holey baloney

That’s IT! I concede. I’m dumb as a donkey. Like what I told the IT dude at my office, it’s very easy to cheat me of my money.

So I was at Cathay Pacific office during lunch today to make the payment for my trip to Hong Kong, and when she was calculating the final pricing, I noticed that the additional room night charges was a little different from what I remembered it as. My memory tells me that Empire Hong Kong’s additional night charges was S$74/room/night and she quoted S$83. I asked her about it, thinking that it might just be that she was looking at the different season charges. But it was for the low-season so I thought I must have remembered wrong. I mean, I do have alzheimer’s disease sometimes… Just.. sometimes…

ANYWAY, after I made the payments and got all the required documents & vouchers, I came back to the office and the nagging feeling that I overpaid was still there so I pulled out the original Excel spreadsheet that was sent to us when we first queried for a quotation, and TA-DA! Empire Hong Kong’s additional night is S$74!!!!! She apparently charged me based on the Empire Kowloon prices.

After all that trouble to head down to Ocean Towers, I have to go back there tomorrow or Friday to get my re-issued tickets and revise my payment. And I didn’t even realise that the package price itself was wrong! So now my trip is S$27 cheaper. =____________________=

It’s not the first time my instinct tells me something, I ignore it and do something else. And lo & behold, the outcome proves that my instinct was right in the first place! Oh. My. God.

Once, twice, even three times, I can put it as coincidence. But a multitude of times? I’m just plain stupid. STUPID! Argghhhhhhhhhhhhhh! *smacks head*

Oh God Somebody KILL Me!!!! But before anyone does, tell me again WHY is he still technically the father of the country? Times like this I wish he would just you know… GO.

At a Human Capital Summit in Singapore, our dearest Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew makes the following comment, as reported in CNA.com:

On a lighter note, the Minister Mentor touched on what he calls assortative mating, that is, finding a spouse at your level - something he strongly believes in.

He said: “I have explained this. I think I lost votes after I explained the awful truth. Nobody believed it, but slowly it dawned on them, especially the graduates, that yes, you marry a non-graduate, then you worry about whether or not your son or daughter is going to make it to the university.

I’m sorry to break your bubble dude, but unfortunately, BOTH my parents never made it to University. They didn’t even finish their Secondary school education! My mom failed maths in her O’levels and my dad didn’t even complete Secondary Two. Somehow, I managed it to University, a world-class Singaporean university, and graduated. My brother’s in poly, yes, but he recently won third in a Youth Entrepreneurship competition.

None of my aunts & uncles from both sides of the family went to University. Yet 80% of my cousins graduated successfully. I even have a President’s Scholar in my extended family. And no. Her parents never did make it to University.

I don’t know where did you get that preposterous idea of assortative mating but really, you should wake up your idea and see the society for what it really is. Of course most of us will marry at “our own level”. That’s simply because there are so many University graduates around! Throw a stone randomly and I bet you, you’ll hit a University graduate on his/her head.

Furthermore, I don’t think that having a university degree necessarily means that you are all that. It gives you a slight advantage over others, and allows you to start at a level a little higher than usual. However, it’s only the civil service and local based companies who really scrutinise the degree results. MNCs don’t actually care very much about the degree. Everything is based on experience, aptitude and attitude. A degree is just icing on the cake. Nothing more.

On the subject of civil servants, I have to say, some of your highly treasured civil servants are really clueless. I didn’t know that there could be working adults who have no idea if DHL could pick up packages from Cambodia and bring them back to Singapore. All they knew was that they have only been sending packages out of Singapore. It took all my resolve not to roll my eyes and tell them they’re stupid.

So, really. Stop your eugenics ideas. Just. Stop. It.

Please.

Thousands sick and 2 killed. And all Sanlu does is apologise and now says that they will recall the milk powders? When they have been informed about the incident and was told to recall weeks before? This Chinese practice of covering one’s mistake cannot go on any more. It’s hurting it’s brand and causing confidence in Made In China products to drop from low to zero. Even Chinese nationals have no confidence in their own products, as a colleague of my friend has to stock up on Singapore milk powder before she goes back to China.

I’m currently trying to lose the 10 kilos I’ve piled on since my Uni days, so it’s hitting the gym plus reading up on diets, weight management & physical fitness.

Today I saw this post on ping which says “5 Tips for Losing Weight”. And reading the post and then the rest of the blog made me suspect that it could be a plagarist at work. So I picked out text to google. And true enough. I found proof (this time with screencaps) that she plagarised. And whoever she is, tried to be smart. She made some changes to the text so it was not 100% the same as the original, so some people might think it’s just a coincidence. However, she can’t change the language ability of the original poster, so it varies with the rest of the blog. 

Red is the exact same ERROR that the original poster made, which the plagarist didn’t correct.

Blue is the parts she changed.

 Original article

 Her article

To show that she didn’t put the link of the original post.

She says she’s getting married in December and would like to “share whatever I know in my blogs”. So that’s fine if she’d credit the source, even if she didn’t write the articles herself. BUT, she didn’t just copy, she purposefully made changes to the copy. That’s got to be infringement of some kind of copyright law. Or creative commons license. Or something. 

There’s no way of contacting her to tell her how *ahem* unhappy I am so I’m calling her out on my blog. 

If anyone who knows this person & sees this post, please inform her that what she’s doing is wrong. Thanks.