choongyong.koh July 25th, 2008
早上如常带儿子上学，在楼下碰见邻居。邻居告诉我，她儿子的好友刚刚失去了父亲。四十岁，身体最近才经过检查，并无大恙。不料一天在工作上忽然晕倒，一倒不起，原来是心脏病发作。
虽然我本身并不认识死者，但也勾起了自己的一些回忆：两年前楼下的家庭医生和我们一家人都非常熟悉，因为大儿子当时常常生病。有一天听到医生骤死的新闻，我们也有点不知所措。
可想而知，这些死者的家人，听到亲人的死讯时，应该会更加振撼。
最近追看香港电视连续剧《溏心风暴》，剧中也有亲人去世的情节。去世了的大妈，安排了一封在死后三个月才交给家人的信，里面写了非常有意义的一句：
哭有时，笑有时；悲伤有时，欢乐有时
吩咐家人：可以为我的死去而悲伤，但三个月后，悲伤的时候也该过去，应该继续有意义，有目标的活下去了。
很简单的一句话，但我在看到这一段时，眼眶也盈满泪水。
自己常常也会想，人生无常，什么事情都可能发生，说不定现在好好坐在这里写博客，一会儿上街因为某种原因去了。也因为这样，自己选择的道路和许多人不同，着重于珍惜现在，而不是希望年轻时猛拼，老来才享受天伦。
只不过万一真的不幸死去，希望我的亲人们也会记得这一句：哭有时，笑有时；悲伤有时，欢乐有时，在悲伤一段短时间后继续坚强的走下去。
choongyong.koh July 16th, 2008
Had you always wondered what meaningful thing you can do on National Day? Why not volunteer your time for a few hours to join in with Workers’ Party’s activity to celebrate our National Day?
Send an email to organising@wp.sg for more details.
Hope to see you. 
choongyong.koh July 8th, 2008
Was surfing the web this morning and came across this New Paper article Your profile has broken rules of use. So it is confirmed that the change in Reach Singapore’s Facebook presence was prompted by my earlier post.
Just would like to say this is good because it closes a loop:
- Government does something wrong (although not a big crime in this case, but still something that is not right)
- Someone points out (acts as a check)
- Government takes action based on evaluation of feedback
- The right thing is done
This might be a small thing, but it truly reflects that kind of Singapore I would like to live in. Some comments in my earlier blog postings accuse me of nit-picking on small things. However, if we don’t even feedback and check on the small things, what happens when something really big goes wrong? There is definitely a need for checks and balances in our system, from the smallest thing like a Facebook profile, to the “big things” like government policies.
There was others who says I am criticizing from a moral high ground instead of feeding back to Reach on this. I say this is what the Internet is about: someone says something, if it is complete nonsense, it will be forgotten and left to rot on its on; if it makes sense, someone else will pick it up and more people will read about it. In this case, I am grateful that someone thought my original posting was worthy enough and recommended it to Tomorrow.sg (although a few days after I first posted it), and the editors of Tomorrow.sg decided to publish it, and from there the attention grew. Eventually enough people got to know about this, and eventually the right people made the corrections.
Isn’t this a wonderful closure of loop that many would like to see in so many of our other suggestions in day-to-day life?
Definitely, the Internet is not an arena where ‘more heat than light is generated’.
choongyong.koh July 1st, 2008
I blogged about Reach Singapore’s Facebook profile a few days ago. Today, it was picked up by tomorrow.sg and I saw quite a number of visitors to my blog. There is also a small debate at tomorrow.sg about this.
There was a blog that accused me of being rigid and quoted a number of other organisations with Facebook presence, like UNICEF Youth Voice. Someone responded that the blogger too did not understand, that there is a difference between a User Account (which Reach Singapore’s was), Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages. Rightfully said, because the violation I mentioned was with the use of a User Account to represent an organisation. None of the other quoted groups/organisations used a User Account.
Going back to Facebook again to check out Reach Singapore’s profile, I realised that the User Reach Singapore also created a Reach Singapore Facebook Group today. I was thinking to myself, at least they are pretty fast in responding to feedback, even when the feedback originated from elsewhere on the net.
However, when I refreshed the Reach Singapore User Account profile, I was confused. The name of the profile was no longer “Reach Singapore”. It has now become “Ho Chee Har”.
Now there is a small problem here. What this means is, if you are one of the 300+ people who added “Reach Singapore” as a “friend”, you suddenly have someone you don’t know in your friends’ list. If you chose the default settings when adding friends, your personal information in Facebook that you shared with your friends will now be available to Ho Chee Har.
This is a small problem because you can always remove Ho Chee Har from your friend’s list. But it goes back to my original premise: if the platform was understood and the correct tools (Page or Group) were used in the first place, no such problem would have occurred in the first place.
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