Of Tadpoles and Pearls

took mc thursday. its been a really nice relaxing long weekend for me.

friday met up with darrell lim from our army daze. supposed to have included anthony and jaikanth but they flew kite so wuz just us both. but we had a good time eating at werner's oven. darrell was in philly the time i went to the states for that summer camp thingy. he was there on an entrepreneurship program by nus. haha. until he revealed to me that he was actually the first participant to fail the program, i actually thought he was quite zai to even be on the program. but poor darrell being darrell, ill-disciplined and rash and a follower more of heart than head went to try to start his own start-up while in the states and not long after all went bust. and back he came with nothing to show for but a half a semester of missed lessons and flunked examinations. first particiapnt to ever fail sucha program. he was put on counselling and charged with school fees amounting to some $12,000, which he can't pay off and therefore he will be working in nus after he graduates this summer.

poor guy. i always thought he had a spark of genius in him. if only he harnessed it. so now he's got this quirky new idea to start a daily newsletter in nus. its gonna be daily. d-a-i-l-y. how to pull it off. gotta admit even i think its really challenging even though i had just explained my tadpoles and pearls business plan to him and good heavens he's actually the first to be able to see the light and tell me its gonna work if execution was disciplined. anyway yeah, he wants to start a daily newsletter in nus and aims to beef up the pride of hte nus student population by keeping them updated about events in school a la university of pennsylvania where he was based(joe and i drove by that place once). according to darrell's pride for college theory, the reason why local colleges have low/barely there/outright no participation rate is largely due to the uninformed general student mass who can't give a rat's behind about whats going on in school and can't be bothered to find out. but thrust this valuable info into their hands on the a daily basis and maybe people might start beefing up attendances.

its a debatable theory but i have to agreed with the majority of what he was trying to get at. many a times i have wished for more of this kinda passion for my own school. such was unlike the stuff colleges in the states were built on, with stadiums of 100,000s filled to the mighty brim, enormaous school bands and drum corp blaring inspirational pieces, cheerleaders parading their wares, and of the clumsy mascots. ah yes. mascots.

unfortunately its an uphill task and battle. extremely challenging and according to him only 1 out of 10 professors believed that a daily newletter aimed at the general student population would actually turn the national university of singapore into a genral mass market brand name. and even the only one who supported his idea was skeptical as to the magnitude of the task at hand. how sad. suffice to say i didn't think it as easy. nor did he. he apparently approached the chief editor of the nus main paper, the ridge(or something to that effect) and was so disappointed by her lack of vision and sense of purpose that he concluded he didn't want her editorial team on board this lunacy. ccording to him all nus journalists ever want to cover are topics expressing their own opinions and controversial firebrands topics like maybe stuff on pink liaisons, politicking and why ahlians pronounce the letter R as ar-rer. there just wasn't anyone passionate about reporting the daily events and the normal news. these days according to him every writer who has got a passion to write(and not writing for the sake of it) just wanted his/her opinions aired or wanted to cover something controversial that gets bounded by red-tape so that they can complain about the lack of freedom of press. how sad.

so he's currently still looking for his team. i swear i'd join his cause if i were still in school(provided it was for ntu). as to whether any of this ranting ever materialises we'd just have to wait and see. so watch this space.

along these lines we did lament on how unappreciative singaporeans generally are about our own culture. this complain that complain. driver drive too slow, complain. car in front too slow, complain. pedestrian walk too slow complain. then when we're pedestrians, car drives too fast, complain. car never give way, curse and swear. the failure of putting oneself in another's shoes. the failure to appreciate what we have rather than complain about what we don't have. i mean hell, in new york the pubs also don't open past 3am in the morning and in the entire state of pennsylvania its a bloody state law that pubs have gotta close by 2am. and here we complain that we can't open till 6am. how sad.

well i say if you've got so much to complain about and wanna move out of singapore then jolly well ship out asap. don't stay here and whine and complain about what we don't have or whats better elsewhere than here. either go do something to change things for the better or go to your better half of the fence where its got what you seek and everything's rosy and perfect in your eyes only. they don't want you either? then go ask yourself why they don't want you, stop complaining about why you weren't born there. and if you're that desperate then so try to swim over in a floating shoebox or soemthing. darn talking about this makes me boil. so i'll go into this some other time.

this is a long blog.

so anyway after all that with darrell(boy we sure had fun). i went to devil's bar with lian chun leon kelvin and thomas. we decided it wasn't happening enough(okie so maybe i decided that) and then adjorned to our usual haunt at mdm wong's. shared a bottled and had fun for the rest of the night. though i think i'm really getting old liaoz. am not as enthusiastic to cheong as i used to be(think final sem in ntu) and don't really drink as much as i used to liaoz. maybe its life in the ratrace lah. haiz.

yesterday drove to jinde's place to watch soccer. england vs north ireland. the northern irsih are so poor they can't even afford to print their last names on their jerseys. so sad. and the only big name players i could think of were maik taylor and keith gillespie. haha. had placed a plum $10 on england winning by less than 3goals. so the first half was actually promising when they trooped off to the dressing room with a 0-0 scoreline. but the 2nd half in a 10minutes blitz they score 3 goals and that killed off northern ireland and my $10. final score 4-0. rooney is da bomb.

the saturday recruit page is geting thicker and thicker every weekend. so here i am still waiting till april 19th before i decide whether i wanna make a move out of stanchart. i start shift 5th april. jeff asked me to join him in posb as a relationship manager. according to him if i join after my 6-mth stint here i'll be ranked as a relationship assosciate which means more pay and more power(choot choot!) sounds enticing but gotta wait till he goes through the guinea pig rounds to see what the job entails. gotta make sure that my next move within the industry is one that i'll stay longer. industry's abit small so there's only so many times i can jump ship. and posb as we all know is a place only suitalbe for auntie killers. yeah sure just about everyone and their luohan fishes currently have got a posb account in singapore but looking long term our current young will probably have not heard of posb by the time they grow our age since they weren't around when posb was still run by the gahmen. eitehr way it means that the only people who'll still bank with posb are old folk and as we all know, old folk die. old folk also don't have huge risk appetites. old folk just want to put their money either in fixed deposits or leave in in their savings acocunt because now is the time in their lives where they can enjoy the fruits of their labour. so growing money is not as important as say you and i. so posb is gonna go the way of the dinosaurs as what i can see. but then isnt posb owned by dbs? yes it may be but they're still too separate entities. to the best of my knowledge i think dbs wants to shift all of posb's assets into their own account in the long run, then what will i do afterthat? i'll be a dbs relations officer thats what! oh well. we'll see how things go from here. alex is quitting kpmg and joining hsbc as a personal finacial consultant and has recently asked me to join him on board. hsbc? nah. if i'm gonna work in a foreign bank then i've somewhat pedged my loyalty to stanchart liaoz. i mean i love it lots and am honoured to be a part of this huge organization but sometimes really gotta leave for greener pastures then bopianz. so if hsbc maybank of abn amro tries to snare me i'll probably give them a miss. unless of course that huge bank from the states that starts with the letter 'c' tries something funny. now there i wouldn't mind.

think thats the end of my long rant.

meeting the gf later. i wanna go watch spongebob squarepants - the movie! haha.