Week Update

Well, I must say I’m surprised there are PEOPLE reading what I’m writing… and secondly ENTERTAINING!? OK probably things that happened to me won’t be that interesting to me.

And I’m here doing a week update, just because I thought there were some miscellaneous stuff that I wanted to note but it wasn’t significant enough to take up an entire post. And no it’s not a weekLY update, it’s just a special edition for this week.

1st: I think I blundered on the Macdonalds price hike — I went Mac for breakfast today and it seems prices are still normal. I must have visited some city Mac that sells higher; I upsized some weird thing to up the price; I was cheated; or I’m just plain blur.

2nd: Reading jonquil31’s miserable post made me think about my week, which happen to be not so good too. 2 outings were canceled, 1 with Quinnies and 1 with Cherlyn and gang. Then I had the bad 2nd interview, bad offer and now a bad reject.

3rd: I’ve got my StandChart debit card, but the password and PIN hasn’t arrived. I’ve been anticipating it, with disappointment every evening I open the letterbox. Every day late means a day less interest for me, albeit the TEENY WEENY cents. (is that how you use albeit? vocab improve time again)

4th: It seems I’ve been actively going towards completing my resolutions for the year: I’ve made effort to go to the bank to open an account; when I borrowed the car (although initiated by stoopidger), I purposely keep re-parking on my own; I’ve even popped into Yamaha @ PlazaSing to note Guitar prices, which start from S$140. I guess I’ll be better off borrowing one from some gave-up-guitarist. All in, there’s a start to more than 50% of the tasks on the list! Good job! *pat pat*

Pre-GST hike’s GST hike

It means, raising prices due to GST hike, BEFORE the announcement of the GST hike. The businesses seem to be rather confident the government is going ahead with the hike, and many raised their prices at the start of 2007. Macdonald’s breakfast upped 30 cents from $5 and $5.30. A fish-filet meal now costs $5.30, and Big Breakfast $5.60. Ya Kun stuck a statement beside its cashier, added 20 cents to its menu, and pushed its Set A to $3.90. Even my Kosong Prata went from 50cent to 60cents, effectively a 20% increase.

I know its hard to sell prata at 51cents each; I just hope it won’t become 70 cents after the Budget Day.

Opened StandChart account

Went down to the bank to get my eSaver account open today… it offers the current highest savings account interest while I do not have enough savings funds to go for a better investment yet. Since I’ll be leaving my money in the bank account anyway, why not let it earn by itself? Though I know it’s still very very little interest, it’s still more than 7 times more than what I can get elsewhere. Also the daily calculated interest is paid monthly instead of annually, so there’s actually a bigger compound interest factor, making it worth even more than the “more than 7 times more”.

In the end I opened two accounts with them, the original eSaver I went for, and an additional bank account which links to my eSaver account. The “promoter” introduced me an accompanying account that comes with a debit card and cheque book, so I was able to withdraw eSaver funds from the ATM directly with the card, despite eSaver itself being unable to. This also granted me access to the atm5 network which I’ve been wanting to join. I’ve queued enough at those dreaded POSB/DBS atms!

Since the new account also had no minimum balance I just needed $1 in each account to get it open. The only catch which he reminded me is to cancel the new account after 3 years, cos that’s the time for the expiry for fee waiver! Hopefully I’ll be lucky enough to get an extended waiver from them!

Resolution ’07

Yeah I know I’m one day late in preparing my resolutions, but, well I still have 364 days in this year! And it’s this same attitude that makes all those unresolved resolutions.

Speaking of which, before I start to make the sacred list, I’m wondering why it’s called a RESOLUTION??? Like it’s something to resolve? or 1024×768??? Well someone should come tell me the origin and why it’s call a resolution. Also, I seldom make resolutions, at least not formally like writing it down this time. Why? Because I know I’ll default on the resolutions, so why make them? But then, rules were written to be broken. So… out of some fun, here’s MY list this year…

  • Brush up (as in relearn) my parking skills
  • Get a facelift = seek treatment probably
  • Play a guitar! — if I do get my hands on one within this year…
  • Transfer my savings to somewhere else where I get more than S$6 interest in a year :'(
  • And, make my dear angry less times than last year!

OK, I’ll probably skip the actual counting on the last wish, hopefully I’ll be able to FEEEL that it happened less times at the end of this year. More importantly, no IT stuff! It’s my life side of things!

Test Post for OpenID

This post is used to test for comments using OpenID.

And as you can see, comments can now be posted using OpenID. Registrations has been disabled. Therefore, to post comments here, you can either:

  1. Be a LiveJournal user – just select LiveJournal on the dropdown list, type just your LJ username in the box, enter your comments and hit submit. You’ll be redirected to your LJ site to confirm the action. If you’re not logged in at LJ just enter your user/password on top as usual to login first. Be sure to check the URL to avoid phishes!
  2. Be an OpenID user – Register with any OpenID site such as http://www.myopenid.com/ to get an OpenID. Then, select Other OpenID on the dropdown, type your OpenID identity in the box and enter your comments.
  3. Be a Xen user – means ask me to create an account for you so that you can login to this site as a user. Once you’re logged in you’ll be able to post comments!

The bad points about this plugin are that it is theme-specific: you gotta know how to modify your theme to enable this plugin. Also it’s just for comments, so I can’t grant access on post-levels to OpenID users; to view my protected posts you’ll have to get an account with me like in Option 3 above…

Driving Toyota Vios

Had two long drives yesterday, from Sengkang to Buona Vista and back. Road into South Buona Vista was long and winding, kinda reminds me of those mountain roads back there in Aussie. Will never forget the roads on the Glass House mountains, and the dark foggy road to Byron Bay in NSW. At least not for the next few years despite my short memory.

Learnt a few things bout new cars – they’ve loads of automatic features. Hazard lights come on when you do certain things like open the driver door, and I must remember you can’t start an engine unless your gear is on ‘P’. My cousin stopped the car at ‘R’ and I couldn’t start it back, and none of us know why until I checked the gears. New fuel indicators are LED based, so you need to start the engine before you can even see where it is. Older cars actually show you where the indicator is, but don’t indicate the actual level until you start the engine.

Also realized my parking skills are gone, even vertical parking was a problem… don’t know whether it’s due to difficulty in parking in a squeezy underground condo car park. Well partially also because I thought the Vios had no boot (like a Getz) and almost attempted to park it all the way into the wall… luckily I didn’t.

Nano for Xmas

Got a shock when I opened the xmas present from my company – it was a 2GB iPod Nano. Just hours after windy and I were talking about MP3 players, this one landed on me. Never expected that coz they’ve already given us a $250 taka voucher for xmas which I have not utilised too…

Actually I didn’t want to buy a player for myself, since I already have a Creative Zen. Was more of my sis who showed me advertisements of MP3 players to hint openly for one. Luckily I haven’t bought one yet, so most probably I’ll be letting sis use more of it.

No comments

I’ll be trying to integrate OpenID into WordPress (in my free time) so i’m not opening my blog for public/anonymous comments yet. Should you wish to comment in this blog, tell me directly and I’ll create an account for you. I’ve allowed registration while i’m working out the technicalities… I’ved used the available OpenID for WordPress Comments instead.
Yep I have an OpenID, and no, I do not have an LJ account. Thanks.

Theme Park Attendant

Nieces and nephews have finally gone home after a day of “fun” at my house. Practically had a LAN shop running with maple, audition and games. Sega Mega Drive 2 still works after so many years and kept those youngsters busy for quite some time.

All the buzzing activities kept me on my toes for the whole day as well, as I assumed the theme park attendant role. Setting up the network and ensuring games worked was trivial, changing game cartridges every few minutes to play another game was OK. Tough was pushing the kids to take meals and getting them to go home. Guess I was like that too many many years ago. Even though the games we played were radically different — no computers or high-tech games, getting food into our mouth or dragging us to go home was felt just as difficult as today.

Shall stop my story abruptly here, just feeling rather tired to write on… so… good night!