Car Park Technology

I strongly dislike Tampines Mall. It’s very crowded, and the mall car park has minuscule lots arranged in strange geometric patterns. The last time I was there, I scratched the left rear end of the black monster car while trying to exit the mall car park via an ascending narrow curve of a road. So I even have a souvenir of the horrid trip.

However, my impression of the car park has improved slightly. This is because the entire building, including the car park, is managed by Capitaland, and now, Capitaland car parks have a very useful feature: Each parking lot has a heaven light above it. Red light means “occupied” and green means “available”.



So it’s very cool, you can look down the row of never ending red lights and race towards the lone green one. Sometimes, I love technology.

The car park is actually brightly lit but I saturated the colours so the red and green lights are more obvious, but now it's too saturated and you can't see anything but the lights. The dark shiny blocks would be cars.



So why did the Mother and I ended up at Tampines Mall today. Earlier this year, I think it’s either over Chinese New Year or during the sis’ wedding, my cousin Joseph (whom my sister’s in-laws said reminded them of Tony Leung!) was over at our home.

Joseph works for Starhub, which provides cable TV services. He observed that my household was using first generation cable TV setup boxes, and expressed controlled dismay, and gently urged us to upgrade. Most Singapore households have the more advanced DIGITAL setup boxes and the techkie ones have the most advanced HD setup boxes.

So today we decided to quit being laggards and blend in with the average Singapore household, and install the DIGITAL ones. For that to happen, we have to make a trip to Tampines Mall to visit Starhub.