Ian On The Red Dot

I work at Tampines.  Yesterday, the train service between Pasir Ris and Tampines was disrupted.  I’m guessing that someone committed suicide.  Woke up today and couldn’t find any confirmation in the newspaper.  Came to work and Googled about it.  It looks like a suicide case from this blog post.

Anyway, the Straits Time has a post about it online.  The post is hilarious.  The article states - ‘The westbound train was travelling from Boon Lay to Pasir Ris’.  Dudes, Boon Lay to Pasir Ris is eastbound.  Unless of course you guys know something that we don’t - like elections are coming and someone did a whole lot of gerrymandering.

Second Day:

Lunch - Subway sandwich - 4

Dinner - Hokkien Mee and Herbal Tea - 5

Third Day:

Lunch - Chicken Rice - 3.50

Dinner - McChicken - 2.00

Fourth Day:

Stayed home.  Had to recover from Blurbme.com’s awesome party.

Found five dollars on the floor at the staircase landing.  Woot!  Lunch for today (Sunday, 5/8/7) is settled.

I might make it after all…

The worse thing than not getting an award is getting an award you do not think you have deserved.

That fate just happened to me.

For some unfathomable reason, my manager saw it fit to nominate me for the employee of the month. I got it. And along with it, the congratulations that make me feel like I’m a fraud.

But I guess my manager saw it coming. Even before the winner was announced at our month’s end gathering, he called me to his table to inform me about the possibility of me winning and advised me not to say ‘err..i really don’t know what i did. how come i get award?’.

But how can I stop myself from saying that. All I have ever done at work, is just my work - I just do what needs to be done to fulfill my responsibilities. There are people in this company with greater responsibilities who do their best to meet them too. I mean…

I feel dirty.

I can’t help but feel that I’m experiencing some sort of reverse discrimination being one of only two Singaporean Chinese in this company. Oh well… Got to justify my manager’s confidence.
I guess the good thing that came out of this is the $50 Isetan voucher which I’m sure my gf will find useful.

The Question: Who were the brotherhood?

Or rather ‘who are the brotherhood?’ because I believe they might still be around even after I die.

Managed to catch up with my reading of the stuff the brotherhood press posted on Intelligent Singaporean and the discussion it generated. Two particular posts got my attention - ‘Can Someone Tell Me Why Our Scholars Aren’t as Smart as the Jews?” and “Intro to Singapore’s Socio-Political Blogosphere“.

I have always admired the stuff that the brotherhood press produced and wondered who the hell these guys were. I even started looking suspiciously at some of my friends who have the mental capabilities to produce such stuff. Looking and wondering.

In any case, I began to realize that I was beginning to get the answer of why the brotherhood press was as good as they were after reading the comments that were generated by the two posts mentioned above.

For one thing, they got a siege mentality. I remember how during Man Utd glory days in the first decade of the Premiership (and hopefully from 2007 onwards) Alex Ferguson drove home that kind of siege mentality to his players - it was them against the whole world. And that made them champions.

The second thing I realized is that they have (to borrow a phrase from the post) a ‘consciousness of disadvantage’. I can’t possibly do justice to what the phrase means so go to the post and read the two paragraphs starting with “One reason according to S. Nuland, author of ‘How We Die’….” and ending with “Owing them all a living – is it such a wonder, there is not fight!”

Darkness was talking about the Jews when he wrote those two paragraphs but in some way, there is some amount of self-reflectivity. For example, the Jews got kicked around a lot and only found a home (Israel) recently in the last century - the brotherhood apparently seems to have been ejected from participating in other websites before finding IS willing to work with them. Jews were to be exterminated in WW2 and that was not the only time their race was threatened with genocide and extinction - the brotherhood felt that the recent post about the Singapore socio-political blogosphere was a similar exercise in kind if not magnitude to remove them from history and our consciousness.

Was darkness conscious about these similarities when he wrote his post and possibly trying to subversively ask ‘why the brotherhood is better than scholars?”.

I don’t know. And maybe I’m reading too much into all this. But hell, how could you not. The IS website just provokes these sort of stuff.

Anyway, if there is something to be learned from all this, it is this. No one owes me anything and I have better learn to make myself better to cope with the changes in this world, in Singapore and in my own life. I need to adopt the right mentality when approaching life and the Jew’s is a good place to start.

Sigh…in any case, I have added one more item to the list of questions I want to ask God on judgment day - ‘who are the brotherhood?’. I just hope he allows me to finish all the questions (yes, I guess I’m greedy like that) before he presses the red button to open the trapdoor.

Breakfast - Beancurd with barley - 1.80

Movie - The Simpsons - 8
Reasons for watching it today: Friend flying off. Cheaper than weekends.

Lunch - 2

Dinner - 3.50

After movie, we went to a cafe to chat. Drink - 5.

My friend drove me home so I managed to save on cab fare. But this isn’t the way to do it. If I want to meet my target, I should do it without resorting to charity but with proper planning. For example, if I anticipate that we might continue hanging out after a movie, then try to make the movie earlier, so that I still can manage to spend quality time with friends and take the last bus home.

Top up fare card. - 20

Today - 40.30

Time spent with friends - priceless (couldn’t resist. sorry)

Got to be more discipline to meet my target. On a better note, today was the first time I made my own coffee in the pantry instead of buying from vending machine.

Valleywag has two posts about facebook’s rate card - the old one and the revised one.

One word…crazy….

I mean why pay $150,000 (now $300,000) over 3 months when you can setup a group totally for free? Sure, there are supposedly more stuff you can do with your group page, the monthly message blast and sponsored stories…but seriously, $300,000 for that?

Of course, the revealed numbers of the rate card are most probably guidelines and not etched in stone. The numbers might be much lower than those in the rate card after negotiations. But still..

The ‘I read Business 2.0 - and I want to keep reading!’ group isn’t a sponsored group. And it grew to the number over 2,000 in less than a month. It grew because people cared for the magazine.

And that is the whole point of this post. Facebook already works great in viral promotion of messages that are worth spreading without all the perks a sponsored group is supposed to bring. In the case of Business 2.0’s group, the message was to save (a cause worthy of supporting) Business 2.0 (something we cared about).

I saw my friend joined the group on my news feed and so I joined.  If the whole point of Facebook is to be a social utility, maybe people should start believing that news feed and invites are sufficient to spread a message - if the message was worth spreading in the first place.  Sponsored stories, email blasts…that feels so last century.