Ian On The Red Dot

I think the finance industry is just one big system to fleece money from the masses to funnel it to the few. It is a game setup from the start to benefit only a few players. There is no such thing as a level playing field.

I took Economics for my A Levels. I did well enough in the first year when the subject material was covering microeconomics related stuff like marginal utility to be offered a S Paper in Economics. I thought Economics was something I had interest in until I started studying macroeconomics and attending S Paper Econs lectures.

I won’t say I lost interest. Rather, I tried to run away and hide from the system we were living in. I wanted to go under a rock and not try to understand what I felt was a totally screwed up system. I didn’t want to face the facts about the system we were in. It was scary stuff.

A lot of things just didn’t make sense to me then. I could understand what the textbooks were saying. I could understand what the S Paper lecturers were trying to highlight. But what really got to me was how in the end, the individual was powerless to change a system that is so messed up that it has led to excesses and suffering. I couldn’t fathom how we even allowed ourselves to be led down a road that was powered by the greed and fear of humans, a system that pandered to the worse in humans.

It was only when I started working, and even then slightly apprehensively, that I began to regain interest in such stuff.

I can’t run away from this system. I am tangled in this web. I probably can’t change it. I jolly well better learn as much I can about this system and understand it, if not to profit from it, at least not to be made a patsy.

Doing nothing is a position taken.

And so, yesterday, I got myself a CDP account. I don’t intend to trade, speculate or invest. Yet.

But to me, getting the account is like getting a driver’s license. You get it even if you don’t expect to use it because you never know when it might come in handy.

I got it as an acknowledgment that whether I like it or not, this is a game (i.e. financial machinations of this world) I have to play, either as an active participant or a defensive one.

Anyway, something worried me when I was opening the account. Half of the people at the customer service counters or waiting for their turn were elderly folks around the age of my grandma. I’m obviously using guesstimation here.

I’m not sure why they were there. They could be there for a myriad of reasons but it just worries me that the elderly is involved in anything related to the stock market. It just doesn’t seem like the wise thing to do considering they have a shorter time horizon.

What was also interesting was how some of these elderly folks were accompanied by younger looking individuals. I would guess that these individuals were around my age. I have my own conclusions about these individuals and none of it is good.

Anyway, yeah. Yesterday was one more step.

There are days when you get careless. You let your mind and thoughts wander down a particular road. You start seeing the world through cracked lenses - everything good fades into the background, every mistake, every transgression takes center-stage.

You don’t want to be ungrateful. You don’t want to be angry.

Yet you can’t help it.

The gates open and every demon, every raw twisted emotion is unleashed.

You start making distinctions to justify the turmoil in your heart.

Doing your duty is different from making sacrifices.

Inconveniencing yourself is different from making sacrifices.

You scream - you cannot abdicate your responsibilities by emotional blackmail.

You cannot say we’ve been spoiled and a better child would be less demanding.

You cannot be the one demanding more from us.

You can actually. But if we meet those expectations or even exceed it, you cannot turn around and say we have no right to not walk in step with you anymore when we are ahead.

We should both expect better from each other. We should be iron that sharpen iron.

But you chose us, we didn’t choose you. The onus is for you to lead. Be our leaders. Our mentors. Don’t demand our respect. Earn it.

Yes, we are older. Maybe even more mature. That does not mean we must pander to your emotional needs.

That sadness is something we all must bear.

I will always have fond memories of Island Creamery. My gf and I first discovered the place when it was just a little corner shop in Serene Center. We had just started dating at that time or in the lingo of this generation, we had just gotten attached. The first flavor I tried from Island Creamery was Apple Crumble and I was hooked. Hooked!

But liking the ice-cream was just one reason why I used to like the place. I would even say it was the least important reason.

The main reason was it fitted into a nice narrative that I told myself about my relationship with the gf and that period of our lives. We had just made the decision to date officially and were starting to learn more about each other as individuals. We were in an exploratory phase and had stumbled across a small growing store which had delicious ice-cream. It was our little secret (not really, but at that time, not many people knew about the place so … ), a place far from the madding crowd where we could share an ice-cream, talk and at least on my part, gaze at her with dopey puppy eyes.

Then they moved to occupy a bigger space.

Things didn’t immediately change. The place was still quiet, still felt like our little secret.

Then, for want of a better phrase, the tipping point came.

Students flocked there. Families descended on it. Couples drove down to get ice-cream.

I knew it was over once a NUS friend who stayed in the East said she had gone there with other course-mates and it was one of their favorite hang-out places.

Island Creamery was no longer a little secret that just belonged to us and to the people who lived around the area.

Recently, another place I like feels like it is changing. This place is slightly different. I haven’t been going there until recently but in the space of 7 months, there seems to be a change in the demographics of the patrons.

This time I have contributed to the ‘problem’. I’ve been inviting my friends to go down to that place.

I know it is silly. It is so conflicting. You want a place to do well. You like a place so much that you want to share its food and the experience with your friends. Yet you still don’t want it to be so mainstream.

You want it to stay the way it was - cosy, intimate and not have it become some place where every time you go, it is a ‘reunion’ with other people.

You don’t want people you hate to be associated with or those who you loathe to find any similarities with to start identifying with a treasured haunt.

You want a place far from the madding crowd.

Via tomorrow.sg, I found this video of a guy Matt who has been traveling around the world and videotaping himself dancing at notable locations in those countries.

I love videos like this that remind us of all the common threads that bind us as humans and how dance and music is so linked with what it means to be human.

Matt’s website is here. His wikipedia entry is here.

Matt is a 31-year-old deadbeat from Connecticut who used to think that all he ever wanted to do in life was make and play videogames. Matt achieved this goal pretty early and enjoyed it for a while, but eventually realized there might be other stuff he was missing out on. In February of 2003, he quit his job in Brisbane, Australia and used the money he’d saved to wander around Asia until it ran out.
One of my greatest regret about my university life is that I didn’t travel overseas enough. In fact, I only traveled once. It was a combination of mismanagement of finances to thinking I didn’t have enough to travel to where I wanted to go and not doing something about that.

Wanting something is really different from desiring something. I wanted to travel. Not desire. I think that is slowing changing.

Anyway, last week learned of this book “Honeymoon with my Brother” through a tweet by Guy Kawasaki.

What do you do when your fiancée dumps you so close to the wedding that the flowers, food, and guests are already en-route?

“You should go ahead and have it,” counseled my brother Kurt. “Your friends will be there. The wine will be there. Why let everything go to waste?”

So I did. I had a full wedding weekend with a golf tournament on Friday, a rehearsal dinner on Saturday, and even a mock wedding ceremony on Sunday. Of the 150 invited guests, 75 turned up — my entire side of the aisle. They only thing missing was the bride.

I then decided to take Kurt on my pre-paid Costa Rican honeymoon. We canceled the champagne and roses, and promised not to carry each other over any thresholds. My head was a cyclone, as you can imagine. I was depressed, angry, confused, suspicious, and even a little bit relieved.

But during the trip, a strange thing happened. I realized having my life turn upside-down might not be such a bad thing after all. Kurt and I did something we hadn’t done in decades — talk, at length, about lives, frustrations, and fears. It felt meaningful and rewarding to re-bond with a brother I barely knew.

So, Kurt and I decided to continue the honeymoon. We quit our jobs, sold our homes, gave away our clothes, threw our cell phones into the trash, and continued to honeymoon for two years and 53 countries!

I don’t think humans were ever meant to be static creatures. Modern work has domesticated us. We were meant to be out there, moving, traveling, wandering. I think something dies inside when we just go through the daily cycle of traveling to work and then traveling home.

That’s one reason why I loathe settling down - getting that HDB, that car, that dog….

We were not meant to live like that. Working just to pay off that flat, those wheels, those bills.

Like my sister would say, we are in cages, it is just that ours look nicer.

I once loaned a friend $2000 to buy a computer. It was in university and she called me asking if I could help her with the amount because she wanted to collect her laptop. Being a close friend, I acquiesced to the request. A short while later, we had a major argument and she offered to return the money.

I refused.

I refused because I feared the return of the money was a way for her to delineate where our friendship would never be the same again if not totally ended.

When I passed her the money, it was not as a gift. I expected that one day when I really needed $2000, she would be able to help me by providing that sum. Yet it wasn’t really a loan because I had hoped the money would be with her as indefinitely as possible - it was my childish way of hoping that no matter what happened with our friendship, I would still have a tenuous place in her life.

There was another friend who I covered for whenever we went out. We weren’t exactly dating and she paid lip-service to the concept of going Dutch by always saying, “I’ll pay you back later”. Of course, later never happened.

I had a bitter fallout with this second friend and in the aftermath of the fallout, I asked for a certain amount of money she had promised to return.

It was a most ungentlemanly thing to do. Here is the thing - each time I paid ‘first’, I knew then at that moment the money was gone. And I did it willingly because I considered her a friend, I understood her financial situation and I enjoyed her company. In my bitterness, I behaved poorly.

I always look back at that moment and reflect on why I reacted that way. And I realized this - there is a subconscious tabulation that goes on in a lot of us. The better ones among us have risen beyond such petty considerations but for me, and I think it would not be presumptuous to say for most of us as well, we are constantly struggling with the tallying that indicates if we are losing out in any relationship.

When a particular relationship ends or if we think it is going to end, we want to ensure we don’t leave it any poorer than we started.

No one wants to be made to look like a chum. It doesn’t matter if someone did it intentionally or accidentally, we always tend to assume the worse that we have been played like a fiddle.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this - like what my parents always advised, never lend what you cannot give. I know some people will say that the value of the amount is important. I disagree. When does the value become too big? When it hits the thousands? When it hits the hundreds? Each of us have different comfort levels to how much we are willing to lend which to me is the same as how much we are willing to give.

So whatever the amount, the same principle applies - never lend what you cannot give.

That however is just one side of the equation. As friends, we must learn never to accept what we cannot return, even if it is a gift. Accept gifts graciously, and always be mindful that as a friend, we should reciprocate. No one should ever dictate how we reciprocate but as friends we need to be aware that not all gifts are equal and not everyone has the same expectations of a friendship.

If we cannot meet those expectations, we should graciously decline no matter how much the giver insists.

The thing is I think sympathy for the lady in the recent kerfuffle changed when the issue of money was brought up because what was happening suddenly fitted into the worldview a lot of us, especially the males and me included, have about women.

We have become so cynical that we immediately assume the worse of the lady and also the guy.

That worldview is that all women are cock-teasing, attention-seeking, emotional-manipulators that try to squeeze money, energy and time out of us guys and string us along when they know they can milk us.

The other worldview reflected was that while all guys may be horny bastards who think only with their dicks, there is the certain (?naive) hope that it was possible for a guy to help a girl just because he wanted to (and felt it was the right chivalrous thing to do) and not because he expected any reciprocation in love or lust and that a girl could be free to treat a guy how she wants, no matter how it might seem like signals, without her having to restrain herself and tell herself that she got to treat guys differently - Ladies want the freedom while leaving the onus of handling her actions totally to the guys.

Neither of these worldviews can be said to be wrong. Each of us are defined very much by our own experiences and that has shaped our worldview.

The truth is that there are individuals who exist on the extremes of both worldviews. There are guys who are horny bastards who will take advantage of girls whenever they can. There are girls who are cock-teasing, gold-digging sluts who know how to use their sexuality to manipulate guys. There are girls who are totally clueless about what might be appropriate and gender-specific behavior. There are guys who are totally inept with women that if Jessica Alba stripped in front of them, they will wonder if there is a hidden camera meant to play a joke or who will blush and quickly grab a towel to cover her up to protect her dignity.

Most of us just fall somewhere in between.

Sadly, when we were born, our birth certificates didn’t come with a play-by-play walk-through on how to circumnavigate the quagmire that is human relationships.

We are all trying to make sense of the rules. Unfortunately, we all play by different rules. It is hard to figure out who is playing with which rule and a lot of times, our judgment is clouded by our hope of what rules other people are playing by.

It is also a human weakness to look for the people who have given us the most attention in our times of need when everyone else seems to forsake us even when we cannot reciprocate their level of attention and kindness. People get led on not because two people go out as friends but because one asks another to do more than what should be asked for when there is an imbalance in feelings.

Are we taking advantage of these givers or are these givers using us to validate their own place in the world?

There are no winners or losers, only victims in this tragic comedy we call life.

In the end, when the dust settles and the mob rides away to the next town and another spectacle, what really remains is just two people who have been hurt and are still grappling with their place in the world.

I self-invited myself to an event organized by Ogilvy to showcase the latest short film commissioned by MCYS (i.e. Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports). Brian (who should never be hired as a door-bitch because he is just too welcoming) was gracious enough to let me attend the event.

I am glad I did.

We got to watch a selection from the body of work by director Yasmin Ahmad (who has a blog here) and I understand why she is an award-winning director.

Films aren’t just meant to saturate our senses with sights and sounds or impress us with special effects. Correction. Good and memorable films (which is different from blockbuster entertaining) don’t just saturate our senses with sights and sounds and impress us with special effects. Good and memorable films lead us on an emotional journey - they remind us what it means to be human and evoke strong emotions that help us cope, appreciate and understand our lives on earth.

I got all the good stuff from her work.

My favorite is this commercial ‘Tan Hon Ming in Love’.

I really like this kid - the innocent, authentic, unbridled expressions and responses were a joy to watch. It reminded me of what it was like to be young and untarnished by the expectations and ‘rules’ of society.

The final message was a powerful one phrased in a simple question.

The film that was commissioned is embedded below.

I really like this short film.

For one thing, it didn’t seem like the typical family campaign commercial. I haven’t seen all the commercials ever put out by my government but my impression has always been that the government likes to showcase only the idealized version of a family - 2 parents, 2.something siblings and 1 dog.

The film doesn’t have such a family. It just consists of a father and a daughter. The family seems incomplete and thus imperfect and the girl a little spoiled yet I think it captures the way we experience our family relations for most, if not all, of us.

For one thing, the way we experience our relationships with the members of our family isn’t a one-to-many thing. It is still very much a one-to-one thing. How I feel about my father is largely based on what happens between me and him and not how he has been an awesome husband to my mom or how he has also been a long-suffering dad to my sis (and me). When we talk about love in the family, it isn’t always a group-hug experience. In this film, the mother has been removed such that only one relationship is in focus and in this one relationship I am able to see a little of my relationship with my dad, a little of my relationship with my mom and ultimately the love that is in my family.

Yasmin Ahmad said that a lot of times when we like something, we find reasons to justify why we like it. That might be the case with this film however I feel that Yasmin choosing that flat to be the family’s home was an inspired choice which allowed us to easier frame our perspectives and hang our own emotions. I don’t think she chose the setting to target at any particular demographic or thug any particular heartstrings but I really like the flat chosen and I think my peers will too.

I don’t think it would be presumptuous to say that for most in my generation and our parents, that flat was very much the setting for our early family experience. We were the generation that grew into prosperity on the back of the efforts of those before us. It is my generation that are the ones who are now at the age of getting married and starting a family and I think this film has the potential to speak to a lot of us.

It did for me.

The film reminded me of the most poignant memory I have of my parents and their love for me.

The first major purchase my parents got when we moved to our first home was an encyclopedia set. I can still remember sitting on the sparse living room floor with the salesperson showing the World Book set of encyclopedias. We had nothing and out of the so many things my parents could have bought for themselves or to make the house nicer, they chose instead to buy a World Book encyclopedia set. We think nothing of buying an item that costs a few thousand dollars now but I can only imagine the sacrifice that was made to ensure they could buy that set of books in the hope that my future would be better.

At that time, our home had next to nothing. Yet in its emptiness, the hope that filled the flat was tangible. We believed life was good and could be better.

Things have changed for a lot of us in my generation. The focus has shifted. Looking at this film, I believe it can be a good starting point, if not a valuable addition, to the conversation each of us have within ourselves as we grapple with our, for some of us strained, relationships with our parents and find the direction for the rest of our lives.

The informal Q&A session was a hoot. Yasmin Ahmad is definitely the sort of person you want at any party.

Her advice to be a good film-maker - don’t try to control everything, produce a good script and have excellent casting.

She also can be counted as a member of the unofficial Vivian Balakrishnan fan club which my sis and mom are part of. Cute and cool are words that have been used to describe him.

I also managed to meet mintea, rinaz (the one with the cute avatar) and juzzywuzzy. I especially enjoyed the jokes juzzywuzzy shared with Brian and me. Which is the smelliest creature in the sea?

I watched The Incredible Hulk last night and it was awesome. Much better than the first one with Eric Bana - there were no pretensions about creating a movie with philosophical musings, just raw brutal exciting action.

The two comic heroes that I first fell in love with were Superman and Batman. Till today, Batman is my all time favorite hero. Why? Because in the Tower of Babel JLA story arc, Batman was shown to have devised ways to defeat every single hero in the JLA which had a pretty impressive roster. Also, in the Marvel versus DC storyline, it was the two humans who trained themselves to be heroes (i.e. Captain America and Batman) that saved the day and not aliens or people who were ‘accidentally’ blessed or divinely bestowed with powers and abilities. Lastly, I love heroes teetering on the dark side especially one who said, “I don’t believe in killing but I have no problems causing extreme pain”.

At the end of the Hulk movie, there will be a cameo from Tony Stark pitching to General Ross about the Avengers. If you have watched the Ironman movie and stayed till the end of the credits, you will have seen the scene where Colonel Fury approached Stark about the Avengers Initiative.

Totally awesome. The next couple of years will be good times for comic book fans hoping to see more movie adaptations.

Now, you might be wondering why I brought up Batman and Superman. The reason is because DC has always been trying to get two movies made - ‘Superman versus Batman’ and ‘Justice League Of America’. The problem with the approach taken by DC was that they wanted to make a movie where we would be introduced to the characters for the first time.

So, the first time you see our generation’s Green Lantern will be in Justice League Of America. The problem with such movies is that the roster of heroes is greater than one which usually means there won’t be enough time to establish the back stories of these characters and make them more than just another run-of-the-mill hero with powers. It is hard for the audience who are not fans to establish any sort of positive connection with the characters and root for them - the characters become bland.

Marvel is taking the right approach. One movie at a time to establish the characters’ back story can create a connection with the audience. Each movie about an individual hero like Ironman and Hulk hints at the bigger movie to come and are all threads of a bigger, more rich tapestry.

Basically Marvel is creating the Marvel universe with each movie. DC isn’t. Now, they might have a chance with Superman versus Batman with two very strong actors in Christian Bale and Brandon Routh in the titular roles for their individual story arcs. I’m surprised they don’t seem to be working to thread these narratives together.

I always cringed when people said Marvel was better than DC because I loved Wayne and Kent. Yet as I read more of the comics especially the older ones and see what Marvel is doing with the movies, I’m being to get won over that Marvel might be a better story telling company. Fan boys flame away!

So Marvel is teaching us something. It is good to have a view of the bigger picture. However, the execution of it can and probably should be done in smaller parts that ultimately can fit together. Good software engineers know this concept of modularization. A great business, a great website, a great online service, a great life - all can be reached with similar principles.

Final note - Those who were disappointed with how the X-Men story arc ended may have hope that the Avengers movie could revive the X-Men’s storyline with a cross-over.

Also, if the Hulk and Abomination were fighting in New York City, where was Spiderman?

Limetouch shares what he hates about programming. Shotgun follows with a blog post sharing his take. Now, it is my turn.

Here is what I really hate about programming - it is impossible to share the satisfaction of what I do with my gf. I can spend a day trying to fix a critical bug and gain immense satisfaction from it but I cannot share that with my gf. Over the phone, she asks me, “How was your day?”. What can I say? I have a wonderful company with zero politics or at least there is nothing I am aware of. I enjoy working with the mates in my team. I got a wonderful office to work in with an awesome view of the sea. Only thing I can really complain about is the code I need to write.

So how do I tell my gf this:

Oh…you know, the team faced an issue together with trying to figure out why we couldn’t get the correct calculated values from a certain set of data. Oh..then we realized that we were coding our interfaces and abstract classes all wrongly which was leading to confusion when extending the classes and implementing the interfaces. Some…blah blah blah… We realized the database structure was not extensible and blah blah blah.

Seriously, damn unsexy.

Heng I got gf already. Imagine dating and having to tell your date about your job.

Minus 10000 points straight away.

Sometimes people just do not want to know what the world really is like. We always hope that human nature is better than we think it is. Then you read something like this about a site like this. Not that it is anything new but the blatantness of it is just crass.

Then you read about other people salaries over here.

Makes you want to go to a corner and cry.

Cry to thank God, Jesus, karma or whoever is orchestrating this whole performance that I managed to find a gf who while not immune to the worst in human nature or innocent of shenanigans at least accepts me for who I am, what I am and how much I have and is willing to walk hand-in-hand with me to build a future together.

I always believed that every man should at least have one vice. I am overachieving in this aspect. Recently, ok, this morning I woke up thinking about the myriad of bad habits I have and decided that a particular one has been stealing too many days of my life. I’m going to start trying to quit this one. I don’t think you ever manage to quit a bad habit. What actually happens is you just prolong the gap between slips until one day the gap is your whole life.

I remember this article on Jerry Seinfeld’s productivity secret - don’t break the chain.

So I’m going to start my own chain over here. I’ve started a spreadsheet. Each day that I do not slip up and engage in my bad habit, I’ll add a green cell. Each day I do slip up, is a red cell. The idea is that I must not break the green chain.

I’m putting it up here for everyone to see as a sort of public declaration that this is a habit I am determined to quit.