Reflections of 2008

It has been just a week into 2009, I finally found some time to look back at 2008 and ponder upon that year and what I should look forward henceforth.

The local media has splashed achievements for 2008 running up to New Year's Eve, achievements we should be proud of and indeed I am.

1) We had the Singapore F1 Grand Prix - First night race, which was exciting and deafening for me, being my first live racing event.
2) We did well at the 2008 Beijing Olympics - paddlers Li Jia Wei, Wang Yuegu and Feng Tianwei finally secured a silver medal in the Table Tennis Women's Team event for Singapore.
3) The world's highest observation wheel started in Feb 2008. - Managed to go for free ride thanks to a friend!

And many more wonderful achievements listed here.

But not forgetting the boo-hoos which I think nullifies and magnifies, dragging Singapore 2008 into doldrums.

1) The sheer "cost" of staging the Grand Prix and the pending 4 possible flagging years as the global economies chews up many teams. I for one, will not be going for the 2009 race. - I wonder if the hotels and the SingaporeGP company will sustain the costs, or will taxpayers' money be used to subsidize?
2) The immediate sacking of table-tennis team manager Antony Lee by its new president, Ms Lee Bee Wah, and the eventual departure of the head coach Liu Guodong as well. - Tsk tsk..where's the grace?
3) The frequent breakdown of the Singapore Flyer and eventually holding 173 tourists and locals in a 6-hour hostage crisis which resulted in embarrassment and caused the Flyer to be suspended from operations pending investigations by the Singapore Police.
4) Escape of Mas Selamat. Where are the apologies? I've seen Indian officials resigning over the Mumbai incident. While ours came out as -

'This should never have happened. I am sorry that it has.' - Wong Kan Seng

That is not an apology.

5) Rising inflation - raised further by more ERP gantries, increased utility bills. Is the ivory tower so high up? Have our leaders forgotten about the common man in the streets?



6) Foreign workers dormitory location issues as well as companies not paying their salaries. It pains me knowing that these people borrowed, beg, steal in hope of a better future and working hard on our soils to provide us with infrastructure, cleaning services and jobs that many locals won't do - only to be played out. How many times have we seen cases like these?
7) DBS minibonds fiasco - its not just about how these complicated products came about to simple investors who wanted to place them in fixed deposits; but how the Singaporean investors are being treated as compared to the Hong Kong investors. Where was our government? How long it took for them to even make a statement? Where is that million-dollar leadership? If it costs us taxpayers so much $ for such a F#$% up leadership, I wouldn't mind standing in for 1/4 of what they costs!
8) The boastful GIC/Temasek splurging billions on bad foresight and claiming long-term investment. Damn it..and they said I didn't study enough, the number of brains in those enterprises got clouded by their obscene salaries? I can make such bad investments in 8 days as well, in fact give me 3 days, I can make just as bad investments!

But what saddens me most besides the amount of money thrown out - from saving global banks, learning centres (lost count of all the bad investments to date).. etc, to investments by town councils smoking to a tune of $16 million. And this one takes the cake -

We started off with (the name) and after looking at everything, the name that really tugged at the heartstrings was in front of us. The name itself is not new, but what has been used informally so far has endeared itself to all parties." - Mah Bow Tan on the $400,000 exercise to rename Marina Bay as Marina Bay.

$40Gs can feed a lot of people for a very long time!

Will the repressed citizens come forth in making a statement that enough is enough, we need to have people take responsibilities, be accountable; we need transparency in the system - in charities, public corporations, in GLCs. Where is the last straw? Where do we draw the line between acceptance and sheer ignorance? Doesn't that money belong to our forefathers, even us and our future generations? The power of one or an elite class is dangerous as we all have seen in the global meltdown of the financial system. Greed and the elitist thinking of 'outsmarting' the system to their own massive gains is causing the impending great depression we are facing right now.


The elitist should never be encouraged, or even be admired. They have climbed so high up in their ivory tower, they seem to have lost touch with the ground and the need to be empathetic to the less fortunate. This high flying civil servant chose to spend his legally earned tax-payers money learning how to cook, but the sheer arrogance of mentioning about his ivy league undergraduate son, well-to-do wife as well as his superb management skills, makes no sense to an article which I thought was about a french cooking school. The numbers in the article popped out to me like a brag in a pretentious way.

Enough complaining as we all know, there isn't much else we can do about it but accept life. I just hope the government do their bit for the less unfortunate, the sick, the disabled. Hear the sounds of cries of your people before the inevitable happens. And I beg to differ that Singaporeans are apolitical and repressed as the internet will be a forceful weapon in time to come, we all just need patience for an opportunity to present itself.

“It is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” - Henry David Thoreau

I hope to end this entry with at least a positive proud moment I had as a Singaporean. Our very own true-blue Singaporeans with pretty little publicity, support/sponsorship and carrot$ dangling in front of them, doing pretty well.

Beijing 2008 Paralympic Games

Bronze Medal in Equestrian Individual Freestyle Championship - Laurentia Tan

Bronze Medal in Equestrian Individual Championship - Laurentia Tan

Silver Medal in Swimming Women's 50m Freestyle - Yip Pin Xiu

Gold Medal in Swimming Women's 50m Breastroke - Yip Pin Xiu

I salute you! Now let's hope our government learnt some lessons and avoid more hiccups in 2009.

Final Home Match for the Singapore Slingers

We have come to an exciting wrap up of the Singapore Challenge Series 08/09. With almost a perfect victory run besides a close 81–90 loss against visiting NBL team Sydney Spirit, the Slingers are 9-1 at home.

Do show your support for the final game this coming Sunday! Seriously I never seen an Indian basketball team before - this should be interesting.

Details

Opponent: Sathyabama Stars (India)
Venue: Singapore Indoor Stadium
Date: 11 January 2009 (Sunday)
Time: 4.00pm

You can book your tickets through Sistic or save the $1 booking fee and tickets purchased through Singapore Slingers Office - no booking fee - Email Michelle.Johnson@SingaporeSlingers.com or Call Michelle at +65-6346 1004.


Will follow up my review and photos of the game vs Bantang Pier Harbour Centre (Philippines) - ex-Jason Castro team, which was exciting till the last quarter!

Merry X'mas and a Happy New Year to all

Just before the year ends, I would like to enter my final 115th blog entry for the year compared to the 9 post I made from 2004 to 2007, I guess I made quite a progress.

This has been a tumultuous year for me, losing some good friends and going through tough experiences which only strengthened my belief that "What doesn't kill you only makes your stronger". It also marks good things such as the start of many new found friendships I made from attending a Singapore Slingers game and shooting a free throw amidst a drunkard state to win some $ to treat a bunch of bloggers.

Blogging has open many avenues of expression and I am just glad my name is briefly mentioned by my fav blogger Mr.Brown whom I have faithfully followed since my army days back in the 90s when his SNEs were downloaded on my PDA.

It was a year which I managed to travel quite a bit, start a new venture and recharged my soul and even gotten myself a great new job.

So I hope despite all the impending financial meltdowns and possible loss of the many things in such turmoil times - we could all sustain kinship and friendship. These are things which should mean something to all of us and not material wealth.

May all be blessed and stay tough in the darkest of times and may 2009 prove to be another refining fire which we would all walk away from - stronger we will emerge. I will be on leave from X'mas to New Year, so feel free to contact me for some hoops or food.

Slingers vs Darwin All Stars

This season's Slingers are doing very well. Unlike the other seasons, the current squad of Singapore Slingers are doing very well defensively, they are also consistent with their offense. They have stamina and results in a better second half team. Almost all their games at home so far for 2008 have seen them erupting offensively which resulted in convincing wins.

Likewise vs the Darwin Resort All Stars in a Christmas special, a close 1st half of 37-35, ended up with a 91-65 win with Slingers going for 22 unanswered points in the 4th quarter. The All Stars were lacklustre in the 4th quarter scoring only 9 points. I believe is the lowest quarter seen so far with Slingers scoring 31 points, mostly from Darren #8 Doc getting hot from beyond the arc. Darren scored 33 points shooting 50% from 3 point territory, draining 5 over the opponents. Darren has video clips covering the match and his signature, dribble, fake, pull up shot.


Al Vergara was doing his damage with 5 steals that night.


And here's a no look "Jason Kidd" back pass to Darren after a cut to the hoop resulted in 2 All Stars closing on him.


And Hillary who couldn't get my kiss cam debut tried to get one on her cam instead!

More pictures from me here; and Andrew's amazing sports photography here. Thanks to Nic for the courtside passes, but couldn't join us for the big win as he was overseas again.

Slingers then gave the All Stars another chance as they flew to Darwin for a return leg match. Wrapping the match by the 1st quarter, Slingers were up 17 points at half time. The match ended 106 - 77 with Eric in turn hitting the big 30 while Darren took 18. More coverage here by Darren and Slingers website.

Gaming Consoles

Pictures shamelessly stolen from here

During my childhood, my dad tried to get me exposed to all sorts of indulgence, from music to even gaming. Back in the 80s, my dad bought me a set to get me hooked onto gaming. The Atari 2600 was first released in 1977, but probably only reached the shores of Singapore in the early 80s. It is the first successful video game console to use plug-in cartridges, and I could have so many game choices to change. It was well built and survived until the Computer PC AT/XT series came about and I was playing 5 1/4 floppy disc games which were under the 360kB the Double Density (DD) disk can hold.

Next came in the early 90s, where the graphics on the PC paled comparing to dedicated gaming consoles. And I was addicted to the Nintendo Famicom System (The Nintendo Family Computer aka Famicom was first released in 1983) which I purchased from a friend as I dabble back into game consoles again. It was tough convincing my parents as the focus for me now was studies. Thus pocket money saved bought me this wonderful console.

But then PC made its debut of improving medium from FDs to CDs and now DVDs, and the slew of graphics card, sound cards made it more worthwhile and enjoyable to be able to play using the computer. You can have controllers, keyboards, wheels to play FPS, racing, strategy games. This brought me to the present time where gamers can choose between consoles or computers as game developers release titles across all platforms.
What makes it interesting is, why should the game consoles survive?

Well I have previously mentioned that game consoles these days are value for money as the makers actually lose $ for every set they produce. I made my decision based on many other factors which I will explain now.

I currently have a PS3, 2 PSPs, a DS Lite and a Wii, besides the PS3 for local warranty, the rest of the devices are bought from Japan with no supporting warranty but have not much issues so far - it's been more than a year. These Japanese gaming toys are well built and provide a lot of entertainment for myself and my family and lately Rainbow Six on the PS3 has given myself and my girlfriend a lot of collaboration time. The only mishap so far was my 1st generation PSP (Black 2004) which has the button dropped off after much aggression playing the NBA Live 2008. 4 years and just a button drop off, that shouldn't be too much to ask right? Even my battery is made in Japan and is still the same one that came with the portable.

My first semiconductor engineering job was with a Japanese company which instilled quality in my workscope. They are very stringent with reliability, quality - it is shown in their attitude towards work, design etc. I used to manufacture Non-volatile memory (NVMs) otherwise widely know as Flash, the memory cards you used in your cameras and DS Lite, PSPs etc. The NVMs I built was tested with many parameters, going through many stages which explained why they used to cost so much, but I tell you - they last. I managed to perform reliability tests on my devices which showed a memory retention of about 200 years! But that was probably on your 32mb card which is probably obsolete right now.

With the Koreans, Taiwanese and Chinese coming into the memory business and slashing costs such as test, reliability monitoring etc. It is why memory is now a commodity business which is now so cheap, it can be considered as a Harddisk option. The price you pay now, is the price you pay for less reliable things. You pay peanut, you get monkeys. Everything comes at a price.

But saying that, who now still uses a 256mb memory stick? Within a year, everyone will be clamouring over a 16gb SDHC card or double that next year. There should be no issue with losing your pictures, as the memory card would be sitting around collecting dust.

That saying, I hope Jase is happy with his PS3 as the Microsoft Xbox 360 is making headline news on its quality and reliability. Apparently, this disc scratching issue was known before Xbox 360 was launch in 2005 and could have been avoided with a USD$0.50 solution. I remembered Microsoft rushing to release the console while Sony was having delays and prefer to lose market share rather than release a bad console.

Lately from the impending economic depression, I have observed that greed over integrity is the root cause of what is happening to the world. But let's not get depressed and enjoy life in some way or another.

Do check out this game console website covers the entire history of game consoles.