I am convinced that I have supernatural powers; here is what happened a couple of weeks ago. I was home on a weekend having nothing to do, nothing to look forward to and a hungry stomach. Feeling the laziness in my bones, I decided to pay McDonalds.com.sg a visit and ordered myself a nice McWings meal. It was scheduled to come within an hour and I laid on my bed in my room waiting for my meal to arrive.

Surfing the web, watching old episodes of the Simpsons and chatting on MSN, I suddenly felt the need to stand up 30 minutes following my call to the McDonald’s delivery center. I then walked out of my room, opened the door to my apartment and stood there. It must have seemed weird to my housekeeper who walked by and saw me standing there at the door, fervently gazing at the doors of the lifts.

Seconds later, the lifts chimed and its doors separated to reveal the familiar uniform of the McDonald’s deliveryman. I paid, brought the food back and promptly forgotten about how perfect the event turned out and how errie that I chose to stand up and walk to the door at that exact timing.

It must be supernatural.

I’m going to save the cheerleader.

What a year 2008 had been…

In my professional life, I’ve completed 4 long years of studies at SMU, achieving more-than-satisfactory grades and a couple of Dean’s Lists along the way, sent out more than half a century of job applications, found myself a career at L.E.K. Consulting while forgoing companies like PwC, GE and Accenture and getting rejected by others like P&G, Shell, Saatchi & Saatchi and McKinsey (what a mix!). In the stealthy way in which 2009 has arrived amidst the financial frenzy, economic downturn, and political turmoil, I am no longer feeling secure of my position in the working world. In fact, recently when my friends discussed about the ways and means to convert our rags to riches, I was thinking to myself, "Could I hold on to these rags while they still last?"

My personal life was in a better shape. I’ve had a wonderful December holiday sprinkled with nights of celebrations here and there, numerous feel-good gatherings with many friends, and recently, I’ve even decided to renew my reading and soccer habits. I’m going through my 6th book now in the last 1.5 months and soon, I will need to head to Kinokuniya to get a couple of hard-to-find titles; I almost got it on Amazon for a higher price, phew.. Soccer-wise, I’ll make sure I fulfill my resolution of being on location on Sundays as much as I can.

Here are the things I wish to accomplish in 2009:

1. Visit my grandparents more often
2. Be more involved in my niece’s 1st year on earth
3. Work harder and create a better professional impression
4. Be more mature
5. Spend less on unnecessaries and more on necessaries

It’s been a while since I’ve had this much fun. This Christmas, Stella and I surprised Ronald and Nat at their home in Hong Kong and spent six eventful days with them, Bernie and Zhao Ting which took all the stress and fatigue accumulated from work for the past six months. Going to Macau, experiencing emperor-like treatment at a spa in Shenzhen, both for the first time has made this trip an unforgettable one.

It’s also been a while since I shopped so much. In Hong Kong, Stella and I exchanged our birthday presents with me receiving a nice Prada wallet and a Calvin Klein Jeans bag from her, and to her, I gave a large Marc Jacobs wallet with its traditional double metal clip front, something she really wanted for a long time.

The damage doesn’t stop there though. I’ve also tailored 5 pieces of shirt in Shenzhen and bought a pair of leather shoes and black pants at Tangs, Singapore. Items still unchecked on my shopping list are a pair of casual shoes, shirts (TGIF types), more pants(!), office bag and a new cupboard for the books piling on top of one another in my room. Ikea, here I come!

For a nice climax to this lovely Christmas celebration, Stella and I had a great dinner with four other friends at Forlino, an incredible Italian restaurant at One Fullerton. Great service, wonderful food, attentive staff, combined with unexpected complimentary items such as appetizers and bottles of still water made the signing of the name on the bill such a positive experience. I don’t usually do fine dining at the same restaurant in one year but I think I’m going back to Forlino soon.

Christmas is over and the new year is approaching. It’s also time to review my spending budget and save up for a trip in April. Here we go!

Couldn’t find Patrick Suskind’s Perfume; reading Murakami’s Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. After which, Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and another Murakami’s After Dark awaits me. This should keep me busy until January at least.

Been really quite tied up at work recently with another case and not initiating any outings with friends, in fact, I hardly even went out with Stelly. That’s why we’re really looking forward to our holiday. That would really make a good end to the year, with good news coming from the missy from her workplace.

By the way, "We need to talk about Kevin" has really been one of the best books I’ve read in 2008. After putting myself through several serious books like the why-the-hell-did-I-finish-a-textbook "Making Globalization Work" and less serious ones like "What they teach you at Harvard Business School", it’s been a nice break going back into fiction again. Heck, I even bought myself the one about the diaries of a London call girl which literally read as fast as a diary, and as intense ;)

I’m going to find this book named "Perfume" by Patrick Suskind. Will update once I’m done with it.

I was about to complete the story of my gaming chronicles until I got staffed on a case 100%. Working 60-70 hour weeks ain’t easy at all but I’m still enjoying it and trying to learn as much as I can.

Long-Term Aim: To be an expert in the industry I’m working on and successfully pave my journey in L.E.K.

Short-Term Aim: To quickly get washed up and have 5 hours of sleep.

Good night.

I got myself a Nintendo Wii two weeks ago and now, I’ve bought 15 games, including Wii Fit, pre-ordered the Guitar Hero World Tour set, and had loads of fun and got myself two tired arms. There are many reasons why I chose to buy the Nintendo Wii. One, I thought it would be a great way to spend some of the weekends relaxing with Stella, my friends or alone through silly and enjoyable games. The PS3 and XBox 360 selections were trashed when a major criteria of mine involved a majority of game time with Stella; multiplayer games rule! Another reason, or perhaps the most significant reason, is that, I am a gamer.

Many of my friends do not know the extent of my love for gaming since I displayed none of it in my University days so I guess I’ll share a brief and historical summary of my gaming chronicles today.

I was a poor kid but had parents who are willing to splurge a huge percentage of their income on family welfare. While I used to spend my afternoons flying plastic-bag kites, playing hide-and-seek with neighbors, catching grasshoppers and crawling under drains, I managed to receive my first Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in Primary 3 from a relative’s cheaper "lobang" which took away about 30% of my time off breeding grasshopper colonies.

My first game was the original Super Mario Bros (SMB) and since I can only buy a new game on my birthday every year, I played that game for almost an entire year; Completing the game in the fastest timing possible became my challenge. The next game I got was my last NES game. Luckily, it was a 72-in-one. I had elevator action, dig dug, mappy, bomberman and all the famous (some crappy) Nintendo games stored in one cartridge! I managed to complete practically every one of them eventually. Guess what, I still have my original SMB game cartridge and NES system till date.

My Sega 16-bit Megadrive came when I was in Primary 5 as part of a PSLE encouragement tool. Interesting, ain’t it? Other parents would probably not let their kids be engrossed in games during those periods; I guess I was lucky. Road Rash 3, Shining Force, Fist of Fury, and Sonic the Hedgehog, became my afternoon staple as my annual dividends (or new games) started paying out twice a year instead of once as we evolved into a dual-income family.

In Secondary One, I received the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). Now, please let me pull you slightly away from the story. If you know my age and the timeframe of which the gaming consoles were purchased, and if you understand the typical console market lifecycle, you would have realized that I have bought these systems at points of time when the markets were either maturing or declining. Thus, every system that I have gotten before the Nintendo Wii, were priced at or below SGD$250, which were pretty reasonable bargains.

Now let’s get back to topic. In Secondary One, I received the best gaming system in my life, the SNES. I was so used to games that involved perpetual running, defeating and killing, and getting through to the next stage that it used to define my entire concept of gaming. Super Mario 3 and International Superstar Soccer were incredible creations, but never had I been plunged so deeply into a story as that of Final Fantasy 6 (FF6), a game that re-defined every bit of my game purchasing criteria. 

Many gamers remember Cloud, Aeris and Tifa of Final Fantasy 7 which was produced for the Sony Playstation, but only a few would recognize the names of Terra, Edgar, Locke and Sabin of FF6. I deeply remembered two scenes.. one where the ground broke away and the villagers started falling into the depths between the cracks and perishing.. the other, a sad moment of reminiscing one’s love on the castletop under the stars.. coupled with the amazing soundtrack.. well, let’s just put it as the two greatest moments that I ever had while playing a video game. Well.. here’s another tear-jerking moment.. go ahead and youtube the rest… it’ll be worth it.

In Secondary Two, the Sony PlayStation, in contrary to my statement of buying a matured product, was at the peak of its popularity. However, my aunt working in Sim Lim Square got me a good deal of $250 for a ‘modified’ console. I think I had almost a hundred games on it, most of which enjoyed only 30 mins of airtime with its fickle owner. Those that had my prolonged attention were games like Metal Gear Solid, Winning Eleven, Suikoden, Gran Turismo and Resident Evil. And again, it was the successor to FF6 that took my breath away: Squaresoft’s Final Fantasy 7. It was such an incredible game with such an wonderful soundtrack, the music toured the world in the theatres of many nations and even spawned a movie, Advent Children; in fact, the music and storyline had always been a huge part of the Final Fantasy series.

Well, this has been a lengthy post; I shall stop here and continue my gaming chronicles in another day. What’s left to narrate would be my adventures with my ‘heavily-zhnged’ computer in the early days of the Internet. Go ahead and guess the games I was crazy about, you’ll probably only get half of them right.

(Part 1 complete)

L.E.K. Training in Sydney

Week 1:

• Had tons of PDs, or "Professional Development", which are courses very much like what we have in school, except that what we would learn in 15 weeks, we do it in 4 hours. Modules include:

  • Excel
  • Strategy
  • Powerpoint
  • Analytical techniques
  • Management and Financial Accounting
  • Phone interviewing
  • And other L.E.K. for beginners discussions
     
• Met loads of people in the Sydney office; I’ve always found it incredibly hard to remember everyone’s name but everyone there had such striking yet diverse personalities, it made things so much easier for me
   

• Friday was THE day in L.E.K. Sydney. First of all, they brought us out sailing in a huge 40-foot sailboat from 1pm to 5pm, cruising under the HarbourBridge and past the Opera House. After which, we went back to the office where everyone got ready for the weekly Beer Trolley. Every Friday at 5.00, an appointed associate would push around this large 3-layered trolley filled with cheese, biscuits, wine, beer and spirits, and serve each and everyone in the office. Coolness..

Week 2:

• Week 2 was the highlight where we had 24 hours to work on a case which we received at approximately 2pm on Thursday and had to present it to the senior partner by 3.30pm the next day; it was terrifying. We presented our case in front of the whole company where we could see some people nodding and some shaking their head in disbelief. It was a killer moment when the partner said, "Could you go back to slide 3 and then look at slide 7 and tell me what’s the story here?"

• Remember that I said we had 24 hours to complete our case? We didn’t. It was a tradition that the prior evening of the presentation would be dinner and drinks and it was openly indicated to us that whoever left the night early would be penalized. I stayed till 230am and you wouldn’t want to know how many hours of sleep I got before heading off to the office in the morning

• One last thing that happened in the 2nd week that was truly crazy: I found a dead pigeon in a plastic bag hung outside my door one night; it almost seemed like a death threat! I brought it to the concierge who went absolutely shocked, slighty apologetic but utterly incapable. No suspects were found and I sort of forgot about it as the days went by

After these 2 weeks, I finally experienced how it feels to be like in the management consulting industry; impeccable, smooth and friendly characters, all rojaked in the salad bowl that’s L.E.K. 

But like any job, there are gripes and complaints too. Many people would say they’d love a jetsetting lifestyle but seriously, there are downsides to that. Plans go haywire, getting terribly bored in the service apartment (you can’t party and drink EVERY night), expensive internet access, missing the girlfriend and comfort of room, among many others… but still, I’m grateful for what I’ve been blessed with and sincerely hope that I can make my stay here a permanent and fruitful one.

It’s been getting hard to get to work from my new place in Hillview. There is only one bus that brings me to my destination and it’s one of the most popular bus in the area; by popular, I meant that its route brings people to many important places at 830 am in the morning which can only mean one thing: overcrowding.

Passing by Hwa Chong, Nanyang Girls School, National Junior College, the whole stretch of Orchard Road and Marina, it is inevitable that the amount of standers would exceed the sitters by a ratio of 3:1 and that the journey would take longer due to a higher frequency of pickups. But this is not my complaint.

My complaint is about what I saw on the bus today. There were two empty seats at the back of the bus which were not easily reachable because of a pair of standers who decided to work on their calf muscles and also refused to move to the back of the bus or initiate allowing people through them. It must be infuriating for the "going-to-be-late" passenger-wannabes who wanted to board the bus but could not simply because the standers in the bus have already been packed all the way to the front steps of the bus entrance while spiders build their cobwebs at the back.

The second and more irritating thing I saw today was a plump dark-skinned woman in a tudong taking a nice morning nap on the aisle seat with an empty seat beside her. That’s fine, I thought, until someone asked her if they could move into the seat beside her; she lifted her hands, shook it and went back to sleep.

The seat was not dirty nor was it wet. I was dumbfounded and wanted to give her a piece of my mind but the two empty seats at the back were, in this situation, more relevant to me and I pushed myself through the two calf workers and got myself a seat.

Thank God it’s Friday.

One week update and thoughts:

• Ended many of the weekdays drinking: Balaclava, Pump Room, ICB, China One etc.. hence, it was nice to spend the Saturday and Sunday with the girlfriend sleeping late into the day, shopping, eating at Angus, watching a movie, among other stuff..
• In the midst of planning a golf class with Stella, Ray and Raymond as well, hope it’ll go through; been itching to swing the wood for a long time now
• Checked my expenditures: status, skyrocketing. Paid bills and promised myself to control the monetary outflow
• Going to Sydney for 2 weeks soon: not entirely excited. I guess it’s because everything’s planned out already; there’s no need for any lonelyplaneting or stuff. Will just enjoy myself there with the trainings and all and see how it goes. Also, will keep to promise about monetary outflow there as well
• Want to buy myself the Nintendo Wii.. not sure if this is a right decision. It’s gonna be a huge expense and what if I do not have time to maximise playing time?
• Popped over the SMU library to check out Jorg Dietzel’s book launch. Always wanted to write a book myself and even started development in my NS days but I guess writing a book takes a lot of commitment, time and sacrifices. Not sure if I will be able to do that before I retire

Buy this book:

Authored by Jorg Dietzel, a professor who have taught me so much about brand management; this publication is very relevant to an Asia perspective of brand management. My favourite part of it was its thickness and the large amount of textual content; I’ve never liked flipping through a book that can show me tons of pictures that tells a thousands words in order to let me finish reading it in 15 minutes.

I have not finished reading it but will tell you what I think about it once I’m done. Meanwhile, congratulations Jorg on the book and tv appearances and may there be more to come.

Friends who are close to me know that I have deep interests in politics and one of the reasons why I am not working for a government agency now is simply because they do not want me there. After all, I did not go through the government-approved academic development path of studying in a good primary and secondary school, attaining an A-levels certification from a prestigious junior college, defending the country as a military officer and studying overseas. What the hell, I think I’d found a better job anyway.

Nevertheless, here’s the report:

IBAHRI Report on Singapore’s democracy, human rights and legal environment

Check it out, it’s thought-provoking at the very least.