Repair or Replace?

Having headache of whether repair or replace your broken goods?

Sometimes, we don't know whether we should buy a new one, or try our luck to replace goods. Yes, I would have such problem of decide so. If we are bad luck, end up the we pay even more of repair before we buy new one. If we are good luck, we just save the money of buying a new one.

I would say we will take certain risk when we repair the goods. Let say I bought a Notebook on last 3 years ago and the default 2-years warranty was expired. The hard disk was malfunctioned and I replaced a new one with RM250. 1 month later, the DVDR-W is malfunctioned, I replaced a good one using RM380. And 4 months time, the notebook LCD broken, and I replaced it with RM700. Fine, and after 6 months, the motherboard broke down, and I need to spend RM1,800 to replace a new one. Since I already spent RM1,330 on the Notebook along this year, should I still repair the board, or just buy a new one?

Lifespan of a man, it's a curve!

Well, risk always can be calculated. Most of the cases, we can just weight based on the following simple questions:
1. It's the new one worth?
2. What is the total cost of repair?
3. What's its lifespan?
4. Can we live without it?
5. The green impact?

How true they are. Let's use the Notebook example just now. A low/medium end Notebook lifespan is about 3-5 years (I'm talking without extra luck here). Since the Notebook is already 3 years old, the lifespan in fact is actually ended. Since a new Notebook with better specifications only cost us about RM2,000, why we still bother to spend more than 10% to change a malfunctioned hard disk?

If the goods are broken within the lifespan, we can always replace it, provided the cost of repair is far below the new one, like 30%? Just apply the questions above and you will find the answer you want.

We save on how much we spend, not how much we save. Hah! I don't get it.

In fact, we can always understand the goods lifespan, or request to extend the warranty of the goods when we purchase a good. If we get the picture clear, we will able to handle this issue easier.

Below are the list of goods lifespan for your reference (taken from Personal Money Oct 2008).

	Lifespan (years)
Appliances
Dryers	13
Refrigerators	13
Dishwashers	9
Microwave oven	9
Cabinets
Kitchen cabinets	50
Masonry
Brick walls	100
Coutertop
Cultured marble countertops	20
Natural stone countertops	Lifetime
Electrical
Electrical accessories and lighting controls	10+
Flooring
Carpet	8 to 10
Marble, slate and granite flooring	100
Home technology
Built-in audio system	20
Security systems	5 to 10
Fixtures
Lavatory	20+
Flooring
Laminate	15 to 25
Tile	75 to 100
Paint
Exterior and interior	15+

For the rests of the goods not listed above, you can always check them from the Internet or different merchants.
Cheers.

How to Benefits from Seminar?

Do you like to attend seminar?

To be honest, I kinda hate it, if it is out of my interests. In the past, I will fall asleep, dig my nose, mourning, sms'ing, visit toilet frequently etc, as long as I try to pass time in order to finish it. Or perhaps, sometimes, if possible, I'll just leave the seminar.

Well, beware of what I did, and it was past. For now, I've learned a lesson. If we spend our heart for the talk, it might able to change our life. I mean IF, so far seminar hasn't change my life yet.

Will it be more efficient if the speaker looks like my favorite lady?

So how do we actually learn from the seminar? This is not simple, my friend. Always remember, there is no free lunch in this world. Since we have to accept it, there are actually FOUR primary skills that can help us to improve in absorbing the important value of the seminar.

1. Don't just listen to what we understand.
Poor guy only listens to what he understand, i.e. entertainment program from radio/TV, and escape from important content. This will definitely reduce our listen capability level.

2. Remember think is always faster than speak.
A speaker need to spend 1 minute to speak about 100 words, where a normal human just need minute to think about 400 to 500 words. This distance allows us to have more time to think other things. In fact, we should utilize this 'extra' time to evaluate whether the speaker's content is true/important for us.

3. Try to forecast the following point/topic.
A good listener will always try to expect the next discussion point/topic from the speaker. If we managed to guess it, we able to expect more from the speaker positively. If we were wrong, we can think about why the speaker against our expectation. Great, we are not passive anymore if we do that. Apart from that, we can also benefits to be more concentrate and improve our analysis as well as memory level.

4. Do 5 seconds essence note.
An experience listener will always spend 5-10 seconds to evaluate and jot down the essence of the talk from the speaker, while the speaker is drinking water, or write something on the board. This will also help us to improve our analysis and memory level.

If the seminar is talk about MONEY, I bet we all know what to do.

Apart from learning, we should also do quite note. So when what notes we need to jot down normally?
1. On the board.
2. Some points the speaker kept repeating.
3. Words that the speaker emphasize with louder voice or gesture.
4. Important point, such as different aspects... or, the 2nd reason is...
5. Summary before the end of the talk.

Okay, sounds simple. Let's begin to practice and do it in our next seminar.
Cheers.

Looking for Escaped Terrorist?

Perhaps this is an old news, but just let me share with you if you haven't know about it.

Since early this year, Singapore people have been circulating pictures of escaped terrorist Mas Alamak Kastari so the public can help to spot him.

Below are the pictures of Mas Alamak Kastari.

But apparently the pictures are not very helpful, as you aware that terrorists always can disguise themselves into various looks under different circumstances. So talkingcock.com came out with a handy print out to help the Singaporeans, as below. (I like the name of 'talking cock', perhaps I always doing that).

No matter what you disguise, your pictures are here!

So, can you help me to make one too, talkingcock?

A Night with Exclusive North India Restaurant

Do you like North Indian cuisine? For me, it tastes good and I do enjoy it occasionally. I visit North Indian restaurant about once or twice a month. If you still remember, I've written a post related to this on few months back.

Hey, I just had a dinner at a new renovated North Indian restaurant nearby my house in the middle of last week. I've a good anticipation on it, because the restaurant served the best food I like before the renovation. My favorite crusine is Lamb Masala. Yummy!

Unfortunately, once we stepped in to the restaurant, we have uncomfortable feel. Why? It's simple, the renovation is just too luxury! We felt like it's for the rich to enjoy the meal. We expected it would be like 'damn' expensive. Anyhow, we decided to continue to dine in as we are in fact quite hungry.

This North Indian restaurant has Exclusive Setup where I never visited.

Once the waitress passed us the menu, we were stunted. The basic dish costing SGD$11-13 and unfortunately, the portion is quite small. There were 5 of us, which means we have to order minimum 5 dishes plus some rices and drinks. Wow, this should be the very expensive meal for us.

Okay, we settled the meal with unhappy face but great appetite that night. The total was around SGD$70, 5 of us. If you dined in other lower class restaurant, I believe you can enjoy it at around SGD$40 for 5 persons. Luckily we have HSBC credit card, which is entitled to get 15% discount. Great, save us a bit.

This few dishes caused us SGD$70?! Don't kidding me man!

Price should not be the issue for me, if the food portion and taste worth the value. Unfortunately, this North Indian restaurant was just too exclusive, from renovation till the very small portion of 'masala'. We are very disappointed in fact. Well, it claimed that it is the franchise of well-known North Indian cuisine Tandoor US. The restaurant name is exactly, Tandoor.com. =.= That's why it needs to be exclusive and expensive huh?

Of course, I will never visit Tandoor.com restaurant again, unless it transform to the original restaurant I used to dine in. I tell ya it won't gain much by having luxury customers in such a small local market. The whole night we dined in, there were only 2 other customers walked in, and apparently both of them are tourists. In that case, how long it can lasts under such a economy downturn situation now?

What if I just order a cup of warm water & enjoy the setup? Will the boss kills me?

To be honest, I don't know what the boss is thinking. He is having a very good business in previous setup with reasonable price, but why he transformed it into a silent (without customer) restaurant? Perhaps he has big business in mind, which is out of my expectation. I wish him good luck.

Real Life Hacking Case

Sorry for the delay on my post, as I'm busy to settle my works these few days.

There was a real hacking case happened lately would like to share here. A company network & Internet access was very slow since early of last week. So a party went in troubleshoot the problem on last 2 days ago.

After detail checking, the party found out the culprit was one of new servers was generating massive of traffics around 15k+ sessions to various of external IP addresses.

The party found out it was hacked and installed with Rootkits. For your information, the rootkits installed were RHV4 and RHV5 (if you understand what I mean here). Possibly based on the indirect backdoors below:
1) The access list was not used (anyone can access from anywhere).
2) Administrator via remote access was enabled (the hacker can do anything using root access).
3) The administrator & other users password set was also too simple.
4) Personal firewall policies are configured, but there was no source and destination IP address defined.

Hacking nowadays are to generate income.

Later the party found out it was caused by the server implementer. What? The implementer shouldn't be professional as what it supposed to be?

So why the backdoors were created? Are the implementers doesn't understand what they are doing? Are they lack of responsibility of not double checking her works? Are they not following the rules while others are? This case is embarrassing the implementer and the implementer's company, in terms of professional.

So can I hack Forex trading and get back my loss money pls?

It taught us a lesson here. We need to check the system ourselves, instead of trusting it is safe to run and protected, even people tell you it is. Don't bull shit.

And I believe the hacker must have use the server to generate email/web spam income, what a free resource for him/her huh! Damn.

Note: The original post content is edited as what it is suppose to be. I believe I've learned another lesson today of what should be posted and what should be not. ;)

FREE Trip to Taiwan Contest

If you are from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia or Singapore,
If you are aged between 18 and 30,
If you like to travel to Taiwan,
I have a good news to you!

Do you know Taiwan Youth Travel is giving out free round trip tickets to Taiwan, as well as travel allowance of USD$1,000 in cash to the lucky person!

Taipei-101, former world tallest building.

Yes, since not many people know about it, you might be the lucky person if you are qualified the requirements mentioned above. Even though you can win the 1st price, you may still entitle to 1 out of 120 Skype phones.

Wait a moment, it's not as easy as you think by by just submitting your name and you can win it without single effort. You will need to fill in your motive of participating the event and personal experience, theme and characteristics of the travel plan of Taiwan, arrange an itinerary of at least 10 days, and list out the ways you use to share your traveling experience in Taiwan. Wow, seems like a lot to fill in.

Apart from traveling, Taiwan is well known at it's many local foods.

The itinerary may cover the budget planning, idea about traveling, idea and arrangement of routes, contents of the theme, or the reasons of coming to Taiwan and so on. You can further explain the contents by any collected supplementary information so as to assist the referees in fully understanding your plan and contribution.

But I guess it should be all right for those who like to travel? It's a chance for you to travel for totally free man! The contest is held from 1st Oct to 30 Nov, so you should have plenty of time to think of how you write your journey.

Perhaps you can look for gorgeous supermodel Ling Chi-Lin if you visit to Taipei.

For full details, please visit Taiwan Youth Travel web site.
If you win it, please let me know so I can share the joy with you. ;)

Good luck!

Visiting Tire Shop

Okay. Now it's the time to give the previous post's riddle answer.

Like the anonymous commented, yes, you shouldn't take the $2 into account. Mathematics should be calculate in logical way. Meaning, you just need to take $25 (they paid) + $2 (waitress pocketed) + $3 (changes) = $30. Done.

----------------------------------------------------------

By the way, that's about my previous post. I would like to share something else today. ;)

I visited a tire shop yesterday noon. By the shop look from outside, it looks exclusive and expensive. Since the car's alignment is always encountering problem and I noticed it's alignment machine is new and high-tech, I decided to give it a try without looking at the price.

I think most of Malaysia's tire shops need to improve their customer service.

It has a customer service center and there are some people to serve you. And the living room is comfortable and huge. It provides comfortable sofa and Astro programme for you to relax while waiting for your car to be align. And there is also a staff to make coffee/tea for you! I feel good about it, rather than standing and waiting in a dirty and small tire shop!

Does alignment technology really worth your penny?

Well, within my expectation, the mechanic came back to me after 10 minutes. He told me that the car's chamber needs to be adjusted as well and it will cost me SGD$125, but sum up it will be SGD$100. That's fine, I prefer to do it in one go, as I still left some cash in my wallet.

I continued to sleep, watch TV and drink tea in the living room, while waiting for him to fixe it. What surprise me is that, he fixed it for about 2 hours! He took so long huh, I don't really know what he trying to fix. That's fine, I paid SGD$100 for it huh!

After that, the customer service gave me a book of discount/free coupons. Initially I thought it was a rubbish. But when I take a deep look at it, I found out some of them are quite useful, such as 3 x free tires rotation coupon and 1 x free car wash etc. Fine. The customer service also gave me a Free recheck voucher for me to return and check my car after 1 month, just to make sure the alignment/chamber is still working fine. Wow, that's impressive huh. So I paid SGD$100 and left happily.

Unfortunately, the tire shop doesn't has what I always looking for.

In fact, the charge is expensive, which I can get abt 70% of the price in any other smaller workshop. I'm happy because the service is exceptional, the staffs are polite, the place for customer to wait is clean and comfortable, and they also provide useful voucher/coupons in order to attract customer to keep coming back. This is a brilliant strategy, which a business person should learn.

Just realized that entrepreneur way can be easy when you are creative!

Calculation Riddle

Hi guys, do you like to have some riddles? I guess this should be my first post on giving riddle. Most of the females like to guess riddle, I don't know why. Some will say they are not good at it, but yet they interested to know. Why? I bet ya it's related to curiosity.

All right, now I have a calculation riddle for you to guess. It should not be that difficult, if you think about it logically.

Riddle is dead? Oh My.

"3 chicks went for a dinner and it cost them $30 per person. So each of them paid $10 to the cashier. However, the cashier realized they calculated wrongly, and the 3 chicks should have paid RM25 only. So the cashier handed over $5 to a waitress and asking her to refund the 3 chicks. Out of greed, the waitress secretly took $2 out of the $5, and she managed to return $3 to the 3 chicks later. Having returned $3, each chick took back $1. So, in total, each chick paid $9 only."

Okay, here's the equation:
1. Each chick paid $9. So $9 x 3 = $27
2. The waitress took $2.
3. So, $27 + $2 = $29

Eh, where did the remaining $1 go?

I will post the answer in the comment after 3 days from now.
Good luck!

Who Slept With Her?

I like to watch comedy movie, especially movie acts by Stephen Chow. It's very funny and always out of my expectation. Yes, I love it until I put his picture as my profile picture in my blog, Facebook and messenger. Well, sometimes watching other genres of comedy movies will get some surprise.

On last night, I downloaded and watched a comedy Korean movie. The theme name is "Who Slept With Her?" released in 2006. I found it is interesting not because the story line, it's about a sexy teacher. She is damn pretty, hot, sexy, fit, tall and most surprisingly, big boobs. Wow! I hardly can seen in Korean movie. It's sort of highly recommended from Ekimkee blog.

Let me just simply introduce the synopsis of this comedy movie. The story talks about a 22 years old sexy teacher entered to a male high school for practical. All students are attracted by her sexy appearance. There is three 17 yrs old lucky asses trying to get along with her, and there is a school supervisor always trying to stop them for doing so, and created some of the funny scenes.

Along the story, you'll have to guess which student (out of the 3 lucky asses) slept with the sexy teacher. Apart from funny, there are quite a couple of scenes that the sexy teacher showing off her nice body. You should have noticed with some scene pictures I attached in this post.

Here's my review for this comedy Korean movie.
Cast: 8.5/10 (for the sexy teacher only)
Plot: 5.5/10 (so so)
Cinematography: 6.5/10 (good quality)
Humor: 5.5/10
Story line: 4/10
Chick: 9/10
Overall: 5.5/10

Her name is Kim Sa Rang. You can watch part of her superb dancing from the movie here. No regret.
What a gorgeous lady! ;)

Online Printing

When we want to do name card, brochure or printing, normally we will head to stationary shop and get it done. But sometimes we found it is quite wasting time, as we have to drive to the stationary shop and queue. And we need to wait a few hours and days until we can get our printing.

Online printing seems like a good idea, as we can save our time on transportation. VistaPrint.com
seems like doing a good job here, which offering multiple choices of business cards, note pads, invitation cards, windows decals, rubber stamps etc. Most of the items are offer at a reasonable price and interestingly, some of them are even free!

It's easier for online printing

In reality, I think online printing is a profit making online business. Customers can confirm the design via email or video conferencing, and delivery the printing via post/courier, without the need of seeing each other. It's quick, save cost and interesting. If the printing gets wrong, we can just email back to ask for amend, without the need to return to the printing shop again. If you doing a good job, customers will definitely return again.

Online printing business, anyone?

Thus, I foresee this online business will getting more popular in the future.

E-entrepreneur rocks!

Talk to Me

Do you like to watch drama?

I do, but I seldom watch it due to busy on my works. If I watch, I will choose some genres that I'm interested, such as funny, romantic or story that I think it's interesting and fresh to me.

I watched a series of 39 episodes Hong Kong drama lately, named Moonlight Resonance. It was a cool drama, talked about issues happen in a big family. It was touch and interesting in the beginning, but I loss my interests with it after I watched over half of the episodes. Well, I managed to learn a word from the drama, 'affection'.

In fact, I'm not intend to talk about the drama story today. I'm trying to share a romantic and sentimental English song I got from the drama. The song theme is 'Ice Cream' (also known as 'Talk to Me') from DNR. I love Ice Cream! If you already watched the drama, you should have already knew about this song.

If you interested with 'Talk to Me' mp3, just post a comment below, I can share the download URL to you. ;)