Ian On The Red Dot

The last few months have been a humbling educational experience just by working around so many awesome crazy generous folks who are building the kind of future they want – from hackers to government folks (yes, even them).

Two main things I learned:

Assume Good Faith.

Not everyone is going to be a dick who will try to screw you over, so you don’t need to be by default an asshole. Doesn’t mean you be a pussy either. Totally mis-paraphrasing Team America.

A quote from Desmond Tutu:

A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, based from a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.

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.

A couple of years ago, I interned at a certain start-up and one of my jobs was to look for salesgirls. Posting classified ads and seeding job boards got me a deluge of applications. Sieving through all of them was a pain and ultimately an exercise of futility. Even though I had narrowed down the possible candidates, the interview process told me little about how they would fare at the exhibition where they would actually have to sell something.

Yesterday, my co-founder and I went down to the IT fair to buy a monitor. We already had a specific model in mind but had some doubts. The salesperson at the booth was totally useless in explaining the specs and why we should choose the model. We decided to walk around a little and found our way to a booth selling Sony’s monitors.

The salesgirl at this booth was amazing. She not only explained why we should buy a Sony monitor, she actually helped us make sense of differences between Sony’s and Dell’s models. I was so so very close to buying the Sony monitor from her.

In the end though, we bought the Dell monitor because it had something we wanted to test out, something that none of the Sony models had. And we only bought it because the Sony salesgirl brought clarity to the whole proceedings. Although we didn’t buy from her, she did such an awesome job that we were 1 feature away from buying a Sony monitor.

I think I know the solution to find good salespeople. Poaching.

Next time, I’m just going to walk around and see which salesperson can get me to buy something I didn’t have any intention to buy. That’s someone I want to hire. Probably going to be more time-consuming that the blast, pray and hope strategy, but ultimately more rewarding.

Many many years ago… around 1997, I went for my first double date to watch the movie Titanic…

We ( my best friend and I ) fucked it up so bad, that I’m sure that I told him

We will end up as priests.

And, what do you know, God has a fucking sense of humor…

A couple of months ago, when Foound burst into the local, and international, tech scene, I thought of a possible campaign that Foound could use to booster the application installs. Basically, Danny (of Foound) could be the equivalent of MySpace’s Tom. Every time you install the application, Danny will be your first friend.

The campaign:

1. Work with possible hangout locations to create a series of campaigns with tag-lines following the following formats:
– Foound with (e.g. Foound with models playing pool)
– Foound at enjoying (e.g. Foound at Brewerkz enjoying free-flow of beer)

2. Only users of Foound who have added Danny as a friend can learn about the location of these activities.

3. A date would be given for a specific campaign.
– Foound with FHM models playing pool on 1st October 2010.

4. Location is not given until 1 day before the event.
– A event will be created via Foound and all friends of Danny will be invited.

5. If the user shows up at the event, with the Foound application installed, he or she is admitted.

6. Only with the application will the user know the full details like date, time and location.

Last year’s Johnnie Walker party was an awesome night of racing, drinks and dancing.

This year, again, there will be two nights of partying at ‘ONE ON THE BUND’.

There are 5 pairs of tickets for people who can best answer this question,

‘Why should you win a pair of tickets to this year’s Johnnie Walker’s Jet Black Party at One on the Bund?’

Hint … Because you love Johnnie Walker.

Do write your answer below by 2359 of the 22th of September 2010. Do note that you got to be above 18 years old.

More about the event below.

Recording this because I think someone up there is trying to tell me something but I’m not sure what.

Met WS at Clarke Quay MRT to go for dinner and as we were walking up towards the escalator, an elderly gentleman came up to us and asked if we spoke English.

I wanted to ignore the gentleman but it was tough. I had already acknowledged his presence by stopping to hear his question and there was no way WS and I could have walked away pretending he didn’t exist.

“Could you help me top up my card, I have no money, ” he asked.

Sigh. This is the umpteen time someone has stopped me to make such a request.

I wanted to walk away, but the usual processing occurred in my brain. A top up is minimally $10 which is less than a beer at a pub. If I topped up his card, I’m only denying myself 1 more beer during a future night of drunken debauchery which isn’t such a big sacrifice. Sure, I have my own problems too. But what if I walked away thinking my money is too precious to waste on a swindler or a good for nothing who should just work to get the money he needs, and it turns out that he indeed needed the help to get home.

And so, I did what I usually did. I took his card and walked to the top up machine, hearing the imaginary mocking sounds of that elderly gentleman’s inner thoughts.

“Another one conned.”

As the screen presented me the options, I was inclined to choose $10, but ended up choosing $20. $10 doesn’t get one very far for very long.

One might think that one should feel good about such ‘charitable’ deeds. I’m not feeling it. I’m feeling deeply conflicted and to be honest, I’m not sure why. I do know a large part of me feels that I’m being a sucker and should be more resolute by saying ‘No’.

What would you do?

Johnnie Walker miniature bottle in a really beautiful tin.

Was holding two of them at chest level as I was squeezing across the dance floor to get out of Powerhouse and somehow, the cover of my friend’s tin dropped. Someone is really going to be disappointed when I pass the tin. There was a strip in Archie about this. And the astute would ask, were the tins even labeled?

Also dropped the cover for my Canon lens.

Thanks to Pat and the great folks managing Johnnie Walker’s brand in Singapore, I had a chance to party at St James earlier today.

It was a crazy crazy night.

Bumped into an old secondary school classmate who looks as young as I last saw him in class, who turned out to be the boyfriend of a friend’s friend that kept trying to get me to dance the whole night. Waited at Powerhouse for a friend who had just returned from Thailand only to leave to another club right beside my place as her other friends were there, just to get ‘abandoned’ by the friend from Thailand who had to go home to sleep. Met a gal who was the younger sister of a famous personality from my university days and went back to St James with her to dance the night away, discovering in the cab ride that the professor the Thailand friend had been meeting before she came to St James was the most famous sociology professor from NUS (who I studied under and totally think is a bad-ass). Sister of famous personality was working in a field that I’ve been studying for the ship. Lots of other coincidences weaved into the tale.

Maybe Singapore is really too small.

And yet, despite the craziness and fun of the night, as I sit here typing this, I can only think of how I probably blew the chance to work with one of the most brilliant guys I’ve ever met in Singapore because I mistook his remarks for condescension as opposed to honest introspection.

It is a crazy crazy world.

On a brighter note, great whiskey was consumed and hot chicks below.

“Everyone is dying. Some just die faster than others.”

The frequency and pain is getting worse. I really should be sleeping but can’t.

I was lying in bed thinking about what it would be like to die in my sleep. To close my eyes and never wake up. Would I know that I have died?

Laying there thinking what would it be like for the person who discovers me dead. And then it occurred to me, what if your death is only something experienced by others.

What if, from a personal perspective, you never die.

You’re crossing the road and a car hits you. Just a knock. You still need to go to the hospital. Just in case. Your family fusses over you. The girlfriend chides you for being careless. That’s how you see the world. You’re alive. All is well.

For others, they witness you being slammed against a tree. Your bones shatter upon impact. Your girlfriend cries for you at the wake. Your parents burn that car you always wanted.

So none of us die. We just live and live.

Sure, it seems like there is a start, when we first start remembering. But maybe that’s the time we remember to remember.

The memories are always there, just mixed with the new. They seem so similar.

The same decisions, the same mistakes.

The same love.

Lying here thinking about dying and reaching the answer to that question that always seems to get asked, “Why do you love that person?”

Because I always have.

Work has become a strange affair. I’m extending my notice period so that I can be around when the project (that has consumed my life for the better part of the last 10 months) goes live. It didn’t make sense to leave my company and our clients at the last hurdle. It feels wrong. I’m not sure whether it’s because I’ve been conditioned by the Singapore education system to be a good worker that I feel this obligation.

I don’t expect anything to go wrong but as they say, production is the last testing environment.

Yet while I’m physically at work, my mind isn’t there. My mind is busy making plans, being terrified and excited with what is to come.

Bad habits have started being entrenched. In truth, I was learning them early last year after the first project went live. They had been creeping in along with the growing dissatisfaction about the state of affairs with my employment situation. My learning of bad habits did get some respite when I was able to occupy myself with other matters like setting up a continuous integration environment (using Hudson) for the second project.

Now, I find it hard to muster any sort of pride when trying to complete the remaining tasks before I officially handover my duties and my system. The tasks just seem too mundane and serve as a reminder of why I chose to leave. I’m just waiting for time to pass, the days to run down, until I leave.

Bad habits, are, bad. (You probably read that and went, ‘No Shit Sherlock’)

I know the bad habits will come back to haunt me once I focus on ship building full time. It is hard to get an engine going when it has been left idle for too long. I don’t need another reminder of the pain I felt when I entered university after my National Service .

And so, I’m writing this post to remind myself that work, while done under a situation I have grown slightly dissatisfied with, is still work that must be done well, even if I’m going to, borrowing a NS phrase, fuck off after two more months. And if I have to test the waters, I’m going to do it.

Take the Powerpoint presentation I prepared as part of the training for the operations staff. The template I was originally bequeathed was the usual boring, stodgy corporate affair, the kind where you had multiple nested bullet points on 1 slide. The embarrassing sibling of presentations found at Note & Point. The first time I prepared the training material last year, I conformed to the template. This year, I tried to push the boundaries, searching for Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr to pepper throughout the presentation when trying to emphasize some point. I hope it worked.

I did enjoy the reaction of the trainees when they saw something different on the screen.

Just because it has always been that way doesn’t mean it needs to continue that way.

And so, with the two months left, I’m going to do two things the client didn’t ask and didn’t pay for because that’s what need to be done:

1. Proper way to track database migrations.
2. Easy way to prepare release notes.

Would be cool if its announced along with two new features:

1. Control the TV with any iOS device. An API to allow development of applications that utilize this new way of controlling the TV.

2. Everything that is on the TV can be easily streamed to any iOS device. Anything on the screen of an iOS device can easily be ‘projected’ onto the TV. API to allow development of such applications.

Not familiar with the current state of the SDK to know if this is already possible. Even if it is, would be cool if these two features were the focus of whatever is being announced tomorrow.

Actually, it is a novel about China, but somehow, to a certain degree it seems like the author was speaking about Singapore.

Given the choice between a good hell and a counterfeit paradise, what will people choose? Whatever you say, many people will believe that a counterfeit paradise has got to be better than a good hell. Though at first they recognise that the paradise is bogus, they either don’t dare or wish to expose it as such. As time passes, they forget that it’s not real and actually begin to defend it, insisting that it’s the only paradise in existence.

Democratic one-Party dictatorship, rule of law with social stability as its top priority, an authoritarian government for the people, a state-controlled market economy, fair competition dominated by the central government-owned enterprises, scientific development with Chinese characteristics, self-centered harmonious diplomacy, a multi-racial republic with sovereignty of one people, post-Occidental and ‘post-universal’ thought of the subject, and national rejuvenation of the incomparable Chinese civilization.

SGEntrepreneurs seemed to be schizophrenic yesterday. A couple of months ago, our founder Bernard Leong wrote an article against the ‘pay to pitch’ business model in the funding ecosystem. Personally, most, if not all of us at SGEntrepreneurs agree with his position against this model of obtaining funding. And yet, an event organized by the very entity that operates on a business model we loathe was publicized on SGEntrepreneurs.com.

Why?

SGEntrepreneurs is a site that posts information about events. The tension in the decision to post about such events is analogous to that of a grocery store owner who might sell cigarettes and alcohol even if he was a teetotalling individual, one key difference being that SGEntrepreneurs does not make money from the posting of such events. So to what extent do you protect the people who may visit your store, or in this case blog. To what extent should the team at SGEntrepreneurs be gatekeepers? Do we always indulge in self-censorship. Do we present noteworthy information even if we disagree with the premise of that information.

And yes, we do believe that the Angels Den Speedfunding event is noteworthy.

What was probably lacking in the initial announcement of the event was a ‘Caveat emptor‘ warning.

I say ‘probably’ because SGEntrepreneurs has rarely, probably even have not, editorialize event listings. In a perfect world, the ‘Related Posts’ plugin would have shown Bernard’s earlier post. In a perfect world, people learning about the event would have done their research, learned lots more information about the event and ‘paying to pitch’ and be equipped to make an informed decision about participating.

We don’t live in a perfect world. Which begs the question, how to balance gate-keeping with breadth of coverage. This is a process we at SGEntrepreneurs are continually working on and this incident is a good reminder on the need to establish clear policies.

Lastly, it is naive to think that no one pays when a start-up pitches to investors.

Someone is always left with the bill.

Those free pitching sessions aren’t free. Well, at least free for the start-ups. Most of the time, the potential investors don’t bear any of the cost. The ones who bear the cost are the sponsors and the government bodies.

Let’s look at government bodies bearing the cost. It is in fact tax payer’s money furthering the dreams of a few. It is tax payer’s money that is paying for access to these investors. Access not only the start-ups benefit from, but access that the bureaucrats can benefit from for their own future private endeavors after leaving government service.

Someone always pay.

I don’t think it should be the start-ups. I don’t think it should be government bodies.

Left as an exercise to the reader to figure out who I think should be paying.

Lucian:

My children are your children, my parents your parents. I would lay down my life to save yours because I knew without a doubt you’d do the same for mine.

This epiphany totally redefined what being a country meant to me.

A few days before World Cup 2010 started, I started noticing people calling out the results of upcoming games on Twitter.

I thought it would be interesting to run a game where fans make predictions using Twitter and a little application runs in the background to collect these tweets and tabulate success rates.

There are 3 prizes sponsored by Nike football thanks to a friend who helped obtained them.

Definitely not as profitable as betting on ladbrokes, but probably less of a hassle considering that it seems there isn’t an easy way for Singaporeans to deposit money into a ladbrokes account.

So, if you have a Twitter account, and love football, head down to football.onthereddot.com and participate by tweeting the results you expect.

Further notes:

Over the course of coding the site and the backend, I learned a few things about the Twitter API:

Going to update them over the course of the month as I tinker a little more with the scripts.

Back-end script to retrieve data from Twitter was written using python and:

1. The library tweepy as an interface to Twitter’s API.
2. SQLAlchemy to connect and deal with database stuff.

Front-end:

1. Built with Sinatra