24 ApR
I need to do a lot more reading on neurotropic B vitamins.
Code.
Sleep.
Lunch.
Sleep or code.
Drive to mother's birthday thingy.
Drive back.
Sleep or code.
2223h
Thank heavens the dinner meeting is over.
From recent meetings : I should avoid commenting on the career challenges of plebs who highly prioritise (a) attending well-banded schools, (b) obtaining well-branded jobs, (c) associating themselves with well-branded ideas or objects. It is not that these subjects do not interest me - but I lack the humility to empathise with this class of political strategies - and inadvertantly encourage these people to diversify their portfolios. So OK, I guess I can comment on these career challenges as long as I first remember that babies are babies, and one should not bully them.
Also : once you carry a brand, you cannot possibly carry yourself as one who lacks the privilege of the brand. So it is not actually possible to do branded associations in the early part of one's career, and then seek to associate as an unbranded person after that. That is why it has been essential for me to avoid brand association for the greater part of my career to-date ... I am not yet 40, and I think the first twenty years are an adequate early-career path which I can use to study the lives of ordinary people. I would prefer, if at all ... to be associated with a brand in the later part of my career, possibly between 40 and 60, by virtue of track record and not by virtue of indicative potential from preliminary testing. I do believe the period of life from 80 to 120, should I survive that long, will be the most productive period for my own work. But before the final third, the middle third can be spent focusing on social work ... commerce, whatnot. That I do not mind. 0-40 is training, 40-80 is social work, 80-120 is for more enjoyable projects ... maybe just math. But then again, I always adjust my plans tactically, so who knows. Every day remains a good day to die.
Clubhouse has replaced Bloomberg TV as my desk work accompaniment.
25apr
I keep forgetting to note, that I have been working on stuffing conscious details of kinesthesia back into the subconscious. Delegation, if you will, I used to call it a synthetic study. More study required.
2337h
Enforced recreation. Let's debug that framework and fix the goddam logger.
26 apr
0623h
Well, two things. First, replacement of outside food with a bag of nuts was physiologically rewarding.
Second, it seems I need control my breathing in order to balance out neural distractions from other parts of the nervous system. Much more study required
1356h
Breakfast time.
LinkedIn stickers are so sanitised, it's pretty much impossible to publicly hate anything 😛
Two completely different briefs :
1. Do X.
2. Build a team to do X.
It's build a car, vs build a car factory.
2300h
Rested, snacked, clocked out, ready for a bit of enforced crafting before bed.
27Apr
Rather unstable times, and I am about to destabilise them further. Oh well, play the game.
Off to bed for now.
2252h
Enforced recreation. Also, I saw my girl, and I miss her. I don't know if she sees me. Haha.
Today, I need to upgrade my documentation function ... to have some kind of call depth registration.
28 apr
2136h
On break. But i should probably start setting up app development for work prep later.
29apr
Recent fitness program :
- increase autonomy of breathe
- above is a special case of a general case : move more control mechanisms from conscious to subconscious, synthesising conscious abstractions for complexities which were previously managed consciously, which are now move to subconscious management
- check conscious memory buffers in all sensory modalities, and actively flush/churn buffers with new data, possibly random data, or just fresh environmental input stream data
- fartlek : on the physical conditioning side
/
Just realised Monday is a public holiday. I think in years and days ... and kinda skip weeks and months, perhaps.
Digital Bank licenses : right - let the poaching begin ...
2345h
Back to work. Now we are reviewing cloud computing.
Made my first Aliyun / AliCloud account ...
1 May
0008h
I should feed. Then work. Then breakfast meeting. Then sleep. Then pick up that washing machine someone is throwing out.
1002h
CakePHP stack containerised. Should be able to put a soft draft on a CaaS by tonight.
2 may
Back to writing manuals, I think.
Companies Act - most of today's reading - did you know the following are not explicitly defined in the Act? (They may be implicitly defined.)
- nominee director
- resolution of the company
- motion
... I demand parliamentary reform! But I am not going to do anything about it just yet. #anotherToothlessMalaysian
3 may
Decent progress on understanding Docker, CakePHP, and Aliyun's superficial limitations.
Back to the Companies Act 2016 ... what shall we learn today ... ?
Aliyun still doesn't want my money, so I am going back to AWS for the time being.
May 4
It has been a very slow month in my two jobs, and three other projects. I should probably go for a run, as I am a bit tired of the slow pace right now.
0113h
Back to work!
0552h
Refreshed myself on Fargate.
Hello - checking my email ... Aliyun has upped the ante and requested payment verification of MYR80 ... that's quite a bit more than the MYR1 they asked for earlier. Heavy sigh. Sending the money ... please don't rob me. (This too, failed.)
0626h
In bed. It's definitely a season for numerous threats and very few means to address opportunities, so hoping not to get t-boned before the enviornment eases.
1500h
Awake and clearing messages.
2343h
Count of friends who have ascended to pre-partnership at MBB firms :
- 1 that i know off
- I actually don't know how many of my old mate are still in the IBs they joined fresh out of school
5 May
Back to recreational projects for a bit.
0525h
Tired. Revised a bunch of bash syntax. Cleaned up stack tracing presentation for ru framework.
The day job hours start soon. Perhaps I will go and feed myself hawker food.
6 May
So, around the time I graduated I started aiming to work on boards, because I'm really lazy, and I want maximise force multiplication. However, I've recently realised in my last 1.2 years of corporate work that it's even more interesting to work as a COACH for boards ... omg.
/
I think a lot of executives who are in the top decile of pay for their delivery levels ... seriously underestimate how easy it is to replace them. The machine gun scenario is when you're trying to find a better staff at X pay ... for example ... you go to the X*50% pay range of the market ... and then you interview the shit out of 100-200 candidates ... real meat grinder interviews, where they have to stammer, or the interview just gets harder. You identify the obvious top 2%, and then you offer them X*85% or so ... and you tell them they have a new job, and they have a few months to figure it out.
The reason this seems hard to many people, is that most people are not very good at running meat grinder recruitment programs. But all the good companies do it - it's not because there's some fuzzy correlation, but it's the actual definition of elitism ... you kick out as many questionable candidates as possible, and the only way to figure out who those are is to interview many and ask a lot of questions systematically ... by and large, people don't want, or don't have the capability to do this ... which is an interesting business problem. (You can couch it in whatever trendy jargon you want, human capital, ML, etc.)
/
7 may
Would prefer to be at work. But decided to do housekeeping for risk avoidance. Pay loans!
8 may
Happy mothers' day. None of us asked to be born. So, as long as you're accepting of the outcomes, I suppose, we have good reason to be friends and get coffee!
/
I was talking to my friend about businesses in Malaysia, normalised regulatory oversight, and normalised corruption (bribery). I wondered if I will make it through the rest of my life in Malaysia without paying a bribe. Often people are faces with difficult choices, because they are more attached to their business, or habits, or loved ones, than they are to the rule of law. The alternative to this is the rare asshole who cares more about the rule of law than individual human units. I wonder if I can be such an asshole. We will likely only find out after I have passed away. Haha.
/
(Based on my current reading of Malaysian law.) There are three ways a natural person can affect change ("do any work about") a company in Malaysia. (1) as a formal director, (2) as a consultant under a contract for service ("wears a sign saying they are neither employees nor directors"), (3) as a formal employee under a contract of service, who happens to carry out work normally carried out by formal directors, and is thereby qualified by law to bear the responsibilities and liabilities of a director even if they are not formally directors.
I suppose I need to find out if those of us "ordinary" staff who work on policies, boards, and other corporate governance concerns ... may thus accidentally qualify as (3) informal directors.
I have yet to confirm, though I have read some indications that ... anyone who carries a degree of influence upon a company thereby runs the risk of falling under (3) even if they are contractors for service, or having no contract at all. I look forward to studying this in the coming week!
9 may
0712h
Time to feed. Then kindergarten. Then networking. Maybe sleep right after that
2338h
Well, ex was in town so dinner. But before that more coaching of techs
TIL swastika and sawadika have probably the same root in svastika
10 May
Oversized plates and flower petals do not make dining fine. If you're charging $50 for brown carpaccio and asbestos-inspired duck sous vide ... it lacks coherence.
11 May
Learnt (xargs) today.
/
Studying Hajj stuff because these days I am a talent manager ... so far I gather :
... miqat => geofence
... ihram => safe mode
... umrah => apt upgrade -y
... hajj => apt dist-upgrade -y
... mukadimmah => syn/ack
... masyaqqah => safe mode
... ifrad => download without auth-token
... qiran => non-resumable download without auth-token
... tamattu => resumable download with auth-token
... (tbc)
/
I was coaching the team at work the other day, that science is fundamentally dependent on creative writing capability. You can't do hypothesis testing if you don't have hypotheses. And hypotheses are just propositions (verbal, or imaginary) that our brains pull out of their arses, after synthesising this or that data structure (concepts).
12 may
As long as I hear the word "runner" in the context of graft-mediating business processors, I will continue to think of Malaysia as a poor place to do business. Nothing new, just the "good old ways" 🙂 - but I have never avoided the poverty of this place as I have had papers here already. A matter of laziness. Maybe one day I will get less lazy and venture elsewhere.
13may
Chip away at work.
mulberry leaf + coffee ... hm
/
Question on Twitter stuff. I just posted a tweet (I tweeted, I twat ... I idk) ... and say, a lot of people RT. I am making a point to thank each one for the RT. What's the best way to scan through the list of RTs ... and see if I have already public tweeted to them already? The Android app doesn't easily facilitate this ... I can click on their profile, but not immediately see our mutual mentions.
14 May
So far, an unproductive weekend. But, all six or seven counterparties are being nagged, so I guess it is just one of those waiting seasons.
/
SOCAR : app doesn't work, phone doesn't receive any validation codes, FB live chat has zero live agents, can't login on website autonomously. What happened to this company?
Forgetting it - going back to coding ... lol
2249h
Housekeeping of documentation time.
15 may
0510h
Emailed my housing developer asking for a waiver of late payment interest.
Kinda sorta readied myself for interstate travel in the coming week - work stuff.
Studying how white shirts yellow.
Updated my LinkedIn profile.
Wrote up some science stuff for commerce.
16 may
I was talking to a friend, about how some people value "experiences that can't be put into words" - so I am not suitable as a companion for these, as I don't value anything that can't be put into words - I put everything I experience, into words and numbers, whenever possible. And I spend time learning how to do so, when not yet possible.
1500h
Did dishes for three hours. Cute.
2332h
I'm having a fascinating year, working with tribal management structures, and seeing how they semi-intentionally increase rigidity towards becoming rank-and-file structures, before pushing into decentralised teams which have reporting matrices as infrastructure. In one group, I'm working with a transition from rank-and-file to decentralisation, and in another we're trying to leap-frog the rank-and-file step entirely to get to the third stance. The third stance comes up a bit in the media these days due to discussions of NCO (non-commissioned officer) dynamics with regards to the USA's military doctrine, and that of Russia.
17 May
I am tired.
18 may
A slow and bothersome day. The timids are out in force.
Tomorrow I have many messes to unmess.
- write letter to developer's board
- pay tax
- submit audit
- reset internet banking
- check car
19 May
I figured out that my current weariness arises from forgetting to recreate (actively refragment my imagination).
The past three weeks have involved a lot of social work, which is what I call interfacing with other people - this requires significant mid-term memory allocation, as each counterparty has its own psychical model consisting of idiosyncratic emotional, cognitive, and verbal mechanics. Too much focus on holding patterns, results in too little time for garbage collection. Roughly I am shuffling between :
- acquisition of a new department to manage temporarily (headcount: two)
- coaching of junior scientists (new science team!)
- coaching of a software engineer (new engineering team!)
- change management and digital transformation programs for a small company (haggling, and rhetoric)
- formalisation of informal contracts (gambits, and control flows)
- coaching of another organisation's governance structures, during an assault on new markets (hemming, and hawing)
- coaching a benched colleague
- supporting industry colleagues under assault from hooligans
- supporting friends facing emotional instability
- catching up with an ex
- negotiating the purchase of an apartment to live in
- navigating the income tax process for myself
- administering the audit and tax process for my LLP
- checking compliance and planning for operational changes (few in a benched business, but necessary)
- automotive maintenance
- personal banking
- ... nevermind the tedium of personal grooming, nutrition, and physical conditioning
Hm. Anyway, yes, active fragmentation of the imagination in various modalities is resuming. I just need to remember to do it.
If you don't feel right on any day, the simplest solution is to forget who you are, and tomorrow you will be definitively new.
I probably need to make more time for research soon.
1647h
Chores half done. Time to feed again.
1903h
Ran. The right amount of exercise is when loss of control occurs over mind and body ... for example, breathing, and what your visual imagination is throwing up on the HUD.
20 May
As much as I want to spend the weekend catching up on work, I should probably do even more housekeeping first.
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"default alive or default dead" (Graham) was published the month my first company shipped its product. I pitched the company to investors as a high-risk play in a red ocean industry where the rate of death was 70% within two years. I also didn't have an explicit DA mandate, so I always ran it as if it would be DD. I would do it again, but someday it would be nice to run a business with an explicit DA mandate. Or did I? It seems like I made a point of edging back into DA territory ever so slightly, but avoided derisking from DD because the largest gains we seemed to have were from studying the DD-escape scenarios.
/
More fartlek.
I should work out more. I think I need to be a lot more tired to be amused by random people so I have fun when I go walking in random places around town.
