Ian On The Red Dot

Sister shared about this song “Cats In The Cradle” by Harry Chapin

My child arrived just the other day
He came to the world in the usual way
But there were planes to catch and bills to pay
He learned to walk while I was away
And he was talkin’ ‘fore I knew it, and as he grew
He’d say “I’m gonna be like you dad
You know I’m gonna be like you”

And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin’ home dad?
I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then son
You know we’ll have a good time then

My son turned ten just the other day
He said, “Thanks for the ball, Dad, come on let’s play
Can you teach me to throw”, I said “Not today
I got a lot to do”, he said, “That’s ok”
And he walked away but his smile never dimmed
And said, “I’m gonna be like him, yeah
You know I’m gonna be like him”

And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin’ home son?
I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then son
You know we’ll have a good time then

Well, he came home from college just the other day
So much like a man I just had to say
“Son, I’m proud of you, can you sit for a while?”
He shook his head and said with a smile
“What I’d really like, Dad, is to borrow the car keys
See you later, can I have them please?”

And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin’ home son?
I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then son
You know we’ll have a good time then

I’ve long since retired, my son’s moved away
I called him up just the other day
I said, “I’d like to see you if you don’t mind”
He said, “I’d love to, Dad, if I can find the time
You see my new job’s a hassle and kids have the flu
But it’s sure nice talking to you, Dad
It’s been sure nice talking to you”

And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me
He’d grown up just like me
My boy was just like me

And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin’ home son?
I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then son
You know we’ll have a good time then

I was having lunch with a friend today when the topic of foreign students in Singapore came up. I have the privilege of working with some of the chaps which have riled certain segments of the population. One of the complains Singaporeans have against such students is that a significant number of them are here on scholarship where their fees are fully paid for by the government of Singapore without a bond. The disgruntled feel that the government should be spending that amount of money on Singaporean students instead.

Two of the reasons for the negative sentiments about this form of government expenditure that I can think of are:

1. The Singaporean government should take care of Singaporeans first.
2. The money that the Singaporean government spends have come from Singaporeans.

For reason one, I have always believed that by getting more foreigners into Singapore, the government is increasing both the labour and talent pool, which will lead to more (and better) companies being setup in Singapore which lead to more (and better paying) jobs for Singaporeans. The argument for how foreign students will eventually help the Singapore government take care of Singaporeans first is more nuanced than what I have written above. This post isn’t about reason one, so I’ll leave it for now.

It is reason two that this post has been written.

One of the arguments I have heard about why the Singaporean government should not spend on foreign students is that the money belongs to Singaporeans. Why does the money that the Singaporean government use for the students belong to Singaporeans? Is it because we pay income tax? However there are other forms of taxation. Two of them is GST and corporate tax.

The students that eventually work in Singapore will be paying GST every time they consume a product or service in Singapore. The companies they work for will pay corporate tax. If these students help increase the amount of GST and corporate tax in Singapore by an amount greater than their school fees and other expenses spent on them, can it be said that the investment on them was worth it?

More importantly, won’t the students eventually pay for their own education?

First, the non-idea. Let’s not build the whole infrastructure from scratch just to implement whatever ideas we do have for taking the Youth Olympic Games online.

Example of an Idea: Hey, you know what, let’s allow people to share their homemade videos of the YOG.

Example of what we should not do: Build our own backend to store the videos.

Example of what we could do: Host the videos on YouTube. Create a website that allows people to upload their videos of the YOG. Use the new YouTube API to save the videos on YouTube servers. The YOG website just aggregates videos stored on YouTube.

Why: Save Money. Stand On The Shoulders Of Giants. Don’t Do Something From Scratch Just For The Sake Of Doing It.

Now, for my idea.

We setup Flickr-booths around the island with iconic buildings and scenery as the background. People take photos at the booths and the pictures are instantly uploaded to Flickr tagged appropriately. A YOG site aggregates these photos.

How to do this. Simple actually. Get Apple to sponsor tons of their iMacs. Protect their computers with a telephonebooth-like shelter. Use their PhotoBooth software as well as plugins like FlickrBooth to take the photos and immediately upload it to Flickr.

Do a similar thing for videos. Again, get Apple to sponsor tons of iMacs and put them at spots around the sportsmen/sportswomen village. Use the iSight camera to create videos which are immediately uploaded to YouTube. I’m sure a simple plugin can be written for this if it has not already been done so. A YOG site aggregates these videos.

Let’s look at the cost here. Hmmm… There are the computers and the booths and the website to aggregate links to the videos and photos. I think cost of computers and booths can be covered by sponsorship and official partners.

Last part of the idea which might be the one with significant costs - all participants of the YOG are issued some EZLink-like card which contains all the important details about them. When they take a photo or make a video, they tap the card against some device attached to the computer which then appends all these details as tags for the video or photo. Even better, use RFID so no tapping is needed.

The metadata is needed so that the YOG website can better aggregate the videos and photos.

This is my idea. What do you guys think about it?

1. There really isn’t a need to twist and mangle words and phrases to use the word ‘co-spaces’ or some variation of it to make it seem like your company or product or service is relevant to the vision of Michael Yap and MDA. ‘Co-Spaces’ is about an idea - not word play.

2. This is SingHealth’s vision statement:

To be a renowned organisation at the leading edge of Medicine, providing quality healthcare to meet our nation’s aspirations.

Notice there is no mention about affordable prices. The speaker was smug. Maybe because he realize he can offer health-care and the most of us can’t.

To be fair, a sub-point under the ‘Mission’ header talks about cost-effective healthcare although cost-effective is different from affordable.

3. There seems to be a lot (too much?) focus on representing the physical (is it really real?) world 3 dimensionally online. Is that the only or best way to represent the physical world online? I think there are many ways to visualize data and 3d is only one of them.

I understand why it may seem attractive to represent the world 3 dimensionally online but with software like Microsoft’s Photosynth, I wonder if such efforts will eventually be a waste of time, money and resources.

However, it does seem from research done that avatars do affect how online interaction occurs so maybe trying to work on 3d representations of the world might have its uses although none of it was mentioned beyond the ‘hey-look-its-the-same-as-the-real-world-and-have-i-said-it’s-interactive’ fawnings. Read more about such research over at The Daedalus Project.

Most of the presentations from companies didn’t seem to touch on one of the core ideas (at least as I understand it) about Co-Spaces. No mention of how to pull data in from the physical world and represent it in a way that helps us aggregate, interpret, analyze and contextualize data with online tools. Little mention of how we can pull data from the virtual and make it accessible in the physical world.

I’m trying to leave room that there might have been more companies or demand drivers that talked about the two ideas mentioned above because I could have missed something but I can’t seem to recall any speaker actually saying anything relevant to those two ideas besides the one from DSTA.

4. I’m not sure if I’m getting what the speaker said correctly but here goes.

DSTA’s speaker talked about soldiers on the ground feeding back data to some commander which will aid the commander making decisions that can be relayed back to the users. Yup. I think that works - leave an officer in a comfortable room AWAY from the battlefield and I’m pretty sure he will make the right tactical decisions when his own life isn’t on the line.

The speaker also talked about how the soldier can be outfitted with devices that relay information about the environment and other data. Yup. Carrying more weight and devices will definitely help the soldier’s mobility and on-the-ground situational awareness.

Actually, I’m not sure if he is talking about all these ideas to be used in an actual war or just for training and evaluation purposes.

I think if it is for a war, it will be a big mistake. Imagine if our enemy gains access to the data being relayed back. Now, they know everything about us and we know nothing about them. Good Game guys. We’ll all be so screwed, and not in a good way.

Now, some people will say we will prevent that data compromise from happening. Yup. The same way we will prevent detainees from escaping. Not pointing fingers. I’m just saying.

Side note: You know what we really need for National Service. Every NS man to be stabbed or shot once in a non-critical area which will not lead to permanent physical damage. It is a bit extreme, but I guarantee none of us will ever forget the 3 second rule if we go through that experience nor will we NOT take our unarmed combat seriously.

The thing is, technology could help make us a better army only if the training stops being pussified. You are already taking 2 years of my life, might as well make it worth it.

Learned about the Great Internet Color Wars of 2008 from Jane McGonigal.

When the dust settles and the historians spin their tales, which team will emerge victorious to gather the spoils of the war. Will posterity vindicate the winners? Will time be kind to the losers? What tales of valor will be told to later generations? What whisperings of deceit and cunning will spread across the land?

Who knows…

All Singaporean Twitterers, this is an open mobilization exercise. Follow the littleRedteam over at Twitter. Stand up and give the best you can!

Hoot!

Anyway, I really like this idea. Reminds me of those time at sports meets and inter-house games where people just start going - “Buckley bomb, Buckley bomb, Buckley bomb to Bayley bomb!”

Good times.

Google’s first chef shares about his contribution to Google’s success.

my job was to create this ambience, to build this captivated audience where people wanted to come in super-early and stay super-late.

Reg Braithwaite asks the question whether software could be a list of business mistakes?

The problem is realizing that if the software to automate a business process is complicated and contradictory and hard to use, then the real cause is a business process that is complicated and contradictory and probably not serving the company well.

We aren’t friends but each other’s emergency hotline.

David Weinberger writes a post defending the ‘double standards’ displayed by those who have been won over by Senator Barack Obama’s speech ‘A More Perfect Union‘.

The notion of a double standard assumes, in an odd way, a single standard. The criticism only makes sense within contexts uniform enough that our moral judgments should be the same.

About three weeks ago, I started work at a new company. Every morning, I would have breakfast with my father before going to work.

One of the images etched in my memory that I associate with a young couple in love who have just started their marriage and family life together is that of my mom and dad kissing at the door of my HDB flat before my dad leaves the home to fight the battles at work to provide for the family.

Somehow, watching the scene in the movie 300 where Queen Gorgo tells Gerald Butler’s King Leonidas to ‘Come back with your shield or on it’ before he heads off to fight the Persians invoked that memory of my mom and dad at the door.

Each morning, when I am having breakfast, I will see young couples having breakfast together before heading to their respective offices. In the mundane activity of two people having a meal, I find something terribly romantic.

I am attracted to the image of two people working in harmony, like two dancers who have perfected their routine, to find seats and purchase their food; as they sit across each other nourishing their body, the space between their gazes filled with unspoken support and encouragement for what lies ahead; the joining of hands as they leave the table to work separately in their own jobs yet together towards a shared future filled with their hopes and dreams and the final, hesitant, almost regretful, unbonding of their fingers as they part at the junction.

In those moments when I look up from my cup of coffee and see such couples, my heart longs for the chance to create such memories of a young couple who have just started their marriage and family life together working towards a shared destiny.