I run into an old friend and his wife-to-be at ChinaTown point yesterday when I met another friend to go to China Town to buy a new fish tank. (Broke the old one… that story later.) When we had dessert together – since it’s his birthday and I got no gifts for him – he told me his fiance received a mail from SLB [Singapore Library Board] informing her to pay a 15cts fine. And I suddenly recall not long ago another friend told me he received a similar letter to pay a 65cts fine.

I find it really ridiculous that they had actually done so and I was told someone who got a similar letter – this one 20cts – wrote a complaint to either the Stooge Times or TODAY about the matter and asked if it was cost effective to do so. I was told the SLB’s reply was that it only cost them 8cts a piece to mail the reminders and there was a total of S$5 million in uncollected fines.

Whoever thought it is a good idea to collect the fines now must have had brown matter in between his ears instead of the usual gray one. You know the brown one that you produce everyday? He should be fired or shot because while it might be a bad idea to write off S$5 million, it would have been easier to just write off those fines under S$5 and move on. I wonder if what they write off wouldn’t be the same as the total cost of all the 8cts reminders they have sent.

Above which, there is good reason to write off those fines. That became obvious because while discussing this ridiculous matter with my friends, we realized that it would cost at least S$1.30 (unless you are a student with fare concession) to travel to a library to pay it – i.e. if there’s a library in your town centre, and you need to take a feeder bus to go there and it cost 65cts one way using your Ezlink ItchyLink card. (It will cost you 90cts one way if you pay cash! More, if your nearest library needs multi-modal transporation.)

Even if you can just walk to one, you need to find time. Assuming you are paid S$2.5K a mth and you work 22 days every mth and 8 hours a day, you are paid S$14.20 per hour. So if it takes up an hour in total to just travel there and pay it and then return home, it will cost you $15.50 nett to pay a silly less than $1 fine. (And of course you need to put a value to your time! You are being made to do something at the expense of your free time which could be better use otherwise!)

Some civil servants serpents are just too damned stupid to realise just how much waste and losses they are creating for people. But he can of course console himself to having increase the bottom line of our zonal duo-polistic transportation companies. And if he has shares in them, console himself further on the fact that he will be getting more dividends from them due to the increase in profits.

This is an old piece of news I am talking about and it goes back to around July 2007. This piece of news reported that Neo, managing director of Cheng Yong Credit and one of the first parallel importers here has applied for a taxi operating license.

Nothing noteworthy about that, except for the fact that Neo plans to operate an environmentally friendly fleet of 800 taxis and charge drivers the lowest daily rental in town. The reason he would be able to do so is because CNG cars are accorded a 40% discount on additional registration fees [ARF – the main car tax] until end of 2009 because they are deemed environmentally friendly. Johnny Harjantho, managing director of Smart Taxis claims that a 2 litre car running on CNG can cover 22km on $1. A 1.8 litre diesel-run car manages about 14km.

Neo said that Prime Leasing – his taxi company – will set taxi rentals at just $69 per day, versus the current industry average of $90, and fares will be ‘slightly cheaper’. On top of that, a cabby will get a lump sum reward equivalent to the residual tax value of the vehicle if he stays with Prime Leasing for 5 years continuously though the cabby will have to put down a joining deposit of about $5,000 first.

My feelings for this is mixed. First of all, I do not think more operators – or even more cabs – will improve cab services in Singapore. There are roughly 22,000 cabs in Singapore (Mar 2006 figures), and so I disagree with commuters that there is a shortage of cabs, and it is my opinion that we are finding it hard to get a cab, because of the mindset of recalcitrant taxi drivers. Cabbies who whine constantly about their difficulties (e.g. rental and fuel cost) but are yet still selective about fares. Furthermore, the taxi problem is not really a taxi one. (Note: Just a few days ago, I was rejected by a SMRT cabby [SHB5836S] to take me to Jurong from Geylang at around 11pm, after I had supper with some friends in that area.)

Next, what good is 800 cabs Prime Leasing is bringing in going to do to a market of 22000 taxis? That’s roughly 3.6% of the total taxis in operation. In other words, when there’s a full fleet of Prime Leasing cabs in operation, chances are that for every 50 cabs at the taxi stand, only 1 will be a Prime Leasing cab. How are commuters going to benefit from that even if the fares are lower? Above which, the cabbies driving them are going to come from the same pool of recalcitrant shitheads and they will still whine about the overheads – remember the $5000 deposits? – and pull the same old cinderella or ‘on call’ [now, ‘busy’] stunts so they can wait for a cab booking.

Lastly, I read that the main CNG refuelling station is in Jurong Island. In my mind, the image of a cab rushing back to Jurong Island to top up when they are literally low on gas is quite funny. Does anyone know how difficult it is to go to Jurong Island now with all those security measures in place? Just imagine the difficulty in refuelling and yet more reasons for the cabbies to whine about.

While the second CNG refuelling station in Mandai will only be completed next year and that might alleviate the situation somewhat, Mandai isn’t like your Shell or Esso stations nearby! That simply means we need even more CNG stations to make operating CNG cabs viable. And according to this article, it will cost $40 million to put in a network of 10 CNG refuelling stations in Singapore. Now I don’t even have to guess who will end up shouldering the cost knowing Singapore’s gover-min!

So, on the short term, I suspect these cabs are likely going to run on two kinds of fuel, i.e. both CNG and petrol or else it won’t be a surprise finding Prime Leasing cabs waiting for a tow truck along the road because they can’t make it back to the CNG refuelling station in Jurong Island or Mandai. And the reason the alternative will be petrol is simply because of the $6000 diesel tax. Had the alternative been diesel, then Prime Leasing’s can’t sustain the kind of rent they are offering and remain cabby friendly – unless there are big Japanese or Continent Car manufactures providing Neo with cheap cars!

In other words, there won’t be any improvements in Singapore’s cab service with this new operator. And the only other way to solve the cab problem – and in extension the whole mess with our public transport system – will simply be a redesign of the city. The model in which people are rushing from one part of the island to certain locations to work – especially the CBD – in the morning and then back from those places to go home must be put to an end.

But don’t say you don’t expect anyone with the courage to propose this and actually do it. Because the Tali-PAP fxxkers might prove you wrong. They will simply just charge the bill to all of us in the end. Simply put, Singaporeans should just stop whining and vote wisely at the ballot box. Because the more we whine the more new policies we get. And in my opinion none of them are in any way advantageous to us at all! Just take the recent CPF tweaks for example. (You can’t touch this!! * lol *)

Plug-ins & widgets, are add-ons you can put in your blog to give it additional functionality. In WordPress, you have the Akismet plug-in, or reCaptcha, which are tools you use to limit, if not stop entirely, spam in your comments section.

All of these WordPress plug-ins are easy to install. Usually you just unzip whatever you download to a folder and upload it to the plug-in folder. However, that doesn’t mean it will work right away. You will still need to activate the plug-in or make certain changes to some of the php files in your theme folder before it will work. Even so, it does not naturally mean they will work correctly. And I can understand Endoh’s frustration when I read his post.

So I would want to share some of my own experience with a few plug-ins. To begin, let me just say I am a hardware and an OS guy by profession (i.e. setting up a LAN, and getting the OS up on a computer, and solving those irritating errors that pops up is part of my work.) I am not a programmer and I almost know nuts about any kind of programming language – be it java or php. In my considered opinion, even Greek or Sanskrit is less challenging, because they are still a human language. I don’t qualify myself a geek either but I do pride myself in my willingness to explore and experiment with stuff – e.g. google for the solutions and try to solve it myself. I learn a little HTML here and there, and I did mess around with my own style.css to get my blog to look the way it is looking now. (That explains my disdain with people who screams immediately at the point of the first problem and will spend no further effort to deal with it.)

Let me begin with AMM [Amazon Media Management Extension] plug-in. I downloaded it because when I was reading blogs, I saw people with this cool “What I am reading now” plug-ins and I would like to have it too. So some searching got me to this.

Without first evaluating if that is what I need (my bad!), I have it installed and activated, and everything appears to work properly. I was able to make a new book entry, and delete it. But beyond that, I am lost. I admit (as a fact) I have no clue how to get the thing to work – i.e. to get the plug-in to display stuff meaningfully on my blog.

The documentation may have been quite clear to everyone else who read it, but I was completely lost because I have no idea where I should place the code, and how it would look like on screen if I do whatever is listed there. I wanted very much to drop those guys a mail, but I don’t know where to begin – i.e. what to ask.

In the end, I dropped the plug-in, because I don’t know if it might be what I needed, even though it might have been a wonderful plug-in. I must make it clear I am NOT saying that the plug-in is bad, but just saying that I would have needed to acquire some pre-requisites before I could understand and get this thing to work.

So, I tried out ‘Now Reading’ next. I got it installed and activated without much difficulties. But a problem soon hit.

I could add a book, but I couldn’t delete or edit them. When I try to do so, and hit the update button, it returns a blank screen. I could live with that blank screen if it saves the changes (be it an update or delete), but nothing happens. There is a bug reporting forum (you have to sign up an account to use it), but no one saw it fit to contact me for more details. And my bug report has languished on site for almost 2 months now.

While I understand the plug-in is obtained free, and I do understand that there is no obligation for anyone to offer support should I have a difficulty using it, what makes this really annoying was the very fact that an avenue was given to you to report the problems, but there seems to be no one interested in listening to them or getting them solved – which sounded amazingly like our gover-min. So I gave up the getting a ‘Now Reading’ feature on my blog entirely. I am simply resigned to the possibility that ‘I maybe just too stupid to do it’.

The next plug-in I tried, is called FLV Embed. I downloaded this because I have been converting all those .flv files I downloaded and converting them to .swf or other formats before I can embed them on my blog. And if you ask me why I don’t just link it from the original location, the reason is that I hate broken links and I am quite certain I won’t be aware if a video or a file is taken offline.

Like ‘Now Reading’, it installed pretty easily, and activated without any problems. But the real problem is, it doesn’t work even though the blasted instructions are clear as crystal. It is called an FLV player, but it doesn’t play files with a .flv extension. It plays files with a .swf extension though, which I take it to mean I had followed the instructions faithfully and did everything as mentioned. (No, renaming the files to .swf doesn’t work. I tried. Or else I won’t be whining now.)

I know there are people who got it to work, but there are also people who had the same difficulties I had. You can read about these difficulties by scrolling down to the comments section. But I don’t see anyone responding to the comments or making an effort to help the people who had a problem.

* sigh * Yet another plug-in deactivated and left to languish in my plugin folder.

So by now some of you might be wondering just what the hell is the point I am trying to make by sharing all these. The point I am trying to make is this… I am not the kind of sits around and expect things to work with a snap of my fingers. But when even I have a difficulty trying to find help for myself, try and imagine the loads of other users out there who are far less diligent in trying to solve their own problems.

As Endoh was saying… Do you need your customers to be professors to use your product?

All I want to say is… My sentiments, exactly!