Unlike other Islamist terror attacks, this was an urban warfare attack – machine guns, sieges and hostages, not bombs. I really don’t know how to respond to this. As with all other terror attacks, it is impossible to justify or comprehend what those murderous scumbags did.
(On a slightly similar note, I’m quite shock The Star ran this – Jews, noble, human, and Israeli? And, heh, the wife is a “native of Afula, Israel”? I thought only Arabs were natives).
The City Hall is aghast that Kuala Lumpur’s many kopitiams and mamaks decided to ignore a new regulation on tables outside the restaurant premises. It’s so easy to apply (just fill up the form and give photos) – and you would be licensed up to 20 tables and 80 chairs. Too little, you say? Well, not really – each table’s license is a nice, cool RM30 per month (those stickers indicating legal status is that expensive). And besides, you can no longer place tables on the road.
Following the law means less tables compared to law-breaking competitors. And on top of that, if you, licensed to set tables outside your restaurant in the sidewalk and parking lot, put out more than the tables licensed to you – the fine is RM500. If you don’t bother getting a license at all – the fine is RM500. But Rajan, you say, what happens if my restaurant needs only 20 tables and only needs to use the sidewalk and parking lots, in a way that City Hall won’t mind? Well, unless the nice enforcement officers come around 15 or more times a year, it’s still cheaper going unlicensed.
And City Hall wonders why no one bothers.
I hate it whenever people (I’m looking at your, various ministers) cite Singapore’s nature of being devoid of natural resources and being small as a reason for the lack of democracy, or detailed planning, or something along those lines. Yeah. Small. No natural resources. Because if an island the size of Singapore with the same population size with the same calibre of leaders ended up in the middle of the Pacific – the very same outcome would occur.
In so many ways, being on the international trading route, and therefore having a shot in being a major commercial centre, is far, far much better than having oil wells (for one, no natural resource curse). And while Singapore doesn’t have a sprawling hinterland, Malaysia and Indonesia pretty much acts like one: it’s not as if Singaporean firms don’t have interests in neighbouring Johore or the Riau archipelago.
And while Singapore bears the risk of invasion, consider this for a moment: Malaysia kicked Singapore out for demographic reasons. Indonesia aren’t too fond of their own local Chinese and have been facing from the very beginning violent secessionist movements, not to add another to the list. It was risky; Singapore was and still is the only modern city-state functioning completely autonomous from a much larger power – but it doesn’t mean that Singapore had to turn into some conscripted authoritarian police state to achieve development.
Heh:
I spent hours trying to configure the school network server on OS X – which, unsurprisingly, is using Microsoft’s protocol. Nothing works. I’m throwing up my arms in frustration!
Singapore’s TODAY newspaper published a centerfold ad targeting Straits Times’ “half-truths” – they apparently truncated TODAY’s letter to Straits Times’ editor to a point that it distorts the meaning. The tag goes, “Why pay for half-truths?” Ohhh, ouch. TODAY, by the way, is under Mediacorp Press, which was form when Singapore Press Holding’s Streats merged with TODAY (SPH also publishes the Straits Times).
Mediacorp incidentally is owned 100% by Temasek Holdings, which in turn is owned 100% by the Ministry of Finance, and SPH has an interest in Mediacorp TV, another division of Mediacorp. Some turf war? Would it escalate to the almost-fratricide of competing newspapers in Malaysia? Am I reading too much in this?
Yes, I am. I probably am.
I don’t claim to have the best tatabahasa (grammar of Bahasa Malaysia). But I’m frequently assault by horrendously phrased announcements in Singapore, leading me to assume that Singapore’s has a variant of Malay that no one other than the employees of public relations firms and public transport operators know.
Example, on the North-East MRT Line, operated by SBS Transit who assumes that there is a broad demography of Mandarin, Tamil and Malay speakers that need to be reminded that there is a platform gap, the announcement is “Berhati-hati ruang di platform” (pronounced, “ber-HAPPY-happy ruang di PLATFORM”). Translated directly, it means, “Careful of the space on the platform”. People frequently die in the ruang di platform after all.
Mahathir can’t swim.
I got a MacBook with uneven keys, will complain. But the nice aspect was when I switched the Mac on for the first time. A loud chime occurred (expected, I worked with Macs before), but for importantly, a second and a half latter, a nice, HD video welcoming me to OS X Leopard with Welcome in multiple languages.
Youtube doesn’t do it justice. It’s those little touches.
BTW, one day of using Office 2008 and I’m having severe Office 2007 withdrawal effects. It’s not about the locations of things – I think it would take a few days to know where stuff are hidden around Office 2008. Its just that the Ribbon in Office 2007 is so infinitely more convenient than all the Palletes, toolbars and galleries. In Office 2007, when you, for example, select a table, the Ribbon tab on Tables come up, showing the most frequently used functions. Office 2008 doesn’t do that.
It would be interesting to see what would be my main OS after Windows 7 – with system-wide Ribbon and APIs for other software developers to use Ribbon.
Also, I’m using Keynote’s 30 day trial. I may not even buy it. There were two killer features of Keynote: the ability to grid elements of a slide easily (for example, it is easy to centre a textbox – on PowerPoint 2007, you have to eyeball it), and cool animations. PowerPoint 2008 co-opts the first one. And animations… is it worth S$159? I rather spend that money on Parallels and get Office 2007 
.
In the defining case (Roe v Wade quality) of McVitties v Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise, the courts accepted the definition that biscuits (cookies) are food that grow soft when stale, and cakes grow hard when stale. Which brings up this important philosophical question of definitions, if that’s the case, wouldn’t soft-baked cookies (think Subway, Mrs Field) be classified as cakes too? They get hard when stale…
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