Asian Tiger

Can you imagine the number of mailboxes that your postman goes through in a single day? Does your postman put on a happy face when he drops your mail? Can you imagine the unhappiness he goes through when the weather changes from a beautiful sunny day into a torrential rain; yet at the same time, he needs to make sure your mail does not get squishy and wet?
Here are some tips that you can adopt to motivate your postman:

1. Get proper residential mailboxes and/or commercial mailboxes of the right size for the majority of your mails. At least you make it easier for your postman to deliver your magazines when you have a bigger mailbox
2. Use a chalk and write a thank you note on your mailbox to the postman. That would certainly brighten up his day.
3. Put a bottled/canned/packeted drink in your mailbox. Delivering mails can be a tiring job. On festive seasons, put a small gift instead.

Some may argue that delivering mails is the job of the postman and all the above is just unnecessary. I tend to disagree because we are all humans and all humans need to be cared for. We are in fact living in a community on planet Earth, least we forget.

It’s the festive mood of Chinese New Year swirling in the air. Most Chinese families in Malaysia will be conducting their annual spring cleaning and home improvement activities right about now. It is only about 2-odd weeks before we celebrate Chinese New Year beginning the 7th of February for 15 days. This year, I intend to consider replacing some of my home lighting to something more modern and yet sophisticated.

I have always liked my home to be illuminated by bright florescent and I opted to use the long horizontal and round florescence lights. Although it is giving me the level of brightness that I like, after a while, it looks too plain. I feel that my home is not homely enough, not modern enough and not “flashy” enough.

Since Chinese New Year is a time for relatives and friend to visit each other at their respective home, I want to spruce up my house for receive them. Having window shopped around at departmental stores, lighting specialty stores and look a look online for ideas, I am considering George Kovacs lightings for contemporary lighting for the bedrooms and bedside desks.

For the living room and dining area, I am thinking of investing in a couple of Hickley lighting fixtures. Some of them may prove to be a little too grand for my home and those are the ones that I will avoid. I’m looking at those similar to the Eden collection where light is reflected directly down to maximise brightness and the designs are not too flair.

This home improvement activity is nothing more than putting make up to my home but first I’ve got to convince the wife to part way with the money…

Many of us own a printer at home; most commonly, the inkjet printer. Why so? Because the initial cost to own one is so darn cheap. Imagine, for below RM200, you can own your own colour printer and start printing out your own digital photos. However, many of us fail to realise that it is not that the printer is cheap, it is the printer ink that is expensive.

There are 2 ways that I can think off to save printer ink and the associated cost:

1. Print in black - always print in black even for pictures (unless you want it in colour) because black ink is the cheapest compared to coloured ones.
2. Print in draft - printing in draft mode uses less ink than necessary. If you are hard pressed for high quality colour printing, go for this mode. Do not use this if you are printing photos; it simply won’t look good.

One final piece of advise; if you are one that does not print on a regular basis, don’t own a printer. Simply have your document printed in any cybercafes. Infrequent use of the printer will cake your ink rendering it useless when you actually need to use it.