Fwd: URGENT: Platelets & Prayers Needed in Singapor

Subject: Fwd: URGENT: Platelets & Prayers Needed in Singapor

hey peeps

ookay i don't mass mail very often! A friend's friend's dad is in need of blood O+ (which is very common right), must be from the male species only. so if you're a female and reading this, just forward to your guy friends ya! much thanks in advance for being a blessing! :)

Details:-

Patient Name: TAN POK SUAN

Where: 7th Floor, HAEMOTOLOGY & STEM CELL CENTRE, MT. ELIZABETH

Preferably : O+ Blood & Male

Just inform the potential platelet donors to tell the people at 7th Floor that they would like to donate platelets to Tan Pok Suan and they will tell you the procedure.

God bless!

Random thoughts at the end of week two

Just a random thought occured to me during breakfast today.

There are people around who KPKB about a lot of things, but do not lift a finger to help.

Basically 'All Talk and No Action'.

Well as they say 'Empty Vessels Make the Most Noise'...

Something I am really beginning to appreciate especially after taking up The Important Responsibility in hall.

By the way, going down later today to support one of my friends in The Organisation. His Corps turns 10 today :)
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Some other random thoughts:

This friend of mine passed out from the Officer's Course only one year after me. Yet till this day, he still addresses me as 'Sir', a gesture which I do not demand but I appreciate it nevertheless. Compare to the younger ones 4 or 5 batches younger. Back then respect for seniority was prized, I don't know what happened along the way.

Come to think of it, about the officers who I trained under as a cadet. If they were to resume their service in The Organisation, will still be calling them Sir / Ma'am even though I'm of higher rank than them now. But sometimes, it's not about what it is on the shoulder, but about the experience that they have had. Therefore we must have mutual respect for one another. Otherwise, take an example from SAF. The 2WO will not respect the 2LT just because of his rank. But if the 2LT will respect the 2WO for his experience and wisdom gained from his 20-odd years of service, I am sure most 2WO will at least give face to him... Of course there are black sheep officers who come out from That Training School cocky and all that. Will they earn the respect of subordinates?

There are a variety of reasons why someone is below you in the pecking order. He could have not had sufficient experience or qualifications. Or he may not have 'apple polished' his way up as well as others. However, everyone is special in his or her own way. Everyone has his or her own way to contribute to the organisation, if you can find a way to motivate them and harness that potential in them.

Even in that particular district in The Organisation, there are a few officers being sidelined, jokingly termed the "Long Term Captains". I can't help but wonder if they actually have the passion to contribute, just that there has been some offence taken in the past which causes their attitude to be like this now...Could it be that now, they are like this simply because they have given up trying?

(I begin to sense I'm being overly optimistic here... but anyway)

We do not salute the man but the rank. But everyone is unique, everyone is special and we respect that. Respect begets respect. The golden rule: do unto others as you would others do unto you. Law of attraction (those who watch The Secret will know). I've seen it come true in my life in more than one way.

I am convinced that my life's purpose is to do something that benefits people. And ever since I have discovered this purpose, I daresay I have had a paradigm shift... and now I see a bigger picture... having said that, I still have lots of room for improvement... and it is my prayer that God will help me in this , for it is not by my strength but His.
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And this is for you, my senior in JC and now hall, you know who you are:

You have meant well for me during the period when my life had no direction. And I had inadverently clashed with you right here in this blog. But at the end of it all you meant well. I was simply not teachable during that period of time... and i am sorry if I had hurt you in any way. God bless.

On JCRC

It's been just a week since the elections have passed and boy, we've been through a lot of discussion, we feel every bit in the job even though it's still a few day before we officially take over. haha

Some random thoughts about my Organisations

A question was posed to me recently about my committments in general. Currently, besides my academic, church and hall committments, I have two Organisations that regular readers of my blog should know.

My involvement in both Organisations can be as heavy or as light as I want it to be. Of course, it's foolhardy to just dive into it for the sake of it. Before taking on any new project, basic economics demands we apply the principle of opportunity cost. Can the time spent be put to better use? Always ask this question first.

Also another economics principle, return on investment. What are the gains (in terms of personal satisfaction, such as knowing that what I have done has helped another person, or my own personal development? Caveat: not monetary gains of course..)

[[DISCLAIMER: I am no econs major, and my understanding of Econs is pretty basic, so pardon me if I applied certain theories wrongly]]

With these in mind...
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I have formalised my plan to call it a day in The Other Organisation. Strange to say, there are no feelings of loss whatsoever. It's just a feeling of emptiness as to whether it was the right choice to join The Other Organisation in the first place.

No doubt, I have been exposed to many new things which put me in good stead for my dealings with teachers especially now in my role in The Organisation. But after all the instances whereby my effort was put to waste (zero return of investment), I think it's been a very expensive exposure indeed.

For these couple of years in particular, my later half of my studies in NUS, I will not be active at all due to my academic committments... and also due to the fact that I am taking up a key position in hall. After that, I would start working and it would be a whole new challenge to keep on top of my working schedule. Probably I won't even be able to continue then, so might as well beat my retreat now and focus on the more critical stuff.

So, principle of opportunity cost and return on investment applies here. Nuff said...

So, I have cut back on one of my 'outside' activities. I am now left with The Organisation...

I received an email from my superior recently that was very much a pat on the back for my hard work. Nothing is more important than knowing that you've done a good job and others have benefited from it.

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It's okay if certain 'old people's mindset' cannot change... that is why younger ones are getting frustrated and leaving the organisation (notice it's not in caps, hence it does not refer to any particular Organisation). I do not find myself in this situation.. yet. But I couldn't help but wonder. One of my colleagues with sterling service has decided to call it quits.

In order for any organisation to change, we have to move with the times. The head of The Other Organisation once said to us, one of the excuses she hates the most is: "It was done this way last time". My formation RSM always asked us.."Last time, policemen wear shorts".

We should not follow what was done in the past blindly, rather we use it as a reference and brainstorm how it can be improved for this day and age.

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I saw a very interesting disclaimer on another blog that goes somewhere along the lines of:

"This author advises everyone that blogs are worse than porn. Therefore... If what I had said is untrue in any way, this author deeply regrets all distress and inconvenience caused, and advises everyone to go to porn sites instead for better entertainment."

Well... quite true to a certain extent... but i won't opt for 'better entertainment', thank you. I think I should write a disclaimer along the lines of 'if you don't like / don't agree, you are always free to hit Alt-F4 and go back to what you were doing before this'.

Whither the B Drive?

C:\> a:

A:\> b:
Invalid drive specification

A:\>


Most of us who use computers nowadays are familiar with the drive lettering system. The hard disk which stores the operating system and main applications is the C: drive and, in most systems, the hard disk which stores the data is the D: drive. The CD-ROM (or DVD for those more high-tech systems) is known as the E: drive (or basically the next letter after the last hard disk drive. USB thumbdrives, flash memory sticks when inserted take on yet another designation, probably the F: or G: drive depening on what else is already in the system.

In networks, a user’s ‘networks space’ is designated the H: drive and now, the network drive letters run all the way through to Z:; each one has its own purpose which for all intents and purposes, as lay users we do not need to know.

One wonders, why does it all start with the C: drive? Why not A: or B:? One must look to the early days of computing for the answer…

In the good old days, when the (510KB?) 5 ¼” floppy was being used (the high density one was the 1.2MB, the 720KB/1.44MB 3 ½” floppy was still unheard of, much less the Zip drives which by themselves are nearing their demise)… hard disk drives were still quite rare. By the way, instead of the immense 20GB hard disks we have nowadays, hard disk sizes back then were still in the range of 100 – 200MB. Most computers had two floppy disk drives, one for the OS (MS-DOS, DR-DOS or PC-DOS in those days. No Windows yet, that invention came with Windows 3.0, followed by Windows 3.1 which still depended on MS-DOS up to 6.22, which was superseded by Windows 95 in 1996?) One would insert the boot up disk into one of the floppy drives and of course, the other floppy drive was required for data, which in those days was WordPerfect for documents, Lotus 1-2-3 for spreadsheets and dBase for databases, and printouts were from dot matrix printers. Colourful printouts from inkjet printers were unheard of. RAM of 4MB was considered luxurious. Back then CPU speeds were the 8086 (XT), 80286, 80386, 80486 (which included the 486-SX and 486-DX), then the Pentium which superseded the 80x86 classification, and as we all know now, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium MMX, Pentium III, Pentium 4 and after that a range of processor chips by Intel's competitors.

Anyway, as you guessed, the boot up disk drive was the A: drive and the other floppy drive was the B: drive. When hard disks became commonplace and the OS started to be installed on the hard disk, computers started to ship with only one floppy drive. By then, the 3 ½” floppy began to supersede the 5 ¼” floppy. For a while, computers had one of each floppy drive for compatibility reasons. However, after a while the 5 ¼” drive was phased out totally. There would only be one floppy drive, the 3 ½” floppy which was designated the A: drive. If you are kiasu, you have two. Anyway, by the early 2000s the floppy drives started to be superseded by Zip drives and then, thumbdrives, Flash drives and what have you. As of this writing, the laptop I am using has a removable 3 ½” floppy drive which has not seen any use recently. Most of the data which I used to keep on diskettes have been transferred to my thumbdrive, and the diskettes trashed.

Nowadays, new computers do not even ship with a floppy drive, meaning simply that the use of the designations A: and B: is moribund.

I wonder whether there will be any new convention to eventually reassign the letters A: and B: to some other drive, once the older generation which used floppy disks retire and pass on. Only time will tell. By then, probably the convention of using C: for the main OS disk will have stuck for so long that people will still continue to use it. Perhaps there will come a time when the ‘legend of the lost A: and B: drive’ abounds… but by then, perhaps hard disks, and even computers themselves are already superseded by some nanotechnological device.

Remember cassette tapes? Already been superseded by CDs, themselves superseded by MP3 players. I wonder what nanotechnological device will the technologists of the future use. One that combines the function of a laptop, MP3 player, phone, portable hard disk (a souped up, much less problematic version of the iPhone, most importantly Not dependant on a computer to sync with). And this device will be no bigger than a phonecard, can just fit in a wallet. Just half a century ago, with the big mainframe computers which filled a whole room, laptop computers were a dream. Even the tall servers the size of a cupboard were referred to as ‘minicomputers’, and desktop computers ‘microcomputers’.

dotz.

One of my friends out there has a special message to his gf at the end of every post in his blog. So sweet! But anyway...

Holidays coming to an end soon! well... It's been an interesting and enriching one for me. Given that next holidays I am likely to go for VIP, this holidays would effectively be the last one I can take time out to do whatever I want, especially for either Organisation. Anyway, especially in a very microscopic level of The Organisation, it is better to let the 'younger ones' take charge but it is also very sad that a lot of the old traditions and practices are no longer being practiced.

I remember as a cadet, when we greeted our seniors we were supposed to 'bend the left knee' before paying our compliments. Later this practice was abolished as it was found to damage the tiled floor in the old RV. But I would have preferred it to remain though...

Today I went down to RV as they had their annual handover parade. Coincidentally, I bumped into an ex cadet of mine who just happened to be visiting the school... This handover parade is especially poignant for me as this batch of cadets are also the last one I've overseen in my current capacity. Anyway, they have done well and my best wishes to all of them in their O levels and future endeavours. Looks like as of today, I have closed the chapter on my time as a uniformed group trainer at the schools level... future involvment will be in the form of a co-ordinator role rather than a trainer.

I saw a couple of friends from The Other Organisation conducting training for their cadets from a distance..

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It takes 4 years' engineering experience to be eligible to attain Professional Engineering certification. After that I am no longer known as Mr. Chua, but Er. Chua. But well, it's the same I guess... Having said all that, a few days ago ST published an article on 'The Boom Time Grads'. Hey, one of those featured earning $3,000 is my JC friend and she still remembers me (she was in the photo with George Bush when he came to Singapore..). Anyway, I hope that come my own graduation, it will still be considered as 'Boom Time' and I will be able to land a good paying engineering job that will put me in good stead to achieve my goal of becoming a PE.

Pay wise I'm not too concerned. But it's the prospects... Then after I've settled down on a career, can start thinking of the OTHER aspect which many of my friends feel I have long neglected... which is courtship and marriage. Well, it's all in the hands of God and no point trying to rush something before its time yeah? (Reminds me of my uncle -- actually my father's cousin -- who at 28 was single and already a high flying performer at some bank. Two years later I attended his wedding and today he is a happy father of 2 kids). But i had a close encounter a while ago... call me scorched by bad experiences, but I will rather reserve my 'energies' for 'The One'...

(:

Do you think it's the same cat? Tell me on my comments box.

Pomp & Pageantry

The past two days have been days of pomp and pageantry for me as a member of The Organisation. Why you may ask me..

This year, to commemorate 40 years of National Service, the SAF invited NSmen to witness the SAF Day Parade. I was one of them due to my involvement in the Organisation (they were also asked to send NSmen)...

This was my 3rd SAF Day Parade (having attended the previous two during my NSF) and the drills never cease to amaze me, especially the trooping of colours. How long and hard they must have trained for the parade is anyone's guess. Anyway, I wonder if either Organisation will be able to pull off a Trooping of Colours... Like one of my friends remarked, 'You see this, then you know our Colours Commissioning is crap!'

During the reception after the parade, I caught up with quite a few of my former superiors in my unit. Some of them had already been promoted to the next rank, am happy for them... Well one of them gave me a tip regarding my future career moves which I am going to take quite seriously...

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The following day was one of great honour for me. I was picked to be the emcee for The Organisation Awards Investiture. For those not in the know, this Investiture involves the conferring of the Order awards on the distinguished recepients. Most if not all had served The Organisation for the greater part of their adult lives. As a Knighthood was being bestowed, the recepients had the privilege of the President of the Republic of Singapore, Mr S.R.Nathan to present the awards.

Mr President is a pretty jovial person and I could see that his smile and handshake was warm and sincere. At the tea reception after that, my fellow officers and myself had the privilege to meet His Excellency. He shook each one of our hands as we introduced ourselves to him. No I did not get to take an individual picture with The President but we had a group photo with His Excellency which I guess is privilege in itself. Anyway, I appeared on national television that night, albeit for a few fleeting seconds and... one of my friends helped record the video clip, something which I am indeed grateful.

Wonder when the next Investiture would be, perhaps by then a new President would have been elected. I remember that when this President was newly elected, I was a cadet in one of the supporting contingents at the General Inspection... and I was able to pick out myself in the photo which appeared in the press.

This event is one whereby I can give myself a pat on the back, as a few of my colleagues in the Organisation did. I am glad I rose up to this challenge...




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Is it time to call it a day in The Other Organisation? Looks like I should focus my activities, volunteer will only be The Organisation. I have already pruned away one of the activities related to The Other Organisation, although it's a meaningful activity but my schedule will not permit me to commit. Anyway I am just doing mundane stuff in The Other Organisation, whereas in The Organisation, under this leadership at least, I have the latitude to undertake more things to make an impact... however, of course once the leadership changes, it is pretty uncertain as to how the new situation will be like. I speak in riddles but no doubt regular readers (if i have) will be able to discern which Organisation is referred to without the need to name it yeah?

Penny Wise and Pound Foolish?

The 7% GST hike kicked in today. oh well, all the public outcry over the issue has fallen on deaf ears and the 'gahmen' has implemented the hike nevertheless...

Over the past few days the newspapers have been splashed with advertisements along the lines of "Buy Now Before GST Increase!" "Beat the GST Hike!" Obviously this is a very good marketing ploy... I ask... is it worth it?

Say an item priced $1000
GST 5% = $50
GST 7% = $70

Savings = $20... But not all of us buys $1000 items all the time...

How about normal day-to-day goods... say clothes.. electrical applicances. Guess a conservative estimate is $200
GST 5% = $10
GST 7% = $14

Savings = $4... Not enough to cover taxi fare back home...

Maybe those buying car will really save... Price of car: $50000
GST 5% = $2500
GST 7% = $3500

Savings = $1000... Maybe you save on one year's road tax or something (As you can see I don't own a car, therefore pardon me if my figures are a bit off)

So, what for rush to beat the GST hike? It's simply what is called 'Penny Wise And Pound Foolish'.

Why not cultivate good habits to save instead?
1. Take public transport... No doubt car is faster but with a bit of self discipline, wake up earlier... the cost of owning a vehicle here outstrips that of taking taxi to work everyday...
2. Don't subscribe to cable TV, the normal Channel 5 channels are good enough... if you wanna watch soccer, the coffee shops are showing them (ok, i'm not a soccer fan myself, so flame me)
3. Don't watch TV (i don't... hahaz).. use the time to do more productive stuff like write articles on your computer (get $$$ for that)... or for students, shouldn't you be using that time to study instead? :P
4. Don't rush to get all the latest gadgets like now we have the iPhone... the price will drop like nobody's business a few months after the release. So why not get it after the price dropped? Better still, get from eBay or Yahoo auctions, some stuff is available for a steal there...
5. Having said that, buy more 2nd hand stuff off Cash Converters / Yahoo / eBay, some of them are still in relatively good condition and the prices are a fraction of that in the open market.
6. (this will probably not apply for the ladies) No need to buy clothes, maybe just during Chinese New Year for those tradition stalwarts... for me, my wardrobe is more than fully stocked, in fact i think i have excess... LOL! Likewise for running shoes, I'm still using SAF running shoes plus another pair which I got cheaply in Malaysia... and dress shoes are my SAF No.3 shoes :P No necessity to get new ones for the sake of keeping up with the Joneses yeah? (Though i guess a lot of army guys will resent wearing SAF stuff outside.. but it does come in a bit handy)

haha... any more suggestions can just add here...

Who is clever, the students or the dean?

Hi.. Who is clever ? The Teacher or student??

One Night 4 College Students were Playing Till Late Night And Didn't
Study For The Test Which Was Scheduled For The Next Day. In the
morning they thought of a plan. They made themselves look as dirty
and weird with grease and dirt. They then went up to the Dean and
said that they had gone out to a wedding last night and on their
return the tyre of their car burst and they had to push the car all
the way back and that they were in no condition to appear for the
test. So the Dean said they can have the re-test after 3 days. They
thanked him and said they will be ready by that time. On the third
day they appeared before the Dean. The Dean said that as this was a
Special Condition Test, All four were required to sit in seperate
classrooms for the test. They all agreed as they had prepared well in
the last 3 days.The Test consisted of 2 questions
with the total of 100 Marks.

Q.1. Your Name.........................( 2 MARKS )
Q.2. Which tyre burst ?...............( 98 MARKS )
a) Front Left
b) Front Right
c) Back Left
d) Back Right .....!!!