A far cry from Singapore where the security services lost their number one terrorist suspect last year, and had to rely on Malaysian security forces to apprehend their man. Of course, public opinion was never really in his favour but apparently trying to escape hasn’t endeared him to the local populace as they creatively suggest he pays the prices for the security forces own incompetency by restricting his privileges.

Of course, Stewart hasn’t threatened to bomb Changi Airport but then again, Stewart has already been found guilty while the other is still awaiting due process I believe.

I couldn’t take it anymore and decided to give them a call to see what the problem is.

The actual customer service staff that answered the call told me he wasn’t technically trained¹. I should refer to the Tech guys². The tech gal was a little stand-offish as if I’d broken something I shouldn’t have but I’ll pass that off as her being a little tetchy since she probably isn’t customer service trained and probably wants to go back to talking with her machines rather than deal with pesky folk who keep breaking things.

Although I’m reasonably sure I didn’t break the Internet while she wasn’t looking.

In the end I had to do some tests using widgets on their site. Not really sure what this entitled me to but the tech gal said her engineers would auto-magically spot these tests, and report back to her. So how long would this take? Maybe a day.

A day?!?

Okay, guess they’re a little backed-up given that they’ve recently had such a successful promotion³.

I have a feeling they’ll tell me their network is fine. It will definitely be someone else’s fault. Most of the Internet’s faulty possibly but most definitely it will have been my own general mistake because I can’t connect a modem to a router apparently.

I’m not the only one apparently unhappy with SH…

Frequent Disconnection on Starhub Maxmobile
Just Terminated My Starhub Broadband

… and what’s a little bit scary is that Starhub wins bid to operate Spore’s next gen broadband. Gawd help us all.

1. He did give me a ray of hope by asking me whether this has been going on for long, but dashed it all by telling me he knows nothing of anything actually useful
2. My heart did groan as anyone who’s ever dealt with tech folks knows they speak another language
3. As the phone system drone is telling me.

Firstly, her messaging leverages on a key consumer insight: we all want quick cash. She also addresses our biggest fear: that quick cash is too good to be true. She reassures us that the loan is legal since you might have some niggling doubts with the generic surname and mobile telephone number.

(My only critique here on this excellent campaign is that maybe she should have added Bahasa to make her message appeal to a wider audience.)

Miss Tan is no fool, she knows that frequency is also a key to delivering a good message. That’s why she’s developed several iterations of her ad (in some case, even promising 24 hour loan approval):

And lastly, placement is key. She dumped these outside of an insurance company called Aviva. Nothing like getting your product or service message out in the right places.

Really, do I need to post on the ridiculousness of such an “official” association? Well, I don’t need to do anything which is sort of the point of blogging. It’s a personal tool for personal expression.

Eshin Direct used to be involved in Hong Kong’s blogging infancy at the periphery and has enough experience to know that blogging politics or regulation of how people express themselves is pointless.

Singapore presents a unique conundrum in that it actually makes celebrities out of its bloggers and we’re inundated with “star” blogs. One does wonder if the whole Dawn vs. whatever her name is attracted more viewers than Singapore or even American idol.

Just exactly who is qualified to set up a blogging association anyway? That’s like saying you’ll set up an association to regulate freedom of expression. And that, as we all know, is the government’s job thank you.

With the release of 3.0, I’m quite a happy bunny as I can now upload in fire-and-forget mode and am comforted that I don’t have to wait and supervise the upload of my images to backup. Unfortunately my MacBook fell ill and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to recover two memory card worth of photos. Luckily I have the high quality JPEGs but it is still upsetting to lose the RAW files.

Now, I no longer have to wonder about whether the 300-400 photos, constituting approximately 1 GB made it to Flickr. And, I’m up to date now as I have all my photos on Flickr³.

1. Approximately 3-4 MB in size each
2. To be fair, it could have been my Macs but both being unable to sustain an upload? I don’t think so.
3. Yes, yes, I will make some more public eventually.

Actually, it is surprising because I am getting a lot of responses back from folks that I don’t normally speak to regularly. It was sort of part of (Western) New Year’s resolutions to try and stay in touch with friends more¹

One lesson springs to mind that was taught to me by someone I met at UBS camp some 9 or so years ago who was writing a letter to a friend over coffee. I thought it a little antiquated considering we had email but I never forgot what she said to me:

You have to make the effort to stay in touch with people because people rarely do. But people do appreciate it if you do put that effort into it.

Me being lazy decided to mail everyone through Facebook but I have tried to send everyone of the (Chinese) people I know a personalised message relevant to them. The response, I must say, has been quite amazing as I doubt I would have received such a response from a mass, impersonal mail sent out to my whole friend list.

Of course, as a marketer in this day and age, I shouldn’t really be surprised by the power of 1-to-1 communication but the key thing here is that I’m not shirking from my genuine interest in each and everyone of the people that I chose to add to my friend list at some point by sending out a mass mailing, relying on a fancy script to add that personalization.

Right, enough of the cumbaya spiel and back to sending out those CNY greetings.

1. Most of you have reached the stage of not caring where the hell I’ve been as its been so damned long since you heard anything from me.

Ever remembered for Morph and the little segment where Tony would make or draw something and you’d never quite figure out what he was making until the very end.

It sucks getting older.