Nobody was really surprised. Kodak has been on a decline since the beginning of the 2000s as digital cameras began to supercede film cameras. Unlike the recent passing of Steve Jobs, I haven’t seen many people on my social media networks lamenting the loss of the company that popularized photography. Looks like people just aren’t shedding a tear for Kodak.

While I do feel sorry for the Kodak employees and pensioners who face an uncertain future, they had little say in how the company was run to the ground by their management over the past few decades. Yes, Kodak film allowed for the creation of millions of amazing images, but in my lifetime, Kodak didn’t care for the consumer very much.

I’m normally a very nostalgic guy, and I will always remember walking past the bright yellow decor of film-development stores that were sponsored by Kodak in the 1980s. It was always fascinating to see how long strips of negatives would pass through the innards of the gigantic machine which would spit out 3R-sized color photos.

However Kodak left more of a bitter taste in my mouth than nostalgia is worth. Let me tell you why.

1. Film was ridiculously overpriced.

When I started getting into photography in the late 1990s, it was such an expensive hobby. If I remember correctly, it was $5 per roll of film, $10 to develop a roll of film and 30 cents to print each photo in 4R size. So to shoot a roll of 36 exposures would easily cost you $25 before inflation.

That’s not counting the cost of batteries as film cameras were power guzzlers – remember the sound of film being rewound in a compact camera? Today you can shoot thousands of photos without considering the cost – it costs just about nothing on the digital platform. But we always had to consider the cost of reloading each roll of film.

You can argue that it forced us to become better photographers when we didn’t waste film, but I can also argue that Kodak profited handsomely from enthusiast photographers.

Kodak and other film makers never really sought to lower the cost of film. The centuries-old method of using silver halide worked for them until digital overtook it with dazzling speed (actually it took about 5 years for digital to go into the mainstream from the time the first decent digicams appeared in the early 2000s).

2. Kodak never understood digital, and still doesn’t

As a tech writer in the mid-2000s, I always groaned when Kodak’s PR agency would pitch their latest digicams for a review. Compared to current models of the day from Canon and Olympus, Kodak’s digital cameras often seemed like backward and ugly cousins. And their image quality was never up to par. I could be wrong, but they were probably re-branded OEM digital cameras. For a company that invented digital cameras, they put little effort and money in advancing the technology.

As film development stores began to shutter down rapidly, I didn’t see Kodak doing anything significant to save their retail partners.The shopkeepers were helpless as the landscape shifted and so was their principal supplier.

I remember it was so expensive to request for film negatives to be converted to a digital format. I tried it for a few rolls after a professional shoot and the quality of the scan was not fantastic. Where was Kodak then? Still trying to sell more Portra film to professionals, and over-saturated Gold label films to clueless tourists.

If you read any business story on Kodak’s decline, you’ll see so many other ways that they failed to capitalize on the digital tsunami. It’s not that they didn’t have the money to invest,  (especially at their peak in the 1990s), but like many legacy companies, they clung on to the past desperately and turned their noses at consumers. We just wanted a better solution instead of having to panic every time our film canisters or strips became accidentally exposed to the sun.

I embraced digital photography the minute I discovered it, and was over the moon when digicams finally reached an acceptable level of quality compared to film (that was about 2007 if I remember correctly, while dSLRs achieved that about 2004 with the Canon 1D Mark II). When I used the Canon 1D Mk II, my first 1GB memory card cost a whopping $400, but it paid for itself quickly – that card was approximately the cost of 16 rolls of film (or 576 exposures) and I shot thousands of photos in a few weeks.

It was sad at first to see how Kodak failed to change itself for the times (in contrast to its greatest nemesis Fujifilm), but after a while, one didn’t care for the company at all. It looks like after this bankruptcy protection, Kodak wants to focus on digital printing. That’s another silly move – everyone in developed countries are gradually moving to ebooks and Zinio mags on tablets, and we’re now sharing photos on Facebook folders…thousands of them, all for free. Who will pay for digital printing in the future?

Like the cliche goes, change is a constant, and we have no choice but to embrace change. If you work in a company that doesn’t embrace change, please take a look around and see if you can get out before the company becomes obsolete by its own choice or ignorance.

Kodak may emerge from its bankruptcy protection a better company, but the young people of today don’t even know how iconic it once was. Perhaps I should be sad for the past, but that feeling just isn’t happening.

Related posts:

1. You make me feel like dancing

A few years ago, I attended a company course called Presentation Power. Its main objective was to teach people how to make more powerful and impactful presentations. I’m going to distill the entire course (or at least what I can remember of it) into one single sentence:

“What’s in it for your audience to listen to you for more than a minute?”

You can be speaking on any topic on earth, but as long as you know what your audience is interested in listening to, and you know how to tell it that way, you’re already a powerful presenter.

I write this post because recently, I sat through an awful presentation. The presenter spoke English well (he’s a native speaker) and he had interesting things to say. Unfortunately, it was on a topic I had little interest in, and I was made to believe before the meeting that we would be discussing about something else.

I gave it my all to be as polite as possible and listen to what he had to say (why, maybe there might be something I could learn or benefit from this), but then it was Death by Powerpoint for nearly an hour. Look, I might work for Microsoft and I do use the Office Suite a lot, but I can tell you that with a great program comes great responsibility – Powerpoint is very easily used for the wrong purposes.

To make it worse, the Powerpoint deck he was using, appeared to be designed for another audience and objective in mind, but the presenter had deemed it okay to re-use it on me. To cut the long story short, by the end of the presentation I was really tired and not really interested in finding out more.

Not everyone can be a good or great presenter, and I think I speak too much Singlish to be a great orator. However, I can share with you a few tips I learned from the course, my journalism experience (where I met hundreds of good and horrible speakers) and my work in Microsoft.

1. Be very clear, both to yourself and your audience, what you are going to speak about before you even begin. Otherwise you’re mismanaging expectations. I often dread attending church when their most boring and longwinded speaker is giving a sermon, and ironically, he gave a sermon called “Are you wasting your time” a few weeks ago.

2. Give a good summary page/overview of your presentation, so your audience has a chance to tell you which segments they might want to skip to. Or just get to the point and expand upon it from there.

3. Use as few slides as possible. Some people have learnt how to cut down on the number of images and text paragraphs on their slides, but it’s still not enough. You have to distil distil distil your slides until it contains the barest minimum of information and visuals. Let your mouth do the talking, and not have people staring at the slides all the time trying to read reams of information.

4. Learn to read your audience and adjust your presentation on the fly. Are they yawning? Are they getting stoned out? Are they playing with their handphone? What is the reason? The one thing NOT to do is to keep droning on until you get to say what you planned to say. The right thing to do is to engage them directly and start asking them questions. You get to know if they were listening, if they were interested or if their mind is already on another planet. The feedback that you get from them will allow you to decide if  you want to change topic, cut short your speech or just do something else.

Once you lose your audience’s attention, your presentation has broken down.

5. Give them a great reason (or many reasons) to listen to you with absolute rapt attention. Like I wrote earlier, what’s in it for them to bother about you and your topic? No matter whether you are a sales guy, journalist, teacher, doctor etc, your audience needs a good reason to keep listening to what you have to say. Does it benefit them financially or emotionally? Is it a matter of life and death? Will it change society as they know it? Can you say it in five minutes instead of fifty?

(Note to church preachers – you don’t need to fill up the entire 45min speaking slot you know).

Really, you don’t have to speak like a lawyer to be a great presenter. Just put yourself in the shoes of your audience and you can soon see the flaws of your presentation. Poor presentations are often the same in nature – they just don’t connect with the audience.

Sadly, many people are only interested in listening to themselves, not someone else, and that’s why they’ll never understand what an effective presentation should sound like.

You can avoid their pitfalls very easily – just recall all the bad presentations you’ve been in, or keep observing the bad one you’re stuck in right now – and ask yourself how do you avoid boring/annoying people like the guy on the stage.

Related posts:

1. The power of effective English

I write this post – which will take you less than five minutes to read – to tell you that you do yourself, as well as the people you’re holding up, a grave disservice.And that I won’t hesitate to tell you off right there and then. Perhaps I’ll be nice about it, but I’ll still do it. Also because you deserve it.

I believe most of us want to be upright and good, or at least perceived as such. The imagery of knights continue to inspire many young kids to heroism or at least gentlemanly behavior. Key attributes of a knight would surely include bravery, chivalry and a serious code of honor. But most people probably won’t associate them with punctuality. (In reality, the knights of old were probably a boorish lot.)

It’s unfortunate that King Arthur never spoke at length on getting jousting tournaments to start on time, and I find it even worse that there’s a modern English term “fashionably late”.

Fashion is never late, and late is never in fashion, people.

Punctuality frames peoples’ impression of you so quickly. Think about it, for every minute that you have yet to turn up without a good reason or forewarning, your reputation drops in tandem. When you do finally arrive, do you expect people to treat you with a smile or a scowl?

And conversely, for a person who is consistently on time for meetings and dates, people come to know him as rock-solid reliable when it comes to keeping time.

If you have trouble with punctuality, it might help to get a good wristwatch with fresh batteries.

I’m not sure at which point in my life did I begin to value punctuality as a virtue. But definitely before I started work.

Even as a journalist (where is the norm to be “fashionably late”, a terrible excuse for poor time management and slow typing skills), I abhorred being late for press conferences or interviews. What if I missed a great soundbite? What if I missed an awesome photo opportunity?

Yet the PR industry feeds this behavior by organizing events with the expectation that journalists would turn up 30-60min late. So I would be there on time, and yet have to wait an hour for anything significant to happen.

Times are a changing, folks. With greater workloads, more email and less work-life balance, every minute is more precious than ever. If you’re going to be late, at least inform your receiving party in advance with a quick call or SMS.

Don’t assume people have the spare time to wait for you, or that we accept lateness as a practice.

There’s nothing more rude than a person turning up late without any warning, and then when he does appear, he pretends that there’s absolutely nothing wrong.

I regret to say, I won’t let you continue to think that way.

Ok, my time is up. Thanks for reading.

Related posts:

1. The death of the Post-Intelligencer
2. A filler post
3. Post seminar thoughts

We went through a General Elections where we managed to finally exercise our collective voice through the Internet (the Prime Minister actually apologized on behalf of his party, can you believe it?) as a galvanizing force, we demonstrated to the local news media that we no longer consumed media in the old, top down manner, and technology continues to transform the way we consume content with greater acceleration than ever.

On the personal front, I completed my fourth year working in Microsoft, and my SPH journalism days are but a faint and distant memory. My thought processes remain much like a journalist – always probing, always skeptical – but my daily skill sets have shifted from the verbal to the numerical.

It’s hard to believe, but I’m finding it harder and harder to write posts on this blog. The older you get, the less you want to say about how you feel and the things that you observe. It’s also more difficult in a corporate world when people can easily misconstrue what you write. Facebook now offers me a private space where I can share my ramblings and images constantly with my close friends and acquaintances, without fearing some random stranger who would read my posts and form an inaccurate picture of me.

And this year, after 15 years since I first rode my army motorcycle, I finally got my own civilian bike, freeing me from the tyranny of the Certificate of Entitlement (which have returned to sky-high levels of the early 2000s) but exposing me to the relentless Singapore wet weather and reckless Johor riders.

As we head into 2012, apparently the year the world ends according to the Mayans, I do have some wishes I hope to see come true before the Mayan or Christian Apocalypse. They might seem insignificant to some of you, but hey, they mean a lot to me. These are things I think about daily these days, and I hope the new year brings improvements in these areas.

More good drivers on the roads, seriously.

If you think about it, there is much stress, anger, time wastage, loss of productivity and general unhappiness that is generated by lousy drivers and riders. One fool tailgating and smashing into another car in front can generate a traffic jam on the PIE, CTE and AYE combined. And totaling your car today by choice or otherwise, is a very expensive proposition, since COEs are so high. Bad drivers can really spoil everyone’s day, so for brighter days ahead, let’s drive well and be better role models to the young drivers around us so they won’t pick up bad habits that other people impress upon them.

Better weather

Global warming is upon us and it sucks. From higher temperatures to colder Novembers, we who live at the Equator suffer pretty badly. We don’t get hit by typhoons or tidal waves, but there are people who do and we should pray for them too.

More sensibility

Personally, I don’t like Twitter. I mean, why restrict me to a stupid 140-character limit? And I’ve mentioned before that it drives poor social media behavior as people seek to be as controversial or as witty as they can, even if the situation does not call for it. We’ve seen various companies and individuals taken down by poor use of Twitter and Facebook. In the new age where we talk less and post more, we need more common sense, and more wariness of what the Internet can do to our reputations.

Sensibility also extends to the way we think about our society and our neighbors. I’m personally appalled by much of the xenophobia and bias towards foreign talent in our country, when society is a free-for-all and everyone has a right to grab their opportunity if the talent and the heart fit the job. So what if they speak differently from us? They’re still people, with families, with dreams and with emotions. Just like you and me.

More guts

More people need to speak up on the things that are going wrong. For too long, we’ve kept mum as some public services have deteriorated (MRT services, COE management, housing policies etc) but because so many Singaporeans like to complain about the smallest things, people think that it’s wrong to complain too much. Excuse me, it’s never wrong to complain when something is really wrong, but one must also provide intelligent solutions, Otherwise, the ones you complain about will always say you don’t know what’s going on, so keep quiet. Show them you know, show them you’ve got the guts to speak up, and show them you’ve got the brains to offer alternatives and answers.

A greater pursuit of happiness and contentment 

My personal philosophy of life is to seek happiness + contentment for myself, my family and my friends. I recently cleared a few drawers full of old letters and receipts. Now I was cheered to see letters and photos of long lasting friendships, but I was also stunned by how many receipts I had for materialistic goods like speaker systems, cameras and other gadgets. I love technology, and I love gadgets, but I have to remind myself I’m no longer writing technology stories and keep my gear to a minimum of what keeps me happy and contented. Many of my gadgets served that purpose, but quite a few didn’t. I will also have to work harder on bringing happiness to those around me.

Contentment is another tough thing to achieve. When is enough enough? Especially in a society like ours where it is so difficult to satisfy everyone? We should not be content with poor services or policies, but we should be thankful that life here is much better than many places in the world. We should not be content with the terrible education system that forces children to lose their childhood, but we should be glad that the kids can grow up in a safe environment here. Contentment doesn’t mean accepting every situation, but being positive about what we have that is good and useful.

More believers

And finally, I pray that many more people will come to know Jesus and the message of hope, love and eternal life that he brings to us. I also pray for older Christians like me who are constantly on the verge of forgetting his grace and power. Every day, I remind myself that the things I have are made possible only because He allows it, and we pray daily with the kids, always hoping that they will walk the straight and narrow path, and not veer off it. In a world where so many things are uncertain and where many of my desires as listed above may never come true, God remains the one constant that does not change. Whether we’ll have a financial meltdown again, or whether we will get stuck in another train disruption, there’s only one person to rely on no matter how bad or how good things get for us.

So here’s a great new year to you.

Related posts:

1. Closing thoughts on the elections
2. Thoughts before turning thirty
3. Random thoughts to close 2008

So with a trip to the Paint Extreme workshop, where the tank was repainted and decaled with a Kamen Rider logo 仮面ライダー, the Black Widow was born.

Related posts:

1. My Kawasaki Ninja 250R – Black & Red Edition
2. The Black Spider-Man Logo theme!

A scene from the Bishan MRT platform during the train system breakdown on 15th Dec. Photo from AFP

I just spent two weeks in Hong Kong and Penang, and it was during this time that two things happened in the Singapore public transport system - Comfort DelGro changed its fare taxi structure and SMRT suffered two consecutive days of train breakdowns on its Circle and N-S lines. Both things sparked off citizen fury on different levels, and what is remarkable is how little the Govt. has stepped in to moderate public sentiment, as well as its own image after the recent poor showing at the General Elections.

Transport is always a hot potato in Singapore for several reasons, and these are not being tackled correctly by the people in charge.

It highlights widening class differences

With today's stratospheric COE prices, only the well-off can afford to buy a new car. I bought my Toyota Altis nearly 3 years ago at SGD49K brand new when the COE was at its all time low of a few thousand dollars, and now the current model is priced at over SGD100K. Thus it is no surprise that the cheap car brands in SG have died off or declined rapidly, leaving top car sales to the premium brands like Audi and BMW.

Most CEOs and ministers in Singapore do not take public transport, and if you drive all the time, you would not know the level of unhappiness on the ground when it comes to overcrowded trains (at all times, not just peak hours) and always-late public buses. Sure, a minister can give public transport a spin for several weeks to do his research, but surely he wouldn't take it all the time.

The resentment that people would have towards Transport Ministry policymakers, cab company and SMRT CEOs, would probably include anger at the lack of empathy due to the different lifestyles involved.

It is all too easy for people to frame this as a contest of wills between the Haves and Have-Nots. Why would the Haves really bother about the transport woes of the Have-Nots?

Of course, there are a lot of well-paid people who do take the MRT daily, especially those working in the Raffles Place area where it's not whether you can afford the season parking, it's whether you can actually get a season parking lot.

FYI, for various reasons, I take the train, bus, car and motorcycle on different days of the week so I experience all the issues involved in any mode of transport. I hate taking public buses though, because the wait can really kill you.

It is not world-class, at least in the eyes of the locals

If you travel overseas quite a bit, you'd really appreciate the range of public transport choices there are here in Singapore. If you don't, you'd always be unhappy with the situation.

In Penang, we struggled to find cabs to flag down, and when we did, we still had to haggle over pricing (which I would always lose if there are no cabs in the vicinity to provide competition). The bus stops were a sad sight, often with no signage about which buses actually stopped there. And if you go to Jakarta, you can't simply escape the traffic jam by running to the subway - because there isn't one.

On the other end of the spectrum is Hong Kong, where there is true competition in the transport industry. Taking taxis in HK has always been a fuss-free affair for me, and the MTR subway always impresses with its ability to transport millions of people with more efficiency than our MRT even though the HK system is older (and more grimy looking).

Singapore's public transport is somewhat near HK's level but the problem is that there is no perceived competition in Singapore (hey look, the national taxi association is encouraging the other companies to increase their fares like Comfort), there are confusing taxi surcharges all around, our public buses are notorious for being slow to arrive, and our MRT system is simply overloaded most of the time due to the population squeeze.

To the average Singaporean, it doesn't matter whether it is CityCab/Comfort or SMRT that you're dealing with. It all seems like the same entity and you always feel that you have no say over their levels of service standards. And if you don't own a car or bike, you can't actually boycott the main public transport providers.

When people write in to the media complaining about the lack of rationale or logic over public transport price hikes, the transport companies are either silent or give some template answer that doesn't answer anything. That's not good PR, that's terrible PR. If you need to raise taxi fares due to rising costs, put forth your data - Singaporeans are largely educated and can analyse the data for themselves. At its most basic, good PR is simply communicating to people what you want to say and making sure people get your message with no distortion or misunderstanding. If it is rising COEs that is adding to the cost of taxi operations, then go fix that bit with LTA, not pass the cost to consumers.

It is a critical barometer of public sentiment

Due to poor management of the COE system by LTA in the past decade, the car population here rose rapidly, straining the road network and increasing the number of traffic jams. Add to that the influx of foreigners into Singapore which helped to put a strain on the public transport system.

Unlike other political issues which people may forget about (eg. ministerial pay, which we have still yet to hear anything about six months after the elections), public transport hits you like a sledgehammer every morning if you are part of the commuting crowd trying not to smell the other guy's armpit in the train.

Yet oddly, on many instances when we face public transport issues, the authorities hardly  manage public sentiment on the issue with any finesse.

When Comfort raised its fares, this was the Govt's response as reported by Today newspaper:

While he was "sympathetic" to concerns of both commuters and cabbies, Mr Cedric Foo, chairman of the Government Parliamentary Committee for transport, noted that the taxi sector has been deregulated and market conditions would decide fares.

To observers, if one is "sympathetic", one would use this to generate political goodwill rather than just let the taxi companies have their way (which still baffles the average person, including me) with no semblance of further action or thought on the matter.

So much damage has been done to SMRT, Comfort DelGro and the LTA's image in the past two weeks, it is a no-brainer that the politicians should use this opportunity to repair public sentiment, and that PR experts should enter the fray to show them how proper damage control is done. It was only with the recent SMRT breakdowns that the Transport Minister finally stepped in to give his public comments, but what about the earlier taxi fare hikes?

The bottomline is this - if you don't manage the issue of public transport carefully in Singapore, be it the actual infrastructure or the communications surrounding it, you will end up being on the receiving end of societal class divisions and anger at the lack of public engagement. There has been a consistent lack of discourse by the stakeholders in the transport industry, and they've allowed the media (traditional and social) to have a field day with their shortcomings.

In the meantime, I will go for a spin on my motorbike.

Related posts:

1. Twitter and the lack of curation
2. Nicole Seah and Public Opinion
3. So you want my vote

It’s been ten years since I started my violin classes. In the beginning, I was fueled by curiosity and fascination. Could an adult like me pick up an instrument at 25 and do well at it? Could I fulfill a lifelong dream to read and play music? And how good could a violin sound in my hands?

Over the past decade, the key goals haven’t really changed, but I see it so differently now.

1. There’s a long way to go in improving myself.

The technical difficulties of the violin, coupled with a working and family life, means that it takes me much longer than a child to learn and play new violin pieces. And every time my teacher demonstrates how to play a piece, I feel so embarrassed because it’s a reminder of how poorly I still play after all these years. But while there is momentary discouragement, there is hope, that perhaps one day I can play as well as my teacher.

The violin epitomizes the ACS motto: The Best Is Yet To Be.

2. I have bad habits I cannot see, and they take a long time to remove

My teacher will sometimes teach me techniques to overcome my bad habits (eg. too much bow strength at the end, rather than the beginning of a bar). These habits are so ingrained in me, they take a really long time to abolish. The worst thing is that when the piece is difficult, these habits come back immediately and I don’t even realize it.

Thankfully, my teacher has infinite patience and continues to help me along, and I’m very grateful for it. The same also applies to the way I live my life at work and home – I have bad habits that have become so much a part of me, I need others to tell me and help me change for the better. It’s never nice to take honest and brutal feedback, but it’s even worse to continue on the wrong path.

3. Technical excellence is possible in anything, just practise, practise and practise.

I’m a pretty good photographer, because I spent so much time on it during my younger days. I devoured books, shot off hundreds of rolls of film, spent countless hours on Photoshop and in my home darkroom, and received continual feedback from my seniors in TNP’s Photo Desk. I wish I spent that much time on my violin, because technical excellence remains within grasp, but I just don’t practise enough.

The difference is that I desired so greatly back then to become a pro photog, but I am fearful that I will never be anything more than a lousy violinist. There are two very different motivations here, and I’m still trying to motivate myself to overcome my fears, and plunge myself into music like I did with photography.

And truth be told, music is far more difficult than photography, and requires several magnitudes more of commitment to excise the errors and to be able to emote the tunes with flair. It is always humbling to attend classes with young kids and see them play so well because they have, voluntarily or not, put in the hours needed to create the muscle memory in their fingers.

My teacher told me this gem: “Don’t practise till you get it right. Practise till you don’t get it wrong.”

4. Life is about enjoying the moment and letting go

I know I need to relax in order to play faster, but I still get too tensed up and I mess up the semiquavers. It’s such a paradox that you need to unwind more to play more difficult pieces, but it’s true. Once in a long while, I might enter the zone and play with a relaxed mind, but most of the time, I’m worrying to much.

That has taught me that in life, when the going gets really tough, you really need to let go and let the practice kick in. Everything else is up to God.

Related posts:

1. Should your child go for music lessons?
2. The Return Of Jack

Related posts:

1. The Kindle 3 and the price of early adoption
2. Final thoughts on the Kindle 2
3. Book Review: A Discovery Of Witches

I was driving into Orchard Road with the family a few weeks ago when I saw the huge billboard (above, from Mr Brown’s site) from Abercrombie & Fitch. I was so stunned that I took a second look and probably put myself at risk of an accident. It was a black and white image of a rippling male body with his genitals barely hiding from view underneath the low-slung jeans.

I said to Goy: “Wow, that picture is going to cause a few accidents.” but left it at that. After all, the billboard did its job of capturing my attention and the male model does have an amazing body. And it was a very well-taken photograph, never mind that it had little to do with A&F apparel at all – such is the nature of brand advertising.

In recent days, the billboard has become a tabloid-style news story. First it was reported that the Advertising Standards Authority of Singapore (ASAS) had suspended the billboard. Then it came to light that the Authority had no authority to do so, since A&F was not part of its group and not beholden to their bidding (which I found was the more newsworthy bit, rather than the near-naked guy). The Media Authority of Singapore  supported ASAS’ call but said that the industry is self-regulated. In short, nobody can take down the ad except A&F themselves, and I’m sure many ad agencies are rubbing their hands in glee thinking about what they can achieve now with their clients.

I don’t know if they’ll ever get the billboard taken down but I oppose such a move on artistic grounds. Yes, we are a conservative society, but we are also living in a wasteland of mediocre visuals and advertisements. If you’ve ever visited Rome, one of the key attractions is a statue of a very nude man – Michelangelo’s David.

I’ve visited the statue twice, and both times, I’ve just sat there staring at the sheer beauty and perfection of the sculpture. No, I’m not gay, but there is something enthralling about the artistic depiction of a human body. And you don’t see people going “eeeee, that man is naked!” because it is undoubtedly art, and it is not vulgar.

And the Christian fundamentalist shouldn’t wrongly compare the story of Adam and Eve who fell into sin and quickly covered their nakedness in front of God – our Creator made them perfect and unclothed but sin caused them to become self-conscious of their bodies. Man would of course fall greater into sin and lose self-control of their bodies, which is what the Bible warns against repeatedly. Then we should also consider what happens when someone views an image that he purports will make him lose self-control of his body – this is the line drawn between art and pornography.

When it comes to art, everyone has the right to disagree on the interpretation. What is vulgar to someone may seem as virtuoso to another. But art is always judged and weighed in the zeitgeist of the times, and overlaid with common standards of morality and sensibility. It is not surprising to see ASAS’ objection to the ad, but one also must ask: “Are there a lot of people who are upset with the ad?” Personally, I haven’t heard anyone complaining and demanding the billboard’s removal. These sort of images, my dear ASAS, are par for the course these days.

And as a Straits Times forum writer pointed out, there are far more vulgar ads going around that ASAS does nothing about. It’s just that they are all smaller than the billboard in size.

I’m more upset with the general low standards of advertising in Singapore which celebrates the lack of wit, creative expression and artistics standards. Marketing managers are happy to adapt the most boring global visuals they can get from their HQ and just get their media agencies to book the ad space – because they don’t know what they can achieve in creating customer excitement. Most of them have never stepped into Bras Basah’s Basheer Books and flipped through the vast collection of award-winning advertising visuals and graphic art, and thought about doing it better themselves.

I’ll be very clear here: I don’t wear Abercrombie apparel, nor am I a fan. I’m a conservative in many ways, but I also appreciate art deeply. I’ve taken my fair share of sexy fashion photos during my photography days and I hope they weren’t seen as vulgar. I’m also very inspired by the billboard’s abs of steel and I shall do more sit-ups tonight.

If ASAS hasn’t gotten it by now, the whole furor has just given A&F the absolute best advertising in town – public controversy where the advertiser hasn’t really done anything illegal. The more ASAS tries to pull the billboard down, the worse it will look on them, because all A&F did was to put up a thought-provoking visual and it turned out that ASAS is really toothless after all its public statements. Bigger powers may step in, and they will be in turn branded as prudes or overreacting by the younger crowd in Singapore.

It’s always amusing to us media and ex-media alumni how stories are generated in Singapore. Many times, newsmakers do not know when they are exposing themselves to ridicule or embarrassment when they decide to go public with something. Then the media has a field day and the newsmaker wonders how did things go this way.

Just leave the billboard alone folks. A&F will change it when next season’s apparel arrives anyway. So far there haven’t been any car accidents right?

No related posts.

In July this year, I finally received permission from the CEO of the house to have my own two wheels. Then it became a question of which bike to get.

Now in Singapore, most Class 2A licence holders will go for a Honda CB400 (Super 4) as the licence allows you to get a bike up to 400cc. I had no desire to get a bike that everyone was riding on the roads, especially one that we used as the training bike in Bukit Batok Training Centre. Due to Honda’s dominance of this category, bike dealers now bring in very few other streetbike or sportbike models in the 201-400cc range.

The stock Ninja 250R in black, which is what my bike looked like when I bought it.

After shopping around, I decided to go for the Kawasaki Ninja 250R. An extremely popular model worldwide (apparently it is Kawa’s bestselling model in the US), this bike is hardly found on the roads here due to people’s preference to get the Super 4. It was also half the price of the Super 4 when new (I hear too many horror stories of second hand vehicles to bother with used).

Much has been written about how the Ninja is a great little performer – it’s light, it’s nimble, and the 2008 redesign is just plain sexy. Honda launched the new CBR250 around the same time with more modern parts (ie. a digital speedo), but the Ninja has the edge in looks.

For the first two months or so, I was focused on just breaking in the bike. Then I discovered the wonderful/terrible world of bike modifications. By nature I’m not a car or bike nut, nor did I modify my Corolla Altis very much apart from changing the rims and audio system. But motorcycles have an amazing capacity to be modded and the Ninja is no exception. You can do small mods or extreme stuff like changing all the fairings (the plastic body which gives it its overall look).

I did most of my mods at Unique Motorsports at Kaki Bukit Autobay, and AHM Performance (a few doors down from Unique) helped to order and install the Koso digital speedometer. The Ninja mod project was like a big Gundam airbrushing assignment – how to bring out the best parts of the machine without going overboard.

My Ninja, after all the major mods which turned it into a black and red beauty. The old rear mud guard was removed and replaced by EvoTech Tail Tidy, and the bulbous stock signal lights replaced by tiny Rizoma lights. I also repainted the rims, which is a stronger visual option than just pasting rim stickers (which can peel after a while).

The worst thing about modding is how addictive it is – once you do a small mod, you think about which other parts you need to mod. The best thing about bike mods is that it is relatively unexpensive when compared to car mods – the total cost of my Ninja mods is still lower than a complete set of Ah Beng car tyre rims.

Driven metal red grips, Motovation bar ends, ASV brake and clutch levers, EvoTech brake fluid reservoir. Sorry for the distracting sun ray, but you must agree such photo angles don’t come all the time.

Red bolts and gold engine oil cover to add small accents to the side of the bike. I changed most of the visible nuts and bolts to red.

Another dash of gold with the rear brake fluid reservoir. I’ve thought about changing the stock exhaust but the legal ones are all not too pretty, and they don’t really improve performance for the money.

I also changed the brakelines into braided steel red colored ones.

The Über-cool Koso digital speedometer. You can’t get this here as demand is pretty low, so we had to ship it in from Germany (even though the product is made in Taiwan). Koso also makes a special Ninja 250R mounting board and plug & play wiring kit for easy installation. I guess most people who own this bike can’t wait to get rid of the ugly, old school analogue dashboard. 

 A clearer view of the handlebar area. I also added red and gold bolts to accentuate the dashboard area. You can also see the small analogue clock from www.clocks4bikes.com which is specially machined to fit Ninja 250Rs.

 The Immortal Graphix tank protector pad took some time to source, as most of the designs on the market are just plain tacky or just plain. 

 The rear seat was replaced by the original Kawasaki rear seat cowl accessory. It makes the bike look cooler as a single seater, but it does make it less comfortable to ride when I’m carrying a backpack to work.

Related posts:

1. The Black Widow
2. My Ninja Garden
3. Goodbye, PC Mag print edition