2005 Ending Soon

Like the title said, 2005 is ending soon.. in about 4 days. Wow. this is really fast...

Barely 4 days after Christmas, shops have all switched from playing Christmas carols to New year songs... Walk around some neighbourhood shops and you will see red -- literally. Chinese New Year Decorations have gone on sale in most shops...

Did I mention stress?? Seeing all these only reminded us how close it is to New Years, not to mention Chinese new year... There is a list to do, and on the top of that list is "spring cleaning" up the house!!

2005 could be said to have been very eventful, not to mention busy as well..
Below are some events classified into their related categories....

PERSONAL:

For starters, it is my secondary 4 year and thus, the 'O' Levels which is over now. Currently still sweating, waiting for results..
Problems also plagued this year, with unexpected bums in my studies which has cauesd un-necessary dilemmas.

This year also saw the unexpected outburst of the public due to the NKF saga (news article ) which I have blogged in an eariler post. Well the level of outcry only goes to show the level of trust which we have placed in all Voluntary Welfare Organizations.

Singapore:

Besides that, there was the execution of an Australian national which was caught smuggling drugs through our country..(news article ).... It escalated into a calls for boycott of our country's products and services by a small group of people. This really put the ties of the two countries in a test. This matter is not going to be put to rest so quickly as it had really split the Australians into two camps -- Those for and those against capital punishment. This case was also closely monitored by other countries especially Bali which has arrested 9 others for drug related crimes, better known as the "Bali 9" (news article).

The Education seen in Singapore has also changed, with more flexibility in admission to tertiary education. One example would be the Direct School Admission (DSA) which allows schools to accept pupils based on other qualifications other than the academic performance.

Global:

On the global scene, there has also been fresh attacks by terrorists which has revived old memories of past attacks as well as input new ones... Will this ever end?? No one knows...

China and Japan's ties were also in the rocks, with fresh protests to Japan's Prime minister's visit to the war shrine which honours class A criminals together with other war heros...(news article)... Ties are seen as improving.

Internet / Web Tech:

On the web technological front, there has been new trends in the current web. Long gone were the days of static content and slow internet connection. More and more people are connected these days. With the high proliferation of the internet, users are becoming more demanding. There has been talks on the current trends and many has come to classify the current generation of net as "Web 2.0".

Web 2.0 speaks of new trends like podcasting, blogging. It also includes new technologies like Asynchcronous Javascript and XML (AJAX), Ruby on Rails , new web APIs which promises a rich user experience. We also see guidelines from the World Web Web Consortium (W3C) becoming more deep-rooted in web development as web designers now starts conforming to markup standards. Because of this, Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) and other standards dependent languages like XML can be implemented more easily.

Websites are now built using a combination of XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Flash, Actionscript or even XML, mimicking desktop functionality and behaviour while taking away the pain of updating webpages for developers. AJAX has also lightened the load on servers reducing the amount of bandwidth consumed. Languages like javascript also make use of the Document Object Modal (DOM). Knowledge in this areas of development, which was once a bonus has now becomed a neccessity. Already, jumping between site areas fast are now deemed dull. Fading into new pages offers a much more pleasant experience.

Tags: Computers and Internet, Blogging, Internet, Personal, Weblog Life

Merry Christmas!!

Ho Ho ho!!

To all everyone in Singapore and those overseas,

Merry Christmas!!!

Cheers!

NKF Saga

I guess if you have been listening to the news, the NKF Saga came to another major junction. By that, I am refering to the release of the independent KPMG audit report a few days ago.

Thought it was already quite shocking when they revealed the ex-CEO's pay. Never thought the situation on the whole could ever be worse.

From what I could gather from the news, I am not really surprised at the reserves the company has, nor the expenditure or even the CEO flying first class. To be honest, I never even heard about the 30/70 rule. What I was most surprised was the excessive concentration of power to one person.
The whole structure of "power" of the upper echelons in the old NKF for a moment reminded me of past dictators.

It irks me to read from the audit report which stated that only 10 cents from every dollar goes to patients.
Was my compassion misplaced??
I felt like a fool to have urged my father to donate especially during the yearly NKF fund rasing charity show. But then, I don't think the level of betrayal me and my family felt was anywhere new what the artistes which risk wounds to perform stunts to raise money.

The confidence of people in these Voluntary Welfare Organizations (VWOs) has been shaken. Only time will heal it.
However, time is something these charities / VWOs may not have....
Sickness do not wait until a crisis is over before striking....
The patients do not have the time to wait....

I am, however, confident that the current board and CEO will set the record straight. The minister of health had acknowledged the poor coordination among regulatory agencies and a lack of clarity in lines of responsibility........ However, he assured that all these systemic weaknesses will be fixed within three months.

In this undeisrable episode, regulators have learned that they must follow through robustly even though it may cause unpleasentness and unhappiness (Mr Khaw's words) and relax because of historical successes of the organization in question.

In the coming months, we will really see the extent of damaged which has been delt to the NKF by the old board. Already, a substantial amount of people have dropped out of the monthly donation programme.

Will they return? No one will know for sure.

haha! yea...

Countdown!! Christmas is round the corner!! A season of joy and giving!! lalala...

But it is also the time I have to say bye bye to some of my friends who will be going overseas....
Well, for starters, my best friend, Jeremy will be off to London to study soon. I wish him a safe trip and hope that we will meet again... Maybe, erm 10 years from now at the class reunion sheduled in 2015.

Z.Y. is off to Italy, for 11 days. my Cousins will also be off to Genting for a few days... I myself won't be around online for a few days ....

Aside from that, can say I got myself or rather, thanks to Z.Y, he got me into Bleach, an anime currently showing in Japan... As you can see in the navigation bar in this page, I even added a "Bleach" section.

Blogexplosion is hiring people, but extra requirements like, "extensive knowledge in PHP, MySQL", I can't even try... Even then, will they hire a 16, soon 17 year old teen?? I doubt so.

Anyway, finally completed my month long redesigning of this blog... can say I discovered quite alot, although page load time may not have improved as I hoped... but it is a different from my old color schemes, alot brighter...

Graphics, Layouts were all designed from scratch. Spent about a day thinking about the layout and linkages alone. The whole site is extensible and based on CSS, making maintainance quite easy.

Holidays are fast coming to an end.. Must really start planning what to do.

quiet...

Ooops... have not been blogging for sometime...

Quite busy, if you count in trying to rush through 60 episodes of the Anime: Bleach within 4 days.
Went to my friend's house for a few days for the past week as well as catching some movies. Waiting for Narnia to come into cinemas.....

Holidays coming to an end too.... and I still have not finish packing my room. 2006 Chinese New Year coming early too... Must really complete clearing up the room soon.

Well.. today's the 14 December... Looks like a few of my friends will be flying overseas soon, if they have not already.... Looks like it is new year, new country for them... haha.

My computer seems to be outdated already.... Wanted to buy Quake 4 the other day, but sadly, the game requires at least an ATI Radeon 9700 or the X-series of graphics card. I only have an ATI Radeon 9000... Tech-geeks especially gamers may say that my computer is already ancients... sighz... really too bad...

At home now.... Working on a new layout for my blog..

Some may wonder why I seem to be changing all the layouts all the time..
Well, thats the only way I could get myself to learn....
Used to just copy and paste from website templates, with the exception of the current one here, which I coded myself, although some parts were not coded by me....

The new site will be purely made from Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Some elements like Flash and javascript tickers will also be added.Coding Markup stricty adheres to XHTML 1.0 or 1.1 Standards, with the exception of blogger inserted codes. Must make sure that the codes won't go outdated when World Wide Web Consortium (w3c) releases XHTML 2.0.

Well, back to my coding... Waiting for Bleach ep 61 too. Should be released in about 8 hours...

-out-