On the visit of Prince William and Duchess Catherine of Cambridge

3:45pm 12-Sep-2012
A very “typical” afternoon in Queenstown

WAYANG – a Javanese word for particular kinds of theatre (Wikipedia).

During my National Service days, wayang simply means putting up a good show. A wayang is often initiated by the pending visit of a very high ranking officer (usually of rank Colonel and above), or someone of high office (e.g. a minister). I am not sure whether it still happens these days in the Singapore Armed Forces [SAF] but when i was in an overseas base for a year between 1993 and 1994, there were several visits involving the formation chief, the Chief of Medics, and the brother of our Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Yang (who was then Brigadier-General, if I recalled correctly). The typical SAF wayang usually involves what I called “environmental engineering” – whereby every bit of trash is cleared from the dumps, clogs in the drains are cleared, floors are washed thoroughly, fluorescent lights along common corridors, bunk fans etc that has long broken down are hastily repaired, vehicles and car-park lots are repainted, and rusty metallic equipment scrubbed, oiled and greased to create the impression that they are all well maintained and serviced. Even the grass is cut, often with shears. In some cases, weeds are plucked with bare hands since life is often harsher and better equipment not available to us in the pre-3G SAF back then. Most of us felt utterly stupid and ridiculous doing all that crap, but everyone just do because no one wants extra duty, or to be charged summarily for insubordination.

With the exception of the Chief of Medics, who made the effort to highlight the issues of hygiene and areas where camp cleanliness fell short, the other visitors spent no more than a few minutes (or even seconds) at a particular location. According to the camp grapevine, BG Lee himself actually walked past an ad-hoc dumping area that was somehow overlooked. Well, we treated it as nothing more but a camp myth, since no one was punished for that boo-boo as the state of the dump was horrendous, not to mention God-knows how many SAF regulations was violated considered the stuff that was disposed there. But the wayang at Queenstown on September 12 is definitely unprecedented.

Kids playing at 3:45pm in the afternoon? Senior citizens using the facilities and practising Taiji or Qigong? Come on, it is so fake that it retches my guts. Had it not been near dinner when I saw the photograph, I would have puked my lunch out. Not only has what was done made me felt personally utterly stupid, I felt quite shameful about it because it puts us right there beside countries like North Korea. While we Chinese have a saying – 禮多人不怪 (literally: the abundance of politeness causes no offense) – I am sure Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge probably knows about it by now (from Facebook) that everything at Queenstown was nothing but a charade and an utter farce. I wondered how the royal couple would have felt.

However, I am not surprised that this stupidity was actually carried out when I consider who is at the helm of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs right now. It almost made me miss George Yeo. Just almost… *wipes a tear from the corner of an eye*

~ * ~

On the iPhone 5

One of the biggest mistake of Research-In-Motion (RIM) was simply this: trying to be somebody else. It tried very hard to be cool and funky, to move away from the image of being square and only for the business type. To do so, it made a whole bunch of uninspiring devices (the Blackberry Storm for e.g.) which irked many existing users and charms no one else. In spite of the criticisms, I actually liked the Storm very much until its screen died on me. Unfortunately, RIM also reminded me of Lucy Pevensie in the movie Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Lucy doubted her self worth, and in a dream she completely disappeared because she wanted so bad to be like her sister Susan. Lucy’s fate in the dream may well turn out to that of RIM’s, unless its bet on BB10 (its latest OS) pays off. I won’t place too much hope on that considering how Palm’s bet on WebOS turned out.

More than a year ago, I read an article which defended the form factor of previous versions of iPhones. The writer argues that the width of the iPhone is such because it allows people to hold and operate in one hand, as the thumb can easily reach all across the screen. The writer went on to boast about how that demonstrates the effort Apple put into designing its stuff, and dissed Samsung’s “haphazardly designed” and generic array of products. That probably explains why Apple designed a longer phone and not a wider one, because it is too stubborn to concede to its competitors that the iPhone’s form factor has become a shortcoming (if not a liability). With the iPhone 5, Apple is right now about where RIM was when it released the Blackberry Storm. Steve Job’s “Reality Distortion Field” is apparently failing after his demise, and now Apple has to try and catch up to with the rest because the market has irrevocably spoken in favor of larger screens. Even the stylus has made a come back in the Galaxy Note!

Anyway, the iPhone 5 is still inspiring and awesome. It was inspiringly boring and awesomely unexceptional. After all, Samsung, LG and HTC have phones with larger screens and LTE for at least a few months already. That would have been the iPhone 4S, if not for Siri. Even so, Siri was nothing more than an idea copied from Star Trek and a rather meaningless gimmick that probably few people even use these days. Alfred Siew put it very well in this article on Techgoondu:

To put it bluntly, it is not just like Windows and the boring PC in this post-PC era. What Apple is doing here is much like what Microsoft did with… *gasps* Windows Vista! Fortunately for Apple, its large base of fanbois will keep the iPhone 5 from suffering Vista’s fate.

Apple fanbois would be screaming about how the new iPhone 5 has a more powerful processor and whatever technology gizmos. But the fact remains, just how much of that translate into real perceivable improvements for the user? These days computers have quad-core processors too, and really, even if you have 32GB of RAM in that box you can’t tell the difference when you use it to surf the Internet or do your word processing. Perhaps everyone would notice how great the new iPhone 5 is when they tied them together and do supercomputer calculations to design the next nuclear bomb like India. Apple iFreaks will no doubt be exceptionally upset and indignant that others are dissing something which they have never, and possibly never will use. In fact, they How ironical that they hate getting served the shitty dishes they’ve been cooking and serving others all along. Apple is now into uncharted water where there are no longer the wrecks of Palm, Nokia and RIM to serve as an example on what to avoid and it has to figure out the perils on its own. I won’t go so far to say that the copycat company who pretends to be an innovator will do better than those which have fallen, but if will bring me joy to see it fall and never get up again.

Before I end, let me explain why I hate Apple so intensely. While I would not deny that many companies (and patent trolls) resort to patents for “rent seeking”, Apple took it way too far. There is no company more hypocritical than Apple. It claims to be protecting innovation – by killing innovation. It calls others a copycat when it has been a copycat in the past! Had Apple’s methods been used in the automobile industry, it would mean that the steering wheel, the placement of headlights on the vehicle, the placement of instruments on the dashboard, and the use of proximity sensor (not the sensor itself) for warning when reversing the vehicle will be patented. Apple will even also apply to the courts to ban its competitors from selling anything that had 4 wheels because it would look like one of theirs.

I can hardly tolerate something so utterly ludicrous.