Dice Calculator for iPhone also got rejected...

OK.  Now I know.... there is a lot of things to do to get your app approved.  My the other iPhone App was rejected because the name of the App has the word "iPhone" in it.  So, we need to name the App correctly!

Back to the drawing board to make even better app.  :)

This is so much fun!!

 

My first Apple App got rejected!

Apple App Store has rejected my Dice Calculator app. And it is very cool that they gave me a reason so that I can work on improvement plan. This is very very cool. The reason why mine did not get thru is they wants my application to support both portrait and landscape mode instead of only supporting one orientation. Let's spend some time to work on that. Hmmm....



This is also good. By the time I finish fixing this... I may be able to see how much to charge. :)

Taobao

Every one knows that China manufactured almost 95% of everything...  so, of course it is very natural to buy things from China.  However, Internet shopping can be very different from Amazon or Ebay from US.  Taobao is one of the best shopping site that I go to.  Especially when I needed to buy iPad related stuffs.  i.e. cover, 3G card cutter, etc etc.  The price is really very cheap.  It is like buying wholesale price.  But there is no way to pay them.

Fortunately there are these third party companies that become the middle man.  Help people like me to buy stuff from China TaoBao and they will collect money, earn that 2% commission, and then order the stuff for me from Taobao and sent the stuff to me.  Great site, great service.

1.  Surf Internet Shopping site such as Taobao.com.

2.  Find the product you want to purchase.  Copy the URL link.

3.  Go to YoyBuy.com, create a new order, and add new item to purchase.  Don't forget to instruct them what color, what size, etc.

4.  Next day, YoyBuy.com sales agent will email you (make sure to check your Junk Mail folder) and then ask you to verify the items to buy.

5.  Once you verify, you can select to pay them by Paypal or DBS Internet bank transfer.

6.  Once that is done, you wait.  They will place order and then receive those packages.  and they will estimate shipping fee, and request you to pay those.

7.  Waala... you get your merchandises on the next couple of days.

Sweet & Easy!  Recommend to use DBS to pay, as it does not collect any more charges.  Using Paypal, you need to pay 4% to Paypal.

OK! I will try my best...

Some restaurants in the world has started to place this card on their table top. This is to further prove that iPhone is becoming the most powerful phone in this planet. I don't see any other similar sign such as "No Blackberry", "No Nokia", etc... So, I felt happy for Apple!!!

Of course, I usually will take photos of my food and blog it or facebook it. That's it. At least, I don't play games during eating time. :)

Toddler's Weekend Activity - Sentosa

Sentosa can still be fun for toddlers. We went there during Noon and have our lunch by the beach. We passed by Luge, and was tempting to try it.

We have not been to Luge, and this is the first time, we go to Luge. The ticketing manages to convince me to take 2 rides and I pay about $21 for both me and Jay Jay to ride together.



Of course, Jay Jay is now > 100cm and should be able to play the Luge.



But I must say, sitting on the Sky Ride is very scary. All the while I am afraid of heights, but for Jay Jay sake, must train him not to be like his dad. So, no choice, I have to sit on this scary ride. At first, it is still good, but when it go over the top, my heart are pounding fast. My back leans again the seat, and dare not move my body an inch in front. I am glad the Sky Ride is over, and it is then that I have decided to ask Jay to persuade Mummy to take the next Sky Ride. hahahahaha



The instructor has an efficient way to teach both of us how to break, how to move. And there we go, before entering the route, I asked, which is the most safest. The guy said some jungle trail, so, we decided to take the Dragon Trail which is more faster with more incline in slopes... And there we go, Yipee.... I am Lightning McQueen, shouted my Jay all the way.



Its Mummy's turn... and it is a good decision to let Jay sit with both parents.



After the Luge, we moved on to Siloso Beach. As we brought Jay's sand bucket and shovels. It will be a sand play by the beach.



We had a great time by the beach, the weather is also cooperating... no rain...



Jay is not old enough to enjoy Universal Studio yet. Therefore, it will not be worth to get a family pass as yet to visit Universal Studio. However, Luge is one good family ride that all of you should try!

How to ask your son to drink medicine

There are some medicine good to drink and there are some that is horrible to drink, even your son some times would object strongly and refuse to drink.

So, even when mummy put the medicine into his favorite drink, Yakult or Ribena, Jay would refuse to drink.

So what do you do? It's time to negotiate. that won't work either.





This is a tip to solve that.

1. Tell him the truth. Mummy put medicine into the Yakult.
2. Tell him, medicine is good but taste awful.
3. Invent a way to drink. Tell him, if you cover your nose, you will not smell that awful taste, and drink fast fast swallow it fast fast. Then you will not taste the awful medicine.
4. Lastly, drink one second and quickly have deep breath.

So, the whole medicine drinking session become a very fun process, just like a game.

Jay take it well and really follow it and have fun with this. At the end, he is happy, and he finished the whole Yakult. Hooray!



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A tour at Pinnacle

My cousin Larry came from US. He loves taking photographs. So I brought him to the Pinnacle's Sky Garden.




The guest's lift is at level 1 block G. So park your car near to the car park entrance will be a good choice.





There will be a ticket station at level 1 near the guard post. To go up to the Sky Garden, you need to pay $5 per pax. And you need a EazyLink card to pay. They will not accept cash.

For car owners, some time is good to carry one. If you buy groceries from Giant or Cold Storage, the Passion Card is a EazyLink card.

Otherwise, just pay $15 to the guard to get one new card that has $10 worth in it.





Then go up to the 50th floor. Pass through the gate, you arrived at the Sky Garden.





The view up here are breath taking and spectacular, it is 360 degrees view. It can be a long walk along the garden.





The annoying grill can be annoying as it is in all your photos.




The sun set, around 7:11pm was great. IPhone 3GS may not be the right tool to take sunset photos.





Overall, it will be cheaper to see Singapore cityscape here compare to Marina's Sands Sky Park. $5 only.

Also, a great place for couple. And no Pets are allowed. And a lot if rules...



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Location:Jalan Lempeng,Clementi,Singapore

LePao - Alternative Lego

It's amazing. I can build a tank with it.

And check out how the conveyer belts move... Got to have high imaginations to build such. And a lot more variations you can do with different pieces.

It's designed by Taiwanese and I bought it from the world book fair a month ago.

Great stuff! Www.lepao.com.tw

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Singapore Next Generation of Broadband Network

Should everyone be excited over this New Generation of Broadband network?

Yes, IDA said that residence can get 100Mbps up to 1Gbps of network at our homes. What exactly does that mean? I got quite a few non-IT savvy friends were asking me regarding this. They felt very excited. And they want to install it immediately. They got pretty excited when they hear that the price for it is only $20+ for residential, $70+ for commercial.

What IDA has revealed are the LOCAL LOOP price. Which is the fiber price connecting to your home. IDA is funding this by using our tax payer money. But they will leave the commercial pricing to the RSP (Retail Service Provider) to decide what kind of package to sell and what kind of price they wanted to collect.

I am not so keen about this at all. Nowadays, any household can easily get 100Mbps of bandwidth pipe to your home, via Starhub Cable TV system. And SingTel will offer 15Mbps max at the moment to residential. But if you compare the surfing speed during PEAK hours, it is not hard to find that the following statement is true. Both network are SLOW at night, SingTel one is slowly crawling, but Starhub one sometimes cannot move. I have used both and I think this is very true. That is the exact reason why I switch from Starhub to SingTel because SingTel one can at least MOVE SLOWLY.

So, what is it so?

The reason is very simple. Unlike Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan, Singapore basically has NO contents. i.e. There is a lot of Japanese language sites within Japan, this is because they have huge enough contents to drive traffic into Japan instead of going out of Singapore.

Top Web Sites that Singapore sufers go to

Out of the top 20 websites, almost all are overseas websites. That means, the ISP here will have to BUY backhaul traffic or IP Transits traffic from tier-1 ISP in the world. In layman term, the ISP in Singapore will have to buy Internet from the ISP in overseas that hosted these contents. Of course, they will buy that Internet in bulk at a much cheaper price. But still, it is a cost to all these ISP. And they have to OVERSUBSCRIBE the Internet in order to make it work and affordable for the ISP/Telco here to make "huge profits". As most of these Telco ISP are listed, so they have to answer to the share holders. :) Oversubscription means they are sharing the Internet of 1Mbps to 15 others Internet users (example: 1:15 ratio)

The following is an illustration of the ISP buying or peering Internet from bigger ISP in the world (i.e. tier-1 ISP).



So, given the above two reasons...

1. No contents in Singapore...

2. ISP in Singapore buys Internet from overseas bigger ISP and oversubscribe all Singapore users.

I concluded that, the openNet or IDA new Next Generation Broadband Network will be useless to me. Because if I subscribe to it, I think I will still get a very slow sleep surfing the web. And I believe it will become worst as now everybody has big pipe at cheap price to surf internet. And If I wanted a quality surfing speed, I will need to pay the ISP for that premium service.

So, who actually benefits from this? I think both Telco, Starhub and SingTel. Because, now Starhub can provide High Speed local loop to every where. And Singtel can provide high speed compare to their old ADSL technology which capped at 25Mbps. So, both will still fight each other, but both will still need to make money, so, it will be a friendly competitions. As for M1, good luck... because they do not own OpenNet or Neucleus Connect, so they cannot benefit from both.

I could be wrong, but let's wait and see. I am very sure that I will not pay for the cheap local loop as they need to box up in a very ugly manner in my newly renovated place.

MIO TV - Does not work for my home...

There is a very serious mistake in this diagram, and I think SingTel has oversold their MIO TV.

This is what happen:

1. I used to be on 10Mbps SingNet Broadband and I paid $88/month for it. Yes, they gave me a free Apple Macbook.

2. When the 2 years contract is up, I opt for the super Mio package. What this does, it reduced my subscriptions to about $68/month, they even up the bandwidth to 15Mbps. In addition, I got 20% off for both my iPhone monthly subscriptions. Lastly, they threw in a MIO TV for me. This is great deal. So I saved more than $60 per month from my mobile phones and Internet subscriptions and yet enjoy their MIO TV.

3. The problem now is, SingTel cannot get the MIO TV to work properly. They have sent technicians to my home and try to identify, and try to fix it. But nothing can be done.

4. After multiple time of discussion with them "technically", they finally given me a reason. This is because, my Internet is driven at a high speed of 15Mbps. Although the MIO TV is run on a different telephone line, but that has caused some interference by the 15Mbps SingNet Broadband which is run on a separate telephone line WITHIN a cable. (I cable usually have 4 pairs of telephone lines). So, they concluded that, I need to pull another cable in so that the new telephone line is run on a different cable and will not cause interference to each other. So, they recommend me to pull a new cable from the riser into my TV console. Well you know, the cable will be box up and will be very UGLY in a condo which I have concealed all the cables and wires.

5. So, they told me, I have to choose between Internet and MIO TV if I insists to run on a single UTP Cable. I have no choice but to keep the Internet, as Internet is a life line for this house. Both myself and my wife relies on Internet to do our jobs, i.e. Web Conferences, etc.

6. My MIO TV set top box has since placed in my closet for more than 6 months now.

7. But I don't have huge complaints on this. As I am already paying lower for my Internet, and get additional $40 savings for my iPhone mobile subscriptions. I really don't have a complaint on this. But I just felt weird that I was given something FREE that does not work.

I think MIO TV has a long way to go to compete with Starhub Cable TV. Yes, they might win the EPL today, but just think about it... how many people, especially those who lives in Condo and landed properties will allow SingTel or OpenNet to come in to install and box up the cable in their living room? I will not allow that!

Note that in the diagram, they need only 1 cable to go to the ADSL2+ modem which will drive the MIO Voice, SingNet Broadband and MIO TV. This is obviously wrong for my case. So, they should change it.

Singtel 3G coverage really sucks...

Let me teach you a way to discover how bad is your 3G network coverage.





On your Carrier or network settings, try to MANUALLY select Singtel instead of let it Automatically search for a network.

Once you have done so, intelligent smartphone such as iPhone will reveal the following Network Lost message in a very frequent manner.





That is the proof. If you set it to Automatic, when you lost the Singtel signal, it tries to get it back by searching for other network. So you will frustrated by drop calls but don't know why still got signal. When you set to manual, it has no choice when it lost the signal but to tell you it has lost the signal.

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Location:Singapore

Singtel Bridge Mobile Roaming in JB

I was in JB today. So, I happily pay $20 for the Unlimited per day roaming from Singtel. After confirming the payment, as when I wanted to switch my network to Maxis, some incredible thing happen.





This U-Mobile keep forcefully force my iPhone to use U-Mobile even when I try manually select My Maxis.

Something is wrong! And of course I don't dare to use the data network.

Will complaint to Singtel tonight!
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Location:Kim Seng Rd,,Singapore

捕鱼歌 and Toilet

It is amazing that what does the kid learned from school.

Jay was telling me he needs to pee pee. I told him to go to the common rest room. He went.

Suddenly, he was singing loudly. I was quite curious why he start singing. Then I reliaze that the toilet's light was off, and the toilet was a bit dark. No wonder I keep hearing 我不怕. Lyrics from the children song say I am not scare... Hahaha


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Location:Clementi Avenue 6,Clementi,Singapore

How to teach toddler, first you must remember these...

1、经历比名次重要
2、对话比对立重要
3、激励比指责重要
4、成人比成功重要
5、成长比成绩重要
6、榜样比命令重要

Unbreakable pencils

The pencil cost $25 with refills. But it comes with two things..

1. It is really unbreakable. And the pencil just keep coming out. You no need to tik tik tik it out.

2. It comes with a triangle shape for the holding part, and it really helps toddler hold it properly and with correct strength.





It really looks like a pencil but it's actually a mechanical pencil.

I strongly recommend this!

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Location:Jalan Lempeng,Clementi,Singapore

The number scale

The numbering scale is interesting. You put 7 on the right, you will need to balance it with a 3 and 4 or 2 and 5. All numbers comes with correct weightage. If both sides balanced, the arrow move to correct tick symbol.

Jay was amaze with this, but he has not mastered the concept yet.

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Location:Jalan Lempeng,Clementi,Singapore

More Chinese book

Jay's favourite reading. It goes Loke this, and you be the judge to see if it is simple ?

我有家
你有家
小鸟也有家
小猫也有家
小狗也有家
小猴也有家
小羊也有家
大家都有家

What do you think? Quite good, is it not?

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Location:Jalan Lempeng,Clementi,Singapore

A knowledge beach ball

This fancinating beach ball is different. It has common English word on it. So you throw the ball to Jay and ask where is his index finger pointing to. And he will learn by first recognizing tht word on the ball.

It's a game and let's treat it like a game. Have fun!

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Location:Jalan Lempeng,Clementi,Singapore

The correct learning clock

This should be the correct clock that every clock should have.

What so special about it? Only the blue minutes hand can turn. And when it turn one round, the short red hour hand will move accordingly to one hour advance.

Very cool clock. Only $5 for the clock. Jay will understand now how the clock move and how to tell a more correct time.

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Location:Jalan Lempeng,Clementi,Singapore

Chinese Books

At the book fair I bought a lot of books, mostly Chinese. I think some how Jay Jay has English as his native language. So we have no worry of him learning English from the school. It is the Chinese that we need to help him.








These flash cards can help him to learn more Chinese characters.








Jay loves to learn the 笔画. This book will teach him where in our normal life to find the 横竖撇 and so on.








This interesting book help children to see how Chinese character evolve to become a Chinese character today. Some if the Jay has learned are there, and he will find it fancinating.








The below one is the most easy one so that Jay can read on his own.








Lastly, the kid loves how to draw. So Jay Jay gets a book to trace the train, car and buses.

Notice that I use the choice of word such as "helping" Jay to learn Chinese. Jay was taught to make his own decision towards learning. As a parent, we can only help him, but not force him to learn. This is huge different in toddler teaching. Once he understand why he has to learn, he will gain the interest to learn and nothing can stop him.

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Location:Jalan Lempeng,Clementi,Singapore

The Piggy bank that tells you how much you save...

Have to bargain with the sales girls there in order to get this free gifts. I bought both the Batik and Splash Attack, to entitle this.





It is quite cute. If buy separately, cost about $29.90.





It is a good way to help Jay to learn a concept of savings, how much that you save.





Instaed of saying I have money, Jay can now say "I have seven zero zero" I.e. $7.00

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Location:Clementi Avenue 6,Clementi,Singapore

Batik and Splash Attack

Jay always loves to play the board game. He likes the board games that I have chosen. I think it is fun.

Remember, the aim is to spend lots of quality time with your children.





The aim for batik is to make your opponent to run out of fish/seafood to throw into the tank. It's what piece you use and where you throw that control the winner. This is $49.





Splash attack is a game of fishing. You throw the dice to determine which which to hook. If the dice does not match any fish, then the first player who shouted splash attack will get the red fish where grant you permission to eat the fish. Whoever ate the first 3 fishes win.

The game is not complicated at all. And it's perfect for a 3.5 years old.

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Location:Jalan Lempeng,,Singapore

The Magformers

Last year I bought a set of Magformers from somewhere. My son, Jay Jay loves to play with it. Whenever his cousin visits, he will always play with them together with the cousins.

The other day, Jay lose a few pieces when he brought it to KL and was playing with some of my friends children.

I always wanted to buy another set for him. But too bad I cannot recall where I bought it.

Until today, I saw it at the book fair. The uncle told me no one distributed it and it has to be bought during last year book fair.

And without any question, I bought another set. And just now spending 40 minutes playing with Jay, I have made up my mind to go get more of it tomorrow.

Ok, this set cost $75. If you buy 2 sets, they will give you a free smaller set.

We sure have a lot of fun... Take a look what Jay was doing...

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=395945078283&r78ad3453&refid=0

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Location:Jalan Lempeng,,Singapore

A different kind of Lego blocks inveted by the Taiwanese

I was at the book fair and this Taiwanese is selling this blocks toy, something similar to Lego, but it's much cheaper, and it has a lot more creativity in it.

You can build a lot of things with it, it's easy, and I love the ferries wheels build using it.

I played it at their booth for a while, and I love it. Quite easy to build your imaginations.

I would day Lego build the 2D version of your imaginations, this Taiwanese toy build the 3D version of your creativity. Can turn, can move, and best of all, all parts are safe for baby Kay.

Its $148 for 280 pieces. Good buy and get it! They will give you extra replacement pieces, make sure you get those too...








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Location:W Coast Hwy,Clementi,Singapore