Yawn 84

30 mar

1030h

Awake again. Perhaps it will be a productive day.

31 mar

0517h

Tried to dart an undershirt ... 12" waist reduction, omg.

Later today, I must hand over the mantel of analytics leadership to a trainee.

/

Dating is supposed to be a careless form of entertainment. A little empathy is valuable for palate diversification, but beyond a certain cost it jeopardises the point of the entire operation. Ah well, win some years, lose some years.

/

Working through a list of priorities over 20+ years is an interesting experience. Sometimes you pop an item off the stack after like 17 years and go like "this is surreal". In 3Q2022 I'm sorting out business clothing ... something my friends were doing in 2003/4. I hope to get it done soon. I'm almost done learning how to repair most common pieces of business wear. Sometimes I put things on a low priority because I don't have the time I need to brain them completely. It's been an interesting life.

Sometimes these days I hang out with peers who are a year younger, with 16 years corporate experience, and I wonder about my competitive disadvantages. In perspective I'm a 39yo with 3.5y of corporate experience ... so what the hell, I'll just crawl along and pay my dues. I suppose it'll be complimentary with the time I prioritised to do elsewhere. Important things first ... you can't learn faster than your biology will let you, but you can earn money at arbitrary speed. So learning got prioritised early on.

/

"Specialisation is for insects."

"And scalpers."

" ... and experts"

" ... s'what I said."

1 Apr

I see everyone is in a fekSejahtera mood today ...

2150h

I have so many clothes to fix. Gotta get going. Friyay.

2 apr

0115h

Time passes quickly. It is a season of waiting for other people.

I really hate managing people, but I really enjoy being a mercenary, and sometimes mercenaries babysit. That is the nature of the profession.

Babysitting for absentee parents ... ah, there's the rub. Come, let us build better homes, or, you my children, will walk with me as the house comes down.

1249h

A day of processing claims, receipts, invoices, etc. Between four entities, I should move slowly, or just lose track unnecessarily.

2017h

After spending some time with a best friend, I spent too much time on the road reaching the low base.

Maybe I am Uncle Vanya.

Way too much driving today.

Moved receipts to paper mount, over tequila at a bar.

3 apr

Caught up on sleep, for the first time in a long while. Not quite ten or even fourteen hours, however. Barely just over eight I think.

Ok, a data entry day.

1724h

Moving on to accounting and taxes

4 apr

0816h

Roll out.

2200h

Tea time.

2340h

Just realised that Sentul is jogging distance to Desa Park City, and I'm kinda psyched.

5 apr

Cheerfully droll day. Worked on jobs one and two. Sent a note of appreciation to my love (unrequited). Developed my professional network. Handled routine tech issues. Lifted weights. Swiped through my quotas. Refilled the soap bottle.

Next.

6 apr

Design an IT function.

2030h

If it occured to me before, I forgot - translating job ads is a great way to study business language, since the functional semantics are often terse.22 APR 

A fairly good day - most of it was spent reading for work. And by the end of the day, I didn't have many other pressing issues in my life, and I was able to focus on preparing myself for the next day's work.

7 apr

A young lady said to me (she's in her fifties or sixties only), I should be more mysterious, to attract ladies. How foolish, as lovers of mysteries are typically uncertain about their objectives. After all, then whole point of transparency is to weed out timid people.

2342h

Reflections on this theme. There's entire class of people who are sad because they have been let down by everyone / every woman / every man / etc. And a large subclass of these specifically expect counterparties to read their minds ... omfg, do we not deserve to be incensed by our own stupidity and narcissism when we expect others to fulfil our needs, when those needs are not stated? Haha. I am sad for the loves I have lost, but it does not make me admire this particular subclass any more than I would if I did not love some of them.

8 Apr

This week I have been studying the natural language use of the phrase "emotional vulnerability", and teasing out its analytical definitions. It has reminded me a lot of a study I did for a few years beginning in college, regarding the disintegration of memory.

In brief, this week the concept of vulnerability was tied to the active disintegration of a concept of identity, so the related memory buffers were modified more often, cleared of stagnant values, and generally just stimulated to mutate more frequently.

1706h

After coaching of direct reports, it is back to the dictionaries. At this rate, I can chingchong about opsec and program management by next week 😑

30+ years of ZH-EN dictionaries ... what a ride.

It turns out that the Chinese phrase for "hacker" is intrinsically coloured - so a "white hat hacker" is a "white hatted black visitor".

1853h

Time to feed. I miss my absentee lovers.

1942h

Back to work.

2241h

Ah, I come to take my place in this city. I work two stupid jobs, I get paid a bunch, my brain is fried, so I mod jewelry and go looking for coffee at 11pm on a Friday night. I mix it up with work, researching a popular row where women have gone and made stories for twenty years. I see a classmate, and their spouse, we met over job introductions and immigration a few years ago - they look happy. I drink my coffee, and attempt to recover more quickly, so that I can be useful to myself later. Few other people are useful to me. Tis a season - I expect it to pass ... make hay while the sun shines.

9 apr

So many of us aspire to be uninspiring, normal, and invisible ... but some of us are further from the goal than others. I have been thinking of the shift in cognitive allocation since 2021 due to the nature of my profession, and I believe that due to the enormous increase in political work on my schedule, I may need to flush out daily memories more aggressively, with athletics. To be contemplated.

I was coaching direct reports on how to economise for learning at early-career stages, using myself as an example: that as a people-manager I no longer focus on anything intrinsically valuable - my delivery is constrained by the delivery of the people that work for me. I also don't work on much that is intrinsically valuable to myself in an intellectual sense, rather I sell what I am good at for payout (around December of 1997, I had decided that leading people was too easy to be stimulating, and shifted my focus elsewhere). So being in the season for comfortable but boring jobs, of course I reviewed the usual opportunities in investment banking and management consulting ... the former I'd probably do for fun, the latter for money (boring, but 200-400,000 MYR/month is not bad for boring). I reviewed my personal branding portfolio, and note that nothing has changed of late ... I've always been positioned as an aggressively noisy person, the very sort that high-rolling conservatives shy away from. I figure, given the cards, maybe I'll just have to find out what I don't know about what I don't know - as anything I know about anything is generally boring. I expect to be working till the day I die, and the human lifespan puts it such that I tend to think of the risk landscape as three chunks of forty years each. While every day is a good day to die (or continue work), these days I am never sure if at 15 to 17 years in the workforce, if I should consider myself an early-, mid-, or late-careerer.

1420h

Rise and chore.

10 apr

Managed to get claims done yesterday. On to tax and reporting today, following the midnight break.

0247h

YA2021 personal taxes done. Gotta pay a visit to the tax office later to confirm it.

Old partnership reporting - either tonight or in the morning.

0325h

WTH - got it done. Now for a shower, then to figure out if I want to sleep or work some more.

Ended up fixing a problem with the watch strap braid - I still don't know my knots well enough. More practice required in order to improve internal visual simulations.

1335h

Washed, dressed, need to feed and then study the PDPA and subsidiary documents and write an operations proposal on medical recordkeeping.

2017h

Dinner is palak paneer and chit chat with a new friend who is an autism activist.

Home for some desk work.

11 Apr

This past year, I made all my friends sad. It wasn't fun. Win some, lose some.

2017h

In a lot of pain and getting varieties of grief from LHDN, Digi, my phone, my jobs, and other things. Just the cost of living in this country, I suppose. Maybe I should sleep it off.

2309h

Regrettably, I am forgetting how to English. Gonna blame it on the amount of ching i chong at the offices and with social partners.

12 apr

It turns out pure hyaluronic acid powders are easily available.

13 apr

Found a lost pattern recently. Imaginative stagnance is a precursor to mental fatigue, whereas stirred memory buffers are refreshing ... I suspect down to the chemistry of toxin clearance, as known to be the literal stuff of dreams. The stirred pot is a rustic idiom which is remarkably accurate here. Flush all buffers every waking second ...

14 Apr

hypothetical -

me to dudeA : "you understand that the other guy over there's actually a businessman who's only here because he was recently triggered about how little tech he knows; so you think you're behind him in this field, but you have a future here that he probably doesn't want?"

dudeA to me : "and what are you doing here?"

me to dudeA : "maybe i'm an artist who needed to pay the bills"

/

Meanwhile I am enjoying desk work in cute spaces in the middle of the city. I'm so glad I don't have to run this joint, just to be able to use it.

15 apr

Regarding the HBR note on people needing at least two careers :

I am a gentleman, and a fool,

searching for a gentlelady, and a hero -

this is hard. 🙃

/

musk vs twitter : In order to understand why he cares so much about this, you must note that his current portfolio includes

- the energy production layer

- the logistics physical layer

- the communications physical layer

So he's just trying to add a communications application layer in front of that, in order to start interfacing with all other existing software to extend his existing supply stack.

16 apr

Yesterday was mostly spent in bed. Waiting for autonomous signal blockers to get turned on again ... until then, higher than usual sensitivity in haptic, vibrational, modalities ... maybe others too. Had two small meals out, a couple of limeades, and soaked in the crowd. The chills are mangeably enjoyable, a nice change of physiological atmosphere.

I wish everyone understood their body as well as I do. I was thinking, I should set up a channel on quantification of sense experience.

1323h

Many dreams later - well it is good to dream, I should probably cut caffeine in this season.

17 apr

TIL some tanks can shoot guided missiles out of their main gun barrels.

1400h

Enforced washing, grooming, next ... it is feeding time.

Then back to readings as needed for work.

1614h

Carnap.

As I promoted physical exercise to the same priority as brushing teeth in February, I need to also promote dreaming to the same. Dreaming, lucid or otherwise, is just uninhibited conscious imagination ... and it captures a large fraction of the mechanical value of sleep on general, including naps, especially sub-minute shuteye-sessions. Of course in general, we know the function of sleep is rest and repair for worked circuits ... it may just happen to be the case that my most worked circuits are the ones responsible for inhibiting my imagination on a second-to-second basis, for the purpose of socialisation 😛

17 apr

TIL some tanks can shoot guided missiles out of their main gun barrels.

1400h

Enforced washing, grooming, next ... it is feeding time.

Then back to readings as needed for work.

1614h

Carnap.

As I promoted physical exercise to the same priority as brushing teeth in February, I need to also promote dreaming to the same. Dreaming, lucid or otherwise, is just uninhibited conscious imagination ... and it captures a large fraction of the mechanical value of sleep on general, including naps, especially sub-minute shuteye-sessions. Of course in general, we know the function of sleep is rest and repair for worked circuits ... it may just happen to be the case that my most worked circuits are the ones responsible for inhibiting my imagination on a second-to-second basis, for the purpose of socialisation 😛

18 Apr

13 years after starting real work on a web development team, and 23 years after HTML ... finally have a reason to reserve memory for comprehensive jargon on security issues. Woo hoo.

19 apr

I am getting fat on this shitty diet and sedentary lifestyle, so, I may have to run soon.

1430h

Breakfast. Then prep for run. Seems cloudy enough

Rain, so after food and housekeeping of old tracking documents ... I plan to work out in my room.

Listening to a podcast on reconciliatory chats, and skimming off reminders for dating comms strategy, while sewing up an old jumper. I think, it's nice to at least do topological things as exercise, even if I don't have the time to do actual topology for the time being.

Can't even fartlek properly ... so going to focus on that, before resuming longer runs.

2322h

Tea at sbux. I need to raise the priority of listening into crowds for recreation.

20 apr

More work. More fartlek. More work. Time to feed. Then back to work.

Never heard of WKW growing up. Probably decided to take him a bit more seriously when I realised a lot of people I like have a Maggie Cheung mode. At least one was a fan.

21 APR

Seriously, Depp x Heard is the best programming I've heard in a long time. Pity about the circumstances.

Pre-nups man ... even if you're poor ... Lol

23 ApR

I still have no comprehension of morons whose ambition is, "to make enough money, that I don't need to look at pricetags", however, I think over time I become more interested in selling to them. Ten to twenty years ago, these people were still below my line - too dumb to sell to, I can't learn anything fundamental from the process ... well mainly I am of the same view now, but, I already cleared a bunch of study priorities in the time that has passed, so as I grow older I feel more inclined to take money from babies. Hm. Maybe I should really just focus on math and toss the whole study of commerce. Maybe one day.

1912h

Time to feed. Then back to reading.

Will be reading for work in Telawi. Yell if you want to catch a drink. Can drive out.

2135h 

Time to start learning X.500 and friends. OMG it's going to be such a shitty year. LOL