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Watching your kids grow up, it never stops to amaze me to see how they have developed over time. Memories are so ingrained into me of the times I carried them in my arms and now they are taller and stronger than me.

I always fear that we will get less family time as they grow older and lead more independent lives, their circle of friends taking precedence over the family.

We just had an Italy vacation in June where the older one could not make it due to school commitments. I had so wanted to retrace our honeymoon with the kids this time, 23 years on.

Yesterday was one such occasion where we experienced great quality family time. We used to play badminton as a family of four and it has been a while since our last game. As exams were over, we decided to do it again. We laughed and cajoled each other during the game. My boys seemed to be so much more competitive this time around. It was a wonderful 1+ hour of bonding time.

After the game, we had a late dinner and the conversation was lively as we reflect on what the boys wanted to do with their lives. The discussion was very meaningful to me as I can start to see the development of their maturity as they face adulthood.

Very soon, they will experience compulsory army life in a few years time, to be moulded into young men. Hopefully, they will still value family time by then.

 

 

Yesterday marks the beginning of a new journey for me. I accepted a new job.

I left my old one in Apr this year and decided to create a To-Do list as a way forward. I completed almost everything after more than 6 months. Picked up new social media skills via online learning, tried to jump start 2 businesses, did a class reunion, started a blog, met various people for lunches, explored fintech opportunities and tried to see if I can reinvent myself along the way, searching for the next career that might interest me.

Life is full of surprises. Just when I hit  a dead end, a friend reached out to me on a job opportunity that just happened to be open. After more than 2 months of interviews and waiting, they finally gave me a letter of offer and I signed it yesterday. I will officially start work 3 weeks from now.

This is an ideal role as not only is it something quite different from my previous jobs, it also leverages on what I have been doing for the past 26 years.

Hopefully, all my past experiences can come together and I can optimize them for this job. It feels exciting to be part of a team that is on the brink of embarking on a new path and I believe that the upside is huge 🙂

 

 

 

Unlike the first 2 debates, this one was more subdued as Trump held back his tongue most of the time while Clinton tried to land some killer blows at the start but then decided to just maintain her cool to try to be more likeable and appealing to voters.

In my opinion, moderator Wallace was the winner for the night. He was cool and unbiased throughout. He asked pointed questions and cut to the chase for each candidate while controlling the audience well. Trump did not try to interrupt too much. For the first time, this seemed to be what a normal presidential debate should be like as compared to the first tw debates that degenerated and behaved like a kindergarten playground at times.

The main stunner of the night belongs to Trump. He refused to acknowledge that he would concede if the final results on 08 Nov showed that he has lost, preferring to adopt a wait and see attitude. This was totally against the grain of the American democratic election process where the loser will graciously congratulate the winner instead of accusing her of election fraud/rigging after election day.

As I predict previously, if Trump loses, he will say that the elections are rigged and try to extend his shelf life by keeping everyone guessing for the next 4 years if he will run again in 2020. Meanwhile, he will milk the free publicity for all that it is worth for his own financial gain. There is talk that he will start a new TV channel and have his own propaganda machine to drive home his new shows – maybe the New Amazing Apprentice??

Market is numb to the antics of Trump by now but he can still surprise by desperately hitting new lows to win back voters.  With less than 20 days to go, voter fatigue is starting to sink in. The rest of the world cannot believe that US elections have sunk to gutter politics and becoming a laughing stock now.

If Trump ever wins, the markets will go into a tailspin. Republicans should make a stand now to reject him for the greater good of the country and look forward to rebuild the party to remove the rot and hatred, else we will see another Trump 2.0 in 2020 again.

 

 

Had a wonderful day yesterday celebrating wifey’s birthday. Started the morning with a simple bouquet of roses to kick-start the full day of events.

After sending kids to school, we went to East Coast for a leisurely breakfast by the sea, followed by a short morning stroll along the beach. By mid-morning, we headed to the gym for a nice workout – some weights and a jog. After a refreshing shower, we had a light lunch and a bit of shopping before beginning our 3 hours spa session. It was lovely chilling out in the jacuzzi and having a one hour massage to relax the body.

Went home to pick up the kids after the spa session. Kids planned a lovely FAB birthday present for mummy and she was delighted. Last stop of the night was a birthday dinner at a fusion restaurant called 999.99 which had Japanese and Western influences.

I hope my better half enjoyed herself with the full day of activities. I certain treasure the quality time we had together and the family time during dinner was priceless… To more good times ahead.

 

Trump must be thinking aloud to himself : “What the fuck?!?! How did I get so far in this elections? The bunch of idiots I conned were so naive that I want to puke…”

He is planning for an exit strategy now, knowing that chances of a win are getting more remote by the day – 10 women groping victims and counting. He probably doesn’t want the job anyway – shitty pay for the next 4 years to address issues way beyond his bandwidth and intellect. He is probably thinking of the long vacation he is entitled to after losing the election, blaming everyone but himself. His rhetoric about the elections being rigged against him, even after Pence said that he will acknowledge the final results, is an exit strategy to rally his hardcore supporters to deny defeat.

He has crossed many lines in this elections, opening the Pandora box for future con men politicians to tap on the same brewing undercurrents to try to secure success. I bet that a new candidate without Trump’s historical baggage might seize the day and bang on the same issues with reasonable chances of winning in the next elections in 2020.

Knowing that Trump is a superb marketer of himself, he will probably milk the probability of running for President again in 2020 to the max. His new reality shows (” King Maker”, “Don’t Rig my Bank”???) might enhance and prolong his popularity – more $$$ for his business empire…

The Republicans really need to clean up their act and learn from this – I give this a probability of only 20% of happening. Else Trumpism will manifest the GOP and turn it into an ugly machinery full of hate and anger into 2020.

The Bloomberg article below pretty much sums up what can be expected after this elections, citing examples of countries like Thailand and Italy .

Do pray that we don’t get a fluke result and Trump wins at the last moment by some crazy miracle…

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-13/trump-may-not-win-but-he-s-not-going-away

 

 

 

Being a newbie that just set up my first online blog in Apr this year, I was naturally pleasantly surprised when I received my first reader comment from one of my daily writeups. I replied to him and thanked the person for his feedback and encouraging words.

Subsequently, I started to receive more comments on the same blog writeup and I started getting suspicious about it. Firstly, the email addresses all seemed to be coming from a generic source (mailcatch.com) and the IP addresses were identical. Secondly, the comments were beginning to sound unrealistic and ridiculous – I was just talking about something simple in that blog and the reader seems to think that they were earth-shattering insights. To date, I had received about 30 such spams on the same blog page. Who the hell was so free to do this and what is the hidden agenda?

On further investigations, I was enlightened by helpful writeups from the web (added the link of one of them below). Bottomline, these robo-comments were normally auto-generated by certain spam software to try to game the system to help increase views to their own sites. They are also trying to trick Google to rank their sites favourably as the comments allow them to leave their URL link on my blog. Google judges the popularity of URLs by measuring the number of external pages pointing to itself. The technical name for this is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) spam.

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“When Google, or any other search engine, decides which websites to place at the top of a list of search results, one of the factors it considers is the number of links pointing to the site. A page that has many links from other places on the web (these are called “inbound links”) will rank more highly in the search results than a page that has only a few links. Web pages with many inbound links are more popular, and therefore Google concludes that those pages are more likely to have the information that a user is looking for.”

“Spam comments are a way to “game the system” by randomly blasting comments into the web in order to get as many links to your site as possible. Some of these will be deleted by attentive (and irritated) editors and administrators, and some of them will be filtered out automatically by spam filter programs. But some will get through, and the more that do, the more inbound links your website will have, and the higher the search engines will place your site in search results.”

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So how do I stop them? I can’t. While WordPress does a good job of sieving out most of the unwanted spam at the moment, some still do get through. Spammers will disguise the comments with genuine human like sentences. We have to keep the gate open, as a real reader’s comment may actually happen. For now, I guess I would have to vet all the comments that come through and tag them as spam manually…

http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/features/report/3191/revealed-the-grubby-world-of-comment-spam/

 

I have always been interested about starting my own business. One short cut was to leverage on established businesses and obtain a franchise agreement to operate in your own country or around the region, to become a franchisee.

Most developed businesses now acknowledged that one way to expand their business in a faster way is to be a franchisor, to be the party granting the rights to multiple franchisees. This can help the company to scale up quickly while providing more stable BAU (Business As Usual) income and minimising the risk of capital outlay to set up new outlets.

Over the last few years, I have been attended an annual event called Franchise & Licensing Asia to check out some of the possible opportunities that may work for me. Today was the first day of the 3 days event and I had signed up to attend.

First impressions – as usual, there are mainly F&B (Food & Beverage) franchises on display. Most of them were from Japan, Thailand, Korea and S’pore. The free food sampling helps to draw in potential interest. One big problem that we have here is that the cost of rental and manpower is too high and to break even, the amount of sales you have to make to break even is just too hard to achieve.

For example, there was a company trying to sell stand alone coffee-making machine franchises. With training and coaching, 5 machines will cost $78,000 and 10 for $156,000 . How many cups of coffee do you need to sell? Plenty.

The other one that caught my eye was a local coffee chain called Ya Kun. The initial franchise fee to set up an outlet was between $250,000 to $400,000. Your shop will get training but all stock inventory has to be purchased from them. On top of that, a percentage of your revenue has to be paid to them too (I was told it was below 10%). The rental of your shop premise in a popular shopping belt could be anywhere between $15 to $30 per square feet per month. Manpower cost, assuming you can find good help, will also add up to the overall costs.

These odds are stacked so high against the franchisee from day 1. On the other hand, the franchisor minimises his risk while collecting new income.

Guess its back to the drawing board to look at new business opportunities…

 

 

 

 

After the first debate, the following week was a disaster for Trump. I thought that we had hit rock bottom and that it cannot get worse from here. Well fuck me dead, this past week got even crazier.

This campaign is unwinding like a reality soap opera show. Little kids all over the country are now asking mummy what is a pussy. As I had forecasted a few weeks ago, the main loser we are sure about is the Republican party. It is imploding as the many factions within the party disagree on how they should handle the Donald. He is now declaring war on his own party and no one knows for sure what stunts he aims to do next.

Forget about hearing the candidate’s policies, no one is talking about them now. Everyone is glued to their TV sets to see how the 2 candidates intend to rip each other’s throat out. When we think the debate cannot get any lower, it continues to hit new lows. Dealings with mysterious foreign powers? Check.  Sex tape? Check. Sexual assault? Check.

This whole exercise is making a mockery of the democratic election process. This is becoming a big joke to the rest of the world. We cannot even fathom how is it possible that someone like Trump is able to vie for the most powerful job in the world. Talk about handing a loaded gun to a five-year-old…  Woah! Can’t wait for the next and final debate on 19 Oct. Will they go nuclear on each other?