Boredom 101

Helping out

2011-12-02T02:06:00.000-08:00

Sigh. All these external problems are not what I need right now. Spending the last month trying to break this problem is draining the life out of me. So frustrated and angry, but nothing else I can do. I've covered everything I could, better to cut my losses and get back to myself. I need to be more careful with the people I'm dealing with.

I've been spending a little time helping my father out and learning something on the job. Just started a new project, and work has already started. I've already spent some time looking around. Most of the Indonesian sub contractors have become bumiputras. Apparently this is quite common, most of the Indonesian laborers who have been working in this country for a decade or so have become bumiputras. Really surprising, and very disturbing.

I'll start spending most of my time rotating between worksites for the next few months.

Dealing with a problem.

2011-11-27T08:53:00.000-08:00

I've gone back and forth on this. I've tried talking with other parties, but there is so much confusion going on i's become impossible for me pass anything through, morever the situation is so complex. I've put out a long post to put some clarity to the whole murky story.

Sigh, this is just fucking nasty. Long winded and confusing, I can't even read it.

Basically, Dominic is a cheat. His got several people to support him. And I need to have a base for myself so I don't get alienated. He sounds convincing and I've had to deal with a lot of hostility because of his BS. I need more people to realize this so they won't get influenced by him.

Markets rebounded

2011-11-15T17:35:00.000-08:00

I've pretty much recuperated what I lost in the August correction. Market sentiment is terrible, if Italy doesn't hit the rocks, it looks like it will go up next year. Most of the leading economic indicators in the US are still positive. Most likely flatline until next year before it continues upwards. Since I pick from the bottom up, market direction doesn't really make a difference. It's funny how the markets work. A lot of times bad news is ignored if the underlying economy is doing ok.

The jargon for it is called climbing the wall of worry.

uggh...

2011-11-15T07:45:00.000-08:00

If you think your smart, your probably not. Problem +1... and my plate is already full.

I ought to just ignore this. If it drives people away, I haven't lost anything worthwhile. Sigh, what bullshit. Need to get my focus back. All this little fuck ups are jarring my concentration.

Late at night

2011-10-29T14:03:00.000-07:00

It's early morning, and I haven't been able to get any sleep. I'm lying down and I'm trying to organize my thoughts, listening to a podcast and the radio host mentioned that writing stuff down helps organize thoughts better. It used to help, but I haven't been putting my thoughts down recently. Most of my writings here are just small tags that I put down when I feel I have the time to write something. Usually when I'm feeling bored or angry.

I let a small problem grow into a big one. The problem now is that there are people around me who have been turned against me. I can't address any of the points directly because most of the people I know believe the little rat; beyond ignoring me or treating me like a stupid fool, there is really no way for me to attack the issue directly. A friend of mine told me to change a name, migrate overseas and start a new life. "There is no way to deal with jackshit like this", this advice is just funny... nothing else... I know this guy very well, and if people would just bring the issue to me directly I could work around it. Instead of having 5 different people ask me the same question. Or being treated like a fool for no good reason. The key problem is that it is very hard to keep my cool when I am being treated like a jackass.

The most distressing issue is the one I am having with one of my close friends. He has become this guy's biggest supporter, at the same time he is attacking me. The weasel is trying to lift him up to make use of him. The cherry on the cake in this whole issue is that he is angry because I am trying to tell him that he is being manipulated.

edit: Sigh, To eat an elephant I guess I need to start with small bites.

Ugggh....

2011-10-12T07:50:00.000-07:00

I am really under tremendous pressure... What I need to go through right now really drops the hammer on a lot of things. Not to put up with weasels early, otherwise I might find myself on the short end of the stick, as I am now. Not relying on anyone too much without having something to back myself up, because when it really comes to throw down and I find out that I made the wrong choice... I am going to have to struggle through things like this. Sigh, hopefully by the end of all of this I can repair my reputation. It's a really dark mark on an already difficult period.

Sigh, so many problems on my heels.

2011-10-01T05:44:00.000-07:00

It's been a heck of a long run these last couple of months, I've been facing a lot of problems lately, from my personal life all the way to what I plan on doing in the future. I've taken a break from college for a semester to shift through my life and find out just where I am right now. It's been quite a rollercoaster and frankly speaking, it's really been an up and down cycle. I've had a fallout with Dominic, I used to be friends with this guy, but really a lot of things that should have alerted me to his behaviour a long time ago I did not bother to pursue, and right now it is really coming back to bite me in the ass.

He used to brag that he would be able to give people a difficult time if he didn't like them, among many other things, but I didn't really catch on until much later and I didn't tell anyone else about it, probably due to my misguided sense of loyalty. I guess I should have said something about it much earlier on. It always struck me funny how he would list out and overemphasize on all the things that were wrong with a good friend of mine while he spun a very flattering story about me, when at times I was doing worse. When I realized what was going on I backed the other friend all the way, but I didn't point out what Dominic was doing when I should have. The way things have turned out is almost comical if it wasn't so draining.

It's given me a whole new load of problems to deal with, but I guess the bright side is that I caught on to his behaviour, and I'll probably have to put myself out there before he can do more damage than his already done... as it is my relationship with several people have been damaged, if not outright ruined. This is a problem that I should have addressed early on, but with every other thing going wrong, I didn't pay attention to it when I should have tackled it on early. But life is like that, sometimes things go wrong. Fix it, damage control and move on.

Market uncertainty...

2011-08-01T04:58:00.000-07:00

Uggh, in a limbo right now. Still looking around for something to keep me pre occupied for a couple of months. The more I look at options... the better it starts to look.

I'm taking a look at LEAP options, they are long dated options that give u the option to purchase a security 1~2 years down the line. I just finished reading a book called the big short by someone called micheal lewis, one of the guys in the book went from 100k to 12 million using this type of options...

This is really very interesting...

Bloody unbelievable.

2011-06-11T21:21:00.000-07:00

edit: this post sounds really tense, probably not such a good idea to have something out when I was so flaming mad. Saved into drafts.

Half in... testing the waters

2011-05-18T09:56:00.001-07:00

750k.

USD is falling through the floor

2011-04-28T04:10:00.000-07:00

USD is falling through the floor. If only Bernanke actually knew something other than theoratical economics. The only thing he knows how to do is to print more money. This is a nightmarish situation for most of the exporting companies dealing in USD. I wonder just how competitive this is going to make our exports. I know 2 very well run companies that quote their products in USD. (Evergreen Fibreboard/Uchitech Technologies). This sort of USD prices is going to eat into their profits.

Thank god I haven't pulled the trigger yet, or I would be staring at a 3% loss before buying anything...

Rich ass roommate

2011-04-13T04:15:00.001-07:00

My roommate from KDU is making 500k a month. Unfuckingbelievable.

Waiting for the fat pitch

2011-04-13T03:23:00.000-07:00

Good things and bad things going on at the same time. I've gotten my options account up and I'm up about 4k... That's peanuts. I'm eye balling a company that looks very nice to me, I feel that it's worth at the very least 50% higher than where it is right now and I'm willing to bet a very large amount of money on it, but the timing feels really bad. So I'm just waiting to see what happens in the market, and then follow up and see how high it can go. Market's always overshoot and undershoot, it looks like it's overshooting now to me. The world economy is really bad, the main driver, which used to be the American consumer is crippled. There is no way China will be enough to pull this world out of recession, because they are the ones who have relied so heavily on the American consumer. The european crisis is still ongoing, commodity prices are sky high. Where this is all heading I don't know, some really smart people have been predicting a market correction of anywhere between 10~30%. I'm waiting for that dip before I start to buy in. The business is doing very well, and I think I ought to be able to buy it at maybe 10~15% below what it's selling for now. If possible I will probably go for at least a million...

Reposting somebody elses post

2011-03-13T01:12:00.000-08:00

This is a repost from a blog I read often... I would put a URL, but who clicks on URL's?

Here is the URL

Sg Buloh-Kajang MRT Line, Why So Expensive? by Salvatore Dali. This guy is a chinese guy btw.

"Sigh ... why ask the question when we all know the answers anyway. Should we just stop asking questions? Should we ask questions and then nonsensical answers come back, and we all go back to our routine? Then ask questions again, and the same virtous cycle repeats itself. This is not the first, nor is this the 100th project to trigger alarm bells. Seems like the 2008 election results is not enough to jolt some people to do better - so fellow Malaysians, you should know how to do better if they do not know how.

First, make sure you register as a voter, and then make sure your family and relatives register as well. Then make sure your friends register. The voting in 2008 is actually 48%-52% for/against ... and 4m eligible voters DID NOT register to vote at all!

http://goodstockbadstock.blogspot.com/2011/03/should-we-ask-singapore-to-help-us.html#comments

When the MRT proposal was first released, I am in general supportive of the deal. The idea of having a MRT line is great. Plus, I have done some calculation, the project cost seems to be in line with the cost of constructing the MRT in other countries. The initial estimate by MMC-Gamuda, although slightly more expensive, it is still within the ball park range. Then, today, newspaper said that the line would cost much more, almost 50% more. Now, our MRT line is not slightly more expensive, it is very very expensive. I am talking about the cost of Sg.Buloh-Kajang line, as the details of other line have not been released yet, so it would be quite stupid and silly to estimate the cost as we do not know how much of the rest of the line would be underground, like our friends in CIMB just did.

First, let's look at what CIMB said about the proposal since they are the only documents that I have on hand that talk about the Pasarana's MRT briefing in details.

As mentioned in the CIMB report, the cost of the line has gone up by nearly RM6b or 50% more than the initial estimates. The analyst explain the price hike as caused by inflation. Very clever. In less than 2 years, price increase by 50% or an inflation rate of around 25% ( arithmetic average). If the cost of construction materials really increase at 25% per annum, a lot of our property and construction players would be in a loss-making position. Property prices, across the country (not in selected spot), would have gone up by 50%. Did we see that type of increase? I don't think so. Assuming the analyst is correct, at a 25% per annum inflation rate going forward, the final cost of the MRT project would be staggering. 25% per annum inflation basically means that the cost will double in slightly less than 3 years. Our MRT is a ten year project, so, within the time frame of the project, the cost will be more than 8x the original estimate or around RM290b. He is not surprised, I wonder what will make him surprised. Plus, the engineers and QS in MMC-Gamuda are very smart people too, they make projections without considering inflation. Or did these people purposely understate the price to get buy in from government, then only tell the government that the actual cost of the line? If that is the case, it makes our government looks quite stupid.

I am comparing our cost with the recent MRT line with that of the recently completed circle line in Singapore. I am not comparing with China because it would make the Singapore line looks expensive and our Klang Valley MRT ridiculously expensive. Let's just says that China are constructing their MRT lines at a tiny fraction of the cost of our Klang Valley MRT. Perhaps I should, since we are paying our Bangladeshi workers similar wages as the Chinese paid their construction workers. But, China is having at least 15 subway lines being built simultaneously, so, they probably would have some economies of scale there.

Singapore completed their circle line last year at a cost of SGD10b. It is 35.7km fully underground line. According to Prasarana CEO, an underground portion cost 5-10x more than the elevated portion of the line. So, I will take 5x as benchmark, that is, I make the Singapore line looks more expensive although the estimates coming out indicate that the underground portion is 10x more expensive. Who is doing the underground portion? Haha..you know what I am thinking right. So, at SGD10b for 35.7km, we will get a cost of RM669m/km for underground and RM133m/km for the elevated section. So, the Sg.Buloh to Kajang line cost RM11b if we use Singapore circle line cost as benchmark. It seems that kiasuland can build their MRT almost 40% cheaper than boleh land even though their engineers and their Bangladeshi workers are paid at least twice as much as Malaysia paid our engineers and Bangladeshi workers.

A little bit background on the Circle Line, the SGD 10b construction includes cost overuns. The intial cost is just SGD6.7b. This is uncharacteristic of a Singapore public project as they normally complete their project below the initial estimate and yet, our Klang Valley MRT line costs 60% more on per-km basis. I wonder whether our Malaysian geography is so different than Singapore that it cost 60% more. In addition, the Circle line construction faces quite a lot of problems. It was constructed at the same time as the two Integrated Resorts.

At that time, Singapore faces a shortage of constructions workers, so construction cost skyrocketed. Furthermore, at that time, Singapore faces a shortage of sands as they manage to piss off a few of their neighbors including Malaysia. So, no one are selling sands to them. Even Genting Singapore construction is delayed even though they sign an exclusive agreement with the Singapore arm of YTL Cement to ensure fixed supply. LVS do not have this sort of agreement and causes them to open much later than Genting Singapore. The shortage of sands is so acute that most Singapore property built on that period uses glass to replace wall to cut cost. A construction project in my university was delayed to ease the demand for construction workers and sands.

The circle line also faces problem in the form of part of the section of the tunnel collapsed, causing delays and re-alignment midway through the project. With all these problems happening during the time of the project, their final cost is still 60% cheaper than our MRT cost at planning stage. I wonder how come our MRT line is so expensive? Should we just tell the people that construct the Singapore MRT to help us construct our MRT then? I think their MRT is built by some Japanese firm, so, there are no question of political feasibility. The old man like to look east, so, he won't make noise.

The complains about the line recently is mostly about the placement of the stations. But, the press painted them as these people do not want the MRT line at all. They make it a rich versus poor thing. We are already being segregated based on race and religion, now they want to separate us based on wealth. Banyak pandai punya media. These people are basically complaining about the placement of the stations, the implementation of the project. They do not say that they want to cancel the project. In fact, some of the station placement is so poor that it is laughable.

Based on their maps, one station in the so-called "poor" part painted by the media is actually place after a toll and it is a park and ride facilities. So, if I am a resident of nearby Taman, I want to take MRT to work, I need to pay toll to access the station. Unless they want to buy up the entire residential estate that is situated behind the station, I do not think the residents in that area can access the station without paying toll. A few hundreds meters down the line, there is a decent patch of land that avoid the toll. Very clever indeed.

They said that the tunneling works would be based on open tender basis. But, the devil is in the details, it may be that the details will favour a MMC-Gamuda bid. By the way, since when does a company that have only dug two tunnels in their entire life can be considered an experienced player? Hmm, you mean those Chinese firms that have 60 TBMs working on a single subway line should be considered grand master? Do we want a grand master to build our underground portion or you want an experienced player with 2 tunnels under their belt? Would it be better for our companies to learn from these grand master and hold minority stake in the project. Next time, with these knowledge, they can go to India or Africa and win tunneling project.

So macam mana?
"

Parking at Sunway

2011-03-07T01:47:00.001-08:00

Just had my car broken into. My door was deliberately left open. Parking in Sunway is just downright ridiculous. The car shops are all weasels. They "reserve" parking slots and their attitude is that the public parking spaces there belong to them. My car got broken into, but theres nothing missing there. The shop infront of my car there are not willing to admit that they did the shit. I had to rope in a few mechanics to help me check if anything was wrong with my car. The mechanics actually admitted that there are a lot of shopkeepers that vandalise your car because they don't like people parking infront of their shops.

One of the mechanics even said that you should just park at the parking at the other side of the road. Thats a PUBLIC parking spot. They ought to get arrested for destruction of private property. If there was anything missing I would have lodged a police report against that shop. God damn.

What am I doing here

2011-03-06T02:01:00.000-08:00

God damn I'm so bored my mind is bleeding out of my ears... My room is a god damn mess. I've got about 7 cups on my table. I need to clean my room, I need to work on that accounting software, I need to start learning how to use that options account and go out and put some money into it. I need to get out and knock on some doors.

Update.

2011-03-05T07:53:00.000-08:00

It's been ages since I last posted, there are tons of things going on right now, and I'm thinking of ramping up my investments with options. Options are a form of security derivative, a form of leverage that allows an investor to leverage his investments. EG: Putting down 10,000 bucks and having the exposure to 100,000 bucks of shares. It's far more dangerous but I think I've gotten fairly good at distributing risk.

Anyway, this post is a rant. It's been quite a roller coaster these few months. Lots of things have been going on. Some important, others less so. I've been working semi actively with my father for some time right now, there are plenty of interesting characters, my father talks very cordially with them, but the prevailing theme among them is that none of them are trustworthy. I think that's probably fairly true in most situations. A large part of working is being able to give and take. Sometimes you need to deal with people you wouldn't want to associate yourself with. There are always little weasels putting on a fake front and trying to curry favour, turning your back on them is generally a poor idea. The key is being able to root out people like this and cutting them off early, way before they can sink in their little paws and do damage. I've made a mistake on this before while dealing with a former acquitance of mine, who goes by the name Dominic. It's a mistake I'm not ready to repeat.

Some people get addicted to compliments, they know that the person who is saying the compliments have been telling lies to them. You know that you are being lied to, but you aren't ready to let go because your relying on the things that they are telling you to form your confidence. Regardless of whether it is the truth. It's a poor thing when your not able to form your own opinion without being told what to think.

I've been working on a number of ideas lately, a lot of them are basically ways to get rich. I've had great record in predicting the market, but it's a bull market right now. I'm not sure what my record would be in a bear market. It's probably coming soon. This has been the longest post recession bull market since 1987. I'm not sure whether now is the time to be so heavily vested in the stockmarket, but it's still looking good, so i'm here to stay.

Dealing with dishonest people.

2010-11-03T08:51:00.000-07:00

Got screwed over by an immoral little shit. I should have just cut him off the last time, that useless little fox. Well, life goes on...

There's a good saying by Donald Trump, "forgive good people but don't even think about forgiving bad people".

On a side note... stupid people give me stress...

YLI Holdings

2010-09-29T10:48:00.000-07:00

YLI holdings is a ductile pipe producer. What is a ductile pipe producer? Please google it. They hold a contract to supply Syabas(the water company) They are the largest producer of this product in Malaysia.

This company is really undervalued, at one point in time it was worth RM5, that was about 3 years ago. As of right now it's selling for RM0.63 cents, this gives it a market cap of 62 million. They have very little debt, if I'm not mistaken their debt to equity is something like 0.25. They have cash holdings of 32 million, thats more than 50% of their market cap that is in cash. Net tangible assets of RM2. The company is worth 3 times their market cap and 50% of the market cap is in cash. Seriously can it get any cheaper than this? Not to mention that it hasn't revalued its properties since 1996... What a value trap. I wish somebody would buy over this company, slice it up and sell off the pieces.

The whole problem with this company is that it isn't making any money, hasn't been making money for about 2 years, profit declining. However because of it's strong financial position and low debt it can probably maintain this status for quite some time.

The reason their profit has been declining is because many of the water projects that were supposed to be carried out in the 9th malaysia plan didn't materialise, and then there is the water tariff issue. There is a lot of water works project to be done in Malaysia, I can't remember where but I read a whole bunch of articles talking about it. Something about how there are 18,000 km of pipes that need to be replaced, and then all this about connecting the waterways between some state or another. The salient point is that there is a lot of built up demand for the products that this company is selling, and they are the largest producer in Malaysia, they also hold a contract that gives them a monopoly on supplying to Syabas.

I'm not sure when the water projects will materialise, but if it does this counter ought to skyrocket. Another problem is that the original ownder of this company, a chinese dude, sold of his major stake to a malay guy. YLI was doing very well... until it got sold to this Syed Yusof fella. Then everything went to the pits, management problem maybe? The company is still financially very strong, but any profit growth is going to be pretty much reliant on the water works project coming through, and maybe the water tariff hike.

Underwater

2010-08-18T05:28:00.000-07:00

These days I feel really misunderstood, maybe it's because I'm too straight forward when I talk, or maybe it's because I don't sound friendly. I don't even understand how I manage to offend people sometimes, is it poor body language, a bad tone? Do I sound insincere? It's so hard to pretend to care about something when I really don't, I've never been able to do it.

Sometimes it feels like I'm building armour, these days I take so much crap sometimes I just block the emotion out. It's great for analysing, but god it feels like I'm dying inside. It feels like there is one world where everyone else is living, and another world where I am living. I'm tired, and frankly speaking kind of lonely these days. I try so hard on some things, and there are just a whole load of people out there just living their lives, moving on the treadmill of life, they just get by and thats it, they just get by. There is just this huge feeling of disconnect.

When did it become like this? It feels like one part of me is advancing, and another part of me is slowly dying. Somebody once told me that I have a very hard time expressing myself, used to be that I didn't need to express myself, people would just be around. But these days, when I try to talk, I don't know, maybe it's because of the topics I like to talk about, or maybe it's because I'm trying too hard to change. Sometimes people tell me I look slightly intimidating, especially when I'm trying to put on a good impression. I've heard this from many people, but when I try and be approachable the feeling I get is that people think I'm being pretentious. It feels like I'm drowning, the harder I try the deeper I go.

Is it so hard for people to understand? Especially people who used to know me, I am not like that. I am not arrogant, I am not pretentious, I say what I feel. I don't play politics, I'm not the type to play a character that I'm not.

Sigh, these days I just feel so misunderstood.

On the euro crisis

2010-05-30T12:16:00.001-07:00

Carry Trade is forex. If u want to play in it u can google fxcm. The reason more people are using the carry trade on euro is because they are expecting the euro to fall. There are other countries with lower interest rates, but the situation in the european union looks bad because of Greece's recent almost default, there are many other issues with the other countries in the european union as well. Read why the euro is falling.

Sovereign default
The whole issue on the Euro right now is that some of the countries in it are very heavily in debt, and they cannot afford to pay off their debt. AKA sovereign default, sovereign default is when a country defaults on its debt, essentially this is like the country going bankrupt... The main problem countries in euro right now are the PIIGS, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain.

Typically, because countries are considered very safe investments(people feel that they will definitely get their money back), they are rated AAA or the highest rating available. This rating means that the debt that they issue(bonds etc) will have a very low interest rate. The problem with some of these PIIGS, is that their rating has been downgraded, so not only do they have a lot of debt that they cant pay off, the interest that they need to pay for new debt has also increased. So they cant pay off their existing debt, and any new debt that they want to issue, they will need to pay more for it.

Sovereign default is a very big big thing, because a country issues a lot of debt (bonds, treasury bills, debt securities) and these debts are bought by a lot of banks/other governments. There is a rippling effect if a country were to go bankrupt, because if the government goes bankrupt, the people who are holding the billions of the countries bonds/treasury will not be able to recover their debt. Which might cause them to go bankrupt as well. The government would also have to reduce their expenses by cutting budgets. Take away unemployment benefits, social security, reduce the government workforce etc. This means more people will become unemployed, there will be less money in the economy, less money around means less consumers for businesses. Certain businesses might have to close down, etc etc. Demand for imported products will fall.

Euro currency is flawed
The entire issue of the euro is that the currency is pretty flawed, because there are strong countries and then there are weak countries. But u have one currrency to govern them all! zz.. For example, if you have a low productivity country with a weak currency, because their currency is weak. They cannot buy a lot of stuff, they can just buy what their currency will allow them to buy. When these weaker, low productivity countries are given the euro, they are able to spend more than they ought to be able to. So they consume more than they produce, and over time their debt grows and grows until they implode, like what the PIIGS are doing now(They call this being fiscally irresponsible). The other side of this is the strong, export driven countries in the Euro union. Countries like Germany, benefit the most out of this euro union. About 50% of Germany's total exports go to other Euro countries.

A lot of the euro countries are unproductive
Bailing out countries like Greece is just a temporary solution, they either need to be kicked out of the euro, or they need to be more productive and produce more than they consume, but because their people are lazy assholes who only work 5 hours a day and get paid much higher than say.. countries like China which has cheaper labour, or countries like Germany, which has much more technology. They are not able to produce as many products to export, and they like to spend their money. Unless there are some real changes in either the way the people consume, or the way the government allocates resources, Greece is going nowhere, even after being bailed out by the IMF + some other countries. Hence, the "austerity measures" that u can read about if u were checking up on Greece when it happened, Greece will need to cut down a lot on government spending to pay off their debts . This applies not just to Greece, it applies to many of the other euro countries because there are many other countries in the euro which have similar characteristics as Greece, eg: the PIIGS, which are the most well known.

Why the euro is falling
So.. u might be asking... what does this have to do with the euro falling? It has to do with demand for the currency, if u want to do business with a euro country, u are going to need euros, or say, if u(big big big banks/other countries) want to put ur money somewhere safe, u are going to want to put it in a reputable currency, or a currency u think is going to rise. Demand for a countries currency will cause it to rise. Euro used to be a reputable currency. If u think euro is going to shit, and u want to make money off the euro coming down in value, u can do what the article is saying, u borrow the euro's and put it in another currency that u think is going appreciate. Any interest differential in these 2 countries, (eg: euro interest 3%, australian dollar interest rate 5%, u borrow euro's at 3% and buy ausd, then put the australian dollars in an australian bank to collect the 5% interest rates). will be ur's, in this case u make 2% of the money u borrowed per year. However if the euro drops 20% against the ausd, u can pocket the 20% difference and take ur money back to euro to pay off what u owe in euroes. The effect of this carry trade is that the AUSD will appreciate and euro will depreciate when u borrow money from euro to buy ausd, and when u take ur money back to euro, the opposite happens.

What is happening now is that, not only are the economies of a lot of the european countries doing badly, people are also losing confidence in the euro, which means they might be selling their euroes to buy other countries. To top it off they are also betting against it by carry trading, this makes the euro fall even harder.

The problem in the european union will affect the world
The problems in euro will affect the whole world because the western countries like the european union and the us are such big consumers, if demand from these huge countries were to fall. Demand for a lot of products would shrink, this would impact the big export countries like China and Germany, weakening in these countries will cause other countries who rely on it to weaken. EG: contagion, this country goes bankrupt, that country enters recession. The only question is how much the demand that will disappear from these countries will affect other countries.

not so sure if this is what u were looking for... but just for the record. There are ppl saying that it might go to par, which means 1 for 1. Some people are saying this is the bottom, and that it will go up after this.

Personally I think the euro is going to continue going down... but its gone down for some time right now, there might be a rally.

I feel like shit...

2009-09-23T12:52:00.000-07:00

My brain has been shot for some time now, out of character, temporary insanity. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. Nothing to talk about... I seem to have reached a point in my investments where I can't really do anything except sit and wait for the seeds to bear fruit... Maybe I can try to solicit money from people for investing, I'm not sure how successful I would be on that, maybe I'm just not convincing enough... I remember reading somewhere that stated that there is something like RM364billion in the banks deposits, it boggles my mind why anyone would put so much cash into something that is giving 3% interest annually, when they can easily get a 8% steady dividend yield in a real estate investment trust, especially in this sort of climate, where the prices of some of the REIT's are still low, it's not unlikely that the REIT will have capital appreciation of 30~40% in several years. If the cash isn't going to be put to use, why not put it into a REIT where you have exposure to properties that provide a dividend yield that is more than double that of the banks interest rates, after all even if the stock gyrates up and down, the underlying assets in the REIT has a steady value, because your technically just buying a share of a property with tenants, more ever REIT's are required to pay up a high % of their income to their shareholders, if you had bought it at the correct price, it's not unreasonable to expect a yield of 8~10% per year...

Ahh.. since I've already started on REIT's I might as well explain what it is... REIT or real estate investment trusts are companies that are listed on the KLCI, or the Kuala Lumpur Composite Index, their business is in real estate. Real Estate can consist of retail/shopping malls(HEKTAR), offices(UOAREIT), industrial properties(ATRIUM), hospitals(ALAQAR), or a combination of several, or it might just be a growth/income fund like (TWRREIT). How it works is that a professional property manager will be hired in order to manage the REIT, and their duty is to rent/lease out the properties under them to tenants, these tenants can be Multinational Corporations(MNC's) or local companies, depending on the type of properties that is being handled under them, for example a REIT like HEKTAR, which handles shopping malls will have dozens or hundreds of individual contracts with the tenants that are operating inside their shopping mall, whereas reits like ATRIUM, who operate buildings or factories might have one or two big companies leasing one factory. These tenants will pay rent to the REIT. This rent that is being received by the tenants is the REITS income.

REITS are expected to distribute whatever they earn to their shareholders, generally this number is 90~95% of whatever their earning, and I know this for a fact, since I've gone through basically every single REIT in the stockmarket, the only time they don't distribute is maybe during their IPO. What they distribute to shareholders is taxed 10% by the government.

The key to buying REIT's is to buy them while they are low, if their making RM0.10 per share and u buy them at RM2.00, when they give out the dividend your getting less than 5%, however if the REIT is making RM0.10 and you buy it at 80 cents, your yield will be 8%, not only are you getting a higher yield, but in the long run, if you had bought it at a low price, the chances of capital appreciation is pretty good. So not only will you be getting a nice 8% every year, but after 5 years you might come back and find that the REIT you bought for 80 cents is now worth 1.20. That's about a 90% profit, 40% from interest, 50% capital appreciation. It's quite likely to happen, because a lot of the times(like now) these REITS are selling in the stockmarket for less than what they would have sold for if they were sold in the property market. EG: 1 share of the REIT has a net asset value of RM 1.05, but for some reason it's being sold for RM0.75 in the stockmarket.

The average yield for REITs in the market right now is about 8%, but some of them have gotten quite expensive compared to their previous prices, although their yields are still in the 8% range...

Post + 1

2009-09-05T13:08:00.000-07:00

I haven't been posting that often recently, I actually forgot I had a blog. What do I have to write...

The stock market is a funny thing, many people, particularly those who study finance, will try to imply to you that the stock market is efficient. If it comes down 50% and then increases 100% in a year these people will come up with all sorts of excuses of why it went down 50% and then went up 100%, inflation, recession, economy is bad, economy has recovered. Their reasons are usually wrong.Inflation does cause an increase in profit when supply exceeds demand and prices rise, the market will subsequently rise. The economy does become bad, and the profit made by certain businesses do fall. But that does not mean that when inflation goes up the stock market will go up indefinitely.

If you say that inflation is the reason why the stock market has risen, the first thing you should ask is how many percentage of inflation have we had compared to the percentage increase in the stockmarket. If inflation for the last 3 year is 4% each year, then it stands to reason that the stockmarket would have also risen at around 4% each year as well. That's a very simple calculation, and it's probably wrong, but what I'm trying to say here is that if you want to claim that the growth in the stockmarket is because of inflation, you need to see how many percent the stockmarket has rised compared to inflation. The problem here is that most people who say inflation is the reason why the stockmarket has risen have no idea what the inflation % is, much less the increase in the stockmarket.

Inflation isn't a good barometer, if your trying to track the stockmarket growth your better off looking at the GDP, or the gross domestic product of a country. GDP is used to measure the size of the economy of a country. If your economy has risen by 15%, the stockmarket will likely rise with it as well, probably not exactly* 15%, but somewhere around there. This is fairly obvious, because the stockmarket is basically just a few thousands (around 1400 in Malaysia) of big companies in the country, companies which contribute to the economy, which is tracked by... GDP.

Having said that, when the stockmarket drops 50%, there is usually no single reason that can be pinpointed to the reason why it has dropped so significantly, generally it starts out with a valid reason, like the economy going into recession, when everything starts to fall, people panic and start selling, which leads to a bigger fall, the same thing happens when the market starts going up to unreasonably high levels, everybody starts to buy, every tom, dick and harry starts to enter into the market because his mother, brother, butcher and his dog has made money from the stockmarket. The market becomes very overvalued, and when the business cycle starts to kick in, or something big happens like the recent financial crisis and the economy comes off its high, people start selling, and then you have your massive drop in price, everybody panics and nobody wants to be the last guy holding the ball.

This is what it looks like on a 5 year graph of the klci...

I actually called the bull market when it was happening, I know quite a few people were talking about it, I remember telling them it was a bull market..... I wonder how much they lost in that period...

Take a look at the recovery, does it look like a mini bull market?
PS: KLCI changed their index to base off 30 largest stocks instead of the previous index following 100 stocks.

ahh what else to write... to be continued later.

What a bastard.

2009-06-06T02:21:00.001-07:00

I've got something to write, but I'm not sure how to put it into words.. hmm. This is about an old friend of mine. Who is... no longer a friend of mine. I'm not sure how to put it in words, but it's probably enough to say that I don't want anything to do with this sort of person. Anyway this dude invited me to his party, and I decided to go and maybe mix around. I'm one of the people who came early to his party, and I spent a good deal of time chatting with this person, up till this point everything is coming along fine. People start coming and I start playing cards with a bunch of people, talking and all that sort of shit. After awhile I don't really feel like mixing around with the people and I go and hang out in one of the rooms in the apartment. He comes and starts complaining, so I go out again. I start playing cards with a bunch of people again, and this dude disappears for roughly half an hour to an hour because there isn't enough food. I'm having a half decent time there up to this point. After some time I start feeling kind of bored and I go into one of the rooms again. Lay down and look around... and this fucker comes in and tells me that if I'm not comfortable I can just leave. As if I'm ruining his party. Even if I was a stranger, if a GUEST comes into your party and doesn't feel comfortable, isn't the host supposed to do something? Not withstanding the fact that I've known this guy for 9 years? He invites me over and ignores me then asks me to leave if I'm not comfortable?

This is the same person who was complaining that another friend of mine is a poor host for not entertaining him. What a hypocrite. It takes a real bastard to turn his back on a friend because he wants to look good in front of other people.

edit: I actually took this down after talking to that bastard. What a fucking mistake, 1 year goes by and he goes behind my back and starts talking shit about me because hes not happy, god damn I got screwed over by that little cocksucker. This really goes to show you can't forgive people like this.

Ahh reading my own blog...

2009-05-08T10:05:00.000-07:00

Nothing to do... so ive been reading my own blog... the quality of posts seems to deteriorate over time...

Shinjuku Incident...

2009-04-19T07:53:00.000-07:00

I went to watch Shinjuku Incident today. That movie is absolutely fantastic, and really thought provoking. Illegal migrant workers and that sort of thing. My father works in the construction line, so I have had plenty of brush ups with workers who don't have permits, or illegal workers. It really made me think, me as a chinese whose ancestors came to Malaysia just 3 generations ago, what it was like to be living that far away from home, away from your family trying to make a living in a foreign country. What happens when the local population discriminates against you, and considers you as something that is inferior. It's been more than half a century since my grandparents/greatgrandparents have migrated to Malaysia. What was it like for them to come here. Why did they come, was life really bad back in China? I remember my father telling me my grandfather came here because the family was being harrassed by tu di. I think that means some sort of gangsters back then. We've come a long way since then...

I guess this must be quite really relevant to the chinese people in China, although even I can relate slightly to what it must have been like. What it's like to bow your head and be treated like that. I suppose chinese people tend to have a lot more sense of pride. We don't like to lose. That might be one of the reasons why the chinese as a whole have been successful.

Hah... It feels like nationalism, except it's for another country. I guess when you have policies in a country that directly discriminates against you, you tend to have less feeling for it. Although I think even if the chinese people in Malaysia would go back to China, as most politicians here seem to want us to. China wouldn't welcome us, because we just aren't it's citizens anymore.

It also makes me appreciate people who don't discriminate against other people. People like Kiang I suppose, he does some pretty stupid things, but his the sort of guy who would never discriminate against other races, it's the sort of thing that I've never seen in anyone else, it's funny because if anyone was in the position to discriminate against somebody of lower class, it would be him.

The Crisis of Credit visualized

2009-03-28T21:50:00.000-07:00

The Crisis of Credit visualized, and it's an animation that gives an easy to understand walk through of the credit crisis and how it all happened.

To anyone who has heard of the credit crisis but doesn't know heads or tails of it. Here's a good place to start.

Part 1
Part 2

I actually wrote an article on this. Couple of months back.

I give up.

2009-03-23T03:55:00.001-07:00

Tired

2009-03-19T08:39:00.001-07:00

Old already, Maybe I've become a little bit stupid. . . . . What to do? I read somewhere that the body goes into overload when people become stressed, adrenaline starts pumping, your body goes on alert and all that crap to make you think and move faster... and if you can't manage your stress properly your body resists going back to normal, and that's when the fatigue kicks in and you just feel tired, all the fucking time. I think that's what has been happening to me.

I'm tired, fuck it. Time to sleep.

Life update...

2009-03-11T09:51:00.000-07:00

I'm in my third week in Sunway, and I don't think I'm settling down quite as well as I would want to. I don't really know anyone that well yet, and some of the dudes that I do know I find quite annoying and most of the people here are 3 or 4 years my junior.

When I go to college I find that I kind of numb myself to outside input, I don't really feel anything. It's kind of walking into the lecture room and somehow or another I feel as if I'm not really there. Some of the lecturers are so boring it feels as if my brains about to melt and drip out of my ears. Bla bla bla, bla bla bla... at least the notes are complete, that way I won't have to fail. Ohh man... I should have just skipped this course and just started looking for a job in some relevant field and just work my way up from there. I get the impression that many of the dudes in this course don't really have any idea where they want to be in the future, and when I talk about the sort of thing I'm interested in, like stocks, or just talk about joining some clubs or something or another.. I generally get an uhhhh... or I hear all this shit about how they did this and they did that, and somehow or another it becomes like a pissing contest.

Or maybe I'm just bad with people... Ahhh...

Isn't this a bloody course in Banking and Finance???? You would think that these people would know something in line with finance or investments wouldn't you???

Haha US

2009-02-27T06:52:00.000-08:00

"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved."

Now, just look at history and the last one is the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997/8. Now apply the above quotation. The IMF left the Asian countries then no choice but gave them the immediate medicine of the 1st alternative but instead of "a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion" it was a mandatory contraction as a requirement condition of funding support i.e. belt tightening.

Whereas for the US getting into trouble because of too much consumption due to credit expansion is thinking of curing the problem by getting into more debts to stimulate the consumption to support the economy. Anyone with half a brain will know that it will be the 2nd alternative result in the making i.e. "or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." Note that H. Clinton was in China asking China not to stop buying US treasuries.

Because the USD is the world's reserve currency, the recent strength of the USD is guaranteeing further economic deterioration as an important contributor to the continue down trend.

Going by earnings of S n P 500, the strength of the USD will further pull that down for sure to around 600.

The strength of the USD benefits all other countries except the US and therefore, the rest of the world will recover well before the US which will most probably be further into the lost decade as happened to Japan.

Note that South Korea recovered from the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis in about 2 years even after the country's balance sheet was completely wiped out. How? Auterity measures and a depressed currency stimulate the exports economy that quickly repaired the balance sheet. Neither Bernanke nor Geithner seem to understand economics 101 or they think economics 101 does not apply to the US.

Funny stuff

2009-02-06T07:48:00.001-08:00

Dad showed me some funny stuff, too bad it's all in chinese... I don't have any Mandarin programs nor do I know how to use the programs... here's a rough translation in English... the other longer one I'll probably scan it in or something.

Said Also Don't Listen
Listen Also Don't Understand
Not Understand Also Don't Ask
Ask Also Don't Do
Do Also Do Wrong
Wrong Also Don't Admit
Admit Also Don't Correct
Correct Also Not Happy
Not Happy Also Don't Say

read already laugh like idiot.

Isreal and the Gaza conflict

2009-01-26T07:54:00.000-08:00

I don't really have anything better to do.

The Isreal - Gaza conflict refers to a series of battles between the Palestinian militants and the Isreal Defense Forces (IDF) that began in mid-May 2007(wiki). The back and forth fighting between Isreal and the Palestinians have been going on for a long time, but the initial trigger for this conflict was due to terrorist cells(Hamas, Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine) launching rockets into Isreal, which led to Isreal launching attacks against Gaza, an area that is currently being controlled by the terrorist group Hamas.

It actually sounds quite funny to me that people are crying foul over the fact that Isreal is attacking Gaza when the Isrealis are merely retaliating against a terrorist group that has been firing rockets at and into the homes of its citizens. If the Hamas/Gaza is so worried about having bloodshed then why don't they just stop launching rockets into Isreal? It seems to me that many media groups are painting an extremely biased picture of the current conflict.

Anyway that's it for the conflict between Gaza and Isreal, let me get on to bigger stuff. The conflict between Palestinians and Isrealis. Just FYI, the people of Gaza are Palestinians, and Palestinians don't like the Isrealis, there's some history on this. If you don't know anything about this issue you would probably want to stop reading now, but if you do know, or your interested in learning more than please continue. The Isreal/Palestine or Jew/Arab problem originally started somewhere in the 1948.

Lets have a history lesson for awhile. From 1917 to 1947 the region of Palestine was occupied by the British. The British had taken control of the area from the Ottomon Turks in 1917. Somewhere around 1947, the United Nations voted to divide western Palestine into seperate Jewish and Arab states. (This happened in the United Nations resolution 181), The Jews agreed, the Arabs did not. The Arab countries then proceeded to attack Isreal and urged the Palestines/Arabs to leave the country(This was also known as the War of Independence for Isreal), there was 5 or 6 Arab countries attacking Isreal. This created a situation where the Arabs who had left Isreal became refugees. It's interesting to note that although there were Arab refugees who had left Isreal, there were also many Jewish refugees who came from Arab countries. The official number of Jewish refugees, according to wiki is 856,000 and 600,000 of them resettled in Isreal and most of them have been absorbed into whichever culture/country that they have gone to. Whereas the Arab refugees, numbering around 520,000 (Israeli sources) to 726,000 (UN sources), considerably less, which begs the question of why they were not absorbed into the Arab countries, which are several hundreds of times larger than Isreal. The refugee problem has multiplied throughout the years... literally, as the current refugees are most likely 2nd and 3rd generation refugees who number in the millions.

to be continued....

Bad experience

2008-10-18T15:12:00.000-07:00

Driving around during midnight... car was fucking attacked by 4 Malays on bikes. These people are getting daring, they actually hit the window on the drivers seat several times. Tried to ram one of the motorcycles, but I missed... I should have just chased them down and run them over. I actually wound down my window when the motorcycle tried to tail me, they tried to pretend to be a policeman. I can just imagine the sort of Malay people who would do this sort of thing, the Malay people in National Service comes to mind, this is just your typical Malay. The sort of bottom feeders of society, fairly common among Malay people. Anyone whose dealt with Malay people ought to be familiar with this phrase. "OI, nak gaduh? nak gaduh ah???". When their alone they become turtles, when their in groups suddenly they act like their some sort of bigtime gangster. Disgusting cowardly behavior.

Brings to mind one occasion my father's friend went through. Indian bastards came into his sundry shop and took cigarettes without paying. He used his 4 wheel drive to ram one of them into the wall. Over 200 stitches. The bastard was lucky to survive. The fucked up thing was that these group of Indians continued to go to his sundry shop to steal cigarettes, and the plain clothes policeman caught them red handed. My father's friend was released... Figures, bottom feeders of society are generally really stupid.

I'm turning racist, I used to be pretty open minded but the more I come out into society, the less confidence I have in humanity. Particularly Malays.

Race and the subprime crisis

2008-10-18T01:21:00.000-07:00

I haven't been updating the blog lately. So here it is...

The success of a country has a lot to do with what race has the majority in it. Look at Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and to a certain extent, Korea and Japan( the Japanese people actually came from China a few hundred years ago. Don't believe me? Google it ). These countries are all either developed, or developing at break neck speeds.

Then take a look at the White people, Europe, America, and many other countries. The people are white, and the countries that they live in are all very successful.

Let's back track a little, and take a look at Black people, their usually a minority in whatever their country is in. Black people have the highest number of drop outs among all races, they commit the most crimes, and their neighbourhoods are drug dealing dens, their IQ is the lowest of all races. This is the wealthiest country in the world. If you can't make it in the richest country in the world, where else can you make it? They complain about racism and bias against their race and the fact that their a minority, many of them put the blame of their lack of success on white people, they claim that the CIA is distributing drugs to their neighbourhoods, that the Americans are suppressing the people and that the only reason black people are not successful is because their being suppressed. How true is this?

Does anyone know what the Sub Prime crisis is? This happened in the US, and was the result of banks giving out mortgages to people who did not have a good credit history. Is this a case of the banks being greedy? It seems like quite a big scandal doesn't it? A lot of blame was put on the banks for giving out loans to people who had no means of repaying their loans. Apparently it was because the banks were 'greedy' and they wanted more money. Let me enlighten you on what actually happened by taking a quote from Phil Town.

Since the mid-1990s there has been a concerted effort on the part of politicians and policy makers to force banks to relax their lending standards. The crowbar that was used to open the bank vault was the charge of racial discrimination in lending. A Boston Fed study seemed to show that racial discrimination was the single factor that resulted in banks lending less to blacks than to other races. The authors of the study below debunks that study, but from the date that it was blessed by the Fed, banks that wished to keep their standards for lending were in deep trouble.

The Fed proclaimed that banks must evaluate a borrower's credit worthiness based on cultural factors. Banks that did not do so were open to fines of up to $500,000 for "discriminatory practices". So the banks complied and made the loans to borrowers who, previously, would not have qualified as credit-worthy. The banks did so grudgingly at first, and then aggressively as WaMu and CountryWide used Fannie Mae as a source of funds for subprime loans (with Fannie's encouragement) and exploded their revenues.

The banks were forced to evaluate how credit worthy a person was based on cultural differences. Not how well they were able to pay their credit cards, not whether they deserved the loans because they were capable of repaying the loans. The loans were given based on cultural differences, aka skin colour. If you give a 700k loan to a person working in Wal Mart. It goes without saying that this is a loan just waiting to default. Bad debt coupled with the leverage going on in the financial system resulted in this massive mess the world is currently in.

Ok, back to the main topic.

Now let's take a look at Africa, the land of Black people. What is Africa synonymous with? Disease, poverty, violence, mob wars. It's a dozen countries in a country, civil war is rife. Life is nothing over there, everyday people die. The children have no food to eat, 10 year old children carry rifles to fight. Let's look back at the black people in America, hmmm.... it looks like they have it a lot better in America.

Now let's take a look at Malays, you can find many similarities in Malay people and Black people. For one thing, they blame their lack of success on the other more successful races. The difference is that while Black people can actually blame White people for suppressing them since their a minority, in Malaysia the Malays are blaming the Chinese for suppressing them economically when their a majority. Is this pathetic?

Now lets look at Indonesia. Some people might remember the Asian Financial crisis, the Chinese people were the scapegoats, Austronesian people slaughtering Chinese because of the Asian Financial crisis. What is Indonesia famous for? Again, poverty, clan wars, who do they blame for their pathetic state? Indonesia is a country that is very rich in natural resources. Timber, oil, quarry. They have a large amount of natural resources. Why are they still in such a pathetic state? This has always been a question mark to me. Everywhere you hear that everybody is the same, but you look at the Black people and Asians, and very noticeably, you can see that there are very big differences in physique, the top athletes in the world are usually black. The differences are obvious, why is it so hard to believe that there are differences in characteristics between races that cause certain races to be pre disposed to certain things. I am not discounting other factors, like education and culture, but to a certain extent, maybe more than a little, genes do matter.

PS: To anyone interested in the current financial crisis happening around the world. Read this to find out how it happened.

Gaining experience

2008-09-21T08:25:00.000-07:00

My dad recently got a small renovation job, since I don't have anything to do lately, and I've really not been doing much at home, my father asked me to go over and look at how the renovation is going on, look at the steps they take to renovate a house. How the form work is done, tiling, plastering, carpentry, hacking, plumbing, brickwork and all that sort of thing, so I can get a general idea of how everything is done, that way if I ever want to renovate I won't get cheated, or at least that's the reason my dad gave me.

It's been a pretty good experience for me, I've learned slightly on how to deal with the workers. I've begun to have a basic grasp on just what there is to do, and how it is done. It's really a matter of knowing what to do, a lot of the things that are done during construction, my father learned on the job, and his teaching me a lot of this right now, I suppose a lot of this knowledge is not taught in books, and if someone new were to come out and try and do this, a lot of problems might occur, just because they didn't know some simple things. Sometimes it's just a matter of whether you know how to do it or not.

Something about the renovation job... The clients for this job, a retired couple, Mr and Mrs Ng, they come and check the work every single day. Their retired so they have plenty of time, but I really can't understand how they find so much time to come every single day. I've been pushing the work a long time, and it's moving at a ridiculous speed, this work was probably going to take around an excess of 1 month to complete, I'm gunning for 2 weeks, and my dad tells me if I can keep this pace up there will be no problem. Although I think I'm pushing the workers too hard, I hope their not going to go on strike, then my dad will kill me.

Just something that I've been thinking about. I tend to get this feeling when I'm talking about qualifications and the like with some people, I was talking to the client and I mentioned that one of the reasons many people have said to me is that with only a diploma, I might get looked down upon, and there is this really uncomfortable short silence. I didn't realize until later that maybe they were thinking that I was referring to my father... Although my father is currently working as a contractor, he studied in the UK and came back with a civil engineering degree, his recognized by the BEM(Board of Engineers) as a consultant, at one point he was working in JKR(Jabatan Kerja Raya) and was the temporary head of JKR. What he is, is an overqualified constructor, but his dealing with high end banglo jobs these days. My family isn't really rich, but we aren't struggling either.

The only gripe I have is that I have to be at the site at anywhere from 8 ~ 9AM until minimum 6PM, and sometimes even 8PM. That's 10 to 12 hours a day. I don't have much to do there, and it's eating up my time like crazy.

edit: Board of Engineers Malaysia is BEM, not BOE.

Back from China

2008-08-26T22:13:00.000-07:00

China is a big place, I went to Guang zhou. Stayed in a hotel called Lido that was right in the middle of the city.

China.... the first thing that came into my mind when I looked out of the hotel window is just how many high rise buildings they have in Guang Zhou, I'm not talking about Beijing, Shanghai or any one of the major cities. This is just another city in China, and I counted more than 30 high rise buildings just from outside the window.

China is just amazing, before coming to China I was expecting to deal with rude people. I didn't really have any good expectations, and then I go to there and find that their probably even more advanced compared to KL, and Guang Zhou isn't even their main city. Everyone is saying how fast China is growing, you don't really understand just how FAST their growing until you actually go there and see it with your own eyes. The shopping there is fantastic, it's cheaper than Malaysia, and their not selling you poor quality clothing, the clothing can range anywhere from 10 yuan to 120 yuan, depending on where you go for shopping.

My head hurts

2008-08-20T12:30:00.000-07:00

My head feels like it's going to crack, it almost feels like my head is about to give birth to something thats trying to crack its way out of my skull. Is this a migraine? I can't relax, it's driving me absolutely fucking insane. The pressure is so fucking high I can't even think straight.

What the hell am I going to do. Am I going to take a risk, and try my hand on investment? Or should I just continue on to my degree?

Lemmings...

2008-08-02T15:17:00.000-07:00

Random thoughts...

People always feel more inclined to do something when they see someone else doing it. Even when it isn't really a very smart thing to do.

Stocks: Update

2008-08-01T09:04:00.000-07:00

Just a heads up here, if anyone is interested in my posts on stocks go to www.stocksforidiots.blogspot.com or here.

I'm going to post up my posts on stocks and investments there whenever I feel like it, so drop by there if you want to know anything on stocks.

I'll put all my previous posts there as well.

Done with my diploma, KDU sucks.

2008-07-20T12:32:00.000-07:00

It's been hectic these past few weeks, a lot of things have happened. I've finished my finals for my last semester in KDU, a diploma that took me 2 and a half years to complete, going to KDU wasn't the best of choices. In KDU the lecturers at KDU go to a job. They do just enough to maintain their job, and I came into this college with certain expectations and what I got was not what I was expecting. I'm not sure how I would word it because there is just so many things to say and not many of them are good.

Let me try and summarize what I feel about KDU and the quality of education that they provide,

- There is no focus on what their teaching, I'm under the impression that they make up as many subjects as they can to sell to the students so they can earn maximum profit with minimal effort. I had subjects like "introduction to programming", which is kind of like programming, except it's not, and the lecturer I got knew even less on programming than I did. You get IQ questions and the sort of questions that you would more likely find on an online quiz than an exam, and then theres "Managing your hardware", I remember complaining about this, this subject is actually on managing your hardware o_O, I learned what not to put near the CPU when your opening it, what is the difference between HAZARDOUS, DANGEROUS and DANGER. "Internet", theres actually a subject on Internet, what they do is they tell you where the address bar is on your browser, what country Nokia came from, what the file button does.

-I had no less than 3 subjects teaching the use of director flash, and director. Thats 2 programs, and it's not the coding and intricacies that I'm learning, it's the features of the program. Not exactly something that I would be able to make use of, what happens if I use a different program for designing something? I would have to start from scratch, might as well have thrown me in a designing class, at least I would have learnt something that wouldn't become redundant once I change programs. None of these 3 subjects went into real detail. Yes they covered quite a number of parts, but it's the sort of thing you would be able to learn in frankly speaking, less than a week. In fact one of the lecturers actually gave us online tutorials that were done by someone else online, and again, these are just the features of the program. I'm not going to be able to change platforms for it, and I only learned the basic stuff...

These are just the ones I can remember off the bat, simply because they were just so bad.

edit: I don't like KDU, I have a poor opinion of them, it's not that I hate the college. If someone sells me a bad product I like to say something about it. It's not something I lose sleep over.

On religion.

2008-06-11T11:30:00.000-07:00

Creationism
Creationism vid 22

There are 24 videos.

Just FYI, creationism is the belief that all life on earth, the earth and the universe is created by a deity(God). This belief comes from most religions. Some of the Christians in the US are trying to assimilate the bible into education... Which is .. jaw-droppingly stupid.

Another few clips on science vs creationism and creationism. Another one..

...

I need to find something to do...

Ranting

2008-06-08T23:54:00.000-07:00

I feel like shit.

Anyone who has dealt with silent, unmotivated teammates would probably know how I feel right now.

Cutting the story short, I am the group leader of a bunch of guys who have almost NO motivation to proceed with the assignment work. They are almost completely silent in the group meetings. I'm reminded of this picture every time I look at them.

and one of these guys is actually dragging his feet. I could cry... The blank stare, and that I don't know attitude is driving me up the wall. This isn't just my assignment, I can't believe I'm going to be dragged down by a bunch of fools. This shows just how important it is to choose your group mates.

Lion, I'm faster than you!!!

2008-05-08T01:08:00.000-07:00

81 words

Speedtest

It's TOO HOT

2008-05-02T10:17:00.000-07:00

It's stopped raining, and the heat is absolutely INSANE. I can smell dried meat, I'm not sure if I'm hallucinating, or am I really being slow cooked inside my room.

Rant

2008-03-29T15:05:00.000-07:00

Theres a saying that goes, "Your true friends are the ones who will never lie to you", and I've always appreciated honesty. I have a lot of respect for people who aren't afraid to sound out, and to me, that shows character. Even when I might not like a particular person, I find it admirable that they would be able to speak what they feel, instead of lying... just to suck up.

I know that this isn't a feeling that many people share, I've met people who would prefer to squat in their own world, and when one day their faults become too big to ignore, they will simply pin the fault of their problems on the people around them. IMO, these sort of people are at best kept at arms length, or preferably, kept out of sight.

............

.....

...

.

Lee Kuen Yew, one of history's greatest minds.

2008-03-10T10:30:00.000-07:00

I haven't been posting much lately, for any of those of you who read this blog. Here's some food for thought. --

One is the product of a civilization which has gone through all its ups and downs, of floods and famine and pestilence, breeding a people with very intense culture, with a belief in high performance, in sustained effort, in thrift and industry. And the other people- more fortunately endowed by nature with warm sunshine and bananas and coconuts, and therefore not with the same need to strive so hard. Now, these two societies really move at two different speeds.

It's like the difference between a high revolution engine and a low revolution engine.

-Lee Kuen Yew on the differences between the Chinese and the Malays, March 24, 1965

Let us not deceive ourselves; our talent profile is nowhere near that of, say, the Jews or the Japanese in America. The exceptional number of Nobel Prize winners who are Jews is no accident. It is also no accident that a high percentage, sometimes 50%, of faculty members in the top American universities on both the east and west coasts are Jews. And the number of high caliber Japanese academics, professionals, and business executives is out of all proportion to the percentage of Japanese in the total American population.

-Lee Kuan Yew, "The search for Talent," 1982

I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution. People have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different inter mixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils. I didn't start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I've come to. When we were faced with the reality that, in fact, equal opportunities did not bring about more equal results, we were faced with an ideological dilemma.

In other words, this bell curve, which Murray and Herrnstein wrote about, became obvious to us by the late '60s. The bell curve is a fact of life. The blacks on average score 85 on IQ and it is accurate, nothing to do with culture. The whites score on average 100.

Asians score more... The Bell Curve authors put it at least 10 points higher.

There are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the results cannot follow. All the bright young men became Catholic priests and did not marry. Bright priests, celibate, produce no children. And the result of several generations of bright Fathers producing no children? Less bright children in the Catholic world.

You read Hong Lou Meng, A Dream of the Red Chamber, or you read Jin Ping Mei, and you'll find Chinese Society in the 16th, 17th century described. "So the successful merchant or the mandarin, he gets the pick of all the rich men's daughters and the prettiest village girls and has probably five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten different wives and concubines and many children."

And the poor laborer who is dumb and slow, he's neutered.

It's like the lion or the stag that's outside the flock. He has no harems, so he does not pass his genes down. So, in that way, a smarter population emerges.

"When young London children called me a Chinaman or a Chink, it did not trouble me. If they meant it as a term of abuse, my business was to make them think differently one day."

the video is here

edit: The Bell Curve sounds quite controversial... The type of thing many people would love to hate. So I went off to dig criticism on it and find out just how credible is this idea...

So here it is, what people have to say about the Bell Curve.

QUOTE Howard Gardner

"The Bell Curve is a strange work. Some of the analysis and a good deal of the tone are reasonable. Yet the science in the book was questionable when it was proposed a century ago, and it has now been completely supplanted by the development of the cognitive sciences and neurosciences. The policy recommendations of the book are also exotic, neither following from the analyses nor justified on their own. (p. 61)"

"Scholarly brinkmanship: ...

I became increasingly disturbed as I read and reread this 800 page work. I gradually realized I was encountering a style of thought previously unknown to me: scholarly brinkmanship. Whether concerning an issue of science, policy, or rhetoric, the authors come dangerously close to embracing the most extreme positions, yet in the end shy away from doing so. Discussing scientific work on intelligence, they never quite say that intelligence is all important and tied to one's genes; yet they signal that this is their belief and that readers ought to embrace the same conclusions. Discussing policy, they never quite say that affirmative action should be totally abandoned or that childbearing or immigration by those with low IQs should be curbed; yet they signal their sympathy for these options and intimate that readers ought to consider these possibilities. Finally, the rhetoric of the book encourages readers to identify with the IQ elite and to distance themselves from the dispossessed in what amounts to an invitation to class warfare. Scholarly brinkmanship encourages the reader to draw the strongest conclusions, while allowing the authors to disavow this intention. (p. 63)"

"On social policy:

Though there are seven appendices, spanning over 100 pages, and nearly 200 pages of footnotes, bibliography, and index, one element is notably missing from this tome: a report on any program of social intervention that works. For example, Herrnstein and Murray never mention Lisbeth Schorr's Within Our Reach: Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage, a book that was prompted in part by Losing Ground. Schorr chronicles a number of social programs that have made a genuine difference in education, child health service, family planning, and other lightning rod areas of our society. And to the ranks of the programs chronicled in Schorr's book, many new names can now be added. Those who have launched Interfaith Educational Agencies, City Year, Teach for America, Jobs for the Future, and hundreds of other service agencies have not succumbed to the sense of futility and abandonment of the poor that the Herrnstein and Murray book promotes. (p. 71)"

"Concluding comments:

It is callous to write a work that casts earlier attempts to help the disadvantaged in the least favorable light, strongly suggests that nothing positive can be done in the present climate, contributes to an us-against-them mentality, and then posits a miraculous cure. High intelligence and high creativity are desirable. But unless they are linked to some kind of a moral compass, their possessors might best be consigned to an island of glass bead game players, with no access to the mainland. (p. 72)"

KDU FUCKS ME IN THE HEAD, AGAIN!!!!!

2008-02-21T11:16:00.000-08:00

Why did I take a subject under that lecturer... why.. why...

What sort of lecturer will tell a student that she won't teach simply because the student asked at the last minute? Granted I am asking a day before the deadline, but a lecturer is supposed to pass on knowledge? I'm paying this college just to deal with these idiots who are supposed to be teaching.

If I had known I was going to have to deal with these idiotic lecturers in this college I would have just bought a programming book and studied by myself. The assignment isn't covered in the notes, and the "lecturer" doesn't want to help me, just out of spite.

I'm going to have to scrap 8 hours worth of testing just because I CAN'T FIND OUT HOW TO RETURN A GODDAMN ARRAY!!!!. ARRRRGGGHHH

Rant

2008-01-06T04:02:00.000-08:00

I don't like foreign workers. These people always have these angry, sullen, empty expressions whenever you look at them, and if you have ever bothered to speak to them you realize, it's not just their expressions that are empty, from what I gather most of them never make it past the first 6 months of working in Malaysia, because without any sort of monitoring, they sleep on the job, and get sent back with huge debts.

It's the mentality... the way they think. I guess they've gotten used to having people like themselves around them. They litter everywhere and spend all their money on cigarettes. Pay them their salary and 3 weeks later they've spent most of it. I wonder if it ever occurred to them to send money back to their families? Well it doesn't matter since our government will accept them into this country. . . . . It's an interesting fact, Indonesians who become Malaysian citizens have been able to receive Bumiputra status, where as Chinese people who have lived here for generations don't get Bumiputra status.

Rant 2

Lately there's been a lot of hoo hah, particularly about a minister in the MCA, one of the health ministers apparently, this is a man that has actually done something for the country, he pushed for several legislation's on health matters to improve the quality of the service, and he has done numerous visits to hospitals, this is one of the ministers who was "outstanding". Now hes being condemned over a 'scandal', some sex tape that was taken by someone in a hotel.

I'm not supporting extra marital affairs, but it seems quite funny that something completely unrelated to his work would have such a huge impact on it, where as people like Najib and Rafidah get away with the things that would put most people in jail, Najib with that Mongol model murder(blown up by explosives that only the police special forces have access to) and Rafidah with her AP scandal. The person who came forward with the evidence against Rafidah was actually jailed by the ISA, jailed without trial for bringing up evidence against corruption, are the people up there really that invulnerable?

Competent people are losing their jobs for something that should not even be the business of the public, on what was basically political assassination, and the big sharks are still swimming out there.

Streamyx connection just dropped...

2007-12-12T01:48:00.001-08:00

Yay, 10 kbs per second.
I remember subscribing to a 1 mbps line, not a 56k dial up.

Politics

2007-12-07T22:16:00.000-08:00

I don't know many people who know anything on politics other than what comes out on the newspapers, most people brush off any information regarding the government, whenever I bring up a topic like this I get that blank, boring silence. A lot of times I find that some people actually seem to support the government, their happy with what they have, or they just couldn't be bothered. As the saying goes.. ignorance is bliss.

There's plenty of information to be found online, things you would not be able to read from the newspapers, and it's very interesting. Anything related to politics usually isn't reported in its entirety in the newspaper. You can read plenty of comments belittling the opposition thrown by the government, the sort of name tossing you usually see in children. There is never a public forum for any sort of debate to happen, people are expected to take whatever the government chooses to feed them. It's a huge joke when the government posts up huge figures that are completely false(NEP incident) to fool the general public, and then proceed to lambaste anyone who says otherwise, even when they have concrete evidence to back their claims, of course since the majority of the people in Malaysia think its just "politics" they simply never bother to find out.

I would probably say that for every 10 people I know there probably aren't more than 1 or 2 that actually know just how far off the figures that the politicians came up with to justify the continuation of the NEP is, and just how many times the politicians have managed to get away with the worst sort of crimes.

People who say that corrupt politicians are "smart" because they know how to earn a lot of money and get away with it ought to be shot. I tend to get this sort of impression whenever I'm dealing with some people, the feeling that being more well off or being "better" justifies whatever they do. Their attitude is that, in the end, I'm still better than you, so what if I'm lying? So what if I'm being rude, in the end I'm still more well off than you are. I suppose in some respects this is true, a person has to learn to adapt to changes but having to deal with people who completely lack any sense of morality is really disturbing. I do know confident people who generally feel that morality is incredibly overrated, but the people who support something that is obviously wrong simply because the person who is doing it isn't getting caught is in my opinion, stupidity at its finest.

read this, there are several articles from an economist from Australia about Malaysia, a lot of information here that you probably would not be able to get anywhere else.

Streamyx problems for the last month.

2007-11-14T06:40:00.000-08:00

Streamyx doing something to their lines again, dc + lagging, and its been dragging on for the last month, just what is going on over there? Maybe they've decided to throttle entire connections.... instead of throttling the torrents only..

I am bored. Again

2007-10-25T14:20:00.000-07:00

Blogging looks to be something that will appear in my busy schedule regularly! Busy.. haha...

Rant and rave,

I have something against stupid people, I find them incredibly irritating. Stupid people are the people who can't think, these are the same people who will tell you they are right despite the 1000000++ facts that tell them they are wrong, and they aren't capable of thinking with any sort of clarity, because most of them can't exercise any control over their emotions. These are the same fools brimming with confidence despite having been proven wrong repeatedly, they make the same mistakes again and again, without any sort of improvement, yet continue to have that misguided confidence in themselves. Now if these people would keep to themselves and live in their own little village where their species would die out I would have absolutely nothing against them, but it annoys me to no end when they try and impose their stupidity on other people.

A good example I would take from would be from DOTA(popular LAN game in CC's), now I've been playing this game for a very long time, although I've stopped playing for more than a month, and I cannot describe just how irritated I get when someone who has little or no skill whatsoever in the game tries to shoot off commands to better players, it's one thing when your a top notch player and you tell people what to do, its another thing entirely when your score is 0 kills 10 deaths and your tell a person whose on a godlike streak what to do. Of course anyone who is actually good at the game would tell you that getting a godlike streak doesn't always mean that player is a really good player, but when your score is 0 kill and 10 deaths aka negative godlike, it's fairly obvious that your not up there among the top players. It has nothing to do with your 'mood', if you made a mistake and you can't even work out what mistake you made that means your not up to par, go improve yourself.

Another type, the most common type, are known as N00bs. You can't really differentiate between the stupid players and N00bs, since N00bs are usually stupid people. Not all of them though, some are morons, others are idiots. N00bs are the players who have been playing for a long time, but never seem to able to grasp the basic details of the game, they play for hours on end every day, but they never seem to improve. That itself isn't a problem, but n00bs are not only bad at the game. Since they've been playing for so long, they consider themselves to be 'pros'.

How is a person, who has little or no knowledge on the game able to judge just exactly how good they are? Let me give you and example, let's say some idiot thinks 1 + 1 = 5. He has so little mathematical skills that he doesn't even realize just how far off he is from the correct answer, so when asked to rate himself he says, "I'm pretty good at maths". Put 10 people like this in a game together and they start complimenting each other on how good each of them is, and everyone starts thinking, "Hey, I'm a PRO!!", well guess what? Your all equally incompetent. (theres actually a term for this, its called false consensus). These are the people who go to cash prize tournaments and get wiped out in the first 2 rounds.

Holiday at Port Dickson

2007-10-14T04:02:00.001-07:00

Went off to Port Dickson on Saturday, somewhere around 2 o clock, my mom went nuts, again, why? I don't know, but I'm beginning to realize what to expect every time the family goes off for an outing, she did the same thing on the last 3 holidays, she always picks fights with people whenever her mood sours and its driving me up the wall, onto the roof, throwing sticks down while screaming... I had a massive argument with her, which pretty much killed the holiday mood, again.

Nevertheless the holiday was pretty fun, took 2 hours of driving to get to Port Dickson, the traffic was bad, or it probably would have been taken an hour and a half. We stayed at some place that belongs to the methodist church in PJ, the whole family used to go off for holidays there, but that was more than 10 years ago, the area is pretty big, roughly 20 acres total according to one of the keepers over there, Kumar. They have a canteen, a hall, dormitories etc. The land was acquired by the church more than 50 years ago I think, they still use it for some of the church activities these days, although I wouldn't really know, I've never been a devoted Christian even back when I was a kid, but I saw some thick branches stacked up at a gathering spot, and a bunch of kids that looked as if they just got out of Sunday school... How I miss the days...
...
..
.
yea right, I've never liked going to the church. Anyway it looked like there was some sort of bonfire that would be going on at night. We got there at around 5PM, give or take a few minutes and introduced ourselves to some Indian guy called Shamugen, the maintenance guy right now. He recognized my dad from last time, so we got the methodist price tag, the room looked something like a motel room, 3 beds, 1 mirror, 1 toilet, a cupboard, and some place to hang the towels. Hmm... RM45, nothing great, but the big area you get to walk around and the fact that its practically next to the beach makes it a great place to stay. The atmosphere is relaxing as well. Absolutely perfect. Took off for dinner, had to wait for 3 hours for the food, damn hari raya, all the restaurants were jam packed, and the idiot waiter got our dish wrong, thought the person who took the order made a mistake so we dug in and waited for the next dish, turns out it was actually for the table right beside us, and the dish(lala) was absolutely tasteless, what a waste of money and the bloody boss looked at us as if it was our fault, fuck, look at your waiter, not your customer. After finishing that dish we had to wait for another hour for our next dish. The experience is not one I want to repeat again. Had to wait for so long, and I had a stomach ache after eating the food. Spent the night face down in the pillow moaning in pain. What a lousy experience.

The next day more than made up for all the bad luck though, got breakfast at the canteen, eggs and sausages with jam and bread and some butter, went to the beach, dug up some small lala's to bring back, weather was good, etc etc. Lots of fun, went back at 2 o clock.

Another post!

2007-10-11T02:30:00.001-07:00

Yet another post, right after my mid terms! I've got way too much time on my hands right now, time to go off for a holiday!!!

Talking about myself again, is this a sign of narcissism? hmm... I really don't care.

Well I don't really have anything to do right now, but I've actually wrote a post that I intended on modifying before this one that I put into the blog's drafts, but somehow or another it got deleted when I deleted my post, damn blog should say something before deleting the drafts, I basically typed out a 500~1000 word post and its all fucking gone now. What the hell does save drafts mean??? If I save the fucking draft I expect the draft to be there the next time I open it.

Anyway this post is about a good friend of mine, lets just call him NoWorries for the sake of anonymity, NoWorries comes from a wealthy family, NoWorries is aptly nicknamed so because thats basically how he lives his life, with absolutely no worries whatsoever, he spent several years overseas and basically came home with nothing to show of it, because he flunked out on everything, he doesn't return things that his borrowed from people unless you ask him, repeatedly, continuously, for several weeks. He almost never comes on time for any sort of appointment, even when he is the one who comes up with the schedules, he has absolutely no reasoning capabilities whatsoever, every time someone calls him up on his behavior, however nicely, he throws a tantrum and literally screams, its absolutely ridiculous, he has absolutely no control over his emotions, one moment his wallowing in self pity, and the next his high on some anime. It's gotten so bad that most of the times I avoid playing games with him, because this guy just gets way out of control.

I've been friends with NoWorries for several years now, and I tend to close one eye everytime NoWorries throws a tantrum and starts behaving in a less than sane manner, but its reached the boiling point after I find out that hes actually planning on getting .... engaged. This is a guy with the mindset of an adolescent, irresponsible and immature, who can't even take care of himself, and he actually thinks he has the capabilities to not only look after his girlfriend, but to become a parent? All the lectures his been given by his parents, his friends, the people around him has crystallized into this steaming pile of shit?

Some people might say this isn't really any of my business, he is after all a rich person, he could probably live for the next 10 generations without any sort of employment and still be able to live comfortably, but I say that a friend has at the very least, the duty to inform another friend of the mistakes he is making.

Christopher Hitchens: God is not Great. How religion pollutes everything

2007-10-10T03:33:00.000-07:00

One of the better reads out there.

I don't feel like writing so I'm just going to list out what this author has brought up. This is by no means a summary of the book, in fact I've never actually read the book itself.

- Religion comes from a period when humans were able to think and seek for information but had no way to explain what was happening around them, and religion was a way of explaining the things that could not be explained back then.

- No theologian(people studying religion) has ever been able to conclusively prove the existence of a higher being at any point of time in the history of mankind, the best they have ever been able to do was to attribute an apparent harmony in the arrangements.

- Religion goes for an already rather impossible task of proving the existence of said entity, and takes it a step further, and expects people to believe(which they do) that the speaker not only can prove the existence of that entity, but can claim to know this entities mind quite intimately and can claim to know his or her personal wishes, and in turn can tell u what u can do or can not do in his name.

- It gives to people(ministers/rabbis/shamans) power in the here and now. If you are his holiness the pope, and u have aggregated to yourself the power to free or to imprison, and to decide who may read what, how many tides must be paid, how many holy days must be observed, how many disciplines must be followed, is it seeking power in the afterlife or is it seeking power in the here and now? This is fairly obvious, and to add on to that, the sort of power being attributed to these people can not be challenged by normal challengers.

- One way of demonstrating the fact that religion is man-made is its proliferation(religion is everywhere!)

- There can only be 2 possible creators of religion, it can either be 'god made man' or 'man made god', if it is 'god made man' then it is very hard to see why there are so many religions, and why they are constantly at war with each other, however if you make the opposite assumption, that man has invented religion and god, there isn't much to be explained and I might add there are uncountable cults, sects, discrepancies within the holy books, warring churches. Iraq as an example, most of the hostility is directed at rival churches, at other Muslims, rather than the occupation force.

- For a morally normal universe, people of good will will do the best they can, and people of ill will will do the worst (wicked things), but for good people to do wicked things you need religion. In Denmark cartoonists were sent death threats for drawing a cartoon, flags were burned and people were shouting on the streets for the heads of the publishers, is this the sort of thing you would expect from a peaceful country?

PS: this isn't exactly a point, so skip it if u want(there are some good points here though), it's a counter argument against something put up by another debater, the argument is that religion has done plenty good for mankind, its wrong to say that religion pollutes everything, the counter argument was that while it can be said that religion has done plenty of positive things for mankind, these things were in fact things that could have been done without the help of religion(eg: humanitarian efforts, charity, amnesty International), and if religion were to take credit for the positive things, it should take credit for the mass murders and warring religions(the crusades). You might say that it isn't fair to put it that way, using the example of how a professor should not have to take credit for both, the student who passed with flying colours and also the other who dropped out, but the fact is that in every religion there are statements like, 'smite the head off the unbelievers' and other statements of the same sentiment, and while not everyone will follow that, that is what the holy books say, and as a believer that is a means of justifying however brutal the act may be, eg: "mass murder/genocide".... The point here being that the holy book encourages the believer in these acts, just as the same way a psychopath professor would tell his students to go out and commit mass murder,the holy books not only endorses these acts, they encourage it. As it is the analogy of the professor with the good and bad student is faulty. A proper one to describe the situation would probably be the one of the psychopath professor. To put all of this in a nutshell, name one good act that could not be done by a person without religion, and then name one evil act that a religious person can commit in the name of religion that a normal person would not do. You will find that it is far easier to find answers for the latter rather than the former.

The danger of religion is its totalitarianism form, believers are stifled from any form of thinking, reasoning is put aside and faith that is blind to everything else is encouraged.

Blogging about my blog...

2007-10-09T06:53:00.001-07:00

Why am I blogging? I have close to no writing skills, reading my old posts bores me to tears. This is barely a journal, I don't write about any significant events in my life on this thing.

My strongest motivation would be boredom I suppose...

quote"Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it. "

I am a potential sinner!

Here I am again, griping about my life

2007-10-09T03:38:00.000-07:00

Throughout my childhood my caretakers have for the most part been in the form of philipino maids, Susan, and some other nondescript characters that I can't remember were the ones who took care of me and my sister through our childhood years, the maids were our playmates, the person who cooked food for us, and the person who told us weird ghost stories. You could say that the maid was like our second guardian. Which might have been the reason for my slightly twisted personality...

Having had a friendly English speaking maid as a ruler to measure with is probably why it feels so disappointing( after Susan disappeared to only god knows where after her 4 year + contract ran out...) when all the maids to grace my home have been
- stealing my things (one of them stole my piggybank, another one stole my hand phone, and another one stole all my 1 ringgit coins in my coin box)
- vandalizing things at our home (one of them actually broke the handle to the door at her room, apparently because it made opening the door easier... . .)
- putting funny things into the food
- probably something I never found out...
It's baffling why these maids would do these sort of things, it makes me wonder what type of mentality they have, it's not as if their being abused, for the most part we treat them really well. I'm not one to demean groups of people, but these village Indonesians have really been a thorn at my side, and it's nigh impossible to get Filipinos help these days, as most of them have gone to Taiwan or Hong Kong, where the pay is much better, so the Malaysian are stuck with the labour force from the back alleys of Indonesia, these people can't speak a word of english, their lazy, they vandalize your property, they don't appreciate your help, and some of them treat working in Malaysia as some sort of holiday. Its disgusting. This coupled with my mother(she complains about the maid everyday for several hours) was the reason why I was against getting a maid for extra help around the house. After several months since the last maid quit(got fired) working at my home, and my mother starts complaining that she's doing all the work, etc etc etc. This is a complete lie, as the only thing she does for the family is wash and hang the clothes, even then most of the time the clothes are not mine since I throw mine in my room and take them out to wash all at once, she does not feed the dogs, I do that, she does not wash the dishes because quote "My hands are too sensitive" end quote, either my dad or I do that, she does not go to the market to get food for the family, my dad does that, she does not cook for the family, we go out to eat, my dad pays for that. She contributes almost nothing in the house, but somehow manages to convince herself that shes doing everything in the house. Whether this is some sort of self induced delusion shes going through I do not know, but this has lead to a new problem at home; because my mom's complaining so much, my dad got one of his worker's wife to work full time at our house, but with this 'helping hand' around... more problems are cropping up.

The extra help happens to be from Myanmar, not an Indonesian, that in itself I suppose is a good thing but heres the catch. She doesn't speak a word of English.... and shes never worked as a maid before... that was fine with me, I don't mind using hand gestures to get the message across, but then I find out that shes greedy, she doesn't just eat 3 meals a day, she cooks supper for herself and she finishes whatever is left out. She actually ate half of a traditional dessert that was left out on the table, something I was planning to finish later on, without telling me a single thing and shes eating all the eggs in the fridge, when my mom asked her she actually had the gall to say that I was the one who asked her to cook it, and she doesn't wash the clothes properly, shes so lazy she dips the clothes into soap water, dips them into clear water, squeezes the water out and thats it, thats what constitutes as washing clothes, hell even I'm not that lazy, and I'm a sloth. Just what the hell is going on, I used to think that foreign maids were people who were hardworking who came all the way to this country because they were too poor and wanted to earn enough to bring something back home, but here I am dealing with lazy, dishonest, greedy, thieving snots. I wonder whether these people would actually care if they lost their jobs, if the job means so little to them why did they bother going overseas to work in the first place.

No friends.

2007-09-19T11:39:00.000-07:00

I think I'm starting to realize now why I have so few friends, it's not because I'm choosy, it's because I sound like a ignorant jackass when I open my mouth, and I have about as much control over my enunciation and body language as a monkey... Surprising how much information can be missed when a person doesn't pay attention..

Read and be well read...

2007-09-12T02:31:00.000-07:00

http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/411742
Read at least 3 pages.

Turning 20

2007-09-04T11:22:00.000-07:00

Turning 20 soon.... 2 more weeks

XXX college fucks me over, again.

2007-08-29T07:01:00.000-07:00

I have nothing to do so I'm going to rant here. I'm doing a course called Managing Your Hardware this semester, and the lecturer for this subject has the technical know how of a computer illiterate Idiot, that fool doesn't even know the difference between RAM and processor, she actually thinks processing speed depends on RAM and not the processor. How ridiculous is that? Anyway, she argued with several students, here are some 'memorable quotes' quote "The processing speed is determined by the amount of RAM you have! If your computer has a processor but no RAM, you think the computer will work??" <-- That was what she said, almost word for word, and someone responded with the obvious, "but a computer with no processor isn't going to work as well". How bloody stupid can this lecturer be? Just FYI, the processing speed of a computer, lets just assume this means how fast a computer can execute commands, is determined by several factors, not just the RAM. Ignorant bum doesn't even know how a PC works, and shes actually teaching the subject. Processing speed is determined by the processor, thats my reasoning because the processor is what actually processes the instructions(more clock cycles per second = more instructions done per second), RAM is how much memory you have to execute the instructions, more RAM means more applications are able to run concurrently, since you can have more things stored in your RAM, eg: you can run more applications at once without your computer lagging, once your computer runs out of RAM, it starts using the memory from your hard drive to run the programs, but this is a problem since your hard drive is further from your processor(think 1 million instructions, and you'll understand why you need RAM).

Anyway, even after several students pointed this obvious fact to the 'lecturer', she continues to insist that the RAM is what determines the computer processing speed, quote"The MEMORY is what determines the processing speed, you dun believe me you go check", how the hell someone with this amount of ignorance manage to secure a position as a lecturer is beyond me.

FYI:(The speed of the processor is determined by the number of clock cycles/instructions it handles per second, hence processor, 3 gigahertz means 3 million clock cycles per second, 1 megahertz is 1 thousand cycles per second.) more hertz usually means more speed, and more heat as well.
Duo core processors have 2 processors on 1 chip, hyper threading is a single processor that simulates 2 processors.

PS: this is the same lecturer I complained about below.

edit: took out college name

Back pain

2007-08-22T00:50:00.000-07:00

Sleepy as hell, back hurting, head hurting, dont want to go back to college, dont know what to do.

Lets start up with today..

5AM in the morning, my mom is freaking out and screaming at my dad, whose still half asleep, I'm not sure what the problem is there. Something about clothes, she can really make a person miserable for absolutely no reason, what a bad start to the day. I'm tired and my back was hurting and I have my mom to add more spice to my already bad start of the day.

7AM off to college, my dad sends me off to college, since my sis wants to use the Camry, I have to take the cab back, after looking around for the timetable I find out that college only starts at 11AM... thats 3 hours of nothing to do, so I spend the next 2 hours in the library and an hour in the computer lab... Honestly going to college makes me feel like I have a chain around my head. I can't do what I really want, and sometimes the lecturers feel the need to pick on me for no reason... For instance... in my first class the minute I walk in my lecturer says something along the lines of, quote" Where is your paper and pencil?" ramble ramble ramble for half a minute, lost my attention after the first sentence... In the middle of class she tells me, quote" Why do you look so uncomfortable? You look so uncomfortable your making me uncomfortable, are you alright?" and this goes on all through the 1 hour class, bad enough that my back hurts, now I have an irritating lecturer giving me grief... annoyed and feeling like a fool i decide to just go home after that... I need a break... but I've already had a 3 week break...

Gym...

2007-08-10T17:05:00.000-07:00

Went to the gym on Thursday with Kiang Hong, met up with the trainer in the California Fitness gym, turns out we had to make an appointment beforehand, apparently he had some existing appointment, so we had to work out ourselves,as it is we went off for some cardio, cycling running etc. Nothing interesting, afterwards we took off to get some rest at the resting area. California Fitness is pretty spacious, there are 2 floors, most of the weight lifting machines etc are on the 1st floor, the 2nd floor is where the cardio machines are, the treadmill, cycling, aerobics, punching bags are over there, theres also a room where they hold different types of exercises as well, yoga etc, they have a schedule for the different exercises there, but I'll have to get those from the trainer the next time I go there, haven't really got the details, not really something I'm interested in. Theres also a swimming pool on the outside of the gym, they actually have a jacuzzi over there... o_O? Tiny basketball court and a relaxation area as well. about 1 hour into the gym and we were pretty much exhausted.

Anyway I ended up staying over at Kiang's place, that guy has the worst virus ridden pc I have ever seen, I've asked him to reformat that thing so many times I've lost count, seems like he doesn't even bother maintaining his pc and that technician that keeps coming over to his house to fix his pc? I get the feeling his ripping Kiang off, that guy doesnt update the Windows for his pc at all, it's like cleaning up the mess from a leak but not fixing the leak itself, what is that? His still using the XP Service Pack 1, Service Pack 2 came out years ago. Literally years ago. I tried fixing his pc but it was getting late so figured might as well get some sleep. Figured his dad would send someone over to fix the pc again.

Next day Kiang dumped me at his house to go off for class, why did he ask me to stay over if his just going to leave me there with nothing to do until 1 o clock plus??? that guy never thinks things through. So while I was flipping through the channels, some technician comes over at 10 something and 'fixes' the pc, this guy probably thought I lived there or something, he tells me his fixed the pc and stuff, said he installed spybot: search and destroy and spy sweeper on the pc, now I used to use that thing(spybot etc), and while it does work, it only covers spywares, doesn't work on everything, much easier to just reformat the pc and update it, especially something as badly infected as that pc. Anyway the funny part is when I went to double check the pc and I find out that the technician hasn't even updated his windows!? It's still service pack 1. What the hell is going on... No wonder the pc keeps getting infected, this guy doesn't actually fix the problem, he just gets rid of the viruses.

I spent the rest of the morning looking at the idiot box, channel surfing, reading comics and feeling like an idiot, should have went home. I found out that he had a previous engagement with Dom, some lunch thing, I tagged along, figured it'd be good to see Dom again, so at 12:30+ his driver sends me off to uptown 5, Tower D. Which happens to be Kiang's father's company. One thing lead to another and We(Dom, Kiang and me) ended up having lunch with a bunch of executives and his parents at a sushi restaurant that apparently belongs to his dad as well.. Went home and fell asleep after that.

Wonder if I should join the camping trip.

At College

2007-07-02T19:27:00.000-07:00

I am depressed and bored, I've spent the last hour in class looking at articles from http://www.damninteresting.com/, and I've actually finished reading 90% of the articles in that particular website... I have absolutely nothing to do in this class, hell I'm not even sure why attendance is compulsary, the lecturer isn't even teaching anything, the class is over now though, and here on to my next subject, which happens to be taught by the same lecturer, and this lecturer does not intend to teach for the hour that I am able to attend to the class... because 1 guy didn't attend and the other 2 have other classes, that leaves me, the only guy out of the incredible number that is '4' students for this class, what a massive waste of time. Heck the subject itself is a waste of time, learning how to use the most basic features of Macromedia Director, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with that... and I did multimedia authoring on my 1st semester in KDU, why am I paying to basically learn the same thing?

So here I am wondering what the hell should I do right now... and then I remembered I had a blog...

And what now... this is just bullshit...

Mmm.. the previous 4 posts suck so bad... I think I'm going to delete them.

Streamyx,

2007-06-04T09:47:00.000-07:00

In the last few years streamyx has upgraded its service several times in order to provide higher bandwidth for it's customers, what I have never been able to understand is the existing problems that still continues to plague me throughout the years of using their services, I mean, why not give those shitty customer service staff's and technicians some training in etiquette and some actual knowledge on just what their talking about, instead of giving them a single A4 paper with 'The Same Answer for All question'. Pisses me off when I have to deal with rude idiots who keep going OK, OK, 2 more hours, 1 more day, 2 more weeks, and completely ignore my report for the next month, damn you lazy bastards, if you don't know whats wrong just send the fucking technician over on the same day. To top everything off my connection always gets these hiccups where it disconnects once in 5 minutes for more than 3 hours, works fine for awhile, then starts disconnecting again. I've disconnected for more than 15 times up till now, which is probably the only reason I'm actually spending time on this blog.

Think streamyx is good? Maybe for your area, but their service for most of their customers is bad.
Type in streamyx sucks in google and there will probably be half a dozen links where you can find people complaining about streamyx.

Its 5:20 AM and my Internet connection is still disconnecting every 1-5 minutes, its been more than 7 hours so far.

Them technicians over there must be making love to the electric plugs.

College is a sack of potatoes.

2007-06-03T11:24:00.000-07:00

Life at college can be compared to a sack of potatoes, why a sack of potatoes? I don't know, but somehow it feels appropriate to me to compare it to a sack of potatoes.

So now that it has been established that life at college is in fact a sack of potatoes, I would like to further elaborate on the distinctive qualities of a college student. In KDU, the locals(read: Malaysians) hang out at the Cyber Cafes, for the rest of the KDU population? I dunno.

Now that I have finished my 3rd blog entry, I shall expire.

Damn I really need to find something to do...

Removed

2007-05-19T01:52:00.000-07:00

Spring cleaning?

The very First

2007-05-15T23:04:00.000-07:00

For lack of anything better to do, I have decided to create a blog.
My rant for today.

Life in Malaysia is bad, there can be no other word to describe the feeling I get when I have to deal with taxi drivers who refuse to give me back my change, rude people, and the ludicrous amount of people whom which common sense never seems to apply to.

Just recently I had to deal with getting my driving license at the beloved Safety Driving center in PJ. My Instructor was late for the 1st class, left me alone in the car with nary an instruction for over an hour for the 2nd class, went home early for the 3rd class w/o bothering to tell me, and left me waiting in the car for half an hour during my on-road practice. After which I confronted him and asked him why he left me in the car for so long, etc etc. This instructor proceeded to blow me off and tell me that I did not need to bother continuing for my practice, quote 'If you want to be like that then NO NEED to practice, we go back now' , after which he sent me for a 'mock exam' with another instructor. After the mock exam this slacker was nowhere to be seen. This marks the second time he has gone off with the wind, apparently on some sort of 'urusan penting', because he is a 'very busy man', a driving instructor has many other more important obligations to attend to huh? After all, he is a driving instructor, one of the more important decision making individuals in this country right now.
Since it was getting pretty late, (4:30PM) I decided not to pursue the matter until tomorrow.

So the next day I call the SDC office and tell them I want another instructor, the clerk over there, on a stroke of genius, proceeds to hand the phone over to the very instructor that has been giving me such a head ache. So I tell him off, in reply he says that there is something wrong with my IC, and says that he will 'make up' for the time lost by rescheduling the 'lost time' to tomorrow. Now that really wouldn't be much of a problem(not taking into account the fact that he left me stranded twice, and threw a tantrum), if the time that that slacker allotted had not already been taken for my next lesson. I proceeded to tell him this fact, however for some reason this 'person' did not understand what it was I was trying to tell him, and proceeded to repeat the same thing over and over again. The conversation finally ended with him telling me that there was something wrong with my IC, again. Now here I am thinking why is there suddenly a problem with my IC? Why did the office not inform me earlier? So I decide to wait for an hour before calling back, after confirming with the office that there was indeed no problem whatsoever with my IC, I called my instructor again.

This time he tells me, "Oh, I need to confirm with the authorities, they will be coming over at 4:30 to 5:30PM." Now I for one know that the safety driving center starts emptying out at 5 o' clock, so it's pretty damned obvious to me whats happening here.

I wouldn't say that I'm a street wise person, but honestly just how much crap does this asshole think he can feed me before I start looking for his boss?

On the other hand his boss might actually look after his own 'people's' backside. I am at a loss of what to do...
If I hadn't paid already I would probably have just went to another driving school.

Am I the only one who has to deal with this sort of bullshit?

On a side note, This brings to mind what my cousin said to me once... In Australia if you go to a restaurant and get food poisoning you can sue the restaurant, in Malaysia if you get food poisoning your pretty much on your own.
Malaysia Boleh!