Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

This entry was first published in my wedding blog.

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Honestly, I didn’t think that getting married would make me feel any different regarding my relationship with my wife. After all, we have been together for so long (since 1999 when we met and got together in the first year of junior college) and know each other so well. And my wife didn’t think it’ll be any different as well.

Guess what, we were both wrong! There’s just something that marriage does to you that makes the relationship very different. Even for us who have been together so long, marriage just adds on another level of commitment and responsibility (at least for me). Maybe it’s because you no longer have a girlfriend/fiancee but rather, you have a wife whom you vowed to love and care for in sickness and in health.

And I also think that somehow, marriage has kind of made us become more mature in the relationship. Not that we weren’t mature to begin with, but I think we are letting go of many of the smaller things that we would usually get uptight easily previously. It is indeed an interesting experience.

The other thing about getting married is that it feels odd to have to start calling your in laws Dad and Mum instead of Uncle and Auntie. It’s not easy to break the 8 year habit, much less to get comfortable about it. I guess that will take a while to get used to.

Now we are back to the mundane world of work and school. And there’s still the customary ceremony and house application to think about. Reality still bites.

I’ve joined the ranks of Singapore Angle. Read about it here.

I had my graduation ceremony today, receiving my Bachelor of Social Sciences Second Class (Upper) in Communications and New Media, as well as the NTUC Income Prize for being the top student in my programme.

The graduation ceremony was good, but I think it meant much more for the family of the graduand than for the graduand. Many brought not just their parents but their grandparents as well. I think for many of families, it’s really a proud moment. For my own family, it’s too a proud time. My sister and I have become the first graduates of my family. The graduation ceremony is really more for the family, especially the parents, to feel proud and happy of the achievements of the graduands.

It is also a day for friends to gather together for one last time. It’s not going to be easy to meet up as much as they used to. Classes, tutorials and ECAs brought everyone together regularly for the past 3-4 years. Now, there are no such things to bring people together as often. So, the graduation ceremony is the time for friends to get together for one last time, taking pictures to preserve for eternity the final moments of one’s university life. Thank goodness that digital cameras make it so much cheaper and easier to keep memories of special moments. Here are the pictures taken today:

Mr Chua Soon Hock’s advice published in the ST today couldn’t have come at a better time. The stock market is hitting all-time highs, and the property market is enjoying it’s strongest bull run in ages. Like Mr Chua, I think it is not the time to be entering the market at all. Now that we have a tight labour market, I think it’s wiser to find a good paying job and earn as much as possible.

I suspect a crash would be coming along in a year or two, so it is definitely good to have some liquidity to snap up bargain stocks or property then. I’m planning to save up as much as I can before the Great Singapore Sale arrives on the SGX and property market. I think Mr Wang too has opined a couple of months back that it’s time to get out of the markets.

I think investors should help caution one another now because the markets are really getting red hot. I still remember how terrible the dot com bubble was for some of my relatives. Even today, some of them are still paying the price for entering the market just before it crashed. Of course, no one can predict with complete accuracy when the markets will crash. It’s always a judgment call best made by individuals. However, just like the weather, when there are signs such as dark clouds and strong winds, it would be wiser to carry an umbrella out.

As the saying goes, the smart person learns from the experience of others. The average person learns from his own experience. The fool never learns at all.

Something went wrong with my server today, so my blog wasn’t accessible for more than 12 hours. It should be resolved now. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Thanks to Ned Stark, I’ve been alerted to a bug on the newly installed theme that causes users to be unable to post. I’m trying to hook up another theme now. Apologies for the inconvenience.

**UPDATE**

Problem fixed. It was an issue with the theme that caused people to be unable to post, and I wasn’t able to debug it myself, so I found another working theme. Thanks to Ned Stark again for alerting me to the issue.

Just updated this blog with the newest Wordpress 2.2 engine, and I decided have a new look to go with the change in the blog engine. Somehow, chinese characters have been mangled as a result of the upgrade, and I have yet to figure that out. Everything else should pretty much be working.

I’ve set up another blog dedicated to everything about my upcoming solemnisation. So all wedding related updates and information will be posted there instead. My fiancee will be blogging there as well. All are welcome!

Here’s the link: http://aaron-ng.info/wedding

I believe it has to be a first that a local blog aggregating site receives a legal letter. The details of the letter can be found here.

How Tomorrow.sg decides to respond will certainly be closely watched by the internet community because the guys at Tomorrow.sg will be setting a precedent. The situation is not unlike the traditional newspaper receiving a lawyer letter. Editors must then decide whether it is worth fighting a lawsuit for the sake of ideals, or just agree to the terms of the person who sent the lawyer letter.

The problem with Tomorrow.sg is that it probably has no deep pockets. Granted, most newspapers around the world don’t exactly have deep pockets (probably with the exception of Singapore Press Holdings), but I think Tomorrow.sg seriously doesn’t have the money to fight a lawsuit at all, unless some lawyer is willing to waive legal fees or someone is willing to bankroll the lawsuit. Of course, Tomorrow.sg would have to consider the worst case scenario and whether they would be able to pay the compensation.

I do wonder if the lawyers have also sent a letter to the original writer. After all, Tomorrow.sg links and republishes articles written by others and it would not make sense to just go after Tomorrow.sg without going after the original writer. But unfortunately for the law firm, the original entry is hosted on an overseas server, and the WHOIS data of the domain doesn’t list any contact information. There’s an email provided on that blog, but it’s a gmail account which the writer can easily close (or choose to ignore any email that threatens legal action).

Perhaps this is why the lawyers decide to go after Tomorrow.sg. The WHOIS data of Tomorrow.sg has an actual contact person and address. Interestingly, the letter requested Tomorrow.sg to disclose the name and address of the writer. I suppose the law firm had run out of ideas on how to get the identity of the writer and resorted to try and get Tomorrow.sg to do the work for them. In anycase, I doubt the people at Tomorrow.sg will know anything at all. If the lawyers had done some homework, they should have known that Tomorrow.sg probably knows as much them and nothing more.

Let’s watch how this pans out. In the meantime, I must say that there are quite a few grammatical errors in the letter (and the URL provided in the letter was wrong). Not very impressive, I must say.

I’m in the midst of checking out all that needs to be done for solemnisation, so I might not be able to update for a couple of days. In the meantime, keeping up with the love is in the air atmosphere of the blog, I’m posting the Youtube video that darkness of The Brotherhood left in a comment to my previous post.