I don’t expect anything to go wrong but as they say, production is the last testing environment.

Yet while I’m physically at work, my mind isn’t there. My mind is busy making plans, being terrified and excited with what is to come.

Bad habits have started being entrenched. In truth, I was learning them early last year after the first project went live. They had been creeping in along with the growing dissatisfaction about the state of affairs with my employment situation. My learning of bad habits did get some respite when I was able to occupy myself with other matters like setting up a continuous integration environment (using Hudson) for the second project.

Now, I find it hard to muster any sort of pride when trying to complete the remaining tasks before I officially handover my duties and my system. The tasks just seem too mundane and serve as a reminder of why I chose to leave. I’m just waiting for time to pass, the days to run down, until I leave.

Bad habits, are, bad. (You probably read that and went, ‘No Shit Sherlock’)

I know the bad habits will come back to haunt me once I focus on ship building full time. It is hard to get an engine going when it has been left idle for too long. I don’t need another reminder of the pain I felt when I entered university after my National Service .

And so, I’m writing this post to remind myself that work, while done under a situation I have grown slightly dissatisfied with, is still work that must be done well, even if I’m going to, borrowing a NS phrase, fuck off after two more months. And if I have to test the waters, I’m going to do it.

Take the Powerpoint presentation I prepared as part of the training for the operations staff. The template I was originally bequeathed was the usual boring, stodgy corporate affair, the kind where you had multiple nested bullet points on 1 slide. The embarrassing sibling of presentations found at Note & Point. The first time I prepared the training material last year, I conformed to the template. This year, I tried to push the boundaries, searching for Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr to pepper throughout the presentation when trying to emphasize some point. I hope it worked.

I did enjoy the reaction of the trainees when they saw something different on the screen.

Just because it has always been that way doesn’t mean it needs to continue that way.

And so, with the two months left, I’m going to do two things the client didn’t ask and didn’t pay for because that’s what need to be done:

1. Proper way to track database migrations.
2. Easy way to prepare release notes.

1. Control the TV with any iOS device. An API to allow development of applications that utilize this new way of controlling the TV.

2. Everything that is on the TV can be easily streamed to any iOS device. Anything on the screen of an iOS device can easily be ‘projected’ onto the TV. API to allow development of such applications.

Not familiar with the current state of the SDK to know if this is already possible. Even if it is, would be cool if these two features were the focus of whatever is being announced tomorrow.

Given the choice between a good hell and a counterfeit paradise, what will people choose? Whatever you say, many people will believe that a counterfeit paradise has got to be better than a good hell. Though at first they recognise that the paradise is bogus, they either don’t dare or wish to expose it as such. As time passes, they forget that it’s not real and actually begin to defend it, insisting that it’s the only paradise in existence.

Democratic one-Party dictatorship, rule of law with social stability as its top priority, an authoritarian government for the people, a state-controlled market economy, fair competition dominated by the central government-owned enterprises, scientific development with Chinese characteristics, self-centered harmonious diplomacy, a multi-racial republic with sovereignty of one people, post-Occidental and ‘post-universal’ thought of the subject, and national rejuvenation of the incomparable Chinese civilization.

Why?

SGEntrepreneurs is a site that posts information about events. The tension in the decision to post about such events is analogous to that of a grocery store owner who might sell cigarettes and alcohol even if he was a teetotalling individual, one key difference being that SGEntrepreneurs does not make money from the posting of such events. So to what extent do you protect the people who may visit your store, or in this case blog. To what extent should the team at SGEntrepreneurs be gatekeepers? Do we always indulge in self-censorship. Do we present noteworthy information even if we disagree with the premise of that information.

And yes, we do believe that the Angels Den Speedfunding event is noteworthy.

What was probably lacking in the initial announcement of the event was a ‘Caveat emptor‘ warning.

I say ‘probably’ because SGEntrepreneurs has rarely, probably even have not, editorialize event listings. In a perfect world, the ‘Related Posts’ plugin would have shown Bernard’s earlier post. In a perfect world, people learning about the event would have done their research, learned lots more information about the event and ‘paying to pitch’ and be equipped to make an informed decision about participating.

We don’t live in a perfect world. Which begs the question, how to balance gate-keeping with breadth of coverage. This is a process we at SGEntrepreneurs are continually working on and this incident is a good reminder on the need to establish clear policies.

Lastly, it is naive to think that no one pays when a start-up pitches to investors.

Someone is always left with the bill.

Those free pitching sessions aren’t free. Well, at least free for the start-ups. Most of the time, the potential investors don’t bear any of the cost. The ones who bear the cost are the sponsors and the government bodies.

Let’s look at government bodies bearing the cost. It is in fact tax payer’s money furthering the dreams of a few. It is tax payer’s money that is paying for access to these investors. Access not only the start-ups benefit from, but access that the bureaucrats can benefit from for their own future private endeavors after leaving government service.

Someone always pay.

I don’t think it should be the start-ups. I don’t think it should be government bodies.

Left as an exercise to the reader to figure out who I think should be paying.

My children are your children, my parents your parents. I would lay down my life to save yours because I knew without a doubt you’d do the same for mine.

This epiphany totally redefined what being a country meant to me.

I thought it would be interesting to run a game where fans make predictions using Twitter and a little application runs in the background to collect these tweets and tabulate success rates.

There are 3 prizes sponsored by Nike football thanks to a friend who helped obtained them.

Definitely not as profitable as betting on ladbrokes, but probably less of a hassle considering that it seems there isn’t an easy way for Singaporeans to deposit money into a ladbrokes account.

So, if you have a Twitter account, and love football, head down to football.onthereddot.com and participate by tweeting the results you expect.

Further notes:

Over the course of coding the site and the backend, I learned a few things about the Twitter API:

Going to update them over the course of the month as I tinker a little more with the scripts.

Back-end script to retrieve data from Twitter was written using python and:

1. The library tweepy as an interface to Twitter’s API.
2. SQLAlchemy to connect and deal with database stuff.

Front-end:

1. Built with Sinatra

He was a revered figured.

There is much to learn from the way Dr Goh lived his life and served the nation.

Rest in peace Dr Goh. Thanks for everything we as Singaporeans get to enjoy because of your efforts.

The Old Guard

1. Dr Goh Keng Swee
2. S. Rajaratnam
3. Lim Kim San
4. Hon Sui Sen
5. Toh Chin Chye

The Malayan Forum.

More to be added.

Notes:

Time to refresh knowledge about the old guard. Time to remember again.

Both of us wrote a post about Fly Entertainment’s luncheon seminar with James Sun.

You can tell whose day job is to sell things and people. Hint, not me.

My post was about the event. Descriptive. While I introduced James, I didn’t sell him. Compare what I wrote to Daniel’s pitch on why you would want to learn from James.

Why should you listen to this 32-year old young punk, you ask? Let’s see:
* He’s founder and chairman of location search engine GeoPage.com,
* James’ rubbed shoulders with Donald Trump and Barack Obama,
* He started his own investment firm at 18 with US$5,000 and became a self-made millionaire at age 22, and
* Did I mention he’s good-looking? (Sorry ladies, he’s taken)

If you’re interesting in winning tickets for the seminar, Young Upstarts and SGEntrepreneurs are both running competitions.

Side note:It is also now possible to not just write an essay about marketing, but easily test out what was learned and measure the effectiveness of what was taught in the textbooks, lectures and tutorials.

Got to love the Internet.

The blogger will also be invited to a series of activities. For example, bloggers may be invited to a cooking class. Each blogger in this program is given the chance to collect sets of badges. The ‘Cooking’ badge could be part of the lifestyle mastery set. Once a blogger collects a complete set, they are eligible for a prize. Some of the badges can be awarded by the results of polls. For example, after the cooking class, there could be a poll – ‘Do you think the blogger deserves a cooking class badge?’. Since in this case, the readers of the blog cannot taste the food, the cooking teacher’s input will be available as additional information above what the blogger posts on his or her blog.

No rant except this.

With hindsight, if the gatekeepers had been better, the initial idea could have been tuned to something better, and currently existing in this world.

I think what we are missing for our startups are mentors who can help polish ideas. It seems we are getting there with a few of the new initiatives.

I’m excited.

So if I leave my job then, I will waste not only my time, but lose any form of compensation.

So, should I postpone resignation just so that SAF doesn’t waste my time on the cheap?

And don’t get me wrong. NS is important. It is just that I’m going back to redo my ATEC test, a test that was failed because of the incompetence of people other than the men. And frankly, I don’t think those other people have upped their competence at all during the interim period to make the exercise any more useful than it was last year.

FUCK.