I am too busy to break down the experience at work for lodging program day by day so I decide to you know, compile and share these few days together.
Paku Pakis free veg in wild
Paku Pakis (Diplazium esculentum) is a type of wild grown fern and we were taught to harvest these fern from the wild and turn that into a dish that many Malay will enjoy. They have different grade depend where you harvest it and they also can be found in Singapore as the name 过山猫. You can cook it with salted egg as well.
This aunty has a nice online cookbook for instruction how to cook sambal with Paku Pakis she can follow back easily in the future. Recommended format which I can try in the future.
Belacan and flour for fish bait
I was trying to hand reel catch fish at the local river at Kulai. Ah Ong shared with us that instead of using white bread as bait, we can try belacan mix with flour. I didn't think of that and I realise that belacan is made of shrimp paste and that why it will attract fish.
Concrete Mix for basic construction
Well, as we all know that I studied civil and environmental in poly. Other than the short time (2 years) in Semborp I don't get to really practice my trade. Even during my ID time last year, I didn't really get to do site supervision job.
Then out of the blue, I got the chance to help out in the farm for the construction of swimming pool, waterfall and a outdoor baking oven!!!! OMG, who in the right mind build these things at home?? Don't worry Durian Guesthouse 流连宿 will be so crazy enough to build all these using raw material.
And we got to experience doing cement mix and concrete curing ourselves and do the whole 流水线 by ourselve.
Thats all for today. Next week I update more on my work stay
Okie, exciting. My friend Ben for the ID firm recommended me to try 打工换宿. Interesting concept from crouchsurfing!!! You can literally work / volunteer and exchange for lodging at different country, hence experience different culture from different country. Therefore, we decided to start our first experience at 流连宿.
流连宿
This self sustaining farm at Kulai is owned by Tai Shun. He used to work in Singapore as a mobile phone retailer and other job for many years but he ends up returning to Malaysia to start a homestay. His idea is not to keep chasing for the money and wants a farm that is fully substainable. He learn all the skill like electrical, plumbing, construction, carpentry and gardening from all around the world. More of his stories can be seen here.
Direction
From Queenstown MRT to Kranji MRT > take SBS 170x to JB central > T30 bus for 40mins to Kulai. I went during Tuesday afternoon 12 as it was off perk and so it took me 2 hours to reach Kulai bus terminal from Queenstown MRT. No jam and straight through.
Day 1
Banana tree only grow one branch of banana and they will weed. You can cut off the stem and sucker will start to grow from the base near to the original plant.
Compost method using permaculture, which instead of more modern industrialization method, permaculture is adopting a more traditional or natural method。
Good place as a 2nd home
Crystal shared that Kulai is a good place to start a homestay beside the hot and sunny weather which is the cons.
- 40mins drive to JB if you want to enjoy some city time
- 15mins drive to JB airport (small) which connects to the rest of malaysia via domestic flight.
- as a semi rural area, they still have good amount of facilities like police, fire, school and hospital around.
So we did catch and cook a couple of time for the catfish. I tried pan frying with alone and andrian, then we become more adventurous and tried streaming it couple of times and invite different people to try. Lastly we still think that pan frying with rosemary is the best. A bit 黏牙 like that is the best.
I have been actively promoting the benefit of eating catfish. Many of my friend steer away from it as they find it smelly so they say. Actually they hasn't try eating it before. But I guess is that catfish generally eat waste so they assume the meat is muddy.
Convince friend to give catfish a try
According to this articles, catfish is low is calories, high in vitamin D, omega 3 and rich in protein. In fact due to the low cost of production Chinese restaurant those selling 烤鱼, many are using fry catfish as their choice of meat. Thailand people also like to grill them on 2 chopstick commonly found in golden mile (demolished). In fact in Malaysia, a lot of people treat catfish 白稣公 as one of their local delicacy.
Talking about this week right, I went Labrador park to fish for salt water. Too bad, that day I did witness the oil spill first hand and found 2 otto kanna coated in oil. I really can feel for the marine life as fisherman over harvest fish and constant pollution of sea by big corporate and oil company. The world is so bad and everything is getting from bad to worst. World is not getting to a better place but heading south. I make me really deter of having children as I don't wanna bring another person out to suffer in the world.
Gutting the catfish and review
As compared to Tilapia. Catfish is surprising easy to clean as their guts are cleaner and they don't have to be descaled. Only draw back from the fish is the meat is close to tasteless albeit meat is firm and sometime chewy if you don't overcook it. I also felt that the meat is quite oily and make it very 腻 after a while. Unless of course if the cooking method is rose mary pan fry :)
Jacky went to find Andrian to ask about my temperament issue when I am dealing with retail client. I tend to stick to my principle a lot and unable to 扮可怜 or 博同情.
I would rather jeopardise the whole deal rather than meeting client at the "middle".
I acknowledge that I am not very end goal driven. I always do thing without an end in mind. Sort of a very process kind of person.
Jacky came to a conclusion I might not be very suitable to be working in the service line. She asks me to do back my leather project and at least start off with a product. She says since I don't work really well with bosses and colleagues, I am not a very people person as I like to exercise my world view on people around. She recommends that I should at least be enforcing my control on a product as a solopreneur.
well. I sold my old superlight raw lacquer for a $700 profile. This bike is so great that both of us has seller remorse over it. I mean I could have profit a 1.3k at least. Show u by ex photo.
Well. My 3sixty chrome is still with me. Like my 初恋情人. Cannot be replaced even by the atas Brompton. Show u my 初恋. Although she is also available on carousel.
Now after Jacky gets her red superlight and I buy another P line storm grey. Our collection in garage as follows.
Soon we will need to buy the sets of tools to repair and maintain our bike. Stay tuned.
I love blogging again. But I hate google blogspot platform. Doesn’t have a good app for me to use to publish my post.
Let try to upload my Macau trip
Okie. Just realise I need to allow the “blogger plus” have Google drive access to upload picture.
And lastly I think there is a double up strategy to almost sure win in casino. I play the game big small with near 50% win rate. With enough capital, I can sure win without black swan events. The trick is to only buy 1 option only. Everyday win $100 go home sleep. Eat and drink free inside. Nice!!
Update: 06 Feb 2024. Deleted the useless blogger platform. As the photos need to have certain google access which I am not comfortable with. Decided you know to convert back to blogging using PC.
On my way to renaissance man, I had joined Jacky to do a community work at a community garden. This is to give my to community and also extending my social circle boarder and not confine in just my working networks. Giving back is a good way to feel better about ourselves.
1st week, I met up with Felicia, she told us main tools we need is a shovel and a cutter. She introduce us to the layout of the garden. We helped in washing some veg with ETL solutions. And we get to harvest longevity spinach and eggplant. Then we are tasked to distribute some to the household for presidents to enjoy and raise awareness to the community garden there. Therefore inviting them to come to the garden to ask for more harvest from the volunteers and of course come and volunteer for garden's manpower.
2nd week, as usually we kept our schedule to 9am to 12noon. We started off my restarting the soil for another pod, namely Cai Xin. Felicia shared
the closer the seed are planted, the smaller the root and hence the veg will be smaller too
a seed and be harvested 2 to 3 times, rather than rooting it out, just cuts off all leaves leaving 2 smaller sprout for photosynthesis.
Cai Xin life cycle from seed to harvest usually is 4 weeks, she manged to harvest it within 18 days
To grow healthy plants, need to watch their PH 6.5 which is neutral and the soil quality. Remove pest by covering them with nets.
While she mentioned that she is proud that this community is harvesting at a faster rate due to some special formula of hers. She encourage and motivate us to learn quicker and harvest faster as this community garden is the faster growing within the hundreds of garden around Singapore.
However, this makes me question about this capitalism world. Everyone is now focus on competition over collaboration. It is a toxic cycle come to think about it. Many will agree that having "healthy competition" is good for the world / corporate / community. But I see this will eventually turns into hurting the world just like all the big corporate did. Nestle, Shell, Apple etc. The uncalled for competition just motivate company to use extreme methods of agriculture, industrialized methods that end up causing issue like carbon footprint.
Within the community is fine, all teams are willing to share tip and trick to help each other. But we just end up creating unreal competition with other communities. Therefore it is not advantages for us to share among inter-community. I hopefully can advocate we should not compete. Focus on the real why you are doing this and like about collaboration instead. Volunteer work wise of working wise.
Week 1 of work
Back to my new job. Love and hate for the first week.
I love it as they are not as toxic as the place I came from before. Colleague are willing to set aside work and mentor me. That doesn't happen in my previous place. I guess is due to the unreal expectation from the top management. Also from the 奋斗逼.
I am tore between choosing central area where a lot of experience colleague around or somewhere at the suburb heartland mall where our team starts at the same place and learn together. You know, the pro and con between learning things faster vs taking things slowly.
Wah, early retirement extreme really intrigue to me read word for word and the concept is very align to mine. As though, the writer help me to put up a more detailed version of what my worldview is. I really recommend this book to people who like to retire early. Comparing to FIRE, although I haven't read it. I would think this is a better book.
In the book is part people into 4 groups. Salary man / working man / business man and renaissance man. What renaissance man is also a polymath, or commonly known as "jack of all trade". This align with me to be a generalist over a specialist. Being a special come with a benefit but people often overlook the cost of specialisation.
So I advocate being a renaissance man, which the following clip say you need to have 2 things,
dedicated learning : Cross learning a skill which can help you to learn another skill easier
opportunistic learning : ability to learn things as it present itself and therefore able to learn new things quickly.
Very good video and I like this speaking cadence which show so much confidence. Love it.
Being a handy man
I want to research should I invest in bicycle maintenance tools. Which has some cross between handyman tools for general repair. If much item is similar or overlay. I think I will bite the bullet to invest in a set of tools.
These are long term ROI and very possible income generating. I need to start working on some hard skills, technical skills or blue collar skill.
Everyone is a natural builder. From young as a baby, we smile with curosity as we touch the world around us and realise we are able to touch and modify things. As we grow older, we lose this kind of instint due to the busiest of work. We outsource simple things to others in term of services. To escape capitalism, I want to learn more DIY.
When I finish my notes on retirement extreme, will share it. Inside a lot of example why we need to be a handyman
This weekend got fly aeroplane by 2 group of friends.
Lilian suppose to meet at SP for singing end up cancelling as her daughter is sick.
Flo and Herm cancelled Sunday cycling as Herm bike Brompton got gear issue. Same things that the connector just got disconnector.
Knowing how to fix the Brompton yourself can help to save the $70 servicing fee. This information can be easily found on YouTube provided you have the leisurely of time of not working to study and DIY. Of course I agree the opportunity cost of spending time to research, study, trial and error vs paying for an expert to help you solve the problem. However, as a typical "S" quadrat guy. Learn a general repair skill has the potential to ROI the opportunity cost in your life time.
I am advocate for general specialist. I no longer see the upside to specialise very deep. Able to know a vest knowledge broadly will help us to see solution from different angles. Your solutions are usually unique and more out of the box.
Frugal living
End up I need to go through my phonebook to jio friend out for a pint. So hard to find friends now as all has their own group. Meet up with Michael at Bugis and he had been working for grab part time for 2 years. Very powerful, beside his main job, he part time as a grab and all good weeks he can get 1.4k usually in the 800 to 1k weekly. Due to his past 1 year, he say he got 20k annual from grab part time.
He shown me that he has also upgrade his bike to electrical one. I tried and it was very good and responsive. He is getting fitter which is a good thing. He encourage me to go get the shirt and start doing it now. Well the bundle will need $70 so typically 2 days are enough to break even the start up cost.
I told him I don't really want to do it for the money. I looking more for the experience and also the work out part of the job. We had a small talk which revolve how he is inspired to clear debt, buy condo in the future and a car really soon. I really advice him against it as a frugal woke man. However, he is very quick to dismiss my point of view of course thinking I am a crazy man or a outlier. I really hope I can come out with either a book / podcast / video to advocate the frugal lifestyle.
Aline, my friend from Vietnam had done a similar thing which is very good I think. Can copy her style.
Outlier is a good book, recommended. 10 hours rule in the core teaching and even Ali also recommend it as a very easy to read book which are being listed in the top 10 for a reason.
Before I buy something online, eat something or watch a movie; I had the habit to search for review online. I almost enjoy the process of researching for review more than buying the item or experience.
Sometime it will just cause me a lot of dilemma and confusion, even it will make to procrastinate on taking action or avoid doing it all together.
However, I am a very compare dot com kind of guy.
I know a lot of reviews can be brought or fake, however it didn't know that review market had evolve to a state where most of the review are fake.
At the end of clip, she mention that although it seems like the review system had benefit the food store, user and the broker. However, in the long run, it is damaging to all parties.
Restaurant have to particulate in rhetoric star rating system, waste energy and money
Broker / Platform that contain fakes review in the mix and lose real client base
User long longer able to get real information on platform
I should remind myself not to get too involve in comparing different product. Goes with the middle option to save more opportunity cost.
Blogging
Blogger is very hard to use and it don't have a app to do it. Wordpress had gotten better over the years.
3sixty
My brakes cable replacement parts had arrived. Thanks Jacky for the help. Too bad she is down with COVID also. It was so hard to avoid. Even I catch it when I go golden mile.
This weekend might go out for a foldie ride on Sunday. This bike is really good and I like it after 1 year still. Although the ride frequency reduced but the need to use it once in a while is always there. If I take care the bike and dry and oil it. I can last me a life time. So it is a 1k well spent.
Today after watching Samurai Matcha, I got inspired to start writing my online dairy. I guess I still love my blog.
Travel
I am midway between my job. Now taking a short 2 months break. I did travel a bit after COVID reopen. In case you had missed out my Selangor Trip and Dalat Trip. The motive behind these trip is first, relax and secondly, introduce Jacky to micro retirement. From blogging for many years, I realise it is good to have records over the years so we had started both a channel on Youtube and a mini project for podcast.
Capitalism
Today I was telling Jacky about capitalism market and how they suck you in to keep purchasing things that you end up throwing out a while later. I was trying to avoid falling into all the marketing and selling technics in recent years. Take for example that, fashion industry was so saturated so capitalist designed fast fashion that promotes planned obsolescence which phrase out product in a certain life span. Fast fashion had been known to cause depletion to our earth natural resources.
Living a frugal life
Spend only on my needs not want, when I want to buy something I usually delay my purchase, only if I sleep over it and I had the urge I will return again to buy
When buying I always avoid single purpose products, there needs to be multi functions
Instead of buying for comfort, I buy for value. Looking for potential ways the item could ROI or be monetized in other ways
Gig economy
Recently, we had plans to move from E to S quadrant. For the lower and non guaranteed income, we hope to exchange for anatomy, flexibility, diversified, purposeful and aligning to vision type of life. I had borrowed the book "The Gig Economy" on Kobo. This E-reader is better than kindle due to the app is able to connect to local library via overdrive to read infinite books. So far I had read 2 books. Barefoot investor and 中国历史一点通
My first instinctive thought is the fear of horrible lung infection and long term organ damage the virus can do to my body. I guess many will feel the same way. The worries, fear or pressure may be overwhelming to a lot of people. I can see some few might even suffer from depression from his unfortunate mishap in life.
However, this fear lasted only 3 minutes within me. Fear I believe is due to the natural human defend mechanism when facing dangerous situation that we naturally comes out with some worst case scenario to better prepare our brain.
But what went through my thought was, my belief system that our life is all being watched over by an good person. Many call that god while I just call it a good person. They will watch over us and make sure they will provide us the best possible outcome for us. All choice that you make regardless of good or bad ultimately is the only choice that you will make to lead you to the best outcome.
The virus was cast against me so that my body will build up the natural defend mechanism probably to protect me against another bigger problem. Which otherwise will kill me in an instant if not because of this COVID experience.
Measurement of time in second, measurement of length using metrics, measurement of wealth using dollars. How funny all this are just man made. And if we are always worry about how young, how tall and how successful base on these metrics. We just leads ourselves to misery. No one cause us to feel sad. We just allow ourselves to be measure against other's expectation. Hard to describe but 你懂的
I was shocked how come I can be so positive as if I can’t even be scared in front of this kind of life and death situation what else can hurt me anymore. I felt invincible.
The reason I am sharing how I mitigate stress and pressure is because I felt a lot of people are always worrying too much. While a lot of illness is cause by stress and pressure itself. And it was only amplified by our own mind. So nice if I am able to advocate to people how to be as positive like me.
Imagine you flip a coin. The chances of it landing out as head have the same likelihood that your marriage will last a lifetime.
Ask yourself, will you buy into an investment product that made you lose all your money 50% of the time?
Then why do we still believe marriage?
Marriage history
In ancient, marriage started off strategically to bind noble and ruling classes with diplomatic and economic ties. It is a treaty to establish a peaceful relationship, trading relationship and mutual obligation by marrying families together.
More recent time, marriage serves a purpose to keep our wealth contained and passing it down to our lineage. The benefit of which is to safeguard assets and to form a coalition group.
Presently, marriage is merely to satisfy peer pressure, obtain legal entry to government programs entitled for couples and to have a consist person to fulfil our sexual desires.
Wedding industries
In fact, marriage is such bullshit and is so fragile. It is the only relationship in this world that requires an institute to penalize people from letting out of it.
Think about a true kinship or friendship. There is no need for a certificate to penalize you. You have a friend of a lifetime. You just feel right, and you don't mind being friends forever. Both of you are busy with life, both of you have a different social group. No matter how long you didn't get to see one another, there is always the feeling of closeness and connection when you get united again.
Cost of marriage
Can you really put a price on love?
In fact, yes. On average, getting into marriage will cost you somewhere between 30k to 50k. (according to dollars & sense, seedly, value champion)
Marriage is a scam due to the ease of getting into one verse the exorbitant amount of ordeal at getting out of it.
As a Singaporean, you just require a nominal fee of $50 to legally bind yourself to your partner at the institute.
On the other hand, to get out of one you have to invest an enormous amount of time and money. It is almost impossible to divorce on freewill. Once you are married, to consider a divorce in Singapore you need to provide proof legally that your spouse had committed one of the followings:
Legally obtained evidence of spouse adulty behaviour
Legal proofs of unacceptable behaviour
Proof that your spouse had deserted you for 2 years
Proof physically separation of up to 4 years
Then you have to go through the legal proceeding of the dissolution process and settling the complex dividing of assets in ancillary matters. If a baby is involved, custody decision and spousal maintenance so on and so fore.
Is marriage natural
Evidence shows that only 3% - 5% of mammal species in this world practice monogamy. (One partner of life). Most of them evolve into monogamy is for the increase of livelihood. Since human is so rich in emotions and more complex in our thinking process. We are only cheated into believing it only right to stay committed to our spouse or otherwise we will be deeply frowned upon. The social pressure of marriage fucking us up on our moral compass forces us to stay faithful to our counterpart even when our heart and soul is saying otherwise.
So is monogamy a natural evolution?
Scientifically, while women have limited egg to carry offspring. Men, on the other hand, have an unlimited amount of sperm. Since our ultimate purpose in life is to reproduce for the extension of humanity. How do we handle the extra desire fueling inside men's body?
Socially, we have to look into masturbation and ask if it is natural. In many countries, paid sex services are legal due to it will manage the needs of many men and in turn, bring down social crimes in general.
Whao, that 7 months since my last post. I joined BB since Feb 2019. 5 months into the job but I still haven't cleared my probation. They say the learning curve was steep, I don't believe. Now from the look of my KPI. I just managed to clear 10% KPI averaging over 5 months.
Many people ask if I regret leaving my last job. Why did I have to leave the job that I can do with my hand tied behind my back with big fat payroll, flexible timing so on and so fore. Honestly, I do not regret and I love the new challenge that I am facing.
First of all, promoting credit facilities had bottlenecked. I had learnt all that I need to learn and from that moment on, I am literally "working" for money. Jim Collins in his book "Good to Great" mention that for you to really find long-lasting satisfaction in your career you need to have passion, value and talent.
Since young before primary school, I was a strong believer in friendship. I was always the first who initiated contact with friends after we graduate for a gathering and catching up. But to my dismay, a lot of time this kind of affection is one-sided. I was almost a bit jealous of friends who got into new clique to the new environment. It like I am having withdrawal symptom towards friends "moving on".
After secondary school, I already understand there is almost no friendship that will last forever. So I tell myself, 朋友是阶段性的。And after the army, I understand that friend is mutually beneficial and you are automatically excluded when you are no longer useful. 朋友是互相利用的。
Over time, from extorvert, I became an introvert. Excluding myself from gathering, get together, almost like social withdrawal.
After the "big bang", I was rescued by 3rd Uncle who brings me back home. I was paranoid and constantly on the edge of the feeling that I was under supervision by the authorities. I constantly doing streaming on Belive and FB. A bit siao liao.
I threw a way macbook, Iphone X, passport, Iphone 7 and my favorite Addidas Blue dry fit. + many many more. I was at the airport and brought back a macbook air and Iphone X. The spending spee started.
I tried many interviews and ended but had 2 offers. The Dbank offers a higher basic Relation Manager, which I applied through job street. The Ubank offers a higher commission by success HR. One job is a new undertaking of new financial products the other the old credit facilities product.
Congrats to my cousin for their happy marriage. This family was from my Penang side Auntie (my father sister). This family and these group of cousin is the only one left that is not residing in Singapore. Acutally, my father side family is very big.
Rich dad poor dad was the first financial book I ever read when I was a teen. It was the only book that I manage to finish reading. I was given to me by an MLM leader from Amway. I believe it was called the bible of multi-level marketing, due to the ability to influent the way you think about money.
As financial knowledge is surprising not taught in school. You are typically being taught by your parents who haven't got a clue about it either. Unless of course if they are already at the 1%. With that most of us is miseducated on financial planning.
I had made a summary of what you can find in this book below.
Power and influence is everything is this power hunger era. It is for people who love office politics and everyday power struggle with other leaders. It is not for the Mr nice guy, this evil and cunning book teaches you how to exploit people weakness and emotion.
With power comes more corruptions. Being powerless is as good as being helpless. Knowing these tips is inevitably going to help you since the game of power is inescapable. You need to know it to see it.
If rich dad poor dad is a bible to MLM, then four hour work week by Tim Ferriss is a bible to "digital nomad".Every backpacker read somehow this book. Tim Ferris is known for coining the word "Lifestyle Design" and also know to define the current mentally of the Millennium group aka The New Rich.
It centric on defining differences between financial freedom from being wealthily rich. This book talks about how to escape the 9 to 5 rat race trap and living a more meaningful which is geographically unrestricted.
One of my friend Alan had point my attention to a recent article about Jim Carrey sanity and I would like to discuss a little more and provide my own insight into this episode. Jim is one of my idols and he is famous for his role in ACE ventura and The Mask. He is of course known to be a comedian later turn into a inspirational figure to many as he is also a two time winner of oscar.
The purpose of my articles is the Jim Carrey shares a lot of common attritubes as me, of course excluding the measurement of success and influent. I am definitely not remotely suggest I am like Jim carrey. I would like to use his story as a reminder to take away for myself.
When I was younger around 12, in my head is all about thinking to age faster till 18 so that I will have the freedom that I had always hoped for. After my parent let go of me and I finally get to decide what I want to do with my life. Instead of heading towards freedom, I am slowly getting trapped.
Where are you now, Gary
Minimalism is the new materialism. In short minimalism is the idea of living with less things that distracts you. You more you reduce your choices and options the less time you spend making them.
Minimalism isn't about living without money; that's poverty, but its about living rich enough to be able to live like a poor person who values experience over possession. Come to think of it, experience and possession which do you think is more permanent? Furthermore another benefit of being minimalist is having lesser things to lose.
There are many definition to happiness. I had been searching for the ultimate definition for my whole life while I maintained positively most of the time. I realise I am always happy and there are really very little that can make me sad.
Its not like 8 years ago that I had time to write blog for my poly friend to read cause now there are seldom people following my blog and no one cares about my writing anymore. So the style of writing will be from a much wordy post to something like more visual.
I am into photography 8 years ago and now I am into videography. Also I am not professional and I don't even think I can pass of as someone worthy as an amateur. I just like what I am doing and it doesn't matter if I am good at it or not cause I just enjoyed.
Now this post is to feature Sandy and Tracy whom came to Singapore after 3 years when I last saw them in Hanoi. They hosted me 6 days last time and now I am here to return them the favour.
2nd HCM of the year after phi phi Island last month, I am off to HcM to attend a friend wedding. Although that are mishap to our plan but we are still a fun group to be around with.
