This by-election is for residents of Hougang to vote for their member of parliament. On the surface, it seems like it doesn’t concern anyone else in Singapore. But quite the contrary, this by-election continues to be ever important for everyone in Singapore. The scale of the election is certainly smaller, but it is not any less important. National issues continue to be relevant in this by-election. Residents of Hougang may be feeling a heavy burden. On the one hand, it…
Today’s Straits Times reports about LTA reviewing the penalty framework for MRT breaches. Everyone’s very mad about all the recent MRT breakdowns, particularly the two major incidents in December 2011. We’re all thinking that the MRT operator should be fined heavily. But do you wonder, at the end of the day, who really pays for the fines? If the operators’ bottom lines are affected by these penalties, or side-effects of such penalties (e.g. increased maintenance costs), they’ll ultimately petition the…
As much as I sympathize with football fans who were upset by SingTel’s mioTV epic failure during the epic EPL season finale, I’m glad I don’t watch football. I would otherwise have been completely infuriated and spent the following week organizing a campaign against SingTel. This is a colossal engineering failure. Surely SingTel knew the number of subscribers they had on mioTV. I think most subscribers are on mioTV only because of the football programmes. Otherwise they would probably find…
The last couple of days we’ve been entertained by the public inquiry into the spate of SMRT disruptions. We’ve just come to the juicy part where SMRT ex-CEO Saw Phaik Hwa gets grilled. Not unexpectedly, we’re going to learn about many more things wrong about SMRT. One of the key issues is about the maintenance budget set by SMRT had not kept pace with the growing ridership. To cut a long story short, Ms Saw claimed a mid-life refresh had averted…
You thought that would be it. An appeal for support to help him get into school. Then it got exposed by the Sunday Times article yesterday that Alvin Wang, the person seeking support for his appeal to get into NUS, actually did get into NUS. In fact, he was offered a place in the School of Computing’s Information Systems course. But he did not want Information Systems, he wants Computer Science. All the theatrics about the online call for support…
This morning, you might have found yourself waking up to all the buzz about helping Alvin to get into school. School, here, being the School of Computing at NUS. Oh yes, that’s where I work, hence it caught my attention, a lot more than most other viral marketing campaigns might have. It got so much of my attention that I’m now actually writing a blog post about it. What is this buzz about? Well, Alvin launched his website www.helpalvingetintoschool.com to seek…
The SMRT breakdown yesterday could have been easily averted. A power supply earth fault had brought down their communications backbone network, and that disrupted their train signally and hence te trains could not run. Now, I suppose they do have UPS backup power, but probably just not enough of it. If only they had enough batteries, the 2.5 hrs of downtime could have been averted. It seems like such a silly thing for network equipment to run out of power….
Transportation is in the hot seat lately. Last week, it was about our Transport Minister justifying that MRT breakdowns are unavoidable (see The New Singapore Standard for Train Service). This week, we are told to be prepared for more shutdowns. I’m disappointed. These stunts are what I call “managing expectations”. Or more appropriately here, “managing disappointments”. I’m annoyed because “managing expectations” is what books teach me to do to other people. It doesn’t feel so great when others practice what you’ve…
I read with disappointment our Transport Minister Mr Lui’s address in parliament. I thought we were supposed to have a world-class public transport system. His Ministry is only targeting to minimize train disruptions that last longer than 30 minutes. I suppose delays under 30 minutes are considered tolerable. If the train operators can shorten the delays to under 30 minutes, they would have satisfied the new standards for train service Mr Lui wants. Seriously? Shouldn’t you want to minimize the…
In December last year, I was trying to decide if I wanted to participate in a fire drill at work. You see, I was a fire warden, which means I had some extra work to do. There is a story behind this, about why I’m peeved about being a fire warden, but I’ll not talk about that now. For this fire drill, the fire wardens were promised that there would be a reward. It was supposed to be a monetary…
