DianaTan.net

I realized that I have put too much information on the internet. So I am trying to turn off my public profile lest some crazy jealous stalkers come near me. I have disabled a few web applications that link all my blogs together as I don’t need such publicity to show my blogs anymore. I can get traffic from good honest readers who come and go and not bitch about it elsewhere. I have also put down my nice personal photos which are from now onwards for own viewing only. Notice that I no longer blog what I eat or stay anymore, so you don’t have to compete with me. I have my own set of problems to take care of to ever bother about such things anymore. I also did not renew a personal domain that I have maintained for a few years as it is not generating high enough income to warrant continuity.

I have paid the worker’s SOCSO company contribution for April 2009 and until today, 12th of May, I have yet to receive a receipt and form for May payment from them. SOCSO stands for Social Security Organisation that was established in Malaysia to make monthly payments to workers becoming disabled in the course of their employment. It is like a form of insurance. Today, I tried to contact the numbers that I have in the SOCSO letterhead and they have changed to a new number that is non-contactable at all and simply send a thank you message and hang up when you select all the options! Even the operator number leads to automatic message with no one to pick up the phone! I don’t know who is the director or head of department for SOCSO but they sure try to find ways to automate their telephone calls with no single person to pick up calls and attend to enquiries. This is surely the ‘makan ular’ (lackadaisical) attitude of the staff who is missing in action! Typical of the Malays who are so lazy, and depend on the UMNO government to take care of their needs to the exclusion of other races. I am still wondering how sincere is the government in advocating 1Malaysia concept.

I lost my voice again when it was about to recover. I could hardly speak for the last 2 years and it all boils down to psychological problems. I had to suck in air to speak out in a weird voice instead of breathing in air. And it was about to recover and I was able to talk in a sore throat voice and breathe in normally when this happened again. It is very frustrating when others could hardly hear me speak and I had to repeat myself a few times. I don’t know how long this condition will continue but I certainly hope to recover soon and speak normally again. Otherwise, I could hardly communicate with people and do business with clients.

I have stayed for 12 years in Singapore since my JC days. I still recall taking 3 different buses every day to commute to my junior college in Bukit Batok and another 3 buses back. Imagine the hectic I went through during those tumultuous years. Plus the fact that I had to find my own food, do my own laundry at the tender age of 18, still a teenager. I had to study hard and it seems the syllabus there is much more compared to other countries. Working life also has its pressures. At the end of 2000, I was quite stressed out and finally came back to recuperate in Penang. Singapore is a good place to earn money but not to stay there for long. Most of the yuppies there power dress from top to bottom but hardly have money in the wallets. They wear branded clothes to join the Joneses and spend a lot of money. At the end of the month, their bank accounts are almost used up and live from paycheck to paycheck. If you can take the heat, then by all means work there in the Lion City but you will be competing with the best brains from China, India, Malaysia, etc.

I was talking to mum the other day about her shares dropping rock bottom and she is not too concerned about it – according to her, as long as she does not sell it, it is just paper loss and likewise if you make money but don’t sell your shares, it amounts to paper profit. I sense that because we 3 daughters are contributing RM600 a month each to the household expenses that my parents can afford to dine out every day. My mum does not cook nor does she do housework. In many ways, you could say that she leads the life of a ‘tai-tai’ or shopping mall wife who reads the newspapers every day, watches Astro on television whole day and sleeps in between during afternoon naps.

While I don’t have the luxury to slumber all the time, I need to work hard and save up for my retirement so that I will have more than enough to last a lifetime. As I don’t have kids, I cannot depend on them like my parents depend on us for financial support. With the economic gloom and share market in bearish run recently, it heralds for austerity measures. And I haven’t even straighten my wild hair for the last 12 months even though it is difficult to comb them sometimes.

That phrase simply means I was not born rich! I come from a middle class family where my dad worked as a teacher in a Chinese remove classes and my mom helped in out in a family business that has since closed down years ago. With the little savings that we had, my parents could only afford to bring us up to SPM level. I did my A levels on a sponsorship in Singapore and paid my way through university. My dad conveniently took optional retirement at the age of 50, being feed up with school work and bureaucracies when I just entered A levels. After graduation with much struggle, I worked in the secular world teaching Microsoft Office applications and did not contribute my income to the family. My dad was not too happy about this. I was earning about S$1,700 and had to pay my rental plus food and transport. With the extra that I had, I spent it on myself and this earned the ire of my parents who wanted me to contribute to home. Fast forward another 10 years, and I am now contributing RM600 a month to the household expenses. Such is my life and I had to work hard for my living. This problem is also compounded by the fact that both my parents lost a lot of money in the share market?

I am using Windows XP on my desktop and Windows Vista on my new laptop. After 2 months, I still prefer Windows XP as my operating system as I can also install other applications like Autocad Architectural Desktop 2005, WS-FTP, WinZip plus a host of other programs which I cannot install using Windows Vista. In fact, installing such programs gave me some problems with Vista. Though Vista is newer with better graphics, it can only run on newer high end computers and yet it is not as robust as Windows XP. My only guess is that whoever programmed Vista, did a hurried job without checking all the functionalities and stability of the previous OS like Windows XP and there are many bugs that come with Vista. In the name of making more money and ‘improvement’, Vista is very much worse off than Windows XP and I will continue to use XP for a long time.