Ian On The Red Dot

Came across this blog. What do you think of these individuals and the amount of money they are making?

What do you think of this industry?

I just don’t get it. Say you have an insurance policy. You have been paying the premium for a good number of years. Say you suddenly need money. You have a few options, two of them:

1. Terminate the policy and get as much money out as possible.

2. Take a loan from the insurance company at 8% interest.

Now, the amount of money you take out is equal to the amount you have initially put in. I don’t get why I am paying interest to use my own money. Ok. I think I get the marketing spill - I’m still covered. The policy isn’t prematurely terminated so I still have the chance that when it matures, I make ‘obscene’ amount of gains.

But I don’t buy the argument that this is the same thing when you take a loan from the bank.

It isn’t.

Usually when you take a loan from the bank, the amount is significantly greater than the amount you have deposited with the bank. You are taking a loan for an amount of money you don’t have yet.

With taking the loan from the insurance company, what is happening is you are taking out the same amount of money you have already put into the policy in the hope for large amounts of money in the future. The future is never a guarantee.

I understand and appreciate the need for insurance. However, if you have more than 1 insurance policy, I think it might make sense to close one of them and take a one time penalty instead of a yearly recurring penalty in the form of interest.

Sometimes I wonder about the advice FAs dispense.

I was bathing last night when I remembered a competition Nadnut had shared about on her blog. Apparently, you can win a HP TouchSmart by,

Just be the MOST creative/innovative/productive/interesting answer (and the fastest too!) to the following question: “What will your life be like with HP TouchSmart?”

I had read about the competition sometime ago but didn’t have any ideas to write. Until last night in the toilet.

I wanted to add some pictures to the comment but apparently you can’t leave pictures in comments. I wanted to get my nephew to be the star of the photos but realized I didn’t have time to go to his dad’s house to get those photos.

So, the trusty Flickr was called to the rescue.

Before the HP TouchSmart:

Picture attributed to mnScouser.

Picture attributed to mknowles.

Picture attributed to ctoverdrive.

With the HP TouchSmart:

Picture attributed to chesh2000pro. Picture is actually of Microsoft surface but same thing lah.

Anyway, this is my comment.

Hands with different colors,
Painting pictures.

Trees, rainbows, home,
Of father, mother and me.
Until it is time to rest …
Carefully, lovingly, mom
Hangs those pictures on the wall.

Smiling now, with my own gift from God,
Memories like those I will always cherish.
And with this new computer,
Resting comfortably on the table top,
Touching it, we laugh, creating new memories, forever to cherish.

Again, dedicated to same friend. The six kinds of drunks.

1. The Horny Drunk

This one is pretty easy to spot. Usually it is a guy who tries to grinds his crotch against anything that moves. Damn irritating. Thinks he is charming the ladies. He isn’t. Hands like octopus.

Rare occasions we get a girl like this. We hope for such occasions. She will dance wildly on the floor. Watch the wolves descend upon her. Not a pretty sight.

2. The Sleepy Drunk

The kind that just rests at some corner or on some friend’s lap. Kills the night for at least one person.

Famous words from such drunks:

“Is it time to go yet?”

3. The Laughing Drunk

The kind that laughs at anything and everything. Person pukes. Laughs. People Fight. Laughs. If girl, makes every guy feels like a stud because they think they are bloody witty. Can get extremely irritating if she cackles. Can be cute if she giggles.

If it is a guy, we just think he is retarded.

4. The Hyper Drunk

The energizer bunny of the group. Bouncing here, and there, and everywhere, we are the Gummi bears.

We always wait for such drunks to think they can dance and jump onto the platform. If only there was better lighting for the videos soon to be posted on YouTube.

5. The Angry Drunk

The most dangerous kind of drunk to be around. Belligerent. Friends have to keep watch on person and make sure nothing violent happens.

Famous words:

“CB. You stare what stare. Want to fight is it. CB”

6. The Melancholic and sometimes Philosophical Drunk

If guy, can be extremely sexy to some girls. Will just sit there and look melancholic. If musically inclined and if in right location, guy will whip out guitar and start playing songs. Girls will swoon.

If girl, guys get chance to show sensitive side by listening. Chance to put arm around shoulder and give gentle squeeze and stroke hair. Use chance wisely.

Famous words:

“Why are we here. Sigh. What’s the point of life. Sigh. Why love? Sigh.”

So, which kind are you? I’m three of them.

Looking at the picture of Jessica Alba below, I have decided that I will deliberately stay away from looking at any pictures of her for the next few months. If not, the fantasy is just going to die…

记得我在读书的时候,大多数的时候我会用上面的那句话开始文章,所以今天第一次用华文来写就用这句做标提.

Whoa. It took some time to blog the above line in Mandarin. I’ve been thinking about doing it for some time and today, I finally learned how to activate Chinese writing for my laptop. I am trying to make a concerted effort to practice my Mandarin. Been forcing myself to converse with my colleagues in Mandarin instead of them accommodating me by using English. My Mandarin is rusty so things have started slowly and rather badly. One of the problems is that even when I want to write in Mandarin, I think in English and then translate to Mandarin. Very inefficient.

Anyway, for those who don’t know what the header means, it is - ‘One windy and hot afternoon, ‘little’ Ming…’. The phrase was a popular cliche phrase that I would use a little too often in my Mandarin compositions. The Chinese version of ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’.

So, as I attempt to blog a bit more in Chinese, do forgive me for mangling the language.

Do the words ‘alternate‘ and ‘alternative‘ mean different things to you?

Both these words have this definition:

allowing a choice

But do you also associate the word with ‘alternative’ with this meaning:

pertaining to unconventional choices

where ‘unconventional’ means:

not conforming to accepted rules or standards

When you use the word ‘alternative’ in describing something, does it carry both meanings at the same time?

What does this have anything to do with energy?

Earth day has just passed, oil prices have been rising, and the Rambling Librarian has blogged about energy.

When you hear about alternative energy, do you think they are the suicide girls of the energy world.

If so, does it affect how we approach the research, commercialization and use of alternate sources for energy?

When I was in Primary School, one of the first things we learned in science about nature and the world is the concept of cycles. My favorite example was the water cycle. It was a really beautiful system. It has mechanisms to control the amount of water moving through the system. It is a sustainable and self correcting system that ensures that life on this planet gets the water it needs. The system is closed. What is used isn’t lost. It is just in a different form and there is a way to get it back to a form that it can be used again.

Our current energy system dependent on oil isn’t like that.

Oil is a by product of earth’s history and age. It isn’t something the planet started with.

Now, I don’t really know what to make of God. Sometimes, he seems to be a mass murderer. Sometimes, he seems to be a guy who hates amputees. Other times, he seems pretty cool - I mean, come on, his son Jesus turns water to wine. How can you hate a guy like that?

So, I don’t really know much about God, but I do believe, if there is a God, then he isn’t someone who does things for no reason.

So, if he is going to put us here, I think he would have made it such that the Earth at its initial stage would be enough to take care of us and our energy needs which he would have seen. We wouldn’t need to depend on waste material which takes years to change and take a form which is useful to us.

Wind energy, solar energy, Geothermal energy - all these are sources that already exist from the start - we just need to know how to harness it. 70% of the world covered with water. Our distance away from the sun. All these must have a purpose. It can’t possibly be some arbitrary value if you believe in a God.

So, if you are a Christian, or you believe in some form of omnipresent, omniscient, loving God then alternate sources of energy aren’t really suicide girls alternative. In fact, these sources of energy should be considered the actual sources of energy we should have used all along - the natural choices, the only choices, the alpha and the omega in our energy considerations.

Of course, if you don’t believe in God / gods….

So, there is a lot of noise going on at Ping.sg about gay bashers, intolerance towards gays, intolerance towards those who are intolerant towards gays, intolerance towards those who are intolerant about those who are intolerance about gays …

This post isn’t about any of that although by following the conversation regarding ShadowFox and the offending post led me to this gem which highlights the problems with contextual advertising on blogs and possibly automatic endorsements of brands based on Facebook activity.

This was found on the blog of a Christian blogger who is against homosexuality.

NOTE: I am just deliberately being obtuse with the post title.

Yesterday, Owen Hargreaves scored the winning goal against Arsenal from a free kick just outside the penalty box. I think I’ve only seen him take two free kicks and he has scored from both. I’m pretty sure he must have taken more than 2 free kicks during this season - he has taken 28 shots this season - but whatever that number is, it is less than the number of free kicks taken by Ronaldo.

Cristiano Ronaldo has taken 230 shots and a good number of them are free kicks. He has scored a couple of sensational goals from free kicks but the question is whether he is scoring as much as he should to justify him being the first choice free kick taker.

Based on memory from watching the games, I think Owen has a better scoring ratio from free kicks than Ronaldo.

Which brings up an interesting question.

Which is the better player? The one who insists on taking the shots and scores a higher number of goals but with a low success ratio or the one who chooses to take only kicks from certain ranges and angles and scores with a higher success ratio.

I think you need both kind of players in a team but when does the first one start suffocating the second?

The New York Review of Books has an article by Tony Judt on history and how mis-remembering the last century and not reflecting enough on it is causing some of the problems we have now.

First paragraph:

The twentieth century is hardly behind us but already its quarrels and its achievements, its ideals and its fears are slipping into the obscurity of mis-memory. In the West we have made haste to dispense whenever possible with the economic, intellectual, and institutional baggage of the twentieth century and encouraged others to do likewise. In the wake of 1989, with boundless confidence and insufficient reflection, we put the twentieth century behind us and strode boldly into its successor swaddled in self-serving half-truths: the triumph of the West, the end of History, the unipolar Ameri-can moment, the ineluctable march of globalization and the free market.

About how we expose our youth to history:

But such official commemoration does not enhance our appreciation and awareness of the past. It serves as a substitute, a surrogate. Instead of teaching history we walk children through museums and memorials. Worse still, we encourage them to see the past— and its lessons—through the vector of their ancestors’ suffering. Today, the “common” interpretation of the recent past is thus composed of the manifold fragments of separate pasts, each of them (Jewish, Polish, Serb, Armenian, German, Asian-American, Palestinian, Irish, homosexual…) marked by its own distinctive and assertive victimhood.

About contrasting views on war:

With the exception of the generation of men who fought in World War II, the United States thus has no modern memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries. But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead. In continental Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians. Yugoslavia recorded over half a million civilian deaths, Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million. These aggregate figures include some 5.8 million Jewish dead. Further afield, in China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.

As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies —seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance.

About torture:

This abstracting of foes and threats from their context—this ease with which we have talked ourselves into believing that we are at war with “Islamofascists,” “extremists” from a strange culture, who dwell in some distant “Islamistan,” who hate us for who we are and seek to destroy “our way of life”—is a sure sign that we have forgotten the lesson of the twentieth century: the ease with which war and fear and dogma can bring us to demonize others, deny them a common humanity or the protection of our laws, and do unspeakable things to them.

These excerpts are just here as my notes. Please do go over to the site and read the full article.