Do you go SITEX this year?

SITEX is coming very soon. Next Thu it would start at Singapore Expo. There are four shows all year round in Singapore. 3 months one show. Amazingly people have endless appetite for IT products.

Do you go SITEX this year? My thought is go only if you have things to buy. IT product get outdated so fast, it is pointless of chasing it. Better focus on need rather than want.

3 Scenarios

1. You want to buy something. Go there to shop around, should be able to get a great bargain.

2. You have nothing to buy but just want to window shop there. Most probably you bought something you don't really need but is cheap. Later, you just throw it aside.

3. You have nothing to buy and just wonder around for a whole afternoon. Then, what is the point going there? As a pass time?

So, the answer is quite simple.

Crocs sales at Expo, don't know what you want to call it

I saw the news on the web, Crocs is having their sales at Expo with a big discount. I never own a pair of Crocs and I am just curious why so many people like it. So, I went to check it out and possibly buy a pair to try it out.

When I reached Expo, I met a friend. He queued for 1 hour to get into the hall and 3 hours to pay for it!!



This is the main entrance, people are queuing to go into the hall. You might want to start queue up, but not until you see the next picture.



The queue went before the toilet and go into another hall.

After looking at this, I decided not to go in at all. No point, wasting my time queue for few hours to save 10 dollars only.

I think they really underestimate the response. There are simply not enough cashier to clear the backlog. Another interesting point is why so many people like it?

Ishi Mura at North point

Today was another fine Sunday. I picked up the Sunday Times to read. In the food section, there is a report about the new retail food concept. The interesting part is about a new japan themed food court in North point, Ishi Mura. So I decided to check it out.

I reach the place at 3pm, in order to avoid the crowd, but still there were many people. Of course, I have no problem finding my seat.



Look at the front door, it looks much like a restaurant than a food court. No wonder many people have doubts when going into it. But there are so many individual stall inside the shop selling all sort of Japanese cuisine. First you are spoilt of choice and second the price is really affordable. The only downside is the place is rather cramp.



After I went through one round, I decided to eat this Okonomiyaki. The chinese name should be 大阪烧， but the stall keeper call it 菜饼. No matter what, I ordered the seafood Okonomiyaki. If you need to know the mean of this dish, go and do a search. Some also call it Japanese pancake. It only cost 5.9 and it looks really good right?



I also ordered a drink, green tea at 1.5. Now, this looks like a complete meal set.

The pancake has lots of cabbage/lettuce, corn, egg, mayonnaise and seafood. It taste really nice, crunchy, juicy and full of taste. I think they are really spot on in opening this shop!

First use of stumble upon

Recently I have installed a service called stumble upon. It is like a user voting system on website. You would install a toolbar and select the topic that interested you. Whenever you click the stumble button, it would take you through a random website. You can choose like it or don't. The more you choose, the more accurate it gets.

It is interesting initially. But after a while, still get a little bit boring. Because the website is truly random and you are depending on other people's suggestion to discover new site. Might need to try it out more to decide whether to keep it.

Travel through park connector

Yesterday I decided to go cycling. There is a shop at Sun plaza park renting bicycle for $5 for 2 hours. I heard the lady say this is promotion. Buy 1 free 1. It is cheap. But, if it revert back to $5 for 1 hour, then it become expensive.

The parks at east side are all linked. I decided to see the pasir ris park first. Hence, I travel the following path:

Sunplaza park -> Pasir ris town park -> Pasir ris park

The journey is short, about 15min to reach the town park. But I cycle around to see the place. It has been a long time since I cycled for this long hour - 1.5 hours.

The Pasir risk town park is interesting. There are few fishing or prawning pond for people to fish. Inside the same park, there are restaurant also.

When I reach the pasir ris park, the path pass through the Downtown East area. I just realised that they are actually quite close. The pasir ris park is not so popular as east coast park. Some BBQ pits are empty. I think the no of ship also more than east coast park. However, it is still quite nice to go there and enjoy the holiday atmostphere and looking at people BBQ.

There is another part of the connector which would lead me to the Changi Beach. Given the limited time, it is left to next trip.

Keep adding the RSS feed

Had been quite busy recently, today still went to office in the morning. But, in the afternoon, managed to watch one movie and read other news.

Today, just installed the stumble upon toolbar. Quite an interesting website to discover new website. After that, I went to omy to browse other people's blog. Accidentally hit this chinese blog which talk about food. It is very good. From there, I linked to other blog competition website and managed to add in many blog feed into my rss reader.

Looks like my rss reading daily is going to increase a lot. Now, I already read about 300 post per day. Of course, for those heading I am not interested, then I just skip them. A bit information overloaded.

Browser war accelerated - Firefox 3, IE8, Chrome

People always say competition is a good thing. Looks like that's really the case with web browser. Remember the days where IE squeezed out Netscape, we are forced to rely solely on IE. There after, it came Mozilla with Firefox which "take back the web".

I have been using Firefox since version 1, till now, no regret. It is a piece of great work. The very recent firefox 3 even got a world record under belt. Compare to Firefox 3 vs IE7. Firefox is a clear choice. IE is too bloated, slow and more security problem. Although, browser like Opera, Safari are still in the game, the market share is still very small.

The entrance of Google might just change the game. They have come up with something new and relevant. They also got the marketing strategy right. That is to educate the user, what works behind the scene. Trying to get user to appreciate how good it is and cultivate the loyalty.

I just downloaded the Chrome browser, it looks pretty good and fast. Whether I would ditch my firefox remain to be seen. IE8 release is around the corner. Hopefully, as the competition intensified, we would get better user experience.