Category: Info

Dim Sum Dollies [点心宝贝] – The History of Singapore

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Been wanting to do a blog on this but hadn’t gotten down to it until now. A particular event at work that transpired last month has put quite a bit of lethargy on me lately, but I thanked God for being a good friend in my time of need – by putting people around me to make sure I do not feel there is no happiness in living.

Anyway, back to the topic. My friends ‘Ah Beng’ and Alice introduced me to Dim Sum Dollies and invited me to go watch Dim Sum Dollies’ Cabaret show – the History of Singapore – with them at the Esplanade quite a few months back. They told me it is good and I will like it, because they know I like satires on politics and current events.

I was originally skeptical that it would be enjoyable but wanting to try something new, I went with them to watch it last Sunday (Jul 12), after waking up from an afternoon nap with a splitting headache (thanks to the blasted weather). It was my first time at the Esplanade, and I did not regret watching it. I told them to ask me along for other interesting stuff like this in the future, as long as I don’t stand out like the lights illuminating the National Stadium.

(I took a blurry photo of the inside of the Esplanade theater with the camera of my mobile before the play starts.)

Dim Sum Dollies – the History of Singapore, is not a history lesson, and they made it very clear right in the beginning. It is actually more like a satire in songs and stage play about current events – like sarong party girls, disappearing taxis, hit-and-run driving by celebrities, parking wardens, DVD pirates, the IR, GST increase, and mini$terial pay rai$e etc.

Casting Selena Tan (you should know her from watching the movie ‘I Not Stupid’), Emma Yong, Pam Oei, and Hossan Leong, the cabaret show was 2 hours of pure fun and laughter. I laughed so hard until my headache went away and at some parts I was actually in tears from the laughter. It is worth every cent of the $80+ I paid for the ticket. I strongly recommend it to everyone.

And if you are not convinced why you should go, here is a teaser from the cabaret show itself (taken from the CD which was bought at the show). Enjoy the song, and decide for yourself if you should go and watch it yourself.


Just listen to song: Click ‘Play’ button to start

Baby Lee Junior’s Army Gaffe

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Got this off another blog… What do I think about it?

First, those other ocifers who 2LT Baby Lee, Junior is referring to should probably start looking at a career move elsewhere. After all the day when 2LT Baby Lee, Junior becomes BG Baby Lee, Junior, these guys probably will find no seats for them in the ‘Next Gen SAF’.

Next, 黄鼠狼下耗子 – 一代不如一代。新加坡自求多福吧！

Finally, to the blogger who wrote this piece: Singaporeans fear this gover-min. Never the other way round. It’s sad. But it’s the facts. And they hide their fear by all sorts of lame excuse. I have heard enough.

That’s all I have to say about this. No further comments is necessary.

Special: White Horse Explained.

PM’s son’s army gaffe and why we have to worry

Read this from the HardwareZone’s forums and confirmed the story with a friend in the military. A few bloggers have blogged about it too.

2LT Lee Hong Yi, better known as PM Lee’s son, had fired off an e-mail within the military network lambasting the ‘quality of leadership’ in the SAF to the top brass, including the Minister of Defence and the Chief of Defence Force.

He had done it after being punished for an error that was largely not his.

What was his fault, however, was involving just about the entire military force of Singapore in this one small matter of his, by addressing the e-mail to entire battalions of people. Committed by an ordinary serviceman, the offence would have warranted a formal military charge – and in an officer’s case, his rank may be stripped.

Nothing so far (or so I hear) has been done to 2LT Lee, save that the Commanding Officer of his unit gave a speech to the entire unit the next day about ‘following the chain of command’.

While one might argue that the e-mail comes from the military intranet and should not have been circulated in the general public (i.e. in HardwareZone), 2LT Lee surely could not have expected the matter not to leak out when he addressed it to so many people, most of them National Servicemen rather than full-time regulars.

If you looked through the thread, what’s worrying is not the blatant abuse of family ties, by a person who is highly likely to take up an important position in our society in future.

Neither is it the fact that he is being given favourable treatment on two counts: first, the lack of punishment for his offence, and second, his pending disruption from the army (which he mentioned in the article), despite not being bonded under a government scholarship, which, as far as I know, is the only official way of obtaining disruption.

And of course, it’s definitely not the ‘quality of leadership’ in the SAF that 2LT Lee questioned that worries me.

No, it is the perceptible sense of fear in the Hardwarezone thread where the topic was discussed. No one dared to give the full details: one had to sieve through several pages of the thread before getting the full picture. Nicknames like “Bored Dragon” and “Golden bar” were given to the persons involved. There were even warnings given by concerned forum members about the ISD and MSD surveilling the thread.

If it were in other democratic countries like the US, such an incident would have been a scandal and generated a media frenzy. Questions would be asked about his conduct and his suitability for an important position in future. The public would have a field day airing their views on his actions.

What would have been the effect? 2LT Lee would learn a painful lesson in humility, and the transparency of the government would be highlighted, because they did not shield even the son of the most important official when he had done wrong.

The resulting fire of the public would simmer and die down, and the public would have been satisfied that their views were heard and their indignation expressed. That fire would have been a cleansing one.

Instead, the entire deed is hushed up. The original thread on HardwareZone was deleted. But perhaps the worst thing of all is that the public is censoring itself. People dare not to speak up about the topic.

Instead of fire, the incident is met only with self-defeat and fear. The public has lost its voice and its own opinion, and surrendered its position as the main critic of the government. And as we know, the local media surrendered its own position a long time ago.

It shouldn’t be this way.

Governments should fear people, not the other way round.

It’s just a minor incident – after all, there’ve been worse offences committed by officers in the SAF – but it speaks of a larger, darker, and insiduous problem.

“It does not do to rely too much on silent majorities, Evey, for silence is a fragile thing…one loud noise, and it’s gone…Noise is relative to the silence preceding it – the more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap. Our masters have not heard the people’s voice for generations…and it is much much louder than they care to remember.” – V, V for Vendetta

Errata: Li Hongyi does have the PSC Overseas scholarship, my bad.

Featured Blog (2): Malique

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How did I come to know of Malique’s blog? Well, I was trying to some of the ping.sg members to my MSN messenger when Malique put up ‘malique.is.cool@live.com’ on the ping.sg shoutbox. Unwary it was a prank, I dumbly added it only to find out it was fake a while later. Silly me!

After that I decided to check out Malique’s blog because I wondered if his blog would be as funny – or interesting – as he is on the shoutbox. I didn’t regret doing so.

Here’s a screen shot of the header:

Note: The header part changes when you hit ‘refresh’ on the browser.

I went through some of his blog posts, and I find this and this quite interesting. There are also some creative advertisements which are featured and they are damned cool. I wonder how long it would take for any of them to reach me had someone circulated them through emails.

I also learned a thing or two… for e.g. how to change your wordpress login page. I suppose when I finally get my ass down to learning a photoshop skill or two, I would do something similar to my photos. But I definitely won’t flatten my tummy to make myself look thinner or ‘adjust the geography of my face to look better’ like a particular vain bucket of pink shit. (Sorry Malique, I had to take a swipe at her… Shigata ga nai. It can’t be helped.)

And finally, the other thing that caught my eyes is of course one of the ‘citizen journalism’ pieces Malique has put up. Like this entry.

So, do hop by and give Malique some support on his blog. And yes, I finally did manage to add Malique as a contact on my MSN. You will never have too many friends, just don’t regret having only too few.

Featured Blog (1): Decay On The Net

Remember the Hammer Gal and Chillycraps Matrix: The Hammer video? This is not another blog entry on them. This is however, a blog entry about an interesting chap on ping.sg, nicknamed dk99, the other guy in that video.

I have decided a series featuring the blogs of some people I met during the ping.sg anniversary party. Why am I doing this? Why am I introducing the blogs on ping.sg? Because ping.sg is a community. While one can of course just stay put and not participate in anything, and be a hits-whore hoping to get more hits from ping.sg, that really isn’t the idea and what the founder of ping.sg intended it for.

Why did I choose to feature dk99’s blog? Well, first of all – if I had not mistaken – he mentioned that we ought to do more citizen journalism on our own raise to awareness of the things that goes on around us. Regardless of our feelings of our local media or our political views on them, I agree with that because the newspapers – being an invention 400 over years old – can no longer effectively and efficiently relay everything that happens around us.

For e.g. would you know that Starbucks uses super automatic espresso machines? Would the Stooge Times report such trivial?

You might ask if such things matter. But as a consumer you have a right to know and decide if your money is well spent.

Also, would you know if someone in Vietnam has copied ping.sg?

Anyway, it will soon come a time when we get up-to-date, if not real-time, information about the things going-on in the world on the Internet from our friends, and not from the newspaper, radio, or even TV. The blog will be the best multimedia medium to do so. In fact, when there was a water spout recently, it didn’t take us very long to put the photos up on our blogs and comment about it.

So, do visit dk99’s blog… you may learn a thing or two from it.

Computers Problems…

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This happens to me once in awhile. I will install something and not really suspect it to cause problems on the PC. I also seldom expect them to have a relation to the problems that might arise.

Anyway, quite awhile ago, I was introduced by a friend to a nice little application called AppLocale. Basically it allows you to run programs with unicode character encoding written for non English Windows so they don’t appear in garbage – or what I called ‘angelic text’ – on your PC. For e.g., if you chat with people in China over an IM called QQ, you will need this for it to run QQ on English Windows.

I have installed it on my office PC but have never used it – and has no use of it – until several weeks ago. That was because an internal chat program in the office, while allowing Chinese input, does not send them across to the recipient properly. So I start using it to launch the chat program, after discovering that by doing so, it now allows me to communicate with my colleagues in Shanghai and Beijing.

Two weeks ago, this problem started appearing on my system:

MSIEXEC?! No waaaaay!!! This is the Windows Installer. Basically THE piece of software that installs and uninstalls most of the stuff – which come in .msi format – in Windows XP. If it’s fxxked, then it’s dead serious because you can’t install or uninstall stuff on your PC anymore! Technically speaking, Windows is also fxxked though you can still use it with whatever that is still there, with the possibility you can’t update it at all. And this is an office PC I shared with my colleague. It can’t fxxk up!! Not to mention I am the IT Desktop and Server support fellow and thus this is a matter of face!! I MUST and WILL fix it.

So I started by downloading and reinstalling the latest version of Windows Installer. – Failed.

Then I un-installed it, rebooted the machine and reinstalled it. – Failed.

Not giving up as yet, and since the office PCs get stuff installed using packages, I cleared the registry entries indicating its presence to the automated install agent on the PC and fool the system into reinstalling it. – Obviously, it didn’t work either!!

Alright… I give up and eat humble pie. I could have googled it but I guess the computer and Windows win some at times. Above which, I have spent half a day on this crap and googling for the solution may take up even more time. So I backed up whatever I can on the PC to a server share, and did what some IT guys love to do to their users: re-format and re-install.

Of course it went away… and so I happily reinstalled my proggies – including AppLocale – and moved everything from server backup back to the hard disk. And as you realized, I moved them which means they no longer exist on server. Not to mention, because it was done on the same day, the server didn’t even have a backup copy as it didn’t stay until a scheduled backup was done.

As to why AppLocale was reinstalled? Hey, I love talking to the guys in Beijing and Shanghai and there are certain meanings that cannot be conveyed other than in Chinese. Pinyin is crap. It is good as an input editor or for chow angmohs to learn the language, but is it even a language to begin with?

The good times didn’t last very long. Less than 4 days later, it came back and I was on leave. My poor colleague who came in to cover morning duties, must have been quite annoyed and did what I have done before: re-format and re-install.

And the problem went away, along with it… whatever I have saved on that PC for the past few years. Oh well, God’s way of saying “Practice what you preach.” because I have always told my annoyed users who lost all their files to save everything on the server. I just didn’t do so myself.

Problem apparently went away until this morning… and when I logged in, the same error message stared me down in the face as the automated install agent tried to install an update to the PC.

No… this can’t be happening!! Alright, it can happen but… not to me!! This is the worst nightmare for an IT support person and this is… humiliating! The computer has effectively just declared WAR on me.

So now I did what I didn’t do the first round. I typed the error out on Google and did a search. And obviously, it wasn’t very effective at all. There were quite a huge number of entries related to the error message, but none of the solutions were applicable. I won’t go into the details but I was starting to become depressed. The one thing that I have always been proud about, my ability to deal with my own computer problems, has gone down in a pillar of dust like the WTC in NYC did during 9-11. It has caused grievous damage to my pride but I had to seek help.

I asked 2 of my best source of IT solutions in the office. My colleague on sitting 2 floors up and one guy in Tokyo. Both have seen something similar, though not caused by MSIEXEC.EXE itself, and have not got a clue how to solve this particular problem. The message that now came to mind was: “Abandon ye, all hope here…”

Completely devastated, I start backing up my stuff again, ready to do one last format, and I promise myself this time I will just install whatever standard applications available in the office. Nothing fancy. Nothing not authorised. Some how, something in my mind prompted me to ask a user, whom I have introduced AppLocale, to check if he is having the same problem.

And the answer was affirmative. Now I have a bigger problem. Rebuilding my PC isn’t an issue. The IT department rebuilds PC all the time. But to rebuild a user’s PC would have been an issue because arrangements has to be made with the user, and test will have to be done to ensure everything works when he logs on. And what happens if the damned problem – like it had on my PC – resurrects itself again? Like it or not, I have to spend time to deal with this.

I went back to the AppLocale page where I downloaded it to take a closer look and it was completely demoralizing. It says, ‘This application is distributed “as is”, with no obligations or technical support from Microsoft Corporation.’

Ok, but AppLocale is now confirmed as the apparent culprit, and so it is time to include it in the search parameters on Google. After all, one of the rules of an IT support guy says: Once you have found the cause of the problem, then it is likely some poor fxxk out there will have come across the same problem and found the solution. And here’s one of the interesting entries:

If you can’t read Chinese, you are already fxxked. And this is in the traditional script which means you maybe doubly-fxxked anyway. But thank God I was given a mother who taught me to love the Chinese language!!

What it saying is basically: “The use of AppLocale may create a file AppLoc.Tmp in the C:WindowsAppPatch folder. This may cause errors in the execution of Windows Installer…”

Interesting. And so I went to look for the file AppLoc.Tmp and there it was sitting pretty in the folder indicated. Wary that I might be deleting a file that might break Windows, I renamed the file instead of deleting it. Crossed my fingers, and hit the update on the automated install agent again… and… the problem went away!!

Blast… it’s one of those days I pay a heavy price for doing things to my computer. It sort of happens once every year. Last year it was stopping the virus scanner service on my home PC resulting in a virus infection.

But overall, it was quite an exciting experience. I once again learn something new.

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