Ian On The Red Dot

Help save Chuck! Join The Cause.

Chuck has become, after ‘Life’, the show I most enjoy. With a geek for the main character, intelligent scripts peppered with references that are a geek’s wet dream come true and what is possibly the best TV couple at the moment, Chuck is a show that probably deserves another season.

Came across this Facebook Group – Singapore Sucks. The reactions over at Stomp are interesting.

Does Singapore suck? It has its ugly sides. It also has its charms. It really depends on what is important to you. Do other countries suck? Possibly? Of course? Just follow the news a little more. Travel a little more. You are definitely sure to find something about some countries, if not all countries, that you don’t like.

Are these foreigners on the mark when they say Singapore sucks? Their opinions are quite funny because most of the stuff said are familiar.

My country can be ugly.

I think there is almost no government in this world that value foreigners as highly as the Singapore government. Hell, there probably isn’t a single government that gives its citizens the impression that it values foreigners more than its own citizens. What really interests me is whether other countries face this possible little inconvenient problem we have with foreigners – that for all the welcoming we do, there is no country that is more hated by the foreigners she so badly desires and welcome.

Are Singaporeans generally ruder than people in other cities? Possibly – I haven’t live in any city long enough to know that answer, much less all the cities.

Here is something interesting. The older generation always, in their reminiscences, seem to convey the impression that things were much simpler in the past and people, as neighbors, were much nicer.

Things have changed and part of it is due to our relentless pursuit for economic growth. In that pursuit, we have made certain decisions, done certain things that has changed our society. Individually we have possibly become different. But hey, you know what, as a society we have more foreigners.

What sort?

Would it be presumptuous to say the sort that go where money can possibly be made.

Seriously, if Singapore is as bad as some say it is, so culturally devoid of any soul, so morally reprehensible that our citizens have no sort of decency and courtesy, so politically backward that no one has any sort of personal freedom, then what would attract scores of foreigners.

I’ll be so bold as to make a few guesses – Money; the chance of economic prosperity; the opportunity to rape another developing country for whatever resources it has.

Don’t kid yourselves. Corporations didn’t come here because they wanted to help Singapore develop. Expats weren’t sent here to help our citizens develop.

Better pay. Better job. Different lifestyle. Tax incentives. Parking of money.

Notice a trend?

Maybe Singapore is so terrible NOW because of all the foreigners. We could possibly have, unfortunately, attracted all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons.

We are all connected.

This reminds more of a little joke:

A guy said to a virgin girl, “I love you a lot. Don’t you love me? What’s wrong with having sex if we love each other.” The girl was moved and lost her virginity to the guy. After the sex, the guy turned to the girl and said, “We have to break up. I can’t marry a girl who is so immoral and not a virgin before marriage.”

Singaporeans, this is not an absolution of our complicity in this matter. It is up to us to set our own priorities. To start changing what can be changed. To start attracting the people who want to be here for the right reasons (we probably have to decide what these right reasons are).

And let this be a lesson to Singaporeans. It is stinging when we open our home to outsiders and they eat our food, steal our cutlery, have their way with our women and then proceed to piss on our beds. It is, to put it mildly, rather rude of them.

Let us not be like that and if you really look in a mirror, we have been rather poor travelers and guests ourselves.

And oh, foreigners who think Singapore has nothing to offer, maybe you got to start hanging out with different groups of locals.

Further Thoughts:

Singapore has always had foreigners. Even my paternal grandfather was a foreigner. The better life for people arriving then would be food, security, shelter and material possessions like clothing. It has remained so. And the new foreigners we are attracting, while different in degree, probably have similar definitions of the better life.

It is up to us then, who have due to the blood, sweat and sacrifices of generations before us, to build a different better life, if we want to, so that generations after us will move up the hierarchy of needs.

Maybe Singapore was never meant to be a country – she should have just remained a port and an administrative outpost. Someone once commented that an individual’s destiny is determined by genes. Similarly the reason for Singapore’s birth will chart an immutable course for us into social and cultural oblivion.

Who cares that Oprah is using Twitter? Guys would probably be more interested in these 10 Porn Stars who use Twitter. In case you are wondering, definitely NSFW.

via:fimoculous

Notes:
There is a post there, somewhere, about porn stars using Twitter from a guy (i.e. me) who grew up in a Christian family. That post would be coming from the same place which led me to make this comment (not verbatim) at BlogOut2009 to litford and patlaw.

“Growing up in a traditional Christian church, I have been conditioned to believe that people with tattoos are deviant and individuals who are desecrating the temple of God and thus must also be morally corrupt.”

In case you are wondering, some of the nicest people I’ve met are lesbians, gays and people covered with tattoos.

Reality doesn’t gel with what is preached from the pulpit and whispered in the dining halls of churches.

My family has been living for about two years without a television. Life goes on as normal (with a little more reading) except when Manchester United has a game to play. Trying to find a place to watch the game has become even harder since moving to Sengkang. Thankfully there are online services like Justin.tv & USTREAM.tv where there are kind souls ( among a lot of spammers ) who stream the games.

But the quality is poor. Yesterday morning, because the video was so pixelated, I didn’t realize the ball had ended up hitting the back of the net until I saw the camera zoom in on Ronaldo’s muted celebration.

Besides the online streaming services, I also rely on Soccernet’s GameCast Live Commentary to follow a game. The guys who are responsible for covering the games are hilarious and more often than not you get gems like the line below.

Anyone know of any good places near Sengkang to watch those early in the morning matches?

There is a Chinese lady standing in the train. She has a slender face with delicate sharp features. She isn’t, by the samples showcased in FHM or Maxim, what one might consider hot. Yet there is something about her that’s undeniably attractive. My eyes are drawn to her. I try to look away, embarrassed by my intrusion.

Maybe it’s the way her eyes dart keenly across the cabin. Everything is worth a pause, a look, a read. There’s a spark in her eyes when something captures her attention. Like a child who has just started exploring the world, everything is wondrous. Her body is overflowing with a joy from being in the now, experiencing the here.

She smiles. It is a small one. Almost hidden. Memory of a precious moment of happiness?

Notes:

The lady on the train was captivating. Something about the way she moved, the way she looked, the way she smiled.

If there is 1 job I really want, it is the job that allows me to go up to different individuals and ask what their life was like just a little while ago and what their life might be a little further on.

Such a job requires one to be obnoxiously presumptuous about one’s position to ask for permission and inordinately arrogant to expect that permission will be granted.

Yet…

Each day I pass strangers on my journey to work. Strangers to me.

But these strangers belong to someone. They have their own stories, each nursing their own sadness, bearing their own burdens, containing their own joy.

I want to know these stories.

Further Notes:

Yesterday, I had to go to Peninsula Plaza for some personal administrative matters. Having grown up in Singapore, I’ve come to associate certain buildings with specific groups of people. Lucky Plaza – Filipinos. Golden Mile – Thais.

Peninsula Plaza to me has always been a focal point for a smorgasbord of groups – eastern European wasn’t one of them. So, while at the lift lobby, when I noticed a gorgeous leggy blonde ( I’m guessing she is Eastern European because I heard her speak in an accent that seemed like a better version of what you might get in a James Bond movie ) I was instantly curious about her business in Peninsula Plaza.

What was she doing there?

Join this site.

Site fills a market need:

Because of how our society works, it is awkward for someone to walk up to another to ask them if they would like to get involved in a Mutually Beneficial Relationship.

A Philips fruit juice machine. After 10 years ( might be longer, but we can’t remember the exact date we bought it ) it is still going strong. Philips, if only you made all your products like this – I’ve got an electric shaver that didn’t perform its job very well.

Anyway, my mom is on a fruit-juice making craze. Yummy …

Shirlyn, who is the lead singer of UnXpected, will be leaving for LA soon.

I often get asked this question, ‘What do you do during the day?’ I guess you guys are curious about whether I have a day job. I have been a full time musician almost all of my music journey, with the exception of a part-time waitressing job in between my last gig somewhere else and the beginning of The UnXpected.

My answer these days, when posed the question, is ‘I practise yoga.’

Shirlyn & UnXpected have made the nights that my gf and I spent at Wala-Wala a special part of our relationship. They aren’t just a band that is on stage playing good music. Each night, they sing songs that transport us back into our past, playing music to guide us through our memories and most importantly, leading us through a night of fun.

Do catch them before she flies off. Their schedule is here.

He gives a preview here. Some thoughts on the app’s link-tracking.

Yongfook’s new project to help track and measure social media campaigns is basically a souped-up URL shortening service focused on helping businesses instead of the average social media user who blogs and twitter.

A URL shortening service basically takes a very long link and makes it into a shorter one. What happens when someone clicks on that shorter link? The service needs to resolve that shorter link into a longer one and redirect the browser to load the original page. During this resolution stage, two key data can be captured: the click and the originating page for the click.

Of course, Google Analytics can be massaged into being about to provide this data, but changes would need to be made in the behavior of the administrators (if not the code) of the publishing and linked sites.

It would be trivial for such a service to allow campaign sites being run by the PR companies to add a DNS entry to point a sub-domain to the service. What this does is that it prevents the creation of obscure shortened URLs that point to potentially malicious sites.

So instead of getting http://urlshort.com/1231872138 which gives no indication of the endpoint, we can get URLs like http://socialmedia.nike.com/awesome_sneakers_campaign.

Of course the latter link isn’t exactly shortened, but you get the drift.

Once the creation of these links pointing to a campaign’s page (i.e. a page promoting a newly launched product ) is done, these little ‘peas’ can be sowed all across the web.

Now, whenever someone clicks on a link, the app can get data to generate beautiful reports.

I guess what happens now is that when PR companies start generating social media releases, the URLs would now all be using a shortened URL or at least a URL generated by the service.

No more http://www.nike.com/campaign but http://socialmedia.nike.com/campaign.

The beautiful thing about this is now PR agencies or any other company for that matter who engages bloggers can start being sure which group of bloggers are worth the engagement. Imagine creating two campaigns for the same site. One to target the ‘in’ bloggers and another to target people on forums.

Each campaign will produce two different links. So, you get http://socialmedia.nike.com/campaign-a and http://socialmedia.nike.com/campaign-b which effectively point to the same site. Now, you use two different links for two different sets of press releases. The service would make it much easier to identify which campaign is more effective.

If a blogger uses the souped up link, data capture is easier and I’ll know which blogger to stop inviting.

If the use of this service catches on in Singapore, we might start seeing which bloggers are the ones ‘not wearing any clothes’.

The idea is a simple and beautiful one. The use of URL shortening services has exploded alongside the growth of social media. Yongfook’s app and other similar ones targeting the same space are using the common behavior of social media users to generate more useful data for companies.

Final thought – This service could potentially even help businesses and PR companies assess the portion of marketing budget that should be spent online. Why? Hint: links aren’t just published online.

A few years ago, a simple yet brilliant idea called the ‘Million Dollar Home Page‘ netted its creator Alex Tew a cool million dollars. Now, Singapore has another similar site trying to cash in on the idea.

However, this time, unlike the many other copycat sites that proliferated the net, the creator is doing this for a good cause.

Named ‘Singapura 123‘, the site aims to sell virtual parts of Singapore to raise funds for the ‘Straits Times School Pocket Money Fund‘