Not having enough sleep is making me grumpy.
My brother made me go to Starhub to transfer the accounts to my name so that he can change his phone and get the $50 rebate with his old phone before it gets too old.
The plan was to cancel the subscription and go for a M1 mobile plan during the IT fair currently happening this weekend.
I remember it took a few days for the process to complete after going to the shop to change the ownership of my phone number, but my bro told me it was immediately done.
Unconvinced, I call Starhub to check. Apparently it takes 2 days but they could "expedite" it.
So I went to the one at IMM and got a queue ticket at 12pm.
When my turn came, everything went smoothly until the end when he told me it takes 3 working days minimum. 3-5 working days are the norm.
Can't "expedite" it.
Fucking wasted my morning I could have used for more sleep.
Now I'm pissed.
And I can't sleep late tonight because some relatives are coming from Malaysia tomorrow.
Then I've got to go to the office early on Monday for some serious work.
Hmph. No more sleeping late till Monday night.
Counter-intuitively, the importance of military spending is inversely proportional to how well the regional and global economies are doing.
Wow! The last king of Burma was really sad. He's probably one of the few former kings I've read about who died in destitute, and his grandaughter is barely aware of her royal lineage.
The most impressive part of the article was this quote:
My late father, the Royal Mindon Min, the golden-footed lord of the white elephant, master of a thousand gold umbrellas, owner of the Royal peacocks, lord of the sea and of the world, whose face was like the sun, always smoked the Esoof cheroot while meditating on his treatment of the bull-faced, earthswallowing English. Had I done the same I should never have lost my throne, but I used the opium-drugged cheroots from Manila and the trash which was sent to me from San Francisco, and I fell.
He was such a poor king, he didn't even know why. Blaming his drug of choice for his downfall!
I wonder why nobody revolted before the British took him down.
In fact, it feels like the British did the locals a favour by exiling him. On hindsight, an execution would have been preferable because now the Burmese will always have something in their history to be ashamed of.
What luck!
The Malaysian relatives came over in the evening today because they were leaving tomorrow. Apparently the elder son, my uncle, was unable to take leave on Monday so they had to rush everything to the point where they couldn't visit my mum.
So they came over to chat a bit and left.
I was also fortunate enough to ask the right question and he gave me the most helpful answer throughout this whole mess.
It had been in my mind constantly for a week now and I was unable to find an answer, so the first thing I asked when we sat down was," Is it possible to settle all the intestate matters without a lawyer?"
Since he was a banker in his 40s, he probably knew quite a bit about the laws involved.
Moreover, the estate laws in Penang and Singapore can't possibly be too different since they were both British colonies until a couple decades ago, then in the same country for a few years after that.
Unless he was a Muslim, in which case he'd be more familiar with the estate laws of the Syariah Court. He wasn't.
Hence the most useful answer I've ever gotten so far - get a "Letter of Administration" from the "Public Trustee office".
Seriously, googling for "intestate" and "wills" and "no wills" only got me websites that told me how to write a will and how the properties of the deceased are split.
Nothing mentioned those two names he gave me that I quoted.
The catch, when I found the correct websites, was that there were a lot of documents I needed to prepare that I don't understand. Clearly the laws are designed such that lawyers can make money out of the ignorant lay.
Here's what I got from the website of Singapore's Subordinate Court:
Documents required in the application for Grant of Probate and Letters of Administration cases:
- An Originating Summons together with a statement containing the relevant information to be entered in an electronic template;
- A checklist for the Originating Summons in an electronic template;
- A supporting affidavit verifying the information in the Statement for Probate or Administration. The affidavit must be in the format and contain the necessary supporting documents as prescribed by paragraph 118 (6) of the Subordinate Courts Practice Directions and must be filed within 14 days after the filing of the Originating Summons and Statement,
- The Administration Oath(s) by the Applicant(s) and Co-administrator, if any;
- A certified true copy of the deceased's death certificate. The Original must be submitted to the Probate Counter, located at the Civil registry of the Subordinate Courts, for verification by 4.30 pm of the next working day after the electronic filing of the Originating Summons and Statement.
- A certified true copy of Inheritance Certificate from the Syariah Court (for Muslim estates only). The original must be submitted to the Probate Counter for verification by 4.30 pm, of the next working day of the electronic filing of the Originating Summons;
- A certified true copy of the Will. The original must be submitted to the Probate Counter, located at the Civil registry of the Subordinate Courts, by 4.30 pm of the next working day after the electronic filing of the Originating Summons and Statement;
- Certificate of Result of Caveat Search together with the search reports from both the High Court and Subordinate Courts in the electronic format.
Right...
In fact the website also advises visitors to get a lawyer to handle all that for them if they're unfamiliar with the necessary procedures.
And that's why every lawyer I've ever encountered advised everyone to make a will. With one, you would get a lawyer since he or she is the one keeping the will, and everything is simpler.
Coz this is the kind of crap your surviving kids (or wife or parents) have to go through after you're gone.
I could also ask the Public Trustee to do this for me but it charges a percentage of whatever estates it handles for me.
As for the lawyers, I have no idea how much they would charge, so I'm going to ask for a quote.
TUE
Sooooooo there are a few types of salted fish.
At least two.
One is soft and the other is hard.
Apparently the soft kind isn't supposed to be fried before making steamed meat cake with it.
No wonder it got burnt so easily.
I bought about 200g of it and used 100g with roughly 500g of pork in each attempt.
The first wasn't so good because it was not easily to prepare.
The stuff was raw, so it was kinda hard to separate the meat from the bones.
But with my cleaver, I managed to debone most of it.
Since it was soft while the skin was tough, it was hard to get a proper hold onto it without squeezing it into mush. Hence I didn't cut it into tiny pieces.
The result was that the flavour didn't spread throughout the meat.
The second time was better because I took the time to cut it into smaller pieces.
Since it's known to be carcinogenic I'm not going to try salted fish for quite some time. The point of this is to find out how cost-effective this dish was. Cost in terms of time, money and effort and effectiveness being the tastiness of the dish.
It's quite cost-effective but the health effect wasn't worth it.
Transexual air stewardesses?
You know who should be the happiest about this?
The rest of the air stewardesses.
Why?
No more sexual harassment!
I want an iPad 3. It's got the best display among all the tablets as far as I can tell, and that's really the only important feature for my work IMO.
I could also just print out photos which is the cheapest alternative but that's far less convenient.
The cheaper alternative is to get either the iPad 2 or the Galaxy Tab 10.1 but their displays still look vastly inferior to that of the unreleased product.
Finished Mass Effect 3 yesterday. Kinda surprised that my reputation didn't allow me to talk my way through the final conversation. Still, I took what I got.
I have no reason to replay the game at the moment because I've finished almost everything the game had to offer without replaying the previous two games. The only sidequests I didn't complete were the ones that I had before the Citadel invasion and the ones that I couldn't find even though I had explored every star system available and got 100% for every one that had anything to be found.
Battles were easy on Normal. Throw plus Singularity/Pull is an awesome combo for any situation. I just take whichever has the fastest recharge speed. My Throw's cooldown was below 2s after half the game because I went for recharge speed bonus most of the time.
Although I used a sniper rifle, I rarely shot anything with my weapon. Therefore after I realized my cooldown bonus is affected by the weight of the weapons I carry, I only went on missions with the rifle.
I think it was possible to complete entire missions without firing a shot but there was no achievement for that so I didn't bother to make life harder than necessary.
The only times I fired the gun was when I was fighting harder battles like multiple brutes and banshees, or when I got impatient.
Oh, and the shield-wielding guardians. Their shields were so annoying! Fortunately I realized I could just push their shield away with a Throw and then snipe their heads off. Quicker.
Brutes and banshees were hard until I took Carnage as my bonus ability. I played as a Sentinel and this class has no strong ability against armour. Warp's good but not good enough. In this game, anti-armour is far more important than anti-shield or -barrier.
Also, Cryo's useless when Throw has such a fantastic cooldown. At max level I could spam Throws faster than enemies could recover... unless there were more than two of them coming for me and my teammates were down.
That never happened.
Both had happened multiple times but never at the simultaneously.
Throw's so overpowered, I didn't even need to hide behind covers in the final mission most of the time, while enemies were being killed despite doing that (Warp behind walls).
The only time when I felt overwhelmed was at the final mission where I had just finished all the brutes and banshees and I realized I only had 4 rounds remaining to fight the large wave of marauders. I could probably finish it but I had had enough of fighting so I just ran for the missile controls.
I even had to use a grenade and a medi-gel in the same fight!
Grenades weren't very useful when I was using the Singularity/Throw combo. Both did the same except grenades were limited in quantity. The benefits of using grenades were that they were more powerful and they didn't have recharge times.
I didn't need the extra damage when my exploding Singularities were flinging enemies out of the map all the time. I'm a pacifist... sometimes.
But I did use it because I had to kill the brutes before they could charge me. I once killed a brute that was charging towards me and got an achievement for that, but there was no need to repeat the feat all the time. No need to tempt fate.
Perhaps ME3 had balance issues. Guns were so unnecessary in the game. I play the game mostly using EDI and Liara because of their abilities.
For the biotic detonation I needed someone with quick recharging biotic abilities, so that gave me either Javik or Liara. But I didn't like how Pull brought the enemies closer to me and only affected a single target, so I chose Liara. Morever, Liara had Warp vs Javik's Dark Channel. Dark Channel was too slow, while the additional Warp could also help me take down enemy shields and barriers quickly.
For the third member, I needed someone to take down enemy shields since my Overload took too long to recharge. So that gave me the options of Tali or EDI. Tali had the better anti-shield/barrier ability obviously, but she had nothing against armour. In addition, drones no longer distract enemies as effectively as they did in the last game, so I took EDI who had Incinerate.
The teammates I picked were all-rounded except for their firepower so that they were almost always useful, with EDI being the least useful due to her slow recharge speeds. Good thing I made guns obsolete by detonating Singularities with Throws.
About the game itself, the level designers were great as usual. Every battle felt interesting, not too hard, and allowed room for creativity. Maybe too easy, but that could have been due to the difficulty setting.
The writers, not so great. I felt that one of the foundations of the plot was weak - the fact that it took so long for them to overwhelm Earth's defenses when it seemed to take mere days for the Reapers to cut through their extraplanetary defenses.
If they never found the Reapers' sole weakness until Shepard discovered it late into the game, if the Reapers could destroy entire fleets with ease, how come it took what felt like weeks for them to completely take over the planet?
Unless the plot was saying that all the things I did took place within a couple of days.
I think that kinda ruined the story for me a little.
Of course setting a minimum wage level in larger countries like Malaysia is not a good idea. RM800 is a totally different amount to a city-dweller compared to a kampong resident.
Even the concept of minimum wage in itself is has debatable consequences.
Don't get me wrong, I pay my workers more than the generally accepted rates, but setting minimum wage is quite obviously a bad idea to me.
Too high, and it just makes it pointless to run small or medium businesses.
Too low, and employers who have been paying their workers higher will have an excuse to stop giving raises until the minimum wage rises... or even give them pay cuts when the business doesn't do too well.
On one hand, minimum wages means employers must pay their workers at least a certain amount of money; on the other, it also means that workers will remain jobless until they find an employer who can afford to pay them that much.
The Small-Medium Industry Association of Malaysia has warned that 80% of small firms will be “totally killed” if the minimum wage is set at RM800. SMEs employ about 59% of the workforce, or about seven million workers, according to the association...That would put four million jobs at risk.
Moreover, as Andrew Lo, a trade unionist from Sarawak, rightly framed it: “If companies cannot afford to pay a minimum wage that is set at around the poverty line, they have no business being in business.”
Because yeah, if 4 million people are jobless, well... too bad.
When you get even an additional 400,000 unemployed people (10% of the estimate) on the streets, blaming their ex-employers for sucking will solve the issue, right?
And the first thing I can think of when this happens is that prices will go up. That's obvious, I know.
This makes local businesses uncompetitive.
What will they do?
If the difference is large enough, they would move their operations to cheaper locations like Indonesia. In fact some of my competitors have already been doing that for years.
The bottomline here is that a low wage is better than no wage.
The fact remains that it is completely unnecessary for my business to stay in Singapore. If it is no longer worth the convenience, it is perfectly ok for business owners to find greener pastures elsewhere.
Here's the truth that people should be aware of: it's not the duty of private businesses to provide jobs, but the government's.
It sucks but it's true.
That's why DBS and POSB offer such crappy rates for everything. Focusing on creating jobs simply lowers the effectiveness of the organization. If the same amount of money can pay two average employees or a single well-trained veteran employee, having to focus on creating jobs means you must choose the former.
And that's why in most countries, the top talents rarely remain in civil service, something our own government is trying to avoid among the top civil servants.
So how does one make sure the rate is correct?
That is so debatable, seriously.
For example, the minimum wage for waiters and porters can be lower because they can also rely on tips to supplement their income. You can't say the same for janitors; nobody leaves a tip when they accidentally clog the toilet bowls.
Yet both are in the service sector.
Moreover, what about the handicapped and unskilled people? Obviously few employers will be willing to pay them what they pay normal workers. Will this lead to a worsening of discrimination against them?
The general idea that setting a minimum wage will force businesses to be more efficient. The problem is there is also the alternative of moving everything elsewhere except for the shops.
Anyway, there's a whole Wiki article on the debate.
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