I had the dubious pleasure of opening a new bank account recently and it made me wonder why we bother to stick with banks? I swear, if someone was to invent an alternative to banks, I’d be there like a shot.

I’m not talking about investment banks, those Ponzi-scheming, blood-sucking, Crown-of-Thorns starfish devouring institutes of everything in their paths. Ahem. I’m talking about your normal, run-of-the-mill banks that, now that I think of it, are little better.
Think about it. You’re giving the bank YOUR hard earned money. And the bank will be using YOUR money to make money that they supposedly survive on. Remember when banks were like that? But now….

You want the flexibility of a daily working account? Well, you ain’t going to get a cent in interest from any money there. And if you underestimate your expenses one day and overdraw your account, the charges rack up at an alarming rate.

You want something with some interest? After all, you should get something back from essentially giving your money to an alien concern that may or may not guarantee your cash deposit, right? Sure, you can have some interest, but the bank won’t make it easy for you. You can’t have a cheque book or ATM card associated with YOUR money. You have to pay for any over-the-counter transactions associated with YOUR money. You have to maintain a minimum balance of YOUR money.

As the conditions of the accounts available were explained to me, you can probably guess that I was getting more and more unhappy. You can bet that if I had a more client-friendly place like a credit union available, I wouldn’t have given the bank a second glance, but I didn’t have a choice.

I hate the way banks pour on the charges for each thing you want to do with your own money. I hate the way banks give exchange rates that are worse than you can get from a High Street money-changing booth. I hate the way banks expect to make many percentage points of profit between the paltry rate you wrangle out of them and the rate at which they loan out your money. And I hate the fee they charge every month to keep your money in their virtual building. It’s obviously not good enough to make money the regular banking way. Oh no, they have to rub salt into the paper cut by then taking away your money whether you’re using it (transaction charges) or not (account-keeping charges).

Anyway, that’s my weekly rant. The account was set up, the service exactly as I was expecting (I was dressed casually), but I do not count myself as a happy customer. If anyone is thinking of setting up alternative banking options, please let the world know. It’ll be more popular than inventing a new mousetrap.

As a lacksadaisical aquarist, I made a terrible mistake recently. I bought some new fish but didn’t quarantine them and ended up killing four out of five of my very big, very graceful angelfish when I introduced the newcomers to the tank. All that was left was one lone angelfish, the newcomers also having succumbed to stress and who knows what else, as well as passing their malaise to a small school of tetras. Sigh. Expensive lesson well learnt.

This gave me a problem. I have an automatic fish feeder and, with only one fish left, the feeder was dumping way too much food in the tank. I needed more fish, I told J. But not from Teh Evil Aquarium Supplies. I’d have to scout farther afield. I decided to go to Gelang Patah.

Gelang Patah is a small town of around 20,000 inhabitants, essentially forgotten by time. I can say this because, four years ago when we first clapped eyes on it, we noticed that the curbs were crumbling, the buildings were unpainted, and trash littered every centimetre of open ground. We couldn’t figure it out because GP is very close to the Singaporean border and all the glitz and glamour thereof. If you wanted a contrast of countries, you couldn’t do better than, say, Jurong and Gelang Patah.

GP has improved since then. With the influx of Singaporeans looking for cheaper housing on the other side of the border, it didn’t have a choice, but progress is slow and there are still some things that are startling.

Anyway, getting back to the story, I bundled the kids in the car and we went exploring to GP. And we found it hard to find a spot to park (most of the main car-park being occupied by empty stalls waiting for sunset and buka puasa (end of the day’s fasting for Ramadan) to start selling food) so we parked behind a busy row of shops (in front of a much less busy row of shops). After purchasing some beautiful gourami, I decided to stop at a shop that advertised frozen meat in blocks. The sign itself was stark and so was the shop. The floor was unfinished bare concrete and half a dozen chest freezers lined one badly painted wall. One young Malay woman was present, loading one kilogram sausages of chicken mince into one of the chest freezers. There was no air-conditioning, only two fans swirling in the increasingly humid heat of mid-morning.

The whole place, with a couple of shelves holding some groceries with faded labels, reminded me of nothing more than a big ole fish bait shop in Queensland, Australia. If you’ve ever been driving north of Brisbane, up Bundaberg way and beyond, you’ll know what I mean.

The young woman seemed content to parcel chicken mince into a freezer and I was about to leave when a tacked-up sign in plastic against one of the walls caught my eye.

Burger Arnab – RM8.00

“Burger arnab?” I repeated in disbelief. “That’s rabbit.”

The young Malay woman turned to me. “Yes,” she replied. “We have rabbit.”

“May I see it?” I asked.

She smiled and opened one of those old freezers. And there, stalwart reader, I found more than just rabbit burgers. I also found ostrich burgers and local deer meat (rusa) burgers.

Ostrich! Local venison! Rabbit! All Johor produce (made up in Kulai) and distributed — not to one of the snazzy supermarkets that have sprung up like weeds, but — to a basic, hidden away shop in a small town that barely looks as if it can support any kind of exotic business whatsoever.

Of course I had to buy one pack of each and we tried the ostrich and venison burgers for breakfast the next morning. They were nicely seasoned and delicious. I’ll be going back and hunting through the freezers of that shop with a little more diligence next time. And the family can enjoy ostrich and deer burgers for breakfast every now and then. (I’m waiting until J’s at work one day before trying the rabbit. He has some aversion to eating past domestic pets, I think.)

Just goes to show you never know what you’ll come across unless you try exploring a little.

As you know, stalwart reader, I’m homeschooling the kids. Part of their curriculum includes the use of technology and the concept of blogging. For their very first blog, I asked the kids to write a short post on anything that took their fancy. This is Little Dinosaur’s 9yo effort. After she came up with a title, being about herself (yes, she’s a vain little thing), she goes on to say:

I wake up in the morning to eat my breakfast.

If there is noting to do on my computer then I go up stairs to watch TV[.]

I watch Animal planet, Mhtbusters [sic] and and TVIQ so that[']s what I watch.

Okay, we’re working on her punctuation and a bit of her spelling. Ahem. You’ll notice she doesn’t say anything about school though! In any case, here is her 11yo brother’s comment to her post:

The whole family knows what you are doing. It’s not like we don[']t pay attention.

They have wonderful arguments and all J and I can do is try to stifle our laughter as we listen to them. Ah, kids. I know I keep threatening to sell them but I think I’ll hang onto them for a little while longer. Hope your weekend is an entertaining and I’ll catch you next week.

Recently, a news article hit the papers. An immigrant family, new to Singapore, was complaining about the smells coming from their Indian neighbour. You see, the Indian family was cooking curry on a regular basis and the immigrant family (mainland Chinese) found the aroma objectionable.

The Indian family would close all doors and windows before cooking their curry but it appears that wasn’t enough. So much so that the Chinese family took the Indian family to a mediation centre. The ruling was that the Indian family could only cook curry when they were sure the Chinese family wasn’t at home. (Insert eyeroll here.) You can read the article here.

In retaliation, some Singaporeans organised Cook and Share a Pot of Curry day last Sunday (21 August) (it’s on Facebook somewhere) to show that curry is part of the Singaporean national cuisine and that it should be encouraged, not discouraged.

Feeling warm and fuzzy yet? Not so fast.

Five years ago, there weren’t as many mainland Chinese in Singapore. The city-state was thriving with a large white-skinned expat community. The banks were living high off the hog (still are, but there were more bank employees around then) and there were Europeans everywhere. In this environment, J and I went apartment rental hunting. And almost the first question we were asked (during our initial telephone enquiries) was whether we were Indians or if one of us was married to an Indian. Remember that the rental agencies we were talking to were run by Singaporeans.

When we went to visit apartments, the landlord (or his/her agent) would ask what kind of food we cooked. “Er, mostly Western,” was my reply. “No curries?” they’d persist. I’d shake my head. With my big Slavic husband by my side, it was a lie they easily accepted. The landlords we met, and their agents, were all Singaporean Chinese.

At one complex we visited, we were told quite proudly by the agent that there were “no Indians” living in the block.

By now, J and I were completely stumped. “What’s wrong with Indians?” we asked.

“Their food is very smelly,” was the reply. “We don’t like renting to Indians.”

Every single one of these comments came from Singaporean Chinese. It seems to be a well-known fact that the moment an agent gets an Indian family looking to rent a place, they get shunted to the less salubrious properties with less discriminating landlords. NIMBY* for curry.

Yeah sure, mainland Chinese are bigoted. They make a big show of belonging to an older culture and thus are “superior” to everyone else. They have paler skins than the south-east Asian Chinese and make a big deal out of that as well. (Malaysian Chinese we’ve met have a particular antipathy towards mainland Chinese, calling them arrogant peasants.) Mainlanders also have singularly undeveloped senses of humour. (We know, we’ve worked with a few of them.)

BUT…don’t blame them for an already existing problem. Singaporean Chinese were discriminating against Indians and complaining about the smell of their food long before one million mainlanders flooded the country. But I do applaud them for a neat sleight of hand. Now none of this is their fault At All. Well played, Singaporean Chinese. Well played.

(*) NIMBY = Not In My Back Yard

POSTSCRIPT: J reminds me that we also had to confirm that we weren’t mainland Chinese when we were apartment hunting. You see, the Indians may stink out the place (snort), but those same agents told us that mainlanders trash apartments. If you can see a bigger problem looming beneath this little feel-good band-aid, you’d be right.

You may have noticed that, in the WAR GAMES giveaway, I specified EPUB as the reading format. Why did I do this?

Well, first, because EPUB is an international standard put together by the International Digital Publishing Forum and I’ve got the hots for international standards. I love them. Without international standards, you wouldn’t be able to have your luggage tagged from one international destination to another, make phone calls or send a postcard to a friend, for example.

Let me admit something to you. I’m also an open-source fan. I don’t like proprietary systems. I like to rip things apart to see how they work. EPUB fills those criteria.

PDF, while widely known and used, is an Adobe product and, while I adore FrameMaker, Adobe has been notoriously antagonistic (or indifferent, take your pick) towards Linux. What really bites in this regard is that Adobe products are available for Apple (a *NIX variant) but they will not go that bit further and port across to Linux.

Secondly, you have to understand the philosophy behind the two products. PDF was created as a screen alternative to print, at a time when most documents were still being sent from place to place in paper form. In order to win over those print fans, Adobe created the Portable Document Format (PDF), that had all the advantages of a printed document, but without the horrendous shipping and time costs.

Because Adobe was targetting print fans, PDF gives you a printed page on a monitor. You see the page as the author intended, complete with the typefaces, margins and positioning as the author intended.

The production of a PDF, then, is a completely different proposition to the production of an EPUB, where the size of screen, margins and even typefaces and their colours vary according to the reader’s choices on her/his screen.

PDF has another problem. Where the PDF hasn’t been constructed to be reflowable, it will look terrible on your screen. I know this because I’ve tried (and failed) to read dozens of PDFs on various ereaders and they are a pain. Having to depend on the PDF author/publisher to do the right thing is a risk I am no longer willing to take, and one I don’t wish to impose on readers.

And, lastly, because PDF is a faithful rendition of a printed page, all the considerations that didn’t have to go into an EPUB have to go into a PDF. That is, I have to cater for widows, orphans, gutters, rivers, hyphenation, and so on. This is not a trivial task if I want to do it properly and, believe me, I want to do this properly.

Having said all that, I haven’t ruled out the possibility of having PDF giveaway versions of my Sandal Press books, but it’s just going to have to wait until I have a bit of spare time. (Although, if you really want a copy, Smashwords has WAR GAMES in PDF to sell you.)

Hope this explains the reasoning. Have a good weekend and I’ll catch you next week.

ADDITIONAL: Oops, I forgot to mention. The winner for the WAR GAMES giveaway ended up being two winners and copies have been sent to Cathy Pegau and Barbara Ann Wright. EPUB, natch!

You may remember me mentioning QUINTEN’S STORY a few weeks back? Well, the cover is ready to be revealed.

Taaa daaaaa!

The book itself is a-l-m-o-s-t ready for Dev Ed, which is no problem as it’s not due for release till December. QUINTEN’S STORY, while it has romantic elements, is not a romance. It’s straight space opera, set in the Republic (ON BLISS, PRIME SUSPECT, A PIRATE’S PASSION, IN ENEMY HANDS).

After meeting the firebrand Kiel Souiad, Quinten Tamlan falls in love with her and joins her in creating the ST Alliance, a rebel group that is trying to bring down the Republic. But something happens, Kiel dies, and Quinten spends the next seven years wallowing in grief. However, his ship — too big for one person to handle — is disintegrating and he’s finally forced to take on a crewmember.

Quinten thinks he’s been forgotten by the Republic and forgotten by the people he and Kiel tried to liberate. He’s about to find out that he’s wrong on both counts.

Hey, that doesn’t sound too bad, does it? I may try to work some of that into the official blurb.

Anyway, that’s the news for this week. A book trailer AND a new cover. Have a good weekend.

I uploaded it to YouTube last night. Hope you like it.

If you have been following along, stalwart reader, you would have noticed an interview with me at Diane Dooley’s blog. That’s one chance to win a copy of WAR GAMES.

You can go back to last week’s blog post (just look down below this one) and make a comment. That’s a second chance to win a copy of WAR GAMES.

You could sign up for my newsletter (click the envelope in the sidebar) and ask for a copy, but then I’ll be asking you to pretty please post a review somewhere. Third chance.

And next Monday, I’ll be at Charlie Allden’s blog, Smart Girls Love SciFi. Fourth chance.

Don’t say I’m not helping you out here! I’ve got more jobs than time available at the moment. If someone could please make a day last 48 hours, instead of 24, I think I may just get all caught up.

Have a good weekend and I’ll catch you next week.

Dear long-suffering and stalwart reader. Yes, you read that right. WAR GAMES is out, my very first release from my own press, Sandal Press. That link goes to the Sandal Press page, where you can choose an etailer, if that’s your heart’s desire. While I’m on Amazon, Smashwords and XinXii, I’m still waiting on Kobo. And it takes time for the electrons to propagate to such places as Sony, Apple and Diesel.

With a new release comes the inevitable competition, which tweep @RowanLarke kindly jogged my neurons about. If you, kind visitor, would like a digital copy of WAR GAMES (in EPUB), you have two choices.

Choice one is signing up for my newsletter. Just ask and you will receive.
PROs: It’s free!
CONs: I will be asking that you put a review up somewhere. Plus you have to put up with my bi-monthly rantings for at least one newsletter. And the August/September newsletter will be out at the end of this week, so you don’t have much time.

Choice two is commenting on this post.
PROs: Limited exposure to my rantings and no gentle reminders to put up a review. You have till the 15th to enter a comment on any of my blog posts.
CONs: You have to think of something to say.

The choice is yours.

If you’re piqued, you can read the book’s Prologue and a bit of its background here. Meanwhile, I’m hard at work on the next two releases for this year and trying not to compulsively check Amazon/Smashwords every fifteen seconds.

Yes, once more Kaz has pulled the this-is-not-a-blog-post rabbit out of the hat. So, this is not a blog post. The real blog post will appear on Monday, which is the official launch date of WAR GAMES. Hint hint. Have a great weekend.