ARCHer

Errr.... I take the phone to the toilet because I play games when doing business. !! Anyway, I voted yes. I have nothing to hide. Totally transparent with all my communications.

I think the Qnap cost me around $800, excluding the hard disks. Yes, I am running RAID 1 with 2 750 GB Seagate 7200.10 ES hard disks. If you think the 2-bay NAS is something, well, look at this: Yes, that's a 5-bay NAS (Thecus N5200), which cost about $1,700 (excluding the hard disks). The thing is powered by a Celeron M processor (or so I was told). Gonna put in 5 1 TB hard disks in there.

Unfortunately, in investment banking, there is very little room for middle ground. If you want to earn $$, you must be prepared to slog like mad... 14 hours work-day is considered very good.... 18 to 20 hours work-day is more the norm. If you aren't willing to put in long hours, IB won't want you. Remember what Jackson Tai said recently? He was suggesting that work-life balance in Singapore is given too much focus, and that young people should make use of the opportunities to learn as much as they can while they still have the grey matter. It is tempting to look at the high bonuses and feel envious. Don't be. Frank Wong has said that this is part of the 'career risk' that one has to take. You may be well paid in one year, but in the next, you may be asked to go. It wasn't that long ago that we read in the papers about investment bankers who used to earn five figure monthly salaries having to give tuition because they were told to go.

We tried looking for part-time cleaners, particularly through recommendations. I don't know if it is out luck or not, but the cleaners we spoke to are non-Singapore citizens/residents. We didn't want to flout any law for illegally employing people who have work permit for doing something else. Anyway, it is not just cleaning and ironing. It is also cooking. Right now, we can't cook because there is no one to look after my daughter when we are in the kitchen.

My daughter is 11 months and 7 days old, but who is counting. She is quite a handful now, crawling all over the place. Yes, sleep is like a luxury for my wife and I. While she has been 'trained' to sleep through the night, recently, she wakes up at least once or twice a night. Sometimes, she will sit up or stand up in the cot and cry, and we will have to put her down again so that she can sleep. On better nights, she will just take the toys we leave on her cot and play with it. We still wake up because she like to rattle the toys. Nowadays, our lives are dictated largely by our daughter. In fact, we have to plan our activties around her schedule e.g. home when she takes nap, no late nights etc. Currently, we don't have a maid, and this is quite troublesome because not only do we have to look after our daughter, we have to do all the cleaning, washing, ironing etc. Since the arrival of my daughter, my wife has changed from working full-time to working part-time to quitting all together (esp. at this stage when we don't have a maid). It's very tough on us..... but we are also having the most fun....

*SIGH* Yeah... that's just a nicer way of saying that I got no sense of humour.... I thought private banking was one of the first banking jobs to have great title. And American banks are good at giving great job titles. Which reminds me... I actually wrote a letter to the Straits Times forum about job titles. Well, if your buddy is single, well, you never know....

Errr... there are usually 3 components: a) money; b) title; c) nature of work. a) alone might now be sufficient to keep a person. Usually, it involves two factors. I won't want to be called a monkey and made to do monkey's work even if I am well paid. On the other hand, if I am called "COO" and is well paid, then I don't mind doing monkey's work. Corporate rank can be crap, but they are important because the rank determine the salary range of the individual. I doubt many organisations will have a clerk rank that pays 100K. On the other hand, senior managers may have salary range of 100K or more. So if you want to earn 100K, you need to be SM.

Oops. Missed out this thread. This is my custom-made study table which I got my carpenter to make. The idea is to have the study table extending out of the the bookshelves. There are 2 sides to the study table: an L-shape side that you can see from the photo, and at the other end, a straight side. The concept was great, but the implementation was flawed. The carpenter ended up using a very thick piece of wood (more than 2 inches thick), and this resulted in a very high table. Had we design the table to be lower, or had the carpenter used a thinner piece of wood for the table top, it would have been perfect.

Me doing well? *LOL* In Romance of the 3 Kingdoms, there is a General by the name of Liao Hua. He wasn't a very good fighter (like Zhang Fei or Lu Bu) or a good strategist (like Zhuge Liang or Sun Quan), but he was one of Liu Bei's top general. Why? Because there aren't anyone better to lead Liu Bei's armies. Well, I am but a Liao Hua. It all depends on how flat is the corporate structure of the organisation. Before John Olds/Jackson Tai/Frank Wong joined DBS, DBS has a very elaborate structure: from junior officer, officer, senior officer, assistant manager, deputy manager (maybe the 2 is switched.. I can't remember liao), AVP, VP, SVP, EVP, SEVP, President and Chairman. The structure was then changed to Associate, AVP, VP, MD and SMD. A lot of VPs left because it was very difficult to jump to MD grade. As a result, they have to reintroduce the SVP grade to retain the VPs. I was told by a headhunter that corporate rank/title/designation isn't that important. What is important is how much they are willing to pay.

Luck and a bit of knowledge of demographics. For popular zodiac years e.g. dragon, the number of eligible applicants tend to be a lot higher, so balloting is more likely. Nowadays, with so many parents volunteering at schools, schools can be picky about which volunteer they want.

Step down? Wah.... Phantom is either VP level or above, or working in a foreign bank.

Welcome back! Great picture. If my wife sees it, I am sure she will want to stitch up photos of our girl in the same way.

Well, we have a choice of being maids in other people's countries, or being maids in our own country.

I will only buy HDB only if I qualify for the CPF Housing Grant.

Don't be too happy. The $1m is the transaction price, while the $1.5m could merely be the offer price. I bought my property at $1.4m just over 2 years ago. I have agents telling me that they can fetch me a price of over $2m. Yeah right.

Does it matter what animal zodiac the baby belongs to? For as long as I can remember, my father has thought that he was a Goat. When celebrating his 65th birthday, we did some calculations and realised that he was actually a Horse.

Here are some of the things you may want to consider: a) Form factor. Size and shape can be important. The video cam with the best specs are also the biggest (those used by reporters for example). If small size is important, you may have to sacrifice some features. Also some video cam can be the 'matchbox' type, and some people don't like these because they find that they cannot grip the cam properly. Choose one which is comfortable in your hand, esp. if you think you will be holding it for long periods of time. b) Media. Traditional video cams record the video on tapes (miniDV is the most common), but newer ones allow you to save on either hard disk or directly onto a DVD. If you do editing of the footage on your PC, you may want to have them on miniDV or hard disk (which you can copy to your PC). Else, if you just want a unedited copy of what you have shot, you may want to choose a DVD media type of cam instead. c) Resolution. Newer video cams from Sony, Panasonic, Canon etc. are all touting HD (hi-definition) video. Probably the best hi-def format is the 1080p format. That means that your images is stored in native resolution of 1920 by 1080. But for you to use this resolution, you must have equipment (PC, software and even the LCD TV) that support this format. Unless you are getting the higher end equipment (LCD TV in particular), you may not be able to view the footage in 1080p format. In which case, standard modes will probably suffice. d) CCD/CMOS. Old debate of whether the sensor chip should be CCD or CMOS. IMHO, this is pretty irrelevant. Layman should not worry about this but worry about the next 2 points. e) Colour reproduction. Probably most important to us is how accurately the shot footage reproduces the original colour. Some enthusiasts swear that they can see the subtle colour differences, while many just prefer to have bright vibrant colours (which may not be true to the image). No point looking at the LCD of the cam to check for colour reproduction, since the LCDs themselves do not reproduce colours that accurately. You must view the shot footage on a properly calibrated monitor. f) Low light. This is often overlooked, but which something that I pay quite close attention to. Video cams generally have not problems reproducing vivid/true colours when images are bright, but under low light conditions, some video cams either produce very grainy picture, or the colour reproduction is not accurate (e.g. some may not reproduce low light red well). A good low light video cam is also useful when you are shooting images in semi-darkness e.g. birthday parties where only the candles on the cake are lit up. g) User interface/ergonomics. Some cameras are well designed by having the most commonly used functions literally at your fingertips and lesser used functions located further away or buried under different menus. Check these out by holding the camera in your hand and trying out the function. There are other more subtle design issues which may or may not be important to you e.g. a camera with a bottom tape loading mechansim might not be that useful if your camera is always mounted on a tripod; you will need to remove the camera from the tripod before removing/replacing the tape. i) Price. You would want to choose one that represent value for money. Cheaper models frequently have fewer features though. Canon, Sony and Panasonic are all good brands and there are different models to suit your needs. Check out the reviews on the net.

It is better for both parties to let each other know how much each earn so that they can make joint decisions using all available information. This can range from something trivial e.g. should they file their tax returns separately or jointly, to something more significant, such as should one person quit to stay at home and look after the kid(s), how much each person is saving/spending etc.

Different people have different threshold of pain. Also different people recover at different rates. For my wife as well as my elder sis-in-law, they both have rather quite recovery rates. Just a few days after the c-section, they are able to move about already.

CHIJ, Tao Nan and Ngee Ann are all good schools. CHIJ has been considered a good school for a long time, and Tao Nan has also improved al lot over the years. Ngee Ann, perhaps spurred by the keen competition from CHIJ and Tao Nan, has improved in the last few years. My brother has 4 kids, and the eldest one is in Primary 6 in Tao Nan, and the 3rd one is in Primary 1 (youngest is going into Tao Nan only next year). From what I gather, teaching methods have changed over the years, and like some of the other contributors to this thread has said, there is a lot of involvement of parents in the children's studies. I've friends who send their kids to CHIJ and Ngee Ann, and I find that these schools also involve the parents quite a fair bit. If you are staying in Marine Parade, I would think that any of the 3 schools are fine. Each school has a slightly different culture, but the differences in my opinion are marginal. For example, I don't consider Tao Nan to be too Mandarin focused (based on what I see of my nieces and nephew). So you might want to choose one that is the nearest (which will be either Tao Nan or Ngee Ann if you are staying in HDB flats there, since CHIJ is across the road). For me though, I intend to send my daughter to Tao Nan (still early... she is only 11 months old ). That's because we are about 900 metres away from Tao Nan.

Actually, I have already made the provisions and necessary reserves. Perhaps. But statistics show that there are lots of DINK (Double Income No Kids), and many chose it because they think that having kids have more negatives than positives.

You are not going to use the credit card to pay for the car fully, right? Assuming you take 90% financing, on a $100k car, your credit card only need to have a credit limit of $10k. Since the maximum credit limit cannot exceed 2 months' income, that means you only need to earn $5k a month.

Well, imagine a 17-year old boy driving this van to JC..... That was what I did back in 1981.

You can only use the urinals for doing small business. For big business, you would need the full WC. As space is a premium, especially in the toilet, it does not make sense to install both a urinal and a water closet.

Why won't you want to believe them/him?