There has been lots of commotion about multi-tasking but I’m not the least concerned — not because I am not getting it on my iPhone 3G, but because I don’t see a need for it with the type of apps I use. Mail and Google Maps in the background doesn’t make sense. I might change my mind if there’s a good IM client someday.

For now, the only useful features are shown below.

Panoramic view from the Three Sisters at Blue Mountans

Beautiful Beaches

On our way to the Great Ocean Road, we dropped by Pettavel Winery and Restaurant in Geelong for lunch and the food was awesome (so was the wine). We even saw people fly in via Helicopter so it must be really good. I’d highly recommend anybody going past Geelong to have a meal there. A decent meal with a glass of wine averages around S$40-60 per pax.

Fine Dining at Pettavel

The 2010 Holden Commodore SV6 with a 3.6l V6 engine we rented was also extremely fun to drive and handled really well around the winding coastal/mountain roads.

Apollo Bay Motel and Holden SV6

We also took a 10 minute heli ride in a Robinsons 44 which was worth the experience!

12 Apostles taken from the Heli

Robinsons 44 landing

And of course there’s no visiting Australia without coming into contact with Seagulls. Here’s a really fat one.

Fat Seagull

Anyhow, I’ve got my Linux (CentOS 5) box working and my home network is now “IPv6 ready” (hooray!) but I’m still tweaking the settings so I’ll update the technical stuff later.

Some little bits about IPv6 I’ve learnt so far is that DHCP servers aren’t really required anymore. Interfaces can self-assign an IP based on their MAC address and this will be almost certainly unique (since MAC addresses are unique). Even in a controlled network, the interface would assign it’s own address.

Meanwhile, here’s my traceroute to ipv6.google.com.

traceroute6: Warning: ipv6.l.google.com has multiple addresses; using 2404:6800:8005::63
traceroute6 to ipv6.l.google.com (2404:6800:8005::63) from XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:1:217:f2ff:fe40:3848, 64 hops max, 12 byte packets
1  XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:1::1  0.534 ms  0.392 ms  0.410 ms
2  2002:c058:6301::1  199.142 ms  199.858 ms  199.485 ms
3  2001:470:0:13b::1  201.157 ms  200.728 ms  198.965 ms
4  2001:504:d::1f  197.870 ms  199.858 ms  199.927 ms
5  2001:4860::1:0:21  290.454 ms  203.619 ms  264.787 ms
6  2001:4860::1:0:77d  220.451 ms  220.804 ms  436.060 ms
7  2001:4860::1:0:75  511.964 ms  511.896 ms  320.166 ms
8  2001:4860::1:0:16  703.447 ms  399.187 ms  624.945 ms
9  2001:4860::2:0:119c  511.687 ms *
2001:4860::2:0:119b  529.863 ms
10  2001:4860:0:1::e3  403.409 ms  517.593 ms  400.969 ms
11  * * *

Hop 11 seems to have packet filtering and dropped my traceroute.

I’ve also masked my internal LAN IP to XXXX:XXXX:XXXX otherwise somebody could connect back to my LAN segment. I haven’t had time to figure out the firewall yet. But you can say this is the beauty of IPv6. With a 128 bit address space, every machine has a public routable address.

Once I have my home network all ready I will begin transitioning all my servers to IPv6. Embrace technology.

Maybe I’ll elaborate on the corporate ladder part. Big companies (in your case) are big enough that you are actually insignificant. Not just you, everybody else is dispensable. These companies have stood the test of time and will stand even if the key people leave. This is what makes a company – it’s structure. CEO leaves, so what? There’s still many people under working despite his absence. People now know that if you throw a stone, you’ll hit a degree holder.

“There’s many others that can do your job,” says your boss. Sad but true.

The fact is that the corporate ladder is overrated and nobody should sit around a company waiting years over years to climb it. It just does not happen that way. Climbing the corporate ladder in a large corporation is mostly politics. Nobody I know sits around a company for a few years and gets promoted without meddling with some politics. Most who just stay put and “do their work” get at most a measly pay raise and hardly any promotion.

Don’t think about the ladder. There’s a closed door at each floor. You need to convince the person staying there to open it for you. There’s usually only room for one on each floor, and that person has to go up as well. If he doesn’t move, you don’t move either.

The alternative? Either work in a smaller company where your value is greater, or work for a company who would pay you more, or go start your own business.

So here comes the second last blog entry. Aheem… (clears throat)

I’d love to thank my wife, mother, father, etc. and of course Prof. Ben for inviting me to attend this class out of nowhere. I truly enjoyed my time and learnt a lot of things. Actually, I joined the class with the aim to learn anything, or what Prof would call “random stuff“, not to develop Facebook apps. I’ve actually had enough of Facebook apps back in 2007 where I worked in a small company dealing with some very first Facebook applications being made out of Singapore, although building an app for others and building an app for yourself is a different thing altogether.

So what have I really learnt? I’ve learnt that my English sucks after four years of being bombarded by Singlish in the local workforce. I’m actually struggling to write a proper blog entry every time.

I’ve also learnt that I’ve lost touch with the geek world. I didn’t even know what Google Wave was. I’ve never heard of Prezi, and I’ve never heard of DropBox. There’s probably about 100 other things I’ve never heard of that I found out during these 13 weeks.

I’ve also found out that damn NUS students can talk and present! Sorry lah, but to the outside world NUS students are either like nerds or CMI.

I’ve also found out that a year 1 freshie can actually learn ActionScript 3 build a Flash game within 1 week.

So there are super things that people can do that you’ve never thought was possible. But, now I know the power to create lies within, and I finally kicked myself in the ass and learnt how to build stuff in Flash. So, yes, I picked up a new language. Programming language, not French.

I also face new challenges trying to get things done. I think it’s a little different everywhere. Back in Polytechnic, it was either nobody cares, or maybe I cared too much. Yufen once said doing project a with me gave her “满足感多多，成就感少少” (great sense of satisfaction, no sense of achievement. Did I translate right?) because I practically wrote most of the code and we’ll all get an ‘A’.

Then at work you could K people ‘cos they either deliver the goods or get fired. It was the root of all evil at work. $$$

Then in NUS it was also different – everybody cared too much, but was too busy. Like Prof. Ben said, this is not the typical NUS class. OK, I buy his explanation.

So anyway, CS3216 is a weird class, but I guess it’s weird in the right way.

Back to work…

I can’t seem to undo it now ‘cos the entire StarHub subnet is being blacklisted for vandalism. If you have been scammed before, please help me undo that and also write a blog entry somewhere substantiating my claims. Please help stop these SLS stores from scamming tourists and locals.

It wasn’t a good idea really, but the wife had an important certification training that got confirmed quite last minute and due to the school holidays, there weren’t any tickets on the weekend. She refuses to travel alone and so the husband must tag along.

I arrived at Tokyo and it was really cold (slighly below 10 degrees C). I had a fugly green winter jacket that I bought seven years ago when I went to China, but it was way too puffy for this weather, so my first stop at Narita International was to grab a decent winter jacket.

Anyway, fastrack a little bit. Most Japanese can’t speak English, and that’s my biggest problem here. Things are horribly, horribly expensive as well, e.g. no decent meal below S$10 per person. Nothing you can really buy for less than S$5 except canned drinks and MacDonalds’. My Hotel is miserably small for S$170/night. The entire room including the bathroom is actually about the size of my bedroom w/o the bathroom. Oh, and also, almost every non-living thing here talks by itself – lifts, trains, doors, pedestrian crossings, restruants, escalators, stairs… I’m serious! It warns you to mind your step!

This is the most automated and robotic place I’ve seen. Even people keep talking non stop – I mean the retail staff. You go to a counter and pay for something, the moment they greet you, they go on saying things (I cannot understand) until you get your change and they bid you goodbye. But the people are really polite and I do enjoy being around this place as a visitor. Working here is probably another different thing altogether. I’m about to head out of my hotel to take a photo of the peak hour rush on a Monday morning.

Tokyo Subway Map

If you think Singapore’s MRT/LRT is messy, wait till you see Japan’s JR/Bullet Train/Tokyo Subway maps. The map above is just the Tokyo Subway alone. There’s the JR and Bullet Train not shown here. Bullet Train is quite straightforward though, it has only a few stops as it was designed to go long distance really fast.

On the side note, while I was walking down Roppongi with my wife this evening, two crazy angmohs (Caucasians) came up to me and tried to poke fun of me – maybe they were cracking some racist jokes or something. I told them off (in English, of course) that “I’m not a fucking local.” I guess they were a little surprised when I responded that way. These angmohs had better behave in other peoples’ country, seriously. I don’t know what they were thinking poking fun of Japanese in Japan. Somebody should kick their ass.

P.S. How is it possible for a map not to be north bound?!? The Tokyo tourist map is not north bound! I’m having a hard time reading it with my compass!

While Google probably made close to $100m in Singapore selling advertising alone, I still think citing pure advertising as a form of  monetization is an extremely bad idea.

Advertising is an extremely crowded space. Search engines are doing it, news portals are doing it, forums are doing it, social networks are doing it, so where do you stand in this crowd, especially if you’re a new startup?

Instead of looking to sell advertisements for money, think of how you can monetize your strengths such as selling a service or  selling data and statistics for market intelligence, or even being acquired by another company.

Think about it…

If any of you need to buzz me, the surest and fastest way is via SMS.

And for those who’ve mailed me on project groupings and/or discussions please hang on a bit and I will get back to you ASAP.