Quick trip to IT Show 2009

It's the first day of IT Show 2009, and there was a huge turnout of eager shoppers looking for good deals. Being a Thursday afternoon, you'll expect the crowd to be a bit thinner. I expected to be in and out within an hour as I'm a focussed shopper, but the snaking queues almost began the moment I stepped out of City Hall MRT. After about an hour and a half I finally completed my re-contract and purchase of Nokia's XpressMusic 5800. There was a minor hiccup when a staff did not give me free earphones worth 139 bucks, but thankfully it was resolved promptly. Finally, I'm back to owning a camera-phone after more than 3 years!

There's many interesting IT products in the show, like ACRyan's Playon! DVR. I own an older version of ACRyan HD recorder, but the new version is on steroids! Expanded connectivity options (wired and wireless), video-stream playback capability and the ability to record analog and digital TV certainly makes it very attractive.

UOB credit card owners looking for a new camera can check out Harvey Norman for the Fujifilm Finepix F60FD. It's 349 (originally 499) after trade-in with ANY camera (including those using film) and you get a whole lot of freebies (mini-tripod, 8GB SD card, etc) just by swiping your card.

Overall it's a pretty nice shopping experience. With lots of stuff at discounted prices and with cute show girls manning some of the booths, even the congestion can be forgiven :)

拭目以待 - "未来不是梦"主题曲 ("The Dream-Catchers")

最近在追“未来不是梦”，觉得题材相当有趣，更有趣的是拍摄的动机。主题曲相当特别，是我近期来最喜欢的歌曲。


歌词 by 小寒

http://blog.omy.sg/xiaohan/2009/02/02/我用悲觀去樂觀著。/

Singapore IT sector resilient against current recession?

With all the news about retrenchments  locally and abroad and how hard it is for people to land jobs, I'm seeing quite a lot of new faces in and around my workplace, quite a number of them fresh grads. And among my friends and colleagues, quite a few have switched jobs. My mailbox is full of alerts from job portals about new opportunities. So amidst all the doom and gloom, I'm just wondering, is the local IT sector more resilient against the current recession compared to the other industries?

陈绮贞 - 太阳 ( Cheer Chen - Immortal )

陈绮贞的新专辑发行了！那天听朋友说了之后我马上到唱片行去买。933强力推选，但我是他的粉丝，没人推荐也会照买无误。真的觉得这张专辑非常好听，“太阳”和“烟火”属于摇滚，令我情绪高昂也想跟着呐喊。“距离”和“下个星期去英国”则属于清新民谣，听了让我轻松许多。

原来新加坡有绮贞的后援会，太棒了！而且值得注意的是，她将在四月四号在室内体育馆举办演唱会！太棒了吧？

Rynten Okzaki's "Mai"

A beautiful, melodic piece by Rynten Okzaki

Thoughts on starting the school day later

I was reading the Straits Times the other day about the positive benefits about starting the school day later.  Basically, students would perform better academically. However, as bus operators who ferry students to schools also ferry worker to offices/factories, they pick up the students on the same schedule as before, Schools that have pushed back their start times find some students still arriving at the same time and these students have to endure a longer wait. The articles suggests pushing back the starting time even further back (to say 9am) so that bus operators have enough time to ferry workers and students. Parents would also have some time for breakfast with their kids. Anyway, I saw this letter to the ST forums:

Teachers and other staff will also benefit from later start to school day

MANY parents like me are in full agreement with the article, 'Start school later and let children sleep longer' (Jan 9).

Finally, after so many years, we have an article that puts this matter in perspective. How is it that our children's well-being is determined by bus operators keen to make more money by operating two services instead of one? Since Singapore has no natural resources and depends on labour to sustain the economy, do the authorities not want to evaluate the ramifications of sleep deprivation on our children in their growing years?

 

Apart from that, will teachers and other school staff not also benefit from this positive change? I am certain that teachers and staff will welcome the change as this means aligning their working hours to those of their spouses and other family members. With positive changes like this, the Ministry of Education will see less attrition of good teachers too.

 

Furthermore, if school starts later at 8.30am or 9am, schoolchildren will also depend less on school buses as working parents can take them to school on the way to work. It is ridiculous to allow children's and school staff's well-being to be decided by bus operators. It is time the authorities looked into this and not continue this mindless trend.

 

With sufficient rest, children will not find school as tiring and tedious and will enjoy it more. Teachers will also be less sleep-deprived and able to deal with work stress better too.

 

Ginny Leow (Mdm)

Some thoughts.

First, can we fault the bus operators for wanting to make more money by operating two services instead of one? Of course not, these are private business entities and they provide a solution to the problem of getting kids to schools. How much of a rise in transportation fees are parents willing to bear so that bus operators can maintain their current profits by running one service instead of two? And since labour is indeed needed to sustain the economy, it is important as well to ferry workers to their workplaces as well and it should not be denigrated.

Second, what are the ramifications for other motorists, public commuters and transport operators? And not all students take school buses, quite a lot of them make use of public transport as well and starting school later would definitely add a significant amount of traffic during the morning rush hours. Feeder and intra-town bus services would be most severely affected as many primary and secondary schools are located near to student's homes. They would be jam-packed with students at a time when hordes of people are rushing to work. Train passengers would be affected as well but would not be as much since student traffic is usually localised (at least for primary and secondary students).

To add on, if parents drive and need to drop their kids off, traffic around the school might slow down as well. If they don't, they'll need to take the public transport to send their kids to school. Either way we're looking at a situation where almost everyone spends more time in their daily commute and a certain proportion of them needs to wake up earlier. And the reason for this is so that students can spend more time sleeping. How ironic is that?

If school is to start later.....make it a lot later

Starting school later is a good idea, but clashing with the peak hour traffic is not. 9.30 or 10am would be a better  time to start school as the crowd would have thinned out by then

Iljimae (一枝梅) - Great show, great music too

I know that currently most people are addicted to The Little Nonya, but for me, Iljimae wins hands down. The plot is pretty confusing at times (just ask my mom, she's still lost) because each of the two male leads has more than 1 father, and 2 of the fathers are common to both the leads, though they do not know it. The two half-brothers seem doomed to kill each other in some sort of a confrontation as one of them (Lee Geom) becomes the infamous thief Iljimae, while the other becomes a law-enforcer who's in hot pursuit of him. The tragedy that befalls Lee Geom really draws me in and it's really gratifying to see how he exacts revenge against the forces that slayed his family. I'm expecting lots of exciting fight scenes once he masters some thievery and martial arts skills.
Iljimae main cast
Besides there's also some eye candy to ogle at in the form of Han Hyo Joo, Lee Young Ah and Son Tae Young (too few of her appearances, really).

And to top it off, the music is really top-notch, I've got to say some of the tracks instill a sense of poignant melancholy. Like this, it seems to be called "Hwa Sin", or "Flower Letter"

花信-朴孝信.mp3 -

This is the opening theme, which I really like for it's pensive beginning and the subsequent kicking in of the percussion and strings to set the dramatic mood.

iljimae(Main Title) - Ryo Yoshimata

And this piece for a bit of soothing sentimentalism

iljimae - 03

I'm gonna get the OST :)