The Way of the Writer
Singapore’s Mathematics textbook is recognized by this American lady. It’s ironic how people all around the world go into endless cycles into believing that our education system is flawed. Mass education is not perfect, and never meant to be.
I almost threw myself off the chair when I saw this sponsored blog review request. The exposure I get to different small mini-scale websites doing part-time paid blogging brings some interesting websites to my knowledge.
Wize.com
Wize is committed to facilitating consumer research by delivering unbiased consumer and expert product reviews. © 2008 Wize, Inc.
So how will you use Wize? In this example, let’s say you are looking for a crock pot or a slow cooker. (Word of the day: A crock pot is an electric cooking pot). So you check out the recommendations made by other consumers. It’s a pretty cool concept.
You can check out a range of product categories there - Including Electronics, Baby products, home appliances, and video games. I think they should include the travel industry and hotels also. Till now, I have yet to see a hotel review site that is as uncluttered as Wize. So that’s one possible area they can go into.
I think one ironic thing is - In today’s world where have so many choices to make - We need the reviews and comments of others to help us make our decision. Are we really better off?
It’s pretty interesting how my recent blog assignments are related to travel - I guess that’s because the nature of my blog is that of a personal blog. I can’t really define a scope or area to blog about specifically. I don’t specialize in technology, politics, society, programming, news, travel, or personal issues in depth. My blog is a ramble of everything that happens in my thought process. It’s.. too restrictive for me to hold my blog to any area.
My next sponsored blog post is on a specific hotel chain in Australia - Cheaperthanhotels.com.au. Their website allows you to search for hotel booking prices on accommodation in Australia, including Sydney and Melbourne. Apparently, they guarantee the lowest available instant booking rates on the Internet. That might interest travelers who need to make an urgent last minute hotel booking.
A little about their background:
Cheaperthanhotels is operated for Flairview Travel Pty Ltd , Gullivers Travel Associates and their various brands. They are wholly owned subsidiaries of Travelport [formerly Cendant Travel Distribution Services ] , who have been providing online reservation services since 1996 for more than 30,000 hotels in 130 countries worldwide. Travelport processes more than 100 million travel transactions per year.
Apparently they have offices in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdoms and of course, United States. (There’s no office in Singapore and Hong Kong!!?)
If you happen to visit Australia, you might want to check out their services and hotel bookings available in the different Australian cities such as Sydney Airport , Melbourne Airport , Brisbane Airport .
They also operate in New Zealand. Check out their hotels available at Auckland Airport to see if you are interested in using their service.
Disclaimer: I have not tried the service of this hotel chain myself, but I think it’s worth a try if you are operating on zero knowledge on any good hotel chains you can check out.
I just chanced across an online store selling rugs. Some would call rugs a carpet - There’s been some debate over whether which are the correct terms to use. Try searching for “rugs” on Wikipedia and you would end up with the explanation of the term carpet. Quoted from Wikipedia,
Some use the words carpet and rug interchangeably. Historically, however, some have distinguished between carpet and rug based on size (the former being larger) or use (carpets on floors, rugs on beds or on the hearth).
Anyway for the purpose of this blog entry, take it that carpets are similar to rugs. The store I’ve chanced across is named Superior Rugs . Their collection of rugs ranges from silk rugs, traditional wool rugs, contemporary wool rugs in various shapes such as rectangular, round and runner area. They are currently (as of the time of writing) having a free delivery promotion for all deliveries within the United States of America. Their normal delivery charges ranges from $35-$80. Apparently they have a refund policy which ensures that their customers receive non-defective rugs. Restocking fees still apply though.
Check out a picture of their silk rug!
Silk Rugs
Read the rest of this entry »
This post is for beginners for Ruby on Rails who is learning from the Depot tutorial from the book: Agile Web Development with Rails 2nd Edition. The release of Rails 2.0.2 had deprecated some functions, and changed some defaults. I’m only started with Ruby on Rails for less than a week and still in the process of clearing a lot of doubts out.
This entry will mainly focus on getting you up and ready for Chapter 6 >> Iteration A1: Get Something Running. Specifically the parts I’ve identified so far that will cause problem is the switch in default database to sqlite3 (There should not be any problem if you have used sqlite3 for your database, but the ebook uses mysql for the walk-through)
I get the kick out of watching this video. Tuition teachers can try getting your student to solve the calculation of Singapore’s taxi-fare to prepare them for their PSLE. Apparently this has proved challenging for several professionals.
Original Code Monkey Video
An Awesome AMV which won an award. There is tremendous potential for free-lance artists (song-writers, firm writers and directors), and you have one more option than the conventional way of approaching firms to groom you.
I just chanced across Ling86’s video on Youtube, and was definitely impressed by her passion! Keep it up Ling!
Ling86’s Larkin Step
Promoting Small Businesses
- To be a free agent nation . 80% of the people works as a contractor, temporary job, or micro-businesses (with 3-4 people). The goal is to make every industries either a blend of oligopoly and monopolistic competition. In essence, there’s a long tail of small businesses serving the niches that the market giants fail to serve.
- Office buildings to be set up at residential areas to relieve traffic congestion from the city centre. More online stores to reduce the reliance on our natural constraint of lack of space. More home businesses consultancies to be set up. Startup hubs with decent facilities and contacts could be set up to encourage collaboration between different companies.
Social Welfare
- Waiver of GST on medical facilities, school fees, and costs (with the exception of cosmetic surgeries such as LASIK). These are basic welfare necessities that citizens should be entitled to.
- Families whose income per family member under S$800-$1000 to have their utilities bills waived for a certain reasonable limit, such as $50/pax.
- Increase in minimum wage of blue-collar workers. Local (Singapore citizen or PR) workers to be increased to S$9/hr and foreign workers to increase to S$12 per hour.
Transportation
- Privatizing feeder-bus services in Singapore. It is a waste to have large single-deck buses with unused capacity going around during off-peak hours. It would be more beneficial to have private mini-buses (capacity of 8-16 pax) at 2-3 minutes interval going between towns. The extra feeder buses that are freed up could be used to serve the public more extensively during peak hours.
- Carpool lanes in expressways, and heavily congested roads. ERP to be waived for carpool lanes. Implementing bus-lanes on heavy traffic roads (such as Marymount Road)
- Taxi-bus door-to-door transportation service available. Consumer can book a cab online or through phone SMS (no booking charges) and receive a fixed quote and expected time and pickup location which will be charged to his online account automatically.
- Increase in COE prices by 70%, except for vehicles registered by businesses. This will reduce the number of cars on the roads.
Technology
- S$10-$20/month for unlimited mobile data plans usage. 100MB mobile data plans included in all mobile plans. Mobile companies are hurting their profits if they fail to even encourage their customers to try out their mobile service. Think about it. Would you have such a heavy volume of SMS without the extensive number of free messages that comes embedded in your service?
- The ability for us to receive our credit card and utilities bills or statements online. (And to give us the option to stop paper-delivery of our statements). The ability to receive free itemized billing if we take up the option of online-delivery of our bills.
- The ability for us to view up to 7 years of financial transactions with our bank accounts. Not the pathetic 2 months that we currently have now.
Cisco believes that the next big wave is collaboration , and social networking. They are now rethinking how they can help companies distribute content more securely and efficiently to their customers, meaning they have to move into areas beyond switches and routers, but also about unified communications, wireless and mobility, home networking, and security.
We will know they have achieved their goal when it’s as easy to have a video conference meeting without technical hiccups as the way we use instant messaging nowadays.
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