Good Job, Pak Lah.

No salary revision for now.

Finally, something right has been done. Every single year, the budget covers plainly for civil servants. I don't know what CUEPACS is ranting about, but their basis of argument is plainly inaccurate.

An maxima increase of 40% for those in the support category (NST quotes hospital attendants, drivers, gardeners and clerical and administrative staff) .. ok let's see:

1.4 X 480 = rm 172 increase. If 200,000 people get rm172 increase, that's rm 34.4 million off the government coffers. Coupled with tax reliefs, car and house allowances, pensions, reduced income tax, no EPF, and they are still complaining?

Rules of basic survival :
If you can't survive, don't beg. It looks pathetic. Another clear example of what Malaysians have become, overly dependant on the government. All the while the budget has never or rarely benefited private sector workers.

The entire overview of this is that it is kind of bad. The income of the general public has never actually inflated by a big margin over the years while costs of living have gone up by at least 200%. It also dictates the problem of having a controlled economy. Some may argue that Malaysian economics are more relaxed and free than most socialist economies, but that still isn't really true. For example take the ceiling prices of controlled goods. Although from one side, it seems good that traders and middlemen don't raise prices beyond affordability, in another way it's bad. Basic macroeconomics, demand and supply. If the price is fixed at a certain level, supply will stay constant as well, as producers are reluctant to sell. Less supply + More demand = Price Inflation. As simple as that. Fiscal policies people!

Blinded

Well, this is in reply to Darren's post here.

It’s just wrong to say all this. Let’s see what our so called mega projects are doing now.

KLCC – Occupancy rate <50%

Cyberjaya – Failure, occupants consist of LKW students, Bangladeshi workers, and companies seeking the incentive of no taxation. Why set up shop there anyway? It’s not near any major transportation hub. KLIA? How expensive are aviation costs going to be? It’s definitely cheaper hiring logistics from Cyberjaya to Port Klang (a good 80-110km, non inclusive of traffic) and going by ship from there, although, piracy in the Straits of Malacca is rampant. That’s why Bayan Lepas is more preferred. It has an airport and a nearby port-of-call.

Putrajaya – High administration costs as well as transportation costs. Why locate to somewhere where no one knows? Trying to copy the Aussies? Well, at least Canberra is a city, and it’s more well known that Putrajaya (uhh where’s that). Rest assure that at least a majority of Australians know where Canberra is compared to KL-ians. Imagine Reuters or AP using Putrajaya instead of KL, note: they are still using Kuala Lumpur. “Putrajaya has said that no actions have been …etcetc..” the readers will be like .. uhh wtf is Putrajaya” instead of Canberra, which the entire world acknowledges that it is the administrative city of Australia. I remember Canada and US having the same system as well, but mind you, they are 1^st world countries! Even UK doesn’t do this. Why relocate Downing Street to Birmingham or Manchester or worse still, Reading, Slough, Luton and the likes of these places? That’s right, you’re thinking.. uhh where the fu-k is Slough.

KLIA – Well maybe this was town planning at work but it doesn’t make sense, to relocate from Subang to some like Nilai/Sepang is just wrong. Cheap land? Of course, but best of all, is transportation. 45 mins driving through nothing and you’d already think, why is the airport so f—king far away? After all it’s 45mins worth of land that you’re driving through at 90-120km/h. Just think about it.

Bakun HEDP – Waste of money and clearest of all was cronyism along with Ting P3k Khiing. It’s just a cover for massive logging for $$. I mean 2400MW of power output is way more than how much Sabah and Sarawak require. Kalimantan has cheap wax therefore it doesn't need to buy power from Bakun. Proposals include an undersea cable to transfer unbought energy from Sarawak to Johor. I forgot how much it'll cost but trust me, it's not cheap. Read this link for more info: Why build a big aluminium smelter that’ll buy off 50% of Bakun’s power generation just to overproduce aluminium for Malaysia. What if prices collapse? What happens during oversupply?

Penang Bridge : Obviously TDM and SamiVeloo (I purposely spelt it wrong) were not thinking ahead. To build such a bridge with loans from Japan spelt trouble. Japan’s economy collapsed, soon after and we had to write off debts.

MAS is a private company with the government investment Khazanah having a good portion of share in it. The reason for that much money was due to it’s MSS (Mutual Separation Scheme). That includes payments. Mind you it’s less than RM 1 billion not 4.5 billion. Read Uncle Kit's blog for more info. Another thing I might add is to read the opposition's blog to get an insight of things on their side of the story. Jeff Ooi's is a good blog as well.

If you are complaining about taxation, then come live in the UK and you’ll feel the effects of direct and indirect taxation. VAT here is at a staggering 17.5%. That’s indirect taxation for you. Income tax is at 22% if you are earning £2091-£32400. 40% if you are over that amount. Think, £32,400 is not much when it comes to per year. It's only £2,700 per month. European countries basically have high tax rates.

If you do further research deeper, you’ll find out that our previous leader led us into a big government deficit. The current one basically just reduced it. Which is why the outcry from TDM, all this rantings don’t mean anything because you aren’t PM anymore. You have no power and no one is afraid of you anymore.

Let me remind you once again, we are a developing country. Want to compare to China? Look at its human rights record. Look at the central government banning or filtering sites. Want to compare Streamyx to Singtel? Singtel blocks P2P uploading while Streamyx (probably the worse company alive) doesn’t.

Just don’t keep on complaining. Don’t keep your expectations high, just because we think that we deserve much more. By human nature that’s true.

What TDM did in the past years were spoonfeeding us and keeping us dependant on the government. He succeeded in that, now people are complaining just because the petrol rised up. Have you seen the effect of petroleum in US? Be happy because we are still a net petroleum producer instead of an importer. Problem is that our fiscal policies are “slightly” screwed up. Inflation in market commodities and pricing while deflation in salary and income. But there will be a time when employers will feel the pinch and raise salaries.

Indonesia, now has way less issues with the Indonesian Chinese than before. It's growth rate per annum in percentage of GDP is chasing up to us (or overtaking I think).In fact the Chinese over there are prospering and are given more respect than before. However, I’m saying, just protect your interests and no one can harm you. For the past 20 years, under the leadership of you-know-who money has been drained from Chinese pockets and channelled to the pockets of the ultra-UNMO people. Not ordinary malays which is why I always insist on not generalising.

I feel the target of 2020 will be barely in reach when we are at that time. But, this time around, the prospects are brighter than before. That’s what I feel, that’s what most people who can read between the lines feel. People have been blinded before by the media, by words, by everything they see on one side of the story. Read the other side and judge for yourself who’s right.

Remind yourself of the Israelis and Palestinians who are fighting a war just for a simple reason. To find a place to call home. We people have one, and we are already complaining. So please be glad that you have a good home, although with an ineffective government, but peaceful and blessed with resources.

Ok.. If anyone is reading this post (I take that no one reads it), I'm extremely busy now and my school server has just unblocked Friendster and Blogspot.

First things first: My free time.

Free Time (GMT+1, British Summer Time)
Mondays: 10.20-11.00am, 3.20-4.00pm
Tuesdays: 11.20-12.00pm, 2.00-2.40pm
Wednesdays: 11.20-12.00am
Thursdays: -
Fridays: 8.00-8.40am, 11.20 -12.20pm, 2.40-3.20pm.

----- After time conversion (+7 hours)
Mondays: 5.20-6.00pm, 10.20-11.00pm
Tuesdays: 6.20-7.00pm, 9.00-9.40pm
Wednesdays: 6.20-7.00pm
Thursdays: -
Fridays: 3.00-3.40pm, 6.20-7.20pm, 9.40-10.20pm

After that I usually won't bother to come online.. I'll be in my room or in the sports hall working out, or playing games.

Speaking of games, I just got Call of Duty 2, Civilisation IV, and Half Life 2 from Paul! Friggin cool I'm telling you.

Half Life 2
Graphics: Totally owns (on my laptop) (9/10), Heavenly (on a gaming desktop) (9.8/10)
Gameplay: Interesting
Comments: This game definitely sells with it's graphics, terrain and character buildup. So much difference compared to it's predecessor.

Call of Duty 2
Graphics: Superb (8/10)
Gameplay: Being the military enthusiast, obviously this is the ultimate game for me (for now)
Comments: I can't get it to work on my comp!! .. Damn you Int3l for providing a low quality 915 Graphics Accelerator.

Civilisation IV
Graphics: Mediocre (5/10)
Gameplay: -
Comments: I'll try this one out.. as soon I can get it to work!! $(!%@

Ahh.. September and October is the time to get into gear and submit your UCAS applications ASAP! I don't know whether I'll be even considered for an offer because of my ABB. Oh well, I'm taking 2 universities as insurance and going for the other 4.

University and Course Application
University College London (UCL) - L100 Economics (Offer AAA-AAB)
University of Warwick - L112 Industrial Economics (Offer AAA-AAB)
University of Manchester - LN13 Economics and Finance (Offer AAB-BBB)
University of Edinburgh - L100 Economics (Offer ABB-BBB)
University of Bristol - LN13 Economics and Finance (Offer AAA-AAB)
University of York - L112 Economics and Finance (Offer AAA-AAB)

I'm not going into Oxford/Cambridge/LSE mind you.. I'm not wasting my choices on places which I know I barely have a chance to enter.

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Basically I think this is all that I can blog about this time.. Will update soon.

Little things that I find interesting

Recently, I came across this interesting webpage swarmthe.com. It basically is a project, just like Whatpulse where you will be able to view, in real-time, what webpages other people are viewing.

Swarm is a graphical map of hundreds of websites, all connecting to each other. It updates itself every second with where people are going and coming from. As sites become more popular, they move towards the center of the swarm.

Website traffic is symbolized with thin lines. Each time you see a line appear, it means someone has moved from one site to the other. You can gauge how many people are swarming around based on the number of lines.

Give it a try, and also, since I said it, might as well introduce Whatpulse.

Now, Whatpulse is basically a program which logs keystrokes (not keys, unlike a keylogger/trojan) and clicks. Now, you may be wondering, what's the point of all these things. The reason is simple, ever wondered how much keys you typed all this while? Ever wonder how much clicks are there in a game of Counter-Strike? That's the reason. Not only that, the user can also send his information to the Whatpulse server for it to store and to get a total cumulative value of the number of clicks/keys.

When you "pulse", you're actually sending your keycounts in the program to the server along with other information about your Account, so the server can decide where to put the keycount. If the pulse goes according to plan, the server sends back an "OK", and the client's keycount is reset to 0 (zero), and your previous keys are added to your profile in the server database! :)

And for all you people who are thinking "oeh mi god a keylogger, no way!", well, exactly, No way. WhatPulse is not and never will be any sort of keylogger, it does not collect the keys you type, but only how many keys you type.

So far, since I've joined about 9 months ago, I've logged about 4,000,000 keystrokes/2,000,000 clicks. (4,071,170/1,937,330 to be exact).

One other program that I find rather interesting is this, ServStats. It's a Firefox extension whereby, I'll quote here:

ServStats is a Firefox extension that lets users share statistics about web server connectivity and diagnose network failures. With ServStats, you can just push a button in your browser to find out the number of times other people have attempted to connect to a server, the average latency and rate of failure for that server, and more.

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Hmmph, keep you posted. I'll be blogging more often nowadays.