It’s a wet morning, we were too lazy to go out to get food, and the kids in our house have finished the entire inventory of instant noodles. So we decided to order in from Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut has a nice website at www.pizzahut.com.sg, but I would not say the same for the online ordering system. I don’t understand why they had decided to build it in Flash, the usability is certainly thrown out of window.
When we wanted something really badly, we would start to pray for it and hope that it will be given to us. Sometimes, if not more than often, we did not get what we prayed for, we started to blame God for not hearing our prayers. I used to do that a lot.
If you remember Jim Carrey in Bruce Almighty — I was like him. When things did not turn out right, I blamed God. When luck wasn’t on my side, I blamed God. When I didn’t get what I wanted, I blamed God. When I had nothing to blame, I blamed God. When I felt like blaming something, again, I blamed God.
I put up advertisements on Facebook, looking to hire someone who is good in HTML/CSS, who can help share my workload, so that I can have more time for sleep.
In two weeks, the banner showed up 171,487 times, in which, got 42 clickthroughs (i.e. the banner was clicked 42 times, possibly by 42 different individuals.) Out of the clicks, only 3 wrote in to ask about the job. That is like 7% of conversion rate. But I was not very happy with the result, I thought there should be more people who might be interested in the job, if the click throughs were so low, the only explanation is there are already too many web designers out there.
To find out the answer, I put up a poll in Facebook which would collect data from 100 users, with the question asking “Do you have a friend or relative who happens to be/claim to be a web designer?” To my expectation, more than half of the respondents claimed that they do have friend or relative who happens to be a web designer. Only thing I’m not sure is: is the web designer whom all these people know are the same person, or there are indeed so many web designers out there?
As a freelance web designer, I receive average of 5 to 20 emails/calls each week with inquiry on web design for small to big companies. While most of the calls were genuine, occasionally I would still receive amusing requests like the following:
Hi i would like to have a website like e-bay. Could you quote me a price, in total for everything to be in place. Inclusive of membership n reply mails and payment.
A website like eBay.com requires a truck-load of programmers, a couple of months if not years, and a couple of million dollars to build. The person who made the above request was either new to the internet, or new to the world. But for being polite, I replied to his email along with the explanation, let’s see what he’d say about it.
There are many ways to show off to the world that you have a new laptop that has built-in WiFi that lets you access to internet from Starbucks. You can do things like checking emails, looking up the map for direction, post a blog, update your calendar, run some shell commands, even build a website! But please do not use it to watch YouTube videos. Why? Because you are fxxking hogging the fxxking bandwidth as if you are the only person who needs internet access!
(Blogged from one of the Starbucks outlets in Malaysia, after waited 20 minutes for Gmail to load, and another 20 minutes for this blog to load, and realizing the guy sitting next to my table watching YouTube on his laptop.)
When you are running out of food, you don’t try to eat less, you go out and look for more food.
Sometimes, I hate having to think of the title, so I’d just use whatever that came up my mind the moment the cursor landed in the title field. This time, I thought about Master Yoda’s famous quote “Do, or do not, there is no try!” To make it fun, I modified the sentences a little, the concept remains. See, it’s not that difficult to be creative.
I received a call from a lecturer in Ngee Ann Poly today, she heard my interview over the radio last week, so she went on and checked my website and got my contact number from there. She’d like to invite me to go over to give a talk to the students about web design, a down to earth kind of talk, i.e. nothing on technical mambo jumbo but more on practical aspects of web design. She told me that they do teach about web design in the school, but they only teach about what’s in the book; and she wants me to talk about those not in the book. In which I think I’m going to like the idea a lot, because I never read any book!
One thing you might not know about Cancerian, is they like to be center of attention, a lot. And I confess that I did. All my life, I have always wanted to be center of attention every where I go; but I’m not the type who would scream out loud or do some stupid things to get attention kind of attention seeker, rather, I’d chose to do things differently, if lucky enough, in the process, people would start noticing me. That kind of attention turns me on a lot.
Some times, I hate this characteristic of me, because the same characteristic tends to get the better of me especially when it comes to relationships. I would not tell her that I need some attention, I would do something differently and hoping she would notice it. Now, this part of me makes me feel like I’m sissy, because why? I thought only girls would behave like this. But then again, other than this, the rest of me is rather manly you know? So I should be alright, right? Damn it, I probably shouldn’t even write about this… And what is it I was supposed to write again?
When you are buying a service, if possible, don’t bargain. Because ultimately, it is easier for the service provider to short change you. When you thought you have saved some, you might end up losing more.
I thought I should get a laptop cooler, but I didn’t think I have the time to go shop for it at Sim Lim, so I checked out local auction sites to see if I could find anyone selling it online (interestingly that’s the only way you can find decent things to buy online in this technologically-advanced Singapore…)
Indeed I found some at Yahoo! Auctions. After considerations, I shortlisted and placed a Buy Now for one.
It didn’t take long for the seller to contact me, which was good, I always respect responsive people, particularly online.
The seller moved on to discuss about delivery, he/she offered the options to meet up at Jurong East MRT or Bukit Batok MRT, in which both are inconvenient for me, and both are further than Sim Lim! So I requested for the seller to come to Paya Lebar MRT instead, after all I’m the buyer, and the money is in my pocket!
The seller remarked that Paya Lebar is out of the way for him/her, and proposed Serangoon as third option; again, somewhere I’m not familiar with and definitely sounds further than Sim Lim.
I thought for a while, then cancelled the order. I told the seller that sometimes I was the seller too, and I’d deliver the goods to wherever the buyers wanted me to. And I don’t believe that I shouldn’t expect people to do the same for me when I was the buyer.
Basically, I don’t believe that spending money should require efforts!
I’ll be moving over to China for good in few months time, I guess this will be one part of Singaporean that I’ll miss. Every second of the day, people in China are competing against each other in getting money out of others’ pocket; in Singapore, people are instead waiting for others to put money into their pocket! I’m going to miss this competition-less country.
