Month: March 2010

According to our National Economic Action Council (NEAC), we are losing too many Malaysians as our skilled workforce migrates out of the country and we are unable to attract nor retain our skilled labour. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

Various programmes to attract skilled talent have been introduced in the past but they have achieved very little in concrete terms. The result is a shortage of dynamic talent needed to push Malaysia into higher value added activities.

That is not the only problem – trying to attract skilled talent. Don’t they know that there are plenty of skilled talent within the country who are forced to leave because of idiotic policies put in place to stifle their growth. It’s not just the policies but also the people put in charge of organisations are usually not that skilled and too kiasi to try to do the right thing.

I personally know several PhDs in various technical fields who are now working in random areas totally irrelevant to their interest or skills. I am one of them and I have tried fighting my way against the system – goodness knows I’ve tried all the way – to no avail. People in power to fix things do not even want to see me. So, I am already taking measures to fix the problem myself – before I end up rotting and dying in service to my nation.

Constraints include cumbersome immigration and incentive policies which discourage recruitment of foreign expertise along with restrictive practices of professional associations which restrict foreigners from working in Malaysia, it says.

I think I know one such professional association, which practices protectionism for its own community. Personally, I think that protectionism is dumb. You only end up sand-boxing yourself to your own However, this is a smaller problem than it is trying to retain our own people. You see, if we are unable to retain our own talent, they will leave and bring all their bitterness and anger with them.

Who do you think foreign talents will speak to before deciding to immigrate into our country – their Malaysian colleagues and friends who have left the country. Obviously, our talent who have left in a cloud of darkness would not paint a pretty picture of our country’s work environment.

Personally, my frustrations have come to a head and I just need to vent. I have already come up with my own solution to my own problems. I fully intend to do something about it and I just hope that things will ultimately turn out alright, even if I have to bludgeon a few heads along the way.

I am who I am.

A friend of mine, who happens to be the same age as I am, mentioned that most of her compatriots who graduated alongside her have reached some manner of success while she was still struggling on her own. This got me thinking about my own situation. I would have to agree with her on one part that is – I am still trying to find my way to success and that it is a long way away.

However, it got another part of me thinking about what I have already achieved in the last 30 years – the unique experiences that I have gained and the lives that I have touched along the way. If I ever say that I am a failure, that would be a lie. There are plenty of people out there who would be happy to trade places with me (although it could just be a case of the grass is greener…). However, to say that I am satisfied with what I already have today, would also be a lie.

I think that I would have to frame the situation this way. Many people would probably consider me a success and some people would consider me on the way to greater success. However, I consider myself an abject failure and there are reasons for this – because I have never achieved anything of significance nor hit any of my targets in life. Never. Not once. This could be a symptom of a larger problem.

Honestly, I am not trying to gloat.

One of the targets that I set myself when I was 15 was to be a millionaire by the time I was 21. Obviously that has not come true. However, in the pursuit of that target, I released my first commercial software product at the age of 17, which ended up being shown at the ministry level in front of the DGs and used by a government school for a while. I learned a lot of important life and business lessons through that one single experience which lasted several years of my life of trying to push a commercial product into market single-handedly.

In school, I have never ever been able to hit the results that I aimed for and have regularly failed to impress anyone. In fact, I can still remember the expression I got from my teachers when I went to collect my SPM results – it was as if I had let down the entire school. However, in pursuit of education excellence, I earned my way to a PhD at one of the top universities in the world. Working through blood, sweat and tears, taught me a lot of important lessons on strength and tenacity.

Maybe, just maybe this is the reason why I still have the drive to risk my dreams wherever they may take me. I still need to prove to myself that I can do it.

Or maybe, as another friend of mine put it – I just need to be happy.

PS: This tune randomly entered my head and got stuck there.

Well, not exactly.

However, I heard that our MCA elections ended with Chua Soi Lek winning the position of party president. This got me wondering – someone who has broken our penal code, gotten his act caught on film, came out with a full admission of the act instead of denying it, got himself kicked out of a ministerial position for the act, got turned into a sort of pariah in the party – made the ultimate political comeback to win the party presidency in a coup de grace.

Honestly, my hat is off to him.

Firstly, for being able to last so long in the film before coming at the end. Secondly, for exhibiting a great amount of patience with all his detractors. Thirdly, for engineering his comeback with such pomp. Regardless of everything else that he may have done, I salute him for doing the highly improbable and near impossible.

What I don’t get is, why is he not in jail or something – for breaking the penal code with a full confession. I would think that this was an open and shut case for our police. It should not tax them one bit to park his sorry arse where it belongs.

Unless of course, he plans to push amendments through parliament – to change the bits of the penal code that he broke. I am sure that many people will thank him for it.

As someone who is actively involved with registering voters in our country, I have some thoughts on what Jagdeep Singh Deo said about automatic voter registration.

1. Automatic Registration using MyKAD
   “voter registration exercises were outdated as Malaysians now have MyKads that contained all necessary information.”
   This I will need to agree with. We have put in so much information and security into the MyKAD that it does not make sense not to. Our National Registration Department (NRD) has all the necessary information in their database and they already share this with their counterparts in the Elections Commission (EC). All voter registration needs to be done using the exact information in the MyKAD. If we registered a different address than the one on the MyKAD, the registration would actually be rejected by the EC. So, it does not make sense not to just put all the information into the EC database directly. In fact, with the right software in place, all the work of sorting out constituencies will be automated too. It just makes perfect economic sense to do it.
2. Compulsory Voting
   “In some countries, voting is compulsory and eligible voters who do not vote are penalised.”
   This I cannot agree with. I am a strong believer in personal liberty. We cannot and must never force someone to vote. If that person has no interest in voting and makes no effort in understanding the issues, that person should not be encouraged to vote. Voting should ideally be done by informed voters – people who know enough about issues to form an opinion and then go out to express that opinion at the ballot box. We must never compel someone to vote. It will just ruin the outcome of the votes because these people would end up voting based on some random thing like gender, race, religion and whether or not the candidate wore white on polling day. Garbage-in, garbage-out is the term to describe the outcome of such an election where voters voted randomly.
3. Reduced Voting Age
   “If we are serious about becoming a truly developed and international class country, we should seriously consider reducing the age of voting eligibility to 18.”
   This is another thing that I cannot agree to simply because, I do not think that we should draw the line at any arbitrary number such as 18. If our criteria is that people should be mature enough to think and decide on issues, then I don’t understand the rationale for picking the number 18 since kids these days are so mature that they can probably tell you the right thing to do at the age of 15 or younger. I think that voting age should be drawn along the lines of – if you are old enough to be affected by the decisions made by silly politicians, you should be allowed to vote. But this would not be practical as babies would fall into this category. So, maybe a more practical solution would be to allow anyone who is old enough to work to vote. Their jobs would be directly affected by the decisions made by politicians and they should have the right to express their grievances.

Anyway, if you have not yet registered to vote, please do so tomorrow. You can request a form from any post office in the country. It is a fairly straight-forward form to fill – you just need to be careful about entering the information exactly as found on your MyKAD. Then, wait about 4-6 months and check your registration status at the SPR website. If you have successfully registered, you will see the information online.

Finally, when it comes time for the general elections, please check online for your exact voting station. There will not be any letter or notice sent out to you officially. Just go online and check for the information. Turn out to vote as your employer cannot deny you the right to cast your vote. In fact, drag your employer along with you!

PS: You can find me at a certain pasar malam every week, shouting and signing up voters on the spot. I am doing it because I see it as a civic duty, personally.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Exploiting the ultimate cloud computer – our fellow human beings!

Our most expensive local ISP is back-peddling on its decision to cap downloads. While they may spin it as a monopoly listening to customer feedback, I think that someone truly dropped the ball on this one. Considering the fact that tax-payers forked out more than RM 2-billion to help subsidise the infrastructure deployment, our rakyat should really not have things shoved up their behinds as a thank you.

This high-speed broad band is only good for the country if the rakyat are able to reap its benefits. Capping your download to 2GB is basically capping the amount of knowledge that a child can learn in a day, which is just dumb. It was a seriously dumb move from a business sense too, since their HSBB packages actually make their ADSL packages look good.

Someone really dropped the ball on this one. It’s just good that they are back-peddling on their decision.

I just do not like the idea of them reserving the right to cap bandwidth in the future. They must remember that the rakyat are stake-holders in the infrastructure as well. The people subsidised its deployment and should actually get a heavy discount on the packages instead.

More downloads means more traffic, means we get to buy bandwidth from the international hubs in larger quantities, meaning that the bulk prices we pay per bit will be lower, ultimately driving the price of broad-band dramatically downwards. I seriously urge all early HSBB adopters to download to their hearts’ content so that the rest of us can pay less for it later.

I guess that I am not alone in thinking that UniFi sucks. According to TheStar, consumers had their bubbles burst when the packages were announced. However, the article got some of the facts wrong.

In Singapore, a 1Gbps (gigabit per second) service – which is five times the speed of a 20Mbps connection – only costs about RM200.

A 1Gbps service is not five times the speed of a 20Mbps connection, it is fifty times the speed at a similar price point. To say that our broad-band services are expensive is just laughable. It is sad that our national monopoly cannot get its act together to give our citizens what they need. If it is about buying aggregated bandwidth from the international hubs, we have 10 times the number of citizens in this country compared to Singapore. Our bandwidth consumption should be 10 times more than Singapore. So, that excuse just does not fly.

Telekom Malaysia CEO Datuk Zamzamzairani Mohd Isa said at a press conference to announce the UniFi pricing yesterday that the measures were part of its Fair Usage Policy. This policy is a standard industry practice to ensure that all subscribers get to enjoy the same web surfing quality.

While I agree that fair-usage policies need to be implemented, it is unfair to cap the bandwidth at such a low value. The caps are hardly enough for a single user, much less a house-hold. However, they have no caps for business users and the business packages are only slightly more expensive than the home packages. So, I would recommend that consumers subscribe to the business packages instead of the home packages, if that was possible.