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What Matters Now

From the total of 193 fined, I am sure many cases went unreported.

Via www.kwsp.gov.my

In its effort to protect members’ savings, the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) has continued to take action against employers for defaulting on their employees’ EPF contributions with a total of 193 employers slapped with fines by the courts totalling RM278,970 during the third quarter of 2009 (Q3).

“The rate of defaulting employers during this quarter has registered a drop in which only 1.75 per cent employers had defaulted compared to 1.91 per cent in the previous quarter. While this suggests that increasingly more employers are aware of their role in their employees’ retirement wellbeing, the EPF will still persevere with its efforts to ensure that employers continue to comply with the law,” said Nik Affendi Jaafar, EPF General Manager for Public Relations.

Click here for full story.

Is this an issue with education? Are business owners in Malaysia that ignorant about basic labor laws? Or the risk and consequences of getting caught is far lesser than the penalty that would be imposed on these fly by night business owners?

From the above report, the EPF’s General Manager seems to have missed the point. 1.75% of employees who defaulted this quarter and 1.91% of employees who defaulted of previous quarter should not be labeled as a drop, unless both quarters has the same number of employers. This is when statistics are mistakenly used in the wrong context. It certainly does not suggest an increment of awareness as mentioned by the EPF’s GM.

This reminds me how politicians used the very same tactic to confuse the public.

On another EPF-related story, only about 23% of EPF members have nominated beneficiaries.

Via TheEdgeMalaysia.com

Only about 23% of the Employees Provident Fund’s (EPF) 12.4 million members have nominated their beneficiaries, said its general manager for public relations Nik Affendi Jaafar.

In a statement today, he said: “As your nomination determines who will receive your EPF savings, it can offer some financial protection to your family should death suddenly occur. Nomination will not only ensure speedy payment to your family, but will also help to spare your loved ones from unnecessary suffering.”

The EPF is launching an awareness drive to remind members on the importance of nominating beneficiaries for their EPF savings. It will be running an advertising campaign from today until Dec 21 through the radio and newspapers.

The next key question is, of this 23% nominated beneficiaries, how many percentage are up-to-date? The last time I logged into my KWSP’s i-Akaun, I do not remember seeing my nomination details. No, I am not even thinking of asking KWSP to allow me to change my nomination online, because I think that would be a bit too much. Just let me know my latest nomination details would be good enough, because I would think that nomination details is definitely no more important than displaying the balance of my EPF amount.

Or why not simply just use some ‘default settings’, like what they did with The Distribution (Amendment) Act 1997? If you are not married, the default nomination setting would be Father and Mother, then to your siblings and then to your grandparents. If you are married, then it would be your legal spouse, then your legal issues, and then your parents, your siblings, your grandparents and so on. This ‘default setting” would definitely be better than letting the money go Amanah Raya Berhad.

And I’ve recently received an email from a friend, Jodie, with some KWSP nomination tips and it goes like this:

If ONE (1) of your Nominees in the EPF Nominees list dies, automatically the whole arrangement (EPF Nominees list) is VOID .. Meaning if, you only put in One (1) name & unfortunately he/she dies before you – automatically EPF will channel your EPF money to trustee of AMANAH RAYA upon your death.

Even though if you have few names in the EPF Nominees list, – the whole arrangement is VOID & none of the individual names left in the EPF Nominees list will get their portion & automatically EPF will channel your EPF money to trustee of AMANAH RAYA upon your death.

Piece of advice – if any of the your Nominees in the EPF Nominees list dies, please do immediately approach the nearest EPF counter & present the Death Certificate of the individual & register your NEW / LATEST Nominee in the EPF Nominees list + NEW / LATEST percentage .

If, you & the other party (maybe spouse) involved in the same misfortune (accident / illness) that caused death to both yourself / spouse please, please, please alert your siblings / relatives / parents to immediately approach the nearest EPF counter & share the information within 3 days to AVOID all EPF money to be surrendered to trustee of AMANAH RAYA .

Upon surrender to trustee of AMANAH RAYA, your children will have to battle the money thru 3 channels;

Majlis Agama
Pejabat Tanah
Mahkamah

The normal period via above 3 channels usually takes 2-3 years (except if you have inside/tip top connection) at Amanah Raya.

I’ve always thought that in the event of the death of one of the nominated beneficiary, the remaining beneficiaries who are still alive and kicking will automatically inherit the entire EPF fund, with the percentage of the fund’s value adjusted according to their initial ’shareholding’. I need to give KWSP a call tomorrow morning. Some things are just not that obvious.

You must have already heard about the RM50.00 service tax imposed on all credit cards (incuding supplementary cards at RM25 each). I certainly do not think that such a blanket policy is aimed at curbing over-spending. I am sure not every plastic users in Malaysia are behind on their payments. Such an act is only a sign that the government is running low on cash, and for all you know, they are going to charge a new road tax for every tyres you have in your car- which includes your spare tyres!

Here’s a nice article from Tony Pua on his thoughts about the new Plastic Policy by our beloved Government…

I MUST say that Budget 2010, announced by Datuk Seri Najib Razak on 23 Oct 2009, contained quite a few surprises for better or for worse. And my observation is from someone who has pored through the government’s budget over the past five years.

For one, I’ll have to start picking up the phone over the next few weeks to cancel my many credit cards. An unwelcome announcement was that beginning 1 Jan 2010, we will be taxed for every card we own, regardless of whether we are or aren’t in debt.

At RM50 per card, and RM25 per supplementary card, that’s probably enough to set me back at least RM700 per annum. Yes, I have indeed a whole string of credit cards, but thankfully without any debt attached to them.

Click here for full article…

Been cleaning and battling the irritating IFRAME virus on a few blogs for the past few days. If you have been trying to access Meshio.com and was warned by your anti-virus program that Meshio.com is trying to infect your computer with a virus, the bad news is that it’s a valid threat, but rest assure that I am once again being sucked into the role of a system administrator doing my best to get rid of the virus.

For the record, I have cleaned the virus for the 2nd time on Meshio.com and for other blogs I’m running, up to as many as 5 times. So, do not be surprise to find Meshio.com compromised again. Sigh…the more doors you have, the higher the risk. Just when I thought I have closed up all the ‘doors’, the malware programs seems to be able to discover a new one and start creating a mess in the system once again. From the discussion with other webmasters, it seems that the most attractive entry points were the FTP client, a tool which is used to transfer files from your computer into the hosting server. If you think that your site has been compromised, here are some very relevant advice from Adrian on how you can up your defense against these malwares.

Change all FTP pwd immediately.

Download the whole site to hdd. do a scan using a special written files, remove it all infected files. replace it.

Do another scan on your website using this:… Read More
http://unmaskparasites.com/

Make sure all those who has FTP access to it, they are equipped with antivirus and updated virus db. Then only give them the new FTP pwd.

PS: if want the file i can ask my team engineer to email to you, we write in php.

And here’s another short anti-malware guide from Pin…

You might also like to take the following preventive measures to protect your website from malware:

1. Upgrade your Adobe Reader to the latest version
2. Install anti-virus software like Malwarebytes and Comodo
3. Use SFTP instead of FTP
4. Remove all malicious coding from your website
5. Upgrade to latest WordPress if you have a self-hosted Blog
6. Change your FTP password

I just cannot think of a really good reason why would anyone spend their leisure time engineering malicious programs to cut down the productivity of people they don’t even know, except for some boost to their ego.

Maybe there is really something sinister going on behind all these virus attacks after all.

There’s just so much similarity between these online viruses and the real-life ones (e.g. H1N1), all the anti-viral companies makes a huge profits from these ‘engineered’ outbreaks! The fear that was created by real-life viral pandemics would have easily justified policymakers all around the world to start mass vaccination on their citizens, in the name of containing the spread of the disease. Similarly, in the virtual world, anti-virus companies are laughing their ways to the banks each time an effective virus was set loose and infected millions of people’s computers worldwide.

Just think about it, why do the car manufacturers continue to churn out automobiles fueled by cartel-controlled petrol? There are already so many other alternatives available to replace petrol. Also, look at the disaster created by corporations that provided genetically-modified crops to Indian farmers, where the farmers are resorting to suicide due to their failing crops and their inability to pay the debts owing to these corporations which promised them lucrative yields. It’s a vicious and very profitable business model, a prevalent feature in any capitalistic economies.

I am all for businesses that are out to make profit. That’s the whole reason businesses are for anyway, but a business should never make profit by taking advantage of others.

A Typical Web Development Project
So, it’s finally time for you to look into building an online presence for your company’s website? Or it’s about time that you revamp the website after hearing from your boss that the website is looking really dull for the 999th times.

I would assume that you have a budget for your web development project. I wouldn’t go into how you should come up with this budget, but a budget would give the developer and yourself a rough idea on the scale of the development. You cannot have a RM799.00 budget and ask for everything under the sun. A budget would also allow you to prioritize what features to include in your website, and what features should be implemented in the subsequent phase of your web development pipeline.

Ok, after the Management has approved your budget, what should you do next? Naturally, the next step is to find a competent developer who can deliver the project fast, cheap and beyond expectations, as unrealistic as that might sound.

So, you post up the jobs, ask around your friends who’s in the IT business and do a search on Google for ‘Malaysia cheap and good web design companies’ or ‘cheap web designers’ or even ‘freelancers who work for free’. And after that, you shortlist 5 of them and asked each them to give you a quote. And you waited for a few days before all the quotes come in, and after looking at the figures you decided to meet with 2 of the cheapest one, and one that quoted the highest (just because you were curious why this particular designer is so different from the rest).

And after interviewing each of them, you finally nail down one company, let’s call them Super SEO Sdn Bhd, and the project begins by paying the web development company a 15% down payment. The project usually begins with Super SEO collecting all the information that you want to put up on to the web for the world to see. All the annual reports, the magazine scans and all your interviews with the newspapers. Next, you also require Super SEO to come up with a few prototypes to give you the ‘look and feel’ of the design. As a matter of fact, you don’t really know what you want, but heck, you can always change your mind, right?

And so it goes on for a few weeks, with Super SEO proposing their revised color scheme for the Nth times, while you continue to browse at your competitors’ website to see what they’ve been up to lately, and to see if there’s any cool features that you might be able to ‘steal’ from them.

If all of the above sounds familiar to you, then you’re very likely to find yourself with a website that did not bring in any positive impact in your sales. Well, at least now your company has a website, and you can include the cool URL on your name card and ironically, other than the URL, there’s really nothing inside the website that you could really shout about to your potential visitor. You begin to wonder why did you spend RM8,000 on the web development project.

My advice? Just get a domain name and have a single page with your company’s address on it. That will probably only cost you about RM150.00. Nothing to shout about either, but it’s going to have the same impact on your name card.

Hold it, now you’re saying that you are really, really serious about building your online presence and how else, other than the method explained above, can you go about it?

Who’s the Architect?
Here’s what I’ll propose, and I think this would definitely work much better than the commonly-used method illustrated earlier.

First, you must know what you want out of the website, and how the website will affect your business’s bottom line. No web developers on this planet can give you this answer, simply because they are just that- web developers. They know nuts about your business, and probably won’t be interested to listen to you brag about your rag-to-riches stories.

Contrary to what you may have been told, if you are going to build a website that works for you, the key architect of the site is none other than you and the people in your company. If it’s a revamp of your existing website, the feedbacks that you’ve gathered from previous visitors, clients and the web statistics will also be an important source of information in working out the blueprint of your web development project.

You should be the person deciding the metrics you want to benchmark the website with. How many visitors are you expecting after the revamp? What keywords do you want to position your website with? Which languages do you think you should translate your site into? Which countries are most likely search about your industry and what kind of search engines do they use? Do you have a department in your company that would be able to tap into the company’s web resources and improve their service delivery?

And if you still think that your web developer is going to do all these for you, you’d better rethink your purpose of developing/revamping the website.

The Blue Print is All You Need
So, it’s really not rocket science. What I am really suggesting is that you need to first identify your web development’s need. Figure out the benchmarking metrics of your website and the conversion ratios you are hoping to accomplish. Let everyone in the company chip in and contribute in the planning phase. Get the blueprint of your project done and make changes whenever a better idea or suggestions come along. It’s 80% cheaper to change the features on the drawing board than after you’ve got your website up on the net.

It’s very tempting to hire a web developer based on their portfolio and their client base. Yes, these are important attributes which will help you determine whether they can deliver what you want, how you want it and when you want it. Yet, it’s even more important to engage a web developer who listens to your needs and can help to ensure your blueprint is realistic and achievable. An experienced web developer who can help you to come up with the final blueprint can also dramatically reduce your risk. The blueprint will usually only be a fraction of the entire project cost, but it’s also the foundation of the entire project. With this blueprint, you will have a clear idea of what to expect from the website and you can even bring around this blueprint to any web designing companies which can execute the blueprint for you, exactly the way you want it. Again, this can help to further reduce your development cost and also to ensure that you will not be ‘surprised’ with the end product.

Conclusion
A website is becoming one of the most important tools in an organization’s public communication strategy. You can deliver an impressive message by providing the information that your visitors are searching for with the least effort or you can be turning off potential customers with a few badly designed product purchasing forms.

Whatever it is, I would like to emphasize again my point: Your website is your business!