RSS Feeds and Email Subscriptions!

I just got the RSS feeds and email subscription services from Feedburner up! Take a look on your right. I placed it all the way on top so it's visible for all to see!

You can either subscribe to the RSS feed which will tell you everytime I have a new post or to the email subscription service which will send you an email whenever I update the blog. That way, you don't have to keep checking back all the time!

Also, be sure to bookmark me on all your favourite sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and many more by using the quick and convenient Add This button at the bottom of every post!

Go ahead and get trigger-happy! =)

Understanding Plastic Recycling and HDPE!

Plastic recycling is essentially the collection of waste or scrap plastic and turning them into useful products again. Take note that the products might be totally different from its’ original state, an example would be a plastic bottle being recycled into toys, etc.

All plastic that can be recycled has a resin identification code and one of the most common forms of recycled plastic is High Density Polyethylene (or HDPE) which as a resin code of 2.

HDPE can be used for a wide variety of applications such as containers (think Tupperware, milk jugs, laundry detergent bottles, etc), folding tables and chairs, plastic bags, natural gas distribution pipes, snowboard rails/boxes and refillable bottles.

In the process of recycling HDPE, scrap HDPE is produced. Scrap HDPE comes in many different forms and can also be used for many different purposes. Unfortunately, post-consumer HDPE (which is HDPE that has already been used as consumer goods and have been discarded) are being wasted every year by the thousands of tons. This is very detrimental to the environment, not to mention a perfect waste of a useful manufacturing material. Fortunately, there are companies out there which purchases scrap HDPE for further recycling.

If you’re interested to learn more about plastic recycling and HDPE, please visit HDPE Material.

DRE Public Talk: The Potential and Challenges of the Real Estate Funds Business!

Wednesday (26/03/2008) 12pm at LR423.

Mr Jonathan Yap gave a presentation on his views regarding the real estate business and gave specific insights on how Ascendas India Trust (a-iTrust) is run. I was priviliaged enough to be able to attend his talk. Below is a brief outline of what he covered.

Changing Market Dynamics
Investments into Asia have grown over the years. Surprisingly, this is actually due to the greying of the world's population. Currently, 11% of the world's population is >60 years old and that number is expected to hit 22% by 2050. This leads to retirement/pension money increasing and thus more money have been pumped into investments in developing economies, including Asia. With the globalisation of sources of funding, the accessibility of funds have gone from local to global with the interest in cross-border transactions increasing (think SWFs and foreign investors, etc). In Asia, REIT IPOs have generally been oversubscribed and currently, Asia REITs distribution yields have substantial spreads above 10-year government bonds. Just in Japan and Singapore alone, the REITs market cap have grown by almost 3 times to S$60 billion over 2005 to 2007.

Tapping on Real Estate Funds
There are several key advantages in tapping into REITs. First of all is the streamline operations of these funds. Real estate funds bring their niche expertise to the table, including development expertise, management expertise and local deal sourcing expertise. In addition, there is an add-on for capital market capabilities including fund structuring, capital raising and fund management.

The Ascendas Business Model
Ascendas employes a three-pringed strategy to provide maximum shareholder value. They are creating assets, enhancing asset value and finally unlocking the asset value. Ascendas manages about 7 funds (2 public and 5 private) including a-reit and a-iTrust as their public funds. The key investment highlights of a-iTrust include a high quality portfolio managed to international standards, strong growth potential, unique three-pronged acquisitions growth strategy, exposure to the booming Indian economy and Ascendas sponsorship and strong corporate governance.

a-iTrust closed up 2 cents to S$1.04 per share yesterday (Friday, 28/03/2008).

About the Speaker

Mr Jonathan Yap is Executive Vice President, Real Estate Funds Business, where he focuses on the formation of new private funds for Ascendas across the Asia region and developing business synergy across these funds.

Mr Yap is concurrently CEO of India Funds, overseeing Ascendas' India-focused funds business, including the Ascendas India Development Trust (private fund) and and the award-winning Ascendas India Trust (listed on SGX-ST).

About DRE Public Talks
These talks are organised by the Department of Real Estate and are opened to members of the public, students and staff of SDE. If you're interested in finding out how to attend these talks, drop me a message and I'll forward the registration links to you the next time there is a talk.

Get Paid to Blog!

On an earlier post, I mentioned about being able to make money online. Well here's one more for you, did you know that you get be paid to blog?? Yes, you're reading it right! YOU get PAID to blog! Makes you wonder why you've been doing it for free all this time huh.

I recently signed with payperpost.com. Starting out was not easy. There were several requirements that my blog didn't fulfil like having enough posts within a certain time frame and not selecting the right categories, etc. But Customer Love (the in-house customer service guys) managed to help me resolve my issues and they even managed a very quick turnaround time. It took them only a day to get back to me. Now that's good customer service for you! And now my blog has been approved and I'm writing this post as my first sponsored post!

My dashboard in payperpost is easy to use. The controls are simple enough and it's very well-organised. I managed to surf around the members area and check out all the other cool stuff like ppp direct the very first time i logged in. The loading of the pages is a little slow though but then again, I think that's really my fault, not theirs!

And you don't have to worry about all the gimmicks that are running on the web. Payperpost has shown that they are a trustworthy and reliable online company to work with. The terms and conditions are properly laid out (for example, you can check out the word of mouth ethics), there's a clear way for you to be paid and the customer service is top-notch. I should know, hey, I'm already signed up with them!

So what are you waiting for? Click on the payperpost link below and starting signing up! It's FREE!



Don't just blog for free, get PAID to blog!

Making Money Online!

There are many ways to make money online these days. Even blogging can earn you cash. Blogging you say? That's right, you can make money out of your own blog!

Many people don't even notice it, but for those people using a Blogger account, there's an option to set up a Google Adsense account. An Adsense account will allow Google to place ads on your blog and you earn money everytime someone clicks on the ad on your blog. It's a terrific way to earn money cause you basically don't have to lift a finger to earn the money. If you want examples of adsense, just take a look around on my blog. You can sign up for an Adsense account here. Go ahead and grab an Adsense account, you know you want it!

Besides Adsense, there are many other ways to start generating profits online. Examples include affiliate marketing, viral marketing, network marketing. These are all online examples which you can do right in the comfort of your own home. It's not easy however. Just like starting any other business, starting an online business would take time, patience, capital and lots of learning. But, hey, the sooner you start, the sooner you'll learn the ropes of the trade and be able to start earning money online.

Gone are the days when you have to get a job and slog it out 9-5 everyday just to scrape by. With the advent of the Information Age, the way people are earning money has changed.

Are you changing along with it?

SMART Investment Expo 2008!

The SMART Investment and International Property Expo is going on at Suntec City next weekend (29th & 30th Mar)!

--> http://www.smartexpos.com

It's one of the biggest and longest established expos in Asia and it brings together the world's most attractive investment opportunities from the real estate and financial sectors. This expo is one of the most well-known and trusted platforms in Singapore because of its' many educational programmes and international property showcases. The SMART expo is one of the most important for all serious investors because of the many free expert advice on offer.

To top it all of, admission is FREE!! All you have to do is register your seat! Do not hesitate any further!

--> http://www.smartexpos.com

This is NOT an affiliate link. The only reason I'm promoting this is because I want some company to go with me!!! It's lonely to go alone and hey, it's always better to go with friends and learn in a group. You know what they say "hao dong si yao fen xiang". It means "good things must share"! So that's why I'm promoting this on my blog. I think this is going to be pretty helpful. And what's the opportunity cost? One weekend spent learning and expanding your knowledge on investment and property. Now I wouldn't call that an opportunity cost at all. Nope, it's called an investment in time! And again it's FREE!! What more do you need to convince you.

--> http://www.smartexpos.com

And to all my friends in SDE if you're reading this, this expo is something we can't miss. It's an expo on investment and property for heaven's sake. We're studying Real Estate. This expo is practically made for us! There'll be industry heavyweights there dispensing free advice and guidance plus their views on the property market for the near future (click here for the seminar timetable). If this doesn't concern us, then I don't know what does!

Register your seats now! And don't forget to drop me a msg so we can go together! =)

--> http://www.smartexpos.com

Open Houses and Birthday Chalets!

Last Saturday (15/03/08) was NUS Open House 2008! I had two major things running on that day. First, I was working as a Student Ambassador for SDE and second, there was a fund-raising event going on for SDE FOC 2008. There fund-raising event was about selling ice-cream to raise money for the camp! Unfortunately I could only help out inbetween ambassador shifts. But they peeps at the ice-cream stall sure looked like they were having fun!


Wished I could be there all the way to enjoy the festivities! I didn't even get a picture taken of me at the stall!

Anyway after the Open House closed for Saturday, we rushed down to Downtown East for Ezann's 21st birthday chalet!

Her actual birthday is on the 19th of March. It's on a Wednesday so of course we had another round of celebrations in school!

For some reason, someone brought sparklers to school for the birthday celebration and we thought it would be a good idea to light them up.

We ended up creating so much smoke and fogging up the entire SDE 4th floor until the fire alarm rang and...

Campus Security has to come down and take our details down! Haha.. but all's well that end's well. We were let off with a warning and continued our celebrations! We even got friendly with the security officer; he came to buy ice-cream from us when we were selling it at SDE level 4 later that day!

And look what became of the nice little cake that we got..


Yup, it was devoured by us! All-in-all it was a great celebration.

Hope you had a great 21st birthday Ezann! Oh yeah.. and welcome to Adulthood!!! =)

Cos Living Day 3 - The Finale!!

We're back with Cos Living Day 3! This is the finale ladies and gentlemen!

So the rest of the bulkier furniture came and we went back as a group to fix everything up and do the final touches for the renovations. Since the furnitures were the bulky ones, we naturally needed to set everything up. There was the sofa, the Cosy Corner chairs, the huge mirror, the carpets, the tables, etc. Lotsa work to do before we were done.

Finally after all the hard work, we were doing up the finishing touches of the revamped place!

This is what the Cosy Corner looks like after we were all done with the renovations.

And this is the new living room! We changed the entire layout of the flat. This is according to our objective of doing a maximum makeover with minimum cost and hassle.

So this is the result of our hard work, blood and sweat. Look at the change!

Amazing isn't it! I myself didn't expect to achieve such results. Our group really put in so much effort to do this. Great job guys!

And of course, we'll have to take some pictures of us using our own creation!

I absolutely love this picture. Think it's just so cute. Haha.. Too bad Yin Mun had to leave before we can take it. Otherwise, we would have the entire group present!


Of course, no project can be done without the help of a few selected handful who contributes their time and money to the project. Here are they! First up, the brave family who willingly put up their home to be renovated by us.


Then there are friends of the family who takes time off and put in lots of effort to help out with the work!


Last but definately not least, the financers of the entire project. The cost came up to about S$1,600. A big THANK YOU to them all!



Well, this is the entire group's photo! This is like one of the only two we got with the entire group in it! Haha.. And of course, something has to screw up like Joanne closing her eyes! Argh!!

All in all, this was a fantastic experience. I'd never thought we could have pulled this off. But we exceeded our own expectations and did a fantastic job! Of course, all's not over yet. We still have the report and presentation to tackle but they're just minor work compared to this!

GREAT JOB GUYS!!!!!

Cos Living Day 2!

This is part two of the three-part series on Cos Living! Welcome back!

Alright, so picking up from where we left off. We went to Ikea to grab the furniture needed to revamp the house. Total cost came up to about S$1,300+ but luckily we got Kelly's parents who were kind enough to be our very first customers! They paid for all the furniture plus paint and hardware that we needed to complete our renovations.

We went to lunch at Hong Kong Cafe opposite Ikea Alexandria after the shopping trip. All famished already. We were supposed to finish shopping by 12 noon but ended up finish around 1 plus. Sebastian couldn't join us because he was in China for his company training and ZZ was waiting for us at Boon Keng already. That's why both of them are not in the picture. Actually, come to think of it, there's always at least one member who is missing. Haha.. we hardly have any pictures will all 8 of us inside.

After lunch, we were off to Boon Keng to start our jobs! Bought some paint and starting painting the place up. Our objective today was to paint the Cosy Corner red and paint the door so that it looks more presentable.

As you can see, work was not easy. Luckily for us, Yin Mun was there to save the red wall. The guys were actually in charge of the red wall but due to, ah, lack of experience, we couldn't really do our jobs properly. Yin Mun's a saviour I tell ya. She's skilled in painting, doing up websites, image editting. I'm so glad she's in the same group as me and not someone else's.

We hand-carried some of the furniture from Ikea back to the place. The bulkier items were sent for delivery. Of course, having some furniture there meant that we had to set it up.

There was also drilling that needed to be done. That task was given to ZZ, our handyman!

And of course, we just simply have to take random pictures (cam-whoring!) of as we work. Or else, where's the fun eh!

At the end of Day 2, we managed to achieve our objective of painting the red wall, door, window grills and assembling some of the furniture. Although we finished pretty late (10+pm I think), we were very satisfied with what we've done so far. Work's not over yet though. The bulkier furniture would be arriving in a couple of days and that's when we'll be back again.

That is the story for my next post, Cos Living Day 3 - The Finale! The final completed product (plus lots more random cam-whoring pics!)! Watch this space!!

Cos Living Day 1!

Okay as promised, this is the first part of a three-part series for Cos Living!

For those not in the know, I'm doing a marketing project this semester. We're supposed to come up with a business plan for the project and my group came up with an idea similar to Bai Jia Le - you know, Home Decor Survivor? The one hosted by Bryan Wong? Anyway, the company is called Cos Living and we specialise in renovations of maximum effect and minimum cost and hassle. I don't want to bore you with the details so I'll skip the introduction to the company. If you really want to know, drop me a message and I'll tell ya.

So anyway, the pictures here are taken during our very first day down. We went there to basically look at the place, do up measurements and brainstorm for ideas on the renovations.

The living room

Window grills beside the door

The door Doing up the measurements Discussion on the renovations and new layout for the place

Coming up next! Cos Living Day 2! Watch out for it!!