Category: Life

After I graduated from my polytechnic education, I lazed around at home, jobless for 6 months until deciding to find a job.

My first job interview didn’t go well. It was too technical for me to handle at that time. Needless to say, I didn’t get it.

But I wasn’t concerned, that place was too troublesome to commute to anyway.

Some time later, my math teacher from my polytechnic called me up and told me her friend was looking for a web developer. I went for the interview, showed the forum I coded during my polytechnic days in ASP, with a notepad, and got the job

I worked there for 8 years. (Since October 2003)

There were ups and downs, a very long period of stagnation because of my addiction to online-gaming and things happening that left me in a feeling of despair.

Thankfully, I pulled through.

The last 2 years have been very fulfilling. I revamped the way we churn out websites in my company. I designed a centralized CMS system so that we don’t have to install it for every website. A front-end system that simplifies and reduces the repetitive tasks that needs to be done each time we work on a website.

It was until recently, I felt the need for more money and my day job wasn’t giving me enough. A friend from my polytechnic days just so happened to approach me with some freelance work and I took it up.

Everyday after work, I would spend 2-4 hours at MacDonald’s, on my laptop, coding away on a CRM and invoicing web application. I could feel myself learning something new during each coding session.

I accomplished a lot each day and night to the point cheap SG$1.60 beer tasted satisfying.

Although things didn’t go well with the client requesting many changes and additional requests that required me to change a lot of my code, I told myself it’s just for the learning experience and just hang on there.

Word of me working on my freelance CRM project actually helped me land a job opportunity at a new startup company with flexible working hours and dress code. Overall, the pay would be slightly lower but the founding team will be given stock options.

I could now live the kind of life developers and programmers in Silicon Valley get to live.

I’ve officially tendered my resignation yesterday. In about 26 days, I should be able to start working at my new company. Can’t wait to move on.

“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
 – Thomas Jefferson

It began with me pulling out car keys and boarding a red Mazda RX-something.

The scene was the top of a very tall carpark building which I’m pretty sure I’ve dreamed of it before.

I was trying to run away from some friends in that car.

Next thing I realized, this carpark building became very crowded.

Then somehow, I was already on foot, carrying the car with me as if it’s a suitcase. I was trying to get on a weirdly designed elevator, trying to go up. There are no walls on this elevator to prevent you from falling off. It’s like the castle stage in 8bit Mario where elevators keep coming up from the lava and you have to use that to jump over.

When I look down from this elevator, I see lava. But without fear, I grabbed onto the chain (that’s pulling this elevator up) with one hand and proceeded to jump in a zig-zag way upwards.

Then it’s like I just entered the attic of a very tall tower. It’s very dark all around. Something tells me to just make my way up. I walk along a ledge filled with things you would see on a wizard’s desk, scrolls and stuff all over this ledge. It kind of reminded me of my messy desk at home.

There were people sitting around and chatting.

I was trying to find a save point. But then I recalled in my mind that the save points were removed in the last version update. But still I tried to find one anyway.

In this dark tower, there were random small sparkling gems floating. I waved my hand near them and started “absorbing” them into my hand.

I looked around for more and found a huge blue crystal rock the size of my palm. I grabbed it and observed how it slowly shrank in size as I absorbed it.

I look at my hand and see a value of “10,000”+. Then see the blood veins of my hand turning blue. I knew I had “Atma Poisoning”.

I climbed up and came to a floor, walked past a bright smoky portal which I knew would lead me to a battle with a minotaur.

A RL friend who also plays FFXI with me showed up. Saying he’s trying to catch up on the missions and tells me he might need my help later.

We came to a few exhibits, there were no one else around.

These exhibits have holograms and are actually puzzles you have to solve.

After seeing my friend solve one, and it involves pushing a coke bottle down a hole, I move out of the place and came to a small village.

I tried to find a shop that sells an atma container and during the walk, I took out my iPhone and began looking up “Atma Poisoning” for more info.

I walked into a store and told the shopkeeper if she had any atma containers. Some guys there asked what happened and I said I was trying to complete “Wings of Altana” mission.

Then she took out some cheap looking long plastic container, took my right arm, used a pair of small scissors and snipped on the blue veins on my hand.

Blood flowed out, it was dirty red in color, as if a bit of blue paint was mixed in. My arm swelled up and lots of blood gushed out until the swelling reduced.

She then did the same for my left arm. The container was close to filling up and this was when I woke up.

I felt refreshed and happy because I just had a nice long fantasy-related dream.

In my current office, most Mondays, we always come to work to find out that something had broke.

The other day, the thumb-scanning device that opens the door when authorized people scan their thumbs, froze and half the company were stuck outside. It was probably the thunderstorms that occured throughout Singapore earlier that morning.

We had to buy screwdrivers from the nearby hardware store, open up the device, disconnect and reconnect the power supply to restart it.

On another Monday morning, we came in to find no power supply for everyone in the first floor. The circuit breaker had tripped. But even when we switched off all the devices, the breaker will still trip. Turned out to be faulty electrical cables somewhere.

A long while ago, a glass door in the 3rd floor fell on it’s own. I didn’t check out the scene so don’t know why.

Today, a Monday, I plug my laptop into the power socket on my desk and the power supply for my cubicle went out. Circuit breaker didn’t trip. Turns out the power socket on the floor somehow got damaged and had to be replaced.

If you want to feel despair about living in Singapore, check out Stomp.

Stomp is like a public shaming website where people take pictures of other misbehaving people and post them to this website to shame them.

It’s not the misbehaving people that gives me despair. It’s the people who post those pictures.

In their attempt to feel the thrill of having their pictures posted online for thousands to see, they take pictures of very minor offences in action.

Sigh…

I’ve never felt the lust for more money until earlier this year.

Now, I’m looking all over the place for ways to earn more money.

I could use my savings to buy a condominium and rent it out, using the collected rent to pay off the bank loans for the condo. But current condo prices are too high and even when combined with my mum’s savings, we don’t have enough for a decent unit at a decent location.

Later this year, some government policy might affect condo prices, and with the recent increase in flat supply from the government, we might see prices going down.

I ended up tossing the idea of buying a property in Australia because I’m not comfortable with not being able to “see” the actual property and have worries of being scammed.

I’m also thinking of setting up a company on my own, providing web solutions, customized web applications, running on a subscription-based business model. SaaS.

Just today, I woke up at 5am and couldn’t get back to sleep.

So while lying down on my bed, I kept thinking of money-making ideas and ended up with an idea for a phone app to organize my manga collection. A bit of research reveals that there are some apps already doing the same thing but they either have a crappy interface or not as convenient as what I have in mind.

There are so many ways to make money. Just need to put in lots of hard work.