Comfortable Creativity

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suburbia in 2013; same shit, different day; feels almost like 1993, and it might be fairly similar in 2043

One of the things about myself that comes to mind today, is that I like to throw my thoughts out over timeframes of about 25 years. Anything lasting less than 15 years feels like an operation - and I start taking conservative positions. But beyond 20 years, I feel like I have some leeway for innovation.

It's probably due to the way I was raised. Most of the time, I was working on getting into university. (By the time I was actually doing that, the idea had already become boring, and I was already pessimistic about social prospects.) I guess if you spend 1.5 decades of your life studying a 3,000-year-old tradition, everything on much shorter time frames just feels like kids play.

Voting for change? Bollocks...
Innovative technology? Bollocks...
Make loads of money? Bollocks...
Fall in love? Bollocks...
Raise a family? Ditto.
Build a company? Ditto.
Run a country? Ditto.

All these things happen every day. People make them happen. I still appreciate the point of view that these aspirations are middling in quality. To be exceed these limitations, one can only aspire to the unexpected, and that includes none of these.

Back to the lab, inside my head.

Of course, a perspective such as this is regularly pooh-pooh-ed by spectators. But it's something I perhaps grew accustomed to over the first ten, or so, years of life.

Horrorshow, Malaysia, Plain Horrorshow...

Recent sedition arrests: dark days? kids... we just turned off your training lights... lol...

He was known for saying, "look what terrifies you, in the eyes," so they bound him, and bound his eyes with hungry worms for an hour.

So, it's funny to read about people just beginning to feel about Malaysia the way I have felt for fifteen-or-so years.

Where's My #$^(@& Campaign?

Ok... maybe my initial estimate of USD 165,000 for the free publicity generated this week by the PDRM for our dissidents... was a little too low... the New York Times reports. Apparently BBC did too. Etc.

About 3.2% through this decade. What have I achieved? What must I next achieve? These thoughts consume me, today. 1x web framework in alpha. 1x client well on the way to launch. 1x deep dive into 3rd wave coffee theory. 4 months. Ok lah. But what if I kid myself, and it's all a terrible underachievement? The problem with avoiding the mediocrity of organisations (including the top tier), is that it is hard to live with one's own judgment. Still my own best friend, and my worst enemy. :) It is good to return to a familiar place of mind. I wrote an essay about this when I was 16 - it was homework.

Bartender, Bartender...

... what's the difference between a barista who makes espresso-based coffees, and a mixologist in a booze joint? This question came up during some chats about HR training design, specifically about how to answer particular questions from customers.

My elevator speech response so far is roughly:

A booze mixologist spends most of their time being an encyclopedic decanter - a lot of time is spent pouring things to particular measurements. An espresso barista actually has to grind and cook... stuff that wilts in a minute, which is also sensitive to environmental humidity, to be cooked in very small quantities, at 9 atmospheric pressures, in 30 seconds. That, to me, is the main difference.

The point was raised to me at some point in my readings of Sprudge.

Social Life and Tears

Over the years, there have been occasions when I have taken offense at criticism that I am unemotional. I'm not sure why I do, but the fact that I do, is probably justification in itself. I don't often cry, but I still do. A few years ago, a dude hacked of my little finger and then hit me on the head with a steering-wheel-lock, and I sobbed. A little. It hurt. I understand what hurt is. There were four of them. I understand what it is to feel helpless. But maybe, I am just less easily hurt, and less prone to feeling helpless than many people whom I meet. Which brings me to the question, where do I find others like me?

Need to downshift and reduce empathy with people who don't have a choice about their empathies. So help me think.

Sex in the City (har har)

I regret that investment that I made in Myanmar. It was a huge undertaking, and almost immediately evident that nothing good came of it (for me). Talent turns out to be an extremely risky asset class - it can absorb capital, appreciate it frankly, and frankly disappear. :) And all that makes me wonder... if I need to quit making time for other people, and just focus on myself...

So at this point, I'm wondering if selling my car, forfeiting this mortage, and renting closer to work is a bankable venture. Lol indeed (It's not the drive, but the probability that I might end up dating someone who doesn't like housemates is killing me. Hahahha if I rent in the city, I will have housemates. Then if I date such a person, I'll have to move again. Fts. Lol.)

Conclusion: avoid tossing more low-risk assets; get smarter to deal with drains on time. Aside: maybe stop dealing with drunks. Maybe.

Reflection: then again, as much of a short-term investment as it was, it was also repaying a due favour. So I guess, all's fair... :)

Weekly

Monday

Up. Slow day ahead. Third quartile of the reading. Let me paint the rusty spots on my car first.

Done with routine maintenance for the day. Off to engage routine ops...

Something tells me I'm gonna be that 60 yo bloke with the vegetable cart, and no time for science. :)

Got lost with Apple Maps again. Scoped out the signs of weakness from sadly, recently opened cafes. Saw signs of strength in others.

We need deadlines to work backwards from, otherwise the subplans will never happen. "Pushing On a String" to Bon Jovi's Living on a Prayer #consultingMusicVideo

Huge day. Now only 1x gatekeeper away from moving from zero-marcomms to a geolocated 500,000 physical eyeball campaign.

Ooh my, so flattering, that's what getting machines to write nice things about you will do... http://osrc.dfm.io/jerng

Ate cucumbers. Going to bed.

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The next day.

Enable 2x Youtube playback #neverEnoughTime youtube.com/html5 (enable html5 trial, and reload your video; click the "gear" icon)

Just realised yesterday that some coffee tastes like soy sauce because they're both that colour for the same reason.

I'm not really a food person. But I've always figured the F&B business to be a good one.

Never underestimate the value of sleep.

If boys make your head hurt, well, girls make my head hurt too. It never ends. Just give up, and study.

THIRTY PAGES TO GO... come on Sprudge...

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Wednesday

Up. Back to shoveling mundanities. :) enthusiasm gets chores done...

All consumers, dominant, or submissive, are ultimately needy. Hence there is work for us to do.

10 pages left. Back to Sprudge... Caught up to April 2013. Well that's enough then. I did my (self-assigned) homework. What next?

Called into the city at 5:48pm... city council closing streets here and there... detouring in rush hour traffic. Woohoo! Logjam. Parking and walking instead.

May: Did chunk of work. Did chunk of study. Checking resources. Can I afford to date? Not the fuckin' chasing. So, to the batcave...

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Thursday

First things first. Iced water. Laundry. Then what to do with this day... pick a project, pick a project, hmm...

Morning exercises. Reminding myself, when I look at something, to recognise its geometry first, instead of the concepts in my head.

asm.js : I am glad they are working on this. In 2011/2012, I tried to ask on SO (roughly) how it might be done, and got run out for "trolling". :P Admittedly, I probably didn't ask the question very well, about how to reduce "expensive" features of JS at the language layer, to make it easier to compile to faster lower-level representations.

Washer tub auto-clean; realestate process on track (neverending); asm.js rockin; news from the chick: she's happy. #happythoughts

Not feeling super confidant about the storyboard. Perhaps I will force myself to work on software for the rest of this month.

Too many long-term projects; no short-term incentive to pursue any one; some coordination required; next, breakfast, and coffee.

Another day another tactical error. Managed not to fall asleep in the car, and managed not to run out of gas.

Light reading is refreshing. Or maybe it's of a different colour than what I'm used to. I wonder where my mind will be in a few days.

Thoroughly over-educated in the dimension of the humanities. Unknown cultures do not intrigue me. I guess it's a level of abstraction.

Being incredibly dorky today. No wonder past peers have disowned me. Deviance from popular norms, I suppose.

Technology consultation scam in progress. Thank heavens the target ain't buying it. Sell smarter, kid. #MBAblabbering

On slow days like this, I doubt the quality of my macroeconomic strat. But I suppose, the only thing I want to do is micro, for now.

Indifference curves, convexity of products, fob vs. cif - today's a refreshing day of varied flavours. A cocktail of stimuli.

life's only exciting when there's an emergency to be repaired. sigh. fml

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Friday

Reflections.

Diversifying the use of the weights bench.

Off to meet with architects.

Chit chat at the watering hole with tech guys. Wondering what's next. Maybe reading.

At that strange place where I have let others' needs dictate my schedule for ~3 years. Not sure where my internal clock is.

Ever wonder why the AAAA doesn't ban "unlimited data plan" as false advertising? Prolly 'cause doublespeak permeates Malaysian life.

The bar got a tad too noisy for reading. So I'm taking a nap in my car.

Going to watch a movie, because it's how I used to calibrate my social mind before dating a TV person. Reclaiming my youth right there.

Multi-million dollar light and sound show much more effective for flushing brain, than economics dictionary.

New Star Trek movie thoroughly unmilitary from start to finish. Oh. Is Hollywood.

Also, having watched a lot of fashion TV, I now find myself more sensitive to the fashion of pedestrians in movies.

Cinemas. The stench of humanity greets me. What many of my aytas friends avoid. Their ignorance by avoidance disgusts me just as much.

It's good to know that the people you care about are happy. Then you try and figure out what to do with the resources that had been allocated to worrying about them.

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Saturday

Overslept. But maybe that's a good thing. Routine still missing. Examining removal of the need for such.

Breakfast. Before my brain completely starves.

Turning on some music, and sitting by the balcony to think. Studying the scenery.

Conclusion, it's not the choice of subject which makes a huge difference, but the function of watching which I need to practice more often.

Need to pause research into coffee shop audiences. Can't do anything with the information that I can afford to collect at the moment.

Kinesthesia is still the only drug that works predictably, for me.

Spent some time wondering if my relationships these past years have been driven by convenience.

Heavy rain. Added some meta-data, and tweaked the layout on my blog. Housekeeping-esque day.

Went up into the roof to inspect leaks. Looks like the water's originating from the apex. Oh, and I need to cover those wires...

Right now, I just want a fairly predictable job as a barista. So many other things to do as soon as that happens...

Right. Time for a second meal.

Found something to do with my evening. Migration from Google Reader and Blogger Reading List to Feedly.

incredibly expressive, complicated, sculpted, moany... what a toy... #studyingViolin

I know. Scientists find it exciting when we "see" something. But ultimately the mappings are arbitrary functions from noumena to visual phenomena such as this photograph on your timeline. Right? Right?

to bed, fool, to bed

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Sunday

Awake. Fuel stations. And more deletions of thought.

Slow week. These are times I wish I had more normal preferences. I guess other people get bored too. Decade not looking great right now.

"Economic doctrines:" in the economics dictionary seems to cut to the chase of the historical rationale for flim-flam economic jargon.

Kerajaan Malaysia tidak melibatkan Raja-raja Malaysia. Itu je. Brain this, and you fix half the problems. Lookin' at you, DBP...

Gotta watch that peripheral to imaginary sensation ratio. Letting it go out of whack is a precursor to inefficient operations.

Feedly is proving to be good.

All concepts are approximations of what is not directly observable; it's funny that so many scientists (appear to) actually believe in exact mappings between science and reality.

Not Really a Sapiosexual

But sometimes, it seems that certain intellectual fortitude might be a necessary condition for longer-term compatibility.

Some friends of mine are taking a test to detect asexuality. I joke that some who score "asexual," now did not seem like that before. Perhaps, we agree, certain rituals change us. Brain plasticity comes up. I agree it is fascinating, for the unintentional changes. I tend to have fewer of those, as I plan and execute on really long terms. More suprises would be nice sometime.

Strategy review: maybe letting myself crush on chicks that are lacking in intellectual curiosity... is a recipe for disaster :( . But that doesn't make sense. I get along fine with loads of folks without such curiosity. Perhaps limited curiosity is badly coupled with easy intimidation by curiosity. That seems a smidgen closer. But then that's just annoying... I don't want to run all future dates through curiosity and insecurity tests.. Wtf #isThatRealLife?

Playing the emo game is easy, but finding folk who play the analytical game seems impossible... #canSheDestroyHerselfDaily. It seems that I may have a girl problem. Getting partners to bed is easier than getting partners who are also conversational. Fml. Guys aren't supposed to have issues like this.

As to whether I am fishing in the wrong pond, or not, it could be wrong audience, or "lead generation no enough," or both. Most likely, I'm just not focused enough on marketing this product vertical. I just haven't made much time for mating. So I'm advised to identify an audience, and to customise my product to make it seem "aspirational," but I'm lazy! Someone should be selling to me! Ergo the other problem... I'm probably not targeted by marketing, because I'm a lousy customer ;)

And then she says that in the animal kingdom, males do all the work. Well, zoologically that doesn't make any sense, but hey, when I feel like it, I do the work. Otherwise, return to gripe-zero.

This is a caricature of my life, which is itself a caricature of everything that I believe in.

Sin as Technology

These thoughts were recently brought back to my reflection by the writings of a friend who seems to have recognised a certain pattern of cognitive dissonance in himself.

Remember how you asked me what I saw in you, and I replied with a laundry list of the cool stuff you surround yourself with? I still think you should just close your eyes and dwell on what's left inside... which you can't see. Hehe. It may be much more interesting than you've been thinking.

After all, I know for a fact that he identifies deeply with his emotional reactions and inner thoughts - mostly these are not in the visual modality.

Various traditions have notions of sin, distress, or suffering. The notion of a "father of lies," or "great deceiver," is common in the descriptors of "evil." I prefer to model all confusion and human disagreement in terms of concepts from information science. Given my metaphysical preferences, I tend to think of all these terms as misinformation, and mistaken cognition.

One problem at the end of the day, for many people, is that they intuitively attempt to hold two contradicting ideas in different spaces of memory, then attempt to unify the two ideas without throwing either one away. Sometimes the struggle is rational, sometimes it is not. Given the current state of tools for delineating consciousness, it is hard to figure out what people are thinking using the traditional tools of human communication, but sometimes one can nevertheless do so to a certain degree, and thereby help the thinker to iron out their thoughts, in quite a literal fashion. Sometimes.

Computers as we use them today are masses of electronic switches. They are concretely involved in the channeling of electrons, but often we speak of them as channels of information. The concept of information is slightly more abstract than the concept of an electron, in that it's harder to point at something concrete and say, that's information.

Somewhere in between the technical notions of information and the electron, is the technical notion of truth. It is possible to define truth in informational scientific terms, or even in terms of the terminology from the field of study known as semantics. We often use terms like "Boolean," and "logic," to talk about computers, but these are arbitrary descriptions for what generally is a lot of electrons being deflected between vectors in a dynamic physical system.

Applying some brakes to the conceptual roller coaster, and applying an anthropomorphic bent to the choice of language used to describe computers, perhaps it is accurate to say that computers are primarily semantic systems. Indeed one finds that the etymology of "computation," is closely related to that view. Of course, I'd personally take that view all the way, and generally argue that human consciousnesses amounts to nothing more than the operations upon sensory data. (Albeit that not all sensory data originates in the peripheral nervous system; the central nervous system too, plays a role in generation structures of sensual data, and presenting them to the mind for further .)

Well, as fun as this little bit of blabbering was, I don't really have time to turn this into a pretty thesis today. Not that I haven't written about this in greater detail elsewhere, either - I just tend to write things down, then throw them away. Maybe one day, I'll bother to write about this stuff for a proper audience.

Back to reading about third-wave coffee...

Bendy

Funny thing is, I hung out with Asians who couldn't live without air-conditioning for the first time in college, in the USA... though it turns out, there are plenty in Malaysia.

One decides to bend to the environment, or have the environment bend to oneself; I find the former easier, usually - and when I bother to embark upon the latter, it's usually at a scale that pisses people off...

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In other news,

So if you actually watch the video, it comes across as a pair of flamenco dresses competing to see who can rape the other first with their tits. Pretty, but disturbing. And you don't have to like the way I put it...