Last Day of Renovation for my Flat

[Tuesday, 26 October, 2010]

I began my day continuing to work with Tze Khit at the gym for his banner. I was glad that everything was completed soon we left after I transferred the files into his thumbdrive.

Back at home, I tried Bobby’s photo CDs but they were old and thus quite problematic. Two CDs failed and the final set of three discs for the software required me to insert specific CD in order to retrieve some of the photo galleries. Anyway, the photos were quite small and thus they could not solve all my problems.

I finally got to shower at my house’s bathroom. Since the workers were too slow, they delayed some of the touch-up work, such as installing the heater back. They were too lazy to clear up the mess as they did not want to do double job on the second last day of renovation work. After taking the cold bathe, I continued working on my website and slept after 7am.

I woke up at around noon. The Starhub team from the CRM department rang me up. The lady knew about the conversation I had with her colleague the day before and she insisted that they could only offer me a hundred dollar renewal voucher for my mobile phone line. I was quite pissed off for my entire family were using Starhub line and we were also their hub club member who used their SCV and Maxonline services.

My elder brother went downstairs to get medicine and thus I had to entertain Lucky who kept disturbing me from my sleep. In the last afternoon, he went down for his leg treatment.

Soon, the renovation ended and I started cleaning and packing up my house together with my mum. I washed the toilet and bathroom’s wall thoroughly and was disappointed that the workers left tiny paint stains around. So much for the cheap bill under the HDB upgrade programme, we accepted the condition since we knew the foreign talents were lowly paid as well and it would only boil up their blood to create extra problems for us.

My younger brother joined us after he got home while my elder brother fixed up the new bathroom corner rack form IKEA. We were very impressed with our new furniture, including the mirror. My dinner was packet vegetarian mee hoon and it lessened the pressure on my weak stomach after the days of torment.

The endless work after my dinner was the cleaning up of the kitchen’s windows. The frames remained dusty no matter how many times I wiped them.

At around 11pm, I eased my cleaning work and went on to my website while catching the Taiwanese show on channel 8.

.

Meeting Off, Stuck at the Gym for Work

[Monday, 25 October, 2010]

As usual, I spent the morning working on my tuition website and then blogging. I went to sleep after 7am.

Lucky woke me up in the afternoon. My elder brother went down for his leg treatment again and thus I had to take care of Lucky by myself for an hour.

A guy from Starhub, Ari, called me regarding the request for voucher for my renewal of mobile phone plan. He insisted that Starhub could only give me at most a hundred dollar voucher and I was quite pissed off. I got him to call me back the next day so that I could discuss with my younger brother as we had intention to switch over to Singtel for Starhub’s reception was ridiculous.

I wanted to go down to the gym earlier but I had some stuffs to sort out with my younger brother regarding the tuition agency. Since he was coming home, I waited for him.

I left home at around 7.30pm, so that I would be early for the meeting with Andrew and Letian. I was quite shocked that none of them was around there since I thought they would be there for training before the meeting. I waited until it passed 8pm, I SMSed Letian who did not reply me. Later on, I tried contacting Andrew and he told me the meeting was cancelled for Letian was sick. I was at a lost suddenly for waiting down there over nothing.

Tze Khit stopped me from leaving since he had a poster for me to edit. He accompanied me to Burger King where I grabbed my dinner and helped Wilson to get a meal too. Tze Khit insisted to treat me for the dinner but I used his fifty dollars note to foot the bill before taking out my money from my wallet to return to him together with the change. He was too generous to check the sum.

We went back to the gym soon and I started having my dinner. The new mushroom chicken tasted quite nice at the first bite but I craved for the normal chicken burger instead.

I started working with Tze Khit and Bobby. They wanted to make changes to my previous design with all the updated stuffs. It was an extremely tough night for me as they were trying hard to fight against time and poured me with multiple instructions at one time before I could finish even a step. There were numerous trial and errors to exhaust my brain and fingers, especially when I was using the laptop’s mouse pad.

Right before midnight, when it was almost done, while waiting for them to surf the net for photos, I rushed to the toilet as I had diarrhoea. The rest of them left the gym soon.

.

Starhub Max-online is Crap

Following the past two weeks of slow internet experience, the Starhub cable modem demonstrated the “excellent” service from Starhub Max-online. The “POWER” LED was lighted but “DS” was blinking. The following LEDs were all dead except for the “LINK”.

It was 2.30am in the morning, I was typing an important email, and doing other stuffs as well, that required internet access of course.

I started calling 1633 for Starhub’s assistance soon using my mobile phone because the home phone was connected to the modem and was completely dead. It took me around a minute before I could start to wait for the operator to get on the line. Nobody picked up the phone like the previous time I called them and I got so irritated when I heard from the recorded voice “Alternatively, you may drop us an email via customerservice@starhub.com.sg” – If I could email them, I would not even have called. After a while, my phone died on me due to the extremely poor reception from the Starhub mobile service.

I tried my luck for the second time at 2.51am and they managed to hold me up for more than ten minutes before an operator finally picked up the phone. As the reception over my side was terrible, I could not really catch his name – he said something like “Daniel”. Anyway, he went to check for a minute and returned to tell me that it was due to maintenance between 2am to 6am. He assured me that the connection would be up after 6am.

I questioned him, “So, you mean Starhub doesn’t inform us before the maintenance?”

His reply was, “By right we should…”

I knew it was not his fault and thus I did not make it difficult for him. It was 3.14am and I put down the call.

It was less than two minutes after I rested my ears, I noticed that the connection was up. It could never be such a coincident and I strongly suspected the downtime was not due to maintenance.

.

Starhub is Crap

This article is specially dedicated to all Starhub users.

If you are using both Starhub Max-online and mobile service together, you may be one of the fools around.

Starhub mobile line is known to be less stable than both SingTel and M1 services; in fact, it has ridiculously weak reception at many areas. If you are using their line at Tanjong Pagar, you may be finding yourself being in a lost world at certain areas. Starhub’s explanation is that their stations, which produce and receive the signals are far apart just enough to lose coverage of the area. You may imagine yourself standing at a point where ten metres away from the west has a piece of shit, whereas ten metres towards the east has lay shit, and you are just in good distance to avoid the smell, except for a little pungent which strong wind manages to blow it over occasionally. However, if the same situation happens to the mobile phone, the reception is also an on and off situation.

If you are subscribing to the SCV Cable TV or the Max-Online service, you can apply for free home telephone service. The phone line will be connected to the modem itself and all communication will be via the same medium, and Starhub does not get to lose much. By offering this extra service, they can probably attract more users to subscribe to their services. SingTel owns most households’ phone lines since it has started since before I’m even born. The subscription fee together with the count-by-second call rate are wastage of consumers’ money since they can easily get everything for free. Not many people know that by porting over from SingTel to Starhub, they can still keep their home number without extra charge.

However, if you are subscribed to the above services from Starhub, you may face this problem of when the Max-online or Cable TV is or are down, the phone line is being cut off as well. At this point of time, you can only use your mobile phone to call up Starhub customer service care centre.

For English, please press “1”
For Starhub Mobile service, press “!”
For Starhub Cable TV, press “2”
For Starhub Max-online service, press “3”
..
..
..

The long flow goes by. When you opt for the technical issue, using recorded voice, they try to tell you to check your modem for problems. You are already so agitated and you still have to wait for the craps to finish off before they let you know you have to press “0” to speak to the customer service officer. In the midst of waiting, the recorded message suggests that you can leave your number and name with them through fax machine and then you realise most households in Singapore do not own a fax machine. Another suggestion from them is to email to them via customerservice@starhub.com.sg and you probably feel like screaming to tell them the freaking internet service provided by them is down; but too bad they still do not pick up the call. Ten minutes later, someone finally picks up the phone and the line cuts off because you are using Starhub mobile phone line and the reception happens to die off totally. You have no choice but to call back and the same process happens again. Another ten minutes later, a woman picks up the phone and you know obviously she is not from Singapore for her accent and mumbling that it kills lots of brain cells and saliva to get her repeat her words. Then, she says they need around three hours more to fix the problem, or rather, she is saying other things, which cannot be heard.

.

Mobile Phone Number Changed

I signed up a new Starhub mobile phone line under my mum’s name to enjoy the Hub Club privilege with discounts since we had Maxonline and SCV.

Last week when I called Starhub to cancel the line at night, they told me they would call me at my previous line back within five days to confirm the cancellation. Since I did not want to carry an extra phone with me, I had been waiting for them to call me to confirm it before switching to the new SIM card.

Services had been very bad for the past two days that my friends did not receive some of my SMSes. Just a moment ago when I was about to go to bed, I realised the display on my handset was “Inactive SIM” and immediately I knew what had happened.

What happened to the damn Starhub people when I was using the old SIM just because they bloody hell claimed that they would be calling me at that number to confirm it and now that they had terminated the line before informing me, leaving me no chance of telling my friends.

91829456 is no longer in use.

.

New Mobile Phone Pouch

My Saturday started off late. After finishing the design work for a flyer, I went to Marina Square with my mum and younger brother to re-contract a Starhub line.

While waiting at the bus-stop, two smokers were just right outside the shelter and the wind tried to murder us by blowing from their side towards our direction. I was wondering how effective NEA’s law to ban smoking inside bus-stop was. We took bus 75 and alighted opposite Marina Square. One of the escalators was spoilt and I was surprised that the management kept the working one moving downwards. We got a new phone for my mum.

I was trying out the free wireless network but it was not as easy as I expected. I could not login into my Gmail somehow and that some websites took forever to load.

Dinner was at Carl’s Junior. We shared two sets of meal and chitchatted over there. It was already nine PM and every shop was beginning to close so early on a Saturday night. We walked towards Suntec City to search for phone pouch. My younger brother got himself one good quality pouch at Popular bookstore and he bought me one at the Wallet Shop. I hesitated for quite a while before buying because I found the pouch not very pretty but it was ultimately interesting for a heavy Internet user like me dealing with all the advanced sites. We book bus 196 home after that.

After eleven PM, I went down to jog with my brother with his phone to try out the Sport Tracker using GPS. Unfortunately, at some places, there was no signal and thus we could not totally trust the results.

.

512 MB Ram is Never Enough for Photoshop

I took a risk of spoiling my own reputation on Friday by not going to office. Weitat and Jingkun knew my situation well and suggested the idea to me the night before.

The travelling time was definitely harmful to my work. The time wastage and crawling-like speed of the laptop together with its lack of resource to do up the design work forced me to make up my mind. It was a good decision. At least I had clear self-conscience that I was even spending my own holidays on work.

The staff from Starhub finally called over. My younger brother confirmed the new line we were going to subscribe and together with my mum’s singing, we picked a new number out of the given choices. I would be waiting for the new SIM card to be delivered over and then my current line would be cancelled.

I was tremendously sick of receiving annoying calls looking for another person on my line ever since I got it three years ago. I guessed the previous owners of my current number were running away from loansharks and thus they did not let anyone know of them changing their numbers; or perhaps, some morons could have given their friends wrong number (my number). Lastly, it was also necessary for me to get away from gays and unworthy friends.

Jonathan sent me new pictures for amendments. I further touched up the faces of the models to remove pimples and moles, and smoothen their faces. I was one step nearer to perfection of my Photoshop skill though I was not even at half of the journey.

In the evening when I was taking my nap from the exhaustion of making love with Photoshop, my mum called to ask me to go down to get my watch done. It was a birthday present two years ago from my younger brother and the chain was a bit tight that I had not put it on for so long.

.

Sony Ericsson G705

My younger brother, mum and I went to Bugis on Sunday afternoon to renew our phone lines’ contracts.

We took bus 80 to the National Library to return some books before going to the M1 Shop at Bugis Junction. We were taken unaware when the staff told us that our intended phone, Nokia E71 was out of stock already. We decided to go to Starhub shop first to get my mum another cheap yet good phone but the Starhub shop, which my brother remembered was no longer around.

We were walking halfway when my mum suddenly said she wanted to get a packet of French fries, which was very random. Later, we found out that my mum was feeling weak due to famine and it was quite ridiculous since she had bought many carrot cakes earlier on, which she did not take before leaving the house.

The MacDonald’s restaurant was simply too crowded and thus my brother decided to go to the V8 cafe for some light snacks. We ordered a plate of Cheesy Potato Wedges and Chicken pizza to share. The wedges were delicious. My elder brother and his girlfriend arrived later.

We went back to the M1 shop later and my elder brother tried hard to find out more about the Nokia E71 phone, which was a disappointment. It actually took me very long to decide on getting the phone as well since everything was nice about, especially the price, except that the camera was lousy. We would not want to wait for another month for them to top up the stocks again and that it would not be in promotion price anymore.

The next resort was to get other models and my younger brother recommended Nokia N79 and Sony Ericsson G705, which were more value for money and cheap enough. Since we had another Starhub line to re-contract, we bought both phones and I was able to choose which to use while my younger brother would send another one.

My elder brother and his girlfriend left in disappointment while the three of us stayed behind to get all the documentation done. Then, we took bus 960 to Marina Square for the Starhub Roadshow but it was a total wasted trip.

.

Henderson Waves with Family

Sunday started off in the morning with my elder brother’s plan to have breakfast at Amoy Street. We were, however, so unlucky that the stall was having a two day break. Therefore, we had chicken rice instead. So, my elder brother and his girlfriend and my mum shared half a white chicken and half a roosted chicken at twenty bucks. The taste was normal but I did not like the soup. After eating, we had a little shopping at the NTUC.

The next part of the day was during the late afternoon after taking a nap. My younger brother and mum were ready to go to the Henderson Waves. We stopped by the bread shop near 7-11 store and got some buns. My mum had a waffle and complained that the amount of peanut butter applied was very little.

The Henderson Waves

We started off at Henderson Road and challenged the stairs. It was not that tough after all. After admiring the place which I had been to for more than four times already, we proceeded towards the Terrence garden and then down Forest Walk. We stopped at Hort Park and the entire trip took us more than an hour.

We took a bus to Vivocity and shopped at the Giant. We conquered the groceries section and managed to let my mum know that we had to carry whatever we bought all the way home. We were drooling over some nice and cheap sofa but had to face the fact that our house was too cramp and messy to put any.

Next, we stopped at the Starhub shop and applied to change our house’s phone line to Starhub since we would be enjoying the free service as long as we were subscribed to SCV Max-online. We were the last customer and the Pilipino staff Christopher impressed me with his politeness.

We bought big coleslaw from Harbourfront Centre’s KFC and went down to MacDonald’s for dinner. They did not have student meal and thus, our budget meal was destroyed.