Fire Safety

I am getting paranoid. Been so since last week when I attended a talk on fire safety.

I never given this subject much thought until this talk. Firstly, look at the statistics. There were 2799 fire in Singapore between January to June this year. Of these, 401 were household fire which made it an average of 2 household fire per day. I am totally surprised. And I thought that staying in apartments is safer but this is apparently not so.

Also, I thought like many others that in the event of a electrical overload, the safety circuit breaker will trip and cut off power supply thus preventing a fire. Boy am I wrong! Just look at this video of the burning Christmas tree. Apart from the speed in which the fire spread, look at the light on the right. It continued to light up until the fire reached it!

So I did an audit of the various hazardous areas around the house.

First, the TV wall. There is only 1 wall socket. From there, I have one extension wire which have another extension wire. Altogether, from 1 wall socket, it branched out to 6 outlets powering 7 devices; the tv, an amplifier (yeah I am that old school), a DVD, a cable set-top, a Xbox, a fan and 1 spare for charging batteries. Okay at least nowadays the Xbox is gathering dust and not plug in.

Another area is the opposite wall where 1 wall socket leads to an extension wire with 5 outlets juicing up the Princess's computer, monitor and printer and the wireless telephone with 1 spare outlet. But here most of the power points are switched off at night.

More terrible is the other wall where I have 2 fish tanks. There 1 wall socket branched out to a 3 ways which branched out to 2 separate wires making a total of 9. These power 2 lights for the fish tanks and 3 filters and 2 air pumps. Except for the lights, the rest runs continuously and is never switched off.

But even more scary than all these is the fact that in the past months, there have been 3 instances when somebody in the house forgot to turn off the gas stove. Once it got so bad that it caught the attention of an opposite neighbour who had to rush over.

I have fire insurance for the house but what is the point of insurance if there are casualties? Money can never replace life. Okay did the minimum that can be done for the time being. Went out and bought 3 fire extinguishers and a smoke detector. And a note to everybody to check and make sure all unused appliances are switched off at the mains rather than just leave on standby mode. Hopefully that will be enough.

32 Degrees Fahrenheit

Suaku Uncle finally knows what is shaved ice or at the shop they call it Snow flakes ice.

Basically it is ice that is not crushed but 'shaven' so that the texture is very fine. The ice are flavoured and is topped with topping of choices.

Verdict - damn shiok especially in our hot weather.

Milk with strawberries and mangoes

Milk with Cococrunch

Chocolate with orea and nuts

Learning Chinese

It takes a great man to admit his mistakes and it takes an even greater man to admit his mistakes to the whole world but unfortunately for, I dare say a fair bit of us at the tail end of the baby boomer generation, it is a bit too little too late.

I am referring of course to our elder statesman admission of his mistakes in pushing through the method of teaching Chinese in the seventies to the nineties. Especially galling is the insistence on a pass in Chinese before the student can move on to the next higher level of education. I know of many people and heard of even more bright students who did well in every subject except Chinese and had to go overseas to further their studies. But these are the lucky one whose parents can afford to send them overseas. What about the countless other not so well off students who had to cease their studies because of some silly policy?

My personal experience with Chinese had been so bad that to this day I cannot for the life of me remember the name of a single Chinese teacher who had taught me from my primary school days till JC. The only name I can remember? Miss 懂 不懂 caused that was how this particular teacher ended every other sentence. One other thing I remember was how this particular teacher will make the student stand up in class and read out loud from the text book and whenever the student stumbled or mispronounced a word, she will sarcastically correct it while the rest of the class snickered at the poor reader standing there in humiliation. And more often than not, she loves to pick only a selected few - me being one of the unlucky one. Maybe she enjoyed the laughter I gave to the class or maybe she was genuinely trying to help the weaker students, I will never know.

I managed by the grace of God to scrap through my O level and went on to JC but faltered at that level thus ending my studies for good. To this day, I get by with I hope passable conversational Chinese but I can't read and I can't write (at least not the cheem words) Chinese and have to rely on colleagues for translation whenever I need to read or translate some Chinese stuff.

So let's know the educators out there can now do something so that the current and future students will indeed enjoy learning Chinese.

Those Pesky Fund Raiser

Don't you hate it when you get those annoying cold calls from credit cards, banks and insurance. What can be worse than that? Bladdy irritating people stopping you on the street to cold sell!

Those who works around Tanjong Pagar MRT area would have spotted these people hanging around the passage way stopping the people walking by. Just the other day while on the way home, I was stopped by 3 of them - one after another!

They are not selling credit cards or insurance but raising funds for some charity! The first time I encountered them was I think 2 years ago when they were raising funds for Club Rainbow. Nowadays they appear to be raising funds for the Heart or Cancer Foundation. So what so bad about that? They will follow you as you walk - doing their sales pitch. They will start off by saying they are not selling anything but then they will launch into their pitch and ask you to donate to the cause they are raising fund for. They don't take no for an answer and they not after your cash donation. What they want is your credit card! These people want the donor to sign instalment donation plan and boy are they pushy. They will talked and talked and harassed you following you all the way to the escalator.

I know they are just doing their job but it is so irritating! With cold calls, you can just put down the phone on them, be rude to them, scold them but how to be rude to a real person?