2010 YOG is scheduled to start at 20:10, so finally the screens on stage started displaying 5,4,3,2,1 and then fire works started. Fireworks has become common in singapore for every notable event like National day, New Year & YOG etc. I should say fire works have become quite monotonous as they look same for every celebration (for me this looks muted down compared to new year. Not sure whether they  haven’t unleashed full potential for this rehearsal). Then came display of singapore culture by all ethnics aka chinese,indian,malay etc. They also announced “welcome president of singapore” etc..  you know president is too busy to attend rehearsals, but they want to say, what they are supposed to say on 14th aug and we were sensible enough to understand all that. We all stood up for singapore national anthem and singapore flag was hoisted on corner.

Welcomed YOG athletes en masse. They mocked this by getting some huge school children. Most of front rows facing stadium are reserved for athletes seating. It took some time for them to get seated. Then there were few displays of dance, enaction of displays based on olympic chapter themes (these were quite boring if not for some fancy display of  different creatures). Then started flag ceremony with one carrying board written with country name and other carrying flag. As usual they started with greece and then alphabet order and singapore at last as host country. there were big applause for asian nations and to my surprise spain received very big applause and also many football dominant countries like argentaina, brazil and recent world cup hosts south africa. I tried to gave some big lion roar when india turn came up. It took a while to call up all 205 countries and there are country names which i never heard of (i doubt anyone of 25000+ heard of them all).  Then came speech by IOC president, YOG chairman (they put mock persons who said start speech and end speech causing laugher from crowds). Finally olympic anthem was played and 5 rings flag was hoisted. Three guys took olympic pledge on behalf of athletes,coaches and umpires. Then few more fire works and they said it is end of reharsal after nearly 2hours. But one thing they left out is lighting up YOG torch. It was for reason as normally it is kept secret who’z going to light and lit only once. But i saw huge cauldron at centre of stage probably for torch. In all it may take around 2 and half hours to complete opening ceremony considering real speeches will be crisp.

But overall my opinion about opening ceremony is mixed. There were some good displays but i expected more out of first ever youth olympics opening ceremony (fire works are not up to mark, if they are going to be same on 14th august).

P.S: I have taken some pictures, but before we left they asked not to post any pictures until opening ceremony. So i would like to respect that and more over pics are not of great quality as i am at last row and took from my mobile.

Party will be held on 15,16 and 17 September. Each one will have chance to attend on one of those days.  Having said all that i may consider going there if time suits me (not interested in taking half day leave as dates fall on weekdays).

In the end said more details will be provided when we report for duty. so wait continues!!

Although it came at cheaper price, the quality of print is not at professional level. It serves purpose but some times i observed letters were printed in some curved form. I self satisfied my self  by reminding  quality of service is directly proportional to quantity of money invested.

I have printed some where around 200 pages until now and mostly with 2-side, duplex and gray scale  printing. Then i was shocked to see that my black ink cartridge had started to look empty  or near empty(color cartridge still shows full as it is hardly used) . So i finally decided to buy a spare black cartridge for future replacement. I went to hougang challenger store and initially couldn’t remember my printer model no to find correct cartridge. Thanks to iphone, singtel and canon online warranty i could dig in to my warranty info and find model as MP-258.

Finally i picked up black cartridge and it costs Coooooool SGD26. As package looks big i thought it contains two but to my disappointment just one. Still i went ahead and bought one. On way back home i was thinking about usability of cartridge. if i can just able to print some where around 300 pages (optimistic estimation) for one cartridge  then SGD99 can cover just 1200 pages in monochrome. So in then end just for printing 1200 pages  you need to shell out maintenance cost equal to price of printer itself!!!!!!. I felt like this is some clever robbing from canon or to some extent every printer company. I am aware that most of printer companies makes their profit out of ink cartridge only but i didn’t know goes to this extent. I am feeling gutted that i made some wrong choice in going for cheap printer without minding maintenance. I better careful next time in buying printer. It is better to go with one which may burn your money at initial investment rather than going for high maintenance. Currently i am not aware which one better..but will surely do some research before next purchase.

In next IT show..i try to buy some third party cartridges if they can offer at reasonable price. It is not at all worth spending 1/4 th of printer price for just one black cartridge!!!! i hate spending like that..

When i was about to pay my bill , cashier asked for my NRIC no for membership confirmation and suddenly the one next in queue was so excited and asked are you member???? i was never been such excited being challenger member.. In the end she wants to pay by my membership so that she can get some SGD7 rebate. i happily agreed for that!!. Challenger doesn’t mind also. That’s only happy moment of disappointing shopping..

It has been nearly 2wks since singpost delivered iphone to me ( i ordered online on www.singtelshop.com and got SGD30 discount).  I had some mixed experience so far.

• It took lot of pain for me to identify where to place sim and opening sim holder was not easy. In the end i can do it thanks to toothpick.
• once i inserted sim couldn’t see any singal and only emergency calls are allowed. So i had bit nervous moments for some time. Did i get some f..ked up piece?? i immediately called up 1688 (singtel cust ser) and they told i need to first register phone on itunes before use. once registration done everything was ok.

Next comes finding necessary apps out of nearly 200K on itunes. I don’t want to clutter my phone too much.so i went for very few apps. Before i got my iphone i went thru web to find apps which sync with me. so finally i have downloaded few apps.

Finance: DBS, CitiBank, OCBC Bank , iNETS mobile , XE currency for conversion

Travel: transSGuide (recommended) , iCab for taxi booking ( never used as of now).

Health:  iHealthSg (list all clinics in singapore, highly recommended )

General: SingTel Data Usage, My SingTel (check bills) , SG Malls (lists shops in all malls), LocacitySG (lists many places like DBS/POSB ATMS, Post office, AXS machine etc ), Price Pal (this checks price of groceries if you make app to read bar code. this doesn’t support all markets and reading bar codes isn’t tht fantastic ), iCashSg (lists all three sing bank ATM’s ).

I have downloaded few more but not relevant to singapore. Will update in some other blog later.

If you come across some apps which you find valuable for iphone users in singapore,  please leave post in comment section.

I have collected my accreditation card & uniform in last week. As is case with YOG logo uniform is purple collar Tee & khaki Bermudas from crocodile. They have given some nice cap, wet tissues and sun protection cream (i am bit surprised to see that but still it helps lot). I am reasonably happy with dress colors although i am still bit amazed why singapore is so fond of purple & orange (most of sing buses are of same color).

Coming to my work..  we had nearly around 10days of training from last November and still we feel very nervous considering most of our practice was done at some medium level of players whose speed is relatively modest compared to guys going to play in YOG. I am more interested in calling service line although it is most toughest to concentrate. but once you make your call..you can relax until next serve. most of my colleagues are bit scared to do service considering speed involved and easy to make mistakes.

I got mail from our supervisor that 2000 ppl will be present on first day of 15 Aug. Excited to see how it goes? If you are part of YOG please share your details.

Disclaimer: please don’t share sensitive information like security, vendors, etc.  Strictly no names etc.

It is available at ground floor where all electronic goods are sold (beside jewellery shop).

They also provide 1year warranty.

I have also found two shops where you can get same calculator and bit cheap also. (I found convenient to buy at mustafa as i go there every month)

http://www.parisilk.com/location.html (It’s store is located at 3 locations. but better contact by phone to check stock before proceeding to buy). Price is SGD56 and payment term is by cash or NETS.

http://www.li.com.sg/ContactUs/OurLocation.html . price is SGD52 and payment is by cash only.

Update 3 Aug 2010: I am planning to sell my TI BA II plus calc. Reason being i decided not to give CFA considering high opportunity cost.

I am willing to sell for SGD35. I haven’t used much so in a way it looks quite new.  Need to collect from kovan/Hougang MRT.

Update 5 Aug 2010: calc is sold out.

1) are you able to spend nearly 20hrs per week of study for nearly three years ?? (and it may take long also)? you may need to compromise on so many thing like going for out with family in weekends or spending time with kids or going for late night parties? Looks bit tough to forgo all these??

2) are you able to get afford pay cut from your current salary and join some financial institution (for ex bank) as a fresher?CFA  is awarded only when 4yrs of experience is acheived in related financial filed (and this is quite broad filed but limited to financial sector only). so it may really challenge in managing  your monthly financial commitment  against your earning?

3) And more importantly one should ask themselves why they really want to move in to financial field?? If it just for better pay and position may be need to give second thought? Money is always not guaranteed even after 3years of putting every effort in to CFA. If you really have some zeal with business and finance than your current job  it might be better choice for you. Without having some sort of attractiveness toward  business and financial  sector it might be tough task to complete CFA with in 3 years.

At least in my view if you can able to pass all above three steps , it may be right for you to give serious try at CFA?

All the best if you are proceeding to take CFA challenge.

Note: Register as early as possible after decision has been made to get curriculum books and also buy Financial calculator to get familiar with it for as long as possible. (only Texas Instruments BAII plus or HP 12c are allowed)

Idea behind starting blogging: As i mentioned already twitter lead me to this page..i am quite fascinated about politics & business & computer related products & more passionately sports and reads lot of stuff related to them and watch on TV also.. over sometime i come across this strange name called Twitter and decided to give it try. But although i  am not the early embracer of tweeting , many of my friends are either not joined or joined and moved on to something new startup  product or i am not aware about their identity. So in the end i just started tweeting to me (no followers) and slowly some people found something intersting in me (not sure what it is) and started to follow me. oneday when i am going through some news feed on my nokia e71, i come across to some extent self claimed blogger in name of “AnilDash”. I just gone through his following list and come across some prominent names like US president Barack obama, 7 times Tour De France champion & cancer fighter Lance Armstrong and Cisco CTO padmasree to name few. And i also come across this wordpress (the symbol has some inducing power to attract ) and out of curiosity i checked what is wordpress about. At start i did not understand and then spending after some time (cyclic effect of following someone on twitter) finally understood that it is blogger application used by many people/companies. Then i started to give some thought of  having my own blog to share my ideas. So ended up in writing this  exciting blog about myself. Thanks to wordpress for dedicating public accessible link (with my name & wordpress name) to this blog .

As this is my very first blog, contains more about me rather than something useful .. but hopefully i can get some of my web time to blog  from now on with some thing intersting..(hope this blog is not such boring also..)

catch you next week and thanks for spending your valuable time on my blog.

Thanks

Raj