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Showing posts from July, 2006

Improving Taxi Service in Singapore

One of the hottest topics in Singapore recently is the increases in transport fees and while that of the public buses and MRT is in the processing of getting, almost confirmed actually, approval, that of our "deregulated" taxi fares have already gone up. The justification for this round of increases is that of the raise in diesel prices and commuters are asked to help taxi drivers shoulder the burden of the higher costs. One glaring issue that the taxi companies had been intentionally quiet on is that taxi rentals, the most direct cost, has not been decreased despite the prices of Certificate of Entitlement (COE) dropping to multi-year lows and car prices trending lower every year. Many consumers do question the logic of price increases when there had not been noticeable improvements in the quality of taxi services. How can taxi drivers increase their income when taxi companies are not adequately taking care of their drivers and consumers are not willing to pay more for what

BitTorrent vs ISPs

Local ISPs are definitely having a problem with BitTorrent as it gobbles up the bandwidth that consumers have subscribed to. While ISPs usually promise connection speeds of up to some predefined KBps, the planning assumption is that not every consumer will utilise that bandwidth and hence ISPs need not have the full network capacity to support 100% of subscribed bandwidth. However, with BitTorrent, ISPs are now having to rethink their network planning strategies since consumers are trying to make full use of their bandwidth for downloading. Technologies like traffic shapping, throttling, etc are but some of the techniques that ISPs are trying to use to bring BitTorrent traffic under control. However, where there is a will, there is a way, and BitTorrent has now evolved to involve protocol encryption, etc that makes it far harder and expensive for ISPs to try to limit BitTorrent traffic. ISPs should deliver on the bandwidth speeds they promise instead of shortchanging customers by usin

Inconsiderate Mobile Phone Behaviour

The peaceful morning was marred by this guy seated in front of me on the bus whose phone kept ringing and all he did was to take it out, look at it and then proceed to let it keep ringing till it went dead. All in all, the phone rang like half the bus journey and I had half a mind to give him a knuckle rap on his head. Perhaps it is a call he really does not want to take but it is so difficult to put the phone on silent mode or even just to silence the ringing even if he did not really want to take the call nor cancel it? I have used Motorola and Samsung mobile phones before and it has never been difficult to silence a ringing phone without cancelling the incoming call. Is that popular brand's design so bad that users cannot even easily stop their phones from ringing? Is it a design failure or was the user so freaking ignorant that he decided making a nuisance of himself was a simpler option? Technology should really be kept out of the hands of these sort of people. They underutili

DBS Revised Terms and Conditions Governing Electronic Services

DBS has just released a revised terms and conditions that will take effect from 19th August 2006. It is a long and wordy statement which I believe most people will not read event though DBS put up a prominent banner on its website to announce the revision. Being the very free person I am, I took the trouble to click on that banner and scanned through the revised terms and conditions and one particular section under Part A caught my attention. I will reproduce the section as follows: --------------------------------------------------------------------- Part A - Conditions of Use of General Electronic Services Payments Charges Fees Costs and Taxes You will pay such charges and fees for the provision of Electronic Services as we may prescribe from time to time, whether or not you in fact make use of such Electronic Services. We are authorised to debit your Account (s) for all charges, fees, withdrawals and payments for the provision and/or use (authorised or unauthorised) of Electronic Se

AIA Participating Fund Commentary

America International Assurance, more commonly known as AIA, has for the first time published a commentary of AIA's Participating Fund, commonly referred to as the Par Fund . This is supposedly an industry first by AIA as insurance companies are not required to and typically do not reveal details of how they invest the premiums of the policyholders. The AIA Participating Fund commentary that I got my hands on has provides information on the asset mix, net assets, etc. This increased transparency by AIA is, I believe, an effort to address the bad publicy that it had been getting from media coverage recently. By being transparent, AIA will be able to show if its Par Fund is performing in accordance with the general market and hence justify the quantums of bonuses and dividends. Personally, I find that while AIA's Participating Fund is a laudable effort. It is quite irrelevant to people who are mainly holding insurance for protection. Only when one holds endowment or investment or

How to Make Money Through Investing?

Many people who have just started working will inadvertently ask how money can be made from investing. Unless you are the central bank who prints money or your job inherently deals with investing, it is quite impossible to make money from investing. Quick money will come in if you speculate but speculation is inherently extremely risky and money that comes easy goes just as easily too. I believe the right way to approach making money is to do so with a proper job or start a business. Get yourself renumerated for your efforts and slowly accumulate a pool of funds, your seed money to grow more money. With the seeds obtained, you can then proceed to grow money by investing in the appropriate investment vehicles.

Is CreditShield Necessary?

If you own a credit card from any bank, have you ever noticed the few dollars that are added to your outstanding balance every month? If you have not, now is a good time to check it out. If you have noticed, then the term CreditShield should be familiar to you but have you ever wonder if you truly need CreditShield? What exactly does Creditshield do for us? In simple terms, a premium is charged for certain quantums of statement closing balance and helps repay outstanding credit card bills should the unforseeable happen. Do cardholders really need this protection? After chancing upon a book over the weekend, I was suddenly enlightened that this so-called "protection" is absolutely unnecessary for people who do not rollover their monthly balances. If you have the cash to repay your monthly charged amount in full, why in the world do you need protection against something that you are not worried about? By simply terminating Creditshield, you will have saved another small sum ove

Co-workers Who Do Not Get Along

It is an exceptionally difficult situation when working with people who do not get along with their co-workers. Just the other day, this user called me up for SAP (my most disliked) support and after clarifying her queries, the solution will be simply to ask this other woman who belongs to her same office. Yet, because of some disagreements between the 2 of them, a simple requests that can be resolved by on-the-ground operators get escalated unnecessarily to the IT support. This is a significant problem that is being encountered by my Finance department where different sections work in isolation from each other and their respective section heads in self-denial and not taking proactive steps to address it, preferring to take the less efficient but still workable step of unnecessary escalation of problems encountered. Such poor human to human relations in the workplace penalises efficiency severely and also finger points higher management of poor people management skills. There must be a

No Opel Astra

Ok...it is official. I am not the proud owner of the new Opel Astra dangled by Stomp and will have to continue relying on public transport.

Review CPF Interest Rates Formula

CPF members receive a market-related interest rate (based on the 12-month fixed deposit and month-end savings rates of the major local banks) on their CPF savings and this rate is reviewed quarterly. However, even when major local banks required money, they tend to offer "promotional rates" instead of upping the normal fixed deposit rates and even then, offer "promotional rates" to deposits of larger amounts. Most CPF members have larger sums of money tied in their CPF accounts and will be eligible for the major local banks' "promotional rates" if they had it in cash. If CPF took the large amount of cash that is under its charge and deposit it with the banks at the "promotional rates", it can easily obtain risk free returns of at least 3%, higher than the 2.5% being given for CPF Ordinary Account now. It is perhaps time for CPF to review the interest rate formula and tie it to something more up-to-date and relevant such as the banks' 6 or

Stomp's Opel Astra

You're shortlisted to win Stomp's Opel Astra grand prize! Join us at Plaza Singapura's Outdoor plaza this Sat, July 15, 715pm. Bring your IC along. Good luck! Got the SMS on Thursday... I am one of the 5000 persons who have been shortlisted. 1 in 5000... better chances than Toto or 4D. Most probably will drop by since I have no plans for Saturday... Wish me good luck!

Shareinvestors

Just found a good site that is regularly updated with Singapore stock market information. Shareinvestors has been updated every trading day with useful insights into stock market movements. Shareinvestors does not look exceptionally pretty but it definitely does prove to be quite a good source of information. Be careful using about the information on it though since it is a blog site and there is no assurance that the information is truly valid.

Problem Installing IE7 Beta 3

I was trying to setup Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3, IE7 Beta 3, and was encountering some problems where it fails at the end of the process. Looking into the installation log, I find entries such as 110.108: Num Ticks for Copying files : 30053 114.625: DoRegistryUpdates:UpdSpInstallFromInfSection Failed for ProductInstall.GlobalRegistryChanges.Install error: 0x5 114.625: INF_REGISTRY Failed 114.625: DoInstallation:DoRegistryUpdates failed 114.845: Access is denied. 114.875: Internet Explorer 7 installation did not complete. Select 'OK' to undo the changes that have been made. 114.875: Starting process: C:\WINDOWS\ie7beta3\spuninst\spuninst.exe /~ -q -z 171.406: Software Update Rollback has completed with return code 0xbc2. This rollback requires a reboot. 171.406: Internet Explorer 7 installation did not complete. Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 has been partially updated and may not work properly. 171.406: Update.exe extended error code = 0x5 After searching through the Internet, it

Over $1m in Sales But Zero Commission

There had been many people whom had feedback via various channels that the financial consultants in the banks do not really provide good and relevant financial advice. Today's report in The Straits Times highlighting the plight of a relationship manager who received zero commission for over $1 million in sale will definitely start bringing the practices of banks under the microscope. I have constantly advocated not buying financial products from banks as I had found the ability of their financial consultants to be far from adequate. Sitting through sessions with the banks' consultants, there is usually poor understanding of my needs and considerations and their knowledge of financial planning is sometimes even poorer than me, a non-financial practitioner. Furthermore, it is always the "hot" products that are being pushed out... When certain market segments have shown good returns for a while, corresponding products are pushed out but the easy money had already been ma

Loanshark Vandalism

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After the police cracked down on loansharks some time back, their activities had die down significantly but it seems that after a lull period, these loansharks are starting to make a comeback. Recently, I encountered vandalism by loansharks on walls and inside the lifts, trying to pressure the debtors to return the sums owed...

My Beef, Your Poison

The Internet has made the flow of information much easier and faster and it is possible to leverage upon this strength by frequenting niche forums that are relatively interesting for information. It is interesting to note that the quality of online forums differs significantly... ranging from the very intellectual and useful forums at sgFunds , to the mundane and time killing ones at HardwareZone . One distinct feature stands out among many of the forummers and that is a desire to be spoonfed when it comes to the really important stuff. This is evident from the many threads that were started asking about simple questions that a search on Google turns up an answer on the first result page. Should I invest? How do I go to this place? Should I get term or whole life policies? Which is the best insurance company? How do I get started on share trading? Which is the best credit card? How much should I save? How to invest using CPF? Is MLM a good business? Is land banking a sensible investmen

Why Disallow Use of Correction Tape in PSLE?

The Straits Times Forums is really being abused by all sorts of people... Now this inane feedback on use of correction tape/fluid. Actually all the parent has to do is to ask around and he will realise that the advise of not using correction tape/fluid is very relevant since all too often we will forget to fill in the changes subsequently, leaving blanks. It is much faster and easier to just cancel.... I never cancelled neatly ;-) .... and if the answer booklet is about to run out, just raise your hand and the invigilator will pass you an additional NEW booklet! Maybe it is time Mr Francis Teo Beng Hock starts chatting with other parents with children of school going age. It will definitely be eye opening and saves time trying to write letters to newspapers and waiting for the SEAB to reply. Anyway, the text of the letter is as follows... --------------------------------------------------------------------------- MY SON, who will be sitting for his Primary School Leaving Examination (P

Taxi Fares Increase Confirmed

The rumoured taxi fare increase has materialised, officially being announced by Comfort DelGro yesterday. It appears that Comfort DelGro is aware of the potential backlash if the fare increases are followed by increases in taxi rentals paid by the drivers and it had said that there will not be any rental increases. With Comfort DelGro increasing the fares, all the other smaller taxi companies are definitely gonig to follow suit. I better plan for significant increase in my expenditure on taxi fares.

Superman Returns

Superman returns in the form of Brandon Routh this time. I caught the show and really loved this episode. While it may not be inspiring, the familiarity of Superman, the imageries of Superman having the weight of the world on him, etc, the thought provoking musings all help to create a relatively good experience. Further details I will leave out so that I will not spoil the story for those who are going to catch the show... Guess Brandon Routh will be really able to propel his acting career forward with his being casted as Superman. Do look forward to the next instalment of Superman :-)

Golden Village Promotions

Golden Village, GV, has announced yet another promotion for discounted movie tickets. This time, it is a tie-up with SAFRA to offer SAFRA members S$1.50 off tickets for movie sessions on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, eve of public holidays and public holidays. Officially, the reason was to acknowledge the contribution of NSmen to nation building but if that is the real reason, then it will not be restricted to weekend movie sessions and SAFRA members. This is not the first time that GV has tied up with some entity to offer discounted tickets. GV had much earlier tied up with HSBC credit card to offer S$1 off all movie sessions. For regular movie goers, it is not difficult to see the significant drop in movie attendances ever since GV took the lead in raising movie ticket prices to S$9.50 for weekend sessions. Shows no longer start on time with advertisements running longer at around 10 to 15 minutes... I even ever encountered a half hour of advertisements when watching Harry Potter, a 6