Having lived in Singapore for almost a year now that perception hasn’t changed. All of the toilets I have seen have been spotless.

I had to laugh when seeing the Lonely Planet Six Degrees episode for Singapore where there was a segment about the ‘Restroom Association Singapore‘ and their ‘Happy Toilet Program’. I mean where else but Singapore? If you’re not quite sure how to keep your toilet happy they even have a checklist.

I often laugh when I read the local free daily newspapers and the types of events and occurences that make the news. See Singapore is a pretty safe place and the crime rate is low so what can they write about to fill the papers?

When I first arrived there were ongoing articles about people not standing for elders on the train and then there’s the ‘Ground Zero’ or citizen journalism articles where people write in about some peeping Tom, or someone parking in a no parking bay. One of today’s articles was about people camping on the beach despite there being a no camping sign. Its reassuring to know that everything just works here and there really isn’t that much to complain about. Its actually quite comical reading the paper here.

What made really laugh today though was a half page colour article saying that Singaporeans need to improve their toilet etiquette. Its that bad apparently that the Restroom Association has launched the Lets Observe Ourselves (LOO) campaign.

Thank you Singapore for making life so easy.

Anyway Apple have a new funny new ad that makes fun of Microsoft spending more money on advertising than fixing the product - take a look:

Explicit Yoghurt, Frolick - Holland Village, Singapore

Originally uploaded by grazzzz

I headed down to Holland Village today to do the shopping and open a new bank account; I thought cheque books were for old people, but they’re still used a lot here in Singapore.

Anyway I stopped for a frozen yoghurt and being the kind of guy that I am I was easily amused at the slogans used to promote the yoghurts.

You can see some of the others on Flickr.

There’s been a recent addition to Gmail labs called Advanced IMAP Controls. 

Its really useful in that it lets you choose which labels you enable IMAP for. So no more Junk folder on your iPhone or in Mail. You can also turn off IMAP for ‘All Mail’ which will also free up some download time.

We all know that nothing satisfies like a good old meat pie, but apparently the ladies prefer to see us blokes eating salad.

This latest AdRants post shows off a great new ad from Carlton Mid. Certainly made me laugh and take a few seconds to think how much I miss the Aussie sense of humour.

I also like to upload my photos and share with friends. Tagging photos however when you’ve gone crazy snapping all your friends takes time and is often left for one of those bored afternoons when you have nothing better to do.

Well according to MarketingVox this may soon be a thing of the past. Google’s Picasa Version 3 includes facial recognition software… sounds kind of scary!

Could that type of feature lure people away from Facebook over to Orkut?

I downloaded it at work today to give it a crack and was quite impressed. It has a very simple interface keeping most of the screen free to show what’s most important, the web content. It also has a series of other features and benefits that I didn’t notice straight away. What I did notice was the ease to import all of your settings (bookmarks, passwords etc) from Firefox meaning I was up and running in seconds.

Unfortunately it hasn’t yet launched for the Mac, but you can leave your email address with Google and they’ll keep you up to date.

You can read more about the browser at the Google blog.

The latest instalment of what makes me laugh in Singapore was one of the posters on the wall.

I’m a big fan of coffee, and I love my french press at home as well as the Espresso machine, but maybe all these years I should have been using a sock?

The coffee there has been prepared the same way since 1944 - I just hope they’ve changed the sock. Needless to say, I opted for tea…