Cyber footprints

Today, as I celebrate my 49th year of existence, I find it amazing how things has changed from my childhood days to today. Today, I have had numerous calls and messages from many people wishing me the best for today and many of them are people that I have not heard from for a while. Some of them, I am pretty sure I have never told them of my birth date. So I started asking some of them how did they know the significance of today. A huge chunk of those people messaging me turned out to be people that I have on my Skype contacts. It seems that Skype reminded them that it was my birthday and that was how they knew. Susmaryosep!! I am leaving too many footprints in the cyber world!!. I have had profiles created in Friendster (profile mostly deleted), MSN Livespace, Yahoo, Google, etc. Yikes.

I have instant messengers using MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Google, Skype, and POD (company proprietary). You may ask why? Just that different groups of people that I deal with had their preferences. So rather than limit to one IM, I essentially used all available.

We have mobile phones with huge amount of memories where we can store the contact numbers and other details of everyone we know (and even some we don't). My ex girlfriend finally figured out how to set reminders on her phone and called me early in the morning to wish me Happy Birthday - on time and on the right day, unlike previous years. Ha!! And she is a typical computer illiterate!

I left photos in Yahoo (abandoned since), MSN LIvespace (still active) and Friendster(also deleted). My personal photo collections (mostly taken by me - so I guess the copyright is mine) resides on my hard disk and is backed up on 2 different portable hard disks! They take up almost 13G of disk space at this time and growing! Maybe someone knew I download photos of interest (people and places). I had someone send me a supposedly Zipped file of photos. I had that virus scanned and found a Trojan horse embedded. I suspect that that had been an intentional and malicious act as the person never responded to my queries.

With the advent of digital photography, film photography is dying a slow unnatural death. With SD, compact flash and other memory standards with Gigabyte capacity, it is easy to generate vast amount of photos. I personally use a 2G SD in my Panasonic Lumix(FZ30). The max that I have ever used was 1.5G (and that was with video recordings as well). I still remember the first camera I got - a Kodak Instamatic when I was 13. The flash as a disposable - 4 shots cube of magnesium. With money in short supply, I had to think hard before taking a shot, as every shot had to count. I took photos for Friends and colleagues at weddings to earn extra pocket money and to pay for my hobby.

Today, my son knows that some sites of interest can be accessed on the Internet and he regularly bugs me to help him to get to one site or another. Luckily I password protect the Internet access at home and he has not figured out how to get online without my help at this time. Whatever happened to making your own kite, adding glass to the string with egg white mixed in to hold the glass on the string? Playing tops? I used to be able to whip a top and have it spinning on my palm all at one go.We made our own jelly guns out of a piece of plank and rubber bands. I never had the money to buy toys and resorted to making my own.

Today, my son wants transformers, Spider man, etc. And they are not cheap!! I envy him - he can get so much more than I could in my time and at my age then. The biggest consolation I have for him was to get him a digital camera (5Mega pixels Sanyo) to snap to his heart's content. I will then edit his shots and archive it on my hard disk.

With all these footprints that many of us leave in the Cyber world, I will not be surprised if in a not too distant future, we will be able to get personal information of anyone via a click or two on the mouse and keyboard. We are almost there already as many people are happily leaving their profile, their contact numbers, addresses, birth dates, friends of friends information all over.

One small step for me and you and one very GIANT step for mankind!!

Employment and cost of living

Today the honorable Lim Kit Siang in his blog (http://blog.limkitsiang.com/) is proposing to move a motion on the issue of the MTUC nationwide picket on minimum wages. His motion reads in part "On Monday, 25th June 2007, Malaysian Trade Union Congress (MTUC) staged a 14-location nation-wide picketing by thousands of workers after discussions with the government on its campaign for a minimum wage of RM900 a month and cost of living (Cola) of RM300 for private sector employees came to a deadlock". I have been working for 30+ years now and this statement got me thinking back of the days when I started earning a salary
I was 12 years old, just finished my Form 1 (express class lah), and while waiting for the new school year to start, I worked in a coffee shop in the middle of KL - the current site of Kota Raya. There used to be a row of small shops selling textiles, shoes, bric-a-brac, etc.. Behind all that was a little kopi tiam operated by a Mr. Tham and his family (no relation to me). He was my mum's classmate and as my mum had to bring up my sister and I by herself, this was a good opportunity to earn some money to buy books and other school stuff to start a new school year. No wages were discussed - only that I would turn up for work at 8am and work until 6pm everyday during the school holidays. At the end of the holidays, I had learnt to carry up to 3 cups of coffee (on saucer) on one hand and I believe that Mr Tham gave my mum about $100 or $150 for my services. That sure came in useful for the school re-opening. I worked odd jobs during my secondary school days to bring some money home, but mainly to supplement my pocket money. I was given 20 sen a day for the whole of primary school and that was upped to $1 per day for secondary school. I bought a bus card at student's rate to get some savings. I still remember the bus card would be very dog eared by the end of the month. 20 sen in primary school could get you a bowl of laksa noodles and sometimes with see hum thrown in. I would pick up every single 1 sen I came across. A little old lady in Hot Spring New Village would accept 1 sen coinage for the candies she sold, which typically cost 10 sen to 20 sen. And I still collect 1 sen that I see lying on the ground. Got a whole container full of it now
Many people do not know this, but the current Giant Hypermarket was started by a local family named Teng. Old man Teng used to run a typical Teochew sundry shop behind Jalan Riong. They then expanded to Lucky Gardens in Bangsar and was revamped as Teng Mini Market Center (TMC). The 2 Teng brothers (Yew Heng and Yew Huat) allowed me to work part time in TMC over the weekends. As time went by, business was so good, they expanded TMC to it's current location (opposite Bangsar Shopping Center). The Teng brothers then decided to go one step further and started the first and (at that time) only hypermarket - Giant. The allowance I got from helping out on weekends were useful supplements to my pocket money. Too bad they have sold a significant (if not all) of their share to Dairy Farms of Hong Kong. I used to collect empty coke or any other aerated water bottles and turn them in for the deposit (5 sen per bottle) . I also spied for TMC on the neighbourhood mini markets to get pricing info.
Form 5, while I was waiting for my MCE (O levels or SPM today) results, I worked as a labourer in a building construction - earning a grand $5 per day. Imagine a scrawny 16 year old, who can hardly handle a wheelbarrow, moving around the construction site. Unloading cement bags was the worst experience. You always go home with cement dust clogging up both nostrils. The clothes I wore became really rough, clogged with building dust and debris and very difficult to wash. But $5 a day was nothing to sneeze at as a part time job in 1974, especially for someone with no experience, weighing probably 90 pounds or less.
Finally in 1977, I started on my first real employment - as a lab assistant in TAR college, working in the Electronics lab of S.O.T. and earning a princely $450 per month with $30 COLA and $20 special allowance. (if I remember correctly). But by the end of the first year, i was disillusioned. After working really hard, I got a $30 salary increment, because that was the scale used. No wonder civil servants do not have incentive to work hard. It is just not worth it. When I started in TAR college (a statutory body of sorts), I was the highest paid amongst my classmates. By the end of the first year, many of them had gotten big salary increments that far exceeded my total package. I resigned from TAR, joined Motorola Semiconductor for $475 per month. By working hard, in 9 months, I got promoted to Senior Technician. 6 months after that I was made Maintenance Supervisor. In 3.5 years that I was in Motorola, my salary moved from $475 to $900 when I left for HP in 1981. That is just the basic.
In 1981, I bought a house - freehold - 18 ft x 70 ft, double storey- in Taman Melawati for $43,500. With my meagre income combined with my mum's income, I could only get a loan of $28,200 from the banks at that time. The rest, I borrowed from friends (and learnt a very bitter lesson in life - you cannot depend on your relatives). Despite a basic of $750 (at that time), I was taking home $1600 to $1900 per month! How? Work my butt off on overtime lor. Within 6 months, I managed to pay off most of the loan that I had taken from friends to make the initial payment for the house. All this while, my only mode of transport was a trusty old Honda Cub which my mum bought for me when I started to work. Obviously I had no money left for parties, socializing and what have you.

HP offered me a position as a customer engineer for $1200 per month and 3 months later, I guess I must have impressed my manager enough that he gave me a whopping 25% pay increment to $1500. That was 25+ years ago in early 1982.
Today, without any special privileges (like discounts on buying property) or affirmative action plans, I have built up my asset base to 4 properties, with rental income from2 and expecting the third to come online early next year. Hard work never killed anyone. I even paid for my MBA (from Univ of Bath) by myself while doing it part-time. Cost me RM40K including fees, expenses and others.

But as I look back, I don't think my son will be able to buy a house today at today's price and income that I was able to do in my time. Who is to say? I have always given my grandparents some hard questions - why did not invest in property when they had a tailoring shop in PJ old town in the early 60s? They wasted all their monies on building bricks - the mahjong type. When my paternal grandparents passed away, they died with virtually nothing in their pockets. Theirs is another story to be told when I feel like it.

So is a minimum wage an important issue? Personally I think that it does not matter where you start off from as long as you are willing to work hard to get what you want - through legal means. I have always believed that the paper qualifications is nothing more than a determinator of where you start off in your working life. I started work with nothing more than an O levels bolstered by a Certificate in Engineering from TAR college. Along the way, I took up Diploma in Management from MIM and then my MBA from Univ of Bath. Once you get your foot in the company, how you proceed is totally up to you. Work hard and chances are the rewards will be better than the average Joe

Could my career have been better? Who knows? I guess I could have arrived faster if I had job hopped like many of my contemporaries. But as the sole breadwinner, that was a risk I was not willing to take. In this company, it is likely I'll work until retirement at 60 years, so I still have a long way to go.

Today, I am an Asia Pacific regional manager - cushy by some standards and yet bitching about the travels that I have to do. I also have a part time job as a public Mutual Unit Trust Agent at the level of an agency supervisor. So i have been actively trying to get a package from the company:)

Going to Malacca, Port Dickson and back to KL

Been taking a few days off to supposedly relax. But..... no, I kept showing up in the office because of one issue or another. And to top it off, my hard disk on my home PC just died on me. So I have no internet access for a while (when I am at home).

Yesterday, I decided to take a drive from KL to Malacca. Took off after my son was sent to school (6.30am) and meandered over to A'Famosa to collect rental from them for the lease of my condo unit. Stopped by a durian orchard along the way, sampled one durian (so so) and bought 2 more. Not very good. I would not be going back to this orchard again (on the road to A'Famosa).

Decided to drive back using the coastal road as we (my wife and I) had previously gotten really delicious kampung durians in Port Dickson. But the stall near Pasir Panjang was not opened for business. Should have gotten their telephone number the last time. I keep kicking myself for this oversight.

So, we continued driving along the non tolled roads and spotted a stall selling Rambutans, Longan and Longong (I think that's how it is spelt). While wrapping up the purchase of the rambutans and Longong (that's a duku langsat lookalike), I noticed a Chinese man selling what can be described as non-descript durian. Not loo large, longish and a little on the slim side (the durian, not the seller). You can say that I am desperate to try other types of durians by now, so i sauntered over and asked how much would 3 fruits cost. The man says - try some first, and he opened one of the smaller durians on offer.

The pulp was about the size of one section of my thumb and the seeds was almost non existent. So, it is true, you can still teach an old dogs new tricks. In this case, new knowledge. I don't know if the durian seller was pulling my leg, but he said that that variety is known as the " Rich man's durian" Seriously!!! It seems that "rich men" do not like to eat big pulpy durians and prefer bite size pulps. And this variety comes from Penang where the owner did not want to propogate this variety all over town. So it is only a select few (and a few lucky ramblers like me) who got to savour this fruit. The fruit is gooey and sticky, sweet with a touch of bitterness.

I bought every fruit he had (and there were only 18) and I gave 3 fruits to a friend. The durian seller also let us have a taste of D101, which was really good. It was only one fruit (and insect infested at that), but the taste is so good that I intend to visit this stall again very soon.This morning, my friend confirms that the "rich man's durian was one of the best durian she had ever had.

I realized before writing up this blog, I should have taken photos of the durian. Darn it - forgot!!!
NVM- I have the seller's phone. I'll see if I can get more this weekend. It is only half an hour drive from Cheras to Seremban!!.

May travels- Final leg - Fukuoka

Fukuoka, a.k.a. Hakata is located on the South Western tip of Kyushu island and is physically nearer to Korea than Tokyo. Unfortunately (for me), Malaysian Airlines does not fly there. So I ended up taking a flight from KL to Singapore Changi and then a past midnite flight to Fukuoka. Not sure why travel desk arranged for me to spend up to 7 hours in Changi airport, so I ended up admiring the orchids in the garden within the airport. KLIA also boasts of a similar garden within the terminal, but it is out of bounds to travellers. Changi has the garden in an open space and many travellers were seen taking photographs amidst the orchids and other greeenery. And there is an O'Briens outlet in Changi - but for my Muslim friends, I don't think it is halal. I am sure the crispy turkey ham that Malaysian outlets served was originally pork bacon in the O'Briens outlets outside of Malaysia.

The team meeting that I had in Fukuoka went well. All the team members participated actively, providing animated discussions and seeking clarifications. But what the hell, a picture paints a thousand words - so here are a few thousand words to show where my team went - mainly Shinto shrines. First thing we learn is that before entering Shinto Shrines, you need to wash your hands and rinse your mouth in the watering whatchamacallit strategically placed outside the shrine. We visited 2 different shrines and at both, there were statues of a bull placed near to the entrance. Was this a precursor to the stock market? Merrill Lynch in Wall Street copied this and added the Bear? Who knows?

Also visited a Hakata museum ( Hakata Machiya Folk Museum to be precise) and some of the statues there are so lifelike. Don't believe ah?? see here and here. heh heh

Last but not least, my Japanese colleagues brought us for seafood. He says, the seafood is very fresh. But you wouldn't believe how fresh!!! We had most of the seafood sashimi style and when they say fresh, they mean fresh!!.

When the squid was served, it was so fresh that when you poked at it with one end of the chopsticks, there were muscle spasms (maybe even from the diners!!). The poor thing was looking at us eating parts of it's body. We had 3 different types of fish served sashimi style and for 2 of them, parts of the head and tails were still moving. The red headed fish looks like one ugly toad. Its mouth was still gasping open and close. The gills was still trying to flap. If you could understand fish language, it may probaly be saying " why are you eating me? put me out of my misery"

The darker color fish (supposedly a snapper) tail was still waving about even as we took slices of it's body, dipped in soy sauce and wasabe and savoring it's exquisitely fresh taste. Some years ago (like more than a decade ago), there was a hue and cry when in Malaysia, a restaurant served up fried fish where the head of the fish was still alive. If we had served what I had in Fukuoka, in Malaysia, I am sure many animal right activists would probably be so disgusted as to bring the press in to build up vocal opposition to such a practice.

Before I end this blog, I would like to highlight one practice in Japan that should be emulated by all countries and everyone - the culture of recycling. Waste are sorted by recyclable categories. People actively walk when they can and use bicylces to move around if they could. Bicycles are made by famous automobile manufacturers like Peugeot, Chevrolet and would you believe it - even Hummer. That's the civilian version of a Humvee.The Hummer is a dream possession of many a nouveau rich in China. So I would like to end this blog to show my Chinese colleague with his dream hummer!! Aixin - buy one and bring it home. You will be the envy of many Chinese.