Colin Charles Agenda

Rudd wants fuel subsidies in Asian countries to be removed. He thinks it artificially inflates prices across the region.

Malaysia recently had a 40% increase in fuel prices, where the old rate was RM1.92, and the new rate is RM2.70 (there is still a 30 sen subsidy).

Now, lets investigate the cost of living, and discuss earning power (therefore, spending power).

Australia has the concept of a Federal Minimum Wage (FMW), which currently stands at AUD$13.74 per hour. If you work a 40-hour work week, for 4 weeks (notice that this then gives you a 13 month pay cheque), that’s about AUD$2,200/month, and a yearly income of about AUD$28,579.20. Yes, even for flipping burgers at McDonalds, you get at least 2.2k/month!

Malaysia has no concept of minimum wages. With foreign labour available relatively cheaply, fresh graduates tend to earn RM1,800/month. Flipping burgers at Burger King? I hear (OK, I lie; I’ve seen this advertised outside a BK store) the salary rate is about RM560/month (that’s a measly RM3.50/hour).

OK, so the tax laws are different. Australia exempts you on your first $6,000/year. Malaysia has over 10 million workers, and only about 1.2 million pay taxes (you are tax exempt if your monthly salary is less than RM3,000). In fact, those in the highest 28% bracket currently stand at a paltry 38,500 people.

But the cost of living, is also different. A book, that costs USD$20, will cost about AUD$25-30 in Borders; the same book will cost RM85 in Malaysia! Its no wonder, Malaysians are said to not read very much.

So, books aren’t necessities. Lets look at milk. 1L in Australia would set you back AUD$2.03 (this being Pura Milk, which I’m fond of drinking). 1L in Malaysia (Dutch Lady) would set you back RM3.39. Ouch! Dollar-to-dollar, that is a $1.36 difference for an essential item.

Back to fuel… Its hovering at about AUD$1.60/L, and $1.70 is not far off. Think about paying RM2.70/L, with talk of it going up in the near future, also not far off. Then remember, the difference in wages. And take into account the cost of living.

Remember, in Asia, Malaysia isn’t deemed “bad”, or “third world”. In terms of development (South East Asia, at least), it stands next to Singapore.

Rudd, mate, if you’re not pushing for higher wages, don’t bother pushing for an end to petrol subsidies.

Google needs this in their dictionary. Thank goodness, the Urban Dictionary offers several opinions on what it is to be a camwhore (thus, practising the art of camwhoring, or to camwhore).

See: narcissism, media whore

Synonymous with: attention whore

Ref.: Wikipedia:Cam_whore, On whoring oneself

N/B: camwhoring has nothing to do with prostitution. How often have we seen people charging for viewing pictures or videos of themselves? Maybe I’m surfing the wrong sites… but I’m pretty sure its generally free for all to see.

Unless of course, you remember JenniCam (yes kids, the Internet did exist in 1996 :P) Today, iJustine, and Justin.tv call it “lifecasting”. A decade ago, we called it camwhoring. Terminology…

Maybe, Paul McFedries needs to add this to the WordSpy… go read an entry, like one on brand sluts, for instance.

In what I call a great advertising scheme, Leora Zellman, a blogger, photographer, brand evangelist, etc. is offering her sexy body as ad space.

Her body will cost you on an hourly basis, she’s mostly logo focused, but will also wear schwag, like t-shirts and caps. Buy her back, butt, or chest, they all have varying prices. If athletes do it, why not us regular Joe’s, right?

Well, its not like we all don’t do this. I wear t-shirts with penguins, dolphins, and various other bits all the time. In fact, I haven’t bought a t-shirt in over nine years.

Will this work? Maybe. At a geek conference, every other geek is probably wearing stuff with logos on them. Might be useful for new products? I’ve never actually looked at a t-shirt and thought to myself, “Hmm, I need to check that URL/product out”. Maybe other’s have?

Reminds me of the time Leah Culver sold advertising space on her laptop. Also, on another tangent, Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur spoke about Amanda Congdon using her body to promote her content, Leo basically saying it wasn’t smart. Check out net@night episode 51 for more.

Well Leo, most of the popular blogs in Malaysia, are “photo blogs”, of people “camwhoring”, i.e. showing themselves off in places. Is it sustainable? Maybe not. But will it bring popularity and money in the short term? Probably yes. Some even go on to getting fame ;)

Anyways, enough ranting on this. Best wishes Leora, and to all the other “camwhores” out there.

I’ve been on what I consider, a blogging break. In reality, I’ve been working, and then having a modicum of a social life, finding less and less time to write blog entries. I have morsels of half-baked ramblings saved, so expect a load of posts to show up soon…

luna:toblog ccharles$ ls |wc -l
29

For a comeback…

I have been checking in my photographic equipment. I already carry a backpack with 2 laptops and various other tech gear (it probably weighs in at around 10KG, which airlines can frown at). Of late, I’ve also started carrying a briefcase. Where does my camera gear fit? In checked-in luggage of course!

This can be anywhere in the reigns of 3 Canon bodies, a 30/1.4, 50/1.4, 24-70/2.8, 70-200/2.8, 17-40/4, and a couple of flash units. Not exactly the cheapest of equipment, as I’m into good glass (read: L).

However, the one place I don’t tend to check equipment in, is when I fly to and from the US. The TSA have a silly rule that says your bags must be unlocked, or else they will break the lock for you. This has naturally led the paranoid me, not want to carry any professional camera gear into the US.

And today, my paranoia proves right. I found out that Matt (WordPress fame) lost his camera gear, as did another blogger.

Yes, this is on a certain particular American airline, but I wonder if its just baggage handlers that are dishonest with them, or baggage handlers that are dishonest in general? Also note that insurance tends not to pay (afaik, anyway) if your camera equipment or laptop gear is checked-in.

What are options for the technophiles in us, that fly a lot?

I threw the idea of a BarCamp Malaysia a few years back, and it was mostly shot down amongst the free and open source community members. The reasoning behind it, largely was because it was assumed that we could have the same amount of discussion at a bar (over beer), and there would be a lack of participation from the attendees.

The “Web 2.0 types” though seem to be getting their act together, at organising a BarCamp Malaysia. Kudos to them, I hope it’s a success (and there will be many, many more to come). I’d attend, but its the weekend right after OSCON, which I mentioned on the Facebook wall of one of the early event planning meetings. Apparently, nobody listened.

I’ll try and be at the next event planning meeting, to see what morsels I can pick up, and keep everyone updated. Maybe more hacking sessions up in the highlands, like how Aizat and Ditesh went to last weekend, would rock (I’d have gone, except I was in Melbourne).

So, it looks like Asus is rolling out more Eee PC’s, with bigger screens – up to 10 inches. They’ll be loading it with an Intel Atom 1.6GHz processor, and they’re promising 7.5 hours of battery life.

Now we’re talking. The Eee 701 that I own is piss poor with regards to the battery life. And the other thing that has annoyed me for a while with the Eee, is the keyboard. Its just simply too small. I try to touch type with the Eee, and its not that my fingers are fat (really, they’re comparatively thin and long), but its just difficult. The new Eee’s don’t have such an improvement.

They’re still going to be shipping with 12 or 20 gigabyte SSDs. One thing I notice with the Eee is that for critical bits of information, I definitely do not even need more than 4GB of storage.

I think I’m over the Eee. I’ll probably run OpenSolaris on it soon (I wonder if ZFS performs well on flash based storage?) and dock it with a real keyboard, mouse and monitor. And I think that’s where the Eee could shine (or where OpenSolaris could shine) – support a limited set of hardware from a few laptop manufacturers, and one might be a great success if everything “just works”.

What’s caught my fancy this week? The Dell Mini Inspiron. There are photos, and the specifications according to Slashdot (take it with a grain of salt) state:

• Atom 1.6 GHz – just like the newer Eee’s
• 3 USB ports – Apple better start worrying… Seems nicer than the Air, but naturally, OS X simply rocks
• Ethernet
• Card reader – I’ve found reading SD cards really handy
• Mic/line-out
• VGA port, with screen resolution at 1280×800 – winner! It sounds like this might actually be a 12″ screen, which I like

All for under-USD$500? Eee and Macbook Air killer. Of course, no mention of what kind of disk storage will be available. Frankly, I don’t care if its not flash or SSD; throw in an 80GB 4,200rpm 1.8″ drive even. SSD is a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist today for laptops (it offers next to no benefit to hard disks, in battery life or performance).

So Dell, you’ll have my business, plus the extended 3-year “everything” warranty if you come up with something like the above. Make sure the keyboard is usable. Heck, if you can fit 1280×800 on something smaller than a 12″ screen, that’d be fabulous. And don’t forget to throw in WiFi and Bluetooth. Forget an optical drive. Pack it all in with a 7 hour battery life, and you’ll be selling Mini Inspirons like there’s no tomorrow.

Heck, bring back the idea of docking stations! (I realise that a lot of young folk reading might have no idea what a docking station is, but these were fairly popular in the 90’s for laptops, to “enhance” their capabilities with parallel ports, serial ports, an optical drive, etc.) Charge us a whole bunch more for a sensible docking station. The Mini Inspiron might not be someone’s only laptop, but neither is the MacBook Air.

No mention of what OS will be on it. I don’t really care what flavour of Linux comes with it, I’m probably rooting for Ubuntu LTS, but if it comes with something crap like Xandros (aka Eee PC), its easy enough to replace it with something more sensible.

All I can say is that the next couple of months should be real fun for mini-laptop purchasers. It almost seems like you’ll end up owning several mini-laptops, keeping them in various parts of the home… after all, as we all move online, everything we need will be within a web-browser, right? :)