Happiness Is

I'm happy when clients are happy. Clients seem rather happy today. Not really my fault. Let's hope they're still happy on Monday.

(This month's mileage claim is ridiculous. Occasional road-rage from others remains annoying. Perhaps I am a horrible driver.)

Never thought I'd be hawking shares in a $ holdings company... but the opportunity came my way. So let's kick it as far as it goes. :P So an aunty asked me to manage RM1k for her. I ain't incorporating an investment holdings company, just for that! But if more people want in, sure!

"standing on the edge of the abyss chewing broken glass" - Elon Musk on entrepreneurship

And I've decided that I should include a picture in most of my posts, just to make this blog slightly more entertaining to casual surfers. Maybe.

Ok - enough corporate distractions for the day. Back to coding for wisdom.

I guess it's fair to say that I have inherited a fairly religious approach to life. My religion is technology. You buy and sell. I do.

Starting to put cookies into Hell.

Negative thinking: well, having achieved self satisfaction many years ago... negative thinking is the only thing that motivates me to get things done these days :P

Brinkmanship: this pretty much sums up my approach to life.

Tripped Into Love?

Some people fall into relationships. Others build the relationships that the first bunch fall into :P

Capital structures... hmm

Cepat bubar lah... gatal nak orang diam mengenai pasal undi ni...

First rights of refusal, authorised capital, capital paid-in-cash, capital paid-in-kind, poison pills, SPVs, wtf... lol.

I'm the numbers guy. If it moves, I count it.

toffs, off to waste lofty coffee with tones of toffee

Bed time. Tired.

End'o'March

Wrapped up a project. Snoozed. A few minutes of social affirmation. Time to get back to studies!

0130 hours: InHouse 24-7 bandar mahkota cheras. Kids everywhere.

One constantly seeks the longest possible line of sight. Peripheral vision easily catches what is nearer. #security

Tired. Lots to think about. Mind not emptying fast enough. Also reregistering car tomorrow. Taking a break from tinkering with the engines. Reading up on theory. Reading up on Existential Types in Haskell. So much language abuse.

One attempts to minimise the duration of exposure to a morphological representation of a complex idea, so that the brain may think more of the idea's semantics instead.

Minimising exposure to the morphological representation of a complex idea, instead, lets the brain dwell more of the idea's semantics.

Today's little epiphany: 'syntax,' is the physical limitation placed (conferred) upon 'morphemes,' by the 'semantics,' of a language. The reason we say this is the case: language initially results from a structure of thought, and not vice versa.

The next day:

Slow day at the insurers and JPJ. Done with automotive trivia. Back to studies. Observe when people express annoyance - it tells you when they are vulnerable. This is the study of human temperament.

Trying to have a balance of microscopic and macroscopic targets.

"I hope it's nice when she gets there."

Bold innovation, technical precision, and the love of a community. 3 ingredients for X success. Where X=ur, biz, etc. #readingsForWork Roughly corresponds to the top product, ops value, and CX marketing niches.

Beurre fondue trickery...

Off to Bangsar to write a play. Because the best place to write a play in two days is in Bangsar lah... jom!
First time I've bootstrapped a (STAGE) script in Excel...

Detour! Fuck, I hate getting lost in Cheras. With really slow GPS.

A stimulating supper chat! As much as I would like to stay up and write more code, I have a JV to discuss in the morning. Zzz...

A Slice of the Truth

A: Idioms abuse language in the interest of spreading good sentiments.
B: THAT'S WHAT THEY'RE FOR...

Formal language is always the victim of good intentions. I wonder whose fault that is...

The next day: Warmed up for work. Did some maintenance. Off to get breakfast. Then Excel monkeying. Social work limited, for now. 1545 hours.

INTPs can be easily mistaken for ISTPs if no one understands WTF the N-neess is doing :P

2-OS-On-One-Disk Dropbox installation and use is still not working as expected. I regretfully, admit defeat. This has been a 2+ year experiment, I think.

Killed an iffy project. $1600 worth, but really not worth the uncertainty, at this time.

Corporal Punishment

Kid next door's getting beat. From the screaming, I guess it'd be shocking to hear if you'd never been beat before.

Some people cry in pain for the first time when they get into accidents. I guess if you were beat for discipline, you take more accidents before you cry again.

Generally, my life is good. I'm just concerned that I'll die on a bad day... but such is life!

Who Sets your Standards?

As long as you believe in your taste, you have a very clear target to follow. Hitting it is a matter of time.

Some people have tastes for fashion, and architecture; I personally care more about thought processes - thought is a concrete process, to me. I do find, of course, that people are often annoyed when you propose to delineate what they have accepted as their "unique," identities, or selves. In turn I'm miffed when folks don't as easily see: themselves as compositions of concrete cultural bits, or that culture itself is concrete. But we are all concerned with different problems. I picked a hard problem and solved it in college. Haven't found a harder one since. So I spend most of my time refining what has already been done, and learning how to communicate it.

Maybe that's why I have an empathic affinity for startup ideators. My own work is almost always more esoteric. They ain't see crazy yet.

Bah: and then you have these commercially-aspirant artsy types, who know what they want, and won't believe that it's not what other people want - these then, are the truly confused. I have known lots of people who made things that no one wanted. That is a different problem from not knowing what you want to make.

Outside of intellectual history, I've probably spent most manhours of my life working on web development. To think, it's just a job :)

Half a day left to work... come on... fuck you brain, WORK!!!

Noticed a last-minute-grand-deadline for a stage script. Sorely tempted. But the only quality proposal I would be able to churn out in a day, would be autobiographical. Wouldn't that be a lark.

Job done! To bed! Maybe I'll apply for a stage-writing grant tomorrow. Big if.

Kill off many variables, and life is so much simpler. Family, friends, boring ambitions, delete, delete, delete... ah! Being heartless requires much discipline. Unless you're naturally a stoner/stoic. Guess, if I am...

My prioritisation of projects in life is simple: top priority goes to projects where I'm the only person that I know who can deliver.

I guess it's what a certain narrative of upbringing does to you. Hehe.

3D Printer Price Conjecture

At some point, the price of 3D printers is going to fall through the floor, like those of digital SLRs and LCD TVs. Just wait for it. Focus on the software. :P

Immodesty

Family / Feminist Values Post of the Day

TBH, I think the article takes a (typically) imbalanced point of view. But it's a necessary part of the broader discourse.

I.e. kids should have to think about what it's like to want to be modest, and have no choices; kids should also have to think about what it's like to want to be immodest, and wield certain powers over their peers.

Elsewhere: politicians in porn? Sounds like more votes, to me. You can't cheapen political discourse. Only make it more entertaining.

FB-sized Moneh!

$560k!! It's a nice feeling, when people I've applauded in the past get quantified recognition from the market :)

3+ years from inception, I believe. This was a chap whom I brought to a former client as a developer. The client was always stubborn about maintaining a bloated feature-set (a similar, more focused firm, in the US started about the same time in 2008, and later grew and exited to MSFT for $1.2B). This developer pounced on the problem of bloat, and tried to convince my then-client to pare down the scope of his enterprise. No dice. They never worked together.

A year later, the developer showed me a prototype that he had been working on. It was good enough to trumpet. I don't think the one or two VCs I sent his way took him up, but the developer did get a significant bit of funding later that year. (Later I hear, one of the VCs made an offer, but was rejected - probably because that VC was already invested in the client above.)

Better not say too much, lest I appear to be glory hunting again. lol.

Nice one. On so many levels.

(I feel like old ben kenobi. For various reasons. Hah.)

Sexual Allocation

Sex is like gold. Timeless value, liquid market, volatile pricing, often boring. Superficially satisfying. No balanced portfolio is complete without it. Years ago, 2%, I thought, would be a fair allocation to it, in the portfolio of my time.

Some girls want a super nice guy; some guys want an unbreakable girl.

Plato: the mind is a womb; ideas are its children; the philosopher is a midwife.

I like studying body language. But when it comes to sex, I think I just like bodies.

Waitering

(As someone who always saw being a waiter as a go-to job for life.)

As far as I can tell, the customer is king, but you have the right to remove your kings. If you're an artisanal-non-customer-service-oriented production house, then put a sign up, or something. That being said, one should stick with what they say in public, and so since LDG has gone the full monty (bitches and all), I applaud them for having their own view on things, and hope that their food is good for their sake. Otherwise it seems likely that they will expire by natural causes, as a consequence of their actions. :(

First thing in the morning, and we're essaying customer service. See? Good PR for the pawn that decided to walk in front.

My take away from all of this, is that I do have time for bitches. In fact, I think a t-shirt to that effect would be darling.

Some cannot escape from their tastes. Others cannot escape from such people.

A week of uncertain outcomes. Let's begin by cleaning house and doing laundry. But first, to feed.

When your ardent fans are those whose opinions I don't trust... hmm...

Yesterday: No, no, no... I'm not the realist on this team... there are no realists here... I'm just the minimalist...

Good Game!

Someone with a history of offending women, just by being himself, should not get in the way of women trying to have a #gg ;) (Especially if they're paying for it - my excuse for not buying the last ticket at a friend's eye-gazing party.) I have nothing against women. But I may offer them limited sentiments. Some say, I may be an asshole. (On aggregate, that probably means that I am.) I promised to buy a ticket at the next party, if women complained that the first one wasn't grown-up enough. (Maybe I'm just exhibiting a fear of woman, but to heck with the preponderances... back to coding... lol)

#til that someone who's blocked me on Twitter, over a conversation on racism, is a real firestarter in the industry that I now work in. lol. Which on Twitter is... I give up trying to discuss serious arguments on Twitter - people can't follow god damn THREADS let alone hold a logical train of thought together. If I recall correctly, I would probably have prodded the "activists" hardest on their general stance that women can joke about wanting to be raped, without it having any consequences. You can imagine where that led ;P Reminiscing conversations with people on Twitter - where my position is that one might be ethical, but a moron. Some can't understand it. Silly views are not the sort that all activists would take, of course, but they are the kind of view that some militant flamers might throw out on Twitter. Which folks like me are all to happy to pounce on. Until we get blocked, suspended, and called predatory

Tomorrow's going to be a big cleaning day, at home. Potentially a quiet week at work. I wonder if I can get some other work done.

The next day: crash an eye-gazing party? No way Imma lamp-post at 200+ dates...