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Even though with the current recession, the drop in share price of AIG, followed by Lehman Brothers Bank, and now the US recession, the Asia’s economy is still going strong. Currently in the Asia region, we see a slight increase of the impact felt from the US economy downturn.

Bigger companies are starting to cut jobs, restructure, etc. to save cost. Though we are still seeing a huge number of companies hiring, but it is not immediate. When the demand of services and goods drop, which also means a drop in sales and profits, will impact the companies here, say 6 to 12 months.

I have a few friends in the Banking sector, and all they say is that business are “not as usual”. Cost cutting measures take place, and they wonder if they are even needed. It is good if management regroup, reassign resources to other departments, get employees into training so they can be tasked on other work.

Recently, Citigroup announced jobs cut of 50,000, FIFTY thousand jobs, All aroud the world ! ANd I believe a majority are the senior or higher management staff (because you can save more by axing higher paid ones). Now this makes me wonder if my money should remain with them, but I guess it should be. After all they are strong in the Asia market region.

Let’s hope we could survive this period so that things won’t turn out as bad.

Having ate quite a bit during my KL trp last month, I felt my stomach growing !!!

I have my own set of exercises that I do to keep my tummy flat, but after going through youtube, I found this. This is somewhat similar to what I have in mind so you might want to try it at home.

Please try this only if you think you are comfortable with the normal situps and that you have been physically exercising.

These are some of the pictures for my Kuala Lumpur trip in October. I was there for a training conference called Hack in the Box, but the Main Focus was the eating, shopping, and eating…

Kuala Lumpur Twin Towers.

A picture of the buffet breakfast I had during my 4 day hotel stay - Crowne Plaza Hotel Kuala Lumpur. This hotel is situated beside KLCC, about a 5 minutes walk. It is also a 5 minutes walk to the nearby Pavilion shopping mall. Their breakfast is nice and there’s alot of variety too.

Theres also a monorail just directly in front of the Hotel, and it took us 4 stations to reach China town.
Things were quite expensive around the region of KLCC twin towers, and Bukit Bintang - The Pavilion. My shopping actually starts right at China town. I bought a lot of nice T-shirts, about 15-30 rm each.

View Larger Map

Theres also Times Square, a 10 storey shopping mall with a mini Theme Park inside the mall. This is a 2 station ride from our hotel.

I think I’ve missed out on the October report. Currently I have a net worth of 9520 sgd with that of the citibank’s step-up saving account.

With the bad recession hitting Asia, Citibank are introducing 1-year time deposits, with a minimum amount of 10,000 sgd, @ 1.4% interest P.A. This sounds like a not so bad deal, considering if you had 50,000 which would give you a 1.6%, or a returns of 800 a year.

At such a bad time I rather be save with my money than sorry, but it may also be the best time to invest into the stocks market!

This was taken from an email forwarded to me. There’s no source, but I hope to find it and link it here. Heres the story:

“Once upon a time in a village in India , a man announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10.

The villagers seeing there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them.
The man bought thousands at $10, but, as the supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their efforts. The man further announced that he would now buy at $20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.

Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer rate increased to $25 and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it!

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now act as buyer, on his behalf.

In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers: ‘Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when he returns from the city, you can sell them back to him for $50.’

The villagers squeezed together their savings and bought all the monkeys.

Then they never saw the man or his assistant again, only monkeys everywhere! Welcome to WALL STREET. ”

There you have, the wall street humour. This is also how Wall Street and the stock exchange operates, that lead to our current economic situation.

The follow post was taken from my music site. I had some wonderful performance with a group of people who worked hard to make it all possible. These are some photos taken during one of my music performance at a graduation ceremoney for a group graduating students.

I am honoured to be the pianist for this performance, accompanied by a guitarist, a bassist, and a drummist (they are a band themselves), along with 3 wonderful ladies who sang for the graduating students. Here are some pictures:

 
The ladies and me.

 
The guitarist and me, taken while we were packing up… wires and stuff…

 
The ladies with an informal picture !

This was the instrument used. It costs $250 just to rent it for a day, and we had it for 2 days!

Hope you enjoyed this as much as I do !

Recently on my music site http://www.singwithpiano.com, I posted some photos taken of a music performance where I was involved. I was the pianist, accompanied by 3 very beautiful female vocalist, and a team of professional band members, including a drummist, a guitarist and a bassist.

We had a lot of fun, and alot of rehearsals, and it was the process that was memorable, not the hardwork. Do view the article here:
http://www.singwithpiano.com/2008/10/photos-from-my-music-performance/

My company is sending me over to Kualua Lumpur, Malaysia, where I will be attending “Hack In The Box 2008″. Hack in the box is an annual event that conducts training and conference about stuff like hacking and security of Information Technology and the like.

I will be there from 26 to 29 October, so I would be away for awhile, staying in Hotel where the event is run.

This is the Hotel, Crown Plaza Mutiara Hotel, KL: http://www.crowneplazakl.com/cpkl/map-location.html

From the Hotel, it is a 5 minutes walk to the Convention Centre and a 15 minutes walk to KL’s landmark, the twin towers.

View Larger Map

This is yet another chance to put in more travel series in my blog, with more photos, videos and interesting places like food (My package includes a breakfast buffet!) That’s also part of the reason why I bought the F40d camera.

Meanwhile I will have to prepare for this trip, with laptops luggages, and some of the travel necessities. Just hope it won’t rain. Anyone has recommendations in KL ?

Ok I actually dug up some videos that I’ve missed out when I scanned through some of the photos. Some photos taken were really bad, videos were bad too. But I’ve gotten these 2 videos which are both funny and entertaining.

This was taken while we were waiting at Prudential Hotel. My friend wore a shirt that he’d has bought, so its un washed, with some hair sticking on it.

The other day I was at the SOGO shopping center in Causeway (Can’t remember… hmm). The basement were packed with female shoppers because that was the last day of Thankyou Day or something like that.

Recently I put up a service called feedburner, that helps in the subscribing of RSS feeds. Reason being I have been poking around my website stats, and was surprised to see the large number of people who have added my site to their RSS feeds. There were at least 100 over readers a month, who adds my site to their feeds. Wait, so you asked, what are feeds ?

Basically feeds are ways to receive contents without visiting my site -_-’ , and all you get are just content or data or text, pumped into your feed reader (or RSS reader). These RSS reader, or Really Simple Syndication (RSS) could be an online service reader, or just your Browser’s feed reader. So instead of visiting 10 sites a day for updates, you grab the site’s feed address, and all these data will be downloaded to your feed reader, so you can view them all at once.

RSS has other features that allows a website to grab “updates” from another website via RSS, which gives you the power of updating content automatically, though some of these techniques used are against the policies.

With that, I hope you ultilise the power of technology and what RSS could do to your internet life!

Hello readers, you might have noticed my top right hand corner with this new RSS link. This is a feed burner service by Google (oh well its gooooogle again.), which means the feeds are handled by them. With this service, I could track the number of people who subscribes to my feeds, while previously I have no idea on the figures.

So with all being said, Subscribe to my feeds now!!! As you can see I have a counter showing number of subscribers, so the more the merrier. (I should have kept it somewhere until i read 100 before displaying). Now all I need you to do is to subscribe so my number doesn’t look so bad hehe grins*.

To subscribe, click on the RSS icon at the top right hand corner or click Here to subscribe.

Oh, and I just hope you could come back to look at some other stuff that you might have missed out with the RSS thingy. Thank you !!!

My hand was itchy. I took a picture of all my credit cards… because I know I gonna say goodbye to them. I’ve gotten them mostly out of curosity, to understand the meaning of credit, and what happen that lead to credit market balloon burst.

 
These cards do help in one way or another, with their usage written beside them. Besides some of the shopping or dining, I basically have no uses for them. Oh, maybe just some internet expenses. If you know how to use them wisely, you could save some money, but that is if you fully understand the risks, why there are discounts by merchants and why they can afford to give discounts.

Sensitive details removed for security reasons…

 
I got my first credit card when I just turned 23. To qualify for a credit card in Singapore, you’ll need an annual income of at least SGD30,000, or USD20550. I got hold of my first card from Citibank, with the Clear Platinum Visa and the Citibank MasterCard. Then I got the savings account which is a blue debit card right at the top. That is where I had save almost $9500+ by now.

Then I took other offers with promotions by getting the OUB One card, and subsequently the full suite of DBS / POSB credits cards… which right now, I don’t the need to have them, hence the photo taking.

 
Anyway, I feel that credit cards discounts are one avenue for merchants to advertise. For example, the “FINE” dining discounts offered by my American Express DBS Black card, includes a list of merchants that I’ve never really seen or heard before. Maybe their price are just too expensive, their location inaccessible, or they simply got not much of business.

 
In my next post I’ll talk about my strategies in handling credit cards.

 
Open for feedback !

On Sunday, I bought a new camera for myself, the Fuji F40d. It costs about 204 USD or SGD 299. So what this means is you can expect more photos being uploaded here onto my blog.

The camera might be already taken off the shelve, and might not be available on the market anymore. I bought this from a factory sales instead.

Reason why I bought this, as I needed to go overseas, and used it for some other events and photo taking, I decided it was time to buy one. I’ve never really own a camera, except for the web camera I used to video myself playing the piano. You can view them at http://www.singwithpiano.com. I have a handphone which doesn’t have a camera function, due to some reasons.

For most considerations, I bought this camera with expectations like:

- Long battery life
- Availability of spare batteries (on the market)
- Size of memory cards
- Proper night filming
- Video recording, at least 25 fps, able to record more than 10 minutes
- Some zooming
- Easy transfer of data.

What are your expectations of compact cameras ?

A Review of the camera:
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0701/07010402fujifilmfinepixf40fd.asp

Consuming a “huge” Choclate Cake over 3 days, eating bread with thick layers of peanut butter spread and drink an overdose of coffee (being too sleepy) had made me felt uncomfortable.

There were signs of mouth ulcers and sore throat on me. I didn’t feel quite well too. These are caused by eating too much of these “heaty” stuff that cause my body to react. The solution to this? Chinese herbs and fruits.

I am fine, all thanks to what is called “Luo han Guo” in mandarin, or Momordica grosvenori fruit, regularly. A store nearby my house sells them, ready made into a bottled drink. It is “home made”, meaning they get the best of these fruits, process them and make it into a drink on a “on-demand” basis. This includes brewing it with other herbs/fruits too.

Drinking this helps “cool” down your body, treats some common illness well, and best of all it helps directly to the throat. Which is why I am able to maintain a good and clear singing voice through out the year!

I recommend this for it is cheap and good, and for a better, healthier body.

Sources:
http://www.chineseherbsdirect.com/product_info.php?products_id=769

http://www.tributetea.com/herbs_luohanguo.asp

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