My work colleague has over the past two weeks sent me online posts of available Singapore rentals. From checking photos of the older HDB apartments, he said the apartments were too small for him. Especially the bathrooms. Huh? It sounded preposterous. Why would bathrooms be too small? Could my colleague have needs that I didn’t know about?
I had to check out these apartment photos myself. And here they are.
Whoa. Just look at the bathroom. Is that even for real? Can anyone fit in there? Once you get in, can you make a turn inside? And can you get back out? This is UNREAL!
These older HDB apartments were built for the earlier post-war generation. They are just not good enough for the 21st century.
And what’s with the mainland-ish looking (read: crappy) furniture? They look like they’ll just fall over.
And after finding out that HDBs are most likely infested with roaches- espeically the flying 2″ southeast asian kind- that was the last straw.
I will not likely live in a lower-end HDB. I will most likely look for modern (< 5yr old) HDBs and lower-end condos. If we’re moving half the world away, might as well live it up.
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I have good news! I finally filed my taxes for 2009 this week. For me, filing taxes this time of year is a bit early. In the past few years, I’ve filed as late as six months after April 15, in October.
The really good news is that I just took a look at my deductions. I never really look at the numbers. They run through taxact.com, and I just press OK. Just now, I took at look at how much deductions I get for having dependents.
Aloha. I found that I got deductions of $14,600 for claiming 4 exemptions, myself and 3 dependents. That’s a tax deduction of roughly $11,000 more than the single guy. Bottom line, the 3 dependents cut my taxes by about 11-(11*0.3) = $3,300.
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Learned something new just now- how to increase the size of excerpts in Wordpress. After digging around a bit, I found the code in wordpress/wp-includes/formatting.php. The trick is to just increase the default word count of 55 in the function wp_trim_excerpt() to some large number, like 200. Done.
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One of the most important questions when considering a move to Singapore is- where am I going to live? What type of housing is available in Sg? How expensive is it? What are the different neighborhoods? I will examine each question one at a time.
First, just how big is Singapore? As everyone knows, Sg is a city-state, meaning it’s a city comprising an entire country. Just how big is this city? Since I’ve been a New Yorker for decades, I’ll use NY as a frame of reference when comparing Sg. I fired up Google maps to capture maps of both Sg and NY and then scaled both to use the same scale ratio. Then I copied and pasted both maps side by side. I’ve posted the results below.
Using NY as my frame of reference, I focus on Times Square as my focal point. From Times Square to eastern Queens is a distance of roughly 10 miles and half an hour on the 7 express train.
In Singapore, the downtown district is called Raffles Quay. Going 10 miles west from Raffles Quay, you’ll reach a district called Jurong West. [...]
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So I just ran into a problem in C# where I have to parse out certain names from a string. The name can be parsed out using a certain pattern. The problem is how to do it in C#.
<GRMetaData name=’CREDIT’/><GRMetaData name=’HISTCREDITDETAIL’/><GRMetaData name=’FX’/>
How to get at the strings CREDIT, HISTCREDITDETAIL, and FX ?
After a little experimentation, here is the code to do it in C#:
Regex nodeNameMatch = new Regex(@"GRMetaData name='(\w+)'");
MatchCollection test = nodeNameMatch.Matches(res);
for (int i = 0; i<test.Count; i++) {
CaptureCollection cc2 = test[i].Groups[1].Captures;
for (int j = 0; j < cc2.Count; j++) {
Console.WriteLine(cc2[j].ToString());
}
}
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It’s official now. With less than two months to go, I’m contracted to move to Singapore to start a new application development group for my IBank employer. Career wise, it’s a bump up from my current situation. It’s also a completely new adventure. So, at a point in my life when I’m still capable of making this big jump, I decided to take the big plunge.
This move to Singapore started innocently- or rather not so innocently- back in March 2010. My old work buddy, whom I shall call SD, whispered as we passed each other in the NY office corridors. He was like a drug peddler pushing warez, “Hong Kong? Singapore?” He was desperate for new hires, but he couldn’t be seen as actively poaching workers from a parallel department. Yet at the same time, he was particular interested to get me on board his group- since we worked together four years ago and since then both he and his manager knows I’ve been running one of the comapny’s internal global applications. So my reputation is secure in his book.
I was not even interested in moving to another department when [...]
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Newegg is currently offering 100 4.7GB DVDs at a taxfree price of $23, $20 with discount, with free shipping. At a fill-rate of 90%, or 4.2GB per disc, this option comes out to 21 GB. per dollar.
Newegg is also offering in internal hard drive, Western Digital Caviar Blue WD10EALS 1TB for $85, $70 with a Memorial holiday rebate. This option comes out to 14.3 GB per dollar. Last year at this time a similar deal offered about $10 GB per dollar.
At 21 Gb/$ to 14 Gb/$, dvds are still a better choice of storage media for now.
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I wanted to change my machine’s Grub default boot partition and didn’t know how. After googling, I learned that the default boot partition is controlled by the file:
/boot/grub/grub.conf
Just change the default setting inside and reboot.
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I’m currently using C1Component FlexGrid. To enable a cell to popup a list of allowed values, create a pipe-delimited string (ex: “Red|Green|Orange”) and set it to the Cols(index).ComboList property. Setting the ComboList property causes C1FlexGrid to display a dropdown box next to the cell.
To allow a user to select from a dropdown list of values AND allow the user to enter their own values, prepend a pipe to the same pipe-delimited string as used for the dropdown list previously (ex: “|Red|Green|Orange”).
cfg.Cols[1].ComboList = “Red|Green|Orange”; // drop-down list
cfg.Cols[2].ComboList = “|Red|Green|Orange”; // drop-down combo
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sudo umount /media/doit
sudo mkdir /media/doit2
sudo mount -t vfat -w /dev/sdb1 /media/doit2
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