I found out this evening. I was the only blogger at tonight's press screening of the documentary made by a group of young Singaporeans that will be shown at The Picturehouse come March.

The 75 minute documentary entitled The Kallang Wave is a very well put together commentary on Singapore's society told through the country's history of football. Yes, football (Soccer as some call it). I am not the biggest football fan, but I have to say that the film made me think and re-think my being a Singaporean. It was a semi-emotional ride through passion, desire, and conformity as Singapore grew from a simple town to a world-class metropolis told through the eyes of professional football players, ex-football players, fans, and others.

The film progresses from asking simple questions such as, "why is there more media coverage of the EPL than local football today?" to societal norms and issues such as, "why don't we encourage our children become professional football players?" climaxing at questions such as "what has Singapore become?" The documentary hits home with everyone, especially those who have watched the Singapore Lions play and remembers the passion of The Kallang Wave.

What I found equally intriguing was the people behind the documentary. Seven classmates who since graduated from poly have been working as starving artists (literally) for over three years producing this masterpiece. The group, who now run a production agency called Orbital, started out wanting to document the National Stadium after hearing that it was to be torn down in 2007.

Research on the stadium led them to realise that the history of the stadium was filled with memories of football matches that led all the way back to the days of the Malayan Cup. The group then changed focus and decided to film and compile old film of Singapore's most loved sport. This again led them to another turn when their interviewees began to comment on a bigger issue they've observed in Singapore beyond football. That was the defining moment and the story had to be told.

The group managed to get sponsors such as the Singapore Discovery Centre and HP among others and has passed the tests of Cathay and The Picturehouse to be shown at their 1st Anniversary.

I've uploaded their press release here and these are the links to some preview videos: Teaser 1 (Society), Teaser 2 (Stadium), Teaser 3 (Football), Trailer.

The Kallang Wave will be screened at The Picturehouse from 25 March 2007. I'd try not to miss it if I were you.

Here's an interesting article on the blogging scene in Thailand taken from The Sunday Nation (25 Feb 2007) that's worth a read. According to the report, Microsoft claims there are 1.76 million bloggers in Thailand of which 57% are under the age of 25 (Nice PR move Microsoft!).

Although the article highlights that quality of content is an issue in Thailand, I think it's the same everywhere in the world with spammers flooding the blogosphere with trash. Thank God for rankings!

Blogs mentioned in the story include:

• http://a-wild-sheep-chase.bloggang.com
• http://www.keng.com
• http://event26th.wordpress.com
• http://fringer.org

(Thanks Voal)

If like me you work in an agency where billing is based on a charge up rate pegged to your time, you'll probably know the pains of timesheets, yet you know without them you'll never remember what you did making them a necessary evil. Since I've never had to fill timesheets before joining Hill & Knowlton, it was something I had to overcome. For those who know me, overcoming something doesn't often mean getting used to it. There's always a better way to do something. I had the gut feeling that I wasn't the only one trying to solve the problem, so I went out in search of a solution to help me speed up a somewhat time-consuming task. I found that the solutions out there were either for personal time tracking or full systems for company-wide timesheets. If you doubt you have the power to influence a organisation-wide change, you might want to give these personal time managers a try and maybe make life a little better for yourself.

• If you run Windows and love shortcut combos, you'll appreciate this VB script I found on Lifehacker that can be activated via a key stroke combo (such as ctrl + alt + L). Upon activation, it gives you a popup dialog box with a one line form to will. Just fill in the task you're doing and it appends the date and time much like the way sever logs work.
• Blogger David Seah has a neat little timesheet template he calls an Emergent Task Timer. It really is just a pretty sheet for you to document your tasks in 15min blocks throughout the day. It comes in PDF or an experimental online Flash version.
• Another paper-based timesheet template (with no fancy Flash alternative) is Blue Flavor's timesheet. As good as David Seah's, just depends on which you like better I guess.
• If you refuse to be a tree killer, and absolutely love Web 2.0 AJAX stuff and don't mind leaving the browser window open throughout the day, you might want to either try TimeTracker, time.onrails.org, or the simplest one I've seen, Loggr. All are free, web-based, and good enough for personal productivity.

Now, for those who have the power to uproot legacy database apps or the evil Excel spreadsheet systems with macros that strangle every mouse gesture you make, check out SlimTimer, Time IQ, and 88 Miles. I haven't had the time nor capital to give these commercial systems a go, but they sure do look spiffy. Maybe you can tell me your experiences if you've had a chance to try them. Here's to a more productive tomorrow! (After you waste some non-billable time trying out the above options.) (Picture from David Seah's blog)

Found out about xFruits via Lifehacker from Micro Persuasion. It's like an answer to prayer! Everything you wanted to do with RSS you now can do... well, almost.

My favourite xFruit modules are the RSS to Mobile and RSS to PDF. It makes more a neat little mobile blog, or a newsletter for those who like PDFs. But my initial try showed that the PDF file doesn't do much in keeping your layout in place, and embedded videos are gone. I guess it's good for sites that do listings or are heavy on text.

Singapore anti-spam legislation is being discusses again (nice PR move Symantec!). I am 100% for any move to stop spam, but I couldn't help but notice a few oddities in the news report on the proposed bill.

1. "legislation only affects local servers" Does this mean a local company can host a server in a country without such laws and spam Singaporean without being held accountable? Why not have the legislation cover Singapore companies, not servers.
   
2. "All electronic spam has to be clearly labelled as advertisement" Does this apply to foreigners who spam Singaporeans too? Can't wait to see "legal" spam like [ Advertisement: My sad Nigerian story of wealth ] Then having an unsubscribe link at the end! =P
3. "Once a person unsubscribes, the spam sender has 10 days to remove him from the mailing list or face legal action" Hey, spam is legal for 10 days at a time! Maybe I can promote my blog through spam then completely destroy my spam database after 10 days.
   

What I'm interested in finding out is what kind of legal penalty will be imposed on spammers? I know of many Singapore direct marketeers who have no unsubscription mechanism! How much can we make from suing them?

On a more serious and technical note, I'm actually not as concern about the 80% international spam actually. For users of international email services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, they have anti-spam engines that share trends throughout the network, so if the spam hits somewhere else first, the email system will know to put it into the spam folder when it reaches us.

Large MNCs who have invested in similar anti-spam technologies are also relatively safe, the rest of you... urm... I guess you can try to lobby your ISP for something world class.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHWTLA8WecI]
Here's an interesting video about the exponential future of the world thanks mostly to the connectedness of the Internet. Presentation by Carl Fisch.

Also seen on Mr Brown's blog.

Event organisers have begun to embrace bloggers as media and bloggers themselves are beginning to embrace their duty by rolling out daily, if not hourly, updates from the show floor. A good recent example being Engadget at CES last month.

But as the social media waits with baited breath for coverage from tomorrow's Oscars, citizen journalists are already pushing the packet and taking it a notch up using technologies that deliver quicker updates (up to the minute?) and that go beyond the web and RSS to the mobile phone.

Hollywood gossip blog Defamer already has a Twitter account set up specially for updates from the Oscars with over 250 followers.

Web 2.0 publishing technology has already moved beyond blogs when it comes to information dissemination, speed of upload, and pervasiveness. I wouldn't be surprised if bloggers begin embracing mobile phone camera Flickr tools or even Tumblelogs in upcoming coverage.

You can tell that Tumblelogs have come of age when blogger.com like services such as Tumblr begin sprouting.

I have no idea who created this, just thought I'd share it. =)

We're a month away from close of the Microsoft Next-Gen PC Design Showcase. If you're a sucker for new concepts and crazy (read impossible) designs, do check it out and give your vote. All you need to be eligible to vote is a Microsoft .NET login, which means if you use MSN/Windows Messenger or Hotmail, you're good to vote.

The entry that got my vote is Submission 381: MADE in China, a thin-client tablet design with chopsticks as styluses (pictured above). I know it doesn't seem like much and tablets are not a new concept, but it won my vote because I felt it was thought through very carefully, everything from its design robustness and interface, to the business model and target audience.

Here are a few of my favourite points:

• Target Audience: The 1.3 billion people in China. This also inspired the use of chopsticks as styluses which makes it easy for Chinese character input, dragging and dropping icons, and even manipulating icons in a way a mouse can't.
• Robust Design: The simple addition of a jagged lid over the screen gives it added protection from objects the computer might come into contact with.
• Business Model: This is my favourite point. Just like the successful mobile phone market in Asia, this computer is merely a thin client with everything from software to connectivity coming from a service provider. This creates low-barrier to entry for PC adoption, a new market in utility PC computing, affordable back-end infrastructure where single servers/CPUs can host more than one user. Even the price of $1/day was proposed.
• Environmentally Aware: Building on the centralised business model, all the PCs can be owned by the service provider who can manage the safe recycling and disposal of old units as opposed to the mess we make out of discarding our old computers nowadays.
  

I don't actually think we'll see this product materialise, but I'm rather amazed at the thought processes that have gone into this proposal. Technology's not just for us who have much and want more, but also for those who have never seen it and giving them an easy way to leap frog the generation they've missed.

Don't forget to vote! Public voting ends 23 MArch 2007.