Pie day?

People who get excited about Pi are like people who get excited about pie. It's useless geekery.

Apparently it's possible to sous vide an egg, so that the yolk is hard, while the white is soft.

"Philosophy" should be explained to business people as "the vertical integration of thought processes".

Singapore

Day 1

Balmoral Park. Orchard. Newton. Bay Front. Bueno Vista. Dover. Right.

Camping at the cousins' in Singapore, again. Using the same bottle of soap I bought for business travel, two years ago.

Day 2

LOST IN SINGAPORE

After a day spent half in traffic, and half in coffee shops, I'm on a train home for the evening. Colleagues have gone drinking - I can't be arsed to get into that. I've got ten stations to go till my stop. Briefcase in one hand, railing in the other, I close my eyes, and feel the train beneath my feet, analysing the sounds around me, trying to locate their distance and orientation from me. It is a game, or a sport, and one I should play more often. But I have not been on trains much, these past few years.

I am going home to study Haskell. There is not much else for me to do at this point. Maybe if we get into roasting coffee, I will volunteer. Some do not think it will entertain them, but I do not foresee it boring more than any other work. Sensual work is a good complement to my conceptual studies. It is humbling, because I am insensitive to sensual details, and must make more effort to understand sensual arts. Commerce generally bores me - it is an unchallenging, unsophisticated, game of human emotional dynamics and demi math. There are harder things to play. But one has to earn a living. So nevertheless, I remain grateful for opportunities to participate in commerce where I am welcome.

Day 3

LEGAL PARTNER ACQUIRED.

Multitasking between three highly random projects can be stressful. But fortunately, at least one of them is social. :P

Got some constructive feedback on our internal planning documents, and on our outward-facing comms/pitch documents, from friends.

Day 4

Got a tour of some places in Chinatown. I suppose... there's something to be said for boring, but classic and polished, designs in any field. There's a nice antique shop here, too.

Bye Singapore. Our biennial affairs have been fun.

Other take-aways: CSHH - everything also got; Nylon - nano-sized indy roaster run by ex-financiers; Toby's Estate - Australian invasion; China Town has a couple of cute cafe/diners that say they're coffee places, but are really just neighbourhood hangouts. I did get a good sense, of what difference a bunch of couches makes, to loungify an otherwise pure-dining setting, from Group Therapy.

Eye gazing parties

A.k.a. silent speed dating.

How it's supposed to go:

trepidation, eyes averted, hope, eyes reverted, boredom, skin trembling, hypotheses about air-conditioning, humourous smiles, goal

How it tends to go:

ew... zits...

Otherwise, a good reminder: cocking one's head to the right puts the object of vision more into one's left field of vision; cocking one's head to the left puts the object more into one's right field. (What little we know about) the neurological processes which ensure in the subject are well documented. Mirrored insight in the object's brain should also be taken into account.

Mondaze again

Monday. Parked in TTDI till late. Will be in Singapore for a coffee expo later this wek. So working on unpaid software research meanwhile.

Ice: the difference between a shot of tar, and a complex, cooling drink. I'm almost certain this is considered weird.

Tidying up some code formatting, before I try to improve its semantics.

Broke (haskell-platform). Re-apt-get-ting.

(Coffeeshop visitors: what a beautiful family. Hope they don't piss that kid off, as the years go by.)

Stabilised code. Discovered -XCPP changes the syntax of multiline text literals.

Need a break. Going for a walk.

Now for some mundane bean counting... structuring an employee stock options scheme. The basic idea, is to model investors' targeted return on capital, to treat employees as asset managers, and to structure stock grants as an outperformance bonus. Wondering if my math would be better if I hadn't been fiddling with compiler language extensions all day. -_- Ok. This ESOS thing was hard, but I think my numbers balance out. Now I feel like a proper amateur investment banker. :-S

What to do on a Tuesday. More code, perhaps.

I should make some curtains.

If I keep plugging away at this... every datum in my configuration file is going to become a type... -_- #haskell

Is it just me, or are companies with full-caps proper names a bit of a Chinaman phenomenon?

Ack. Finally exorcised all POSIX regex usage from my code... not sure if it's faster, but it's cleaner.

Revising older parts of this application-in-progress, to figure out how they work.

I prefer I stressing out over my hobbies, and seeking relaxation at the work place.

Headache. Too much mucking around with dirty code. Break time.

Mostly, specialists strike me as bimbotic herdlings. But, I'm sure I seem quite irrelevant to them, too... Rage against the bimbotic recreators.

Steak saute.

Lifting a few hundred lines of very flat code into an encapsulating module structure. This is going to take a while.

What depresses me is the motivation that many have for their work. People? Good grief.

Ok. Stabilised version 2. Time to build write version 3 from scratch.

It's been a hellish fortnight for Haskell studies. But a number of useful techniques were picked up. Road trip to SG for coffee tomorrow.

Ran for oxygen... fruit... black tea... wondering if I can muster an effort to kick off v3 of this Haskell web framework...

(I must be the only one around here that's happy for tax day. It makes me feel more a part of society. heh.)

Pen, and paper.

Let's go for a minimal modification of HTTP semantics now, shall we...

Let me try and un-CakePHP-fy my paradigms, and reduce the ontology some more. Rather than having a two-tiered encapsulation of Controllers and Actions, I'm now thinking of just having Controllers, but branched, within a folder structure, since that's how my Haskell compiler goes about looking for modules, by name, any how.

Conflicted. Tempted to bite off more than I can chew.

After poking at it for a little while, I have concluded that I don't have the head space to juggle web app compiler design, and two fieldtrips on two separate topics in the next three days. :(

Nap. Had some time to think about how to optimise version 2. Laundry, and coding, and defrosting of fish for breakfast.

It's Wednesday already. 5am. Time to wash up and head south for field trips. But, I am not done. Careful stitching. And done. For now. 0517 hours.

Thinking about what it'd be like to be a blind computer programmer. a) less productive b) aural interface c) change style

C) change style would involve a higher ratio of thinking:typing. Something I should probably do anyway!

In Johor Bahru - getting down to work...

Plebs

Moralists... in the broad sense, are those who have a preference for certain human behaviours. Those whose behaviours run crosswise with the preferences of moralists, tend to fall into cognitive category of subhumans. What makes one, a pleb? Any one of these, at least, to someone...

• You work for someone.
• You don't work anywhere for long.
• You're fashion-conscious.
• You're not fashion-conscious.
• You vote.
• You don't vote.
• You aspire to corporate success.
• You don't aspire to material success.
• You don't know your wines.
• You don't know your coffees.
• You talk as if you know your wines and cheeses, but you really don't.
• You care about poor people.
• You don't care about people
• You find that you learn from travelling.
• You find that you learn nothing of fundamental importance from travelling. 

The list just goes on. I guess, we each have our biases.

Weekending

35 / 3560 days. Hopefully I can make a good life of this F&B thing. Did a fuckload of digging around the Kuklewicz regex data structures before the game. Feeling moderately productive. Off to game.

(Gap year? Jerng doesn't do gap years. Jerng does gap decades.)

Someone got delayed because a friend was robbed at knifepoint by a cabbie. Robbery fact (not just the subset of which is rape): if you look like a target, the world is more likely to take you. Sorry.

Still managing to maintain my social intelligence. Let's hope that maintenance costs never rise above a minimal level.

Let's see how much study I can get done before the sun rises. Then sleep. Then cleaning the flat.

People work most within the category by which they most easily define themselves: towards material, social, cognitive, or other goods.

And with that, I'm off to bed. Till the morrow.

Awake. Going downstairs to eat. Back to clean house. Then, groceries, perhaps. Or code.

House is cleaner, and I am happier.

Deciding to avoid non-premium work in programming has been a good decision. Working on sensual jobs brings some balance to my life. The last things I need interfering with my technical research projects are sensual noise and human relationships. But having those as part of my day job makes me feel more like a member of society.

When times are slow, I sometimes wish I'd picked an easier life. Hehe.

2117 hours. A bit late for groceries. Nevertheless, a caffeineless day, so far.

Best decision implemented over the last few years: finally cutting off the nuclear family. Other decisions, not so much...

Not a bad week. Moved JV-proceedings along, at day job; figured out Kuklewicz's Haskell regex APIs, at home; cleaned house; bed; up soon for incorporation.