Sybreon Ones Nought

If I am to drive a car, I should drive a fuel efficient and low maintenance car. Therefore, I should learn from the examples of some of our state executive members who ended up trading in their Protons for Mercedes E200. According to this article, there are many advantages of the Mercedes:

• In the long run, Mercedes cars are cheaper to maintain and could also save us fuel costs.
• The cars could also fetch a high market price when sold as second-hand cars.

It could be true that the older model Protons may be less well engineered and may cost quite a lot in long term maintenance. The Perdana models were design prior to the purchase of Lotus. The article cited the example of the Proton Perdana of state Commerce, Industry and Environment committee chairman Toh Chin Yaw, which has twice undergone expensive repairs to the tune of RM50,000 in the last 36 months.

They ended up paying only RM 245,000 for each Mercedes, which is very cheap. I guess they must be able to buy it without any import duties, for official use. Assuming that it costs RM 50k to maintain a Proton every 3 years, these babies would pay for themselves after 15 years of continuous use, without any maintenance. Add in another 5 years if we factor in maintenance.

But I already drive a low maintenance, highly fuel efficient car suitable for long distance drives. In the short 5 years that I had use the car, I had already driven it more than 100,000 km. A single tank of fuel, which costs about RM50 (RM75 now), can bring me from KL to Penang. I challenge the Mercedes to beat that!

In terms of maintenance, I spent about RM150 every 5,000 km for regular service and about RM500 for replacing some parts, after about 20,000 km. This comes to about RM5,500 in total maintenance for 5 years. The car is a Proton and the parts and service centres are easily found throughout the country.

In case anyone is wondering, my car used to be a Proton Iswara 1.3L. At the time that it was bought, it cost about RM30,000 or so. Oh, and you should not look down on the crash-ability of the Proton. My car had so many bumps and scratches on it, as a testament to its survivability.

PS: When I go home, I plan to “upgrade” my car to something that’s more fuel efficient. I wonder if they will sell the Tesla Roadster in Malaysia. It is the one pictured above and is partly designed by Lotus anyway. Otherwise, I’ll just go for a Perodua.

I find this image a symbolic representation of a boring life, put in a beautiful context. We awake, eat, work, sleep. Rinse and repeat. Life rarely gets more exciting than this.

I’m just not in a very good mood today. So, I don’t think that I’ll be getting any more work done. So, I thought that I’d just rant about random things. Help get rid of some steam.

I hate phone spammers. For some reason, I always get phone calls that try to sell me stuff. I guess that the previous tenant who lived in my room must have given out his phone number at some point. So, I hate phone spammers. I’ll categorise them into 3 categories:

1. Automated Calls.
   These are the dumbest of all. When I pick up the phone, a pre-recorded message starts to play that sells me something that I don’t want. My reply? I just hang up immediately.
2. Fake Human Calls.
   These calls are made by a person. But, they play some sort of background sound, which makes them sound like they are in a very busy call centre, and part of a large organisation. Again, they try to sell me something that I don’t want. My reply? I say, no thank you and hang up immediately.
3. Stubborn Calls.
   With these calls, the operator insists that he/she is not trying to sell you anything. Then, they start rambling on about their product or service. I gently remind them that they’re trying to sell me something, even if it’s just advice. Then, they switch on to asking questions from a questionnaire. My reply? I hang up immediately.

I know that these people are just trying to make a living. Trying to earn a buck in this world is not easy. However, when I say that I am not interested, it means that I am not interested. If that does not get into their head, I just hang up.

I hate phone spammers.

I think that I lack the ability to “toot my own tuba”, so to speak. I have just gotten back a feedback for my interview. I’m glad that they sent it to me as it highlights my primary weakness. Of the many things mentioned in the feedback, a couple of them were accurate, but mostly weren’t. It wasn’t that I lacked those skills but I didn’t present myself well enough, that’s all.

One of the things that they mentioned that I lacked was, no obvious knowledge of Linux. They didn’t even ask me anything about Linux during the interview. But maybe I should have rambled on and found some way to insert that tidbit into some other reply. You can say that I have little knowledge of Windows, since I’ve not touched it for almost a decade and will not touch it with a 10′ pole, but Linux?

No exposure to system level design? Again, I only have myself to blame there. I tried to play down my contribution in the different projects that I was involved in. So, instead of saying that I pretty much pulled the whole team through from start to finish, I made myself sound more like a team player. It’s only natural for me to switch on a modicum of modesty, when dealing with people superior to me. Maybe it’s an Asian mentality thing. I don’t know. This is probably a major mistake on my part.

No understanding of microprocessor architectures? Sigh. What can I say. Other people would not be using my microprocessor designs for commercial projects if I did not understand microprocessors. But I don’t blame them either here. There was one question that they did ask about microprocessors. However, I answered it quite badly as I did not order my answer properly and probably sounded like I was rambling away. I should really learn to just answer questions from the very beginning.

So, the good thing is that I am glad that I have finally received some feedback from an interview. And this feedback has taught me that my biggest problem is communication. I need to learn how to answer questions better. Otherwise, the interviewers would get a mistaken impression about me.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, there is a high chance that I’ll use the Atom based mini-ITX board from Intel as my HTPC platform. It seems that the board is actually capable of 1080HD playback as evidenced in the following video.

This system uses the D945GCLF board with an Intel Atom 230 1,6GHz HT and 256MB 533MHz DDR2 memory only! It claims to use passive cooling and would be very quiet if so. The movie is a 1080p film encoded in WMV9 or VC1 format. This is not as computationally intensive as H264 but is a good indicator. So, the board is definitely powerful enough to watch HD video encoded in MPEG4 and equivalent codecs.

I smell disaster for Intel here. If people catch on that this is all that they need for a regular computer, who is going to fork out 3 times as much for a dual core or even more for a quad core machine. And once people clue into this fact, what’s to stop system builders from building non-Intel low end machines like ARM or MIPS based systems.

Interesting.

Seriously. I must congratulate our dearest government for a job well done. I am so impressed that our PM has personally come out in his shock and horror garb to congratulate the Anti Corruption Agency (ACA) for a job well done. From an article:

The detention of two top Immigration officers by the Anti-Corruption Agency (ACA) in investigations into allegations of bribery in the issuance of visas to foreign workers showed that even big fish would not be let off the hook, said the Prime Minister.

I am curious as to how much does one need to steal in order to pass the benchmark to be a big fish. It’s nice to know, in case anyone wants to show off and be called a big fish, to make up for other lesser attributes.

According to this article:

The sources said syndicate members collected between RM1,500 and RM6,000 to extend each social visit pass for between one and six months. The sources said senior officers get between RM500 and RM700 per passport for a single extension while top officers get between RM10,000 and RM20,000 per agent per month.

Let’s do some quickie math.

Assuming that the agents pay a spread of fees depending on the size of their clientele and it averages RM 15,000 per month, this means that the DG has collected RM 180,000 per agent each year. As another 11 people had been arrested, we can assume that these were agents, which brings our grand total to just under RM 2 million per year. Now, we have arrived at what is considered a benchmark big fish in Malaysia.

A paltry RM 2 million is all it takes! That’s not really very much, when considered against the backdrop of 300 billion or more that have been siphoned out as estimated by Morgan Stanley. It is less than 0.0006% and is hardly even a drop in the ocean and we’re expected to swallow this as a big meal. What kind of cheap people does our PM think we are anyway.

RM 2 million is small fry lar, not big fish. Any statistician can tell you that 0.0006% is insignificant. To enter the realms of significance (0.5%), the DG would have to do it for more than 800 years. I doubt that he has been sitting in his position since before the great Malacca Sultanate or even the earlier Kedah Sultanate were existent in the country.

And the funniest thing is what we end up doing with these people. They end up being transferred to the Public Service Department! So, the PSD is the retirement agency for corrupt civil servants. Now I’m beginning to understand why there are so many problems in the PSD.

PS: As the poster shows: Coming Soon! I am still waiting for the big fish to swim into the net.

I wonder.

I had just attended another potential job interview recently. I submitted my application, and I got an email from them a week later, scheduling a 30 minute phone interview. Instead of that, I got a call from them the very next day, and got called in for a 2 hour face-to-face. This shocked me a bit as I had never ever gotten past the first round of any interview before, much less skipped it.

So, I travelled down for that interview. It all happened quite fast, so I wasn’t 100% prepared for it but I did whatever I could. I studied about the company and their products as well as prepared answers for every bit of information that I wrote in my CV. I also discovered one useful thing about interviews – remember to read the annual reports provided at the reception, because they contain useful information about the company not easily available publicly.

I think that I fielded the questions well, although I’m not sure if I gave the best possible answers or if they were totally happy with me. The interviewers did do their homework though. They had copies of my CV printed, with hand written notes all over it in red pen. They had also looked up the various web references that I provided in my CV, with regards to my work. So, they had quite a lot of questions to shoot me with. I had to go out for 3 cups of water, as I kept talking and talking.

However, there was one question that I simply didn’t have an answer for. I didn’t think that they’d ask me this question so soon. I had thought that I would get at least another round of interview. The question just came out of the blue: how much I’d like to be paid. I was stunned and I gave a really lame ass answer. I hope that they don’t take that as an indication that I’m not seriously interested. It’s just that, I didn’t expect to be asked that question today. Nevermind, lesson learned. I now know, the exact figure to give. I’ve just worked it out with my calculator.

Anyway, I was told to wait a few weeks for a reply. They said that they would have to consider a few other people. What, no more interviews? Damn, it was a stealth final round! But after a few more days, they emailed me to tell me that I failed to get the job. I asked them for some feedback but have yet to hear from them in reply. So, I’m not quite sure where I went wrong, yet again.

I think that it should only be fair for the companies who reject me to tell me where I went wrong. If I don’t get any feedback from job interviews, how am I supposed to improve at them? All I can do is make random assumptions and that doesn’t do me any good.

But at least, I got further than I have ever gotten before, this time around. The difference is that I left out some bits about my previous experience and I did not apply for an entry level position, but a position meant for experienced people. I guess that I’ll need to try things differently again, for the next job.