The latest fiasco about the Proton Perdana versus Mercedes Benz was really the much awaited dessert after the heavy meal of Anwar’s sodomy conspiracy.
Back to the little story about Proton Holdings Berhad’s (KLSE: PROTON, stock-code 5304) top range Perdana V6 Executives. It’s awesome just how much the cost of ownership is to maintain a V6 and taking the cue from the estimated RM132,357.36 maintenance cost for a single car from 2004 as reported, it would whack a cool RM33,089.34 a year just to ensure the national car can roll on the road. Holy cow! That’s really a good money generator for Proton and could easily put Mercedes Benz and BMW to shame. No wonder the Terengganu’s Chief Minister (Menteri Besar) was quick to conclude it would be more economical to change the fleet to 14 RM245,000 (I thought such model costs at least RM340,00 each?) Mercedes E200 Kompressors (for RM3.43 million) as it’s no brainer that in the long run the Germany car was the solution to prevent such huge “leakages”.
Of course people started to curse the Chief Minister for being lavish during such period but can you really blame him for such a shocking maintenance cost? The Anti-Corruption Agency (ACA) was surprisingly fast in their action to probe into the high costs of maintenance with the Chief Minister cheekily told the ACA to be equally efficient into other high-profile projects such as the prestigious Monsoon Cup sailing event and the Islamic Civilisation Park. Obviously irregularities can be seen all over the place in this Proton Perdana V6 Executives’ maintenance cost case.
Nevertheless you do not need a rocket scientist to jack-up the repairs or services charges at other workshops since Proton said its records showed that there had been no warranty claims made on that particular vehicle (cost more than RM100,000 in repairs and maintenance) since October 2004. However Proton Holdings Bhd managing director Syed Zainal Abidin Syed Mohamed Tahir claimed the average maintenance cost for each Perdana car sent by the Terengganu Government was only RM542 per year (huh?). So some geniuses must have pocketed the differences.
The question is do you have that many foreign dignitaries or VVIPs visiting Terengganu? If not wouldn’t it be more practical to sell or auction it off? I’m sure many interested parties would snap the Mercedes Benzes even at 20 percent discount. At least by selling it off the state could cut lost and it’s better to lose RM686,000 than to spend RM3.43 million keeping the cars in the cold storage. But then how could the PM say anything else when he himself spent huge amount of money on yacht and luxury jet? Maybe the government should consider Toyota Camy or Honda Accord for reliability.
Millions of searches are conducted each day on popular search engines by people all around the world. What are they looking for? A number of major search engines provide a way to glimpse into the web's query stream to discover the most popular search keywords or topics. These are:
AOL Hot Searches: Top current queries, or see those in the last hour, last day and within particular categories.
Dogpile SearchSpy: Choose to see either a filtered or non-filtered sample of top, real-time search terms from this popular meta search service. Sister site MetaCrawler offers a similar MetaCrawler MetaSpy service.
Google Trends: Allows you to tap into Google's database of searches, to determine what's popular. View the volume of queries over time, by city, regions, languages and so on. Compare multiple terms, as well. See our review: Google Trends: Peer Into Google's Database Of Searches.
Google Zeitgeist: What people are searching for at Google and its associated specialty services in a variety of categories. There are versions for various countries, as well.
Lycos 50: Long-standing service showing top searches at Lycos each week.
MSN Search Insider: Top 200 queries on MSN Search (annoyingly in random order), top "movers" in TV, sports and music, and a "duels" feature pitting top queries in a race against each other.
Yahoo Buzz Index: Shows you what's hot and what's not in terms of search topics at Yahoo.
If you need to always work from different locations, for example, work from office HQ, then travel to client side; and surfing web after coming back to home at night, this may be the right tool for you:
1. Firefox 3, plus 2. FoxyProxy
If you want to go one step further, to be able surf anonymously, also use TOR, and i found this one particularly useful which doesn't required you to install the application, look out for this app:
PortableTOR
This is a standalone application which can even be run from USB pen drive. It can be very handy if you don't like the idea to install some additional program on your PC.
Yesterday having tea time with my old colleague, who is a veteran IT professional who have been in this line since 70's ... The conversation had added knowledge to me. I found that is was so interesting at one time: - Software always came with free, and given out free by IBM to MAS. There is no SLA, it's up to the airline to change the code to cater their needs. - There are limited software vendors at that time, airlines used to buy software from one another. - Airlines is one of the pioneer embrace IT, at one time, the head of IT in Maybank and Southern Bank were came from MAS. - Mainframe is so robust that it doesn't down even running for a decade. - ... i enjoy the conversation a lot.
Out of curiousity, I wonder why Cisco attract less hostile public comments compare to Microsoft. Cisco dominance in networking is comparable to Microsoft's dominance in software. I did a quick yahoo search and get the following data:
From my humble opinion, this can be an exhibits of the beauty of being low profile. It's not as if Cisco is a company which is seldom heard of, no, Cisco is a respectable company. But they don't publicly single-handed dictates the market. Sometimes, when you are eating the bigger share of pies, it's even more important for you to stay low and collaborate with the others. No doubt Microsoft will continue to drive a lot of competitors out of business, but that's also the price they need to pay for their big bully image.
Not another post to talk about Earthquake. But it reflects another evidence that human is still out of wits when come to grappling with the fate. It doesn't matter you are the smartest of the world, the wealthiest, the strongest, or the prettiest. It just doesn't matter.
But some life do shine when it reaches its end, like the shooting star streak through the night. We hear numerous respectable individual, unnamed but astonished with their noble act in sacrificing themselves for the others. They are those you won't turn back for another look when walking past on the street.
Yet there are many just live a walking zombie life. They have the power, the money, they decide others life, but they only care about themselves. It's a shame.
There is a hypothetical form of physics energy call dark energy. Against belief of majority scientist in the past century, the universal does not contract, but instead expand of the Big Bang. This give births to the necessity of another energy to act against the gravitational force.
Cosmological constant was a term first proposed by Einstein for the wrong reason, to keep the universal stay intact as we do not want to see the universal collapse by itself. Einstein then admitted this is the biggest blunder in his life later on. But universal has a most unexpected way in revealing its secret. Recent years of research once again support the existence of dark energy again.
Finally it had been 2 weeks since i joined IBM. It's so much different from my previous jobs. Yes, i no longer worked purely in software. On one hand, i am happy to try out something new, on other hand, I afraid i might lost touch with the software development skill. After all, i had spent so many years in coding.
There are so much more to learn beyond .NET, java. And so far the people are being nice to me (at least for now). I am also glad to work alongside people with close to 20 years experience. Although it's challenging, but this is the one small step that can make me grow.
Then, not surprisingly, i also bumped into two old friends. One is the high school friend who hadn't contacted for 10 years. We have a nice good chat back in IBM plaza in One Utama. Another old friend treated me a lunch and we exchange life experience in all these years... time really flies
Right now, i am researching Unified Communication for MAS Airlines. Technology had really change our lifestyle, no exception to the enterprise, the whole industry ecosystem is so much different these days, and only the nimble and agile can weathered through all the challenges.
I came across this song in "Lost" tv series, and thereafter did a quick wiki and get know about this song. I personally like it very much and like to share with the readers here.
In less than a month, my stock investment portfolio turn red by a negative return of whopping 14%. I started trading in the midst of last year and make some decent gain of 10% by Dec 2007.
Counters like TopGlove and Tenaga eroded in values up to 50% and 40% each. The two counters alone almost offset all my gain last year. Therefore, some major mistakes can really cost hefty no matter how good you performed in the past. In some respect, this is a good lesson learn for me, you never considered in-money and the market can just wipe you out anytime if you did bad.
As a greenhorn, i really have so much to learn. :)
We gathered in front of the TV watching the election result. Initially the results were all about BN winning the seats, at one time it even reached a 30+ to 1 (opposition). I was thought this might be another landslide victory for the BN. But slowly the news of opposition victories started flowing in. Until to an extent that the official TV channel RTM no longer kept up (purposely?) with the latest news. We then switched to internet and it confirmed the opposition had denied the BN 2/3 majority.
I hope the BN will do some self-reflection and corrected their path. The country still need their leadership for a better tomorrow. What the people looking for is to have a clean government which will service for the people and take people welfare as the priority. BN had been clinging on power for too long and forgot their mandate is given by people. And now let's lobby everyone effort (both BN and opposition) and make sure our country can advance to next level, a whole new future.
Yesterday night was the first time that i attended political speech. I now understood the thrill and adrenaline rush you will get from a good political speaker. No deny that opposition party has better position to attract the speakers especially when they spoke out the discontent of the public. Nevertheless Malaysia is an unique country, the sheer quantity of throng who attend the speech does not necessary reflect the real situation.
Notwithstanding this fact, for the wellness of the country, I hope all will come out and vote, vote for ourselves and our coming generation. Please ditch all dirty politicians and send them to "Holland"... (if you know Chinese, you know what that means)
I like reading, badminton, swimming, movies. I also enjoy beautiful things that I interpret beauty as a demonstration of wisdom, intelligence, power, taste and truth.
You may reach me at: kinccc@gmail.com
Of course people started to curse the Chief Minister for being lavish during such period but can you really blame him for such a shocking maintenance cost? The Anti-Corruption Agency (ACA) was surprisingly fast in their action to probe into the high costs of maintenance with the Chief Minister cheekily told the ACA to be equally efficient into other high-profile projects such as the prestigious Monsoon Cup sailing event and the Islamic Civilisation Park. Obviously irregularities can be seen all over the place in this Proton Perdana V6 Executives’ maintenance cost case.
The question is do you have that many foreign dignitaries or VVIPs visiting Terengganu? If not wouldn’t it be more practical to sell or auction it off? I’m sure many interested parties would snap the Mercedes Benzes even at 20 percent discount. At least by selling it off the state could cut lost and it’s better to lose RM686,000 than to spend RM3.43 million keeping the cars in the cold storage. But then how could the PM say anything else when he himself spent huge amount of money on yacht and luxury jet? Maybe the government should consider Toyota Camy or Honda Accord for reliability.
