My Home - Part 2

guest living room

dining area

dry kitchen

wet kitchen

family living room

aqeel's room

master bedroom

My Home - Part 1

These are some pics I snapped thru my phone (blurry a bit). Just moved in last week, so still pretty mess up. Need some time to unpack, housekeeping and most importantly improve the interior :)

master bedroom

family living room

landscaping at porch area

aqeel's room

wet kitchen

dry kitchen

dining area

guest living room

Roger & Rafa

A class act!

Random Pics as a Traveller..

Here are some random pics :).

stonehenge, uk

beauty swiss

san francisco..i wish i could work here..

melbourne with fellow pet scholars...

arsenal forever, higbury

great ocean road..buddies from adelaide

home sweet home..adelaide

champ league final 2006 - arsenal vs barca

chelsea

brussels, belgium

berlin, world cup final venue

axon hq at london

somewhere at netherlands

universal studio, LA

statue of liberty, NY

SAP Contractor

Went to do part time contract job (SAP workflow) at Felda last week. Good experience, managed to get the job done earlier than expected. Expect some more works from Felda after this. Apparently they have many new developments coming up for SAP workflow. As long they pay me a good rate, allow me to do remote work, and be onsite based on my availability, I have no issue engaging the project with them ;).

My 2nd Adventure 2004

This was my second adventure across Europe. This time around, I was covering again Paris, Madrid, Lisbon and Barcelona. Rather than using Busabout as before, I opted a Euro rail service with a 1 month pass.

Paris, France

Nou Camp Barcelona, Spain (Watching Barca vs Albacete match)

Barcelona City, Spain

Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

Lisbon City, Portugal

Arco da Rua Augusta, Lisbon

Santiago Bernabeu, Madrid, Spain

Madrid City Center

My 1st Backpack Trip 2002

This was my 1st backpacker trip back in 2002. I was covering four cities namely Paris, Lucerne, Venice and Frankfurt. All thanks to Busabout which made my trip possible :).

Busabout

Venice, Italy

Jungfrao Region, Swiss

Lucerne city center

Paris - with my backpack ;)

Austerity measure or vice versa?

It’s the case where European is at odd with their opposite Atlantic counterpart, US. To curb deficit, European led by Germany prefers the austerity measure by cutting down the spending heavily. US thinks this is not a good idea especially when global economy is still in recovering mode. Obama lobbied hard for European to spend, but Merkell said sorry, this is European way of solving the problem. Prominent economists from US such as Krugman is arguing that by slowing down the spending, the economy will not get any better. This translates to low revenue for government, thus, cancelling out the efforts of austerity measure. Remember, the purpose is to reduce deficit in government spending. It makes sense, when the revenue is decreasing, how you could tackle deficit? When the government is reducing the budget, it is a big deal! Looks closely here in Malaysia. Without government spending, the economic activities could not thrive well. It’s a like a chain reaction, less inputs equal to less outputs. No job creation, less businesses, etc etc. But the problem with austerity measure in Europe, it affects the global economy because they are a big deal in world’s economy.

But I’m not supporter of deficit spending either. I don’t like us to be like Greece or PIIGS for that matter. Government should spend responsibly which ensure resources are distributed evenly to the community and not benefitting to cronies only. Wasteful resources should be avoided. In the case of subsidy, I’m against it from the start. I know it’s hard to take away the free candies. Thus, it should be gradually removed. It’s pretty simple, subsidy create an artificial demand and supply. It can easily lead to wasteful consumption. When price is according to actual demand and supply, we will become more responsible. Imagine when price of petrol is RM2.80 per litre, we will definitely plan ahead how to consume effectively.

I can say we are quite lucky nowadays to live in a period when nation is still growing economically. We have plenty of opportunities right here in Malaysia. I’m scared we end up like Japan one day. Japan has really lost it now. The lost decade period is still affecting them till this day. Not much job opportunity for freshies and society is aging day by day. Why this is bad, an aging society simply could not contribute productively to the economy. When the market is becoming so matured, there is not much room left to grow. They need a young vibrant society to inject some innovation. Unfortunately, when the cost of living become too expensive, not many couples intend to have many kids. The trend is happening here in Malaysia and definitely has happened quite some time in Singapore. Our grandfathers use to have 5 – 10 kids, our parents 2 – 5 kids, you? I’m assuming 0 – 2 kids. There you go, we could end up like Japan one day.

So, what's the cause of subprime mortgage crisis really?

I think even the bankers themselves do not understand the exotic instrument offered by investment banking such as Goldman (Oo yeah, they are being probed by SEC for possible fraud on this exotic financial instrument). This may explain why highly sophisticated player such as RBS also was being duped by Goldman. Ever heard of CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligation)? This is the culprit of the worse financial crisis since the great depression. So what is CDO and why this has caused so much pain around the world?

What are CDO’S?

Company A sells 10 mortgages to customers with an average built in interest rate of say 10%. Company A which now is collecting from customers monthly annuities on principals and interests of 10%. Company A does not want the annuities; therefore it sells the 10 mortgages to company B as a package. In doing so Company A has accepted to collect cash today from Company B but in doing so accepts a discount on the interest therefore company A now accepts say 7.5% interest instead of the 10% interest original interest.

Analysis

(1) Because company A has no long term interest of keeping the mortgages it is not concerned about the ability of the customer (who ultimately have to pay)to pay keep up with the payments over time.

(2)Company A knows that it is going to sell the individual mortgages as a pooled product therefore it squeezes as much from the customer in higher interest rates and principals (the higher the market value of the underlying asset – the house, relative to its true cost, the more attractive for company A when it tries to sell the pooled mortgages to company B.

Company B is not concerned about the quality of the individual mortgages making up the pooled investment product (CDO) because it, company B looks on the CDO as one product and not a set of discrete mortgages.

Company B needs to edge its bet against the cash it pays out to company A for the annuities it expect to collect. Therefore it takes out insurance from Company C.

Company C does not care about either the individual mortgages or the CDO, rather it looks on the ability of company B to make the fee payments for the insurance.

The problems?

In order for this pyramid to continue un abated, (a) the original customer has to pay above market prices for underlying asset (the house) and (b) the interest rates company A sold the individual mortgages to the customers have to be inherently high for the profit to be shared to each player in the pyramid.

Customer cannot afford to make monthly payments because the customers’ income has not change and the “basket of goods” the customer has to pay for from a fixed income has now become unaffordable. Customer breaks under the pressure and cannot make the monthly payments. What happens, next – the pyramid falls apart.

CDOs are a pyramid scheme setup to take money from the bottom to support the top. Take from first investor to pay second investor (take money from first payer to pay the second person and take from the third to pay the second, etc.,) CDOs are basically a Bernie Madoff scheme.

Walla, in easy, there is no easy way to make a huge profit. As explained above, as complex as it may sound, Goldman is just another thief that masked themselves in the name of banker. What a shame for them to receive such as huge bonuses every year!!

SAP XI/PI - Process Integration Part 2

Back to office again. However, I’m in the spirited mood. The training last week was pretty fruitful. First, my impression on middleware significance has truly transformed. Now I can see why it is the integral part of IT future. As you see, over the years, companies have invested lots of dollars to improve their IT systems. But IT is changing rapidly. From on-premise concept, now there is on-demand concept whereby rather than purchasing the infrastructure and applications, one can now subscribe this from third party vendors. All they need is just paying a monthly subscription fees. After investing lots of dollars, do you think it’s wise to throw the previous investment and invest on the new technology? When you have many different on-premise or on-demand applications, do you want to opt on integrated application by throwing away all previous applications? This is not a wise move of course. You can still opt to integrated application or even on-demand application by using a middleware application. This is the beauty of middleware application. In the complex IT landscape today, there is a need to integrate all different applications so that they can interact with each other. SAP interacts to Oracle, Oracle to SalesForce, SAP to NetSuite and many others. You see, any type of applications can interact with each other. Then, we will have the power of leverage. On-premise ERP such as SAP can leverage on on-demand CRM such as SalesForce with the power of middleware application. I see this as a future of IT landscape. Thus, I truly appreciate my knowledge on SAP XI/PI. Now it’s time to walk the talk, integrating SAP and Scorpio!

SAP XI/PI - Process Integration

Just when I thought SAP BI is the way to go, my project suddenly requires SAP PI/XI expert. Not as what I imagined it would be, now I have to embrace the SAP PI/XI first before moving to SAP BI. SAP PI/XI once was a very interesting and very much in demand. Basically, it is a middleware application, the most famous one I guess would be IBM WebSphere offering. Things are not looking that well however for SAP PI/XI because the rest of competitors also are just as reliable or much better in the performance area. Also, middleware does not have to be SAP even though you have SAP system in place. As the name suggests, middleware acts as a facilitator of information passing through from one system to another. Let say you have 2 different systems and you need some information to flow from one system to another, middleware would provide this facilities for your requirements (some mapping from SAP XI/PI with external system example as below). Thus, due to demand in this technology, SAP has came up with their own offering, basically to cater SAP customers that need to interface their SAP application with hosts of other external systems. Well, lets be fair here, SAP is a business software expert. Product like this would be an IBM or Sun domain expert and it’s hard for SAP to catch up with these guys. I’ll be positive though, learning new skill set is always exciting. The training will be conducted by SAP Malaysia soon and hopefully I’ll be able to apply the new knowledge gained for the benefits of the project.

Business Intelligence - BI

Business Intelligence is definitely a buzz word nowadays in IT industry. Why not, the big IT guys were swallowing up small time BI vendors like craze (IBM on Cognos, SAP on Business Objects, Oracle on Hyperion). For me, it’s time to plan to acquire the skills in this area or else I’ll be left out. For a start, I have started studying the current implementation in Loders Croklaan for better understanding. Well, it’s not that hard. Have you by any chance use PivotTable in Excel? If you have, it’s basically the same thing. The main objective is trying to make sense a large chunk of data in meaningful format. If you are a CEO, you don’t have time to analyse the data but rather is more interested in glancing the current status in two, three minutes. Then you can make the decision immediately. Sounds good right. That why it’s called Business Intelligence. My job currently pretty much doing the reporting for managers. For instance, recently I just completed a complex report for diesel hedging used in Loders Croklaan US. As you can see below, the report (mind you, this was the report I implemented) only consists of rows and columns which may take some time for managers to digest all the information presented.


Business Intelligence takes this to another level. It will summarize all information presented above to something like below. Nice and easily digested. There you go, from here you can make decision in minutes. Smart right? Well, that’s where I’ll be heading. Taking one step higher to world of intelligence information. Well, some of you might think this all can be done thru excel. Owh no, imagine if you have millions and millions of data. Excel max capacity is 65000 which is useful for small kind of reporting. Imagine you are making sales 1000 per day, one year ->approx 400,000, 2 years? 10 years? See how many amounts of data you can have. Business Intelligence excites me and definitely would be my next direction in SAP world.