Rant – Of wusses and douchebags

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Not too long ago, I was accused by someone of finding every little opportunity to bash the gahmen or criticise its policies because of what he called my ‘intense hatred of the government gahmen’. It doesn’t matter that I have been quite a big fan of the ERP, and at times I have presented the viewpoint of the gahmen after I receive a better understanding of the policies. While I do not deny I can be rather vehement in my anti-gahmen stand, that doesn’t mean I allow that to cloud my decision all the time.

Ironically, the accusation was thrown in my face after I had in fact agreed with this person and put up my own opinion in support. I could only speculate why my comment upset him. He probably thinks only he had the proper justifications or he had better reasons to do so. If not, he must have thought that his way of bashing the gahmen was the only acceptable way. Another friend suggested that the person was upset because he had considered his comment to be perfect, and my ‘greatest sin’ was for adding on and ‘marring his perfect comment’. Whatever the case is, I took this as a grave insult, as it suggests that I am insane and incapable of reasoning as far as the gahmen is concerned. That’s not mentioning that when I started to defend myself, this person waved it off with a comment of ‘whatever’.

What a wussy!

~~~ * ~~~

Next, it amuses me that a 40-over year-old someone was denouncing another person as ‘self-righteous, antagonistic, extreme and hypocritical’ on his blog after he ‘visited his blog and the forum he was running’

Since I am the only person who runs both a blog and a forum, and we once disagreed strongly on how to run my forum, I take this accusation personally. As far as I am concerned, he is apparently still bitter over the fact he was not allowed a free reign on my forum almost four years ago. The fact is he repeatedly threatened me with leaving the forum if not allowed to do things his way. Though I did not object to him creating more than one account, he ultimately created a fake account with a fake email address that caused some concern with the business owner of the hosting server. After she advised me to delete the fake account, I announced publicly on the forum and asked to be informed if anyone wants to create such accounts in the future. He then confronted me on MSN Messenger and again threatened to leave. I decided I had enough of his childish tantrums and simply reply with these two words: Go ahead.

It probably never occurred to this self-centered sorry excuse of a man that there’s only so much emo shit I can take from a bachelor in his late 30s (then!) like him. I suspected he was shocked and angered because I did absolutely nothing to try and pacify him. I simply left him with no choice but to make good his threat. As far as I am concerned, whether he stayed or not would be a great loss of face to him.

Left he did, and the actions he took thereafter simply convinced me that I have no reasons to remain acquainted with such a person. I have been on the receiving end of his tantrums more than once whenever I disagreed with him. That’s when I wasn’t even rude or being an ass to begin with! I simply wasn’t even allow to express a different opinion or to stand firm on my disagreement. His sudden mood swings in a cordial conversation shocks me, as it is even more intense than those I have seen among my female friends or colleagues under pressure. Perhaps a serious hormonal imbalance has caused this oddly feminine behavior… and might probably even hint why my recent posts upset him.

He apparently still behaved just like I first knew him almost two decades ago. I am convince I made the right choice to cease all communications with this douchebag and blocked him on Facebook right after I joined. He has the honor or being the first to be blocked on Facebook and the only person blocked for the longest time compared to the rest in that ‘roll of (dis)honor’

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Random Discourse – Give us a break!

5 comments

The local media has certainly made a mountain out of a mole hill over Jack Neo’s Affair. More ink and paper have been wasted in reporting this utterly insignificant affair instead of matters of more importance, such as the proposed Constitutional changes to have more Single Member Constituencies (SMCs) and more Nominated Members of Parliament (NMPs), the details of the budget debate, or even the merit of Sylvia Lim’s proposal for more concession for the handicapped on our public transports. The local media didn’t even give a more even report on the entire context of Low Thia Khiang’s alternate proposal to control the employment of foreign workers. It chooses simply to take one of his statement to completely remove the levy on foreign workers out of the context and focused on how the ruling party’s MPs ‘gang banged’ on that to make him look like an utter crackpot who doesn’t know what he is talking about.

There is of course, the matter of a church wasting $310 million to purchase into SunTec City so it can now find a place in the city to house its congregation even though it has previously built a 47-million titanium-clad monument to God Capitalism in Jurong West. Hopefully someone like Jack Neo who is a member of that congregation has contributed a large part of the $310 million.

None of the above matters other than the obsession with Jack Neo. In spite of all his awards and his seemingly family man image, I have been told by a friend who has worked with J team previously in the course of filming some of his movies, that he hasn’t been a fair paymaster. From my friend’s perspective, they have been taken advantage of, and unfairly treated.

The papers certainly made Jack Neo looked like Singapore’s equivalent of Tiger Woods even when the entire matter doesn’t even come close. While there was probably half a dozen (or was it more?) women involved with Tiger Woods, there was only one involved with Jack Neo – a cock-eyed 22-year-old model named Wendy Chong. I really don’t give a shit who else Jack Neo had tried to hit on or sexually harassed.

What is most appalling, is that the pathetic local media actually can’t tell the marked difference between having sex with those women and harassing them. The over-exposed ‘Jack Neo Affair’ isn’t even ‘Tiger Woods Lite’. Not to mention, even Tiger Woods’ affairs were nothing compared to that of Edison Chen’s. After all, while Tiger Woods’ may have had more partners than Edison Chen ever did, there are no photos (or even an alleged video) to prove any of those even took place. On top of which, Edison Chen beats Tiger Woods hands down in stupidity by keeping all the juicy stuff on his hard disk, and then sending the Macbook containing them for repairs! But what can I really expect? My impression of Mac users like him is always one who really have not a clue about IT but deliberately buy one so he can act geeky because he can afford it.

As if the lameness of the media and seriously yawn inducing drama of Jack Neo isn’t bad enough, you have one of our local politician from the ruling party making harebrained remarks like this:

Over the years, to me, Jack Neo is a good son, father and also a good husband. Since he is remorseful over this incident, he should be forgiven. Actually, a man who has good career development would find such scenarios unavoidable. – Lim Biow Chuan, MP Marine Parade GRC.

I sincerely hope Lim isn’t a minister and he will never be one. There is however still a glimmer of hope for Lim if he already understand the reason behind my contempt before I start to explain it.

First of all, the comment certainly has the element which suggest that ‘men with good career development’ would have women throwing themselves at them as a fast track to personal advancement. Next, the comment has the element which suggest that ‘men with good career development’ will all succumb to treating women as play things, and they would go as far as harassing 16-year-old girls with proposal to have sex in hotel rooms, or have affair with young impressionable female staff with promises of career advancements. It maybe possible, only if you are a Chinese Emperor living in a palace restricted to commoners.

Whichever way you looked at it, this is certainly not a remark worthy of someone whose party claims to have the best talent to offer to run our little red dot of a country city. Considering the precedence of Teo Ho Pin on the losses by the town councils on minibonds, and Charles Chong’s ‘lesser mortal’ remark, such thoughtless statements seem common place and are hardly surprising at all. It is my considered opinion that the ruling party take note of such mediocre riffraff which had miraculously got past their stringent screening to be fielded as candidates and replace them quicker than someone can say ‘change underwear’.

On top of which, I wondered why Darth Dana Lam of AWARE hasn’t yet already bared her fangs and start growling and barking at a comment which denigrates and objectify women as play things. As an MP, Lim issomeone who actually has some social standing, no? Then again, this is hardly surprising… since AWARE always seem to have a more pressing and happier ‘gayer’ agenda. On second thoughts, perhaps it is already concocting another exemplary display of meaningless ideological babble with big words that would rival ‘objectification of women’. Perhaps it won’t be long before the world will be shown yet another piece of literary masturbation which serves no real purpose other than to impresses those suffering from vocabulary deficiency.

Anyway, while I certainly don’t think that the entire Jack Neo Affair is staged as some kind of publicity stunt for his latest movie, I am wondering if the deliberate playing up of it is to hoodwink us or direct our attention from some other matters that is more worthy of our attention… whatever that maybe. SPH can just give us a break from all these Jack Neo craps already!

As for Jack Neo and men like him, this following Youtube video will demonstrate an ancient technique which should be used on them to cure them of their… *erhem* ‘overly heterosexual disorder’.

Commentary – Love, really?

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Rony Tan has certainly not only caused a great rift among Christians and practitioners of other faiths with his comments on them, he has also caused a small rift within the Christian community itself with his remarks on homosexual people.

Whatever objection to the manner Rony Tan present his comments, I will take the matter up with him in person. I would not write a lengthly blog post condemning him, or ‘conduct a trial by social media’ – something which I have been against for a long time. While I will make no apology for Christianity saying that it is the only religion with the answer (to morality, the question of life and everything), I will admit that it is offensive for Rony Tan to ridicule how other religions present their answers. I do feel some shame and anger, because in spite of all the reminder from our own leaders to be sensitive to another person’s faith when evangelising, a leader of the Protestant Christian faith has done the exact opposite.

Other than with a few of my fellow believers, I have kept from discussing the matter with anyone from another religion. I would have kept it that way, until a chat with a non-Christian friend led to that topic.

With some apprehension I told this friend that Rony Tan has criticised two other religions, and that the remarks themselves were made readily available on the public domain. I told him my opinion that Rony Tan is not the first, nor would he be the last to make similar comments. I had expected nothing more than an angry reaction from him for my indifference to such a serious matter.

What surprised me was his reaction when he said, “I don’t really understand why are all these people upset. What he has said is something that a large part of the population would have considered as correct. All I could say was that he put it on the Internet so he ‘dai sei’ (Cantonese 抵死 – meaning ‘deserved to die’). What I meant is that all religions are somewhat closed in nature and I would find it news if a medium for a certain Chinese deity tells one of the followers looking for an advice to go seek a second opinion from Jesus Christ.”

Upon hearing his ‘second opinion’, we broke out in laughter. Though I doubt my friend was suggesting that all religions are intolerant of one another, he was simply pointing out that no religion (or someone of a certain faith) would actually suggest that another religion has a better answer. His comments hit me with the realization that those ‘crying for blood’ over Rony Tan’s comments suddenly don’t look very ‘open minded’ anymore.

Still, it is my opinion that an apology should go freely only to the Buddhists and Taoists. Anger will make them to close their minds to the message of Jesus Christ and they are lost to God forever. In spite of the Christian opinion of their beliefs, Christians do not deny that a large part of those beliefs also teach them to be morally upright people. In fact, I am in the opinion that these people ‘do by nature things required by the law (of God)’ (Romans 2:12).

However, on Rony Tan’s remarks on homosexuality, I cannot and will not stand with those who would go so far to spread a message of appeasement – especially in appeasing those who demand the right and the legal right to do what God has considered abominable.

The ‘message of appeasement’ masquerades itself as the Christian message of love. In some version of this false message, we are to close a blind eye even to sin – as long as it happens away in privacy and among consenting individuals or we should ‘leave them alone’ because they are ‘they simply seek to love’. The fact is Christians have always ‘left them alone’ and we only began to speak up when there is an attempt to legalised their deviant sexual acts or teach it as normal. Have pastors constantly preach against homosexuality before the furor surrounding the repeal of Section 377A and the fiasco at AWARE?

A brother-in-Christ once asked me this after reading another version of this false message, “Will you love someone so much that you will not tell him the truth simply because that truth might hurt him or offend him?” It is a question that those who spread the false message should bear in mind. The failure to warn someone from danger which could result in his death is a sin – the sin of omission. Do not forget that the Christian message is not entirely about love, it is also a message for us to repent, i.e. to turn away away from sin and seek the forgiveness of God.

In another version of the message of appeasement, someone has said we have failed to love our neighbours. And in explaining who our neighbour is, he cites Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25 ~ 37). The phrase ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ is first found in Leviticus 19:18. I would like to point out in Leviticus 19:17, it is written: ‘Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt.’ It is somewhat amusing that the proponent of the false message applies his definition of neighbour in Leviticus 19:17 only against fellow Christians, but not against the rest of the world. It probably also never occurred to the person abusing Jesus’ parable that the love referred to here simply means meeting the needs of one’s neighbours.

Based on the Good Samaritan Parable, which Christian has been like the priest or the Levite who refused to help the homosexuals in need? Is there any church which would bar a homosexual from just coming to church and listen to the message of Jesus Christ even though it may preach against their deviant sexual act?

What differs between Christians and homosexuals is the definition of needs. Christians believe that the homosexuals need to turn away from their deviant sexual acts and learn that it is considered sinful by God. While Christians have long lost the fight against sexual immorality, it does not mean that we won’t continue to fight when it threatens to expand its influence into our daily lives. After all, even non-Christians would stand up and resist when prostitution extends itself from its traditional strongholds into our neighbourhood!

If homosexuals disagree with the above perspective, there can be no compromise. Love does not extend into condoning or endorsing deviant sexual acts / sin. Do not expect Christians to give or calling us hateful because we are only defending the values that we hold dear. Homosexual activists make it sound like Christians are taking away some of their so-called ‘rights’ which never existed.

It is sad that even some Christians fall for that which I considered the greatest deception of our time and joined them in propagating that falsehood. Be warned, there are serious consequences in leading Jesus’ sheep astray.

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Anti-Social Media – Facebook Friend Lists

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An active user on Facebook would inevitably gather a large number of friends. Yet not all friends will share the same opinion with the user or even one another. So at times the wall postings end up a common battleground between friends on a different end of the divide. It also become a chore to do damage control and peace keeper among friends, and it becomes annoying and time wasting when certain idiots incessantly rant on without getting the point in ‘agreeing to disagree’ or ‘just shut up and shove it up the other end of their alimentary canal’.

Fortunately, with privacy settings and ‘friend lists’, you can now create lists so certain exceptionally pesky individuals can be shut out of your wall posts, or target wall posts and specific users. The purpose of this post is to demonstrate how to create ‘friend lists’, and how to manipulate the privacy settings in Facebook to deny your wall posts to certain users, or to deliver them to a group specifically.

This is exceptionally useful if you can’t stop yourself from the urge to say something about your colleagues or your employer, which might later come back to haunt you later or cause you to lose your job. Personally speaking, I would prefer no one say anything about his work on social media platforms be it Facebook or any micro-blogging facilities like Plurk or Twitter. After all, there is no reason to take the risk that Facebook won’t make certain changes which have the drastic effects of exposing stuff previously hidden from certain groups or individuals.

1. Click on “Account” on top right corner in Facebook, then select ‘Edit Friends’. This will load the ‘Friend Page’.
2. The ‘Friend Page’ is where Facebook recommend people to add as friends (usually friends of other friends), or where you can search the address books of Yahoo, Windows Live Mail etc for friends. Any list created will be on the left sidebar on the ‘Friends Page’. A truncated example of mine show here.
3. Assuming there were no list already created, click ‘Friends’ on the left sidebar to have all your friends listed. ‘Friends’ is the first item under ‘Lists’ on the left sidebar. When the browser finish loading the first page of friends, the following will appear on the top of the list (see below.)

Click to proceed with creating a new list.
4. A small window appears inside your browser. Give your list a name and select the contacts for this list and click ‘Create List’ when done.
5. The name of the list just created will appear on the sidebar. Click it to list check who are listed. Beside the names of contacts in the list, it will also indicate how many other list they are already in.
6. Having create all the lists required, click Home on the top right corner to return your feeds page. Then click in the box for add links or to input the status. Immediately below the input box, a set of icons will appear on the left, and small ‘Lock’ icon and the ‘Share’ button will appear on the right.
7. To shows default privacy settings, mouse over ‘Lock’ icon.
8. Click on ‘Lock’ icon and select ‘Custom’ to edit settings
9. Example: This is what I do if this wall posting should only be visible to the list named ‘Premier Soccer’ but hidden from ‘Island Paradise’. Do not that you do not have to type the full name of the list. Facebook will suggest it as you type in more letters.

To hide from a list is to explicitly deny it from viewing this particular wall post.

Click ‘Save Setting’ when you are done on who can and cannot view this wall posting.
10. To confirm list visibility before posting, mouse over ‘Lock’ icon again. Click ‘Share’ after you are sure this is what you intended.
11. To identify the a wall post’s visibility setting after it has been posted, look at the information displayed under it.

The example on the right shows the information displayed beneath a wall post visible to everyone. (Note: No ‘Lock’ icon at all!)
The example below shows the information of a wall post with visibility settings. Mouse over the lock to show visibility settings.(Note: Except indicate the list which this particular wall post is hidden from.)

Here’s a crazy idea that I thought up when discussing the above matter with a friend. Assuming that your girlfriend does not like you partying with a group of friends, you can now create a list for your girlfriend and mutual friends, and one for the partying gang. In your Facebook profile, you can then still share photos and comments with your otherwise ‘not approved’ activities with your partying gang without your girlfriend knowing.

Isn’t that cool?

BlackBerry Storm I – My Gripes

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I have been using a BlackBerry Storm for quite some time now, and I have only recently updated the OS to 4.7.0.186 after meeting up with Nicole to check out the Storm 2 passed to her for review. Don’t get me wrong, upgrading the device OS to 4.7 won’t make your Storm a Storm 2, because in the core the Storm 2 is a different creature entirely. The Storm 2 also comes with WIFI and I had always complained about Research in Motion [RIM] releasing models that are 3G but not WIFI-capable and WIFI-capable models which are non-3G. Whatever RIM’s business strategy is, it is my considered opinion that a manufacturer should just put in everything available, as long as it does not cost them significantly to do so. Whether the area support the technology provided, or whether the user uses is no reason to remove a feature.

Anyway, I liked the Storm 2 a lot better than the Storm. The feel of the SurePress touchscreen on the Storm 2 was definitely way better than version 1.0. Nicole subsequently informed me that even DK also agrees the successor is way better. He was so annoyed with the Storm previously, he just passed it to her for review after a few minutes.

Anyway, the reason I haven’t gone all the way to OS 5.0.0.451 on the Storm is because there isn’t yet an East Asian version available. No East Asian means no Chinese text input and I won’t go without that. Nicole and I had several chats on the Storm / Storm 2 and she came to the conclusion that as far as these two models of BlackBerry Smart Phones are concerned, a user will either love it or hate it. To add on, the Storm is a product I will use, but one I probably won’t recommend to others. The reason is not because it’s terrible, since it had met all my usage requirements. It is just my personal opinion that some users might find their experience very unpleasant when using it.

In short, unlike iFreaks who have 101 excuses to justify for every bad thing about the iPhone, I will follow my conscience and talk about some of the features I didn’t like – for e.g. Copy & Paste, and zooming, not to mention the long start up time when you reset the phone. Anyway, I did not play with the Storm 2 long enough for me to tell whether it has significantly improve over these features, so do not take my rants into consideration until you see the Storm 2 for yourself.

It will be difficult for me to put down in words everything I dislike about the Storm’s Copy & Paste and zoom feature. So I did a series of screen shots to make it easier for me to explain it.

I loaded up one of my Plurks on the BlackBerry Storm as an example. (By default, my BlackBerry Browser is in ‘Pan’ Mode.)
Same Plurk shown here. Tap the screen once and it brings up the little ‘toolbar’ below. (Yep, don’t have to press or do anything, just tap it.)
Let me bring up the menu and toggle ‘Select’ mode.
As a long time BlackBerry user, I tapped the screen once to indicate where I want to start selecting text, and then slowly slide the finger across the screen. Just like what I would have done using a track ball / track wheel cousin.
FAIL!! I had only moved slightly to the right and then everything on the screen was selected. Frankly, for months I still haven’t figured out how to select text in this mode. I have tried tapping it at one corner, then another but to no avail. (I scrolled up the screen so the other selected text will be visible.)
Let me tap the screen once to bring up the ‘toolbar’ and change to ‘Cursor’ mode instead. (The ‘Cursor’ mode is very much like using the track ball or track wheel on earlier BlackBerry models.)
Noticed the icon change on the ‘toolbar’ after I changed mode? I brought up the menu and toggled ‘Select’ mode again.
SUCCESS!! I did exactly the same thing as I did on ‘Pan’ mode but this works. I joked with Nicole that by now, an iFreak would have finished cutting and pasting at least 10 times on his iPhone. (Again, I scrolled up the page so the text which are not selected are shown.)
Now if I want to copy the text I just need to press the icon ‘Copy’ (highlighted) on the toolbar and it will be done.
Next, I move on to demonstrate the ‘Zoom’ feature. To zoom, press the icon ‘Zoom’ (highlighted) on the screen.
Now it’s zoom in, dead center.
If I hit zoom again, this is what I will see, and this is the most it will ever go. You can’t zoom anything more than that.
If you want to zoom in at a particular area, you need to press on the screen at the area you want to zoom into. (In my case, around the word ‘install’. This is where it is zoomed once.)
Similarly, this is the largest it will zoom. In short, there are just two zoom levels, medium and large.

Anyway, several hours after I finished the screen shots (and the first version of this post), I discovered a easier way to copy a block of text in ‘Pan’ mode. All I need to do is tap once on the start, then at the end and it would selected the text desired. Not surprising, since FoxTwo told me the Palm already have a feature which allow you to click on one point, and on another to select the text in between a very long time ago. Shameful that it took me so long to rediscover this. The price of not reading the manual and assuming that I have used BlackBerry Smartphones so long I don’t need to read it *slaps forehead*. I had forgotten that a touch screen smartphone would behave like… a Palm, the ancestor of all Palm sized handhelds. After all, most smartphones these days arrange icons in a grid, and on touch screens our fingers have replaced the stylus.

Whatever the case is, the BlackBerry Storm’s touch screen has this non multi-touch feel. The absence of the ‘pinch and zoom’ (or reverse a zoom) features aside (since it is patented by Apple and thus RIM cannot reproduce that on the Storm), selecting a specific area to zoom-in is not available. On top of which, the ‘pinch and zoom’ feature is available on the Nexus and Palm Pre, so there is a question of how much that patent actually covers.

While a friend pointed out that ‘pinch and zoom’ is nothing more than meaningless gesture to make the iPhone look high tech and revolutionary, the best I can do is still zoom dead center on a pre-selected point just twice (large, then larger) on the Storm! Granted that zooming in on the point I tapped is actually isn’t significantly different from a ‘pinch and zoom’ as that also zooms in on a point, the main difference here is that the user cannot control the ‘depth’ of the zoom. That inevitably makes a user feel the technology on the Storm to be ‘ridiculously outdated’. Thus, if the Storm did not have much impact in the touch screen smartphone competition, I am not really surprised. In a separate discussion with FoxTwo, he mentioned that if a feature is available on another device and you are a device in the same class, it is best to make that feature also available, unless it has been condemned to be utterly stupid or useless. It doesn’t really matter whether the user use it or not, just put in it and make no excuse like iFreaks do for the iPhone when they are confronted with the obvious handicaps.

Thus, these are the reasons why I won’t recommend the BlackBerry Storm to anybody, even though I personally find it good enough for my usage. It will be hard to convince the user of today – ‘pampered’ by all the other feature packed smartphones – to consider the Storm. The best I can do would be to offer my set to my friends to evaluate if they want to know more, and let them decide whether they can live with it.

The only good news is I heard is RIM has acquired Webkit and it will soon release a new browser for the BlackBerry smartphones. I hope the new browser will do more to improve user experience on not just the Storm series of BlacBerry smartphones, but even on their qwerty-keyboard based products.

By the way, I also told Nicole my ‘crackpot idea’ of sticking a track pad at the back of a mobile phone with a large screen, and that would still give us a smartphone with capabilities almost similar to a touch screen. I thought of this when I was working on my BlackBerry Storm one day, and my idle fingers were just roaming all over the back cover. I thought that would be cool since we won’t soil the screen anymore and we won’t be spending our time wiping it. Nicole mentioned to me that such a product – the Motorola Backflip – already exists. Apparently, some times even ‘crackpot ideas’ are conceived in big companies.

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