My lifestyle for the next one year, in wait for iPhone 5, I’ll need the following features in my phone:

• great camera (8mp and above) to capture shots of kids in action with good lens, light sensitivity and macro shots
• email access
• good UI for access to Facebook, twitter, instagram, flickr, wordpress, google apps, dropbox and whatsapp
• good photo editing apps equivalent to camera+, photoshake and pictureshow on iOS
• at least 16GB storage
• good speakers

Anyone has got a better alternative than the iPhone 4S for my needs? If not I’ll have to join the queue on 28 Oct! -_-”

Here’s our experience; anyone else shared the same experience before? Hope not.

It was on Sunday, 14 August 2011, when we visited the Marine Parade Central Standard Chartered Bank. Our intention was to open an account for savings with cheque book service and look at potential investment opportunities. After approximately 15 minutes of waiting, staff returned from their break and we were served by this young lady. After explaining our needs, she recommended us to take up a long term endowment plan (with Prudential) where we were eligible for a special short-term Time Deposits promotion where we get high interests return for a 3-month period. After calculating and discussions, we took up her proposal and signed up for the endowment plan, started two Time Deposits accounts and started an XtraSaver account.

As it was a Sunday, the bank were not able to deposit the cheque and all transactions had to wait till the next working day, which was the NEXT day. We asked when the ATM/Debit card, cheque book, Internet banking details and other documents will reach us, we were told the ATM/Debit card will be sent to us the NEXT working day and the rest of the documents and stuff will come in 7 working days. After all is signed and done, we left.

The first thing that arrived in our mailbox was the cheque book, followed by the bank transaction slip for our cheque deposit. A week passed and that were all we received. Then another week passed, still nothing was sent. We called the Relationship Manager who served us (whom also upgraded us to Preferred Banking status on 14 August 2011), she said she will check and the other documents should be on the way. After couple of days, still nothing received from Standard Chartered Bank. So I tweeted @stanchartbreeze hoping someone can help look into the matter. Private messages were exchanged and a phone call was made to clarify the situation. We were told they will send out the outstanding items the next working day, which was the day after Hari Raya. So by now, we should have received our ATM/Debit card, Pin for the card, Internet Banking information and documents for our endowment plan right? Sadly, only the card was received and it arrived on Friday! Without the pin number, the card is technically useless, except for purchasing it as a debit card; not what we needed.

From a verbal assurance that the card will reach us the NEXT working day, to a delay of more than 14 working days! This is NOT the kind of service standard we’re expecting from a bank, and for a preferred banking customer some more! Throughout this period of time, the only way we can access the money was to go to the branch and do our withdrawal over the counter. Much time would have been saved if the necessary stuff came in time, as mentioned by the Relationship Manager.

Several times we wanted to go straight to the branch to request for a card and the IB token, but was afraid the bank had already mailed out to us. So we waited. When we called the bank and when they called us after the tweet, neither of them suggested for us to have our problems solved at the branch. Wait was what we did.

If we had opened the account on a weekday, would all this have happened? If not, then is it a failure on the bank’s side to have weekend banking hours yet not able to deliver the standard that should have had for weekday banking? Is this considered a weekend banking fail?

We were looking forward to using the other banking services and products by Standard Chartered Bank before this happened, now we are seriously considering otherwise. If such simple transactional standards cannot be met, how can we trust that a long term property loan or even a CDA with Standard Chartered Bank is what we should take up? Hope something can be done about the bank’s service standard and SOPs. No point having a good range of products/services, great internet/mobile banking tools and nice website, but service standard isn’t satisfactory.

Let’s see how long more we’ve got to wait for the card pin, IB details and other documents pending to reach us. Haiz…

I’ve got too many of these showing on my blog now!! THIS IS DEPRESSING!!!

I do have all the original photos still in my backups but the pain is not the uploading part! Imagine going through all my blog posts to embed all the photos again!! I won’t even know which photos were used lah! This is the GREATEST FAIL in my digital life! I HATE YOU iPHOTO!!!!

I’m never going to sync iPhoto to flickr ever again! No matter how great your integration is going to be.

For the past 4 years, all my photos were saved in the order I wanted. By year, month, date and name of event. This makes backing up and finding photos pretty easily and I was very used to it. Backing up these photos was just a simple drag and drop. In my backup harddisk, all these files are neatly viewable and organised.

Since I got the new iPhoto, where I’m able to group my photos by ‘Events’, I was delighted and ignored all naming conventions which I followed by so faithfully for the past 4 years. So now, this is what I get! *facepalm*

I cannot backup my photos like these man! Not sure how long its going to take for me to sort through 6 months worth of photos! Oh my!! Anyone got solution for this?

How do you handle your photos?

I don’t recall seeing any dustbin around, not sure why. If there were bins around, I wonder if this will still happen.

Whole group of students were having some orientation or sort at the Esplanade underpass. And the mess was spotted at another corner. These may be left there by other group of people. No matter who did it, its still very ugly! Aren’t we supposed to be a clean and green city?

Yap, because health is like shit too, that’s why the color is like that. Healthy shit not this color one! While drawing this piece of shit, the 4 ply tissue in my nose were soaked! Ya, that’s how sick I am now!

Don’t know how I am going to survive the next 3 days with the gigantic list of work pending, blog posts pending and I need to get my suitcase packed for the trip to BKK on Friday! And no I don’t want to fly to BKK and end up sleeping in the hotel because of the weak body I’m living in right now.

Don’t care how urgent work is already! I need to take care of myself! It’s 9pm now. Shower, eat medicine and sleep!

Superman please save me!

Both of us were looking forward to the movie and hope to enjoy a good show. But when we saw the seats in Eng Wah Suntec Cinema 2, I almost puked. Throughout the show, I was paying more attention on whether any part of my arms, neck or uncovered skin was touching the seats or not. I laid tissue on the seats and arm rest but still my mind couldn’t help but picture those dirty cushions touching me!

I didn’t get to enjoy my movie. Pictures tell a thousand words, here’s how clean my seats were!

Those who came in after us didn’t get to see the state of their seats as the lights were turned off already. When we entered, they had all their lights on. Seriously, if you have seats like that in your cinema, turning it dimmer might save your ass for a while. But please get the cinemas renovated and cleaned quick!

There was also a stale and sour smell lingering around the seats around me. Arghhhh! Thought of it makes me feel sooo dirty right now. Going to get myself showered again! I’m not going back to Eng Wah anymore, until they get their cinemas upgraded. I wonder if the other cinemas of Eng Wah are in this state too!

Just for record, here’s our tickets for the not-so-comfortable-nor-enjoyable movie tonight. Don’t get me wrong, X-men Origins was great! Maybe I should just go catch it again at GV cinema.

While accessing SMB|SG

At Sheylara’s blog

And at Veron’s blog

It’s so frustrating when I can’t access the blogs and sites I want! Good thing I’ve a Starhub mobile broadband too, so when I have to access the sites that’s not loading on Singtel’s Mio broadband, I’ll use that.

When I saw Sheylara’s post on Ping.sg top 10, I did the broadband swapped and saw a comment to help solve my problem!

If you’re having problem too and is on Singnet or Singtel’s Mio BB, don’t bother calling their technical support, they’ll give you standard help and if all things failed, they’ll tell you, “Its your problem! Nothing wrong with our side!“ That’s the kind of hell I get from them when I called them for the last time.

Thanks to cowgOesmOo for the solution. Here’s what you can do…

In your browser setting, (or browser preferences), go to network connection settings.
Select Manual proxy configuration.
Set the http proxy to: proxy.singnet.com.sg
and change the port to: 8080

That will solve the problem! Well, at least it did help solve mine for now! Hope Singtel’s resolve their router and server soon.

My take on Social Media… we need to first build the social relationship among the people within the environment. Anybody from the industry who wants bloggers or anyone online to participate in their event, outreach program or any benefits has to first build some form of relationship. Or at least try. Especially if they’re reaching out to individual people instead of a mass community or anyone in a big community. I’d blogged about this before. If you simply can’t be bothered about having any form of relationship, than I’m sorry, neither am I.

Photo from flickr by Fofuras Felinas

Bloggers are not sucker for freebies and free events. In fact, there’s no free lunch in this world. Nothing is free. There’s always a give and return, even for free stuff. And very importantly, we do not owe anyone anything. No one is paying us to blog about the things we’re blogging, unless specifically for an advertorial. So many of us would like to see ourselves as providing a ‘service’ for your company by blogging about the product/ show/ event or whatever that we think is appropriate to.

Couple of months back, I started one which I thought was a relationship (or sort) with this person from an agency. Attended few of their invitation and I’ve wrote pretty good posts for them. But as this relationship continues, I find that there’s no-relationship at all. This person just did the 101 things that’ll pissed people off. Well, perhaps not all, but at least she did pissed me off. And I’ve got quite good tolerance for such things already.

(Part of) the 101 things that may pissed bloggers off…

{-} sending super last minute invitation
(although I’ve to say some people are pretty good at handling last minute invitation. but still not smooth enough. they’ve forgotten we bloggers are very well connected! but we’ll let it go this time round.)

{-} sending an invitation to something that is of no interest to the blogger
Please read our blog or at least check out our tag cloud, categories or random posts or read the about page to see what we are interested about.

{-} saying something like “I don’t believe you mentioned it to me…”. Perhaps its just me, but those words are pretty harsh and uncalled for. If you don’t believe me than why are you inviting me to your events? Because no one else is blogging about it?

{-} arriving late for our appointment! Gosh! This is 100% NO-NO! (But it happened!)

If one person in that agency has already committed four of the 101 things, I guess this agency is not ready for social media.

So since you can’t be bothered, so am I.

Is Yahoo closing down their Auction section soon? Or are they not aware of the situation? 3 days is pretty long for such glitch in the system for such a big company ya?