Orinity

I was looking through Cleo Malaysia (I bought a truckload of magazines during my trip!) when I noticed this gadget in its December issue, on page 328. Presenting you Rakku Shoe Wheel.

My initial thoughts include lots of question marks and disbelief although I must say I was interested as I have never seen this device before. Apparently, THIS is how it works.

Now, my questions have progressed to the next stage – What if I have small feet (I wish I did) and my shoes are too short to reach the centre? What if my shoes are caked with some dried mud (or other residue) and it drops onto the next shoe? And to add in a worry from my mum – How do I clean the thing?

I must say it is a concidence to see the exact same shoe rack being spree-ed on Edynae, and that there are quite a few shops selling this shoe wheel (it’s been so long since I last went shopping) where the spree-ers are trying hoping to get as many orders as they can, so that the store can give them a higher discount rate and free delivery to all spree-ers’ addresses. The Rakku Shoe rack retails at S$129 + S$5 assembly fee if help is required).

For more info on the Rakku Shoe Wheel, you may wish to pop over to the Rakku website and Whoa-Ho (the Singapore distributor).

As a proud user of Gmail since 2004, I have always despised Hotmail and its lack of user-friendliness and functionality. Can you believe that I cannot event mark an unread email as read in the Hotmail interface. I still check my hotmail account from time to time as I use it for my Live Messenger and that Hotmail is my first email account. I do get sentimental once in a while…

Back to Hotmail, I just got the shock after logging in and seeing this! I know Hotmail is a product of Microsoft but doesn’t it cross their pea-sized brains that there are still more than 20% of the users using Firefox and other IE alternatives just because Internet Explorer is crap? All in all, I am utterly disappointed that MSN decided to push out a screwed Hotmail and I am definitely not going back to using Hotmail.

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!