It has been a challenging but fulfilling year 2010, and here looking forward to 2011.
With the advancements of sharing contents in Facebook, I realized my blog has died down A LOT.
However, WordPress is currently posting a challenge of one post a day or one post each week to keep up the spirit and momentum going, and I’m subscribing myself to one post each week.
Let’s see how long this will last.
Year 2009 is coming to an end, and it’s that time of the year again to evaluate if I have been stopping myself enough from excessive spending on gadgets.
I will end year 2009 at $3,023 spent on electronics. Are they excessive? Let’s review.
For myself totalling $2,301.
For families totalling $722.
Come to think of it, the only spending I did for myself this year were all camera-related, and here hoping all those investments actually produced great shots this year and beyond.
So, what do you think? Excessive? Or not?
Last year, my house’s aircons decided that we have turned it off for too long, so it turned itself on. All commands from the remote were disregarded.
Tonight, those same aircon automagically turned itself on again. So, before our electricity bill shoot off the roof, preventive measures have to be taken. We’ve cut down their electricity supply for now, so it’ll keep them quiet until we decided it has to cool us, humans, again 
I reached Jakarta for one-week holiday on Friday evening, 9th October with Valuair for a planned-fully-packed vacation. I started Saturday by visiting my grandma, then upgrading my mom’s laptop to Windows 7 Home Premium. The upgrade took a full two hours, and after upgrade, everything works perfectly fine. In the afternoon, I assisted my mom to calculate and manage employee’s salary, which surprisingly took me almost two hours to go through everything. My brother and I slept in our sister’s apartment that evening. I spent the night there editing photos that I’ve taken that day.
Sunday was even a longer day. I woke up at 6 AM, reached GRII church at Kemayoran for 7 AM Sunday service. After the service, I went to Bakmi GM for breakfast with Evie‘s family. The breakfast was soon followed by me and Evie visiting my grandma and my parents for mango dessert and Hokkien Mee lunch. After lunch, we quickly dashed to Vivien’s holy matrimony in a church in Sunter. With me having no clue on where the church was, I drove around Sunter area with Evie’s holding my phone with GPS on. We got lost for a while before we finally found the church half hour later.
Evie and Me
After the holy matrimony, we drove back to Mall Kelapa Gading to meet my high school friends for a mini-reunion between 3-5 PM. We walked around the mall for an hour, then we went to Mangga Dua Square for Vivien’s wedding dinner. After Evie went home, I drove home, getting lost in Kemayoran area, but found my way back home safely.
Me, Evie, Tung2, Meli, Wylma, and Sara
With a draining Sunday, no wonder I only woke up at 12 PM on Monday, a novelty, haha… I went to optical shop to buy a new glasses for myself. This one I wear is more than 6 years old now. The good thing is, the power of my right eye has reduced though the power of my left eye has increased a bit. The cylinder power in both eyes have magically disappear, so after 6 years, it seems like my eyes have actually gotten better. Me and family went for dinner at Duck King, and ended the day at bowling’s alley. I took 431 photos that day, and spent the night editing photos *again*.
Me at bowling alley
My youngest niece
Tuesday was not much different. I went to my dad’s office, helped to digitize handwritten notes I found there, and finished up a product brochure’s design. After dinner, I browsed the net for images for my next product’s brochure’s design.
No doubt, tomorrow will be a long day again, I’ll update again in a few days
Yesterday, I went to Starhub service centre to get more details about my data usage that amount to that HUGE charges in my bill. I talked to a nice guy who showed me a detailed log file containing every single site that I accessed, complete with its file size, time stamp, and all minute details you can think of.
The person showed me a column that he said containing the page size that I accessed (in Excel). We summed up that column, came out 226000, which according to him was in KB. 226,000 KB is close to 237 MB shown in my bill. Fair enough.
I asked the person to sort based on that column. The largest page I accessed was in http://m.google.com/ domain. The size column showed around 14000. I’m sure that column was in bytes, therefore the page size was about 14KB. The person insisted it was in KB, making that page size 14MB!! We’re talking about 1000 times difference here.
Singapore Rain Locations
Scroll up a few lines, we could see this line: http://www.nea.gov.sg/cms/mss/gif/rainloc0.gif (shown above) amounted to 8579 in size. It makes perfect sense that it’s 8579 bytes, therefore 8.5KB. The person, again, still insists it’s 8.5MB!! Now, try loading that image in your browser, right click, look at its properties, and tell me how on earth that image can be 8.5MB? Even the photos from my digital camera were only half of that size. Moreover I said, if I could load that image in my phone in 2 seconds, does that mean Starhub network speed can go 4.25MB/sec? Heck, even my broadband at home can’t do that.
The person continued to give lame answers that would be passable to other non-IT-savvy users, but I eat bytes, KB, and MB for lunch, I know the differences. The person probably gave up trying to convince me with those lame answers, he promised to call me back later. I went back to my office, and about 6.30pm, he called me again, saying that he has checked and confirmed with the IT department, it was in KB, to which I replied “Check again, and call me back after you get more reasonable answer.”
About 8pm, he called me again, he told me, he has tried to load NEA website, clocking up 100KB from loading the page, and would need to get a few pages before he can hit the page where I could get that image. Well, I replied: “First, I bookmarked that image, so I don’t need to go through few pages to see if it’s raining in Singapore or not. Second, if the home page was 100KB, in order to hit 8.5MB, I would have need to visit 85 pages just to know if it’s raining or not??!!”
He gave up and offered to waive all the extra data charges this month, and will monitor again for my next bill. Good. Unless you can prove how I clocked up 237MB in a month when I have used less than 10MB each month for the past year, you should not try to charge enormous phone bill. Yeah, I know there’s a cap at $36, but still, that extra $30 is enough for my 6 months subscriptions. I’m not letting go easily, especially knowing that Starhub log file didn’t show that I did anything extra (like Youtube) in that month.
To be fair to that guy who helped me, besides the lame excuses, he actually did a good job, trying to cover up what I think was an accounting mistake on Starhub part.
Tonight, I came home, surprised to see a tweet from Starhub, offering help to check for me. I’m surprised to know that Starhub actually checks Twitter and address issues of its customers who complains in Twitter. Excellent job I would say. That Starhub Twitter account was created in 15 Feb 2009, so I think they’re only starting to use this popular online medium to reach out to customers.
Tweet from Starhub
My phone bill charges record so far was around $130, and that’s when I went overseas and uses did some roaming. With that in mind, I was shocked when I received this bill from Starhub today. $729.63 total data usage? What the heck did I do in two weeks so use up so much? I was in Indonesia for the other two weeks.
So, last week I called Starhub to ask for the details, and this afternoon, a lady from Starhub called me to tell me that she has checked with their IT department and confirmed I really have used that much. Puzzling. Especially if the counter on my phone shows only 8MB of usage.
I’m going to drop by Starhub tomorrow to get the details, see if I can spot something “strange” with my data usage.
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