If you live in Singapore, you might be interested to get a Credit Card, because we are *almost* a CC-nation. I call this almost because as much as I’ve been putting my card on the table, at least we don’t get the “you don’t need to sign if its less than 25USD” and stuff like that.

There are two cards which provide the most perks and would probably roll of the lips of locals: Citibank and UOB. Since I’ve done the whole route couple of years ago, I just happen to have a grouse.

When I first qualifying for my first Credit Card, the first card I applied for was a UOB Lady’s Card. And the every single other flashy cute looking thing from DBS, Standard Chartered, Citibank, ABN and what have you. I’ve since canceled them all, and kept the Lady’s Card. Which I’ve kept and used for the past four years.

Lately, for known reasons – my Dutch Credit Card which had a very low limit – bounced in New York because I was traumatized after being almost blown up on Christmas Day and decided to well, shop and shop and shop. I decided to just upgrade to a UOB Lady’s Platinum Card. Kind of like playing on the stronger currency, whether its Singapore dollars or Euros.

UOB has been a pain.

Did I mention that I’ve been a paying customer to them for the past five years? And that I’ve never missed a bill? And have almost always used their Credit Cards?

The sequence of events goes:

(1) I apply for a Lady’s Platinum, I’m far beyond their stated minimum income. I need to settle this before I fly off from Singapore.
(2) I send in three of my latest monthly statements.
(3) After two weeks I have no reply.
(4) I call UOB Call Center and they said they would call me back when they have found my application.
(5) They didn’t call me back.
(6) Few days later I receive a letter stating that they need more documents. I say that I have a werkgeversverklaring in order for us to get a mortgage from the bank. Its in Dutch, but they say its FINE.
(7) I email my werkgeversverklaring to them. They call me the next day saying that it is in order. No news for next few days.
(8) I call them again, and they say its a foreign language and ask if I have something in English.
(9) I don’t have anything in English, and retrieving it takes more time. They already have three months of salary in English! Did I mention that I submitted this application weeks ago to get the card in Singapore and I’m not going to let them fly a Credit Card from Singapore to the Netherlands.
(10) I decided that I’m not wasting all my time talking to the UOB call center. I just tell them settle it or I’m just going to cancel all my cards because this is getting stupid.

I get a call by Zen, who is settling the whole case. He seems to be helpful and he would fix this. He calls me (finally) to say that UOB is couriering me the card. Tonight. Anyway, we’ll see, at least he’s trying, so I’m going to update this possibly tonight I hope.

- As promised, I got the card. Lets see if they managed to link it up to my Internet Banking in time. -

I am in Singapore! And I finally got my order of the Uncommon cases for iPhone as well. Well, it rocks – sort of. Well, I half anticipated a case which is non-generic and what nobody has, and apparently there it was, my black and white Sadoko like princess imprinted on my iPhone case. It fits to a tee and covers the edges of the iPhone which my previous case did not do – and hence the onslaught of ugly marks. I really like it.

However, the dock area is weird. Its protruding and didn’t let me dock properly on anything possible – including the Vestalife Ladybug II speakers which I really wanted to get. Oh well, there, I saved a bunch of money for my speakers now. At least for now.

PS: I can’t wait for the announcement of some sort of Apple tablet on the 27th January too!

Nespresso Customer Service is the way it should be. After ten months of usage, my Aeroccino died. It didn’t want to switch on, and no amount of coaxing would wake it up again. So back to Nespresso it went.

I figured them to fix it and tell me to wait a couple of weeks. Instead, Nespresso gave me a brand new Aeroccino Plus along with a two year warranty starting from now. I mean that’s the way customer service should be – no waiting, no sending here and there, no parts exchange, just plain exchange for the day it broke. I’m so happy with Nespresso right now, I’m never going to buy another brand of expresso machine until whenever.

Anyway, for friends I’ve haven’t invited for ages for coffee, now you know why, now I make perfect lattes once again.

To everyone who has been waiting for me to blog – here it is! For the past few days I’ve been kind of engrossed in Sims 3. You know the kind of feeling, you just want to go home, to play the game you have been waiting all day to play. And since I’m relatively free when I’m home, and a great fan of the Sims series, I just had to play.

Prepare to be disappointed.

Let’s start with the good…

Sims 3 for iPhone review:

Crazy enough, since I had two kinds of Sims 3 to amuse me. I actually liked the iPhone version more. I was very impressed with EA’s selection of mobile games, ever since I bought the Monopoly World Edition and have been engrossed it in ever since. And since then, I’ve spent countless of hours stuck on Lemonade Tycoon, and attempted to try SimCity (thought this one was too complicated for an iPhone game).

Sims 3 starts out light years ahead of Sims 2 for the mobile which I’ve played on my brother’s Nokia. What on earth was that anyway? Here you really get a pared down version of Sims 3. Although it was not as great as you would expect for a PC version, but its nice to play on the train / bus.

Why? You get nice graphics you can turn / twist / zoom. The graphics really play a massive role in determining how nice this all turns out. And there is a range of turns your sims can do now to other sims. Instead of just a watered down version of the Sims 3, there is a now a goal system where you can complete different tasks in order to continue with the game. I heard you can even WooHoo.

Cost: 7.99EUR – Probably the most I’ve ever spent on an iPhone App

Sims 3 for Mac review:

I don’t really get this. There were nice things and bad things, but overall my reaction is more to a bad than a good.

Why? Firstly, Sims 3 is like just a step better than Sims 2 in terms of loading and land exploration. You can now see the entire town, including your neighbours and community lots. Except that you cannot go in! However, since it dispenses with the irritating loading screens you still get with the Sims 3 for iPhone, the whole game is more streamline in general. Each Sim also has personality traits now, which is very nice because you can leave them alone and they will grow up and deal with it, including the entire neighborhood. I tried to neglect a few Sims in order to kill them, but that didn’t work out. I’m a closet sadist I think.

However, its an entirely let down by the amount of items available. There’s a nice car here and there, but otherwise, you get less than half of the items available in Sims 2, and there is a store where you can buy items which if you buy sets and all, eventually turn out to be really expensive! Furthermore I felt it lacked alot of fun depth toys – like magic kits, pets, and so on.

Cost: 49.95USD for a downloadable version on GameTreeOnline.com

Seriously… I’m not very happy with this release of Sims 3. I like certain things, and it coming closer to realism. But it seems to be a atheistic upgrade from Sims 2, minus all the nice fun stuff which made Sims great. Its definitely not the upgrade from Sims to Sims 2, thats for sure. Still, I’m going to continue playing and if there are super cool things happening, I’ll definitely update it. In the meantime, I say, buy it only if you are a great fan, if not stick to Sims 2.

I like business cards.

However, recently a dutch company called “My name is E” has come up with a neat idea.

Basically it does away with business cards and allows you to exchange stuff like social networks, numbers, everything. So far it comes with a Web Interface, as well as a dongle which you can buy in order to exchange contacts.

I like this idea in general, however, the One Billionth Downloaded App Bump is Free, and it has the same features as well. Plus the fact that these ideas often only catch on if someone out there is using it as well. Nokia has tried a few times (and failed), Lovegotchi has tried, and so on so forth… Similarly, I deleted my “Bump” on my iPhone when there was absolutely nobody to bump into.

So, the app is already free. What’s stopping people from using it.

I say:

1. “My name is E” is a neat idea, although the name speaks of nothing. Hence I’m using a kitty thumbnail and it could mean anything!
2. Is there a way to exchange contacts in a better E way? Or is there a launch party where you distribute E tags/gadgets to A-listers or someone who wants to promote your product?
3. Is E able to connect up with other sorts of contact exchangers? Or could it be integrated to say.. when someone gets information and it immediately downloads it to their contact file. For Macs, it could be Address Book. For PCs, it could be Outlook.

If anyone owns an E, I would be interested to just know!

I met Sander recently, who created the iPhone App game iSjoel. Its a Dutch game obviously and when it was released in the Netherlands in February it stayed on the number one spot for a few weeks in the Netherlands iTunes App Store.

iSjoel is a very Dutch game, you get a pile of wooden round pucks, and you aim to shoot them across the board into one of the four holes to earn points. iSjoel, the iPhone App, is actually a very addictive game, because you’ll realize that due to the dynamics of the game it isn’t as easy as it apparently looks. For me, even after many game plays I only managed 115 points.

Well, since iSjoel costs less than a bar of snickers, its quite a nice deal to check out and to save time.

The payouts though, seem to belong to the Belastingdienst – or the Dutch Tax Office.

Assuming an App costs 0.99USD:
- Apple gets 30% = 0.30USD
- Developer get 70% = 0.70USD (Yeah right!)

Belastingdienst first takes away 52% or something like that, so effectively that leaves only 48% or about a mere 0.34USD for the Dutch developer. Assuming that if you manage to get on the top ten in the Netherlands, not International mind you! And that you get an high profile which hopefully people will download. If you don’t get onto the list, well, you can blog about it and maybe get slashed dot. (For the record, the price point of Dapple is too high – initial 4.99USD for it? Even after Slashdot.org he sold 17 units that day. Well Myst is going for 4.99USD, and Myst is well.. legendary)

So assuming that it sells about 10K units on the App Store for its entire run, since it stayed on the top one for 2-3 weeks. Netherlands have x number of iPhones wandering around, with x-y Credit Cards registered with the App Store, so make an estimate.

That makes about a profit of (0.99 * 0.7 * 0.48)*10,000 = 3326USD? Well, it won’t make you rich, but it is nice, since you would probably have gained the expertise of Cocoa and Obj-C for iPhone App number 2. Well, it also means that the Tax Office is taking away too much.

Its something to think about if one wants to launch an App on the iPhone App Store. Really.

Otherwise, back to iSjoel:

Usability: 4/5

Fun: 3.5/5

Would I buy it: 4/5 (I already did!)

I got an email recently to review the brand new Off! Remote, which was released on the Apple App Store. It retails for 0.99USD and it comes from the maker of VLC Remote, Rob, as Apple annoyingly allows only beta testers from the USA, Rob has kindly sponsored the App so that I can review it. The remote however, works for both WinXP, Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OSX 10.5 and later.

Simply put, Off is for the lazy human being in you, because from now onwards you do not even need to manually switch off the computer, you just use Off to do it for you. So basically after a great movie you’re sitting on the couch and want to fall asleep, you just switch it off with your Off remote instead of putting your hand to depress the on/off switch.

Very soon we’re going to be like Wall-E, and develop disproportional arms and legs because technology is doing everything for us.

Before you log in, you are required to install the Off-Helper from Hobbyist Software. If you don’t do that, the remote will scan endlessly for all the computers on the wireless network. Another thing is, the Off! Remote works only on all computers connected to your wireless network, similar to how the iTunes remote connects to iTunes. So don’t expect to just point and it works instantly.

The Off! Helper needs to then be switched on via the System Preferences. You can put a password so that your Off! Remote just switches off that particular computer.

Only then, you are ready to start the scanning for the computers on the wireless network. The scanning takes some time though, at least for my wireless network. But it eventually found Summer’s MacBook.

With that, you get four different options – Off, Sleep, Restart and Lock. Its pretty intuitive to use the remote after this step. Although when you press any option and you want to change the option you seriously need to stop it on the computer very quickly because it executes in only a few seconds. And if you want to shut down you need to make sure you are able to stop all processes because probably things like Firefox, Transmission, etc will start bugging you to manually shut things down.

Otherwise, the interface is very clean and if you can take the effort to set things up for the remote, its actually nice to be really lazy and not even get off the couch for anything again.

Get it: here.

As promised, once Vopium came out with the iPhone app, I was going to review it. Now, after registration at the website, you get a link which brings you directly to the App Store allowing you to download it to your iPhone. Previously, it brought you to the Web Interface.

The main page for Vopium is very VOIP-orientated. The keypad was simple and nice. The great thing about it is that it was very focused around the address book as well, so you could access your contacts as well. There is even a voicemail (which I never tested).

(1) Calls

Calling was nice, there are two ways of calling: via WiFi and by your local call minutes.

If there is WiFi present, Vopium will automatically use it to connect to your contact. However, if there is no WiFi, Vopium will proceed to make a local call, which in turn will redirect it to say… a call to Singapore.

When I tried to use Vopium WiFi to the USA, I could not connect (for some reason, not sure) to two different numbers. So I tried Vopium with my local call minutes to Singapore, and the call quality was relatively good. I would only be able to tell if it is really good if I had a few more test cases.

(2) SMS

Previously, I really liked the SMS provided by Vopium’s web interface. Which turned out to be the same thing here. The + allows you to access your contact list in order to send an sms, which is a really nice thing.

It did not provide the same kind of “conversations” or “sms history” like the sms on the iPhone itself. But it having SMS as opposed to what Skype and Fring did not have, was a nice touch.

And finally, in the “More”, you can both check the balance as well as top-up, making the iPhone app an all-in-one contained app which is really nice.

What I didn’t like? Phone calls still need some polishing. Vopium now offers 30 free call minutes and 30 free smses as opposed to 100 free smses. Although the website still seemed not updated yet. Otherwise, if the call plan and minutes fits you, Vopium is a good choice for making international phone calls.

What do Software geek and fitness have in common? Well, I imagine if the default sky in Windows XP to the be only sky you usually see, then you should really get on that ass!

So I have been trying to incorporate more fitness into my life, because Summer is coming and its time to bring out the bikinis to party at a nice beach or short shirts everywhere! And what a nice thing to know that Nikewomen has really upped the fitness social by including their very own Training site. This is unrelated to the Nike + iPod and its a standalone site.

I think its a nice idea, with no Nike purchase required but a lot of very tempting Nike gear. Few steps is required, you get onto their website and ignore the annoying audio pop-up experience.

(1) Get on the NikeWomen Training Website to create your profile.

(2) You pick a program from Core, Strength and Cardio. If you are beginner like me, I suggest you take Core to have a mix of both, at least thats what my instructor told me.

(3) You Tailor your workout by choosing your start date (No more Garfield’s “Diet starts tomorrow”) and workout level (frequency of the workouts)

(4) Finally, you add your buddies and invite other people to join and support you (Super idea, please invite me – I’m summerrainx!)

With this, you can then either download the widget, or the iPhone app (free!) or log onto your profile online to see your “daily” workout.

On the iPhone app: With this, Nikewomen will then configure a nice workout for you with many videos, for example the Twist and Fold, 4-Point Plank. Its an excellent start but I wished that it included a little bit more cardio. Each exercise would be 10 points each, and the iPhone app has Home, Workouts and Leaderboard to compare how you are faring amongst your friends.

There is so much potential in this! Maybe for a beginner like me I find it really nice, so if any of you could add me to your “buddy list” I would be more than happy to “train” with you!

Join the Nike Training Club: here.

When I shifted into my new house, the first item I ever bought was a Nespresso machine Magimix M100. It was also the first ever coffee machine I ever bought! I admit it was kind of fancy for a starter coffee machine, but there are very little Starbucks in the Netherlands. Let me repeat that for the Starbucks marketing people around: There is too little Starbucks in the Netherlands!!!

And I thought that Nespresso was a little too fancy for me, since on the last two occasions I had it was on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, and George Clooney seriously annoys me, but that’s also because I actually prefer young blonde guys like Leonardo Dicaprio in Titanic (Maybe that will change when I grow up). But looking though the Nespresso website came out with an assortment of recipes. And MediaMarkt was selling it for a cool 149EUR for a M100 and an Aeroccino with a rebate coupon if you Googled hard enough. So I bought it!

Now, since I have had this machine for a few months now, and I still love it alot. It has a fantastic business model for starters, as with all service-orientated models. You buy a machine at a discount, whatever, and you have to buy the capsules over and over again from the manufacturer.

So, Nespresso earns alot of money, even in the economic crisis. I can see why:

(1) You save more money making your own coffee instead of going to Starbucks
(2) Nespresso.com or boutiques is the centralized point to get your new capsules or accessories
(3) Nespresso makes great quality “instant” espressos
(4) I want to show off my Nespresso machine
(5) I don’t mind paying more for the colorful capsules which I also use to decorate my house
(6) Other kinds of weak coffee taste like brown water now

Notice how similar this business model is to the Apple one? I use an AirPort Express for the pure fact it looks PRETTIER than the Linksys one, and costs twice as much. But yes, I was initially incredibly lured to the fact that the Nespresso looked so good, how the capsules hung from the walls of the boutique, how all browsing customers were offered a Nespresso, how great customer service is.

Here’s how easy it is to DIY Latte:

(1) Pick a capsule.

There are 16 flavors altogether, there are a mix of Expresso, Lungos and Decafs. When you first sign up at the Nespresso Club, you’re given an option of a Starter Kit, with a box of 250 capsules and a discovery wooden box to show off to your visitors – it costs 86.10EUR for this.

(2) Drop it onto the box

Switch on the M100 and drop the capsule into the box. Thats the new Fortissio Lungo, one of the new Lungos available. Usually Expressos are used to make Cappuccinos / Lattee but I don’t mind the weakness. The intensity 10 is too strong for me.

I like:

- Fortissio
- Vivalto
- Finezzo
- Decaffeinato

It looks happy sitting inside.

(3) Pour milk into the Aeroccino and press the button

The Aeroccino is a work of art. Forth milk in under 60 seconds, this was the machine which convinced me that I needed a Nespresso machine – as opposed to just wanting one when I had free DE coffee in the office.

(4) Get your coffee out

Press one button to start. Press one button to stop. (This isn’t the automatic model)

This is the part you need to enjoy. The aroma of coffee filling the room…

Yeah, the great start to the day.

(5) Add the milk forth from the Aeroccino

And you’re done!

Verdict: I highly recommend this. Especially for the quality you get from a capsule, not fresh coffee beans. But it doesn’t come cheap, 0.33EUR to 0.37EUR per capsule. And the machine on average is more expensive than other competitor brands. Although if you are burning a few euros a day just on an expensive cafe, this is definitely a viable option. Furthermore, customer service at Nespresso is great. They actually called me to check if I was happy with the machine and their service, and when I mentioned I didn’t read Dutch (well I do a little), they sent an English version over.

Major thumbs-up!