nickpan.com – Page 34 – Family guy with 3 Daughters, Digital Guy, Wine Community Leader, Runner in Singapore.

24th January, 201124th January, 2011

SGGovCamp 2011 and Open Data

On 19 Jan, I attended #SGGovCamp organised by Microsoft Singapore and the stage was set for people from the government, from the private sector, technologists and even web enthusiasts came together to share ideas.

There were lots of talk about how Gov2.0 should happen and someone also mentioned about Citizen2.o where citizens should also step up. I believe we all want to move forward, but somehow it seems to be not happening fast enough. Dr. Pallab Saha picked up a bottle of water and asked, “where do you think the bottle neck is? Its at the top.”

He also shared on “Embracing Gov 2.0: What Does it Really Mean?” during the panel session and his quick pace on those few slides really packed in a punch for the morning session. Just his “Gov 2.0 Maturity Matrix” slide would cause quite a few civil servants to sit up. It address how so many government bodies adopt Web2.0 technologies while having Gov1.0 mindset which cause them to become pretenders that did nothing more than change the facade. I’ve done quite a few projects just as he described.

Dr. Pallab Saha. Photo from Microsoft Singapore.

In the afternoon session, there were a lot of talk about making data open and Project Nimbus was brought up. It tries to avail datasets to the general public and even provides sufficient documentation for anyone to create innovative applications and tools based on these data.

Stuart Smith brought up how US and UK opened up its data and how tools have been pouring in. There were even usage that the governments would not have even imagined. He also highlighted Guardian’s Data Store which used open data for journalism. Its pretty neat.

Should Singapore government open up its data? If so which ones? Its a chicken and egg situation. If the data is not made available, no innovation can happen. If there are no success stories, data owners might not be motivated to make their data available. I think running a country is very much like parenting. Kids always want things their way without knowing what’s good for them. However, parents also don’t give kids enough responsibilities, so how do you expect kids to be responsible? I say, lets give it a go and see what happens, I do think we are now in a good position.

I can’t wait for the day when the Gov2.0 mindset is prevalent and www.data.gov.sg open its doors, that will be the time Singapore takes its quantum leap. That will be the time where we will have more information to make better informed decisions.

Photo Credits:

20th January, 201115th February, 2014

Popeye’s and Frienzie Bistro and Bar @ Punggol East

When we shifted into Punggol back in 2003, we felt that the whole place is so nice and quiet. It was clearly the perfect place for cafes and chill out places. Only after EIGHT years did it really happen. Now we have Popeye’s and also Frienzie Bistro & Bar, soon we’ll have a seafood restaurant and a sports hub. How nice.

Popeye’s

Popeye’s started its business at Punggol on Christmas of 2010 at Punggol East and it was the start of good things to come for us Punggolians. We went there for lunch on the opening day and like any digital native, I checked in on their Foursquare venue and posted the above picture up.

Till date which is less then one month since its opening, there is already 837 check-ins with 533 people in total and 18 photos uploaded onto Foursquare. There is also a flurry of foursquare venue’s being added. Clearly some people could not find which was the correct one to check in hence close to 15 were actually created. I manage to merge them together and now, if you want to check in, pls check-in to this one.

Address
10 Tebing Lane #01-05
Punggol, Singapore 828836

Frienzie Bistro & Bar

This place opened just last weekend and the place looks great! I’m looking forward to have my first meal and drink there tomorrow night. They serve Pasta, Pizza’s, etc. I will update this post again tomorrow when I have a closer look at their Menu.

On Foursquare, the same thing happened again. People went crazy and started creating quite a few venues. I’ve just sent in a merge request, let’s hope it gets fixed soon and people start checking-in to the right venue.

Address
10 Tebing Lane #01-02
Punggol, Singapore 828836

15th January, 2011

Relationships

Parents, Siblings, Spouse, Children, Friends, Colleagues, Associates… The list goes on. Many of us have a decent normal family relationship, it’s just everyone else is weird.

Things start to change when we get married. We start to have to accept another family as our own and our understanding of a normal family starts to change. We then start to create a new normal within our own immediate family.

Relationships between people differ a lot and that’s why we have lots of associates or friends but very little close friends. There is a natural I-want-to-hang-out-with-these-people attitude for some and this can happen with any individual or groups of people in our lives. It can happen between siblings, cousins, school mates and even colleagues. Unfortunately, we have limited time and we are selective, hence there are very few people that we really hang out with.

Life is short and we only have that much time on this earth. How are we spending our time with people that matter to us? How are we sharing our lives and how are we impacting lives around us?

When we finally get to spend time together, why throw it away by twiddling with our mobiles.

Colleagues

We spend roughly about 8 hours every workday with colleagues to do stuff together. Some stuff are amazingly fun to do, motivating and we get to learn loads from the work and also from one another. Some work however are really dumb, but unfortunately someone needs to take out the trash.

Can colleagues be / become friends?

I’ve worked together as a team with many people and we worked really hard together, I believe they know who they are.

There was a situation once where I forgot to think about spam issues on a web project and when the work was submitted for QC, the developer asked me what are we going to do with spam. I panicked and its was a very facepalm feeling. The developer smiled and told me, no worries man, i’ve added a captcha to it and have also added it to the documentation. OMG! I was like, thanks man, you da man! We have since evolved from colleagues to friends.

This is just one example, there are countless examples I can think of where colleagues have stepped out of their job scope / comfort zone and did more than they officially should for the sake of others within the team and its really heart warming. Of cause it’s always a 2-way street and nobody is trying to backstab anyone and no one is trying to slack on their job. Its time like these you know who you can count on.

I’m thankful for the relationships I have at home and also those I have in the office. I’m glad that I’ve come to know many wonderful people in my life and I cherish the wonderful relationships we have and will continue to have.

9th January, 2011

Nicer Fan Designs Pls

Singapore is a warm tropical country and having the air-conditioner on all the time really sucks. The natural thing to do is to get Fans. But the problem is the mainstream fans sold in stores really suck.

From a product design perspective, is it because its a difficult item to design with all its electrical-motor-motion-safety-bits, hence there are not a lot of good stuff out there? Ok, I did some research and found a few nice ones. But still… “Fans” are hardly a normal category found in most product design websites.

If you have anyone of the following, pls let me know where you got them and how much. Thanks.

If you have nicer fans to recommend, pls add links to them in my comments, thanks.

8th January, 2011

Simple is not Easy

The Marmalade Pantry

Have you seen some designs and think “That looks so easy to do, i’m sure even my grandmother can do it.”. The thing is, after being in the web design business since the mid 90s with roles ranging from design to coding, pitching to convincing clients, I can confidently say its not the case.

Let’s just take a look at the above example of The Marmalade Pantry’s menu which I came across last night. It looks so plain and simple, no intense graphic design, no super amazing concept, but somehow the whole thing looks fantastic. Let’s break it down and take a look at some design decisions that was considered by the designer.

Capitalisation – Notice how dish items are CAPITALISED to accentuate it from the description. Bold or underline was not used. This gives the whole menu a light and classy feel.
lower case descriptions – The descriptions are all in lower case, not sentence case as the description are not sentences at all. Instead these descriptions are a continuation of a sentence of the dish item.
Labels – Some dishes are labelled with a “(+)” instead of a typical “*” or small icon. Also “(+)” was used instead of “[+]” which I find is a good call as the sharp corners of “[+]” adds a bit of stress / up-tightness.
Spacing – Everything is well spaced and given enough white space for breathing room so that its easy for the eye and not cluttered. The content is also well away from the edge of the paper which is nice. Each line of text be it a menu item or its description also had the same line-height, this also allows multiple columns of text to line up nicely horizontally.

There are lots more items that can be talked about, the choice of font, the quality of paper, the colour of the paper, the position of the logo and the tagline, copywriting, etc.

If you think that’s all, no its not. There are also the non-design stuff that needs to be factored in.

Profits – Was the design of the above $5, $50, $500 or $5000? Did the designer burned his weekend doing it? Was this design job even profitable? Even Rockstars need to eat.
Approvals – Never have I seen a designer presenting a design to the client and the client go “this is perfectly what I wanted, good job, here is your payment, consider this project completed”. To add another level of complexity will be to get approvals from a committee of non-design people who are travelling consistently and do not want to take responsibility of giving the approval. *cough* gov *cough* clients *cough*
Other Agendas – Some projects are ego trips. The REAL matrix for measuring project success could be if your direct client managed to approve a design that the big boss really wanted and hence give him a raise or promotion.

I know I’m being extreme here, but I reckon you get my drift. There could be a lot of emotional investment, angst and stuff that you can’t see from a seemingly “simple” output. So dear client, when something looks simple and yet it sort of feels right, pls pls pls don’t add crap comments to it because you feel that you must give feedback to the designer you have engaged. Try smiling and tell the designer “it looks simple, yet… somehow… FANTASTIC! I’m glad I hired you and I’m sure it’s not as easy as it seems.”

ps: the shadow is my iPhone and did you notice its nicely aligned vertically? :p