we don't seem to be hitting the right notes

Recently, when the PM announced the many possibilities that his ministries will be working on to boost the birth rates, it was active action of hitting the keys on the keyboard, but the tune didn't sound nice, just like how we complain about the national day song these days being no match against the national day songs from two decades ago.

There are many facets to the birth rate problems. The more obvious ones are money, time, job security, spouse support, grandparents support, maids, car, preschool, quality of life, standard of living, ...

If we drill down to the blocks of life, what every man wants from life, it's happiness. When we use happiness as the guiding principle, we will be able to see more problems beneath the visible problems.

Firstly, happy people will breed happy people. If the person doesn't feel happy with his life, not necessarily unhappy, he will ask himself why will he want to bring to life a child who will feel the same as him, if not worse.

Secondly, successful people breed successful people. A successful person will feel happier than an unsuccessful person. Those who are unsuccessful and say that they are happier because they are unsuccessful are living in self-denial. Our capitalist society has made us all very competitive. After going through ranking exercises in schools for tests and exams, we go through more ranking exercises at work. It breeds a majority population with low self esteem, and a minority population with high ego. Those who are constantly trying to climb to the top will eventually conclude that having children will add more burden to whatever burden they already have. This burden could be in the form of not being working hard enough to reach the top.

Thirdly, high cost of living is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everybody around you talks about how expensive it is to raise kids - milk powder, diapers, medical, childcare, tuition, enrichment, insurance, school fees, university fees. Over time, you think that that is the "normal" lifestyle, and when you try to adopt it, realise that it is really a high expenditure pursuit. This reduces one's life satisfaction index, and hence happiness. Innocently, having children implies increasing your already high cost of living.

Fourthly, over sensationalised balloting results in flat applications. People feel that there are not enough flats for everyone, hence being able to get a flat first is seen to be a big achievement, when it really is not. Going through all that trouble really makes people feel unhappier than happy. 

Fifthly, over sensationalised balloting scenarios in primary school admission. Parents even need to do volunteer work to get a chance to ballot for a slot in the school. This gives people an impression that there are insufficient primary schools in singapore, maybe it really is the case, but if it is not, creates that impression. However, I believe that there are insufficient schools that can meet the needs of the aspiring and competitive parents. When others see how grouchy parents become over just getting their child into primary school, they think that it's unlikely their children will be happy as well.

Sixthly, money makes people happy. Those who say that money doesn't make people happy are either filthy rich, or are being supported by donations. If you give someone $100 rebates, he is happier than his PR neighbour who didn't get it. If you give someone $10,000 in baby bonus, he is happier than the foreigner parent who didn't get it. So my point is, the bottomline needs to be raised, the individual needs to have that constant $100, or $10,000 appearing in his bank balance, so that he constantly keeps himself happy, instead of the government making him happy once in a blue moon, if not, only once in a lifetime.

Finally, I grumble once in a while that I have to spend ~S$20k/year on my little girl's childcare, medical, daily expenses. I haven't factored in my manpower cost to look after her, maybe make it cheap, S$10k/year. If I convert this into GDP, I am contributing an additional 30k/year to Singapore's economy. And I am convinced that the government wants me to spend a lot more, so that GDP continues an uptrend, just like their salaries.

who will re-sign something unfavourable?

Yesterday I signed off the user requirements document for a project, then today, the vendor asked me to re-sign it.

Me: Why?

Him: Oh, because we made a change.

Me: What change?

Him: We brought the signed document back and our boss told us to add in a line.

Me: What line?

Him: That you will sign off the functional specs within a week of signing off the user requirements.

Me: No. I am not signing.

Him: But ...

Me: No.

Him: Our boss ...

Me: Just this week, trying to find a date to go through the functional specs with you yielded no dates. I will only agree to such a term if you can promise me that you have the full 5 days blocked out from your other projects, and we meet consecutively 5 days to clear this. We still have a lot of ground to cover.

In the end, he just said ok.

incident prevention and incident response

I had wanted to write about this for quite some time, but had never gotten the chance to type it out. In IT systems support/management, part of the maintenance phase is incident response and prevention. It's always in that sequence. The prevention bit normally comes as a mitigating measure after the incident has happened.

There was a JC class outing I had in 1999 where a group of us went to The Heeren, and wanted to take a group photo at the atrium area in front of HMV (it was HMV then). As it was quite late at night, 9 pm, there wasn't many people around to help us take a photo, so we approached an idle-looking security guard who was standing outside HMV. He said no, I asked him why, he said it's his job to guard the gates - those magnetic gates at HMV that sound of alarms when someone tries to take an unpaid merchandise out. We looked for another person to take the photo for us.

In what happened in a blink of an eye, while we were gathering for a pose, the alarm sounded, the camera flash went off, and a guy was pinned down by the security guard whom we approached earlier, just beside the magnetic gate. Everyone gasped. Another security guard came over, helped to restrain the guy (a young malay boy by the way), and took the guy into a room. Before we could even move out of our formation, that same security guard was back at his original patrol position, and we didn't even notice when he moved!

After that incident, I had a very different perspective towards incident response. Hence I have a different approach to incident response for the systems I support/manage, I have hawk eyes on incident prevention. However, with resource optimisation, and optimising optimised optimisation, incident prevention is almost a non-existent scope of work. You are hired as the security guard to guard the gates, to control what goes in and out of your system, but instead of watching the door, it's likely that you are re-arranging a CD, or processing a customer's payment, or receiving a delivery, or helping a customer look for a soundtrack he wants, anything except standing at the gate, watching. As a result, any thief (incident), almost always escapes your eyes (avoid getting prevented), and becomes an incident (theft case), which you will then need to respond. You then still have to stop re-arranging the CD, or stop processing the payment, or stop receiving the delivery, or stop helping the customer look for his soundtrack, and chase after the thief, in vain.

You then activate the other teams to help you trace that guy, and as you are on it, your boss will ask you to provide a regular status update on the situation, and it's likely that you won't be able to trace the guy (don't know cause of incident), don't know what he took (because it's not RFID, just magnetic strip due to cost cutting measures), and your boss still insists you trace the CD, so you end up having to do an ad hoc stock inventory, tally it against your point-of-sales system for the day (because the IT system doesn't have a report to handle such a scenario), and finally as a mitigating measure, you state that you need to be more vigilent in future, and it's weird if you say that, so your boss helps you say that.

That's why some people look idle, always idle (due to sampling frequency), and are deemed idle. While you are posing for a photo, he would have stopped an incident from happening, and returned to his idle position, without you noticing.

what first words say about me

Recently yaya started to make more understandable sounds. She is 20 months now. Before that she babbles away and I can't make a word out of it. The first word she said was "stop", which should be one of the words I used with the highest frequency on her. She will stop just before the escalator and say "stop", and then raise both arms to wait to be carried. She will stop at the areas around our house, mainly the carpark entrances and exits, and where the roads are. But I am quite sure that she doesn't know that the road is where I want her to stop because when we are at other roads, she doesn't know that she has to stop. So I have started to train her to stop at traffic lights. She also stops on cue, when I tell her stop, she will stop doing whatever she is doing, or walking if she is walking. lol

The second word she said was "dirty", and I couldn't stop laughing when she kept repeating the word "dirty". She kept picking dirt up from the floor and then said "dirty". Our house is rather dirty, so I always scream at her, "dirty... don't touch" And it comes back to me like haptic feedback. She will also point to her wet diapers and say dirty, and then pinch her nose, which is the action for "smelly". The novelty stopped after a day though.

I have been very conscious with the words I use because I know that it affects what I hear from my mini boss. These two words shows how I have been training her. "stop" is for me to stop her without having me to grab her. "dirty" is for me to tell her not to pick up rubbish from the ground. But when I say rubbish, she will pick it up and throw it into the rubbish bin. It's funny too. I wonder how her brain is associating dirty and rubbish now...