The real, legit, Toyota Sientas have already been in Singapore for many years. But for some people, it’s only when the authorised dealer (AD) brings it in that makes the car officially available here. Well, it’s official. It was announced last week, and it’s now out on Borneo Motors’ website. The Toyota Sienta from Borneo Motors, however, isn’t the same as…
The recent signalling problems on the Circle line is the sort of situation that is familiar to me, in various areas of my work, including programming, network, server systems, and other bits of IT infrastructure. The Circle Line was plagued by a mysterious signalling problem that lasted a few days. As mysterious as it had started, it later disappeared. Do we…
I’ve been looking at cars of late, and one of those that I’ve been considering is the Toyota Sienta compact MPV. The Sienta has been in Singapore for some time, available only through parallel importers. This includes to recent 2015 refresh model, which looks a lot more modern than the prior Sienta designs. It’s been speculated for some time that…
For the two men who died on the tracks in March this year, SMRT has fired a train driver. Another staff from the operations control centre had left earlier on account of this accident. Sure, some people broke the rules, a bad thing happened, and for that SMRT blames two peons. But the whole incident reads like a systemic problem in…
I’ve been looking at cars lately. My existing Honda Stream is coming to eight years old, and it seems like time to consider a replacement. Keyword here being replacement, not necessarily an upgrade. The Honda Stream has been discontinued, but if it hadn’t, I think it could have been a worthy consideration. It was a great car for our needs. Honda’s…
I’m certain many of us have been joking about it. With all the frequent MRT breakdowns, problems are just the new normal. The day the MRT actually works, that will be big news. Indeed, that day has come, with our Straits Times declaring “Circle Line glitch-free since Friday evening“. The trains actually worked. Finally. Today, before reading about this news,…
For the strangest reason, one of the topmost incoming search keywords to my blog is about cars, even though I don’t blog much about cars, or even about motoring in general. My complaints about MRT and public transport, I’m sure, don’t count. One of the most oft searched keywords relate to scrapping cars, and the calculation of scrap value, or more correctly…
As of last night, the official Zika cases in Singapore stands at 151, with some cases found in new neighbourhoods. It’s quite certain that the numbers will continue to rise. Then, we start to wonder if Zika might not just become the new normal, but also be present in every corner of Singapore? We hope for the best, but must…
In news earlier this week we heard about the government’s review of the use of VPN technology over concerns of intellectual property infringements under the Copyright Act. For a country that wants to be a smart nation, its thinking can sometimes be quite antiquated. First they ban the Internet from civil servants, then now they’re considering to make VPNs illegal. The…
Since I got involved in building data centres over a decade ago, I’ve been a quite fascinated by all the big electricity things. I’m not an electrician, nor am I electrically trained, so there were a lot of things for me to learn about what makes a data centre tick behind the scenes. Electricity, interestingly, is about the simplest part of the data…