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In Singapore, POSB is a local bank that is tied up with DBS.

All resources are “shared” among them. When you visit a a POSB outlet, you may do services offered by DBS, and vice versa. What I got here is another savings plan that is slightly more flexible. If you look at the CitiBanks’s saving plan, you’ll notice that it’s quite rigid. You need a minimum $500 and make sure balances of the current month don’t drop below the previous month.

However, this POSB bank’s saving plan (named “MySavings Account”) has the freedom of putting in any amount monthly, and it doesn’t have a termination fee before 6 months of issue. It is offering a 1.0% for savings from $300 to $790, 1.2% for $800-1490 and 1.6% for $1500-$3000.

So I always have this in mind. Whenever I have cash, I won’t let it sit in a regular savings accounts. Instead, put it into an account that allows flexibility. Theres good and theres bad, and there isn’t much money on hand I could spend now.

This is called discipline saving and I hope everyone follows!

This is another One Million Question you can ask someone whom you’ve met in a party. This question will not be too direct and “obvious” to find out if shes attached.
 
 

The question is… “How do you travel home from work / workplace?”

or

“Where do you go after work, home?”

 
 
Surprisingly, it may sound of a care and concern type of question, or like as though you are asking her a date after work. But curiously, show that you’ve never been to that area at her workplace, “I am not familiar with your office, wheres that exactly?”, follow by asking the question, “How do you go home from there?”

I was at a social gathering when someone actually asked me this question, but I could tell she wasn’t interested in me anyway, just curious to know more about where I work. But I think its quite useful, because with this question, it leads to her answer such as:

“I will travel to A by bus, then to B by MRT, and then walk home”

or

“I will go to this place where I have my xx activity, then I will accompany YY person for dinner.”

Ahh! There you have it, here is how you got your answers to whatever you intention (if it’s to find our if shes’s attached!” Even if she is, a conversation is still opened up, and you could really out more (about the workplace) or some other stuff.

It really depends on how you ask, because if her reply was “I would be usually free after work and then I…” This is what to your imagination and your on-the-spot decision!

My dad had a phone which sounded a little soft and was slightly malfunctioning, so I decided to get him a phone.

His contract was over, so I used my company’s corporate plan priviledges to get cheaper rates. I spent around $100 to get him a new phone, port over his phone number from Telco A to Telco B, and gotten a Nokia 3120. The plan is PowerTalk from Starhub Singapore, and it costs $29.96 a month. With a 30% corporate plan discount, I have a $9 savings every month, or about $108 a year.

I just hope my dad’s outgoing calls lasts no more than 160 minutes, so I could save on the dialing charges. This is $30 cheaper than his original bill from another Telco.

It’s money saved!

When my site was setup at the web hosting server, I could see the number of countries connecting to this blog, via Cpanel. And then there is Google analytics that is used to analyse the number of visitors, where they are from and how they got here.

It is quite interesting because I see many different countries getting a hit on my blog here, as well as the other music site that I owned.

This tip here is more suited for site owners, internet markerters and if you are just purely interested at how wonderful internet works. A little research goes here…

My tip is simple and straight forward - If you want to boost traffic of a certain country’s visit, type the keyword or tags of the country’s name in your post more often.

In an SEO point of view, this may sound stupid to you but think of it from a business angle. If you need to target a specific niche, you may also need to target a specific region as well.

For example, recently I went to Hong Kong for a short holiday trip. When I came back, I blogged some photos and palces of interests on this blog. I had many tags and keywords like visiting Hong Kong, travelling in Hong Kong. Guess what? The number of Hong Kong web visits shot up almost 4 times or 400%. That’s quite significant to me.

Let me remind you Hong Kong’s first language is Cantonese, follow by Chinese, then English. Their default Yahoo and Google search engines are optimized for Chinese searches, so it is quite a surprise.

Which takes us to a new level if we want to target countries Taiwan, Hong Kong or big brother China (150 million internet users and growing). All we need to do is to have more Chinese and term “China” keywords and tags, to attract organic traffic.

Finally, look at the Middle east. In 5 to 10 years, they may overtake China in terms of web presense, due to the number of population added up together. They can and will provide us with more money making ventures, businesses and opportunities.

The hint is obvious, If you could look web traffic stats, the next internet stronghold will soon turn out to be China, Middle East, asia. Currently US, Canada and Europe still stands at the top of the chart.

Hope you enjoy my tip!

I’ve gotten this tip after meeting a few new friends, so I was it was a coincidence as I really wanted to know something else, but thought that this was helpful.

Maybe you’ve ask yourself what’s that “easy-to-find-out” question to ask if someone is attached, or the first words to ask when you meet a girl you like, or interested in. Why not put it this way, ask another question which may lead you to an answer.
 
 

Ask her this One Million Question. “Who do you live with?”

 
 
A standard reply will tell you she’s living with her parents, or her husband, or if she’s staying at her boyfriend’s place.

If she lives with her parents, chances are, you have to probe further. Here you can ask her if she intending to move out? When is she moving out? Plans to buy her home (with someone else)

There’s nothing more you could do if she says living with her husband, but you may just continue your conversation asking her how long she’s been married, where she live, how’s the place and environment etc.

If she’s staying at boyfriend place… that’s one of the turn-off answers to receive.

Hope you have your success into getting the answer you wanted, without getting to direct!

Human beings have 7 intelligences or more!. Yes SEVEN or MORE. I couldn’t give you a perfect answer right now because this is still under researched. But more than often, we used two or three of them only.

Since young, education systems are only able to access 1 out of the few intelligences we have. After being in the working society, we often require other skills or specialties. These are what I am going to post here.

I went to a course on NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming) where I was taught the gist of NLP. To be good with NLP skills, you may need at least 6-12 weeks or practise and training, to be “familiar” since it is not a theory course. Nevertheless, I have “simplified” these are the 7 human intelligences in layman’s term, though these may not be the exact NLP theory:

IQ, Intelligence Quotient

Used in: Academics, education and studies, intellectual expertise, calculations and thinkings.
 
 

EQ, Emotional Intelligence Quotient

Used in: Interpersonal relationships, percieve emotions, showing care and understandings.
 
 

Intrapersonal, self-intelligent

Used in: Confident and works alone, high self-awareness, knows what’s going on around him.
 
 

Visual, Watch and Learn

Used in: Learn by watching, copying actions demonstrations, like dancing
 
 

Spatial, Touch and Feel

Used in: Get involved, actions and demonstrations. IT programming, cooking,golfing, dancing, or fixing up a cabinet.
 
 

Auditory, Sensitivity to sounds

Used in: Musicians have this most. People in general who could perform better with music.
 
 

Verbal, Speech Intelligence

Used in: Tasks involving communications, like sales personnels, speakers, customer service.
 
 

Physical Excellence

Used in: Sports, physical activities. Look at the athletics in the olympics.
 
 
And this is where I hope you realise that not everything is about certifications, academics excellent, and exams. Don’t feel bad if you are’t smart, because once you identify what you are good at, you can strength that area.

In my next post I will show what are the stuff I do, to make sure I have an equal balance among all the intelligences.

My Previous post on different methods of learning:

http://www.dennisquek.com/2008/07/different-methods-of-learning/

Here’s a more detailed knowledge written in Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences

This is my last post with some pictures of this and that.
 

I think we had a Tim Sum Lunch at one of the restaurants, and also went to Causeway Bay for dessert. It was quite strange when we were at Causeway Bay because there were not many public toilets in the shopping malls. So in order to sit down to rest our feet and get a toilet break, we went to have dessert. I took a picture of the MTR as well, because there were many many people.
 
 

Before reaching Causeway Bay, we travelled on the MTR, and needed to changed our trip. I was shock because I haven’t seen this in my own train transport system, with so many heads. As I was tall enough, I could get a view… and then I snapped a picture of it.
 
 

 
 

This is where causeway bay is on google map, with many shopping malls around. I wish I had more time to shop there!
 
 

查看大图

 
 
This is the dessert I am talking about. Not bad for the shop’s ambience and a 30 minutes break, which cost around 20.00HKD or $5.00 USD. And remember, all bills and prices in Hong Kong don’t tax on people and consumers, so you pay what you see.

 
This was the other day where we had lunch at this Tim Sum restaurant. In the middle, it is a dish called Yuan Yang Fried Rice, which symbolises the black and white Yin Yang. It’s kinda of wierd because it’s half sweet and half salty. Before snapping the picture my friend atually ate 2 of the ‘Har Kao’ (Shrimps wrap in flour skin). A nice place to relax and enjoy your meal!

That’s all for the Hong Kong trip. Click the links on the right sidebar column for more of my Hong Kong travel series!
 
 

I try to be keep it simple here.

To answer the topic’s question, I am putting in SGD500 (USD344) of SGD into this account the next day I receive my salary. So it is an automated transfer from one bank account to another.

Since I started this quite long ago, I am earning a monthly interest of $2.xx interest and $1.xx step up interest a month. That is about $3.xx a month, and it is growing by the month. My total balance is about $9012.

As this is just a start, I’ll write down each individual component, and by then, I’ll post a summary of my finances at the end of the month.

I’ve seen this somewhere on a joomla help site before, but I will just republish here again. In the website context here, we are talking about a website that does more than just a personal blog, a forum, an E-Commerce site or a informational site. We are talking about big sites, huge business sites high generating incomes, high level of activity, and sites which offer quite lots of services and information.

So who are required to run a website? To my knowledge and gathered inputs from experience, you actually need quite alot of people.

Let’s split this up into 4 major groups of people. They are the content, admin, website and public relation groups.

Contents

These are the group of people who manage the content of a site.

Content / ideal brainstorming group
This group of people may be the brains of a website. If your website is run entirely for online businesses, these people may be the core or the business management group.

They are the ones who decide what should appear in a site, mainly the ideals. Whether their idea worked well or not, it depends how the rest of the team executes it.
 

Copy writers
These people are the one who writes out the content for the group above. What these people do, is to they keep pumping out content, whether if they know that topic well or not. An example for this may be journalists or reporters; those that write for newspaper or magazine articles.
 
Editors
Editors edit the work of the copy writers. Writers writes content, while the editors edits the information into a more readable text, ready to be published.
 
Publishers
The publishers chooses the appropriate time to publish, where to publish, and along with some strategies to make it look unique. In a more complex environment, this is necessary to ensure that information are released correctly at the right place and time.
 
Translators
As the name implies, translators are people who translate content. Pretty much straight forward for any other types of language translation. They simply rewrite them in a different language.
 
 

Admin

The admins here refers to the IT and infrastructure admins. Similar to those you find in IT or MIS department, these people helped to build an infrastructure so that you can run your stuff on.

 
CMS (Content Management System) admins
As you see, this is an application or a system that host these contents and designs, making it all possible for different teams to work on. Example of these includes Joomla and Wordpress. You could design a website without this, like ASP.NE or Java, but that’ll mean more headcounts to the programming team. There are certain features and little tweaks needed for your CMS to work properly.
 
Server admins
The server admins are interested in the servers. They don’t even know what you are running and how many of them. They are in charge of the hardware, the performance, the speed, the temperature of the CPU etc etc…
 
Network admins
Network administrators involves the network, all the way to the internet. They are in charge of the internet backbones, the speed of the LAN to your server, the number of connections, bottlenecks, peak traffic times, and your firewall rules.
 
Software admins
The software guys installs the software needed to run these whole thing. In a site, you may require this and that plugins, extensions, addons, modules, support software, framework. More importantly, they configure your Apache Web Server, ensuring that you have a proper platform to run your sites on.
 
 

Website

This group of people are the web programmers, designers and those who love building websites.

Web Designers
Designers are the one who make your site come alive, and unique. They call them templates, or themes, that contain attractive colors, fanciful site response and beauty positioning of the entire site.
 
Programmers
Programmers actually run the write some codes to make certain things work. Without any simple writing of codes, the design cannot work well in a site where there finer tunings. The designers must work closely with the programmers to make the site happen. Some examples are scripts that pop up new window, or creating proper hyperlinks to interlink pages.
 
Developers
The developers may be seen somewhat similar to the programmers, but I would like to make a difference in them. The programmers are just doing simple tasks on the site itself. Probably some simple PHP or HTML will do.

The developers worked on a type of program that functions and supports the entire web application. He may be writing online application forms, that writes into a database. Then some sites where people could retrieve some data. They will need to design the database as well.
 
SEOs team
I can’t think of a proper name right now, so I name them SEO Team. This is quite a new term in recent years, about 5 years ago? These guys actually optimize your site to be Search Engine Friendly. (SEO means Search Engine Optimization) They’ll try to write keywords, the ones where most people will search and with a few methods, push the SEO rate higher. This team will need to work with the editors or content writers.
 
 

Public relation

This is where you get your site noticed, using different methods.
 
Internet Markerters
Marketers market the site, but all they actually need is to make the URL address as big as possible ? No. They deal with background information as to why this site is important to YOU and what it can offer. Like traditional techniques, they can either do it offline or online. 3 good ways are to add it onto google adwords, get link referrals, or advertise your site onto Television programs.
 
Web Statistics analysts
I made up this one. I don’t really know if there is a need, but if your site is a site on global platform, you will need to know whose coming from where, who likes what, where you got your visitors from and hows the hit rate. These should be analysed to better help improve the site’s traffic and target the right audience.
 
Site relationship buildings
Similar to internet marketing, this creates a virtual character, to “build relationships” with other sites and visitors. Though sites relationships are build, but the focus is on busines here. If you can’t make money offline, it doesn’t mean you can’t make it online! Examples are facebook.com or youtube.com.
 
Offline website marketing
These are like what have been mentioned above. Offline marketing is self-explanatory, but because of the technology today, you can’t just promote a phone number; you advertise your URL Address instead! There are many ways of offline marketing, and I won’t say it here.
 
Help and support group
These group of people will support the queries, bugs, problems, feedbacks, emails, help, support bla bla… They may be the actual staff that does the ground work for businesses, online 24/7. Think Microsoft Helpdesk.
 

Finally

With all these said, running a website isn’t easy. Look at my blog, it involves no one but me and myself, because the scale is snall. When you look at a bigger picture, many jobs are created if you run a proper website. Imagine building a site as big as Google Inc. With so many services provided, how many people do you need?

For businesses, quality of a site is important if people are dedicated to doing what they are suppose to do. You may think that multi-tasking is good, but performance and quality will suffer. Look at the list of people / skillset involved.

Hope to have your views.

In my country, we get all sorts of people from different country who come here to work and study. I must admit it is somehow attractive in my country due to its financial and security stability in South East Asia.

As more and more globalization takes place, people move from country to country to get employed and work. And being said so, I ponder about what employers are looking for, even though we have many nationalities working here.

And so I came to a conclusion.

In the early 1970s-1980s - Experience counts
In this period, employment was more to individual country and more or less peope were employed based on experience.

The middle working class especially, people were hired by the experience they have, and that is all to it. If you know something, and I need what you know, you’re employed, that’s it.
 
 
In the 1990s-2000s - Education chase
Then came the education certifications battle among employees. Employers used it as a guage to decide who should even be entitled an interview in a job.

As more and more people have the ability to graduate from a University, people were sub-divided into different level of education, including Honours / non-honours etc. And nowadays we are looking at Masters or even PhDs.
 
 
In the 2000s-??s - Performance matters
This is period now that we are currently looking at. I felt that emphasis on employees nowadays will tend to focus on performance, more than anything else.

If you can’t perform, you are out. That is why we see big companies cutting jobs in various sectors. This include utilising resources, and value-adding to the company. And the infamous word called multi-tasking means 1 person shouldn’t just do 2 person’s job. He/she must be able to do multiple jobs that varied from A-Z.
 
 
 
To end, I hope everyone have all three factors into consideration when you think about global as a whole. Be prepared of the worst!