PERIOD TO-DO:
- engage with locked variables; re-engage with priority management tools ... zero-inbox, physical conditioning ...
- debride unproductive shareholders
- get a housing loan
- repair, restore utilities to, and clean up Kajang flat
- try to not get fired at both new jobs I started this year
2021-06-27
Studying databases ("with an annoying limpet next to me," LJL 2021).
Not sure where's the best place to pull an 11-hour work day on Sunday in a lockdown.
Officially hit the practical limit of dataset size in Google Sheets.
Update: at the age of 38, fifteen years after bothering to start learning spreadsheet programming, I have registered a database and connected it to a spreadsheet.
2021-06-28
Expressing a need for comfort as a need for a technical solution - apparently a frequent INTJ pattern. Poor things.
2021-06-29
Finally getting down to looking at SageMath and Jupyter after what ... after nine years of ignoring it.
2021-07-01
Six years after memejacking the Brew package manager for a cafe brand, I actually installed it.
2021-07-02
Probably time to start dosing on tyrosine supplements.
Good notes on tyrosine, and sinoatrial node actuation, which cohere with my prior experience. Also why relaxation leads to an enjoyment of work via a testosterone pathway. Lex Fridman x Andrew Huberman.
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Motivation is simply the information structure of having a goal. If there is no long-term or short-term future objective, then the system is presumed to non-autonomous. That is to say, it has no choice / free-will.
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Hm. I played around with QBASIC in the '90s, worked a few months with ActionScript and Visual Basic in the '00s, and learnt the LAMP/jQuery/Vim/VirtualBox stack in 2009. Picked up Git, Erlang, Haskell, and MongoDB in '12, Docker and Rails in '14, barely touched devOps in '15, then deep-dived into JavaScript, unit testing, and AWS in '20. These were scattered experiences ... I don't think I can compare myself to professionals who work with software every day, their knowledge is deeper. So far in '21 I'm getting around to the dataOps and MLOps toolchains.
But the one thing that's finally showing my age is ... when I open a source code repository, I actually take the time to try and determine the architectural layout of ALL the files inside. I would probably have grown more quickly as a software architect if I had bothered to do this from 2009.
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I always wonder if one day I'll work in a role where BigO + code actually impact my bottom line enough for it to be front and centre of operational concerns on a daily basis.
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2 July Malaysia COVID Data Update (based on WorldInData):
- daily confirmed cases : UP
- daily case fatality rate : UP
- daily tests : DOWN, dropping between 3-24 June, then BLACKEDOUT
- tests per case : DOWN, dropping between 16-24 June, then BLACKEDOUT
- reproduction rate : FLAT (obviously obfuscated) between 11-22 June, then BLACKEDOUT
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- hospital admissions : BLACKEDOUT
- ICU admissions : BLACKEDOUT
- excess mortality : BLACKEDOUT
2021-07-03
Lex Fridman x Joscha Bach. This makes me happy. When I figured this out in 2004, I pretty much decided to avoid working in academia because I hypothesised that it would be just a matter of time before this kind of stuff became mainstream, and I wouldn't have to do the work needed to popularise it. Now it's getting there. Whee.
2021-07-04
I think, it may be time for me to ... rent my first "permanent" VPS, now that I have experience in CaaS provisioning. Just shy of 38-years-old, and after about twelve years of toying with computers at the systems level. Estimated cost is 140 MYR/y - not too exorbitant, plus I seem to now have enough study projects to actually utilise a VPS. This slightly advances my push to move all my own work to the cloud, and to thin-out my personal hardware.
Sanity check on whether AliBabaCloud is really cheaper than AWS ... nope ... nominally ABC is 30% cheaper for On-Demand container VPS-es, but that is still 225% more expensive vs AWS Spot pricing.
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Length of each recorded contiguous period of work - first 33 days in the daily time tracker / business analyst role :
"mean: 121 min; stdDev: 81 min"
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Length of each recorded contiguous period of work - first 33 days in the daily time tracker / business analyst role :
"mean: 121 min; stdDev: 81 min"
2021-07-05
As a hiring manager, if you're a technical hire with a relevant degree... I'm going to look at your academic GPA and ask about any deviation from a 4.0. It's on you to defend it. 🙂
FWIW, I have a 3.25, and I know exactly why it's that much. (I aimed for a 3.30).
Update: Just from the volume of comments received so far, I'd guess that it's an extremely sore point and a trigger topic to such an extent that I want to make it a mandatory test for emotional dynamics.
2021-07-06
Getting a home loan - "HQ says you need to get a MRTA+CI" (insurance for the bank, paying out a tiny lump sum if I die + insurance for myself). I literally asked them to charge me more interest instead. LOL - total waste of time.
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Everyone knows what the right thing to do is. Few want to get their hands dirty and become a politician, which is what it takes to get things done.
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I haven't touched Facebook Ads much since my shareholders banned me from corporate social media in 2017. What's new? Going in now for my new job.
2021-07-07
Small exercise in estimating when couples can dine-in in Malaysia.
Today is 7JUL and Malaysia's daily new COVID counts are rising because we only turned on mass EMCOs on 3JUL (so late). Incubation concerns are up to 14 days - we can reevaluate counts on 17JUL. Assuming we see a slow-down by 17JUL, what can we expect next?
From 4FEB to 20FEB (16 days) we saw this metric drop by an amount of ~2,000. There is no comparable data, as JUN data has been obfuscated by KKM's reduction in tests per day. So we should treat this as a best-case-scenario, expecting worse. Dine-ins only resume when the metric drops below 2,000. We're at 7,654 yesterday.
Best-case-scenario :
( 7,654 - 2,000 ) / 2,000 x 16 => 45 days after 17JUL => 31AUG, well HaPpY MeRdEkA tO YoU. So HOPEFULLY by September, we'll see dine-ins resume for couples.
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First day in four years ... playing with Facebook Ads was rather productive. Yesterday's documentation of JupyterLab+Anaconda setup was also rather productive,
This sort of thing is good for executives, but it doesn't translate to organisational value immediately. I wonder also on a daily basis when I'll get too annoying, and then get kicked-out of various roles.
2021-07-09
Reviewing mass proposals ... first-run, everything can get tagged as NEUTRAL / NEGATIVE. Then I do a second run to convert some of the neutrals to positives. 😛
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Malaysia is the epitome of selamba. We've been under a dictatorship for six months and they still haven't rolled out the army because ... they don't have to, LOL. No one cares enough to enforce protocols, and no one cares enough to revolt, also.
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My friend was asking me if the attempted robbery in 2009 traumatised me. I don't think so, if anything's new, I guess I've added a greater awareness of my feeling at the time that I was grateful to not to have hurt anyone severely :P
Second TOTD: Maybe if I need to switch to working in software development full-time when I reach the age of forty. Been delaying doing that for the most part over two decades. I guess if I'm not making about $115,000/year by the age of forty, I could pivot to set up a software services business for a few years and see how that goes.
Third TOTD: As a seasoned desk worker, I'm somewhat aware of when my oxygen requirements fluctuate from a minute-to-minute basis depending on what I'm working on. Previously I'd already figured out how to switch between passive breathing, and active hyperventilation of around 48 BPM (I had to tap it on an app to measure it - it's just intuitively "jogging pace" I guess). But the interesting thing is ... today I was co-working on a sofa, and using headphones to minimise the signal from my colleague's Youtube videos ... and because it was relatively quiet otherwise, the sound of my hyperventilations were noticeably louder, as when I'm engaged in "physical" activities. It's making me a bit self-conscious ... someone we hear people hyperventilating loudly in public and it may seem kinda weird.
Fourth TOTD: A manifestly unsatisfying week, with many outstanding tasks to be pummelled over the weekend. Probably just not enough sleep, and too many unreliable counterparties.
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10 seconds/day => 1 hour/year
#fixit
2021-07-10
Me : Here are the things on my to do list. Shower, eat, laundry, work; and cuddle you.
She : But that's all you do anyway.
Me : Yes, I plan it like that, that's what I'm doing now. If I didn't plan and execute, I would just be sitting here like a lump. Tata!
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It's a matter of training. Mostly from primary school between the ages of 7 and 10, I suppose. I can go back to being more foo-foo after I'm richer or something 😛
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Discussing the General Hammerstein model : WTH do we do with people who are both stupid AND industrious? FWIW : stupid and industrious people make the best customers ... they're predictable and you can always get them something that they want.
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Cibai motherfucker petit bourgeoisie priorities :
NAY : study the law, and get the right candidates into office
YAY : help a private company generate revenue via fantasy cabinet voting games
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From a forum : on the nature of creepiness. Gentle culture protects the timid, at the expense of ease of communication for the brash. Other cultures may differ. In gentle cultures, we create safety nets which minimise pain for those who are more sensitive to stimuli. I wonder, therefore, is timidness in these gentle cultures qualified as a disability? At some point of course, when for any classification of disability, the majority are disabled, this trait becomes the norm, and those formerly classified as not-disabled are now coloured in one of two strokes ... superabled, or differently disabled, depending on their degree of inconvenience to the newly normalised.
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Not a hugely productive week for work - even Saturday was a hodgepodge of undersleep, garden chores for the girlfriend, and three-and-a-half hours of conference calls on organisational development for a non-profit. I must do better tomorrow.
2021-07-13
protocol design today :
switch-cases for business leaders to traverse an organisation-chart, triggered by scenario
2021-07-14
Time to catch up on work. About 14 hours behind on one front.
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Tests/d are up 17.5% from the June trough. Cases/d are up over 100%. But the thing is, we spent most of June hiding cases by reducing tests/d. Right now we're just reporting on past debt.
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My secretive girlfriend asked me to post more about her, so here's what's been interesting of late. She often believes I'm annoyed by her, but I'm not - I'm just inconvenienced. I don't think I'm annoyed because I don't have any negative feelings about her or our relationship, but I am inconvenienced if she gets in the way of my relationship with my wife-wife, i.e. my work in general. 😛 So I will simply shove her out of the way whenever that problem rises in priority.
Going to take a couple of minutes to marvel at / log the status of executive life these days.
Due to the nature of IT in 2021, I have open desktop TABS (fortunately hidden under TAB GROUPS) for say ...
- 3x Gmail
- 1x Facebook + Messenger (dozens of groups)
- 1x Zoho Connect + Cliq (dozens of groups/boards)
- 1x Discord (handful of active servers)
- 2x Slack
- 1x DingTalk
- 1x Telegram (handful of conversations)
- 1x Whatsapp (dozens of conversations
On mobile, all the above, and then some not utilised, but on standby ...
- WeChat
- Line
- Signal
- Instagram
- TikTok
- Meet
- Zoom
- Twitter
- Reddit
- Quora
- LinkedIn
Uninstalled but aware
- Snapchat
- Tinder
- OKCupid
- CoffeeMeetsBagel
- Bumble
- hobby and news forums for technology, business, and investment
- Bloomberg
- etc.
... and this is just about remaining "on the ball" with regards to understanding how the world works. Much like making a point to read the newspaper over breakfast every morning.
There's no way in hell, I'm going to be efficient at taking random questions about what my workflow is. The APM is in the hundreds (if each keypress is an action) ... oh my god, schedule a meeting already, I'll tear it down and explain it linearly but all at once.
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Recyclable is not considered green anymore. The reason is that there is a high frictional cost at all stages of the recycling cycle - and it is way higher in net value to assume that no-one cares in between the issuer of goods and the landfill : so you use bio-degradable instead ... it's just pay more upfront, then fire and forget.
That's my professional opinion. At home I just use whatever!
Here's a good reference point for a major brand : Huggies has shipped a "100% biodegradable" (unaudited) wipes product.
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Log of WhatsApp Business features not found in normal WhatsApp:
- chat labels
- customer labels
- business profile ( operating hours, address, etc. )
- sales catalog ( shareable )
- sales cart
- away message / autoreply
- greeting message / autoreply
- reusable messages / quickreply
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Features useful for businesses, available in normal Whatsapp:
- QR code chat invite
- broadcast
- future : multiple devices for free ( currently, paid access via API )
2021-07-16
Sleep conditioning: rebalancing proprioceptive data resolution in proportion to the mass distribution of the body - a good relaxation technique.
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Got a new boyfriend.
Not what you think.
Previous girlfriend decided, it was time to become the boyfriend. Ok man.
Whatever you like loh.
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Some jobs are weird. You go in for one meeting, and end up ding-donging around miscellaneous issues and teams for four hours. Then you spend another four hours writing five sets of minutes.
2021-07-17
Home after two weeks. Rebuild the workstation. Clean the toilet. Hang up the clothes. Vacuum the floor. Eat, rest, back to work. Dose B12 and creatine. Not in this order.
