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-

Exam Withdrawal Syndrome (EWS)

Thought it would be a nice first few days of rest after the exams..
But got Exam Withdrawal Syndrome instead. One moment you're mugging for 2 weeks 24/7 and then suddenly you do not have to do so anymore... It really feels weird. Got urge to study but no motivation to study. Very paradoxical.
Well I'm not the only one. A few of my friends are feeling the same too. Haha, wondering whether to start studying something extra.

Well I kept myself busy. Been trying to teach myself C++ and Flash/ActionScripting. Been brushing up on my CSS skills and usage also. Will be rolling out a new website design. Moreover thinking of building a CMS (content management site) to put history essays. But I guess that will come later.

Went to watch the Exocism of Emile Rose. Can say quite errie. However, the first show on exocism : "The Exocist" was scarier than this. However, this show is enough to spook anybody or even get them to start praying. 6 demons althogether. Permit me to exclaim : "my God!!!"

However, something had infuriated me today. Or rather, yesterday, once I finish this post.
I was accused of writing, actually tagging someones blog, which I did not.
I will not provide a full transcript of what happened, its between the parties involved. But I'll just give an overview..
Basically does a two letters mean anything?? One has to see "gs" and automatically think it is me. Come on! There are so many people out there with gs as their initials. Furthermore, my initials are not even "gs". For the record, its gyjz or gyeojz, as seen in my URL.
I get angry when there is no prove and somebody starts pointing fingers.
Whats even more provoking in the matter is that I specifically thought about my online nick and site branding, wanting it to be something special.
Why do I have to further shorten it?? I would gladly announce my nick on the site I post to, and I can say I am proud of the nick!

At least I'm glad that incident has been straightened out.

Better sign off now b4 I "over-rant". Got to sleep soon too! Have to collect my Secondary Leaving Certification today at about 8am.

cya =)

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Hey xiiaomiin..
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Cheers!

O levels half way through!!

Wow. What a week! *takes a deep breath* This is it.. D-Day! Concluding 4 years of Secondary School life,I'm (or rather Sec 4 Students) are already into the 5th day of the 2 week long Cambridge-Singapore 'O' Level Exams.

Currently, Social Sudents, E.Maths, English Language, Biology,History 2158 (World Affairs), Literature are done with, including Chinese which we sat for in June.

My goodness! The questions asked can be really weird. For instance, History 2158. So many specific qeustions came out. out of 31 essays, 22 of them were specific. I've never seen so many specific come out in the previous years. Than there were some that were almost... (well I cannot find the correct word to describe it.)
For example, one of the questions: Outline the main events in the history of the Weimer Republic duting the years of 1919 to 1929.
If they want to cut the essay timeline, then cut more. That esssy is not much different from the 1919 to 1933 timeline. The difference is only one sentence which is "Hitler became the chancellor and rose to power in January 1933".
And what the he**!? An overlapping question of pacific war and SCAP?? If we were to write everything, from the bombing of Pearl Harbour , then the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, finally SCAP recovery of Japan, it would take us about an hour, way past the time limit of 1/2 hour per essay for 5.
Even our teacher, when found out about some questions like Tiananmen Square massacre and Deng Xiaoping came out, she control herself from exclaiming "those *~censored~* !!"

Biology Multiple Choice Paper 1 was almost relaxing. A 1 hour paper left most of us freezing in the air-condition hall for 35 minutes as most had already finished it in 25 minutes. You could hear some people stretching themselves in the hall.Although that cannot be said for the Biology Paper 2. There was an essay on eutropication (isn't that supposed to be in Chemistry??). Well I really hope I can do well in Biology. I don't really have high hopes. My fault actually. I cut myself during the biology practicals about 3 weeks ago. And it was a deep one. It took 2 days for it to totally stop bleeding. It just healed, with the outer skin / or you may called the epidermis (onsisting of the gradular and conified layer) still forming.

Just finish E Maths paper 2 today, and never did I expect the fibonacci sequence would make its way into the paper. Well, thankfully they did not ask how to find the n^th term. That would have taken some time. Anyway, can say we had enough time to do the paper twice... a situation totally the opposite from out prelimss. The prelims were disastrous, with many not completing the paper. Even though I completed the paper for prelim, I still got a B3 as I lost over 15 marks due to careless mistakes.

Anyway, taking a 3 day break before the next paper which is Additional Mathematics.Thats 5 papers off the list, with 4 more to go!!