4 Day Weekend

Infrastructure

Saturday was really badly planned, and almost poorly executed. But a lot of errands got done in an ad hoc fashion. Perhaps because I've been low on sleep lately. Negligible housing developments. Shaved, laundered, sales deck, ate when necessary. "Sleep? study? sleep? sleep just won... for a bit..." "Just discovered the subtle difference in spelling complements and compliments. #fml"

Clearing my head. Reviewing the sights and sounds of the past week. Cultivated insensitivity to other senses, is definitely an IT decision. In coderspeak: I need to "defrag my sensory heap" more often. Need to remember to increase my haptics to optics ratio.

There are many types of idiocy in the world. Maybe I'm depressed because I don't have a place where I can avoid all of them at once. I've now had a degree and cell phone for 6.5 years. A laptop and smartphone for 4.5. A car for 10 months. #feelingAllGrownUP #cny Interesting how I don't even need these things... they're all for FUCKING WORK :)

School

Vim for iOS is horrible. iSSH to remote Vim is so much better for real work. Coffee and a quiet afternoon with the Edge. (newspaper not guitarist) Trying to learn how to think like a financier. Machine costs have dropped since the 1300s. Flesh is expensive - save it for when it matters. On why I don't maintain a mind palace.

Linked some spreadsheets so that my personal Ops Cash Flow for the month gets updated every 15 minutes, with my Trading Account Balance. Still studying Erlang datatype morphemes - I feel like the slowest learner in the world. Live Connect (dev.live.com) has a lot of good stuff; in the grand scheme of things, recently opened SkyDrive APIs are probably more important than Windows 8's GUI improvements. Here's a lot of good stuff on scopes & permissions that MSFT exposes to developers: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh243641.aspx The original notion of a thin-client is obsolete. Next, we're recognising that clients nodes will be specialised for heavy UI computation.

What superpowers? With the right training, anyone can be a Jedi. Praticed guitar. Have not in a long while. Strings so old, they're still in tune. Done with CNY gathering - fleeing the parents home, to the friend's home, where I hope to get more studying done. Need to rationalise: sleeping in the parents' home is a waste of time due to the social noise level, studying in the friend's home is a waste of time due to the lack of infrastructure and due to the high pop culture noise levels when the friend is around. So I must be careful to move to the right place for the right activities, at the right time. Study of new languages: (1) throw a bunch of morphemes into conscious memory (2) watch how the subconscious reacts (3) rinse and repeat.

Millisecond programming. It's a nice change from sketching out 12-month PR calendars. Sentiment analysis apparently bridges the connection between my job in public relations, and my studies of computational finance? Good talking point, but nothing new - they've been using NLP inputs for machine traders for a long time now. Facebook's probably going to have an insane post-IPO, given that they sell a product that a multitude of retail investors comprehend.

Fresh juice, siew yoke, Bloomberg, and Erlang. Reading up the library of Erlang OTP's BIFs. Erlang.org/course is probably the prettiest introduction I've seen so far. :( #slowpoke Study technique: make every attempt to store nothing in conscious memory. Flush eveything to subconscious memory & see what sticks. Anthony Bourdain documentary on Ferran Adria is pretty cool. It's encouraging to be able to name folks who work at this pace. The apartment in Sungai Long is meant to be my taller - I've been needing a place to accumulate hardware.

Jobs

Breaking out the PowerPoint... I saw some verbosity that needs reduction. "CSR" is a band-aid for problems arising from a shortage of citizenship (citizenlike behaviour by corporations). MSFT's Segoe UI Light and GOOG's Open Sans seem to be good complements. A good #mercenary works the way AAPL employees are said to work, regardless of her employer. (Final thought for the night. Good night.) In contemporary terms, Science is nothing more than a framework for knowledge management. Big data and other initiatives simply articulate how management is being forced to become more scientific. Cut through the faff. Sideline the talkers. Go straight for the capital. Trade concrete underliers. Stocks. Products. Services. #care One day, it will be nice to take a holiday from spending money on things I don't care about, like culture. Meanwhile, culture is a tool.

Society

Coffee with two random friends, dinner date, boss' birthday party, home again, home again. Really enjoying my study of five separate social media platforms. Every time I find a great link, I'm flipping browser windows and posting it all over. I think the Google+ splash page could be improved by improving emphasis on just one arrow (reduce the others). Must remember not to denigrate the religion of "taste" in first-order sensations.

"Apparently CNY dinner tonight will be @finnsirishpubs ! My fam is crazy, half explains where I come from. // Indeed, we are not the only Chinese family doing CNY dinner at @finnsirishpubs" Helping dad to find the cilantro while holding mum's hand in a mall. On folks at my end of the food chain not running revolutions: My minimum cash requirements have shrunk since I was 10. But those of us who get to choose our lives, already won the talent race. CNYd1: waiting at train station for cousins. Dump them home then figure out a nice place to study.

Following a short conversation involving me feeling that I wish I wasn't so busy, and had more time to explain myself to my date, I'm thinking that my hit rate's gradually improving... but I probably should aim to increase my demand for "workaholism" in the women that I date. Where I am over-performing is in managing to stay extremely productive, without most people realising the extent of my achievements - could be a successful PR strategy, or a delusion - and I do have to remind myself every now and then to stay the course, invite more feedback, but avoid being influenced overly by any that does come.

CNY 华lunch. One jack ass studying Erlang, a few more watching Big Bang Theory.