Zit Seng’s Superwall

This should be an embarrassment to SMRT. It looks like they forgot to pay their bills. Their corporate website www.smrtbuses.com.sg is now inaccessible, because apparently the license for their Blue Coat proxy appliance has expired. Maybe it’s time to raise bus fares again, so that they have enough revenue to pay for their IT operating expenses. Not only is there inflation, rising fuel prices, wage increases, but there is also IT costs to grapple with.

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Don’t you sometimes feel like helpdesks are not very helpful? Or wonder what is the purpose or point of having a helpdesk? I very often do. In fact, sometimes I feel like the objective of helpdesk is not so much as to help customers, but to help its company reduce the number of incidents it actually has to handle. It’s like as if helpdesks have a KPI that measures the number of support calls it successfully turns away.

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I’ve been evaluating a couple of software lately. I’m looking for a nice platform to do tons of documentation. I talk about “nice”, because things need to be beautiful for people to want to use. But at the same time, they have to work. Actually, having to work is even more important. It is such a dilemma sometimes when you have to choose between what’s beautiful and what works.

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The truth is, my wife’s Nokia E66 hasn’t been playing well. It kept hanging, the display kept blanking, and it just hasn’t been playing nice. We sent the phone to Nokia Care, where it stayed a few days. When it came back, we were told the LCD display was replaced, and the firmware re-flashed. Unfortunately, the phone continued to hang, and the display continued to blank off randomly.

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Don’t you think sometimes it gets a bit irritating that it takes someone, let alone our Gahmen, so much time before they state the obvious? How can it be that our Gahmen, overflowing with scholars, be capable of not seeing something so terribly obvious that all our lay countrymen have already known for ages? Yes, we’ve had nice pay increments, but inflation has edged out ahead, so that we basically have a net decrease in real income!

Finally, the Ministry of Manpower tells us that. Ah duh?

I was rather surprised to see this Adsense advertisement on my site. The ad title was “Apple Travel Laptop”, but it was a Sony VAIO advertisement. I immediately wondered, what has Sony got to do with Apple? Sony selling Apple notebooks? So, I clicked (I guess that’s what a good ad does eh, it makes you click through…) to find out. What was the resulting linked site all about? It was about Sony VAIO of course. Nothing about Apple in there. I felt annoyed at being tricked.

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I’ve been wanting to say this for the longest time. Since receiving this mass email this morning, I thought it might as well be now. SOME NUS STUDENTS ARE REALLY VERY STUPID! Does it make sense to leave a notebook out there in the open, walk away from it, and expect it to stay put exactly where you left it when you return 10 minutes later?

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This week is IT Security Week at NUS, and so they have an IT Security Carnival held at the Forum. They have been running this for some years now, and I must commend the organizers for their excellent work all around. In my opinion, this is one of the more successful and meaningful event, and I’m not saying that just because IT security is one of my pet areas too.

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Table tennis wins over the National Day Rally. The live telecast of Singapore’s National Day Rally is postponed to the next day, because the timing clashes with the live telecast of the finals of the Olympics women’s team table tennis match. Singapore’s Prime Minister decided on this arrangement so that Singaporeans could tune in to watch the live telecast of the match.

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Choosing a theme for my WordPress blog is surprisingly difficult. I don’t consider myself fussy. Although I do have very specific characteristics and features that I want, I don’t consider them very unusual or unreasonable. I’ve been looking and searching, but it seems like there are really few themes that meet my requirements. I’ve been tempted time and again to spin my own theme, but they aren’t exactly trivial tasks either.

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