Yawn 77

2021-09-17 to 2021-10-10

That's enough drama for one week. I hope. Weekend means, time to catch up on work. I hope.
Also I finally got around to testing out the replacement of ( phone and laptop ) with a single tablet. As anticipated, there are now fewer distractions while driving, eating, etc. due to the reduced ergonomics of the primary computing device. I do need to get a satchel of some sort to lug the damn thing around, soon.
Also, someone sent eucalyptus leaves, so my desk smells like a fruit bowl. I don't like it, but it's a harmless diversification of sensation, so it should be assimilated.

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Context : I've never in nine years polished or waxed my car, or applied any detailing or paint procedure more complex than brushing.
TIL : $4 including shipping, and discounts.
TIL: ceramic coating appears to work on any surface, so if I like my car looking grungy and worn out, I don't need to clear coat it! Also, it replaces wax. So essentially, all we need for complete car care :
1. car grade detergent (probably just less harsh pH, and nothing fancy; fungible with non-caustic dish detergent)
2. clay
3. clay lube (anything with SiO2 really; but for minimalism this is fungible with non-caustic dish detergent)
4. SiO2 + TiO2 coating
5. Clean (YMMV) water
6. Micro-fibre cloths
7. Spray bottles

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Anyone wanna coffee or drink before Monday?
8:20pm Damansara Heights!
#work #notwork #networking

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[ Writing loan agreements + Managing software deployments + Negotiating talent retention ] / [ one work day ] => headache
[ Debugging Headset Bluetooth Protocol Issues + Trying to be a helpful chatherapist with ex ] => another headache
Super relieved to be ready for my call tomorrow - I think. Still don't know if we have to rehire the critical position, but we'll find out, I guess. So many interviews. Gahhh

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Learnings :
- Android Bluetooth codec and protocols may need to be configured get headsets working properly
- this tab has no compass
- magnet on casing will render GPS ineffective while moving
- there is a huge market for cross-body bags (starting at $2 on shopee)

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Why is there a police check in DAMANSARA HEIGHTS looking for "surat rentas negeri"?!? Do you know where the nearest state border is ...

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Assuming the definition of fine dining as "2x + formality" we should just run a concept which switches every quarter, where voters decide on the casual dining base, and we 2x the price and make it fancier.

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Long day. Probably assisted by taking B12 in the morning, and feeding throughout. Got the front wheel bearing castle nuts tightened, administered a termination, updated real estate options, and attended various meetings. Time to pre-nap.

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"Thiel ensured that Mark Zuckerberg would be the company’s absolute dictator. No one, not even Facebook’s board of directors, could ever overrule him. '
Pundek, if you need to know why this is done, just refer to my CEO story. Haha

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Still giggly over the fact that I really suck at monkey bars because intently procrastinated on this for 27 years.

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Awake and washed. Enforced feeding, and some work before a swim.


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Coffee at Damansara Heights. Join for cowork!

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Recently learnt how to get front wheel castellated nuts tightened. Makes driving a lot more sensible.

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Still missing my 42% sleep target by a mile.

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Ah yes, looking at the spend-two-years-in-IB-then-back-to-the-family-office pattern. I miss hanging out with people who think like this. The thing about my working career has been that ... I don't take very seriously any scope of work that can be excelled in within 2-3 years. I did choose to go very slow on very broad scopes, but I do miss going fast.

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Awake again. Enforced feeding, grooming, and work

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The long day continues. And is expected to continue later into the night.
0429 : done !

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Time to desk.

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Malaysians:
- pro-German cars
- anti-German housing

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Funny experience. I told fam to leave me out of any inheritance if I had to make decisions about it - to minimise my hassle. Then I advised fam to set up a trust fund for my relatives, instead of giving them assets directly.
It didn't previously occur to me that you could set up a trust fund with like, a tiny sum of assets. Hey, sell the car! Now we're trustafarians!

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Hm. I didn't know that I knew how to design a data team remuneration structure.

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Also I don't understand this pattern of separating Job Purposes, from Job Duties, from Job Requirements. (I seem to try to squish job descriptions down into a paragraph everywhere I go.)
First define the Job Purpose. The Job Duties are simply to fulfill the Purpose. The Job Requirements are none except that you fulfill the Duties. Why make things more complicated than that? Even if it's a really long list, why not have them in one list instead of three separate ones?
Traditionally of course :
1.
The Job Requirements are qualities you have that increase your probability that you will be able to fulfill the Job Duties - this is a fallacy. One should never rely on prediction, only on evidenced delivery.
2.
The Job Purpose is something written intuitively/abstractly, whereas the Job Duties are concrete/minutiae. This is also a fallacy. Intuition is for lazy people.
3.
It's a crap shot anyway - if you have an intuition (subconsciously evidence opinion) then just use it. But anyone who has to read about which intuitions to apply probably can't get useful intuitions from reading ... and they will probably only develop useful intuitions only after trying to apply what they read about, after falsifying some of those intuitions through application.

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Enforced feeding.

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If you would not kill and clean an animal, you probably don't deserve to eat meat. #thenewkh

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Reflections from the office:
Love can be defined as fear of someone leaving. Easily applied definition.
Who loves you?

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Just figured out how to set up wholesale pricing strategies.

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A survey of Pavillion.
From a nerdy point of view it is still pathetic.
But I am not a foodie. I mean, I can taste food. But if I let food determine my happiness I would just be depressed all the time, so instead I am not a foodie.

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My goal for the evening is to sort out claims, bills, and other chores.

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Up, late, enforced feeding, then work.

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I'm not very productive this month. But we are only four days in. Then again, it could be due to the general complexity of Malaysia's lockdowns in 2021. Also, starting two mid-career jobs in one year, both at growth-stage companies, in the transformation function, can be a bit mind-boggling. As a whole I have been given many opportunities, and I think my societal roles may be envied by some, yet that doesn't solve the present issue of becoming more productive still by the end of October. The main strategy seems to be a total review of the hours of a week, and how those get spent. Exercise must now be combined with car-care, and social life remains mostly aborted. Most stress comes from the nature of the jobs themselves, being in an operational capacity, without executive powers ... so far. Ah, the plight of middle-managers is the true condition of senior advisors, all you can do is wait for generals to act. In general, I have a lot left undone, and the absence of an appropriately sized office simply multiplies the complexity of daily consciousness. Perhaps soon, that part will fix itself. I must remember to consult that banker.

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Please bear in mind for all staff, training on interpretation of seniors' comments :
Bucket 1: ideas repeated without processed thought
Bucket 2: opinions, self-aware
Bucket 3: opinions, not-self-aware, senior may take it as fact
Bucket 4: orders
Bucket 5: irony / jokes
Bucket 6: hypotheses

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Hung out a bit. Gonna focus on grip strength for the rest of 2021. Time to feed.

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I was talking to this chick, who likes hanging out in bars for the ambience, good food, and wine. I suppose I don't have much to offer people like that ... I think of these things as artificial constructs, that don't really factor into my fundamental work ... and while I do engage with these cultures in work, (hipster coffee, and computer games), I do so simply out of a professional interest. In my daily life as I meet people, and work with and around them, I understand everyone simply as a lump of meat that eats, sleeps, and processes information, among other things. It's a curious person to be.
INFPs enjoy a sense of humour. I see a pattern.

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Check :
10 days is 2.74% of a year 🤔

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Cuddles are still a superior currency. Money is boring because you can do all almost anything with just a little ... and to do anything more interesting you then need a ginormous quantity. Given how most of the world doesn't fit into my ideals, I'm always amazed that anyone still bothers to date or hire me. Maybe I fit within their ideals, but that's just Druckerian opportunity. Well, if you want a world less counterfeit, you may have to mint it yourself. Mint all the worlds.

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As a teenager, I got bored of explaining my parents to each other over the dinner table. Today I kinda got paid to do it for work. So I'm just happy that it was a monetisable experience. Adulting is exhausting.

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Troubled. I guess most of this year consists of waiting. Just like 2004, and 2010, and 2000, and 1994, and 2013, and what seems like too many repetitions of the same foolish people milling around their groceries, and doing whatever it is that people do. So, we wait. I once designed a brand about this. I copied half of it from Hollywood : work, die, repeat.

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Public Relations industry folks - networking over drinks Damansara Heights 9pm. Jom

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Aspirational goods:

$2 MM watch; $5 sandwich; same thing. Know your market.

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Need to adjust protein ratios to invoke a state of constant agitation.

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The New Nusantaran Diet : where is it?

Fine dining - this week I've had to revisit the concept a bit, and here are some brief thoughts about fine dining in Malaysia today. Hm. All monetary figures in USD for convenience. And nothing in this article refers to Malaysia alone, as the case is the same elsewhere also.

I was first presented with the concept of "fine dining" around 2006, when I was working in Kuala Lumpur - and I had to try very hard not to laugh. While my colleagues from the consulting firm ordered food, I ordered a cup of tea. I really wasn't going to pay $ 11 for spaghetti when I made a gross of $ 453 per month. I did enjoy the company of my peers, though they probably enjoyed my company a little less that evening - they made only a little more than I did, and I spent most of the evening smirking at their idiocy.

Many expensive dining experiences in Kuala Lumpur are exotic, and yet by and large they fail tests of finesse. When people in Malaysia say "fine dining", they also have a tendency to refer to "fine dining as it exists in other countries" - and this mistake is the first and last reason why "fine" dining in Kuala Lumpur, with few exceptions, tends to be shit.

To be clear, the high prices are often justified by bringing in ingredients from outside the region using grossly polluting methods ( air freight ), and then sold with minimal preparation as "naked". I kid you not - I don't understand people who don't think this is funny - they basically express a lifestyle which says, "I'm too cheap to go to this other place, so I'll fly their indigenous food over here, and that's how you know, I'm fine". 

In 2021 Malaysia's hourly minimum wage hovers around $ 1.38. Just yesterday in Petaling Jaya ( basically, greater Kuala Lumpur), I had "nasi campur" or self-serviced rice, curry, vegetables, and fish ( high-quality protein ) including some 10-30 ingredients for  $ 1.67 - now this isn't the most nutritious way to spend 1 hour and 13 minutes of minimum wage. But it is an example of how you could spend that much on FOOD AS A SERVICE, and get sufficient nutrition to make a human body economically productive at either manual or intellectual tasks. So let this be a benchmark for food service at the level of essential services. Let's teleport out.

Now in order to buy a basic sandwich and salad in first-world nations takes roughly the same number of minutes of minimum wage in those countries. But for 4-8 hours of minimum wage you can get a meal in a more formal setting, also known as "fine dining". Let's now teleport back.

Today "fine" dining experiences in Kuala Lumpur are nominally $ 36 for lunch, $ 70 for dinner, and ranging up to $ 200 or more. This means local restaurateurs hawk a cultural experience to naive locals for 26 to 173 minimum wage hours. But where is the finesse? It doesn't matter how pure and fresh the food is at these prices, it's simply not relevant to the average citizen. And what isn't within reach of the average person, simply doesn't qualify as fine. It's blithely over-engineered. (Which isn't to say, I'm not frequently the culprit of grossly over-engineered projects, myself.)

I'm just going to cut this rant short by posting a slightly "localised" version of Noma's manifesto. Brain this, if you will. I'm waiting for the ASEAN luxury food exports to take off ... but no one wants to make it happen ...

;)

recap : 2011-2021

It's been a long decade. It started out the year after a two-year contract managing web developers in Bangsar. I ran small gigs for $4,000/mo, helped my friend to run public relations for YTL Comms, SAP, EMC, and Microsoft, and started practicing stock trades on the KLSE. I bought a tablet to study PDFs.

I was dating someone I'd met at my first post-college interview six years earlier - she didn't really like me - probably explains why I was only offered an internship. We went to Bali and Bandung - I'm not much of a tourist ... but I'll travel for business, and women are good business. We were supposed to do Yangon, but I screwed that up, because I sucked at planning. I bought my first Kancil for $1,400, because she'd made me drive her TT back after dropping her at the airport for a business trip ... and it was pretty scary driving without any practice. So I practiced, and crashed the Kancil within a month of getting it. I got the car fixed.

I figured that I should start investing in real-estate - I was 28, and with a first car I could drive out far enough to actually afford something. I settled on a cheap $20,000 flat in Kajang. I ended up living there for less than 18 months over the decade. Right now it's unkempt, and covered in dust and dead birds - we'll need to hook up the power and water again. I'm waiting for my PA to spare me a few days.

It was 2011. I spent most of 2012 studying functional programming at home, and my imaginary friends were the Bloomberg anchors. Facebook, Apple, Herbalife - that was an interesting study. 2013 was spent entrepreneuring as a business consultant, and learning about speciality coffee. I sold the tablet to my client as a POS. I set up some Facebook group that flourished, then resigned as it's administrator. 2014 I worked four jobs, clawing back from $400/mo to $4,000/mo. The third job was so monotonous, that I learnt how to swim ... just doggy paddling with my head above the pool water. 2015 I met the love of my life, and founded my own business, which ran for five years before I was arrested. We sold the trademark, and buried the operation. People died.

It's 2021 now. Every single one of these experiences has turned out to be foundational for the work I do today. I don't know what I'll be doing in ten years, but it feels ok right now. I'm on track with what i thought I'd do between 20 and 40. I'm 38 this year. Right on track. Why ain't I dead yet? IDK. I guess I still haven't pissed off the right people. I still haven't bought insurance. When will I die? There's only one way to find out ... oh, but I gave up waiting for Apple to unify the iPhone, iPad, and Macbook ... so I got an Android tablet, and that's where this is being written. Let's see if consolidation works.