Sunday, January 27, 2008

The Scarcity Conspiracy

I am puzzled to read now pu'erh tea leaves can fetch thousands of dollars per kilogram, and the price seems to rise for sometime.

In 80's when I was young, pu'erh tea was a cheap variety of tea. It was until last ten years that suddenly its price has shot through the roof.

Price is always a function of demand and supply.

On the demand side, it could be the richer Chinese demand better tea leaves, thus larger demand drives the price up.

On the supply side, producers can limit its production rate, introduce different 'grades' for tea leaves in order to price differently, and have specialized 'attack teams' to make a run on tea leaves, driving up prices to create illusions that tea leaves can be a kind of investment instrument.

This phenomena of 'scarce commodity X' becomes more and more common this days. Prices are shooting up not only for non-renewable commodities, the craze also affects renewable resources like flour, chicken, pork, cooking oil, and of course, tea leaves.

How do we, normal folks, deal with this then?

First and foremost: a healthy body. You never know how much money a healthy body can save you.

Next, a skill set that is up-to-date and relevant.

Third, a plan that includes risk-control for worst cases.

Finally: luck. Hope for the best. :)

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Kill Tenderly


Here I have Kueh-Chap, a meal that consists of high-cholesterol pig intestines and thick rice noodles.

Cholesterol, heart attack, unhealthy food? Who cares. Let me finish this first. Deal.

Friday, January 18, 2008

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This is the message I got when I tried to back up my data with Sony Ericsson's PC Suite.

What is the solution? It's the Unified inbox. Exclude it, and your backup will go merrily.

I read somewhere that PC Suite will choke on MMS inside the inbox and if you get rid of all the MMS, the backup will go smoothly. I am not sure.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Be Your Own Boss

Most people have mixed feelings on terms like startup, be your own boss, or business venture.

On one hand starting a business may promise an obscene amount of money (look at Google and early share holders of Microsoft), but on the other hand when one is actually involved in it, these activities usually mean one and only one thing: no life.

Salaried job used to be more stable with less swings: if a business makes money, employees won't get much profit-sharing, but if a business is not doing well, employees (usually) will still get fixed incomes.

However this assumption is losing ground in recent years. Salaried jobs are more ephemeral than ever. I can say in high-tech field like software engineering, no-one can be sure where they are, or/and what they do in the next three years. At least I can't.

Anybody remember Sun stations running Solaris? These were the de-facto engineering stations in a lot of universities and corporate offices roughly 10 years back when PCs were relatively weak and useless. The advancement of PCs, coupled with the introduction of free *Nixes (i.e. Linux, and those BSD variants), has changed the landscape to the extend these workstations which costed almost 4 to 10 times more than a comparable PC, became real white elephants.

Say if you really spent your entire life to study Solaris, what do you feel? I am not saying knowledge on Solaris is extinct, or useless. In fact, there are quite a number of those inside the corporate backbone. And those places are where your next job is. Eventually, when your company decides to purge old machines, you may be part of the stuff that got cleared out from the corporate office.... mean? yes, but this is how this world works.

In the computer trade, the workers need to go through the learn-apply-forget-relearn cycles much more frequently than people in other fields. Put it in other ways, computing and IT are among the top in terms of 'knowledge volatility' (oh yeah, i coined that term).

Now back to the 'Be your own boss' topic. As I mentioned, computing keeps on changing, and IT knowledge has a relatively short half-life than other sectors. I am thinking be my own boss, or at least, get a second income will be very desirable.

For now I still decide to capitalize my computing skill-sets. Hence I am not going to consider things like becoming a hawker to sell fried noodle, selling insurance, or doing multi-level marketing.

My dear reader, do you ever plan to become your own boss, and if you do, what do you want to do, and why?

Please vote at the side-bar as well. :)

Sunday, January 13, 2008

The 200th Post

This post marks the 200th post for Cuppa. In retrospect, the frequent readers of my blog will be able to tell the focus of my recent posts has shifted from geeky technical hacks (e.g. wireless Linux driver) to a more trivial, day-to-day ramblings.

This transition also reflects my intention of venturing into fields other than engineering.

From time to time I will take a step back and evaluate my skill sets against the real-world. What are the nascent trends, what is hot, what is not, and what are the effects on me?

Here are some random observations I have, listed below in no particular order:
  1. Inflation comes hard to the whole world, and it can be felt right at home. All prices are shooting up, except salaries and beer (xf. #5 below)
  2. The mini-markets opposite my flat are open 24hours now.
  3. Gold price has hit US$900 per ounce
  4. Oil price has hit US$100 per barrel
  5. Chilled Tiger beer remains at S$2.50. Thank goodness!!
  6. The Fed chairman said a reduction in interest rate is imminent
  7. Some economists think stag-flation is creeping closer than we think. Personally I agree
  8. I am planning to adjust my investment portfolio to buy more defensive counters
You can see the above observations are centered at a certain theme, and this exactly is the (somewhat biased) view of me. Some things are objective (rise of prices), some are more subjective (the coming of stag-flation).

I don't pretend to offer any conclusion or wise-cracks on the economy. What I can offer are the following pictures:

How I spent today....

A mommy cat with her kittens. She is on high-alert (look at her eyes), the kittens are under the table at the background

Sunday, January 06, 2008

Chronology of Cuppa's Weekend

I went to Penang for a one day trip to attend my friend, Margaret's wedding. She was my Motorola colleague and was also my Karate instructor. On top of that, I also wanted to meet up with my Motorola friends who will show up during the wedding dinner.

Actually there were a few friends whom I also wanted to meet, but the schedule was just too tight this time.

Let pictures talk now.

Saturday:
Waiting for MRT to Changi. Yeah I took this picture myself. :)


Changi Airport


The flight to Penang was only 20% filled


Dawn...


34000 feet?


Landing lor...


Penang airport


Outside of the airport


Lunch under the three beside BJ Complex

Ok, I skipped a lot in between. Here is the bride and the groom.

To be continued..

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

When I Was At Home....

Updated: 19:22. Thanks to Mr. Snail for pointing out the caption mistake.

I went back to my hometown during the Christmas/New Year break, the conditions back home are still crappy as ever: real properties are over-priced, people's incomes are low, government is incompetent, economy is sluggish, things are expensive, and worse still, the vegetables in the market are laced with heavy dose of pesticide.

Therefore I went home without much cheer and joy, except the fact that I could see my family members.


My one-year-old niece and my brother

You may have noticed the yellow paper on my niece's forehead, well, she played with post-it notes and stuck one on her forehead. Cute :)

I spent the whole holiday mainly at home, talking to my parents and listening to even the slightest details in their lives. I guess it is a blessing to spend time with parents.

On Jan 1, I flied back to Singapore.
Bird's Eye View of Johor Kuching, taken when plane was descending ascending

2008 comes. Life, carries on.