart insurance scheme. I was dressed as the Judge while Dylan was dressed as the astronaut. The place was full of parents with children. It was expected. After all the edusmart insurance scheme was mainly targeted at young parents with children of pre-school age.
I was chatting with some of the kids and was asking about their dreams. What did they really wanted to become when they grew up. Apparently their dreams were mainly restricted to what professions they would like to enter into during their adult life. Lawyers, teachers, detectives, judges, car racers, astronauts! (at least 2 of these were high enough on the outrageous , and must be applauded on and strongly encouraged!)
Seeing these kids with their future with endless possibilities open before them, I had at the back of my mind some thoughts. How many of them will actually achieve their dreams and live the life they want? How many of them will eventually choose to give up their dreams as they go along in their lives and go for second best?
As one ventures further along one’s path in life seeking one’s dream, circumstances will happen. Some doors of opportunity will open and others will close. It almost feels like a game of deal or no deal. In this hypothetical game as each door closes, the possibilities available becomes more and more limited. One is mentally breaks somewhere along the way and decides to come to a compromise and go for second best.
In the real world however, the rules of this hypothetical game does not necessarily apply. Till the time of one’s death, the possibilities available will be limitless! There are multiple doors leading to the same intended path. One need not feel despair if one such door closes. All that is necessary is to seek the next door that leads to the same path.
One thing I fear most for these kids that I had the chance to come in contact with today is that some day their parents or the social system in which we live in today might fail them and that they be mislead to believe that the hypothetical rules of deal or no deal actually applies to real life too. Johnson my cousin has one extremely nice phrase to describe this sickness that I have just described “THE SINS OF FATHERS”.
The sins of fathers is when the previous generation in an attempt to protect the younger generation from harm attempts to inculcate values that are already outdated and in some circumstances extremely harmful. These values are based on the norms perceived to work for the prior generation which might actually be very true back in the old days, however no longer applicable due to the rapid changes happening in this century of ours.
I had during today’s publicity event came across a few kids in their early stage of adolescent who gave me this very worrying response to my question “I don’t know!” Obviously something must have killed their dreams somewhere along the way between their times of early childhood and now. With no more dreams these young individuals are now cast away without any true sense of direction for their own lives.
I really wanted to grab and shake them hard then screaming right into their face these words “recall what your dreams are! Don’t let them die in some metaphysical graveyard! Fight for it! Bring it to reality! So what if society says it is not possible! So what if your parents tell you it is not practical. There is never any need to compromise! Put everything that is in your path out of the way and your dreams will definitely come true one day. Even if not, to die trying will really make this life of yours one that was really worth living!” But of course, I didn’t. Their choice of path is theirs to make.
In a sense one has to be extremely selfish and machiavellic a person to follow a path totally according to one’s desire which somewhat explains for the anger, frustration and utter helplessness sometimes felt by my parents and my love ones (or rather ex-love ones before they finally shed one tear too much). Somehow, I could not help myself , attempts to have me shackled with those invisible chains called relationships will always invoke in me either of the following three. Physical aggression, physiological aggression or simply out right rebellion. My will is my own. I was somewhat amazed that Win managed to decipher this from just reading my palm one night when we were out clubbing in Clark Quay. “My way or the high way” he concluded. Which is very true to my beliefs of life. After all, I have but an estimated 42 years of time left, I have no time to waste on making compromises.
Recently with a few of my sites becoming quite popular, I started considering the possibility of migrating some of them over to Singapore hosting services so as to reducing their loading time. I did a quick search on google and took a look at all the hosting services available on the first page.Out of all these I short listed the following.
- webhosting.com.sg
- vodien.com
- usonyx.net
- hostsg.com
In terms of price competitiveness webhosting.com.sg is the most expensive of the lot. Offering just a mere 500mb while charging more than the rest. I cancelled that out.
I next went into command prompt and did a tracert on all 4 hosting providers. Webhosting.com.sg and hostsg.com both required 15 hops from where I am before I arrived at their servers
That left vodien.com and usonyx.net. Both of them just required 13 hops from where I am.
Now I started to price comparison.
One particular pacckage by Vodien.com is going for SGD$8 has the following configuration
- 5 gb space
- 999 mysql database
- php 5 support
- unlimited domain add ons
- cpanel
Another corresponding package by usonyx.net is going for SGD$8 has the following configuration
- 5gb space
- 2 mysql database
- php 5 support
- 1 domain add ons
- plesk
Also it seems the portfolio of Vodien.com is quite strong with all the major education institutions on board.It seems Vodien.com is the clear choice to go for.
I few days ago I hit a wall in terms of communications and faced communications breakdown with one of my colleagues. I was cracking my head thinking of a solution to this problem when I suddenly recalled one of the modules I took back in the National University of Singapore which had to do with International communications (by the way my colleague is from another culture).
The lecturer during one session showed us pictorial representations of how people from different cultures tend to adopt certain styles of communicate. Of course being unable to relate to it back then, I simply discarded it out of my mind shortly after I saw it.
Having traveled through a few territories since then, I had an inkling idea how people from those parts of the world communicate. However, the communication style of people not belonging to that group was still somewhat foreign to me. I had no idea what to expect.
In this scenario, I could have, had I been more observant to what was happening around me. On a few prior occasions I had the chance to observe the style of communication from quite a few other colleagues belonging to the same territories. I attribute this fault of mine to the fact that during those occasions I was on the receiving end of the message and not the transmitting end of the communications channel.
At the back of my mind during those occasions though, I always wondered to myself how come they have this tendency to keep repeating themselves on a point over and over again. And thus it came to pass that this exception came and hit me in the face resulting in the subsequent communications breakdown.
At first I felt extremely frustrated and being extremely puzzled why my messages were not getting through. I decided to take a break. I proceeded to east coast beach. I sat there staring at the clouds and listening to the crashing of waves for hours all the way till sunset. I was feeling somewhat refreshed and relaxed by then. It was during then that the pictorial representations shown to us by the lecturer years back flashed across my mind.
What this pictorial representations synthesized in my mind then was my recollection of my time back in 2001 when I was working as an administrator in the Singapore Armed Forces under two Defense Science Technology Association Officers. They were dealing with contractors all the time and quite a few contractors were from the same territory as my colleague. Amazingly, they were displaying the same style of communications as those group I had the chance to work with. Somehow, back then I always found it unsettling to be on the receiving end of this style of communication where a point that has been stated gets emphasized and re-emphasized from multiple different angles till the extent all possible angles are exhausted.
Right there then on the beach with the sun setting in the west, realization dawned on me. I was too self centered. How could I expect everyone to come all the way to accommodate my style of communication (sad to say it is a a subconscious tendency we Singaporeans all have to varying degrees).
As the saying goes “If the mountain does not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the mountain. ”
Thus I decided right there and then, I will go to the mountain. Thus I did. Slowly but surely I see improvements happening with communications between the both of us. However, I strongly believe there is still lots of room for improvements, I am still in the midst of finding the path to the foot of the mountain.
For the past four weeks I have been working on Ektron CMS400 build 8.0.1.87. This is the copy that is currently available over the internet from the main Ektron site. As with all newly released patches there were a few bugs, some of them were pretty major ones.
Each time I was asked to do a demonstration of the product to prospective clients I was at the back of my mind crossing my fingers. This was especially so when a page started taking more than 30 seconds to load. Thankfully being extremely familiar with such occurrence during my work in the events and entertainment industry, I came prepared with a bagful of magician tricks. Yes, that is right! Direct the attention of the crowd to something else, while I got the w3svc service restarted. While I would leave the demonstration session with the clients quite happy ( and somewhat entertained) with the presentation, I normally have this foul taste in my mouth.
A few days ago, I finally managed to obtain a link to a prior version, the Ektron CMS 400 8.00 SP1(Build 8.0.0.128) and had it installed. This time it worked like magic. This is truly interesting. In spite of the fact that the version 8.0.1.87 came with all the necessary bug fixes, version 8.0.0.128 without any of the required bug fixes seems to perform better and faster.
Thankfully Build 8.0.0.128 is the build one of our client is using hence I will have no need to worry about the existing bug issues in build 8.0.1.87. Thank God!
There is this chinese saying that seems to apply nicely to this scenario “A ginger that is older is still the spicier one”
Suddenly I occurred to me, inspite the fact the windows operating system has advanced to windows 2008, I am still working on Windows XP. In fact I have little or no inclinations to start working on a latter version unless some new technology I have to work with comes up that requires a latter version of the windows operating system. Even then, instead of messing up my current configuration, I would instead choose to create all the mess in a VPC (virtual pc), where the removal of all these mess is just but a click away.
Johnson my cousin once told me during our drinking session that faith is a very important element in any business venture. You can always go about gathering as much information as you can, do as much research as you want, at the end of the day there will always exist a gap between what you already know and where you want to be.
Within a few days after taking a leap of faith and testing out this new methodology for my operations, the problem I am pondering over now has shifted from “where to look for quality human resource” to “how to more effectively collaborate and communicate with the available human resources“.
Already I am having some semi-concrete notions of how to segregate work and minimize the turn around time for each development project that comes through the pipeline.
The problem of work segregation inevitably lead me to recall one particular module I took during my days in the National University of Singapore. Every week I would attend a lecture pertaining to the subject called Discrete Mathematics and each time after the 2 hour lecture, I would feel totally drained out mentally.
One of the problems posed by the professor during one of these lectures was the issue of countability. There are infinite numbers between 0 to 10, but there are finite number of integers between 0 to 10.
Suppose given a range of problems, and each problem is metaphorically represented by the numbers that exist between 0 to 1, there will then be no end to the amount of solutions required to solve all the problems between 0 to 10.
Suppose metaphorically speaking if we are able to impose units in terms of integers on this range of problems between 0 to 10, we could effectively solve all the problems within this range by supplying in 11 solutions.
Out of the metaphorically realm and back into this real world, suppose we are able to take any programming question and segregate it into discrete units, in this instance we will thus be able to count the number of solutions we will potentially require to solve this programming question.
If the above assumption is true (which actually is if you take each unit to represent a use case scenario) and further assuming there are unlimited human resources available (or some what close to unlimited) then we will theoretically be able to engage each unit of human resource to one use case. Suppose there exist not dependencies between any use cases, this would mean that a programming problem of a 1000 use cases could in actual fact be solved within the period required to solve just one use case.
Theoretically speaking, this seems to be a sound and workable solution, however I am now still keeping my fingers crossed. Who knows what kind of exception might happen in this system which I have thus far envisioned in my mind and am slowly weaving into reality.
This afternoon when I stepped out of the train after 3 long sessions meeting with different clients, I felt somewhat weird. While the train was on its way heading towards Clementi, my subconscious mind spoke to me. It emitted this sense of danger, call it spider sense if you will. I started looking inwards, after a short while I managed to identify the source of this wrongness.
During this recent spate of hectic schedule, I was unconsciously blind siding myself by developing tunnel vision and I knew it could get potentially very dangerous. My brain due to the recent overload of external stimuli had kicked itself into overdrive mode (the general direction of my tunnel vision) . This is causing my recent inability to sleep. This inability to sleep further compounded my excessive brain activity. It was a vicious cycle. I was literally walking around like an highly animated zombie during day time in an unnatural state of prolonged hung over.
Pasha a few days ago while we were doing some discussions in the west coast park noted this drastic decrease in my recent span of attention and also this tunnel vision of mine. I have to admit that is the truth. Information is just slipping off my mind before I could even register it to my memory. In fact there have been more than a few occasions, when I experienced serious time lag when attempting to retrieve from my brains facts and information that should have been at my finger tips at any single time (talk about trying to recall what your own name is, haha!). There are increasingly more occasions when I develop this tunnel vision and enter a state of fixation.
Jim while driving my back to his place to discuss about his website pointed out to me, the time lag I had registering “contest” as “contest” instead of “content” during our IMH presentation. Damned! I should have consulted a doctor while I was there at IMH today. 
Hmmm, actually the part about me bringing up the fact that they once had their Hawaiian themed annual dinner and dance at the Expo really got them disoriented. I play my little pranks sometimes, I just can’t help myself.
Back to this issue about my insomnia, I think I got Satheesh really annoyed with it today. Opps. sorry my friend.
Hmmmm… I need to find a solution to it soon.
A possibility to this is taking a long break. I mentioned to Jim while I was in the car that I was intending of taking a two months break in some cheap 3rd world countries with no internet or communications facilities and live under 100usd per month after these current projects of mine finished.
While Jim brought up a valid point about the possibility of me losing lots of business in the process. In this case, it is two against one.
Pasha advised that if I go on anymore like this, something irreparable will break.
Dad has been admonishing me with this statement over and over again recently. “Son, make money for yourself and not for the doctors. ”
Now that Alena is out of the picture and is nicely fending for herself, there is really no reason for my continued presence around on this tiny red dot. Ricky was joking just the other day about this.
“It was weird what happened to you while you started hanging around her two years ago. Now that she is out of the picture, I think you will be getting back to your normal self soon enough. It was even amazing you stayed with her for so long, two long years. It was breaking the guineas world record man. The only other girl that I know of that even got close was just 2 months and you didn’t even see that girl more than once a week. Haha ”
I think for my health, I should really start making provisions for this long over due break of mine. I need to get my spiritual center back.