OPC Calculations 26 November, 2009
Posted by dear1dear2 in Dear1, Dollars & Cents, Internet & Blog, Vroom Vroom.add a comment
Ok, I’m in a mathematical mood today so I’m going to test out the 
Let 
Let us consider the PARF of a normal plated car at each year within the lifespan of the COE of 10 years. For simplicity, we will consider integer number of years 
For an OPC, the 17000 rebate is deducted first from the COE, then from the OMV. Let us assume that 
Next, we substitute 
This equation shows us that if 
This means that OPC owners who got their COE at prices lower than 17000 do not enjoy the full 17000 rebate by virtue of the fact that they will receive a lesser amount when their car is scrapped. In the worse case scenario, the OPC owner will receive only 8500 in rebate if their COE is zero or near zero (i.e. $2 COE in Nov 08).
Of course, there are other factors to be considered such as the actual sale price of the car, the interest rate, amount of loan to take, length of loan, etc. This is only a very simplified calculation to find out the maximum and minimum rebates an OPC owner can get. Yes, in times of high COE, you get the maximum savings, but you might also end up paying more in absolute terms becos of the higher cost of the car and interest payable on loan amount. It’s like buying a brand-less backpack at full price of $20 or a designer brand backpack at 70% off the usual price of $1000. Sure, you saved $700 but you also just spent an extra (300-20=) $280 more than just getting the brand-less one.
Lastly, typing
-Dear1
New Milestones Sidebar 23 October, 2009
Posted by dear1dear2 in Dear1, For Him For Her, Internet & Blog.add a comment
Oh, we’ve added a new item to our sidebar – Our Milestones! It is located just below the Category Cloud. Our Milestones is a chronological representation of Dear1 and Dear2. It lists some of the more significant events in our courtship, such as our first date, our first travelling experience, the proposal, our wedding, etc.
We got this inspiration from visiting other peoples’ blogs where they placed links to special events in their sidebar too. But being the systematic engineers that we are, we decided to start right from the beginning and clearly label the months and years. Haha.
This chronology of Dear1 and Dear2 serves 2 purposes. First, remembering blog as a history log, it allows us to look back in time and appreciate the many wonderful times we spent together. It allows us to take in major events of our lives in a single glance. And perhaps, it can also act as a time ruler with which we measure how long has it been since our last holiday. Hehe… :P
Second, it allows for our readers (yes, u!) to find out more about us and our past, and possibly use our timeline as a sort of guideline for planning your major events as well. Of course, our way of doing things aren’t perfect, but it’s a good starting point for those who are starting from scratch.
Very soon, hopefully over this weekend, I will start putting up links within Our Milestones that will point to specific posts where we’ve talked about the particular event. With that, searching for specific events will become much more efficient than using the search bar or the archives links.
We hope to add more and more events in the future as we continue to write the days of our lives. At the same time, we’ll also be nostalgic and continue to add significant past events when we recall them. These short titles will also serve as reminders that we can write an old story about to fill in the memories of our past.
Take a minute to read Our Milestones. :)
-Dear1
Flag counter in sidebar 9 July, 2009
Posted by dear1dear2 in Dear1, Internet & Blog.2 comments
I’ve added the Flag Counter in the sidebar for nearly 2 weeks now. If you haven’t noticed, here’s a picture of how it looks like. Find it in the sidebar on the right.
Snapshot taken on 09 Jul 2009
Interesting ya. You can get it from the Flag Counter website. The best thing about it for me is that it does not require any registration. Just configure how you want your flag counter to look like, it will generate a HTML code, then just paste it into your blog. It’s so simple.
Now, let’s do a short analysis of the results.
Dear1dear2 is most visited by the biggest economy in the world, that is the United States. Actually, this is an expected result because US is the largest country by geography, by population size, by economy and by Internet traffic to share the same language as us. We all speak and write in English. So it is not surprising that dear1dear2 is visited by lots of people from US.
There’s another reason to this too. And that is our cornerstone post, Diner Dash Flo on the Go Tips. This post is by far THE most visited post on dear1dear2. So again, by looking at the gaming demographics, this game is most popular in US and hence lots of people from US looking for tips. Thank you for your support and we hope you will continue to visit us. :)
Ranked in second place is of course, Singapore. Why? Because we’re Singaporeans living in Singapore and we write about life in Singapore and thing happening around us all the time. And so, these Singapore related keywords are searched by fellow citizens and that is why Singapore visits are in close 2nd place.
#1 and #2 are runaway leaders in visitors to dear1dear2 with more 200 counts while the chasing pack lags behind with 42 counts and less. Let’s take a quick look at the chasing pack. 3rd place is UK, 5th Canada and 6th Australia. Most likely, this is also due to common language. As can be seen, from 7th to 12th place, India, Philippines, Spain, Japan, Thailand and Germany, these are countries that do not share a common first language. English is likely their second language. 4th place is Malaysia, most likely because of both language and cultural similarities.
Hehe… I find it very enchanting to look at these statistics. Dunno if Dear2 will find it interesting or not… We like to get to know the people who read us. So, leave a comment and say hi if you are here! :D
-Dear1
Tokyo honeymoon route 26 June, 2009
Posted by dear1dear2 in Dear1, Internet & Blog, Nihon no koto, Travel & Discovery, Wedding.add a comment
I’m playing around with how to embed Google Maps into wordpress. And what better way than to experiment with our Tokyo honeymoon route. Gee… Here’s how it looks like. Took me about 15 mins to draw.
Interesting… This will be useful for visualizing places that we’ve visited or places of interest both outside and within Singapore.
Now, how do I change the marker symbols? And what about marker colours? Line colours? Lots of things to learn. Tips, anyone?
-Dear1
Happy 1st Birthday to our blog 25 November, 2007
Posted by dear1dear2 in Dear1, Internet & Blog, Slice of Life.add a comment
Happy Birthday to our blog~
Happy Birthday to our blog~
Happy Birthday to dear1dear2’s blog~~~
Happy Birthday to our blog~
Yeah… *clap clap clap*
It’s our blog’s 1st year anniversary, so let’s take a look back at some of the highlights of the past one year. First and foremost, we must definitely visit the First Post.
Next, let’s take a look at some of the most frequently visited posts. In no particular order, they are Diner Dash Flo on the Go Tips, Warbears Mission 2 walkthrough, Our Nokia 6288, Sakura International Buffet Restaurant, How to discover her ring size for proposal? and Buying 4D from Singapore Pools.
Wow, time really flies by. Without realizing it, we’re already celebrating our 1 year blog anniversary. Here are the stats so far:
Blog Stats
Total Views: 27,659
Best Day Ever: 185
Totals
Posts: 248
Comments: 263
I suppose the blog stats only give the grand total since the inauguration of the blog. Hence, by posting these stats here, I’ll be able to track the stats on a yearly basis by subtract these figures from the grand total next year.
Let’s keep up our efforts and continue to pen our lives in this space we named dear1dear2.
-Dear1
Kartrider 13 October, 2007
Posted by dear1dear2 in Dear1, Internet & Blog, Leisure & Games.add a comment
Recently, Dear1 started playing this online game called Kartrider. The idea is simple. You drive a kart and race with 7 other people from the internet and the winner is the one that crosses the finishing line first. :D
But this deceptively simple game has gotten me deeply interested, and I sometimes wonder, what is it about racing games that make it so fun? Maybe it is the controls. Racing games are so simple, just 4 buttons, accelerate, brake, steer left or steer right. Of course this is the traditional bang-bang controller where the acceleration is simple on or off, no medium or slow acceleration. But sometimes, simplicity works when people wants to relax. Realism is really not an issue in this sort of game because people who wants to play just wants to have fun. Real time collision mechanics, deformation and rag-roll physics is really for the hardcore fans.
There is one additional twist to this game though, that is the drift button. With the touch of a button, you can throw your kart into a drifting maneuver and perhaps navigation a difficult hairpin turn without slowing down. Eventhough it is just a single button, some gaming experts who have been playing this game for a long time have developed complicated strategies that involve multiple drift techniques that blaze through corners at inhuman speeds. Let me embed a Youtube video of experts playing the game here to demonstrate what I mean.
I don’t think I’ll ever reach that level of skill, but I think those people are professionals and they probably does it for a living. We’re just simple people looking for some entertainment to our otherwise routine lifestyle.
Dear2 has pick up on this game as well and we’re taking turns to play. Dear2 didn’t want to set up a new account to play so we’re just playing on 1 account which also means that there’s no way for us to race each other. But then, in order to race each other, we’ll need another computer too. So for now, we’re just taking turns racing with people out there in the internet.
This game is really fun, so I think we’ll be playing it quite alot in the upcoming weeks/months.
-Dear1
Do we like to write blogs? 26 June, 2007
Posted by dear1dear2 in Dear1, Internet & Blog, Slice of Life.add a comment
This is the topic of discussion for today. Do we, Dear1 and Dear2, like to write blogs?
The simple answer: Yes.
The complicated answer:
If some of u have been regular readers of our blog, u would have realized by now that Dear2 has disappeared from action for quite a long while. This is becos of her new job. The job scope requires Dear2 to work pretty long hours and by the time she gets home, she is too tired and lacks insipiration to write any post. Simply put, the long hours at work washed away any spark of insipiration.
Another thing u would have noticed is that for the month of June, posts have been very very irregular and totally not following our one post a day rule. The truth is, work. To tell the truth, work hasn’t been going all well for me either. I think I’ve been very unproductive and really need to pull up my socks. However, I’ve been very unmotivated lately and can’t seem to pinpoint the reason for so. It’s just a bad habit to start pointing fingers and blaming the work environment, colleagues, boss, weather, blah blah blah. Somewhere deep in thought, I know the problem must have been more fundamental than my surroundings. It’s probably got to do with my lifestyle, my mindset, my vision, goal, values, etc, this sort of things. And I still haven’t really sorted my thoughts out. Maybe it’s something that I can’t see on my own, and needed the perspective from outside myself to objectively tell me what is my problem. Hmm… Let’s just leave my train of thoughts here for a moment.
I enjoyed writing posts too. Remember blog as a history log? It still stands. I enjoyed logging in to my blog account each day, writing something, looking through my statistics, finding out which is the most popular post entries, seeing who linked our blog from their websites, all so fun and interesting. But I guess life is not as simple as that. Putting thoughts into action are completely different things. And it always requires a conscience effort to do something. For now, let’s get our lives sorted out and maybe this blog will log our ups and downs in life which will become precious memories in time to come. So, yes. The blog will always be here and we’ll always be adding new things to it. Our life story continues.
-Dear1
10000 visits milestone 7 June, 2007
Posted by dear1dear2 in Dear1, Internet & Blog, Slice of Life.add a comment
Yeah… Dear1 and Dear2 blog has achieved 10000 visits after about 6 months of inauguration. Hehe… A point to note here is that these visits are all purely from search results link and linkback from other blogs or forums. On our part, we’ve not told *any* one about our blog, not even friends and family. Well, the reason is, this is our little world and not something that we want to actively publize. Just use the search engines on the internet and if our topic is relevent to ur interest, here u r. :D
Let’s have a short recap of the most popular posts to date. Hmm… looking at my stats page, I realize that I can’t find a button that gives me a table of the ‘Top posts’ of ‘All time’. It’s either ‘Last 7 days’ or ‘Last 30 days’. Hmm… This won’t be a good reflection of our all time top posts, but this is the only statistic I have at the moment. So let’s take a look at them. Counting down from 5.
4. Sakura International Buffet Restaurant
And the #1 top post of all time is……
1. Diner Dash Flo on the Go Tips
Below I’d like to mention some posts that I feel should rightfully in the all time list but just not in the last 30 days list. Here they are in no particular order.
a. Results of Toto Hongbao Draw 2007
b. Warbears Mission 2 walkthrough
As of today, I’ll also add a ‘Top posts’ section in the sidebar and it’ll display the top 5 posts in the past day or two.
The important thing now is to continue to look forward and continue writing great posts. This blog shall continue to grow together with us. Yeah!
-Dear1
Missing in blogging action 28 May, 2007
Posted by dear1dear2 in Dear1, Internet & Blog, Slice of Life.1 comment so far
Haha… Dear1 and Dear2 have been missing in action for 4 of the last 5 days. If u have read our earlier post, u would have learnt about our intention and ambition of writing at least one post per day, sometimes more if there is overflowing inspiration. So what is happening now?
Up till last Tuesday (22 May 07), I thot we were well on our way to only our 2nd one post per day month since our creation last Nov. Discounting Nov 06 itself as a half month, that is only going to be our 2nd full post month in 6 months. Not really a fantastic record. But now, even that hope is dashed for this month. But no worries. We will continue to work hard and instill self discipline.
Last Wed and Thur, both Dear1 and Dear2 worked until very very late. Overtime. We both reached home after 12 midnight and hence couldn’t write a post for that day. On Sat and Sun, it was quite the opposite. After a hard week’s work, it’s finally the weekends and we had such a good time with each other that it totally slipped our minds that we have to write a post. In addition, last weekend is the beginning of the Great Singapore Sale.
YES! The GSS is here! So many things to buy. The sale worth waiting for. And over at Robinson’s, it’s the sale *truly* worth waiting for. Buy buy buy! This is a wonderful time to spend our vouchers that we received during our house warming. Dear2 mentioned that if there’s anything that we want to get during the GSS, we must get it early, because that’s when all the stocks are available and so are all the colours and sizes. Towards the end of the sale in July, only the XXXXXL will be left.
Now, back to our topic on work. Yes, both Dear1 and Dear2 work until late at night. Dear2 works late no because she wants to, but rather because the nature of her work is rather time sensitive and therefore she has to work overtime to finish them. Dear1 works late because my productivity increases at night. In fact, during the morning and day, I can hardly get any work done, too many distractions (eg. people talking too loudly). As such, I go to work at about 10am, and knock off much later, typically after 9pm.
加油加油！
-Dear1
H.K. Cafe flash game 17 May, 2007
Posted by dear1dear2 in Dear1, For Him For Her, Internet & Blog, Leisure & Games.add a comment
Some time back, say 1+ year ago, Dear1 and Dear2 were addicted to this flash game, H.K. Cafe, by Maggie Lau. She also made a number of other flash games which could be found on her website. Almost all her games revolve around providing a service to customers, such as serving food, doing a facial, taking care of babies, etc. And this was before Dear1 and Dear2 started playing Diner Dash. Which game came first? I’m not too sure, but it does seem like a period of time whereby such serving games were really going hot.
H.K. Cafe serves breakfast food to a restaurant of 5 customers. There are peanut butter toast, kaya toast, egg and sausages, egg noodles, coffee, tea and some other combinations. U have to cook the food by clicking on it and it will be transported into the frying pan or whichever appropriate cooking ware. The catch here is, u have to turn off the fire when the food is ready, not undercooked and not overcooked, then it will be suitable for serving. Once the food is ready, u have to put it on the correct plate, bowl, cup or saucer before serving it to the correct customer. Sounds fun ya? Sounds like alot of things to do too.
Dear1 and Dear2 spent a lot of time practicing and playing over and over again to beat the highscore. There was a period of time when we’d take turns playing on the same computer and challenging each other. And our nightly activity become serving breakfast to hungry customers. Obviously, Dear2 is the better player. It was just so fun. But then, frustration set in when we couldn’t outdo ourselves anymore. The problem was that there were too many things to take care of. Broadly, it is cooking and serving. The cooking required good timing while the serving took up too much time and often resulted in food being overcooked while the attention was away from the frying pan. Competition can only go so far, it is time for cooperation. Hence, Dear1 and Dear2 decided to tackle the game together.
However, there’s only one mouse so we had to delegate our jobs and maximise our efficiency. Dear2 was better at cooking and she would handle the mouse and focus on the cooking. Dear1 was in charge of taking orders from the floor and translating the orders to Dear2 to cook. As such Dear1 need to priorities what individual food item to cook and instruct Dear2 directly. After that Dear2 would put the ready food on the plates and Dear1 will tell her which table to serve to. In essence, Dear2 is controlling the whole game, cooking and serving, as she is holding the mouse, and Dear1 helped to analyse the situation and optimize the production flow of the restaurant. And we broke our personal records! And we continued to break highscore after highscore until there’s really not much room for improvement anymore.
What most enjoyable from this episode is working and playing together with Dear2. Through playing this game together, we have lots of interaction and also learnt to trust each other. Dear2 needed to be comfortable with my judgement and follow my instructions while I am certain that Dear2 will produce the right food at the right time without any wastage. It really showed that when the 2 dears work together, we’ll be able to scale new heights. Of course there were disagreements initially, but we worked out the difference, compromise on the management style and proceeded with the partnership in the game. It might be a simple game, but the lessons learnt are definitely applicable to real life situations. You should play a game with ur partner too. I think game playing promotes communication and builds relationships.
p.s. Just this week, Dear2 started replaying H.K. Cafe again, which prompted me to share today’s post with everyone.
-Dear1
