Orinity

Brought up as a typical Singaporean, I have always stereotyped the Police force across the causeway in Malaysia as corrupted. This YouTube video that I came across just enforce my stereotype against their Police force. While I am sure that there are bound to be officers who are vigilant, an awful number of them seems to be corrupted. Either the salary is far too low to make a living or it is just plain greed. I have a friend from university who goes up to Johore, the Malaysian state nearest to Singapore often and she mentioned that Malaysian police like to focus on foreigners, especially Singaporeans, as we can afford bigger bribes. She has already been a victim of the corruption before when the police officer tried to give her a ticket when she just stopped her vehicle to pick up a friend.

There are many methods of making payments online. One of the most common payment methods I find that many Singaporean shoppers seem to be bank transfer or mailing of cash. Personally, I am against the mailing of cash since there’s almost no security at all. One of the alternatives is online payment systems. Over my next few posts, I will be looking into various online payment services on the Internet.

Although services like PayPal and Google Checkout are popular internationally, they are still not quite the preferred payment mode for Singapore online shoppers. Most of the common online payment systems use an email to identify the user. So, having an email address means you can create your own PayPal account. It is as simple as that. To explain how PayPal works to my folks, I usually refer PayPal as my online bank. I can link or de-link my debit or credit card to my PayPal account in order to make online payments. When I need the money, I will be able to withdraw my funds to my local bank account. As I am not based in the United States, it will normally take a few more working days for the transaction to be completed. I think that many non-users from my region are not familiar with this particular function of PayPal, though.

While being user-friendly and widespread in its usage, PayPal is not without their disadvantages. My major complaint in over 3 years with PayPal has got to be their conversion rates when I make withdrawals to my local bank account. PayPal usually take a small portion as an administrative charge which is fair enough. People do need to make money for providing the service. However, what irritates me is that the exchange rate is ridiculous at times. The exchange rate given by PayPal is always way below the rates I get from XE.com. Doesn’t that imply that they are making money off me by giving me less favourable bank rates? It is an example of the Exchange Rate Effect that I covered a short while back.

Overall, I still find PayPal to be a worthy service that served me well over the past few years in my online purchases. I have yet to try out Google Checkout though. I will come to that soon and get back to our readers with a review. I got a gut feeling that Google Checkout may give PayPal a run of its money being backed by the big G. What Checkout may be losing out now is its lack of widepsread usage.

Plain old trucks are usually dirty looking or just look rusty. Being a port city, it seems right to assume that we will have container trucks moving around all the time. A company in Germany actually started a competition for the be graphical art design applied on a truck. I was quite dumbfounded when I came across the article. It cracks me up quite a bit too. Here are some designs that I took a personal liking. I supposed things look a lot better after the artists takes on the truck drivers. Enjoy the designs!

I was looking through my picture collection when I came across this advertisement that is just too humorous not to share. I first saw this bus-stop shelter ad a year ago, and it has since been one of my favourite advertisements of all time.

*For overseas readers who are not sure what the heck is Mahjong, read HERE.

My extended family celebrated my grandmother’s birthday over the weekend on Saturday night. On such occasions, my extended family will usually eat out. This time round, we had our dinner at No Signboard Seafood Restaurant. While not being a seafood lover like several of my cousins, I find that the dishes are quite to my liking with the exception of prawns and crabs. (I am allergic to prawns and crabs, so are several of my cousins.) The crab serving is exceptionally huge compared to other restaurants that we tried in the past. The term for a ‘small’ crab is very misleading as a crab needs to be at least 2.8kg before it can be considered as a ‘large’ crab. Ridiculous, huh?

Here’s my sister eating a gigantic pincer.

The food we ordered tasted good with big servings but do expect the bill to burn a big hole in your pockets unless you have extra cash to spend. We ordered 8-9 dishes and with a table of 10, so we pretty much cleared away most of the food except for the crabs.

My cousins doing their best to finish up the crabs!