Its always disheartening to hear of fatality cases due to road accident. A 76year old husband and 66 year old wife met with an accident while crossing a road. The wife did not survive leaving the married for 40+ years husband alone and single again. They were said to be model couple where they are always seen together, traveling hand in hand.
Imagine the hardship and experience they shared, all gone with a delicate mis-control or even control of the foot. All these caused by a third party where the victims have little control of the incident. How delicate and vulnerable life is.
We’re said to be emotional creatures where we need friends and the moving environment to survive or function at our optimal best, but in such cases, isn it better for ppl to be left alone?
posted by ikaira @ 9:51 AM, ,
Lame Lame Lame.
was going through today's business times and chanced upon a report where a few book chain in our neighbouring country somewhere up, boycott to sell Harry Potter book to any walk in customers. its not1 or 2 standalone shops, but actually book chains, (not those kucang kurak ones but those reputable ones like MPH, Popular and Times). the 3 chains more than 100 book stores nationwalk did this to protest at wat they said were unfair discounts offered by supermarket retailers in Malaysia.
How lame can you be to boycott your customers and not let them get their books because u cant fight for market share and withstand competition?
Obviously, they had no understanding of marketing, or maybe they knew too much of it that they decided this is the best way to get into the spotlight once again.
Sometimes its not how big the company is reputed to be, but actually how the management was to run the company.
somehow, nothing spectacular could ever come out from our neighbours except for the Iskandar Development which somehow seems overhyped and over rated. i just feel its just inches away from a tipping point where the bubbles will burst. as the story always goes, its nice and sweet until some happens, and i believe theres definalty something cooking up there.
posted by ikaira @ 10:07 AM, ,
was late for work for nearly 1 hr. firstly i overslept and Due to that i was caught in the rain.
rain is definately one of the worst nightmares by a motorcyclist's standard, but it ain that bad when the boss replies with a 'ok, ride safely'.
it was actually kinda calming to know there are others who are not as fortunate but still in the same plight. there are around bikers in the bus stop. staring at the rain was far from bad when ur looking at a specific spot, u try to figure out why tgd rain hit certain places more that the other. but when looking at the big picture, actually everywhere is being hit.
cars driving by start to leave an impression that late working hours has All the benefits like no traffic jam, able to sleep late, miss out on the rush hour craze.
slowly the mind started to wonder if you would be able to get such a job or even destinate late working hours as part of ur criteria for job selection. but then again, the thought of following ur dream and let the job shape ur life starts to creep in.
Finally, u know that u made a great catch by accepting starhubs offer to get the voice messenger hp because ur able to type all theses using the hp while waiting for the sky to clear
posted by ikaira @ 1:55 PM, ,
Was reading through today’s Life the past 30 minutes and felt and urge to blog. The first few pages featured bag packing in Brazil, the next article was on France which I did not read in detail. And finally a 9-day 7-night fly and drive trip to Japan, Hokkaido. After which it was another traveling article featuring whale shark.
I believe everyone has the want to travel feel, its just the inconvenience and misconceptions that put us off. im sure everyone wants to see another side of the world, how life works at the other side. Look at things from a 3rd person angle and get to know a new culture. Just imagine if LKY didn’t exist and instead our nearest neighbor took control of us, how we would be living our lives now. Every other day, there will be car stealing, rob and rape, lets not go on further.
I want to travel. But looking at my to do list and bank balance, it dosen allow much wayward thoughts. There will be someday, where numbers will be mere numbers with no obligation or inclination.
The few destinations which I will have to reach within these 8 mths:
1. pass the 2 IBF test
2. get the coaching license
3. get the scuba diving license
4. understand futures and options
5. save up for a new bike
6. survive university
7. in the midst of all these, enjoy life, enjoy frens, enjoy family
god speed my frens in the societal or regiment
posted by ikaira @ 12:32 PM, ,
Shantytowns transform themselves 12 July 2007, 02:06
LAS MILPAS, Texas (AP) - Sixty-six-year-old Zulema Hernandez's small home is brightly painted, with a side door opening up to a patio fragrant with potted herbs and flowers.
Neighbors wave as they drive by over smooth, paved streets.At a community center in another corner of the county, a volunteer physician assistant counsels an epileptic woman during the free weekly health clinic. The center also serves as a day camp and a place to explore the Internet in a room full of new computers.
It is hard to imagine that as little as a decade ago, Las Milpas and Pueblo de Palmas -- colonias, or immigrant shantytowns a few miles from the Mexican border -- were Calcutta on the Rio Grande, poverty-stricken places that became filthy, stinking, disease-ridden expanses awash in mud and sewage whenever it rained heavily."It was very ugly," said Hernandez, who entered the country illegally in 1974 and became a U.S. citizen in the mid-1980s. "But we fought strongly together. ... Now it is beautiful. I never want to leave."
Las Milpas' transformation into a proud, largely well-tended community of more than 17,000 is an immigrant success story. As the many illegal immigrants of Las Milpas became U.S. citizens, they used the power of the ballot box to prod the state and federal governments to relieve their misery.
Pueblo de Palmas, one of a cluster of smaller and newer colonias, is following suit. The flatland of run-down trailers and shacks may look desperate, but water and electrical lines run to each plot, and progress is marked with each second-hand air conditioner sticking out of a plywood-sealed window. And looming over it all is the crown jewel -- what, when finished, will be the new middle and elementary school.
Over the past 20 years, a flurry of laws, grants and bond issues has brought running water, sanitation and other improvements to Las Milpas and other Texas colonias along the border.
And instead of selling and moving to nicer neighborhoods as they made their way up the socio-economic ladder, the residents followed the Latin American model of slowly improving their homes."People organized, and they themselves helped transform their lives," said Elizabeth Valdez, chief organizer for the church-based network Valley Interfaith.Colonias, which is Spanish for neighborhoods, started appearing in Texas in the 1950s, when developers found they could sell agriculturally useless land to poor immigrants eager for something to call their own. At their height, an estimated 340,000 people -- or 20 percent of population in the Texas border area -- lived in colonias.
Many families were migrant farm workers, who went north each year to work the fields and returned in the winter to improve their homes, often by adding on to the trailer they first set up on the plot.
The colonias were usually outside city limits, where there were no building codes. The plots were sold without water lines, sewers, paved roads, trash collection, or police or fire protection.
When Hernandez began living in Las Milpas 20 years ago, water had to be carried in for drinking, bathing and cooking.When it rained, the dirt streets became quagmires, and parents had to carry their children to the edge of the colonia on school mornings because the bus driver wouldn't chance the mud.
Older children took to wrapping their feet in plastic bags after schools turned away colonia dwellers for tracking dirt. Outhouses overflowed and stank.
Children suffered rashes and intestinal ailments.The Rev. Mike Seifert was assigned in 1996 to another colonia, Cameron Park, outside Brownsville. He found himself in a lawless, drug- and disease-ridden place traversed by 13 miles of unpaved roads.
When he and another clergyman headed out for their first Mass there, it had just rained and they couldn't get in."They had to take us in one of those huge, open-sided jeeps," he said. "What we found was something that you would see in a Third World country, not in Texas.
They invited people to witness the conditions, such as a group of epidemiologists from the University of Texas."I was giving them a walking tour," he recalled. "One of the women stopped me at one point and said, `Wait a minute, let me get this straight. Are we in the United States or are we in Mexico?' and I said, `No, this is Texas.' ... And she said, `Well, it reminds me of my hometown -- Calcutta, India.'" "The Border Patrol itself wouldn't go out there without a sheriff escort," he said. "It became kind of a Wild West. People talk about folks driving around, shooting each other. There were dope stashes. There were arms." The squalid conditions drew national attention in the late 1990s and were used to attack then-Gov. George W. Bush during his 2000 presidential campaign.
By the 1990s, however, colonias had second- and third-generation families.
Three-fourths of the residents were U.S. citizens, either by birth or naturalization. Many gained citizenship after a 1986 federal law offered them amnesty.
Around that time, the state Legislature set up a program to help poor areas build water and sewer systems. Also, Valley Interfaith organized what has since become a powerful voting bloc in South Texas.
Buses full of people would leave at 3 a.m. for daylong lobbying trips at the state Capitol in Austin or at political conventions. Community leaders testified about the filth and disorder.
New state laws led developers to install water lines, sewers or septic systems, build roads and provide utilities.
State voters have approved bond issues totaling $250 million to improve colonias. Some $650 million in federal money has also gone to ease conditions.
Cameron Park, with a population of 7,000 to 8,000, and Las Milpas now look largely like pleasant, working-class neighborhoods. The infrastructure has attracted stores, restaurants and gas stations, which in turn have meant jobs.
But Cameron Park and Las Milpas had geographic luck. Colonias more than 150 miles from the border, or in relatively prosperous regions, do not qualify for the state money.
A colonia near Corpus Christi is one of the unlucky ones, said longtime colonia activist Lionel Lopez. There, about 2,000 families until very recently lived amid outhouses or open waste pits, and health officials have found high levels of E. coli in the floodwaters people wade through to get to the paved roads. There is no police or fire protection.Lopez stopped by after a fire and found a young man in a wheelchair who had been abandoned without food for days."We got missed," he said. "We're so far behind what you see in the Valley, and everyone's turning a deaf ear."
Its always heart warming to hear such news. and guess where did i chance across this, AFX from a stock broking company.
its just so damn peaceful, like a feel of serenity to know that somewhere in the world, someone, or a whole of them are fighting just as hard who what they want, be it human rights, discrimination, climbing up the social ladder, or simply surviving. all of us have our own battles to conquer, most may lose theirs, most may die, but as long as theres one battle won, its all well worth it.
at least ur not the only one trying that damn hard. at least u had come to know which is ur battle.
for those warriors out there, dig it in, your time will come, just continue doing wat you are doing, it will come, definitely, someday, oneday, maybe not your generation, but it will come, and it came true because you did ur part in evolution, to want to change for the better, for a better tml, for our children, the next generation.
kudos Pak Budi, someday, ur prophecy will be renounced
posted by ikaira @ 9:37 AM, ,
I asked the boss the question that had been lingering for the longest of time. Didn’t know why I would had asked it because there had always been a Boss / Worker relationship where its hard to bridge that gap.
Maybe it’s a sign of acceptance, evolution. It had been 9 mths since I was first acquainted with the boss, and time may have loosened the situation.
He replied in a very simple and heartland manner “I’m already trying to take things slow. Last time at PAD worst”
Me: “Sir, wouldn’t you want to take a break to relax and enjoy life?”
Boss: “I wanted to retire but they say I need to work till 55”
Me: “Sir, then after u retire, what do u wan to do?”
Boss: “See who wants me lo…. Maybe join co-op”
Sometimes its not about the money that makes the job worthwhile, it’s the job that makes the money worthwhile. Maybe thats just his case, victory words like many of the others who went through and did it.
They always say always do wat you like, follow your heart the money will come.
I would so so so sosososososo love to think that money isn everything. But then again as constant as change, there is always, always circumstances
posted by ikaira @ 12:09 PM, ,
Went to my first AGM.
The impression I always had for AGMs were to be dramatic, full for skeptics where the participants or shareholders grill the big shots and management with every scrutiny, on the other end the high earners trying to defend their decision as if the company was far far more important then their life, like they are more than willing to die a thousand times just for the company to progress or simply do the right thing thou having adverse effects of neglecting the shareholders.
On the contrary, this was a different kind of AGM. The mood was clearly set before physically being at the venue. The group of 10 was drafted in because the division needed representatives, and their marketing merit was that the 10 would be promised a sumptuous buffet lunch after the talk not mentioning being able to skive during office hours.
Far from what I’ve heard about Berkshire’s AGM where everyone would be early and sit right in front as close to Warren as possible, the group reached on the dot and instinctively chose seats far from the stage and near the door so that we can camouflaged and get lost in the crowd and we’ll be one of the first to the buffet line when we’re dismissed.
Unlike how other AGMs were known to progress, ours was too quick and too simple without questions or what so ever. The crowd might not even know which items were being discussed or which page and entry the hosts were referring to. The host even had to guide the crowd to the correct page and even self explain without being asked why some figures are this way or that way.
Well, just like our Singaporean culture where we’re more than willing to queue 30 mins for a plate of nasi lemak or ba chor mee, the AGM lasted less than 30 mins and as promised, the buffet lunch.
So much for my first AGM
posted by ikaira @ 6:07 PM, ,
There was an one hour interview on CNBC with Warren Buffet, the secondrichest man who has donated $31 billion to charity. Here are some veryinteresting aspects of his life:
1. He bought his first share at age 11 and he now regrets that he started too late!
2. He bought a small farm at age 14 with savings from delivering newspapers.
3. He still lives in the same small 3-bedroom house in mid-town Omaha , that he bought after he got married 50 years ago. He says that he has everything he needs in that house. His house does not have a wall or a fence.
4. He drives his own car everywhere and does not have a driver or security people around him.
5. He never travels by private jet, although he owns the world's largest private jet company.
6. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns 63 companies. He writes only one letter each year to the CEOs of these companies, giving them goals for the year. He never holds meetings or calls them on a regular basis. He has given his CEO's only two rules. Rule number 1: do not lose anyof your share holder's money. Rule number 2: Do not forget rule number 1.
7. He does not socialize with the high society crowd. His past timeafter he gets home is to make himself some pop corn and watch Television.
8. Bill Gates, the world's richest man met him for the first time only 5 years ago. Bill Gates did not think he had anything in common with Warren Buffet. So he had scheduled his meeting only for half hour. Butwhen Gates met him, the meeting lasted for ten hours and Bill Gates became a devotee of Warren Buffet.
9. Warren Buffet does not carry a cell phone, nor has a computer on his desk.
His advice to young people: "Stay away from credit cards and invest in yourself and Remember:
A. Money doesn't create man but it is the man who created money.
B. Live your life as simple as you are.
C. Don't do what others say, just listen them, but do what you feel good.
D. Don't go on brand name; just wear those things in which u feel comfortable.
E. Don't waste your money on unnecessary things; just spend on them who really in need rather.
F. After all it's your life then why give chance to others to rule our life."
Is this wat we call being true?
posted by ikaira @ 11:13 AM, ,