Category Archives: Lessons

Guide To Dieting in Singapore

Dieting in Singapore – you can have your cake and eat it you know. Just know how many calories are in each slice. (About 100kcal)

When I first started counting my calories, I got quite a few responses from my friends. Some feigned mock horror, others said they couldn’t be bothered as it was a chore. To amuse myself and to annoy my Facebook friends, I posted regularly on the horrors of high calorie content in our local foods, and what do you know, some of them started calorie counting too. Sadly, most gave up after a while.

Anyway, in the past four months, I’ve dropped about 5.5kg from the time I swore to change my diet. On the bright side, I can see my jawline again, most of the spare tyres around the tummy and chest has disappeared and my waistline has contracted by over an inch, reversing a 15-year trend.

The bad part is now most of my usual work and casual clothes are now baggy and I have to buy new clothes.

To some people that isn’t a bad thing at all.

Anyway, some friends have asked me to share my diet plan and other tips, so you read this earlier post (My Mid-Life Food Crisis) first on the science behind dieting, and my new learnings as follows:

1. Be completely honest about yourself first.

We’ve heard it all before – “Muscle weighs more than fat!”, “Don’t believe the BMI chart, doesn’t apply to everyone”, “It’s ok to be bulkier when you age.” I’m sorry if this hurts you, but they are all rubbish excuses. If you fall outside of the healthy BMI range, you have to accept that no matter your body shape or bone density.

Now our Health Promotion Board has pretty harsh BMI benchmarks compared to the West. Where healthy is up to 24.9, our SG standard is up to 22.9 (which means I have one more kg to lose)

BMI (kg/m2) for Adults	Health Risk
27.5 and above	High Risk
23 – 27.4	Moderate Risk
18.5 – 22.9	Low Risk (healthy range)
Below 18.5	Risk of nutritional deficiency diseases and osteoporosis

Unless you are a bodybuilder, below 18, a senior citizen, pregnant or suffering from illness, you can’t run away from this objective chart. The biggest hurdle in dieting, in my opinion, is our perception of what our ideal weight should be.

2. Dieting doesn’t mean bland food.

You can have your cake (butter or pandan?) and eat it. Really. The only condition is that you need to moderate how much of fatty, oily and rich food you are going to take in a day. It’s common sense, you know it lah, but the only way to know is to count your calories religiously. I still have regular treats of ice-cream, cakes, Twisties and some chocolate weekly, and I’m still losing weight.

I walk into foodcourts today and feel like a war refugee. There are so many stalls that I don’t wish to eat from, because my palate has changed permanently. Once your new dietary habits kick in after a few weeks, you don’t even need to avoid the rich foods – you will have NO DESIRE to eat them at all. This is because Singapore is a food paradise, yet we have sinned too much from the time we are young. Switching to a healthy diet is like a baptism of fire, suddenly your eyes are opened and you see the truth of our country’s unhealthy living.

3. What to eat.

It’s very simple, just think of the following key words - Soupy, High Fibre, Less Fried, Low Gravy and try not to bust 500kcal per meal. For guys, don’t bust a total of 1800kcal a day (to maintain weight) or look to have a deficit of 300kcal (ie. eat 1500kcal a day) to lose nearly 1kg in 25 days. Every kg of weight is worth 7700kcal, so you can calculate from there.

Be it wanton soup noodles (300-350 kcal), economy rice with more vegetables and some meat (500kcal), porridge (400kcal), fish soup noodles (300-400kcal), it’s all ok. Now some of you might think it’s boring and bland, but you don’t have to eat from lousy foodstalls. Eat from good foodstalls and a simple wanton noodle tastes terrific.

This doesn’t mean you can’t eat slightly higher calorie food like fried rice (600-700kcal) or dry minced meat noodles (400-500kcal) regularly. You can have it once a day but make sure your other two meals in the same day are healthier dishes. Once or twice a week, you can treat yourself to fatty chicken rice (666kcal and up) or roti prata (200kcal per prata).

One problem is the prevalence of carbohydrates. We need carbs for energy, and you shouldn’t go on a carb-free diet. But if you want to lose weight fast and not feel hungry all the time, shave off 1/3 or 1/2 your rice or noodles and replace with fruits in the same meal. Trust me, your weight disappears really fast this way, and you won’t faint at work.

4. What to stop eating

There are some foods that are definite red flags and you need to consider if you should eat them even once a week if you aren’t exercising regularly. They contain too much calories per dish, and some of them don’t even make you feel full.

Char Kway Teow (over 900kcal)
Nasi Lemak with the works (over 1000kcal)
Any fast food burger with two or more meat patties (easily over 1000kcal)
Chocolate bars like Snickers (300kcal per bar)
Nuts (Cashew nuts are 1000kcal per cup!)
Duck Rice (Such fatty birds lah, over 700kcal for roasted versions)

Yeah, you can say “How can we not enjoy good food in Singapore?” Yes you can, but many of us have gone overboard on a daily basis and it’s become the norm. Yet we are less active than our forefathers and the food industry spends billions convincing us to spend on unhealthy food.

The other killer in our diet are sweetened drinks. And I’m not even referring to soft drinks like Coke (150kcal per can)

The only healthy coffee is plain coffee without sugar (5kcal). Any other combination of sugar and milk (evaporated, condensed, less or more, whatever) adds unnecessary calories immediately. Depending on how much milk and sugar are added, a regular kopi can have the same amount or even more calories than a bigger can of Coke!

I love Milo (150kcal) but I’ve stopped drinking it regularly too, since I’m no longer a sportsman and I don’t need to win races What I did was to buy several waterbottles and place it at home, at work, in the bag and just keep drinking good old zero-calorie tap water, or succumb to Diet Coke/Coke Zero at work (0 calories, but may be carcinogenic according to some sources).

And where you can, reduce the amount of gravy they add to your food – be it chicken rice, duck rice, vegetable dishes etc. They contain too much fat and MSG, which in turn makes you thirsty and retain more water later. I love my curry, so it’s a regular sin on my economy rice…but not too much!

5. Exercise will accelerate weight loss, obviously.

I would say 60-70% of the weight loss comes from changing your diet, and the remaining 30% comes from exercise. You can always lose weight without exercise, but it’s going to take much longer and you don’t exactly become the toned looking person you desire to become. Rapid weight loss without exercise may just lead to saggy skin, low energy levels and sallow circulation (that’s my theory). Exercise also clears up the complexion rapidly and removes toxins from the body regularly (that’s true).

I’m used to exercising, since I used to be a dragonboater. But that’s not to say I enjoy running three or four times a week. I do it purely out of habit, and it’s not fun in this weather.

One thing to note about exercise, whether you run, swim or cycle – it’s not just the intensity, but the actual duration. You can run a 2.4km route at top speed and nearly burst your heart, but it’s only 150kcal, or the equivalent of a can of soft drink. It’s better to take a slow jog over at least 35min and burn about 400kcal, or the equivalent of one meal.

And make sure if you burn 400kcal from exercise, eat another 400kcal on top of your regular healthy meals to ensure you aren’t under-eating. See my earlier post to understand how to calculate calorie deficit healthily.

We are who we eat, and unfortunately, as Singapore has gotten more affluent over time, we’ve piled on the calories without understanding that our bodies don’t need the excess. We go for high teas, regular restaurant meals and fast food, only because we think it’s the middle/high class lifestyle we should aspire to. We appreciate good tasting food, but we don’t measure their impact on our bodies.

Like I said, it’s ok to enjoy good food while we are alive.

But moderate yourself and suddenly you’ll find yourself looking and feeling much better. (Cue cheesy late night TV ad music!)

Attitude Determines Destiny

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Last weekend, I was swimming with the family at Bishan pool when I heard a China-born swim coach remind his young students “态度决定命运!”. It means “Attitude Determines Destiny”.

It was such a fascinating statement that I stopped swimming to listen further and I kept brooding on it. I went home and did online research, finding out that it was the title to the following saying (I’m not sure who the author is)

态度改变，行为就会改变

行为改变，习惯就会改变

习惯改变，性格就会改变

性格改变，命运就会改变

Change your attitude, and your behavior will change.

Change your behavior, and your habits will change.

Change your habits, and your character will change.

Change your character, and your destiny will change.

How true! All these, many of us know in one form or another, but it had never been laid out to me in such a clear, logical manner. I spent the rest of the weekend discussing this with Isaac, stressing to him how every step (attitude, behavior, habits and character) are essential to building one’s future. Of course, I don’t know how much he will remember of this conversation, since he is still young and inexperienced in the ways of the world.

I’ve always wondered if being a journalist was a good thing, because there was so much unhappiness during my SPH bond. But one thing that was beneficial was that it led me to meet so many different types of people in a very short time, and sometimes I got the opportunity to tell their unique stories.

As I looked back at people I’ve met over the years, the four steps manifested themselves in different ways, but always had similar roots in habitual behavior.

There was this army major, who spent his time blaming young NSFs for his mistakes of poor judgement.

There was this girl, who couldn’t help but keep making the wrong decisions in love, breaking up other lives along the way.

There was this person, who kept lying and covering up in almost everything at work, until it became chronic and known to everyone else.

There was this person who spent his time plotting against others, but never actually doing any real work. As far as I could tell, he didn’t really have any real skills either.

There was a writer who was addicted to plagiarism, but somehow was always let off the hook.

The pattern continues, and you get the idea. People who do the things they shouldn’t do, keep doing it until it becomes a fixed habit. Then they get stuck, because they really can’t stop.

What was the attitude that led to the behavior in the first place? The idea that they can get away with it? That it was an acceptable thing to do to survive in this cruel, unforgiving world?

Some will scoff, saying that you can’t be a goody-two-shoes if you want to rise to the top, because the bad guys always get ahead. The question needs to be asked – do you want to rise to the top, and where is the “top” anyway?

The peak of a corporate firm? Or the peak of your technical skills?

The peak of being a multitasker? Or the peak of being able to live with contentment?

The peak of being able to fool everyone (eg. cheating pastor of a big church)? Or the peak of self-awareness and humility?

How then, did such attitudes get planted? Through upbringing? Through peer influence? Through multiple failures or successes in life?

I don’t know, and I worry for my children as I seek to put them on the right path God instructed parents to. I keep making mistakes in parenting and I keep asking myself if I am doing right by my kids. I look back at my own life, and I wonder what did my mum do right so that I didn’t grow up with the wrong values.

Or was it that I was blessed with righteous and caring bosses in SAF, SPH and Microsoft that led to my current outlook on life? I’m not saying that I’m great at what I do, but my bosses all taught me the unshakeable values of doing my best no matter the size of the assignment, and being brutally critical of my own work and behavior because there is always someone better…..You know, there are few greater blessings than having wise mentors.

Or is it genetic? Are chronic liars and competitive people born that way?

Again, I don’t know, but all I know is that shaping my future, and hopefully my children’s values, all starts with my attitude, and for that, I thank the nameless coach for such precious wisdom. I’m not saying that man is in full control of his life – God is. But we have been given free will to decide what kind of life we want to lead, and what is our attitude that will please God and men?

My Mid-Life Food Crisis

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Update 3 Feb 2013: I’ve switched from the HPB iDat app to MyFitnessPal, which provides a much better food database, nutrition breakdown, user interface and it syncs properly across devices. The problem with locally created apps, especially those from govt. agencies, aren’t very well maintained or designed. But it was a good start and I do thank HPB for it.

Late last year, I got infected by a really bad case of athlete’s foot (that’s foot fungus if you’re not an athlete). It refused to heal despite all sorts of medicine being used, and I had to stop jogging for the whole month of Dec and the early weeks of Jan because it became too painful to even walk. I’ve since ditched the useless Western medicine and am using an ancient method of vinegar soak (50% white vinegar, 50% water for 20min twice a day) and it’s killing the fungus with an unholy vengeance.

The infection forced me to stop eating heavy foods and reduce my snacking, because I knew I couldn’t burn them off with another long run. This was especially miserable during the Christmas season when people are supposed to be making merry and gobbling food.

But that didn’t change my thinking on food, which was to “live to eat”. Two years of running with the Nike+ system gave me more stamina, but I gained about 3kg rather than losing weight. I love my pork lard, dry noodles and curry rice!

Then a few weeks ago, I purchased a digital weighing scale to replace the old spring version which has been showing the wrong readings for years. The new scale came with a fat percentage analyzer, and to my horror, my fat count was over 24% (healthy is 20% or under).

Didn’t help that my BMI was borderline overweight at 25 (it should be under 25). I’ve been mildly unhappy with the gradual disappearance of my jawline over the past few years too, and the weighing machine sparked the decision to change my eating habits for good.

Some fundamentals in adjusting food habits:

1. Data is critical. Most of the time, we make decisions without the right information. Working in journalism and Microsoft has taught me a healthy respect for collecting relevant data before acting. One of the reasons why I never lost weight since my army days is because I haven’t actually bothered to research what I was eating. How many calories was I actually eating a day? What is the trajectory of my unstoppable weight gain?

2. Exercise is unavoidable. Thankfully I have been jogging regularly over the past six years to ensure I don’t fail the IPPT fitness test. But I needed to ditch the rudimentary Nike+ Sportband pedometer because it was always showing a longer distance than I actually covered (due to my smaller strides). And the Nike+ website is a continual disaster with login failures and all sorts of problems. I can’t believe how a great company like Nike can tolerate having such an abysmal online experience for runners. I’ve covered over 900km with the Sportband and I was getting really fedup with the Nike site and my lack of weight loss.

So, I spent a day researching on calorie counting apps, and remembered the Singapore Health Promotion Board folks telling me about their iDAT (Interactive Diet and Activity Tracker) app. I downloaded it and was astounded to find all sorts of local food and their respective calorie figures in the database. It also comes with a basic GPS feature to track your various fitness activities.

The iDAT app’s main screen, which shows you a quick summary of your calorie intake versus requirements. The green bar shows your daily baseline requirement and the yellow bar shows calories expended by exercise. The orange bar refers to how much you’ve consumed so far in the day.

So I decided to do a simulation of my usual intake of delicious SG food and it wasn’t a good report card. It’s scary how many calories our local food contains. We know they aren’t healthy, but the numbers are sobering. My baseline benchmark is a bowl of minced pork porridge, which is about 320 kcal and not the most exciting meal out there.

	FOOD	CALORIES (kCal)
BREAKFAST	Breadtalk curry bun	214
BREAKFAST	Soya bean drink with sugar	138
LUNCH	Chicken Rice	666
LUNCH	Soft Drink	133
TEA	Ice Milo	175
TEA	Biscuit	150
DINNER	Economy Rice with 2 veg and 1 meat	580
DINNER	Ice Lemon Tea	87
SUPPER	Crispy snacks	200
	TOTAL	2343

Give or take, the average SG male needs 1800-2000 kcal a day on average to keep going. Of course, I don’t eat such rich food at every meal but with an excess of 343 kcal a day, one will gain 1kg in just 22 days if you lead a sedentary lifestyle and don’t exercise.

“Calorie In” must be balanced with “Calorie Out” to maintain the same weight. When you take in less calories than you expend, you’ll experience a calorie deficit which then leads to weight loss. Vice versa too.

According to online wisdom, 1kg of body weight is equivalent to 7700 kcal. To burn off 1kg of weight, you need to have a calorie deficit each day of 500 kcal over 15 days. The reverse is true – overeat by 500 kcal per day and you’ll gain 1kg in 15 days. The advice is not to have a deficit of more than 1000 kcal per day for healthy weight loss. The HPB website has much more info and you should do your research there.

Now what puzzles me is – why didn’t I know all this facts on weight management before? Why is it nobody teaches this in school or provide such advice when dishing out gems on healthy living? My suspicion is that most people never bother to find out until they meet a nutritionist or read a blog post like this.

Anyway, armed with this data, I reworked by daily diet to look something like this:

	FOOD	CALORIES (kCal)
BREAKFAST	Gardenia Softmeal Bread 2 slices	137
	Cheddar cheese spread (thin)	30
	Kopi O Kosong	5
	Apple Raw	96
LUNCH	Wanton noodle soup	290
LUNCH	Cordial Drink	88
TEA	Wheatmeal biscuit	110
DINNER	Economy Rice with 2 veg and 1 meat	580
DINNER	Ice Lemon Tea	87
SUPPER	Nestum 3-in-1 drink	110
	TOTAL	1533

Overnight, I would have shaved off 800 kcal from my usual unhealthy diet. Even with a baseline calorie requirement of 1800 kcal, I would have a deficit of 267 kcal. This would theoretically lead to a loss of 1kg over 28 days. I don’t stop myself from eating my favorite mee pok or fried rice though, I just eat half a portion and substitute the rest with colorful fruits to ensure I don’t feel hungry.

Here’s another day’s reduced diet mix.

Now all my friends know I’m an impatient guy and I like to see quick results, so when you add exercise to the mix, the calorie deficit increases even more. To cut the long story short, jogging about 6km at a moderate pace (say within 35 min) will burn about 400 kcal, or roughly the equivalent of a bowl of dry wanton mee.

So if you choose to exercise every day, you can still stay slim even if you eat like most Singaporeans do. However I personally think that exercising everyday at that rate is dangerous as your body doesn’t get enough time to recover, so I do it every alternate day.

My current goal is to lose 3kg so my BMI goes down to about 23, and with the above focus on diet, data and exercise, I’ve lost about 1kg in the first week (which is deemed the safe limit for healthy weight loss). This is the first time in my life that I’ve actually bothered to lose weight seriously, and it’s not as hard as it seems. My jawline has redefined itself and my jeans are already looser.

However, there was a day I cut back too much (about 1200 kcal deficit) and I spent the whole day feeling a little faint and sleepy, so don’t go to the extreme and go bulimic on me please. Once I reach my desired weight, I will recalculate my daily requirements so I can maintain the weight.

This is the park connector route that I take to work. There are several traffic lights to cross though.

This is the park connector route that I take to cycle from Bishan to work in the Marina Bay area. There are several traffic lights to cross though. Thanks Jerry and Dom for figuring this route out for me!

And last week, I finally got a bicycle (has it been 12 years since I last cycled on my Giant?) so that I could keep up with the cycling goblin kids. Also, it’s a great way to get together with the AC dragonboaters who are all now in the same phase of mid-life crisis, going on SG park connectors like we are primary school kids again. I cycled to work for this first time this morning at a casual pace along the Kallang canal route, burning about 285 kcal over 11.7km and 51min, and I tell you, it’s lovely not having to worry about hell drivers in the rear view mirror. It’s also great to be able to cycle with the boys you grew up with over the past 30 years!

On the flipside, this means I’ll be riding my Ducati Monster less now

Now I know I’ve been annoying my Facebook friends by posting all sorts of calorie information on various foods (do you know one cup of roasted salted peanuts has 1000 calories?!?) but really, once you start getting into the data, you can’t stop. After one week of reading the iDAT app, I can tell you offhand the calorie count of most local food.

The younger version of me will pooh-pooh this and say “one should enjoy life and your food”, but I’m not young anymore and my metabolism is really slowing down. Strangely, my palate has also changed – I don’t really hanker after char kway teow or other oily food anymore.

Gone are the days when we used to be athletic dragonboaters or gung-ho army officers, and there’s no point trying to relive the days of the past. Aging is inevitable and if we choose to ignore reality, there will be a price to pay in days to come. Good food can be had in this food paradise, but just in moderation (and I really mean in moderation) while keeping the discipline to not over-eat or snack unnecessarily. I’ve stopped adding milk to coffee and take Coke maybe once a week. No more regular snacking on Collon or Cheezels too.

I must caution you though – once you embark on this path I took, you’ll never look at local food the same way again.

Thoughts on 2012

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Another year flies by and I thought I had better pen some thoughts down before I forget them.

An Instagram photo of the clouds over Bishan, 28 Dec 2012.

1. Photography is now in the pocket

In the mid 2000s, I used to conduct a few photography workshops in partnerships with Canon. Back then, my mantra to the audience was to use as high a resolution a digital camera as you could afford, because you’d never know how big you need to print them or what kind of HD displays you would be using them in the future as photo frames. I scoffed at phone cameras because they were just so primitive then (they were horrid).

Today, that mantra has gone out of the window as the old adage of “having a camera with you at all times” is more important than the actual megapixel count. Smartphones can now do spot exposure, HDR processing to overcome high contrast scenes and have really good color reproduction. And the most amazing thing is that you can share them instantly on social media, rather than wait a few days to get 4R prints and then another few weeks to show them to your friends.

If I go out with the kids and forget to bring my Olympus Pen along (the full frame Canon 5D sees very little action today due to its enormous bulk), it’s still ok because a modern smartphone has a really really good image sensor. And I don’t print photos anymore, photos are now shared by default on Facebook and Instagram, and this blog no longer hosts photos like it used to.

Isabel in soft focus, Instagram style.

Instagram has been a great tool that I have grown to appreciate. While some pros may decry the use of vintage filters, I love it because the same effects are much more difficult to achieve in Photoshop, and if you choose to take photos first and Instagram it later, you still retain the original image. And I’ve always been a fan of square 1:1 ratio images. In the past we used to fantasize about owning medium format cameras just to get that square look…today who cares?

I predict that compact cameras will become obsolete within the next five years, and dSLRs will once again become the domain of pros instead of consumers.

2. Xbox Rawks

The Xbox ambassadors and the rest of the usual gang of suspects at Dance Central Championships. You won’t find another group of more energetic young folks elsewhere (excluding this botak lah)

For the past year, I’ve been the business lead for the Xbox 360 in Singapore, the fifth guy in the job since the product was launched in Singapore during the early 2000s. While I have been driving the marcoms for Xbox and our other Microsoft retail products in the past five years, it’s a whole different ball game to be actually doing product management for such a complex product line.

And till today, I still have to tell people I don’t spend all my time playing games. It’s a continuously challenging business to manage, and while I can’t write much about all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes, what we did publicly was truly fun and groundbreaking this year.

The explosive finale of the Dance Central Championships 2012 at Plaza Singapura.

Dance Central Championships came about because we’ve always wanted to bring Xbox to the masses in a big non-traditional way. It blew our minds when over 1000 people signed up and the finale was simply electrifying as contestants did the most amazing moves on the stage. The finale coincided with the launch of Kinect Star Wars and it was a pleasure to work with the 501st Legion of Star Wars enthusiasts. Trust me, you don’t see such passion very often – these guys live and breathe the Force.

Halo 4 launch, 6 Nov at Funan. We’ve never packed the crowd in like this before.

The Halo 4 launch was something of a full circle thingy. When I joined Microsoft in 2007, my second day of work was the Halo 3 launch at Suntec. While we had to scale this one down due to budget constraints, we organized a Royal Rumble-style Ultimate Deathmatch as our first tournament in many years and it was truly gratifying to see fans line up to see who would be the last one standing.

In my previous job as a journalist, I wrote many stories, but I could have never imagined writing a story like my past five years in Microsoft and being part of the amazing Xbox journey.

3. The Goblins

The Tan family, Xmas 2012

Isaac will be ten years old soon, and Isabel will be eight. Feels like yesterday that Goy and I were still pak-tor-ing (going out on dates). Sometimes I get a bit disoriented and forget that I’m a father to two kids. With them yakking and cracking jokes and arguing all the time, sometimes I feel more like their older brother. Especially since I don’t feel so grown up myself.

It’s really not easy to inculcate solid values and be a good role model to the kids, and often I fall short. But I’m glad the kids make it a fun journey…most of the time. And they are the main reason that I…

3. Fought the education system

It started one day when Goy showed me this ACS Primary sample mathematics exam paper that was so ridiculously tough I lost my cool. I said, “That’s it, I’m writing a letter to the papers.”

One letter led to another, and before I knew it, I had sent and gotten six letters published, and other letter writers contributed their thoughts too. The letters are archived here in their original unedited form (the Today letters have since gone offline, such a pity)

Crippling learning with unrealistic standards

It’s a strong foundation that counts

Is the Education Ministry really listening to parents’ feedback?

Why would people want to have kids in Singapore?

Getting to the root of kiasuism (this was a guest column for Today’s National Day Rally edition)

It is not me who is kan cheong

Did the letters help the situation? I think it did, because since the first letter, education has become a bigger talking point in the public space. The Gahmen stopped publishing names of top PSLE scorers this year and while the problem lies more in the sheer unreasonable breadth of the primary school curriculum, at least they’re doing something.

The problem with the education system, I suspect, is that there are too many layers and differing approaches, and no single visionary who can articulate what kind of education system is good for our kids. To solve this problem at the root, we need leaders with actual field experience and I am awaiting the day when an acclaimed educator become the Education Minister.

I’m not saying that the current Minister Heng is doing a lousy job, it’s just that the PAP’s way of appointing ministers needs to take into account that a finance/army/civil service guy may not appreciate the nuances of education like an ex-teacher would. To change the world, we don’t need technocrats and administrators and policymakers. We need people who know what it takes and are willing to risk everything to improve our children’s lives.

I’m done with letter writing for now, because I was starting to sound like a broken record.

4. My Monster.

My Monster 1100 Evo at one of the old Seletar airbase buildings. Vintage filtered with the help of who else but Instagram.

I first started riding army bikes in 1996, and enrolled in the civilian Class 2B course in 2007. Only in 2012 did I finally realize the long-time dream of owning a Class 2 (400cc and above) bike and after much consideration, I chose the Ducati Monster 1100 Evo and it is an exhilarating ride. I have written about it here.

Seriously, 16 years is a pretty long time to wait, but I guess I was too busy in between.

5. People moving on.

Several colleagues have left Microsoft and I am deeply grateful for all the things they have taught me and gone through with me. Great friends are hard to find in any workplace, and I’ve been blessed with knowing so many talented folks since I started working in 2001. All this sounds very clichéd, but our personality and attitudes to life are often shaped by the meaningful relationships we have and cherish.

And my ex-boss Ben Tan has so many classic lines that I remember by heart. Eg. “Don’t wrestle with pigs!” “Stack them high and watch them fly!” (referencing mass stacking at retail). “How do you get from good to great?”

An old SPH friend, Chee Kin, left us suddenly this year. He was a kind and funny mentor during my journalism internship years, and now I can’t crack anti-Sun Ho/China Wine jokes with him anymore. Quite a few friends have passed away (the first guy during Primary 5) and it is always a grim reminder that our days on earth are numbered and unknown to us. All the more reason to enjoy life for what it is and never regret the things we do. It’s either now or never, people!

6. Passing another violin exam

A shot of my violin and my teacher’s violin.

To many kids, passing the ABRSM music exam is no big deal, since everyone is doing it (usually not by choice). To an adult like me, who has no natural innate gift in music, clearing my Grade 5 exam was a big accomplishment.

This was a frightening exam to go through, because I realized that I still could not get rid of the jitters and shakes whenever I played in front of a teacher or examiner. I concluded that I simply did not have stage performance confidence – an irony because I have no issues giving speeches in front of huge crowds. Goy helped me overcome this (mostly) by constantly practicing with me with the piano and I learnt how to minimize the tonality issues. I just managed to score a merit rating and it felt like a distinction already.

I continue to learn the violin because it’s too late to just stop now, when I’ve worked at this for over 11 years, and because every lesson is such a humbling experience for an arrogant nature like mine. Violin is truly a great antidote for the inertia that threatens to subsume me every day.

As usual, I don’t think too hard about the future and what I want to do in 2013. Everything happens according to God’s plan and all I ask for is to be happy in the things I do and achieve contentment at all times. I feel the edginess and impatience of the mid-life crisis (all the old AC boys are experiencing it) and we have to keep remembering to get together lest one of us disappear from sight without warning.

Pok’s wedding in KL, probably the last time we will look relatively young. Age will hound us from here on.

And 2012 was great because the last of the dragonboat gang – Pok and Naveen – finally got married. Now they’ll understand what we married men have been talking about during our Adam Road suppers

Notes to myself

Why I don’t feel sorry for Kodak

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It was all over the news today – Kodak has finally filed for bankruptcy protection.

Nobody was really surprised. Kodak has been on a decline since the beginning of the 2000s as digital cameras began to supercede film cameras. Unlike the recent passing of Steve Jobs, I haven’t seen many people on my social media networks lamenting the loss of the company that popularized photography. Looks like people just aren’t shedding a tear for Kodak.

While I do feel sorry for the Kodak employees and pensioners who face an uncertain future, they had little say in how the company was run to the ground by their management over the past few decades. Yes, Kodak film allowed for the creation of millions of amazing images, but in my lifetime, Kodak didn’t care for the consumer very much.

I’m normally a very nostalgic guy, and I will always remember walking past the bright yellow decor of film-development stores that were sponsored by Kodak in the 1980s. It was always fascinating to see how long strips of negatives would pass through the innards of the gigantic machine which would spit out 3R-sized color photos.

However Kodak left more of a bitter taste in my mouth than nostalgia is worth. Let me tell you why.

1. Film was ridiculously overpriced.

When I started getting into photography in the late 1990s, it was such an expensive hobby. If I remember correctly, it was $5 per roll of film, $10 to develop a roll of film and 30 cents to print each photo in 4R size. So to shoot a roll of 36 exposures would easily cost you $25 before inflation.

That’s not counting the cost of batteries as film cameras were power guzzlers – remember the sound of film being rewound in a compact camera? Today you can shoot thousands of photos without considering the cost – it costs just about nothing on the digital platform. But we always had to consider the cost of reloading each roll of film.

You can argue that it forced us to become better photographers when we didn’t waste film, but I can also argue that Kodak profited handsomely from enthusiast photographers.

Kodak and other film makers never really sought to lower the cost of film. The centuries-old method of using silver halide worked for them until digital overtook it with dazzling speed (actually it took about 5 years for digital to go into the mainstream from the time the first decent digicams appeared in the early 2000s).

2. Kodak never understood digital, and still doesn’t

As a tech writer in the mid-2000s, I always groaned when Kodak’s PR agency would pitch their latest digicams for a review. Compared to current models of the day from Canon and Olympus, Kodak’s digital cameras often seemed like backward and ugly cousins. And their image quality was never up to par. I could be wrong, but they were probably re-branded OEM digital cameras. For a company that invented digital cameras, they put little effort and money in advancing the technology.

As film development stores began to shutter down rapidly, I didn’t see Kodak doing anything significant to save their retail partners.The shopkeepers were helpless as the landscape shifted and so was their principal supplier.

I remember it was so expensive to request for film negatives to be converted to a digital format. I tried it for a few rolls after a professional shoot and the quality of the scan was not fantastic. Where was Kodak then? Still trying to sell more Portra film to professionals, and over-saturated Gold label films to clueless tourists.

If you read any business story on Kodak’s decline, you’ll see so many other ways that they failed to capitalize on the digital tsunami. It’s not that they didn’t have the money to invest, (especially at their peak in the 1990s), but like many legacy companies, they clung on to the past desperately and turned their noses at consumers. We just wanted a better solution instead of having to panic every time our film canisters or strips became accidentally exposed to the sun.

I embraced digital photography the minute I discovered it, and was over the moon when digicams finally reached an acceptable level of quality compared to film (that was about 2007 if I remember correctly, while dSLRs achieved that about 2004 with the Canon 1D Mark II). When I used the Canon 1D Mk II, my first 1GB memory card cost a whopping $400, but it paid for itself quickly – that card was approximately the cost of 16 rolls of film (or 576 exposures) and I shot thousands of photos in a few weeks.

It was sad at first to see how Kodak failed to change itself for the times (in contrast to its greatest nemesis Fujifilm), but after a while, one didn’t care for the company at all. It looks like after this bankruptcy protection, Kodak wants to focus on digital printing. That’s another silly move – everyone in developed countries are gradually moving to ebooks and Zinio mags on tablets, and we’re now sharing photos on Facebook folders…thousands of them, all for free. Who will pay for digital printing in the future?

Like the cliche goes, change is a constant, and we have no choice but to embrace change. If you work in a company that doesn’t embrace change, please take a look around and see if you can get out before the company becomes obsolete by its own choice or ignorance.

Kodak may emerge from its bankruptcy protection a better company, but the young people of today don’t even know how iconic it once was. Perhaps I should be sad for the past, but that feeling just isn’t happening.

Presentation Power – Yes You Can!

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A few years ago, I attended a company course called Presentation Power. Its main objective was to teach people how to make more powerful and impactful presentations. I’m going to distill the entire course (or at least what I can remember of it) into one single sentence:

“What’s in it for your audience to listen to you for more than a minute?”

You can be speaking on any topic on earth, but as long as you know what your audience is interested in listening to, and you know how to tell it that way, you’re already a powerful presenter.

I write this post because recently, I sat through an awful presentation. The presenter spoke English well (he’s a native speaker) and he had interesting things to say. Unfortunately, it was on a topic I had little interest in, and I was made to believe before the meeting that we would be discussing about something else.

I gave it my all to be as polite as possible and listen to what he had to say (why, maybe there might be something I could learn or benefit from this), but then it was Death by Powerpoint for nearly an hour. Look, I might work for Microsoft and I do use the Office Suite a lot, but I can tell you that with a great program comes great responsibility – Powerpoint is very easily used for the wrong purposes.

To make it worse, the Powerpoint deck he was using, appeared to be designed for another audience and objective in mind, but the presenter had deemed it okay to re-use it on me. To cut the long story short, by the end of the presentation I was really tired and not really interested in finding out more.

Not everyone can be a good or great presenter, and I think I speak too much Singlish to be a great orator. However, I can share with you a few tips I learned from the course, my journalism experience (where I met hundreds of good and horrible speakers) and my work in Microsoft.

1. Be very clear, both to yourself and your audience, what you are going to speak about before you even begin. Otherwise you’re mismanaging expectations. I often dread attending church when their most boring and longwinded speaker is giving a sermon, and ironically, he gave a sermon called “Are you wasting your time” a few weeks ago.

2. Give a good summary page/overview of your presentation, so your audience has a chance to tell you which segments they might want to skip to. Or just get to the point and expand upon it from there.

3. Use as few slides as possible. Some people have learnt how to cut down on the number of images and text paragraphs on their slides, but it’s still not enough. You have to distil distil distil your slides until it contains the barest minimum of information and visuals. Let your mouth do the talking, and not have people staring at the slides all the time trying to read reams of information.

4. Learn to read your audience and adjust your presentation on the fly. Are they yawning? Are they getting stoned out? Are they playing with their handphone? What is the reason? The one thing NOT to do is to keep droning on until you get to say what you planned to say. The right thing to do is to engage them directly and start asking them questions. You get to know if they were listening, if they were interested or if their mind is already on another planet. The feedback that you get from them will allow you to decide if you want to change topic, cut short your speech or just do something else.

Once you lose your audience’s attention, your presentation has broken down.

5. Give them a great reason (or many reasons) to listen to you with absolute rapt attention. Like I wrote earlier, what’s in it for them to bother about you and your topic? No matter whether you are a sales guy, journalist, teacher, doctor etc, your audience needs a good reason to keep listening to what you have to say. Does it benefit them financially or emotionally? Is it a matter of life and death? Will it change society as they know it? Can you say it in five minutes instead of fifty?

(Note to church preachers – you don’t need to fill up the entire 45min speaking slot you know).

Really, you don’t have to speak like a lawyer to be a great presenter. Just put yourself in the shoes of your audience and you can soon see the flaws of your presentation. Poor presentations are often the same in nature – they just don’t connect with the audience.

Sadly, many people are only interested in listening to themselves, not someone else, and that’s why they’ll never understand what an effective presentation should sound like.

You can avoid their pitfalls very easily – just recall all the bad presentations you’ve been in, or keep observing the bad one you’re stuck in right now – and ask yourself how do you avoid boring/annoying people like the guy on the stage.

Thoughts before 2012

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2011 was an amazing year in many ways. But isn’t every year amazing for you and me?

We went through a General Elections where we managed to finally exercise our collective voice through the Internet (the Prime Minister actually apologized on behalf of his party, can you believe it?) as a galvanizing force, we demonstrated to the local news media that we no longer consumed media in the old, top down manner, and technology continues to transform the way we consume content with greater acceleration than ever.

On the personal front, I completed my fourth year working in Microsoft, and my SPH journalism days are but a faint and distant memory. My thought processes remain much like a journalist – always probing, always skeptical – but my daily skill sets have shifted from the verbal to the numerical.

It’s hard to believe, but I’m finding it harder and harder to write posts on this blog. The older you get, the less you want to say about how you feel and the things that you observe. It’s also more difficult in a corporate world when people can easily misconstrue what you write. Facebook now offers me a private space where I can share my ramblings and images constantly with my close friends and acquaintances, without fearing some random stranger who would read my posts and form an inaccurate picture of me.

And this year, after 15 years since I first rode my army motorcycle, I finally got my own civilian bike, freeing me from the tyranny of the Certificate of Entitlement (which have returned to sky-high levels of the early 2000s) but exposing me to the relentless Singapore wet weather and reckless Johor riders.

As we head into 2012, apparently the year the world ends according to the Mayans, I do have some wishes I hope to see come true before the Mayan or Christian Apocalypse. They might seem insignificant to some of you, but hey, they mean a lot to me. These are things I think about daily these days, and I hope the new year brings improvements in these areas.

More good drivers on the roads, seriously.

If you think about it, there is much stress, anger, time wastage, loss of productivity and general unhappiness that is generated by lousy drivers and riders. One fool tailgating and smashing into another car in front can generate a traffic jam on the PIE, CTE and AYE combined. And totaling your car today by choice or otherwise, is a very expensive proposition, since COEs are so high. Bad drivers can really spoil everyone’s day, so for brighter days ahead, let’s drive well and be better role models to the young drivers around us so they won’t pick up bad habits that other people impress upon them.

Better weather

Global warming is upon us and it sucks. From higher temperatures to colder Novembers, we who live at the Equator suffer pretty badly. We don’t get hit by typhoons or tidal waves, but there are people who do and we should pray for them too.

More sensibility

Personally, I don’t like Twitter. I mean, why restrict me to a stupid 140-character limit? And I’ve mentioned before that it drives poor social media behavior as people seek to be as controversial or as witty as they can, even if the situation does not call for it. We’ve seen various companies and individuals taken down by poor use of Twitter and Facebook. In the new age where we talk less and post more, we need more common sense, and more wariness of what the Internet can do to our reputations.

Sensibility also extends to the way we think about our society and our neighbors. I’m personally appalled by much of the xenophobia and bias towards foreign talent in our country, when society is a free-for-all and everyone has a right to grab their opportunity if the talent and the heart fit the job. So what if they speak differently from us? They’re still people, with families, with dreams and with emotions. Just like you and me.

More guts

More people need to speak up on the things that are going wrong. For too long, we’ve kept mum as some public services have deteriorated (MRT services, COE management, housing policies etc) but because so many Singaporeans like to complain about the smallest things, people think that it’s wrong to complain too much. Excuse me, it’s never wrong to complain when something is really wrong, but one must also provide intelligent solutions, Otherwise, the ones you complain about will always say you don’t know what’s going on, so keep quiet. Show them you know, show them you’ve got the guts to speak up, and show them you’ve got the brains to offer alternatives and answers.

A greater pursuit of happiness and contentment

My personal philosophy of life is to seek happiness + contentment for myself, my family and my friends. I recently cleared a few drawers full of old letters and receipts. Now I was cheered to see letters and photos of long lasting friendships, but I was also stunned by how many receipts I had for materialistic goods like speaker systems, cameras and other gadgets. I love technology, and I love gadgets, but I have to remind myself I’m no longer writing technology stories and keep my gear to a minimum of what keeps me happy and contented. Many of my gadgets served that purpose, but quite a few didn’t. I will also have to work harder on bringing happiness to those around me.

Contentment is another tough thing to achieve. When is enough enough? Especially in a society like ours where it is so difficult to satisfy everyone? We should not be content with poor services or policies, but we should be thankful that life here is much better than many places in the world. We should not be content with the terrible education system that forces children to lose their childhood, but we should be glad that the kids can grow up in a safe environment here. Contentment doesn’t mean accepting every situation, but being positive about what we have that is good and useful.

More believers

And finally, I pray that many more people will come to know Jesus and the message of hope, love and eternal life that he brings to us. I also pray for older Christians like me who are constantly on the verge of forgetting his grace and power. Every day, I remind myself that the things I have are made possible only because He allows it, and we pray daily with the kids, always hoping that they will walk the straight and narrow path, and not veer off it. In a world where so many things are uncertain and where many of my desires as listed above may never come true, God remains the one constant that does not change. Whether we’ll have a financial meltdown again, or whether we will get stuck in another train disruption, there’s only one person to rely on no matter how bad or how good things get for us.

So here’s a great new year to you.

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