Appraising your current employer

Have you ever think of how satisfied are you with your company, in the quantitative way?

Every now and then, your employer and/or supervisor will conduct appraisal on your attitude, commitment and performance, usually as a formal basis for increment and/or promotion. In fact, you can also conduct appraisal to assess your job satisfaction, security, working environment, management commitment, career path, etc.

Currently, there is a survey ongoing to help you appraise your company, top management, immediate supervisor, and co-workers. All this will relate back to your job satisfaction and security. The survey is pretty comprehensive with quite a lot of questions, helping you to assess your company from every angle. You may expect to take about 20 minutes or more to finish it.

Good news is, beside being able to assess your employment, by taking part in this survey, you also have chance to win cash price sponsored by Cari Internet S/B.

Click here to participate in the survey.

You might also like to read my other post about identifying and getting your dream job.

Google to retire the AdSense Referrals program

If you have visited to this blog before, you might have noticed the invisibleShield ads that I put up recently. That heavy duty scratch-proof protection film for gadgets such as handphones, PDAs, digital cameras, etc. is really a superb product that I sincerely recommend to you. Now since Google is going to retire the AdSense Referrals program pretty soon, I've removed the invisibleShield referral ads from my blog.

The other two referral ads were Google Pack and Firefox. Google Pack consists of a bunch of free software provided by Google, including the famous Google Desktop, Google Earth, Picasa, Photos Screensaver, Skype, Google Talk, etc.

From Google Analytics, I know that close to 38% of visitors to my blog is browsing with Firefox, which shows that it is a good product recommendable to you. Click the image below to enlarge it and see the statistic as reported by Google Analytics for this blog.



Since Google is going to retire the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August 2008 soon, the above 3 referral ads have been removed from this blog by now. Anyhow, I still strongly recommend them to you because they are really good products.

High inflation rate accelerated the M-shape society formation

During the parliament meeting on 23 June 2008, when answering a question from Tan Sri Dato’ Abd. Khalid (Member of Parliament for Bandar Tun Razak) regarding the hiking price in petrol, food and other commodities, our Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Amirsham A. Aziz stated that if we move the poor line condition (paras garis kemiskinan, PGK) from the current RM800 to RM1,500 (which reflects the actual situation more accurately), the national poverty rate in Malaysia will rise tremendously from the current 3.7% to 24.3%. He also mentioned that the government has risen the definition of low income group for those with monthly income less than RM2,000 now.

Frankly speaking, living is really very difficult for Malaysian family with household income below RM1,500 nowadays. Even those with income below RM3,000 can sense their situation as "new poor" in the M-shape society. Data from the Economic Planning Unit (EPU) as revealed by Datuk Amirsham above indicates that at least a quarter of the Malaysian family has fallen into the poor now.

If this critical situation is not tackled promptly and effectively, we can foresee an increase in crime rate and potential social instability that might risking to possible violent actions, which has already happened in certain regions on the globe now. We hope that our government, the ASEAN, UNESCAP, and all other international bodies can look into the situation seriously and come out with workable remedy plans to ease this globally affected economic condition before it worsen further.

Meanwhile, for us as citizen living in this hard time, we have to strive in finding our ways from falling below the poverty benchmark. As the inflation is fast moving, saving alone is not sufficient, we have to increase our income level to fight the rising poverty line, that might gone up to RM4,000 if the petroleum price climbs up to the scary US$200 per barrel. (I hope this will never happen, at least not in the near future.)

By the way, if you are interested to read about the debate in Malaysia parliament meeting on 23 June 2008, especially Page 6, you can click here to download the official statement document.