Ian On The Red Dot

Today, the 11th profile for the The New Paper New Face 2011 top 20 has been released.

Working on the The New Paper New Face 2011 Top 20 site has been a great learning experience because it is giving us the chance to actually learn from the customer the features that are needed for the main project we have been working on.

I’ve always believed that everyone will eventually cheat (on their significant other). So I’m never surprised when I hear a story about cheating occurring. And I’ve been mentally preparing myself for the day it will happen to me. Cos it will. As it will happen to everyone else.

But does it really happen to you if you never find out? Would you want to find out?

My best friend thinks that it is best to fess up if you cheated. I disagree. You should only fess up if you get caught, so as to provide your significant other a form of closure. Cos once there is a hint of cheating, unless the truth is laid bare, the significant other is going to use his or her imagination to fill in the blanks. And the imagination is a vicious capricious master that delights in the torment that every new thought brings. Does he love her? Does she love him? Does he love him? What other messages did they send each other? Was she with him that night? Were they just fucking? Is it more than just mindless fucking? Is his dick bigger? Does he eat her pussy? Does she use the super-lick-on-his-balls-while-deep-throating-him move that she says she first tried on me? Fuck, did she learn the super-lick-on-my-balls-while-deep-throating-me move from him? Am I fooling myself that he loves me? Should we have gotten married earlier. Damn it, no wonder that kid looks white. Damn it, that $10,000 must have gone to that whore’s fake boobs.

Most people fess up because they can’t live with the guilt. They can’t bear to be the only one carrying the burden of betrayal. And to those people, I say fuck you. If you are man enough to stick your dick into another person’s hole, whichever one it might be, then you got to be man enough to carry the knowledge of betrayal all by yourself.

Now, if you get caught, that’s another matter. So don’t get caught.

Since everyone will eventually cheat, I think they should add this sentence to marriage vows and post-copulation sweet nothings.

I love you enough to never get caught.

Footnote:
Cheating isn’t a monolithic event that just occurs. It clearly exists on a spectrum. It comes in different forms. Some people will cheat physically. Some people will cheat emotionally. What you do isn’t cheating until your significant other finds it a form of betrayal. It is the betrayal the other feels that defines cheating.

We finally incorporated the company. Paperwork can be a bitch. One year ago, when I shared with a close friend that I wanted to leave my job to build my own ship, he cautioned that I would end up doing a lot of other things just to support the environment for us to chart our own course. He was right. But looking at the email sent by Acra, and all the code checked it, I really wouldn’t want it any other way.

The company’s name is in this image:

It was a strange birthday.

While all the guests were busy mingling, eating, drinking, playing games (and it was awesome how the friends from different periods of my life across different age groups managed to just click) I was working on the Facebook tab for New Face 2011.

This was the one time it felt right to work late on a birthday. While working, I was surrounded by the very people I enjoyed working with and who I was working for – family, friends, partners and loved ones. It was a reminder of why we setup the shipyard one year ago – to build a place for ourselves and to be able to move in the directions we want to, together, on our own terms.

You can’t see it from the photo above, but I was surrounded by friends and family. The empty plate once had a slice of awesome awfully chocolate cake bought by one of our writers. Heaven.

Not exactly the same as climbing onto the roof of the old National Library, but Saturday’s party with close friends on the roof was one of the best times I had. The only thing missing was the friend who is on a top secret mission to learn how to convert water to wine.

The New Paper New Face of the year competition is back for 2011. Generally the girls in this competition look better than most others, even the ones for Miss Singapore Universe.

One of the contestants from last year’s competition blogs about her experience here.

Met two of the contestants from last year’s competition at Johnnie Walker’s Jet Black Party.

In less than 2 weeks time, I will be 30. It will be too soon. If I dig up the list I made in Secondary School, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t been able to cross off most of the items I wanted to get done by 30.

Too soon.

We cremated my grandpa last Monday. My uncles and aunties wept. After we had seen the coffin enter the furnace to be burnt, my sister asked if I had cried. The answer was no.

The truth was that I had led out most of my emotions the first day I had visited him in the intensive care unit at TTSH. Sitting in the waiting room, the tears had flowed. I’m not sure if it was tears of anger, loss, regret, sadness …

I just sat there and sobbed. There on the bed was the almost empty shell of a man I had come to resent.

Beyond what I thought he had done to (and had not done for) my family, I resented this man that I had an obligation to treat as my grandfather in terms of time, money and respect.

When did he ever behave as a grandfather to me.

My gf pointed out that I had the chance to first be a grandson. I failed.

I’m typing this out after just returning from the pre-echelon2011 dinner. I had received news that a friend was sick. It was a punch in the gut. I couldn’t stay and do networking.

Networks.

We spend so much time building networks just to cross off those items on our list.

When I look at the Singapore I live it today, I cannot deny that it is actually quite a good life.

But could I be living a better life in Singapore?

1. Is what we have in Singapore today because of the PAP or in spite of the PAP?

Sadly, I live in only 1 continuity (i.e. Earth Prime / Yes, Marvel > DC but Batman > all) and have no access to the multiverse so it is almost impossible to answer the above question. While it is impossible to know how life in Singapore would have been with different decisions or different leaders, it is possible of course to look at some of the key decisions made by our leaders in the past and understand how it led to the Singapore we know today. And it is right to acknowledge the wisdom, importance and effectiveness of some, if not most, of those decisions; which is why, I think rightfully, our parents have supported and continue to support the PAP.

The problem is that policies which benefit one generation, while benefiting the next generation in the short run, may harm the next generation in the longer run – like the rising value of HDB flats. This is a myopia my generation must be careful not to suffer from; voting for the opposition because they seem to offer solutions to our problems must be considered in light of whether those solutions will pose problems for those that come after us – this is a myopia I feel those in my parents’ generation who support the PAP suffer from.

2. Was it only old policies that benefited Singapore?

I think PAP has become such a brand name in Singapore that we might be failing to see that it was the work of the old guard like the late Dr Goh Keng Swee that made Singapore what it is today and not the current batch of people from the PAP running for this election; we have associated everyone from the PAP with the good work done in the past. When we say that we support the PAP because of the good work they have done, we must ask ourselves, how much of it is because of work done in the early days and how much of it is work done in recent years. We might even need to ask ourselves if the newer people from the PAP are undoing the work done by the early titans of Singapore’s government.

The people in the PAP today are different from those in the past, and it is important we ask if they still hold the same values. If they do not, then they are no longer the PAP we grew up with, which means, we cannot keep supporting them just because of past glories.

Wrestled with rewrite rules to get http://sgentrepreneurs.com/the-ultimate-start-up-space/ pointed to http://sgentrepreneurs.com/tag/martell-the-ultimate-start-up-space/ without the URL changing.

Couldn’t figure out a rule for .htaccess so in the end, wrote the rule in the nginx.conf location context just before proxying the request to Apache.

Besides studying whether the gap is widening, it is more important to find out if the lowest-income group is able to get by and not fall into the vicious cycle. Many people are complaining and blaming the government for this problem. But is this really the responsibility of the government? I don’t think so.

Everyone, well most people, in our society are looking out for themselves. Life is about personal aggrandizement. The government creates the playing field in which people go out and screw other people to be number one in society.

The government can, and should, do more about the widening income gap.

The question really is whether it is ONLY the government’s responsibility to deal with this problem.

To me, the answer is no. Employers and bosses can make the choices that will help deal with this problem. Faced between hiring a lower cost worker from overseas and paying more to a Singaporean, most bosses will say they will hire the overseas worker. They, those who are hiring, will claim that the overseas people are more hardworking. BULLSHIT.

I once worked in a company and on projects where the only reason some guys were hired is because they were cheap. Their bodies, or rather man-hours, could be sold to the client for a bigger markup. What about the work they were supposed to do? Well, the Malaysians, who perversely became the brethren of us Singaporeans, and Singaporeans worked harder to pull the average productivity up. Because of poor hiring, we had to work harder to cover the inadequacies of our colleagues.

The government can create policies to force bosses to behave better. Although the truth is the bosses will always find ways to circumnavigate the government’s policies. God forbid, one day, with their money, they can even directly influence these policies.

To really deal with the widening income gap, we need bosses who are willing to take less home for themselves. We also need to ensure that these bosses do the best – their generosity attracts better talent and workers, and their companies do better than those who hoard the wealth all for themselves.

The widening income gap isn’t just a problem for the government, it is one that all of us must solve together. The problem is, once most of us get the sniff of money, of prestige, of power, we forget. We forget.