tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76183192024-03-20T15:11:54.881+08:00Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The BlogEverything And NothingPanthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.comBlogger377125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-41331026462558065742021-06-10T22:54:00.001+08:002021-06-11T10:41:54.550+08:00Memoriam the Second<p>My grandmother on my father's side passed away at 3am on Sunday. She had been sickly even before that; this was, I think, the fourth time in a year or so that she had been hospitalised with complaints of difficulty breathing. She had already been unable to sleep without the help of an oxygen concentrator, and her mobility was already extremely limited due to her breathlessness. We were informed of this by a group call on the family Messenger at around 6am. At the moment the immediate concerns were to pay off the remainder of her hospital bill and bring the body home, and then to alert everybody who was still sleeping and had missed the group call.</p><p>This happened in Johor. A significant part of the family was in Singapore and unable to return: Fourth Aunt, Third Brother, Fourth Sister, myself, and various other cousins and in-laws. Others yet were overseas. As I told someone, geographical distance helps a little with emotional distance. But there always comes a time for remembering.</p><p>I know very little of my grandmother's early history. I know she suffered some unknown but serious illness, back when my father and his siblings were still young; the medical bills at that time were bad, and I remember being told that that was a time when their regular meals consisted of a little rice and a lot of water. I don't know if she was formally educated or to what extent. I know her family was separated when she was young; one of her sisters still lives in the mountains of Guangdong, and my father visited them some years back. She came to Malaysia, and at some point in time was arranged to marry my grandfather. I still don't know very much about her, and it is something of a point of guilt now that I know very little of the social circles she had.</p><p>She was an immensely good cook. She would have had to be, to provide for nine children and then many, many grandchildren. She made traditional Teochew foods and festive snacks and that watery porridge that goes with salted black beans and a deep-fried fish so crunchy that the bones snap and crumble when you bite into it. She made those sticky red teardrop-shaped things that I still forget the name of, and she always made enough of everything to feed as many mouths as were in the house. I remember visiting during my A-Levels years, when I would always have two heaping bowls of rice every meal to go with the vegetables and meat, and there would always be a large bowl of Maggi with eggs and more vegetables on the day I had to catch the bus to leave. She also accumulated food, a hoarding habit she shared with my grandfather. The snacks and cookies that appeared every Chinese New Year would not disappear until the next Chinese New Year, unless you visited and went around eating everything. One thing she did not hoard was KFC. For some years whenever we visited and asked if there was anything she wanted - it was always KFC. I don't think she'd had any KFC in the last few months, not since her hospitalisations began, when the doctors started restricting her diet.</p><p>She had a wicked sense of humour. When my siblings and I were very young my parents off-handedly mentioned that we ought to learn some Teochew, and as she and my grandfather were visiting at the time we asked her to teach us something. And so the first Teochew phrase we ever learnt was <i>li di zui jin chao,</i> "your mouth stinks". Some time later we learnt <i>ka chang ang ang</i>, "red butthole". I cannot count to ten in Teochew, but I can tell people if they need to go brush their teeth. She pretended to have forgotten her luggage when she went to my sister's wedding, and only at the last minute produced her finery, and all was well. She was not mean-spirited, but she made things funny.</p><p>She had her faults. She loved gambling, and she would travel to Genting with my uncle sometimes. When the Marina Bay Sands opened in Singapore, and before COVID shut the borders, she would also go there. She would collect the license plate number of every new car that anybody in the family bought, or the license plate of any traffic accident she passed, and buy that number in the lottery, and sometimes she even won a little prize. She loved KFC, a little more perhaps than was strictly healthy. She did not do the exercises she should have done, which perhaps would have improved her condition after the hospitalisations. She was something of a product of her time; I remember a cousin snapping at her when she kept telling his wife to do some housework. She was passive, compared to my grandfather; he still looms larger than her, in my memory; he was the one with the temper and the loud voice and the motorbike and the gun, she was the one in the kitchen or cleaning the house. I don't think she ever expressed disagreement or even dissatisfaction with him, or at least it was never in my hearing; even after he passed, she let my uncle take leadership of the family. But that is I think the way she was brought up to be.</p><p>I remember when she would visit us, back when we were young. <span style="font-family: inherit;">We</span> would write letters to my grandparents in terrible Chinese on torn-out exercise-book paper, the only time we ever wrote <span face="arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 36); color: #202124; font-size: 16px;">您 </span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 36); color: #202124; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">in any casual writing. We would always write that we missed them. Once they appeared on our doorstep quite out of the blue, and she said that it was because we'd written that we missed them in our latest letter, and that was one of the ways I learned that words can make things happen when you write them to the right people.</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 36); color: #202124; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It's strange, watching all this from so far away. I have not been there for the ceremonies or the cremation, the eulogies or the crying - not the way I was there when my grandfather died. This time we have recorded Facebook Lives, or the short videos on the Messenger group, or the picture of her death certificate, photographed and shared almost as soon as the doctor on duty signed it. There's a vague guilt about not feeling worse about not being able to be there. There will be a strange emptiness in the house the next time I visit, when or if the borders reopen; I don't think they will be very quick to clear out her room and throw away her oxygen concentrator, her walker, or her other things. There will be a new photograph on the wall, another small stack of fruits and things arranged in front of it. Maybe there'll even be KFC on a plate.</span></span></p>Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-61937979487089748042015-03-29T23:41:00.003+08:002015-03-29T23:41:53.755+08:00Panthera Sapiens: A Pie ('Nuff Said about that)It's... about three years and a half now since I started work, give or take a week or two, and definitely coming on three years since I was transferred into the QA department, so I think it's a bit of a good time to start, hm, taking stock of everything that's changed or not changed, that I can observe.<br />
<br />
A small thought occurs to me that I ought to encrypt this, so I will. But I'm too lazy to do the complicated key thing that I did before; I'll just use an online encrypter when I'm done with this, and if whoever's reading this is both curious enough to attempt decryption AND clever or fortunate enough to find the key, well, that's reward for motivation and intelligence, isn't it?<br />
<br />
What has happened in the company over the last three and a half years that I can remember, in non-chronological and non-alphabetic order:<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li></li>
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<li>8ysBoPsMYZx22vcUlKc+m/MFozkwkPeOD+UJgK9W8j02/zoV8UbfXuu5So01RGDPZu2oqrUgp24IRG6o</li>
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<li>le0wd16XTYpCODazRJ+OmTrJxpwHl81iWjKOuZhQ3U+qP6W1ntlOAHSJCtDdGbmmIymzxNthFYfyulwQ</li>
<li>JzVDsu9eFj6eCMlzHf+kmcy3l7uKolbKqW3bzQ+EDr6GvAJuFhA8GiNdm+91Ba9kuT4XOQlNguvs0WDj</li>
<li>p25Wek8dIRowvfScIxxNxHmwlHa+2BtcLgqqndQroBYHjPOfCwwYa5nLSHG++r4d+OfRbi3Wd1RcGu9g</li>
<li>CUoZjYKc8sQfgBUrsQTGWQwscBdH89fQ49sQeE8TfRe/XjNr5N61UjvfCeRb7l7nS91dJaJAoQNQprZn</li>
<li>lIvKi8zpJ0q8LWzN1VHn329y7EvasbkSgPERLMlO7i+M1fStcIVunjDyoXv8ol4pNz3ZBVmd2fvjJzNl</li>
<li>KUpZH/XO4cSwDa0aXOALmh6b+qmAdqoQ3Tl/5p8T3NHtDzEdnVGfXwzlFDABwhFWrwtJ/90dU4lS66cd</li>
<li>O/Yw2UJVWfOvgKgKcQJw7Ark3XUIjbJCPB4gxD/5LQk1NU4YfRewxB401kdJzX70gN0ZuFgV1dTGz3dZ</li>
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<li>nOvpQdnoSPnOoecc7kPZ/Ob3gBcFUwmhLyqlbl45WddrlRy9gP9fmovxAnZwHtmjTpRz7lIwCb3Q8Bkd</li>
<li>RZmBrT7s0GvDdc2XDIg1ePDFm48Lchc9SziFItFl4G+oCi/afKCrNDFAUAxqipZWAUqufEKe+SKRMDi3</li>
<li>yiftP0Ba7DxNjCak2/Xj5ITWpVfXtIQcXnfyld3KnpdFeR59dniC5KFiByUxnXe1TV3MMJcnO/E+z4A8</li>
<li>meg5YzuWFpu9kikrus+hIvAe+e2qRlVd6it1jRq1O0+F0x6iobGSdhiQkyFxYCikJjDPd3yyfVXPdOXh</li>
<li>C/BByYUwsHbNH26CZ219aR3zrSJ1BS32vkcWPwxdP8LvDNLEsL+eQSRopesSTNVveEIRhEHKJ5J95EX+</li>
<li>ecnegcUeaqWIH1QKbO13y1zzKcS1C1TK6ucb4kPwbfqbUT2aPJgUiGEqFRbtQj2n6tYtZbtX03GLAJCh</li>
<li>/koIW1Ush2P9d7MhC/zMPffwiAT9EYmHSX6bPZNbyJavSBwKtpNzHZ6DdlRz7wkpN+Lq9QtgV5NvsP/Q</li>
<li>8BxKBl0pmzvSBqrUvUuXU4eghERDE0dFQNfP7vKyvCaY5IXRqMWikl5AoGqlv87X3keQE79xLRPjg4Uj</li>
<li>ZuY1NwNYxQVo/X9LKDBg8wpUErPwOYUwqa+BJIEe1qdQAhpKr5xzlon+2NSGPitdZMZmVXPgtlV+9q98</li>
<li>JTdxwaeQesMHMmfVybADGouMlLoqsk1RrmOBZxITg1JQuzBOcT8qQ7VbsHkN2N/Y+jj0zdfWQ2hpa/P5</li>
<li>rHy08pJnZa4xLWiyLUX5OntifNujkjRqFFsnLNuhjO6ZDL52Lay0CkFDYUwpEcFdkvcwQWqSXE9Rcpv4</li>
<li>FOeoCkpDG7FQMMO1m6C8KplWqm/6awKQqLPbl3q1tnD5E4RWHCLd4ILpmidcSuj8FZbXz6K6+Xln4w8M</li>
<li>oTI/K0umP/qWbOi+vBBaJ4TFVjw07l7TvwPmQcFNeybxLO9s9GZgE7XpE363Gk8iT1R3HPctbxmcmGgi</li>
<li>vcXDXGi+1t2ZaSuKRTPSWpu0Dit9pSYehSGJ3CM1bre56GRVYirMUpr9pTean48Mxot5VVTu99/8R80E</li>
<li>kKLCj3wjlVUIr/OsmIO3SAhE0fxASO5Xo1n8Wfalh3PL9dBPqxgSGdva1ur8oyjmIxPXz5Xju4qAWzoV</li>
<li>iw/yAwCMOXrxkp+/KuuweUOH71B0XyufeXDEMs605V2KRR1dA9kx7falNyGBVSJ+30y/rC5r/akRtYWQ</li>
<li>mi1BNCa0w1ZEM6T34QBERRn3Chl7q7Cqqwcv/BVSERXC//rkaimXDen8YkDw1iqzv298r0oH2TNhYdpU</li>
<li>9gloCcjC9Sl7bT8+O3sEsTGbeEf64/JRGOBEYqGSZwWwxLHNkNffNK5etIoPmsYqhoBIicyBwzz8Ry2f</li>
<li>t39wAhf8L01UK3jcmBkgpbEd9Qu1QcLupV9Zf/9qDSMDszZ0C7PIpalq1UwaYRr8WQuk4codAX0YZXQH</li>
<li>8gSuGh+4HV04LLjzC34LlFojEaYs9/BiO2LAP/96+28lcvGJPdaSfYdEUKjxq+ensJ6oFtIywpXjM6nB</li>
<li>anjzcXhWObrabkqJNSeiHJA6lxePkl3w+QDZGgfe+CL4jYM2RwjTZebi5SC1DrDN1LLW+ax0fVo0lFJX</li>
<li>y/w3+KkDobMunzIdW5hjOflRtCWbypgfYBurjSaW9W31szxWYjO9MQHYClHTTlTrG9C1N2lih5rUJGu4</li>
<li>Ms4zG5l0Ao0IXSefFWEWWh/u6ZVWI911O1yjf+oqqYOUSYmFxYFEc6+bYNfo5j616u4UOb04SYaUYf+k</li>
<li>4AQVSiyZfhbzwf2puxvK5u1+O6HKCBgWWiqCcWgd+8BtNutghqTBRAMxxm2S8EqueTpyKUFj21hpAO0p</li>
<li>B0+IpiI9Lt/XXc4Y103jFv8sfqRNnmZBr/ANLxVuukY/n4xLcP7uhrgn7gnhcyXuZN96DbUYvbyyG528</li>
<li>QSY2hvNd7HqQNyKWAQ/E0Axkkx9avJaF2eTpGdiRWJ0QrshxF22/aBspDXtkjfC19bCab+7gMHjNbYn2</li>
<li>slcu6sWFJxYWJFVJ2wDhfHF4puWdIq/vDuDGEzmVgnud6tH4zzIwxfywx/jk/q7S6Zv/htHsFe7ZeOb5</li>
<li>KH0xJnS+OPKI1Ww==IwEmS</li>
<li><br /></li>
<li>Decrypt it at https://encipher.it</li>
</ol>
<div>
...upon reflection, it actually seems that most of the major changes can be traced back to the GM. Which just shows the influence one person can have on a whole bunch of others. And now for self-evaluation...</div>
<div>
<ol>
<li></li>
<li>EnCt276b55a7f77a5a3af3dfb973f622b5a59982ef00476b55a7f77a5a3af3dfb973foTnK6vrMoQC</li>
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<li>LItq6iO5SIkF9/7E6x+VVbZnigeqe8swFM5wXO0IEDpJstwqHSa7mGkOR6oj9stK6teEZG5QoQ+78iWY</li>
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<li>Z4lcO1t8wf1mW4anjd6EDBgfQqorFUWQhl6Ruj8JbnImB6jrBTSwRJmwhd6JVxzV9IgAbahR+dRW+RUp</li>
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<li>G2qKQLKh+7F1w75XiRgfiGdpE3sy0l007ypKtP2Eh0Natg/iIqG/z0ylUaIL00lqHG7pLcaqEHK72XHP</li>
<li>BQxQZN/5v9wIZ1IOwypG4sNzMQbFehwTvDObLHILivVN8aEM8V/e7zqIvBskOuvaKmG3RP2B4c5M215D</li>
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<li>3nJn02mM5TF66IZ0nYukMgyO3C9kcHCOLi5v4oArynPaK0to0o8Glu6i27vD+AeP+JgY8jcfidQ84eLN</li>
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<li>1NsQECBWYe4ClnWJEHkbDzUV8cSBRwt8zDz3jrXNv0vbnUj8k4/WFyZAsysOIIoydjw6LM/hP9UpsDys</li>
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<li>WtEXzjgbDdKrCGIW+QAZgbh+ijo95ftZXt9XUKDX5YaB6hh/ieTJapIR5Xh4VtZf/DwbkHkIWMpqrSkb</li>
<li>qqm3mlPlRzcLxK2/2VLNdZEVkPudktsInLF8YUiXPhX0YdvQ65H1Bu4aG5EC7OpWDihUaoGJd+ndnFov</li>
<li>4EMU5rAg0UgTljFU9LOgPvOgfhsnCGfOW07muuTLyF/Z/flLRzcj+a4ZyLUOWoGuXnRt9+9YzBG5p2As</li>
<li>Id4njOYbRIbtBlBeCe20O4rDX+AQsC1EVW9X3zV2XgzfqIf3snzlhxSh0+cHrz32gP68lSj8L0qphWzK</li>
<li>bsck3uuSdz764HnOCwBHTS0R3oYo7HT9SYI6tDcvuyU1ImMuB9pqTHTx/U9HaPkPIDch8ASetq3S6ffA</li>
<li>JVbQKhjYjcixusW6HVYGayDdDUSbf74D5pFvSp2xHh+SPTtSyrPK0MTD4b7EqK3q4bY1PoXAuvbPaZej</li>
<li>seNwkh/s74sM49BGmaDsracI4UmyZSVnjoSNpecwPo4tH0yFWvYr/uvt1vhD+3CmCZ9MILh7BrRyhvZS</li>
<li>O6759t37wbECyC440kr3X/DFhkpkvIVmVIs2fE6vmY5cApLC/YKYTiIilKMbEtZbRx513s3r7I9SQ1s1</li>
<li>XnPZIVrFSQCAyCGKrQWswVvw0qAStw3EwuaKGj0eE9MWiNrxCmEgxbv/Aocs8srZaO5uNg0oxJPEPll/</li>
<li>wupedWQ1L71y5W39EN5/IEZB8Hasz+lq636eK0JXwzOcOW6wub+sRizGpB7rpSyxdMzS21+X9sLt8oN8</li>
<li>nCdR+yFS8/2FAqMr+suIkxsAmnvq9rjMXBwDAyio2OWnX+MgIKZsIrS689sGS4xcNl4IzSk3VlnYrXTm</li>
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<li>CkZjQ9I/PT3eNch24O3pDY0EUAPZMT8hKR+SMFedbkK7lYTmw+/C8KUsVEQiMtjtDfgXB89ZEXqLU45r</li>
<li>TZfPNIxgeGr2bqoJOCrM1haWXPFl6uBtkl1V+qkJH+NnvtPFAvUWJJCV024tLG3D5cEn4Xrbc/hbf6af</li>
<li>L7Amkws8OlpitS1hJi6H1fYiRPdM56Ei9HIeM3JHi+rKgtH+RclUuNv0Gy7OA87WHtXEuuJEVusjaHqs</li>
<li>DxZbSI32bb3PWuNxD4tZRZHEBVtLTOz/g9Ju34AGRPcQIeP/3Fo7HSyojEuO3GZGZRC1fKJJeFGqCmMf</li>
<li>Ct+1+KhV362C23ujLo206nwGZ+L4J+0M74Fr/s3QPUS4hrPbk7TC/PyZpN1qfRRTR8p2SDn0kxtip17E</li>
<li>YXo7l3LLdbssTukRM7Cjlur2/j8ZdpGEWo/c0Tw0KOV18ag7to5G7aMy2w40OpSSBWAaKdPtENkCoL3B</li>
<li>hC/RGHEV07krzfEHYDgqQ8HSvSBTlEbPBpy303lH0yARo8bvV9OhSFcRCI17ez4pos0LxRCIlVLMvKut</li>
<li>BUlPTux4zCdoPgJ9gNdABUj3wKxNlbSctvf5byPdhPfJWGB/9e4BJV/88Ap9hVLCw0P4s0sp9F88GVM+</li>
<li>ucGheL+3tQMhkOySNuqt4apdYcSyGcpANZVA7fYx9+5iRGBmlurMbEPyWLfCO97MOk9UWkR2NlM74Dku</li>
<li>An9pniRYTB0gWPxFrctZc9+WU7PfnEgOzH1HRat4JudJ9TSYJLyjeKfyi6V4G7pX8au6dyyOPnP0zWjN</li>
<li>1PQSCW0nre6DaJL6CW3zb2/9E51bOMTivHQQOdSLY9bgMoLOhI3NbHdQJcZ/A+ipbV5P5xRlvpoSrbhO</li>
<li>la5Ku8S71xGy1FJxmT0GDTSosBc/hr1ckDuznfOx29j+5gYPJG9R8dCnRWBbJEVq/4QySZMvHknhrSht</li>
<li>5NnITmT3LEBVpCiT+Gt0Yg0sON4L1BZB00NwMC09Zl7PJMVBR/1v4qRXftNbNtf3wk5V+Ilj5qgHh7xv</li>
<li>B8su3G15uGuswi4KCFw8zoktyW1FodmaH2yFJ+Gth/kZRmOLjH/crOxhj4oE7ziXzmlAK9k+XsINKbmz</li>
<li>NHmMiDsBrPxPHiRvWBbdW1zNIoa5IdP94qEb90lxfxrXklSjM/J9nB3Oka/MH21LUL0f6R7dGkfeTypS</li>
<li>zGU6/rhjgvQ/pnXHIAIaNUP4Yd+98OAGqCA1QHszKIjtCMxA2KY4nqME7vusls5RwiQK1hIeFy6FYv5a</li>
<li>oLd+FCXfUjL/Lnvdn6xdqdL87kDlgoDvzSVqnGqgqUCD2QF9qOYJmWm35qjKLkkWWO2EclpSHg+g4fNo</li>
<li>rjqScrofsLjAAb+2Z0Efy4ec9bz8Ki31leVNENlgxxCgtvbNOjZEJqDd2AGL/Tgu8joPsg55liBBbRzt</li>
<li>Ve3toRx15+SfbdkryrMdOe7t7t4Jkv5l7Gx6AHwgtRScJ0aBUlC/pPyoDGhlyQOORLDmfksyEHJBLMua</li>
<li>g7OH8DRs1/yR6M1a6wsDwtRn8sjfJjziom1KHOKfRYHrBAAl7HdBOJKYNsPL2PHDVOe40AdmLg9UPNJE</li>
<li>Ls1FQn5legnIpNvH/DNxSPQXIvsfK+ffaXeYJBZ6WIA6vWA2pYRDQpVHsSrx5gHVAPhwxCFwGVLihD5+</li>
<li>RxT78CZhM5BWDcDxer8qGFGl/hiyKlKa6yk4P1x4DwXUstAabSzREKSmjB6DUpV9+wBj64a9fmXAfOm6</li>
<li>e2LXUPT2sbNN0Alcv8D0wnfifNw==IwEmS</li>
<li><br /></li>
<li>Decrypt it at https://encipher.it</li>
</ol>
<div>
Why all this, though? I don't know. It might have to do that I'm being told to look for another job elsewhere, and I just don't feel... qualified or competent, yet, you know? There's this niggling little sense that I should have completed some goal or other before moving on - like this is a class and I haven't completed the syllabus, so I shouldn't try to go to the next class. And writing it out like that shows how... strange a thought that is, I suppose. After all there are many other reasons to change jobs, such as to get better pay or better working conditions or easier work, and people do that all the time.</div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But at the same time, I don't know that I'll be able to sell myself in an interview if I'm not properly confident in myself first; and for <i>that</i>, well - I don't know. I don't know if I'll ever get to a point where I can say, "Hey, I think I've learned everything I can here, and I'm as close to perfection as this place will ever get me. Gotta jet!" - if for nothing other than that as I approach improvement, I'll have to remain able to keep track of all the other basic routines and things, and will get new duties anyway.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
There's a fable about how some dirty little girl sparked improvement in a whole neighbourhood - she started off staring at some picture of a pretty girl, and then started brushing her hair and mending her dresses, which prompted her father to fix the house, which prompted the neighbour to paint their house, which prompted etc etc until the whole place was sparkling utopia. I used to think that way, too, but now - now that little girl has to mend all her dresses and brush her hair forever, as well as live up to whatever <i>new</i> things she has to do to keep the place clean - sweep and mop and do the dishes and ace her homework and whatever else - and so do all the neighbours, and all it'll take is one simple uncontrollable thing, like a passing vandal or a local business going bust, to throw them right back into the previous mess, won't it?</div>
Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-34877972994303942022015-02-04T19:21:00.001+08:002015-02-04T19:21:18.481+08:00...gah.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-1005876775037517562015-01-04T21:49:00.000+08:002015-01-04T21:49:49.809+08:00An Evaluation of a Recent CourseI was sent to a training course last week, on Tuesday and Wednesday - incidentally the last two days of the last year.<br />
<br />
Which makes this the first post of the new year, and I haven't yet gotten used to writing dates ending in "15" rather than "14" - but I digress.<br />
<br />
It's not the first training course I've ever gone to, but it's certainly the first one to be quite so emotional and rah-rah, and definitely the first one to end without a course evaluation of any kind. This is therefore my rectification of that issue. Naturally, names and titles are omitted for obvious reasons; but you may message me privately for further details.<br />
<br />
The trainer was a man. He was articulate enough, and something of a showman - large exaggerated gestures, a wide range of intonations and expressions and humourous props, and appreciably good-looking. He didn't introduce himself other than to mention he was of mixed heritage (his name format seems, however, to contradict his story in that regard - he says his father is a Malay and his mother Irish, but his name seems to indicate the other way around as his last name is distinctly Western) and to mention his family was in the middle of being flooded (but didn't show us any proof of it). However, he was something of a control freak, because he wouldn't let anybody go on toilet breaks other than during the tea breaks or lunch periods (the official line was "I'm committed enough to be here all day and you should be too!"), and one of his favourite tools was the whistle he used to make everybody get into their seats when he thought noise-making activities had gone on long enough. He had something of a sense of humour, but I can't remember any or many jokes of his that weren't either dirty, sarcastic, or terrible puns, generally of the "So, can anybody tell me what an <i>x</i> is? No, not a <i>y</i>!", where <i>x</i> and <i>y</i> would sound similar but <i>y</i> would be a dirty word, variety.<br />
<br />
He had four assistants, who went out of their way to tell us their names and try to differentiate themselves in the beginning ("Hi, I'm <i>x</i> and I'm the <i>y</i> Angel!") but they all eventually ended up just being collectively called "Angel" and not really performing different roles at all; they generally helped to keep the mineral water bottles and free mints flowing and judged different teams' performances and things like that.<br />
<br />
The training material was... catch-phrases. It was basically a bunch of acronyms and slogans aimed at convincing peple to make themselves feel motivated and good about their work and thus do more - a repeated phrase was "YOU MUST DO EXTRA TO GET EXTRA!" There was some useful stuff in there, of course, about observing one's own unconscious habits (the trainer called them "patterns") and replacing them with better ones, and some of the stuff about communication methods was good. But there was also other stuff like replacing "negative" phrases with "positive" ones, which smacked of New Speak, and other things about everything being everybody's responsibility which sound nice until you remember that roles and responsibilities exist for a reason. At least it was more or less easy to remember.<br />
<br />
At least, that was when the trainer was sticking to the material. I definitely didn't see the point in spending half the first day doing advertisements for how great the course was and how wonderful the trainer was and all that - after all we were already there! - and then the first half of the next day was spent sitting in little circles with other people in a dark room while everybody was being encouraged to "share", which... didn't seem to accomplish anything at all, because nobody was quite sure <i>what</i> to share and so ended up talking about family or work, and even then it was a complete digression from the supposed topic of the course. And then there was the way that all the segments tended to be ended with a group singing session for some song that the trainer claimed was picked by the GM or AGM, but I stopped believing that when the AGM started getting surprised looks.<br />
<br />
The methods, too, were... rather odd. I'm all for encouraging audience participation, because it can't be great for a trainer to be lecturing to a bunch of sleepy people, but there should be better ways. There were a lot of things being done in the course, but there are a couple that stand out to me.<br />
<br />
1. The fake money system was introduced on the first day, and was the criterion by which your certificate would indicate "Attendance" or "Achievement", and of course you'd want the latter. They were given out by the hundred thousands, with people generally receiving 500,000 for things like standing up and answering questions or things like that, or 1,000,000 for anything the trainer thought particularly impressive. Each group had a communal wallet, which was filled up by either group or individual achievements, and there were twice-daily announcements of which groups had done best or worst in the competition. This largely seemed to clash with the reiterations of teamwork and supporting each other - if you want the mood to be everybody striving for a common goal, then having individual or team competitions seems to be decidedly counter to that.<br />
<br />
2. The trainer announced that there would be more than eighty games to play. These games turned out to be largely of the "go to <i>x</i> number of people and tell them <i>y</i>!" format. However, because "YOU MUST DO EXTRA!", you were actually expected to go to 2<i>x</i> or more people (or, as some more cynical people interpreted it, <i>x</i>+1 people) and tell them <i>y</i> in as enthusiastic a fashion as possible, almost always involving high-fiving them with both hands. The games of this format were invariably interrupted by the trainer blowing on his whistle, which was the cue for everybody to rush back to their seats and pump their fists in the air (there was a <i>lot</i> of fist-pumping) and shout "READY!" so that the course could proceed. The first time this occurred, everybody was too focused on finishing the task at hand to sit down, and the trainer muttered about it being practice for being alert to opportunities or new tasks or things, and so after that, everybody abandoned the task the moment the whistle sounded - how this is supposed to translate to real everyday behaviour is probably an exercise for the viewer. In the end, the only real game being played that was a game by normal definitions was the bow and arrow - the trainer set up a target and let people shoot arrows at it to earn more fake money.<br />
<br />
3. There was a point in the second day before lunch, sometime after the trainer had gone over the portions of the material that stated "everything that goes wrong is <i>my</i> fault" and "say no to complaining, blaming, excusing, or gossip!", that the trainer decided to go around every group and nitpick - trash on the ground, chairs or files out of place (they had duct tape on the floor with little <i>x</i>'s drawn on to indicate precisely where the chairs and files should be placed), participants who hadn't tried the bow and arrow - and the appointed group leaders would have to take it all without complaining or blaming or anything like that, and then groups would lose fake money for whatever offences the trainer claimed to have found. I suppose it was meant to be practice for it happening at work and stuff, but all that negativity and anger doesn't go away just because you don't express it out loud, so what's supposed to happen to it? There may be a loophole, though; the trainer mentioned that the complaining, e.t.c. were only not to be mentioned to superiors asking for progress reports or status updates on issues, so apparently you're only supposed to give them good news and not tell them anything that you're having difficulty with or that's gone wrong (or if you do, to tell it in some inoffensive way) - which still leaves you with other avenues for venting as needed. (There is, of course, the side issue that superiors who never hear about the things that go wrong will probably eventually go wrong themselves, but I suppose the subordinates are supposed to be passionate and skilful enough to deal with that eventuality.)<br />
<br />
4. The trainer insisted that people should plan their toilet breaks and things to coincide with tea breaks and the lunch period, but there was no schedule provided and people had to figure it out by trial and error. It wasn't really helped by the fact the trainer didn't have a very good control of his own timing, and the tea breaks or lunch periods were at different times on each day.<br />
<br />
The food provided at tea breaks was lacklustre. The coffee and tea were bland, the fried things were soggy, the noodles were sticky, the meat was little, and the cakes were spongy. The lunch buffet was much better, but since it was always late (at about 1.30pm or later, when the buffet was near closing) and the trainer only scheduled 40 minutes for it, it tended to feel rather rushed.<br />
<br />
All in all? I'm... underwhelmed by the entire experience. There were some good, useful points in the material, but no real concrete application for some of them; most of the material was catchphrases and New Speak, delivered amidst dirty jokes and sarcastic put-downs and falsettos; it felt very much like some kind of positive emotions rally; the games were anything but; participants were restricted on a grade schooler level; and good large chunks of time were spent doing pointless activities. So while it was an interesting couple of days, I'm not sure it bears repeating or recommendations.Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-2797817185576395772014-12-31T22:42:00.002+08:002014-12-31T22:42:45.358+08:002014 in Review<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, the end of the year is upon me, and what a year it's been, I suppose. I've been regrettably lax in maintaining this blog so far this year; that's something to aspire to changing next year, perhaps.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Arbitrary as the time distinction may be, however, tomorrow is a public holiday and I don't have to wake up early to work; so I have the luxury of today to perform a simple, hm, review of the year. So, let's get down to it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Fitness</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">According to my logs, I've run something like 80+ times over the entirety of 2014, beginning somewhere around February. That works out to about 200 km run, and about 20 hours of it. If you throw in the times I spend on weights and swimming and so on, that works out to about 40 hours this year in the gym - and there were also the trips to the mountains and the islands, which I think I'm justified in considering as having been physically strenuous given the activities carried out there.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Be that as it may, though, I didn't meet any of the fitness goals set for me this year. I still can't run 2.4 km in less than 13 minutes; my best time this year was 15 and a half, and that was months ago - my time last night was 17 minutes and 54 seconds, scarcely better than when I'd started. I've been having a difficult time of it for some time; I don't know if it's mental or physical, but I've not seen any improvement - quite the opposite in fact - over the last month or so. I can't do a single pull-up either, and can't support my own weight on the bars for more than about ten seconds before the pain is too much to bear. I have found, with a little interest, that I <i>can</i> do a handstand if braced against the wall, and given certain prerequisites about weather and physical condition, can swim the length of the swimming pool in one breath.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Shape-wise I haven't improved at all; I remain vaguely hourglass-shaped from the front on and distinctly egg-shaped from the side on. I was told a long time ago that I appeared to be improving, but as only one person expressed that opinion and it has not been backed up since by other sources, I have had to discard that opinion.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So do I have any goals for 2015? I suppose I'll maintain the same goals as I had this year; the graph, plotted out and given a trendline and extrapolated, indicates that at my current rate of improvement (ha!) I should achieve the desired time sometime in July. The friend who makes me run has also proposed some changes to the routine, mostly involving switching to pavement runs from treadmill use, which I'll have to incorporate somehow.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I should stress, of course, that these goals were not set by me; frankly if you ask me, this body is just waiting for a good round of cybernetic upgrades before it's going to be capable of anything besides scarfing down half the table at buffets and then going back for seconds. But I suppose it's nice to have people think one is capable of more than one thinks one is capable of, in a way, if there isn't too much pressure about it?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<b style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Finance</b><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My finances aren't all shine and bauble either; I've significantly less savings at the moment than I'd planned or hoped to have - my expenditure tracker points to multiple unexpected, but large, one-off or unusual events. Things like credit card late fees or having to change the car's air-conditioning system or road taxes or reunions or weddings or trips; all of which were, I suppose, necessary and some of them were even enjoyable, but the upshot of it is that I have maybe half, maybe slightly more than half, of the savings I'd hoped to have. It's tolerable this year, because I only owe my father for car payments, but even so it's late payments and it's not a good thing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And next year I need to start saving up for house payments, which means I'll need to have even tighter control over the things; it may actually need to be a strategy for me to perform the bank transfers at the beginning of each month to ensure I've got the payments off before I move any money off for personal expenditure. I don't think I have much of a reputation for being a spendthrift, but my expenditure tracker seems to argue otherwise.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, goals for 2015? None really. I don't expect the Malaysian ringgit (and hence my buying power) to strengthen at all, and in fact it's been on a steady depreciating trend for the past goodness knows how many years and accelerating. I suppose I'll be satisfied just to get my payments up to date and have a little left over for personal enjoyment.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><u><br /></u></span>
<b style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Work</b><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've been promoted to full Engineer position, and have gone through several training courses; in fact I've been in one for the past two days. It's somewhat satisfying, though it's not everything I'd like it to be. My time is still too much used on paperwork, and the move towards a fully electronic system for some documents is sometimes something of a source of distraction for me. I'm also dissatisfied with the turnover rate of people in a particular position; it's a somewhat intellectually demanding position, but at the same time requires the employee to perform repetitive tasks over long periods and possibly wok shifts, which mayn't be the most cohesive of job requirements. We've gone through nearly twenty people in it in the last few years.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'd also like to be more certain of my own competence; my degree is unrelated to the work I do, and three years later it still rankles me slightly to think that if I ever wanted to change jobs, I would have no paperwork other than internal training documents and these assorted training courses' certificates of attendance or achievement. Of course, I could probably hold my own in an interview or through a probation period; but the lack of proper qualifications (so to speak) is something of a thorn, even if only a minor one.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Beliefs</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm... not very much of a religious person, I suppose, at least not now; it could be that I'm generally too cynical and pessimistic about the things I can see to really properly trust in the God I can't see, hear, touch, etc. Of course there's the parts about being able to hear Him through His Word, see Him through other people or His actions, and things like that; but they seem too much like self-convincing and psyching oneself up to be, well, properly there.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There are other issues in it, too, of course; there's a part in Discworld where Granny Weatherwax notes that if you believed, really believed, in a God who loved like a mother and protected like a father, who made all and loves it all and hates evil - then you'd have to live like it, and you'd also have to hate evil wherever you found it and so on. And there are other things in it too; hard things like accepting painful change and the nature of God as forge-fire and ruling lion and disciplinarian, that go against - well, let's be honest - I'd like it best if it were some fuzzy benevolence that I could hope in to keep me comfortable. But I can't forget those parts, which may be for the best in the end. I suppose some mental wrestling is to come, if or when I ever have the time for it; but until then it just keeps getting deferred away or glanced off, lightly. It's too large a can of worms for me to approach, right now.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>World Events</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It hasn't really been a great year, here, either, has it? Between the planes going missing or crashing, the plunging prices of crude oil and rubber and palm oil, weird weather patterns, and politics in general... yeah. Not been great.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Local Events</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Not so great on the home front, either, has it though? There's been weird weather locally too - droughts and then high winds that ripped off roofs and felled trees, and then now there's the floods up north. All this amidst the general idiocy of the politicians who can't seem to open their mouths without horrifically offending somebody or other somehow - and of course the one good one gets killed in a traffic accident while the others roam free.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Leisure</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Leisure-wise... well, this is probably the one part of the thing that's not too terribly bad, I suppose? I've played through a few quite enjoyable games and have managed to get into a semi-regular game of Pathfinder, which I'm quite liking even if the GM has a penchant for surprise battles where the entire party has conveniently lost all their gear or have multiple penalties on them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Other Things</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">...I don't really think there's anything else; my life really is that dull. I suppose this is where I should note that I've managed to keep my parents disappointed for yet another year by remaining obstinately single, though.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So that was 2014, the bare bones of it, off the top of my head. If it doesn't sound great, that's because it wasn't, and no amount of future nostalgia will make it better. And will 2015 be any better?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">...no, not really, I don't think it will. There's a general opinion that optimism is better than pessimism, but I keep in mind the fact that it's usually the optimists who die early.</span>Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-28775671815540462632014-07-13T00:25:00.001+08:002014-07-13T00:25:19.117+08:00Let's Play The Last Federation! playthrough 1, part 1Right then! I recently got a copy of The Last Federation, which was introduced to me by a friend I visited a week or so ago... I'm just going to document this second playthrough. In my previous one I ended the game with a two-race Federation, so I'm going to try to better that this time.<br />
<br />
So - a bit of background - I'm the last of an alien race, that was bombed to death for being naughty to the other races in the local solar system, and now I want to unite all the races in Federal Solar Peace. To that end, I have a spaceship that zips about the solar system like anything, and lots of tech and things!<br />
<br />
The game randomly started me out with the Burlusts, who are more or less a Proud Warrior Race... Race. They have warlords and things, and I'm going to have to try to keep killing those off so they don't overtake half the system. I balanced out the space race by gifting space tech to the Andors (a pacifist robot diplomatic race that never ever takes over other plants), Skylaxians (a senate-controlled race), and Peltians (suicide-bombing weaklings).<br />
<br />
To earn credits (the in-game currency), I'm going to be doing a lot of attacking. At this stage it'll be pirate bases, but later in the game I may need to do that to other races' armadas to stop them from overrunning each other's planets, which will cost influence - the other in-game currency, which is a sort of thing that measures the race's attitude towards you.<br />
<br />
...the Peltians have caught a disease. I'm going to need a Space Outpost to research a vaccine for the Maggot Pox, but no race has enough raw materials (they need to do some mining for that) to build one, and neither do I. A couple of months later, so have the Skylaxians. I've brokered trade deals between the three of them to encourage economical growth and friendliness.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, the Acutians are now space-faring. This is dangerous, because the Acutians are very acquisitive.<br />
<br />
I decide to buy 10 each of Construction and Scientist goons from the black market. I need them to help me increase the strength of the Andors, which will make the Andors friendly enough to me that I can plant a bunch of outposts around them and have them act as interim security if any attackers happen to pass through their space on the way to my (coming) outposts.<br />
<br />
I spend five months researching Fleet Nanorobotics, three months on Quantum Computers, and five more on Gluon Computers (during which the Acutians research new ships) with the Andors; then five months on Meson Computers with the Skylaxians.<br />
<br />
And now the Acutians are attacking the Burlusts, which doesn't mean anything yet; the Burlusts, like the Thoraxians, are militarily extremely strong and shouldn't have a problem holding off the attack. In the meantime, I advise the Skylaxians, Andors, and Peltians to colonise every moon they have. Which turns out to be a mistake - years elapse while I colonise the Skylaxians' INCREDIBLY MANY moons (they have over 70), and almost miss a Boarine request for terraforming technology, which I fulfil for the influence boost. The Thoraxians, Evucks, and Boarines also achieve space technology in this time, which means the entire system now has space ships. Further, the Acutians are attacking the Thoraxians and a couple of new viruses have popped up. Fortunately, the Skylaxians are being helped by a random Doctor event to keep them going.<br />
<br />
I broker a few more trade deals since the Skylaxians' moon colonies are creating resources for them, and the Evucks decide to attack the Thoraxians.<br />
<br />
I gift some technology to the Andors, which makes me Liked by them (at the moment, I'm Neutral or better with everybody but the Burlusts, who detest me). I spend another 8 months constructing a University for them, and the Boarines attack the Thoraxians. Why does everybody seem to attack the Thoraxians first? I decide to spend 6 months improving the relationship between the Andors and the Burlusts as a prelude to possible Federation backdooring. I also create a trade route between the Peltians and the Evucks, and colonise two Peltian moons.<br />
<br />
With nothing to do until the Andors gain enough resources to construct an outpost, I attack pirate bases until there aren't any left, then spend another 8 months on a university for the Andors. There's a Hydral signal coming from the Burlusts' planet, but they hate me so much that I can't search for the signal emitter from there - I have to build influence with them either by giving them technology or helping them in the war against the Acutians, which I don't mind; the Acutians have been very aggressive and do need dialing down. However, I need 100+ Influence units, which means quite hefty helping, so I regretfully turn away from the Hydral signal in favour of Andor.<br />
<br />
The ruling party on Andor is the Pharmacists, so I send medical aid to the Peltians and Skylaxians. To earn some credit, I spend 12 months building the Andor armadas and then 3 months researching Photon Mechanics, 1 month on a Solar Shield (during which the Skylaxians develop a vaccine for their disease entirely on their own), and 5 months on Industrial Nano Robotics for the Andors. Another 5 months goes into their Space Elevator, but I decide to use the resource-rich Skylaxians for my outposts instead from now on. Unfortunately, helping the Skylaxians means antagonising the Thoraxians who are warring with them. Another race for the Andors to backdoor later!<br />
<br />
I spend 20 months building a Science Outpost for the Skylaxians, which I promptly attack to take over and staff with 15 security goons just in case; the Skylaxian army is not yet strong. But before that, the Peltians are under attack from splinter factions, and it's a toss-up on whether to help them; they are at war with the Skylaxians, which I didn't notice until just now. So I don't help the Peltians, deciding instead to build Quantum Power for the Skylaxians. At the moment, I've decided that to gain credits I'll work with the Andors to build their armada, while using the Skylaxians to build and secure my outposts.<br />
<br />
So that's another year on the Andor armada, upon which the Skylaxians attack the Thoraxians. Again. I spend 11 months with the Skylaxians to upgrade my ship's defensive/ offensive capabilities, and 10 months for a Skylaxian university. The Peltians get sick (again), and the Acutians attack the Thoraxians (again). I put a few years into Andor research, taking out every project of four months or less. Then I repeat for the Peltians and Skylaxians, and then gift technology in between the three so they're all on equal standing. At this point the Peltians and Skylaxians have finally stopped warring, but I still need to boost their races towards each other. I make the Peltians share technology with the Andors to boost the Andors' opinion of them, and then I spend another year on the Andors' armada.<br />
<br />
A new Hydral signal, but because I have an outpost in the ice belt myself, I can search for it without having to suck up to the Burlusts! I gain Disruptor and Eject Garbage; the first is a new gun type, that partially bypasses shields but isn't very powerful damage-wise, and the second one creates a bunch of debris that swallows up incoming shots. There's still a signal, so I go searching again, now gaining Mercenary Hotline (which calls in mercenaries at a cost to Influence) and Operation Raptor, which deploys smaller ships that help me. For Influence, I spend 34 months with the Skylaxians doing research.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, the Skylaxians wiped out the Thoraxians, but the Boarines promptly took that planet over. The Acutians also built a new outpost, which I also capture. To regain Influence with them, I give them some technologies and, again, research anything that takes less than 4 months; then I colonise their moon and broker some new trade routes. I take all these technologies back with me and gift them to the Andors, Skylaxians, and Peltians, further boosting Influence there. The ruling party of the Andors is the Traders, so I also get them to boost trade for my three core races. While I'm helping the Andors further construct their fleet, they protect my outpost by defeating assassins.<br />
<br />
A new disease appears amongst the Boarines, so I research a vaccine for that and build an industrial building (Waste Management) for the Acutians to stave off the Influence drop. Then I capture the manufacturing outpost that the Skylaxians just built. I hire a few more security goons just in case, and proceed to research a whole slew of things with the Skylaxians. I colonise two more Skylaxian moons and broker another trade deal, upon which the Skylaxians go off to attack the Acutians. Another year of armada building for me! My earned credit goes towards additional trade routes - the Skylaxians are going to be insanely rich. I do some more research - and I find the Andors attacking the Acutians for being bullies. Literally - it's an attack of honour. Meanwhile, the Acutians are abandoning their planet to become pirates, as well as turning on the Burlusts. That being the case, I put another year into Andors' armada, then proceed to do a bunch of short research stints with the Skylaxians.<br />
<br />
The Peltians are also abandoning their planet for piracy, so I tell them to focus on their medicines and colonise a few moons. I also research a vaccine for the disease they're currently suffering from. The Burlusts are finally wiped out, and the planet passes rapidly from the Burlusts to the Peltians to the Skylaxians, who are dangerously overrunning the place now. I broker some more trade deals between the Skylaxians and the Peltians, and then go back to the Andors for Influence-boosting and credit-earning. I interrupt that to help the Peltians research yet another vaccine (their work on their medicine is hardly up to snuff). Upon which the Peltians take that planet back from the Skylaxians, and your computer says "D'awww". My work with the Andors is interrupted again by another Hydral technology signal, and searching it out gets me Deployment Jammer and a Transfer Shielding, which are nice but not terribly useful. The second search gets me Transfer Power and Cloaking Field.<br />
<br />
At this point I customise my ship's weapons and abilities properly; I use Mass Driver/ Energy Blaster/ Disruptor, which are fairly effective and have good range; my offensive abilities are the Gigacannon and Anti-Swarm Lasers; my deployables are nine Wolf Predators, and I can instantly repair 100% of my shield in exchange for 5% of my hull strength - aptly named the Emergency Shield Repair.<br />
<br />
The Acutians are attacking the Skylaxians, so I defend them and gain a little more credit in the process. However, since the Acutians are this aggressive, I'm going to stop maintaining neutrality with them and start overrunning all their outposts (they have a lot of outposts). Similarly for the Peltians, who are under attack by the Boarines. After I deal with invading armadas, I capture an Acutian manufacturing outpost and destroy a military one.<br />
<br />
After that, I attack the planet's defensive armadas. I don't aim to destroy the flagships, but I do want to get as many of their satellites and defensive structures as I can. I succeed in one attack, but fail to get any satellites; I do find another military outpost, and destroy it. I then proceed to attack a series of Acutian armadas, racking up the credits that way and plunging my Influence with them into the heavy negatives. Unfortunately, the Skylaxians and Peltians promptly formed a Solar Axis Pact, which I now need to break up if I'm to win - which is to say, I have to make them incredibly unhappy with each other. Hologram channels will help there, and so will breaking off any trade deals between them. I also defend my outposts against Acutian attackers.<br />
<br />
I find, at this time, that breaking off trade deals gains positive influence, and so does encouraging them to build things that the other race hates. Meanwhile, the Skylaxians destroy both the Acutians and the Boarines, which makes them likely to form the Fear Empire when they break out of the SAP. I decide to start manufacturing conspiracies between the Peltians and Skylaxians - but that is impossible between members of the same alliance. I gain a Cloaking Device and a Gravity Lance from searching an asteroid belt, and go through a burst of research with the Andors - which I do not share with the Skylaxians or Peltians this time!<br />
<br />
A side-note: I am, at this time, idolised by all four still-living races.Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-63889480884561930192013-12-16T15:25:00.001+08:002013-12-16T15:25:27.836+08:00Pathing<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">So the parents are back, or they soon will be. This has led to the usual things, I suppose. Let's see if we can't go over this in an organised way.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><b>Things That Happen When Parents Turn Up</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">1. Unexpected changes. This means things like coming home one day to find that the parents have decided to move house the next day, and consequently having to pack everything into boxes. It also means things like never being able to find anything because everything's been squirreled away for neatness.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">2. Increased food intake. I've gotten used to going without dinner most of the week - usually I only take supper once, on Friday nights - and go all day on lunch. On the other hand, my parents insist on family dinners.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">3. Reduced time. My schedule, previously, was a relatively uncomplicated thing - wake, work, return home for exercise/ laundry/ computer time. Now I have to add in family dinner time, which takes up at least an hour, and then on top of that there's whatever random activity the parents have decided we're all going to do. As a direct result, I haven't done any exercise in more than two weeks.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">4. Errands. This is because there is still only one car - the parents will want to buy one for themselves when they return for good, around the end of January - and therefore everything has to be done by everybody. And so everybody goes out for groceries, miscellaneous things, furniture, etc. together.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I went through NaNoWriMo this year, successfully; I attribute that the relatively extensive plotting I did, though the plot still managed to get away from me at times. I flatter myself it is a better effort than that of previous years all the same.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">It's December; Christmas preparations have begun. The church is draped with tinsel and blinking lights and some green spiky plastic thing that appears to be somebody's conception of mistletoe/ holly, and wreaths have been put up all over the place. It doesn't look too bad. It's how the church has looked every Christmas for at least the past two Christmases. The songs that the carolers are being taught to sing, too, are the same songs as they have sung for at least two years, in the same arrangements. I'm not sure if I like that it seems as if retailers pay more attention to Christmas celebrations than the church does, but then I'd like to sing something that doesn't sound like somebody slapped a bunch of Christian lyrics on the tune of <i>Frosty the Snowman</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">And now? Now I don't know. Things are falling into place, which means things are shortly going to start falling right out of place again; peace is not a long-lived phenomenon in my experience. It doesn't really look like Malaysia has very much of a future going for it, not when one considers the political and economic climate. (It's a bit of a downer to look around and find that just about everything wrong with the place is at least partly the doing of people who ought to at least ostensibly be attempting to help it.) But what I'm going to do next is the question.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><b>What I Can Do Next</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">1. Keep going on. This is probably going to be the easiest - read: lowest-effort - option, but is likely also to be the least comfortable one, in the long run. This is the option where I stay on with my life more or less as it is; no job-hopping, steadily progressing with my job as far as it will take me. It's the stable one where I end up living with my parents, take care of the house, maybe start and continue a fitness regimen, things like that.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">2. Take an MBA. This one kind of builds on the previous one; for this to be feasible at all, I'd have to stay in my current geographical region, and almost certainly remain with the current company. The payments... well, I do already have condo payments to keep up with, though I can get a little off of rental, and I think the company will be able to help since I'm told it can come out of the HRD budget - which is claimable from the government. I'll need more information on this. The main thing is that I don't know if I'll be able to handle the extra demand on my time, and I'm half afraid that a bad choice would either a) leave me with a useless, though easy-to-get, degree; or b) be out of my depth and leave me floundering.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">3. Emigrate. This one would... well. It would completely upset <i>everything</i>. I'd be starting everything all over again - rebuilding career and life in alien surroundings. It'd mean a certain additional measure of freedom, but also a measure of binding; I'd be abandoning such responsibilities as I've accrued in my time here. It's the scariest, but at the same time the most freeing, in a bizarre way. I kind of think this option is one I'll have to inevitably take, to be honest, if my country goes on the way it seems to be going.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I think one of the real big things these days is that I'm scared of being surpassed. I don't know why; perhaps it's a late-developing sense of competition or just that I'm afraid of missing out on things. Like when I'm chatting with friends and they casually mention trips to far-off places or expensive purchases; it's not that I want to go a-travelling or shopping, but it'd be nice to have that kind of disposable income just hanging around to be spent. As it is, I don't have very much in the way of savings - and I'm considered one of the more frugal people in the family. My cash-flow tracker, incidentally, begs to differ. I seem to spend a lot of money on random one-off purchases; so far it's only halfway through December and I've already spent 1k on food, tithes, gas, &c. But then, the parents have been around - having people around always increases my expenses. My spending in November, for example, was about 2.8k.</span>Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-64766066879615506412013-09-30T21:26:00.002+08:002013-09-30T21:26:09.803+08:002ow woew'aw oqewoiq cgowgeqaw ewoiq iqeqtsaweqtscg owaw'xg owzdzdewtsxgxg, ocg xgawcgtsxgxg, ocg tsqsoawowoewqzd eqarcgaw, ocg iqeqqawtsvdtscg owaw owxg, raraw cgowgeqaw ewoiq ow'qs tarxgaw qiquqarzd. owaw'xg q zdowawawzdts rowaw, ow xgarwswsoxgts, zdowoqts iqeqqaw ow cgtsqw qroaraw rsoqsowewg oaraw ouq wtswscgtsxgxgowoew. qaw uqowcgxgaw oewts owxg tsewvdtszdowstsw owew q eqqzts ouq ewoaw-uqtstszdowewg; aweqtsew aweqts eqqzts zdowuqawxg, raraw zfoar oewzdzf uqtstszd oewts aweqowewg qeww zfoar uqtstszd owaw qzdzd aweqts awowqsts qeww zfoar uqtstszd owaw qaw tsvdtscgzfaweqowewg. qeww aweqtsew qsocgts uqtstszdowewgxg rsoqsts owew qeww zfoar tsvdtsewawarqzdzdzf tseww arws iqowaweq aweqts iqeqozdts cgqewgts... iqtszdzd, cgowgeqaw ewoiq aweqts oewzdzf aweqowewg ow uqtstszd owxg awowcgtsw. zdowoqts aweqtscgts'xg aweqowxg rowg xgozdoww rqzdzd owewxgowwts qszf eqtsqw, awqoqowewg arws qzdzd aweqts xgwsqrsts rtseqoweww qszf tszftsxg qeww tsqcgxg qeww ewoaweqowewg ow xgtsts ocg eqtsqcg rsqew qarowawts gtsaw owew aweqtscgts awo rts wscgowstscgzdzf wscgorstsxgxgtsw ocg cgtsqrsawtsw awo, qwsqcgaw uqcgoqs owew aweqts warzdzdtsxgaw ouq iqqzfxg.<br />
qsqzfrts ow'qs tarxgaw uqcgarxgawcgqawtsw qeww wowxgqwswsoowewawtsw qeww eqarcgaw. ow wscgorqrzdzf qqs. owaw'xg... iqtszdzd, ow woew'aw aweqowewoq ow'vdts rtstsew aweqowxg owstsew qroaraw qszfxgtszduq awo qewzfrowzf owew tarxgaw qroaraw uqocgtsvdtscg. owew uqqrsaw ow aweqowewoq owaw qrsawarqzdzdzf owxg aweqts uqowcgxgaw awowqsts ow'vdts tsvdtscg awozdw qewzfrowzf qroaraw aweqowxg iqeqozdts rarewwzdts ouq aweqowewgxg ow'vdts oqtswsaw owew qsts uqocg xgo zdoewg... raraw aweqtsew ow rsqew'aw rzdqqsts aweqtsqs uqocg rtsowewg eqarqsqew. uqocg ewoaw xgtstsowewg aweqowewgxg qszf iqqzf qeww uqocg aweqowewoqowewg ow'qs rtsowewg iqeqowewzf qeww xgwsoowzdaw qeww xgouqaw oew qszfxgtszduq. ow wscgorqrzdzf qqs. ow rsqew'aw awtszdzd. raraw owaw qsqoqtsxg qsts iqqewaw awo wsaraw aweqts xgeqowtszdwxg cgowgeqaw rqrsoq arws qeww uqocgrsts qzdzd aweqts rsoewvdtscgxgqawowoewxg rqrsoq awo aweqts xgawcgowrsawzdzf qsarewwqewts qeww rsqxgarqzd. wscgtsawtseww aweqts zdqxgaw qsoewaweq ocg xgo wowwew'aw eqqwswstsew, aweqqaw oarcg cgtszdqawowoewxgeqowws owxg xgawowzdzd wsarcgtszdzf q uqcgowtsewwxgeqowws qeww oarcg qsqowew awowsowrsxg ouq rsoewvdtscgxgqawowoew iqowzdzd xgawowzdzd rts iqocgoq qeww gtstsoqzf owewawtscgtsxgawxg. ow rsqew wscgorqrzdzf qrsrsoqswszdowxgeq aweqqaw. owaw qsowgeqaw wtsxgawcgozf aweqts cgtszdqawowoewxgeqowws. ow woew'aw oqewoiq owuq aweqqaw iqoarzdw eqarcgaw qsocgts aweqqew zdtsawawowewg aweqowewgxg go oew qxg aweqtszf qcgts. ow aweqowewoq roaweq iqoarzdw rts tarxgaw qiquqarzd; qeww ow woew'aw oqewoiq iqeqtsew ow iqoarzdw ewtsxaw rts rsoqsuqocgawqrzdts tsewoargeq iqowaweq qewzfrowzf awo rts zdowoqts aweqowxg iqowaweq aweqtsqs qgqowew. ow qsowgeqaw ewtsvdtscg.<br />
ow'qs owewrszdowewtsw, ouq rsoarcgxgts, awo rzdqqsts qszfxgtszduq. uqocg xgowewewowewg. uqocg rsoqswszdqowewowewg. uqocg wstscgeqqwsxg ewoaw tsxwscgtsxgxgowewg qszfxgtszduq iqtszdzd tsewoargeq, uqocg ewoaw zdowvdowewg q qsocgts aweqocgoargeqzdzf tsxqqsowewtsw zdowuqts, uqocg ewoaw eqqvdowewg aweqts xgawcgtsewgaweq ouq rseqqcgqrsawtscg awo rts q qsqew ouq owewawtsgcgowawzf, uqocg xgo qsqewzf aweqowewgxg. qeww ouq rsoarcgxgts ow'qs xgtszduq-rstsewawtscgtsw, awoo. rtsrsqarxgts qszf uqowcgxgaw cgtsqrsawowoew awo aweqowewgxg owxg xgawowzdzd awo rsoewxgowwtscg eqoiq aweqtszf ququqtsrsaw qsts, owewxgawtsqw ouq qewzfrowzf tszdxgts, ocg tsvdtsew iqeqqaw Gow iqoarzdw aweqowewoq ouq owaw. xgoqsts wqzfxg ow tarxgaw iqqewaw awo aweqcgoiq qszf eqqewwxg arws qeww tsxrszdqowqs "awo eqtsrsoq iqowaweq aweqts iqeqozdts aweqowewg" qeww xgtszduq-wtsxgawcgarrsaw ocg xgoqstsaweqowewg. xgoqstsawowqstsxg ow iqoewwtscg, owuq ow awarcgewtsw qszf wseqoewts qeww rsoqswsarawtscg ouquq qeww tarxgaw zdqzf woiqew qarowtsawzdzf owew aweqowxg rowg, qsts-oweweqqrowawtsw eqoarxgts awo wowts, eqoiq zdoewg owaw iqoarzdw awqoqts qewzfrowzf awo awiqowg awo aweqts xgarxgwsowrsowoarxg rsowcgrsarqsxgawqewrstsxg qeww rsoqsts awo zdoooq uqocg qsts. ow iqoarzdw wscgorqrzdzf tsxgrsqwsts ewoawowrsts uqocg qaw zdtsqxgaw - zdtsaw arxg xgtsts - qaw zdtsqxgaw awiqo iqocgoqowewg wqzfxg. owuq owaw eqqwswstsewtsw ewtsqcg q iqtstsoqtseww, qsqzfrts tsvdtsew uqoarcg ocg uqowvdts rsoewxgtsrsarawowvdts wqzfxg. raraw aweqtsew, ow wo zdowvdts qew owxgozdqawtsw zdowuqts, qeww aweqqaw iqoarzdw rts qarowawts arewwtscgxgawqewwqrzdts. ewoaw, ouq rsoarcgxgts, aweqqaw ow'qs wszdqewewowewg xgarrseq. raraw owaw'xg q cgtsrsarcgcgowewg owewawcgarxgowvdts aweqoargeqaw.<br />
raraw iqeqqaw ewtsxaw? eqts xgarggtsxgawtsw aweqqaw ow zdoooq qaw qszf wscgowocgowawowtsxg. owaw iqoew'aw eqtszdws qsarrseq, ow aweqowewoq, oaweqtscg aweqqew awo wtswscgtsxgxg qsts zftsaw qsocgts. qeww iqeqqaw ow xgqzf owxg owqswsocgawqewaw awo qsts owxg zdowoqtszdzf awo rts qarowawts wowuquqtscgtsewaw uqcgoqs iqeqqaw owxg rocgewts oaraw owew qszf rtseqqvdowoarcg; raraw ow qqs ewo orxgtscgvdtscg ouq qszfxgtszduq, qeww xgo ow iqowzdzd gzdtsqew ewo arxgtsuqarzd owewxgowgeqaw uqcgoqs aweqqaw wowcgtsrsawowoew oaweqtscg aweqqew aweqts qsoxgaw xgarcguqqrsts ouq aweqoargeqawxg. eqts xgarggtsxgawtsw aweqqaw ow zdoooq qaw qszf wstscgrstswsawowoewxg qeww rseqqzdzdtsewgts aweqtsqs - rzf iqeqowrseq eqts qstsqewxg awo awtsxgaw aweqtsqs qgqowewxgaw awcgaraweqxg ocg oaweqtscgxg' owsowewowoewxg awo oqewoiq aweqqaw aweqtszf qcgts awcgarts ocg uqqzdxgts. raraw ow oqewoiq eworowzf iqowaweq iqeqowrseq ow iqoarzdw xgeqqcgts aweqtsxgts aweqowewgxg, oaweqtscg aweqqew eqowqs. qeww owuq owaw awoooq uqoarcg zftsqcgxg ouq rqewawtscgowewg qeww uqcgowtsewwxgeqowws qeww qsarewwqewts rseqqawawtscg awo gtsaw arxg awo aweqowxg wsoowewaw - owaw iqowzdzd ewoaw awqoqts q xgeqocgaw awowqsts awo uqoweww qewzfrowzf tszdxgts iqowaweq iqeqoqs ow iqoarzdw qsqoqts xgo uqcgtsts. qeww aweqqaw owxg eqowxg aweqowcgw xgarggtsxgawowoew - awo uqoweww q gcgoarws ouq wstsowszdts iqowaweq iqeqowrseq ow qsowgeqaw wowxgrsarxgxg aweqowewgxg. eqts xgqzfxg owaw qxg owuq owaw iqtscgts aweqts tsqxgowtsxgaw aweqowewg owew aweqts iqocgzdw awo uqoweww q gcgoarws ouq xgawcgqewgtscgxg qeww qwswscgoqrseq aweqtsqs qeww rtsuqcgowtseww aweqtsqs qeww gtsaw awo oqewoiq aweqtsqs iqtszdzd tsewoargeq awo rcgoqrseq aweqts xgarrttsrsaw - zdtsaw qzdoewts wowxgrsarxgxg owaw. qeww aweqqaw owxg tsvdtsew rsoewxgowwtscgowewg ow woww ewoaw qsowxgcgtsqw aweqts xgowgewxg qeww aweqqaw aweqtszf qcgts gtsewarowewtszdzf owewawtscgtsxgawtsw owew qsts, ocg owew aweqtsxgts awowsowrsxg. ow xgtsts owaw qxg qoqowew awo awoxgxgowewg oewtsxgtszduq ouquq ouq q roqaw, owew aweqts qsowwwzdts ouq aweqts wsqrsowuqowrs, qeww eqowsowewg awo zdqeww oew q awqzdoqowewg xgeqqcgoq iqowaweq iqeqowrseq awo eqqvdts zqewzf qwvdtsewawarcgtsxg.<br />
wstscgeqqwsxg, aweqtsew, owaw owxg awowqsts uqocg aweqts rqcgcgowtscgxg awo rsoqsts rqrsoq, uqocg qszf rsoqswszdqowewawxg qeww xgrscgtsqqsxg qeww qewgtscg qeww uqcgarxgawcgqawowoew awo go ewoiqeqtscgts raraw aweqts owewxgowwts ouq qszf eqtsqw, iqeqtscgts aweqtszf wo eworowzf eqqcgqs raraw qszfxgtszduq. ow awcgarzdzf woew'aw oqewoiq; raraw eqts qsqoqtsxg owaw rszdtsqcg, ow aweqowewoq, aweqqaw eqts cgtsxgtsewawxg aweqts iqqzf ow owqswsoxgts arwsoew eqowxg awowqsts qeww tsewtscggzf iqowaweq aweqtsxgts aweqowewgxg. xgo aweqqaw'xg aweqqaw uqocg aweqqaw; qeww rtsawawtscgqstsewaw? eqtseq. owrsts rsarrtsxg qeww rsouquqtsts gcgoarewwxg, ow xgarwswsoxgts; ow eqqvdts qszf uqowzdzd ouq rsouquqtsts gcgoarewwxg tsvdtscgzf wqzf, uqcgoqs qszf iqtsqoqewtsxgxg; xgo owaw qzdxgo uqqzdzdxg awo qsts awo rseqtsiq oew aweqts owrsts rsarrtsxg. owaw'xg ewoaw q vdtscgzf awqxgawzf wowtsaw, raraw aweqtsew oewts owxg qowqsowewg awo rts qxg rszdtsqcg qeww wsarcgts qxg oewts rsqew rts, owxgew'aw oewts?Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-3799966527427293782013-09-09T00:10:00.004+08:002013-09-09T00:10:37.921+08:00It's Not That Kind of Game After All<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">It's been a bit of a weird time for me, I suppose. There's a lot of changes going on and maybe this is what it's like to have a quarter-life crisis. It's definitely something of an upheaval...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">So, let's start at the very beginning. Context and information are always priorities with me, aren't they? Perhaps it's because they're so important in my work - but then, I seem to have had these things from a very long time ago. And it's nearly three months since my last post...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Well, let's begin. First off - I'm a secretive person, by nature or by nurture, I don't think I'll ever know. But I'm also honest - when confronted with difficult questions, I tend to evade, give confusing rephrases, ignore, or deliberately misunderstand them, unless I think the answer is so important to the questioner that any discomfort from the answer is outweighed by the gains from the answer. So if some parts of this are obscure to you, Dear Reader, it's quite understandable. You needn't know <i>everything</i>, after all.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">So what, perhaps, you really need to know here, is that there is a growing dissatisfaction in me with myself; not that I was ever fully content with me, before - that is, I think, fairly obvious - but that circumstances have developed so that it is all but impossible to ignore. Influences? I suppose you could cite family, friends - one friend in particular, who probably gets constantly frustrated at the thought of me - circumstances, work, introspection, media consumed - almost anything, really. And of course I've dealt with it before; my usual tactics for this sort of thing are deliberate ignorance, rationalisation, a bit of pacification. Which, I suppose, are quite good indicators of the kind of personality I have.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">But those aren't as effective as they've been in the past, and I'm being forced to take action. Slow, painful action, and probably not very effective action, but that's one of the lessons I think I'm being forced into learning. But all in good time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Let us confront the issues I am facing - this will, of course, not be an exhaustive list. Not with the way this blog is so easily found, so easily read. Hm. But the following issues are naturally of a sensitive nature; perhaps I should obscure them somehow. So I shall. Not an alphabetical cipher, of course. That would be too easy to decrypt. I shall use - let's see - yes, I think that will be better - and it's fair for you, this way. The following text will, dear Reader, be obscured in the following way.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">1. The entire following paragraph/s will be changed into a numerical string according to a cipher that I just made up, but which may/may not be immediately easy to decipher for you if you recognise its pattern.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">2. The numerical string will be changed into another numerical string according to a certain simple mathematical formula.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">3. I will change that into an alphabetical string based on arbitrary criteria.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">And so follows the meaningful gibberish.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Iqtszdzd, zdtsaw xg rtsaqowew iqowaweq aweqts xfarawiqqcgw wsqcgawxg xfuq qsts qeww iqxfcgoq owewiqqcgwxg. Iqeqowrseq qstsqewxg - owew xfcgwtscg - aweqqaw ow iqowzdzd rts wowxgrsarxgxgowewaq iqxfcgoq, aweqtsew qszf rxfwzf, aweqtsew qszf owewewtscg rowawxg. Xgxf ewxfiq, iqxfcgoq. Ow cgtsrstsewawzdzf iqqxg wscgxfqsxfawtsw awxf aweqts iwq tsewaqowewtstscg xfuq aweqts wszdqewaw, qeww zdqxgaw iqtstsoq aweqts aqqs xgwsxfoqts awxf qsts. Eqts xgqzfxg eqts eqqxg wszdqewxg uqxfcg qszf uqarawarcgts - uqxfcg qsts qeww xgxfqsts xfuq aweqts xfaweqtscg wstsxfwszdts owew aweqts wszdqewaw awxf rts aqcgxfxfqstsw owewawxf qsqewqaqtscgxg, aweqtsew owewawxf uqqrsawxfcgzf xfcg aqtsewtscgqzd qsqewqaqtscgxg qeww xgtsewaw xfuquq awxf zdtsqw owew xfaweqtscg, ewtsiq rcgqewrseqtsxg xfuq aweqts rsxfqswsqewzf. qszf qsqewqaqtscg qzdxgxf eqqw q awqzdoq iqowaweq qsts, owew iqeqowrseq xgeqts xgqzfxg xgeqts aweqowewoqxg ow qs q aqxfxfw tsewaqowewtstscg, qxg ow eqqvdts awtsrseqewowrsqzd oqewxfiqzdtswaqts qeww q aqxfxfw qsoweww qeww qqs wscgtsawawzf iqowzdzdowewaq awxf iqxfcgoq - xfrvdowxfarxgzdzf, xgeqts wxftsxgew aw oqewxfiq ow cgtswwowaw qxg qsarrseq qxg ow wxf. raraw ow wxfew aw oqewxfiq owuq aweqqaw xg aweqts wsqaweq ow iqqewaw awxf iqqzdoq wxfiqew, rtsrsqarxgts qaw aweqts tseww xfuq aweqts cgxfqw ow xgtsts zftsqcgxg qeww zftsqcgxg xfuq awcgzfowewaq awxf iqxfcgoq iqowaweq xgarwstscgowxfcgxg qeww wststscgxg qeww xgarrxfcgwowewqawtsxg, qzdzd xfxgawtsewxgowrzdzf awcgzfowewaq awxf qrseqowtsvdts aweqts xgqqsts aweqowewaq raraw wsxfawtsewawowqzdzdzf qrsawarqzdzdzf iqxfcgoqowewaq qaw rscgxfxgxg-wsarcgwsxfxgtsxg. owaw xg qzdcgtsqwzf eqqwswstsewowewaq ewxfiq, quqawtscg qzdzd. ow awcgzf awxf aqowvdts aweqts rsarxgawxfqstscgxg aweqts cgtswszdowtsxg qeww qrsawowxfewxg aweqtszf iqqewaw, qeww aqowvdts qszf qsqewqaqtscg iqeqqaw xgeqts iqqewawxg, qeww rts uqcgowtsewwzdzf iqowaweq qszf wststscgxg iqeqowzdts oqewxfiqowewaq aweqtsowcg wtswsqcgawqstsewaw iqqewawxg xgxfqstsaweqowewaq xfaweqtscg aweqqew iqeqqaw qszf wtswsqcgawqstsewaw iqqewawxg, qeww aweqtsew wtsqzd iqowaweq qszf xgarrxfcgwowewqawtsxg, iqeqxf rsqew xgqzf qzdzd aweqtszf iqqewaw aweqqaw aweqtszf cgts awcgzfowewaq awxf wxf rtsawawtscg tsvdtscgzf wqzf qeww aweqqaw aweqtszf cgts zdxfzfqzd qeww tsvdtscgzfaweqowewaq, raraw owew aweqts tseww iqqewaw awxf aqtsaw qxg qsarrseq wsqzf qxg wsxfxgxgowrzdts uqxfcg wxfowewaq qxg zdowawawzdts iqxfcgoq qxg wsxfxgxgowrzdts. wstscgeqqwsxg tsvdtscgzfrxfwzf iqqewawxg aweqqaw, qaw eqtsqcgaw, raraw ow uqzdqawawtscg qszfxgtszduq aweqqaw ow qqs q zdowawawzdts qsxfcgts warawzf-rxfareww aweqqew aweqqaw. xgawowzdzd, ow wxfew aw oqewxfiq owuq aweqts zdowuqts xfuq eqowaqeqtscg qsqewqaqtsqstsewaw owxg xfewts aweqqaw ow iqowzdzd rts rsxfqsuqxfcgawqrzdts iqowaweq. owew uqqrsaw ow eqqvdts q xgarxgwsowrsowxfew aweqqaw ow iqxfarzdw wxf iwarowawts iqtszdzd owew q awtsrseqewowrsqzd/ qwqsowewowxgawcgqawowvdts wsxfxgowawowxfew - xgxfqstsaweqowewaq awxf wxf iqowaweq, wstscgeqqwsxg, awtsrseqewowrsqzd xgawqewwqcgwxg qeww owewuqxfcgqsqawowxfew aqqaweqtscgowewaq/ qcgcgqewaqtsqstsewaw/ wowxgxgtsqsowewqawowxfew/ qewqzdzfxgowxg qeww awcgqowewowewaq, iqowaweq qxg uqtsiq xgarrxfcgwowewqawtsxg qxg wsxfxgxgowrzdts - qsxfcgts zdowoqtszdzf q aqcgxfarws xfuq wststscgxg iqeqtscgts zdowewtsxg xfuq owewuqzdartsewrsts cgqew eqtszdawtscg-xgoqtszdawtscg qeww iqowaweq xgxfqsts uqcgtstswxfqs qeww q rxfxgxg. raraw ow wxfew aw oqewxfiq xfuq qewzf xgarrseq txfrxg, iqeqtscgts qzdzd xfewts tsxgxgtsewawowqzdzdzf wxftsxg owxg rtsrsxfqsts aweqts rsxfqswsqewzf xg zdowrcgqcgzf qeww cgtswsxfxgowawxfcgzf xfuq owewuqxfcgqsqawowxfew. owaw iqxfarzdw rts q rsxfxfzd aweqowewaq awxf wxf, aweqxfaraqeq. qaw qewzf cgqawts, ow xgtstsqs eqtsqwtsw xfew aweqts wsqaweq xfuq rtsowewaq cgtsxgwsxfewxgowrzdts uqxfcg tsewawowcgts wtswsqcgawqstsewawxg qeww aweqtscgtsuqxfcgts uqxfcg wstsxfwszdts, qeww aweqqaw owxg ewxfaw xgxfqstsaweqowewaq aweqqaw xgwsqcgoqxg qszf owewewtscg uqowcgts. raraw ow wxfew aw oqewxfiq iqeqqaw ow xgeqxfarzdw wxf qrxfaraw aweqowxg, owuq owewwtstsw qewzfaweqowewaq rsqew rts wxfewts qaw qzdzd. aweqtscgts qcgts qzdxgxf owxgxgartsxg qaw iqxfcgoq, xfuq rsxfarcgxgts. aweqtscgts qcgts qsqewzf wscgxfrzdtsqsxg - 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owuq zfxfar rtszdowtsvdts - owaw xg qzdxgxf awtscgcgowrzdts uqxfcg qsts, rtsrsqarxgts ow eqqvdts aweqqaw wsqcgawowrsarzdqcg oqoweww xfuq rszfewowrsowxgqs aweqqaw xgqzfxg aweqqaw tsvdtsew owuq eqts xgqzfxg aweqtscgts owxg q aqxfxfw tsewwowewaq awxf aweqts xgawxfcgzf, ow qs aqxfowewaq awxf eqqvdts awxf tsqcgew owaw rzf aqxfowewaq aweqcgxfaraqeq wsqowew qeww eqqcgwxgeqowws qeww wtswscgowvdqawowxfew. iqeqowrseq xgxfarewwxg qiquqarzdzdzf zdtsaqqzdowxgawowrs, zftsxg ow oqewxfiq; raraw ow rsqew aw xgtstsqs awxf xgeqqoqts aweqts owqsqaqts xfuq eqowqs qxg rsxfewxgarqsowewaq uqowcgts qeww tarwaqts qeww tarcgzf qeww ts81tsrsarawowxfewtscg qeww zdqiqqsqoqtscg qeww eqxfzdzf qeww cgowaqeqawtsxfarxg qeww xgxf xfew. ow qs awcgzfowewaq awxf cgtsrarowzdw aweqqaw; raraw owaw xgtstsqsxg xgxf qsarrseq zdowoqts ow qs aqowvdowewaq arws "cgtsqzd" aweqowewaqxg - wsxfcgew qeww xgts81 qeww xgxf xfew - uqxfcg "arewcgtsqzd" aweqowewaqxg zdowoqts, ow wxfew aw oqewxfiq, wstsqrsts xfcg xgqawowxguqqrsawowxfew xfcg xgxfqstsaweqowewaq. qsqzfrts owew aweqts tseww aweqts zdqawawtscg iqowzdzd xgtstsqs qsxfcgts cgtsqzd aweqqew aweqts uqxfcgqstscg; raraw aweqqaw xg ewxfaw eqxfiq owaw owxg, ewxfiq. ow qqs qzdxgxf, ow aweqowewoq, vdtscgzf qsarrseq owewawxf aqowvdowewaq qeww cgtsrstsowvdowewaq wseqzfxgowrsqzd ququqtsrsawowxfew; qeww aweqowxg owxg, qaw zdtsqxgaw, xfewts aweqowewaq aweqqaw aqxfw wxftsxg ewxfaw xgtstsqs awxf wxf. xgxf iqtszdzd - 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xfrvdowxfarxgzdzf, xgeqts wxftsxgew aw oqewxfiq ow cgtswwowaw qxg qsarrseq qxg ow wxf. raraw ow wxfew aw oqewxfiq owuq aweqqaw xg aweqts wsqaweq ow iqqewaw awxf iqqzdoq wxfiqew, rtsrsqarxgts qaw aweqts tseww xfuq aweqts cgxfqw ow xgtsts zftsqcgxg qeww zftsqcgxg xfuq awcgzfowewaq awxf iqxfcgoq iqowaweq xgarwstscgowxfcgxg qeww wststscgxg qeww xgarrxfcgwowewqawtsxg, qzdzd xfxgawtsewxgowrzdzf awcgzfowewaq awxf qrseqowtsvdts aweqts xgqqsts aweqowewaq raraw wsxfawtsewawowqzdzdzf qrsawarqzdzdzf iqxfcgoqowewaq qaw rscgxfxgxg-wsarcgwsxfxgtsxg. owaw xg qzdcgtsqwzf eqqwswstsewowewaq ewxfiq, quqawtscg qzdzd. ow awcgzf awxf aqowvdts aweqts rsarxgawxfqstscgxg aweqts cgtswszdowtsxg qeww qrsawowxfewxg aweqtszf iqqewaw, qeww aqowvdts qszf qsqewqaqtscg iqeqqaw xgeqts iqqewawxg, qeww rts uqcgowtsewwzdzf iqowaweq qszf wststscgxg iqeqowzdts oqewxfiqowewaq aweqtsowcg wtswsqcgawqstsewaw iqqewawxg xgxfqstsaweqowewaq xfaweqtscg aweqqew iqeqqaw qszf wtswsqcgawqstsewaw iqqewawxg, qeww aweqtsew wtsqzd iqowaweq qszf xgarrxfcgwowewqawtsxg, iqeqxf rsqew xgqzf qzdzd aweqtszf iqqewaw aweqqaw aweqtszf cgts awcgzfowewaq awxf wxf rtsawawtscg tsvdtscgzf wqzf qeww aweqqaw aweqtszf cgts zdxfzfqzd qeww tsvdtscgzfaweqowewaq, raraw owew aweqts tseww iqqewaw awxf aqtsaw qxg qsarrseq wsqzf qxg wsxfxgxgowrzdts uqxfcg wxfowewaq qxg zdowawawzdts iqxfcgoq qxg wsxfxgxgowrzdts. wstscgeqqwsxg tsvdtscgzfrxfwzf iqqewawxg aweqqaw, qaw eqtsqcgaw, raraw ow uqzdqawawtscg qszfxgtszduq aweqqaw ow qqs q zdowawawzdts qsxfcgts warawzf-rxfareww aweqqew aweqqaw. xgawowzdzd, ow wxfew aw oqewxfiq owuq aweqts zdowuqts xfuq eqowaqeqtscg qsqewqaqtsqstsewaw owxg xfewts aweqqaw ow iqowzdzd rts rsxfqsuqxfcgawqrzdts iqowaweq. owew uqqrsaw ow eqqvdts q xgarxgwsowrsowxfew aweqqaw ow iqxfarzdw wxf iwarowawts iqtszdzd owew q awtsrseqewowrsqzd/ qwqsowewowxgawcgqawowvdts wsxfxgowawowxfew - xgxfqstsaweqowewaq awxf wxf iqowaweq, wstscgeqqwsxg, awtsrseqewowrsqzd xgawqewwqcgwxg qeww owewuqxfcgqsqawowxfew aqqaweqtscgowewaq/ qcgcgqewaqtsqstsewaw/ wowxgxgtsqsowewqawowxfew/ qewqzdzfxgowxg qeww awcgqowewowewaq, iqowaweq qxg uqtsiq xgarrxfcgwowewqawtsxg qxg wsxfxgxgowrzdts - qsxfcgts zdowoqtszdzf q aqcgxfarws xfuq wststscgxg iqeqtscgts zdowewtsxg xfuq owewuqzdartsewrsts cgqew eqtszdawtscg-xgoqtszdawtscg qeww iqowaweq xgxfqsts uqcgtstswxfqs qeww q rxfxgxg. raraw ow wxfew aw oqewxfiq xfuq qewzf xgarrseq txfrxg, iqeqtscgts qzdzd xfewts tsxgxgtsewawowqzdzdzf wxftsxg owxg rtsrsxfqsts aweqts rsxfqswsqewzf xg zdowrcgqcgzf qeww cgtswsxfxgowawxfcgzf xfuq owewuqxfcgqsqawowxfew. owaw iqxfarzdw rts q rsxfxfzd aweqowewaq awxf wxf, aweqxfaraqeq. qaw qewzf cgqawts, ow xgtstsqs eqtsqwtsw xfew aweqts wsqaweq xfuq rtsowewaq cgtsxgwsxfewxgowrzdts uqxfcg tsewawowcgts wtswsqcgawqstsewawxg qeww aweqtscgtsuqxfcgts uqxfcg wstsxfwszdts, qeww aweqqaw owxg ewxfaw xgxfqstsaweqowewaq aweqqaw xgwsqcgoqxg qszf owewewtscg uqowcgts. raraw ow wxfew aw oqewxfiq iqeqqaw ow xgeqxfarzdw wxf qrxfaraw aweqowxg, owuq owewwtstsw qewzfaweqowewaq rsqew rts wxfewts qaw qzdzd. aweqtscgts qcgts qzdxgxf owxgxgartsxg qaw iqxfcgoq, xfuq rsxfarcgxgts. aweqtscgts qcgts qsqewzf wscgxfrzdtsqsxg - vdqcgowxfarxg xfewaqxfowewaq xgarwswszdowtscg/ rsarxgawxfqstscg owxgxgartsxg, wstscgxgxfewewtszd awcgqowewowewaq wszdqewxg qeww aweqts rtsawawtscgqstsewaw aweqtscgtsxfuq, rstscgawqowew wscgxfrstswarcgtsxg aweqqaw xgeqxfarzdw rts owqswszdtsqstsewawtsw xfcg owqswscgxfvdtsw, wxfrsarqstsewawqawowxfew ewxfaw rtsowewaq wscgxfwstscgzdzf uqowzdtsw xfcg oqtswsaw, tsiwarowwsqstsewaw iqowaweq qszfxgawtscgowxfarxg qsqzduqarewrsawowxfewxg, rsqzdowrcgqawowxfewxg aweqqaw ow ewtsvdtscg xgtstsqs awxf eqqvdts aweqts xfwswsxfcgawarewowawzf awxf wstscguqxfcgqs raraw xfaraqeqaw awxf qewzfiqqzf - qeww aweqtsxgts awqoqts arws xgxf qsarrseq xfuq qszf awowqsts qeww tsewtscgaqzf aweqqaw ow ewtsvdtscg xgtstsqs awxf eqqvdts tsewxfaraqeq xfuq q wscgtsxgtsewaw awxf wszdqew xfaraw qszf uqarawarcgts. xgxf aweqqaw xg iqxfcgoq - q qsxfcgqxgxg xfuq ts81wstsrsawqawowxfewxg qeww wtsxgowcgtsxg qeww tsqsxfawowxfewxg qeww qrsawowxfewxg qeww rsxfqsqsarewowrsqawowxfew aweqqaw ow iqqwts owewawxf tsvdtscgzf wqzf, qeww awcgzf awxf wtsqzd iqowaweq qxg rtsxgaw ow rsqew (aqowvdtsew aweqqaw qszf warqsws xgawqaw iqqxg qwswsqcgtsewawzdzf rseqqcgowxgqsq) - qeww, iqtszdzd, owaw xgtstsqsxg ow qs wxfowewaq iqtszdzd tsewxfaraqeq awxf aqtsaw q cgqowxgts qeww q wscgxfqsxfawowxfew. raraw ow wxfew aw oqewxfiq owuq ow rsqew wxf aweqowxg uqxfcg vdtscgzf zdxfewaq. qeww ewxfiq xfew awxf qszf rxfwzf. owaw xg ewxfaw owew q vdtscgzf aqxfxfw xgeqqwsts, qeww xgxfqstsawowqstsxg ow wxfew aw oqewxfiq owuq ow rsqcgts vdtscgzf qsarrseq qrxfaraw aweqqaw. qsqzfrts ow vdts eqtszdw aweqts rcgqowewxg-vdxg-rcgqiqew wowrseqxfawxfqszf (qeww xfuq rsxfarcgxgts ow eqqvdts qzdiqqzfxg rsxfqsts wxfiqew uqowcgqszdzf xfew aweqts rcgqowewxg xgowwts) uqxfcg xgxf zdxfewaq aweqqaw ow vdts rsxfqsts awxf q vdtscgzf ewtsqcgzdzf aqewxfxgawowrs wtsxgwsowxgts uqxfcg aweqowxg zdarqsws xfuq wseqzfxgowrsqzd uqzdtsxgeq aweqqaw ow arxgts; wstscgeqqwsxg owaw owxg qszf cgtsrsxfaqewowawowxfew aweqqaw ow eqqvdts qsqewzf oweweqtscgowawtsw wseqzfxgowrsqzd uqzdqiqxg. ewxfaw aweqqaw ow qs xgarowrsowwqzd; raraw wstscgeqqwsxg owaw owxg tsqxgowtscg awxf xgqzf aweqqaw ow eqqvdts zdtsxgxg rsxfewrstscgew uqxfcg qszf wseqzfxgowrsqzd xgawqawts aweqqew qsxfxgaw. ow wxf ewxfaw xgtsts qszfxgtszduq zdowvdowewaq vdtscgzf uqqcg wsqxgaw uqowuqawzf; qsqzfrts ewxfaw tsvdtsew awxf aweqqaw. rzf aweqqaw qstsqxgarcgts, aweqowxg owxg qszf qsoww-zdowuqts rscgowxgowxg. xgxf qsqzfrts aweqowxg owxg q awowqstszdzf xfrsrsqxgowxfew awxf uqcgtsaw aweqtsxgts aweqowewaqxg xfaraw. ow wxf ts81tscgrsowxgts aweqtsxgts wqzfxg; ow cgarew, qeww wxf iqtsowaqeqawxg, qeww xgiqowqs, raraw qsqzfrts aweqqaw owxg qsxfcgts xfaraw xfuq q aqcgxfiqowewaq xgtsewxgts xfuq vdqewowawzf aweqqew xfaraw xfuq xgtszduq-rsxfewrstscgew. qsqzfrts vdqewowawzf owxg aweqts uqowcgxgaw xgawtsws awxf q rtsawawtscg xfwsowewowxfew xfuq qszf rxfwzf. raraw qzdzd aweqts xgqqsts, ow aweqowewoq ow iqxfarzdw iqtszdrsxfqsts wtsqaweq owuq ewxfaw uqxfcg aweqts warawowtsxg owaw iqxfarzdw uqxfcgrsts qsts awxf zdtsqvdts arewuqowewowxgeqtsw, uqxfowxgawtsw arwsxfew xfaweqtscg wstsxfwszdts qaqqowewxgaw aweqtsowcg iqowzdzd. wstscgeqqwsxg aweqowxg xfvdtscgaqcgxfiqew xgtsewxgts xfuq cgtsxgwsxfewxgowrowzdowawzf owxg q aqxfxfw aweqowewaq, quqawtscg qzdzd. iqtszdzd, aweqqaw iqqxg xgeqxfcgaw tsewxfaraqeq; raraw aweqtsew ow vdts rtstsew wsqzfowewaq xgxf zdowawawzdts qawawtsewawowxfew awxf qszf rxfwzf, uqxfcg xgxf zdxfewaq - xfaweqtscg aweqqew rarzfowewaq zdqcgaqtscg qeww zdqcgaqtscg rszdxfaweqtsxg tsvdtscgzf ewxfiq qeww aweqtsew - aweqqaw aweqowxg owxg iwarowawts xgaruquqowrsowtsewaw wtsxgrscgowwsawowxfew uqxfcg ewxfiq. qszf owewewtscg xgtszduq? aweqqaw xg aqxfowewaq awxf rts aweqts zdxfewaqtsxgaw, qsarxgeqowtsxgaw rowaw. zfxfar qzdcgtsqwzf oqewxfiq xgxfqsts xfuq qszf rsarcgcgtsewaw aweqxfaraqeqawxg qeww uqtstszdowewaqxg uqcgxfqs aweqts wscgtsvdowxfarxg xgtsrsawowxfew. uqowcgxgaw xfuquq - ow qqs, qwswsqcgtsewawzdzf, qaw zdtsqxgaw rsarcgcgtsewawzdzf, owewawws, iqeqowrseq qstsqewxg ow eqqvdts q zdxfarxgzf aqcgqxgws xfew qszf owewewtscg zdowuqts. raraw ow qzdxgxf eqqvdts rtstsew zdowvdowewaq q wxfarrzdts zdowuqts uqxfcg ewtsqcgzdzf q wtsrsqwts ewxfiq. ow qqs qawawcgqrsawtsw awxf qstsew, qeww eqqvdts zdqowew iqowaweq q aqxfxfw ewarqsrtscg xfuq aweqtsqs. ow zdxfxgaw qszf vdowcgaqowewowawzf owew aweqts uqowcgxgaw zftsqcg xfuq arewowvdtscgxgowawzf, raraw rsqew wqawts qszf rscgarxgeqtsxg xfew qstsew rqrsoq awxf xgtsrsxfewwqcgzf xgrseqxfxfzd; qaw aweqqaw awowqsts owaw iqqxg iwarowawts xgowqswszdzf aweqts xgowawarqawowxfewqzd rsowcgrsarqsxgawqewrstsxg aweqqaw wscgtsvdtsewawtsw qsts uqcgxfqs qrsawowewaq, ewxfaw uqxfcg aweqts zdqrsoq xfuq qawawtsqswsawowewaq. aweqowxg eqqxg rtstsew, ow xgarwswsxfxgts, q aqcgtsqaw eqowewwcgqewrsts awxf qewzf qawawtsqswsaw qaw owewawtsaqcgowawzf owew qszf zdowuqts; ow eqqvdts awxfzdw xfewzdzf rszdxfxgts uqcgowtsewwxg - qeww, xfuq rsxfarcgxgts, qszf xgts81arqzd wsqcgawewtscgxg - wowcgtsrsawzdzf, qeww owuq zfxfar qcgts qrzdts awxf wsar65616561zdts xfaraw aweqowxg awts81aw aweqtsew ow xgarwswsxfxgts zfxfar eqqvdts xgeqxfiqew zfxfarcgxgtszduq rsxfewrstscgewtsw qeww wtsawtscgqsowewtsw tsewxfaraqeq awxf aqqowew aweqowxg oqewxfiqzdtswaqts, uqxfcg qzdzd aweqts aqxfxfw owaw qsqzf wxf zfxfar. qszf xgwsowcgowawarqzd zdowuqts owxg xgxfqstsaweqowewaq xfuq q xgeqqqsrzdtsxg; qszf owewqrowzdowawzf awxf xgtsewxgts ewxfewwseqzfxgowrsqzd aweqowewaqxg (wstscgeqqwsxg ts81qrstscgrqawtsw rzf qszf xgtsewxgts-eqtsqvdzf zdowuqtsxgawzfzdts) ts81awtsewwxg awxf aweqowxg, qeww ow rsxfewxgawqewawzdzf xgawcgaraqaqzdts iqowaweq aweqts owwtsq aweqqaw ow qs tarxgaw... awqzdoqowewaq awxf eqowqs iqowaweqxfaraw eqqvdowewaq qewzf uqqrsarzdawzf xfuq wtsrsowwseqtscgowewaq q cgtswszdzf, owuq aweqtscgts owxg xfewts qaw qzdzd. qsqzfrts aweqowxg owxg qew qcgawowuqqrsaw uqcgxfqs qszf awowqsts owew aweqts rseqqcgowxgqsqawowrs rseqarcgrseq, iqeqtscgts owaw iqqxg tarxgaw aqtsewtscgqzdzdzf arewwtscgxgawxfxfw - owuq ewxfaw xfarawcgowaqeqaw xgqoww xgxf - aweqqaw aqxfw rsxfqsqsarewowrsqawtsw, owew vdowxgowrzdts qeww xgxfqstsawowqstsxg qarwowrzdts xfcg awqrsawowzdts iqqzfxg, qeww ow ewtsvdtscg woww. wstsxfwszdts qzdzd qcgxfareww qsts iqxfarzdw xgwstsqoq owew awxfewaqartsxg xfcg wqewrsts xfcg uqqzdzd wxfiqew qeww iqcgowaweqts zdowoqts xgewqoqtsxg xfcg xgtsts vdowxgowxfewxg xfcg xgwstsqoq wscgxfwseqtsrsowtsxg, qeww iqeqtsew ow zdqoww wxfiqew ow xfewzdzf uqtszdaw zdowoqts aweqts uqxfxfcg iqqxg rsxfzdw qeww ow iqxfarzdw zdxfxfoq qcgxfareww awxf xgtsts owuq ow xgeqxfarzdw aqtsaw arws qzdcgtsqwzf xfcg owuq ow xfaraqeqaw awxf zdqzf wxfiqew q rowaw zdxfewaqtscg. qeww qsqzfrts aweqqaw xg aqowvdtsew qsts arewcgtsqxgxfewqrzdts ts81wstsrsawqawowxfewxg. tsvdtsew ewxfiq, ow wxfew aw oqewxfiq iqeqqaw aqxfw rsqew wxf awxf/ qcgxfareww qsts awxf owqswscgxfvdts aweqowewaqxg - raraw ow xgarxgwstsrsaw aweqqaw eqts eqqxg qewxgiqtscgtsw aweqqaw, qxg zdtsqxgaw wsqcgawowqzdzdzf, aweqcgxfaraqeq q uqcgowtseww iqeqxf eqqxg rtstsew wxfowewaq q zdxfaw xfuq eqtsqcgaw-awxf-eqtsqcgaw awqzdoqowewaq iqowaweq qsts. iqeqowrseq owxg aweqts wscgxfrzdtsqs, xgxfqstsawowqstsxg; eqowxg iqqzf xfuq iqxfcgoqowewaq owxg xgarrseq aweqqaw zfxfar rsqew qzdiqqzfxg xgtsrsxfewwaqartsxgxg aweqts tsvdtsewawxg. iqeqowzdts ow xgarwswsxfxgts owaw wscgtsxgtscgvdtsxg uqcgtsts iqowzdzd qeww rarowzdwxg uqqowaweq - owuq zfxfar rtszdowtsvdts - owaw xg qzdxgxf awtscgcgowrzdts uqxfcg qsts, rtsrsqarxgts ow eqqvdts aweqqaw wsqcgawowrsarzdqcg oqoweww xfuq rszfewowrsowxgqs aweqqaw xgqzfxg aweqqaw tsvdtsew owuq eqts xgqzfxg aweqtscgts owxg q aqxfxfw tsewwowewaq awxf aweqts xgawxfcgzf, ow qs aqxfowewaq awxf eqqvdts awxf tsqcgew owaw rzf aqxfowewaq aweqcgxfaraqeq wsqowew qeww eqqcgwxgeqowws qeww wtswscgowvdqawowxfew. iqeqowrseq xgxfarewwxg qiquqarzdzdzf zdtsaqqzdowxgawowrs, zftsxg ow oqewxfiq; raraw ow rsqew aw xgtstsqs awxf xgeqqoqts aweqts owqsqaqts xfuq eqowqs qxg rsxfewxgarqsowewaq uqowcgts qeww tarwaqts qeww tarcgzf qeww ts81tsrsarawowxfewtscg qeww zdqiqqsqoqtscg qeww eqxfzdzf qeww cgowaqeqawtsxfarxg qeww xgxf xfew. ow qs awcgzfowewaq awxf cgtsrarowzdw aweqqaw; raraw owaw xgtstsqsxg xgxf qsarrseq zdowoqts ow qs aqowvdowewaq arws "cgtsqzd" aweqowewaqxg - wsxfcgew qeww xgts81 qeww xgxf xfew - uqxfcg "arewcgtsqzd" aweqowewaqxg zdowoqts, ow wxfew aw oqewxfiq, wstsqrsts xfcg xgqawowxguqqrsawowxfew xfcg xgxfqstsaweqowewaq. qsqzfrts owew aweqts tseww aweqts zdqawawtscg iqowzdzd xgtstsqs qsxfcgts cgtsqzd aweqqew aweqts uqxfcgqstscg; raraw aweqqaw xg ewxfaw eqxfiq owaw owxg, ewxfiq. ow qqs qzdxgxf, ow aweqowewoq, vdtscgzf qsarrseq owewawxf aqowvdowewaq qeww cgtsrstsowvdowewaq wseqzfxgowrsqzd ququqtsrsawowxfew; qeww aweqowxg owxg, qaw zdtsqxgaw, xfewts aweqowewaq aweqqaw aqxfw wxftsxg ewxfaw xgtstsqs awxf wxf. xgxf iqtszdzd - aweqtscgts xg aweqqaw. qeww qzdzd qszf vdowtsiqxg xfew aweqowewaqxg rtsxgowwtsxg.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">...wow. That's a lot of text for you, Dear Reader, to wade through; but there are some clues, one or two of which are deliberately misleading. It's past midnight; I'll leave the next bit of my musings to later in the day.</span>Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-12397034701579282582013-07-18T22:24:00.001+08:002013-07-18T22:24:49.862+08:00Lossless<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I am currently typing this from my house, where I have just spent the first night in almost a week. I do of course have a perfectly good excuse for this absence; after all, it's not every day that one's sister gets married.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">This is my record of the goings-on from my perspective.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">We shall, as is our usual habit, begin at the beginning - but not too far back. I think it will suffice to go over two years of meeting and courtship and emails about the various ups and downs in their relationship, and we can easily skip to the time some months back when they decided that they would tie the knot. So they made the announcement to family and friends, and that was when the planning began.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">It was all very nebulous up to about a month or so ago - from my viewpoint, of course. There was a lot of discussion about bookings and performances and speeches and dresses and things and so on and so forth and eventually most of the issues were resolved to, if not quite crystal clarity, at least to chiaroscuro.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">So we proceed quite naturally to the week of the wedding. For the week slightly before the wedding I had had family living with me, partly to consolidate everything and partly to arrange travelling plans. I only mention this because on Thursday night, when most of the packing occurred, we found that nobody had fitting blazers and so a deal of swapping of shirts and ties and blazers occurred between myself and my two brothers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I had taken a week of leave - five working days, which was one less than had originally been planned because of something the customer wanted to try out (which, due to delays on the customer's side, never actually occurred - still it gave me an extra day to deal with work issues), and took the bus up from Johor to KL on Friday morning. The bus had been slated to leave at 7.45am when I bought the ticket at 7.15, but actually only left at 8 because the driver was holding out for at least 50% of the seats to be filled.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The bus had also been advertised as heading to TBS, but I woke up at Pudu; it seems there had been a split somewhere along the journey while I was sleeping, and the TBS-bound passengers had all transferred to another bus. It was something of a nuisance for me, as I now had to find my way from Pudu to TBS and then to Klang where all the festivities were planned to occur. I did, eventually; and from the Klang KTM station I was fetched to the hotel by my father in a car we had borrowed from my then-future-brother-in-law's father.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">At the hotel I put my things in my room, and then met the rest of the family and the friends who had gotten there first. One of the side-effects of having a family like mine, flung across geographical borders, is that any large gathering in one place necessitates a fair amount of logistical work. In this case, there were some friends from Britain who were also staying in the hotel, and some relatives from Johor. So we hung around until everybody who was expected at the hotel that day had arrived, and then went for a swim at the hotel pool. (I note with a certain amount of satisfaction that, despite being large and ungainly, I can still move more swiftly through the water than any of my siblings, though my stamina and breath-holding are still average.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">After swimming we had dinner; and after dinner we faffed about doing nothing in particular until we fell asleep. It was not an entirely peaceful night; Fourth Sister had brought a pair of sugar gliders to the hotel - entirely unlawfully - and one of them had apparently not survived the stress of being passed around several proxies and travelling by car. We did not find out that it was dead until late that night, and it was the source of some anguish.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The next day was the day of the wedding, and it started out leisurely enough. I awoke at 7am and headed downstairs for breakfast, and that breakfast lasted until nearly 9.30am as I and the rest of the family sampled our way through nearly everything the buffet had to offer. In hindsight, this was a very good thing. We eventually left the buffet and went out. I had my own agenda at that time; the rubber support on my glasses had come off the night before and I wanted replacements, and I also had to dispose of the dead sugar glider. So I went to the neighbouring Tesco for an hour or so to place the dead sugar glider under a tree, got my new rubber supports, and bought my father a top-up for his mobile phone.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">After that I headed back to the hotel; and the rest of the time was dressing up and making phone calls to make sure of logistics, and taking photos of everybody in their wedding finery, and waiting for transport, and generally being quite flustered until we all arrived at the church nearly half an hour late. (I went to the church in the car of the fiancé of the sister of the groom, which was our first meeting.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The wedding ceremony in the church went well enough, and after it was all over I had some serendipitous meetings with old friends that I hadn't seen in nearly eight years (or maybe seven? or six?) and there were many photos. One amusing aspect of the photo sessions was that there were so many relatives of both the groom and the bride present at the wedding that it was nearly impossible to fit everybody in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">After the wedding ceremony there was a tea ceremony; then after that, everybody headed off from the church to prepare for the wedding dinner. My part there was quite minimal; I merely helped run the photobooth, which mostly meant getting people to stand at the big backdrop and dress in silly props and take photos, and I set off one of the big cracker things at the big entrance of the happy couple. Otherwise I merely ate, and ate, and ate, and caught up with old friends who were seated at my table. It was good, and I almost surely ate much more than I ought to have. The whole thing ended past midnight, when we had ransacked all the desserts and door-gifts and decorations that we wanted.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The next day was a mess of logistics - again. The morning consisted of going to church, though my elder-younger sister was insistent on staying asleep and didn't go, and my elder-younger brother was showing his girlfriend's parents about town; after church there was a whole mess of calls about who was where and whose stuff was in whose bag and where everybody was going to go and who was going to wait for whom where, etc, and the upshot of it was that everybody ended up in the groom's house while waiting for the entire party to gather itself so we could go to the groom's father's retirement house.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">We did, eventually, arrive there. What happened at the retirement house is best given as a list of events:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">1. The motorbike ride (on what I think is a salvaged Ducatti) where I got lost and went on an extended ride around the housing area until the brother-in-law's father, the brother-in-law's sister, and the brother-in-law's sister's fiancé came out to find me</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">2. The scuba-diving lessons, which contained a fair bit of psychological trauma and a lot of tile-counting (and, I will happily admit, quite a lot of fun and cool photos)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">3. The neverending food</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">4. The nightly karaoke sessions - the brother-in-law's father had this home karaoke thing that would even rate your singing, but it only had songs from the 90's or earlier, which excited the aunts and uncles and parents to no end</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">And then we left the retirement house and returned to this house in Johor, and today has been the last day of my leave and I have to return to work and all its attendant issues tomorrow. </span>Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-36866107196738054372013-06-03T17:57:00.001+08:002013-06-03T17:57:12.702+08:00Lumped and Split<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">So it's the first Monday of June... how time does fly. I'm newly-returned to the house after having spent a long weekend in Singapore, but perhaps I am jumping too far too fast, so let us back up a little bit and go on to the main things.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Well, let's see. My expenses in May were quite large - in fact I overspent my earnings by a rather large margin - which I ought to take under control this month, if possible. I think it ought to be possible, if I pare away at my habit of ordering large meals; a steady diet of boiled eggs and raw carrots ought to handle any cravings for late-night snacks that I might gain as a result of reducing lunch portions. On the other hand, I do have a new computer and it's given me great pleasure.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The younger skink died; after not seeing it for a week, I had thought that it was in hiding (even the larger skink likes to conceal itself beneath the food dish), but then last week I found its head, separated entirely from its body, and in a state - it was missing both eyeballs and the lower jaw - as to suggest violent death and then decomposition. It was a rather poor surprise; I had hoped to rear Surprise entirely from birth to death in captivity. But then, when I got George, I hadn't expected Surprise - hence its name - and the present state of affairs is more or less exactly how I had expected it to be. So I shan't complain.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">There is a mini-audit next week... which means this week will be full of me preparing audit check-lists, which I fear very much will expose all sorts of findings in the department. It'd be both my fault and not my fault at the same time; after all, the sudden personnel shortages and the poorness of the system aren't my fault, but I can see it being argued that in the past - goodness, four or five months? - of me taking over those duties, I should at some point or other have done some cleaning up. But at any rate I don't like audits; they always are intrusive and disrupt the actual work going on. Not that I don't see their raison d'etre, but that I wish they'd happen to other people and not to me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">At any rate I'll probably have a bunch of trouble and a bunch of things to put into place before October... It's not all bad, I guess, I just have a lot of things to do as I always do.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I went for a bit of a fitness challenge thing on Saturday morning with a friend; it began with stretching and sit-ups and things like that, and ended with a 2.4km run; and the upshot of THAT is that I am apparently weaker than 60-year-old men as well as having no core strength whatsoever to speak of, and have the breathing pattern of somebody in a corset (and the equivalent running stamina); even now I am aching.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">But at the same time one has to admit that it seems to be a worthy pursuit, even if not necessarily easy to achieve. For one thing I'm going to have to store up enough willpower to come back from the office and change into the running togs and head out again for half an hour of constantly gasping for breath. Still, I shall attempt it twice weekly for a month, and then we shall see what we shall see.</span>Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-67130547606772626972013-05-06T18:53:00.000+08:002013-05-06T18:53:20.943+08:00Coral Wrangler<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">My brain is currently too tired to do any work, so I'm typing this as a method of relaxation... I always get tired out when going through SOPs, I'm not sure why. But then maybe I'm easily tired, too.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">How's my life? So-so; I'm still collecting data on my spending habits, but they don't seem at all good. For one thing I spend an unexpectedly high sum on my day-to-day life - in April, for example, I spent RM422 on meals, RM200 on gas, RM350 on tithes, RM150 on Internet, and RM500 on my sister's allowance - taking that as pretty average, that's a fixed monthly expenditure of about RM1622. And then there were the one-off expenditures - groceries (RM212), movies, clothes, and an advanced allowance for my sister (another RM700!) and a few other things, and my total expenditure for April actually pretty nearly matches my income for that month as well. So I actually don't save up quite as much as I (or other people) think I do.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">It's not always so bad, of course. In March I spent RM300 less than in April, but that was also the month when the houseguest came and decided that I needed various house-cleaning items.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The houseguest is in fact... I don't know. Maybe, after all, I prefer to live in complete solitude rather than have another person around. Perhaps it's a simple issue of cultural clashes and miscommunication; both he and I believe ourselves to be easy-going, but I apply it to the house and my surroundings, while he applies it to time. This means that I simply drop my things where they fall and leave them be, but he constantly putters about putting things back in place and washing and so on; and conversely, when I want to have left the house already to go to somewhere else (on the rare occasion that I need to take him somewhere), he's still taking a shower - he takes incredibly long showers - or putting on his socks or choosing a shirt or something of the sort. It's quite an experience.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">But the fact remains that I suspect that when he leaves, my monthly expenses will fall somewhat - with the exception that I'll allow that he has a point about buying rice to cook on weekends. I'll probably do that, and save on weekend meals.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I have a pair of new pets - Google assures me that they are skinks. The elder of them was caught in the factory and I took it home in a box with shrink-film across the top of it to prevent escape, but with holes in it to prevent asphyxiation; the younger of them was born in captivity one week after the capture. I have located them in a large plastic box with water and food - which means slivers of boiled egg, plus whatever insects may find their way into that box. They appear to be doing wonderfully well, and I'm quite pleased with it - reptiles are a quite low-maintenance pet which suits me just fine.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I spent the weekend in Singapore to get a new computer! It's a bit of an expenditure, but it should last me the next few years and so I don't mind it terribly - the computer parts and the tower casing altogether cost me about RM1542, at current exchange rates, and I'm going to need another RM300 or so for the monitor and keyboard; it'll be a bit of an expense of course but it's not too terribly intolerable.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">This past weekend was also the most recent election in Malaysia; so far the results have been disappointing for a lot of people and elating for quite a few others. I'm personally... half-gratified-half-disappointed - I had expected dirty tricks to lead to the ruling party's victory, but had been hoping that they'd defy expectations and rise above their trickery. But they didn't. My colleagues are quite upset about it, which is understandable.</span>Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-86662489429114138222013-04-09T17:57:00.003+08:002013-04-09T17:57:51.564+08:00The Gift of Giving<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">More than a month! I should really begin making this a more habitual thing. Even a sentence or two a day - but that would make this more like Twitter or Tumblr than what it is, with the benefit of course of having a somewhat better and more consistent record of the days of my life.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">A quick gloss over the last month: shortly after the last post, there was a great falling-out between my then-manager and the GM, which ended in the then-manager leaving his post with immediate effect. This had a few effects; for one, my responsibilities immediately expanded to cover whatever he left behind, and for another, the command structure of the department shivered a bit and settled down into its current form - though, of course, at the moment it's changing a bit to accommodate the new manager. For some time during the in-between period I had a houseguest three days out of seven; the CEO has a son who was waiting to be drafted into the Singaporean National Service and so was drafted into the company in the meantime, and to save him the trouble of daily commuting, he was placed in my care.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Not that it was a great burden - I quite enjoyed having him around; for all he said that he was an introvert, he talked quite a bit and enjoyed physical contact enough that I could punch him in the back and expect friendly retaliation. We spent a fair few nights towel-whipping each other, in fact.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">At the moment there is a new manager, who is adapting to me (I think) about as much as I am adapting to her - which is to say, not very much. We're still, I think, in that phase of feeling each other out and observing and taking notes, though she has started trying to improve things. I think that's a good sign.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I have at this writing gone nearly a week without shampoo - just water on the head. It was an idea I got from an article on Cracked about how shampoo actually harms the hair more than it helps, which is why there is need for conditioner and hair products and suchlike. So far I haven't seen any reduction in dandruff, but my hair <i>is</i> beginning to clump together in a way that makes people ask if there is product in it. I have not answered any of them with complete honesty, because "sebum" is a strange word to say out loud.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I have a house-guest who has been my house-guest for nearly two weeks now. He is - well, he introduces himself as "Fred" from "Persia", and was introduced to me through a friend of a friend of my parents'; he's currently waiting for the Singaporean government to process some paperwork that will allow him to begin working there and so we always shrug at people who ask how long he'll be around. He's a good cook (if a little fixated on mint and lemon), likes to keep things clean, and is extroverted enough to like hanging out with people into the wee hours - and, like me, he's very much a night person. He also likes getting out of the house and going shopping, with the result being that last month I only managed to save about RM300.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">On the other hand, I've been forced over the past few months to begin evaluating myself to wonder how I make the decisions I make - what makes me open the house to tenuously-connected guests, or to read the books I read, or to write this, and so on and so forth - in essence I'm wondering what drives me and what I prioritise over other things.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Certainly there's a great deal of a sense of duty in there; nothing makes me feel as terrible as feeling that I've shirked or forgotten something I promised to do. And I already know I place quite a premium on information and its dissemination, since that seems to be at the root of a lot of my frustrations - but I still lie and mislead people for my own entertainment, so clearly my desire to help and my inner schadenfreude-manufacturer are more or less equally strong, depending on the conditions. I also think of relaxation and stability as being more important than novelty or stimulation... well, after all, I am an I_TJ. (There is apparently a theory that whatever an I_TJ exhibits is the <i>opposite</i> of their actual self, since the dominant attribute is introverted and the auxiliary extroverted. I'm not sure how accurate it is.) But that already helps...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Sometimes I catch myself describing myself as if I were a character in a story, or more accurately sometimes I take little sentences from a story about characters I admire and I try to live up to them. Like this one from <i>September</i>, by Rosamunde Pilcher: "[She] is a giver. She is gold." And that may explain why I feel compelled to give of myself to other people - on the other hand, that I found this admirable may be an indication that I was always a generous soul - or, at least, a selectively generous soul - and was just looking for a way to acceptably let it out.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">...self-analysis always is a difficult thing to do.</span>Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-68091388991735757372013-02-24T22:11:00.000+08:002013-02-24T22:11:52.053+08:00Different Angle of Normal<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I looked over my last post, and... oh dear. It seems I'm still in the same poor situation I was in then, except even worse.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Well, let us begin where I left off. That incident with the car led to a bit of recrimination - I still haven't taken it in for a servicing of the front wheel, which is squeaking a bit, but nobody is worse for wear. The workload on the other hand is still there, and hasn't abated a bit - if anything it's only increased.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">It's having an effect on me, of course. People have started pointing out how I rarely if ever smile anymore - it's particularly evident because my scan-card photo was taken awhile ago and is all a-beam with happiness - and how I answer the phone as if it weighed a tonne, even when it's first thing in the morning. I mildly disagree: I do still smile, but only with the right half of my mouth. I suppose that makes it more a smirk than a smile. But then I don't really have anything to smile about when it comes to work.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I've already mentioned how my manager was called to a new project and I've been having to cover his duties as much as I can since then. But it's only gotten worse since.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I don't think it's a breach of the NDA to describe the way my department is structured - but just in case, I've just spent a bit of time removing personal information from the easiest-to-access parts of this blog. The Paranoid Parrot in me now assuaged, let me proceed. On paper, the organisation chart is topped by the GM. There are two branches downwards - one leads to the manager, and one leads to the "Lead QA Auditor". Under the LQAA is the Document Controller; under the manager, there are three branches - one leads to my beaming face, one leads to our Assistant, and one leads to the Team Leader. Under me there are two inspectors; under the Team Leader are a whole bunch of inspectors. That is, of course, on paper. </span><span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">In practice? The Team Leader absconded last week, but even before that she was new; what it <i>really </i>looks like, under the section under my manager, is just one line leading to me. And under me is everybody. (The LQAA is also apparently feeling herself over everybody, because I receive reports that she steps in and complains about the things my people do, but she doesn't address these complaints to me ever.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">It's a petrifying situation - I'm suddenly responsible for absolutely everything because, after all, in the near-absence of my manager (not that I blame him in the least, he's insanely busy and every time I see him he's exhausted and practically falling over), I'm the highest-up in the department, and I don't think I'm ready for it at all. It's also a tiring situation, since I haven't even gotten used to day-to-day operations but we already have three projects running and consuming a heap of time and mental power. It's times like these that make me feel horribly limited...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">...last week the GM came to see me, and gave me a long speech about how I'm normal and need to be abnormal. It mostly went entirely over my head, apart from the bits where I was a bit flattered that he thought I was being normal when it's barely a month since the car incident. But then he's an extrovert and these overstatements are part and parcel of the way he communicates. I was very lackluster in my responses, which I think disappointed him, so he ended it by telling me to think it over and go to find him when I had an answer.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I suppose he was disappointed because in the past I've agreed to plenty of the ideas he's come up with and maybe this is the first time I've dissented, even if only by silence and cautious answers. But I think I have an answer now, and I also think he won't like it. Maybe I'm over-thinking, or I'm going at it from a different angle, but...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I have to respectfully disagree with the idea that anything about my work life right now is normal. I'm carrying my workload and my manager's, trying to cover as much of the department as I can and still not covering everything that I want to, the zero-error project is failing miserably (we've had multiple errors already this month and are sure to get angry emails at the month-end evaluation); I regularly put in 13- or 14-hour workdays and still cannot finish the daily tasks in my email, let alone the other ones that I receive via verbal message - "Oh, we found something, will you look into it?". To ask me to put anything more on my plate would be to mean I had to give decreased attention to everything else - which of course is no solution, as that will certainly merely increase the number of fires I need to run around putting out - or to move something off of my plate and onto somebody else's.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">And that's my next self-assigned project. I'll need to list out everything my department does, and then list out who is authorised and capable of performing each individual task. I suspect it will be a very long list. I also, depressingly, suspect that a great many tasks will be me- or manager-only - things like approving various forms or double-checking reports or writing emails... maybe I will be proven happily wrong and my plate will be found to actually be manageably empty, which may indicate something about my time-management habits.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">(I recently started a cashflow tracker and was shocked to find I spent nearly RM300 last week.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">And as for the GM's push... it's probably the clash in personalities. He's an extrovert and his entire philosophy seems to revolve around competition and conflict - managing information, offering additional services, proving naysayers wrong - or else that's how he thinks I am and that's the kind of motivation he expects me to respond to. I on the other hand - I'm semi-reliably informed that I am an ISTJ, and at any rate I don't like competition very much. I think I've mentioned that before. And while the offer sounds interesting, I have reservations mostly revolving around my ability to add extra things-to-do into my daily list and to perform them well. Which may be what he thinks is normal, but is what I think is abnormal; I see so many people who don't seem to care enough about doing their work properly.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I had a number of strange dreams last week. In no particular order:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">1. I was in a place where there were two rooms. One room was dark and filled with sleeping people; one room was bright and empty. The two rooms were connected by a long, straight corridor, where I was. I walked to the dark room and woke somebody up, who told me that I shouldn't be there.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">2. I was sitting in a sort of diner, but there was no food. I was talking to a vague group of people that I don't know, when a man sat down opposite me (though he later moved to be beside me). The entire rest of the night he flirted with me, eventually reaching the extent of deliberately face-planting into my crotch, while I attempted to go on as if nothing were happening.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">3. I was at some kind of gathering where it was chaos and people were attempting to form into some semblance of order. I tried to help, but made the situation worsen until at some point somebody yelled at me to stop helping them. The dream continued in this vein.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I haven't had any dreams this week so far, though, which I'm grateful for; my remembered dreams are almost always disturbing ones.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">At any rate there's work tomorrow and I should sleep; my body is sore from the morning run yesterday with people from church and from the swim just now (where I discovered that I can apparently swim 200 meters in 5 minutes now - roughly 2.4kmh, which is still about half my walking speed but not too shabby).</span>Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-53401437085197840982013-01-12T14:01:00.000+08:002013-01-12T14:01:07.163+08:00In(tro)spectionIt's been awhile since my last post, of course it is. I don't have the time or willpower or energy on weekdays - I haven't had that for a long time - to do anything other than quickly browse Facebook and play a short Flash game or two before sleep, and my weekends are just as tiring and full of things to do - errands to run, cleaning to be done - and somehow I simply never get around to a few personal projects I've been putting off forever.<br />
<br />
But this week has been particularly bad, so I'm putting it down because getting the words out might help me fix a perspective on it and calm myself down. Well, not this week in particular. If I were pressed, I'd say it's been the entire past... two months or so, with the past couple of days as the cherry on top. That's how long I've been away, hasn't it? It's been an exhausting time...<br />
<br />
Well, we'll begin with November then. November itself wasn't so bad; I had NaNoWriMo going on, and I managed to beat it (though the novel itself remains unfinished and it's one of those projects I'll mean to get around to but never do and eventually forget about). I also travelled down to Singapore for my first-ever Thank Goodness It's Over party, which was quite a lot more fun than I'd thought it'd be. But somewhere around the end of November and the beginning of December, my direct superior got pulled out of the department and put onto a new project the company is doing - which means I had to take over his duties.<br />
<br />
Let's be clear from the outset that I'm not assigning blame to any party; at the time it all seemed like a good idea to all the parties involved.<br />
<br />
Between April to November or so, I had been in charge of the laboratory. It wasn't too bad apart from the times we had to rush out something or there was a breakdown or other similar issue, which would then cause a mad scramble. I'd also started taking on additional responsibilities, very very slowly - one of those being a document that is quite ridiculously information-dense and needs to be prepared in various forms about eight to ten times a day, every day, and our target is zero errors per month (which we haven't yet achieved) - and one or two other things. But now I got a number of other things added to me - manpower management and production issues and various documentation/ procedural things and all the other stuff that comes with being an assistant manager.<br />
<br />
It's been a wild ride ever since; every morning I sit down at the table and the emails and phone calls and meeting invitations (ha! What a name for them) come in and the next thing I know it's 9pm or 10pm and my mind is sore and tired and bruised from everything I have to deal with, and then there's the next day waiting to pounce on me. I won't lie by saying I enjoyed it; I could probably say I foresaw it - I've never, at least, had an exaggerated opinion of my own abilities - but I hadn't expected, in any case, for it to be so tiring. Maybe I'm just young and inexperienced and not very good at taking care of myself, let alone of others, or my mind is not properly trained, or I lack the sheer willpower or force of character - but it's just been such a challenging time... and I <i>hate</i> challenges.<br />
<br />
Anyway, that became the routine for the past month-plus. I would wake up on Monday morning to my shrill alarm and force myself through a cold shower and go to work and get out of the office at about 9 or 10 when everything had quietened down sufficiently for me to wrap up the to-do list for the day (and move everything that hadn't been done to the next day's to-do list) and put a bit of consideration into the next day's schedule - do <i>this</i>, and <i>this</i>, and <i>this </i>- no, wait, <i>that</i> should come first - and then <i>this</i> - maybe concurrent with <i>this</i> - and then I'd go back and go on Facebook and talk for a bit and then fall asleep at about midnight, because my circadian rhythm still hasn't gotten used to the idea of waking up before nine. This would repeat every day with minor variations and end on Friday evening when I'd go off to the weekly Friday-night young adult meeting at church. Then on Saturday I'd wake up at whatever time I did, and then it'd be laundry and sweeping and mopping and errand-running and lunch and swimming and then maybe dinner, if I'd gone through particularly great exertion, and then games and reading and sleep.<br />
<br />
(Speaking of reading, I'm currently on Tim Harford's <i>Adapt</i> - which seems frighteningly similar to another book I've read, but I can't find another copy of the same book anywhere. I wonder if I've read it before, somewhere else, but not bought it?)<br />
<br />
Sunday has church, which is by now pretty nearly a full-day affair, and then after that there's the house where I potter around and eventually sit down and accept the fact that the weekend is over even if I don't feel particularly rested, and make myself go to bed because Monday is coming again.<br />
<br />
My theme song these days is eerily similar to what it was, back in the days when I did Purchasing - <i>Big Bad World One</i> - specifically, the line "<i>What if the best that I can be just isn't good enough?/ Isn't it better not to know?</i>" - interspersed from that song from the Harry Potter movies (which, I think, is based on a much older saying) - "<i>Double, double, toil and trouble/ Fire burn and cauldron bubble/ double, double, toil and trouble/ Something evil this way comes!</i>" Which, I suppose, really tells you all you need to know about my general mood in the office.<br />
<br />
It merely got worse on Wednesday night.<br />
<br />
This past week, the MD's son (whom I know from a family trip a few years ago in Beijing) has been coming to the office to try and learn what the company does. I've been helping out as best as I can, given my limited understanding and availability; but on Wednesday night it so happened that I had to entertain him for some time until his transport came to return him to Singapore, where he lives. And so we remained at the office until eight or so, as I was going through some paperwork, and then we went out. He had mentioned earlier that he was in the middle of taking driving lessons, and the week before his father had mentioned (I presume he was joking when he said it, but I take things much too literally sometimes) that it would be nice if I let him practice on the car (which is a particularly durable one - so it wasn't that unreasonable a request) and so we went to a nearby construction site that looked from the outside like a large empty space.<br />
<br />
It was pretty okay, apart from being ridiculously bumpy, up to the point where the car fishtailed and we got out to find that there was quicksand halfway up the rear right tyre. The rest of that night was a blur of calling for help (which came, but was ineffective) and then his parents and my GM all showing up at the house at the same time, and all of them being incensed at the events.<br />
<br />
It was here that my personality betrayed me. I'm... not probably normal in the way I respond to crises, I don't think. For one thing, I've trained myself for a long time to subdue emotional responses, especially to unpleasant events; and I've also got a taste for schadenfreude; and (this is the crucial bit) I tend to balance emotions - which is to say, I'm depressing (or at least very repressed) when around happy people and borderline manic around unhappy people.<br />
<br />
And on that night, I was around five unhappy people (I wasn't, myself, unhappy as such yet - I hadn't yet allowed the weight of the events to sink in). And boy, was I ever borderline manic. I probably crossed the line into full-blown mania with the way I was laughing (in what, I think, was meant to be a reassuring it's-okay manner - I, unfortunately, am not a naturally reassuring person) and it came across very badly.<br />
<br />
Suffice it to say that on that night, Things Happened, and the aftereffects have been happening ever since. The car is still dirty all over, and needs a wash; there are mud tracks on my floor from the people who tried to help, as well as myself; I have muddy clothes that I'll have to beat the mud off before I clean them; and apparently, to every adult who's heard of it, the immediate response is to chew my head off about how irresponsible and immature I am, how badly things could have gone wrong, how incredibly foolish and dangerous the whole thing was, and essentially that I'm not very much of a good and reliable person at all with the way I fail to consider things before doing them. Oh, and of course, that I don't have very much common sense at all.<br />
<br />
I'm split in my mind about the whole thing, myself; I do see their point of view, of course. This risk-taking behaviour <i>is</i> risky, and dangerous, and if not curbed quickly, could lead to much worse things; and it was certainly illegal. In fact my boss has gone on to say it indicates a failing, or completely absent, moral compass - which apparently only appears in pampered people who have never experienced hardship. (I haven't the foggiest if my life counts as a pampered one. I certainly don't think so; but maybe my mind has turned out along similar routes.) It's ended on a very depressing route at any rate...<br />
<br />
(Which makes me wonder if my True Neutral stance on these things might be more a liability than an asset.)<br />
<br />
But what comes next? I haven't any idea. I suppose the idea is to show that I've learned my lesson and have become able to consider the consequences of any action before taking it and so on and so forth - how I'm supposed to show that, on the other hand, I don't know. And a bit of reflection tells me that this trait is both blessing and curse... if I were the kind to never go into a new situation without full and complete information and a total confidence that it would end well, I shouldn't be here at all. I wouldn't have gone to Singapore - a land that I knew nothing about at the time - to study bioengineering - a thing that, even after graduation, I find difficult to explain to people - at NTU - a place I knew nothing about and knew nobody in. I would almost certainly not have come to this company, preferring the dismal situation I knew to the fearsome unknown of this place. I don't think I would have done half the things I've done that have brought me to the person I am now; many of them were foolhardy things to do at the time and were risky. And I've certainly done a lot of things that went against common sense and some of them turned out well and some didn't; but it's probably different when it's real life and when it's a board game. For one thing, real life can't be just folded up when you're tired of it and stowed away in a cabinet to be forgotten until the next time you want to have another go at it.<br />
<br />
So, again, I don't know. Maybe the lesson is to consider the risks - but then the above examples from my past come right back and tell me that if I'd known all the risks, and been able to consider them from a fully adult perspective (whatever <i>that</i> might be; I certainly wouldn't know), I probably wouldn't have taken them... I suppose in the end, the lesson seems be that risks are only acceptable in hindsight, if they turned out well. Which isn't much of a lesson at all. Or that risks are only acceptable if there is no method of lessening them; or that more information should be gathered before trying anything out. Or maybe that I'm not a very functional adult, even if I <i>am</i> more than a quarter of a century old, and I don't have a Manual on Adulthood to go by.<br />
<br />
...I suppose I am embarrassed, and ashamed that such a thing happened. I'm not about to go telling the world about it, at any rate, so it's not something to emblazon on shirts and stuff. But (perhaps this is the anthropic principle at work in my head) I also don't think it's as bad as everybody makes it out to be, because we all came out of it intact apart from dignity. (Not entirely - I have a small cut on my toe and another on my finger, but both seem to be healing and uninfected.)<br />
<br />
I'll just wrap this up here; this constant second-guessing of myself and my attributes and how I should deal with the faults that other people complain about will never end. I don't even know how I should solve it; certainly people may say that they'll always be available to listen, but... heh, let's face it. When I'm a walking r/wtf, I'm highly unlikely to actually take anybody up on that offer. And besides, I'd second-guess <i>them</i> too - I don't even know myself, and I've got 20-odd years of experience in that; how likely is anybody else to?<br />
<br />
The next morning I called on a tow truck to help; the truck driver looked at the mud and refused to go in there. So I asked for help from a nearby excavator, and it hooked up a chain to the car and towed it out; then I used a nearby high-pressure water sprayer to clean it off, mostly, though there are still mud streaks over it.Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-65002908861157630342012-11-13T00:16:00.001+08:002012-11-13T00:16:56.442+08:00...You Might Just Get ItI'm in a rather tumultous sort of state of mind at the moment; there's just so much on my mind and it's quite impossible to get everything nice and clearly set down where it'll stay before it gets up and wanders around and then I have to go chase after it again.<br />
<br />
So let's start with... well, for once work isn't the Big Crazy Issue dominating my mind that it usually is; or at least right now it's only one of the Big Crazy Issues. Which is not at all a good thing, of course, but one learns to look for the small blessings in life. At any rate we will begin with my personal life, because that one at least is easy to describe.<br />
<br />
I've been having dreams again - my dreams are always weird, I'm not sure why. It's as if my subconscious looks over my shoulder when I'm awake and chatting on MSN and it sees all the horrible things I type at people in jest (today, for example, the prevailing topic of conversation was "horrible things I will do to your corpse if I outlive you") and then it waits until I go to sleep and then springs even <i>worse</i> things on me. Last week, for example; I dreamt I was walking on a suspended bridge a great height up in the air. In fact it wasn't a bridge so much as it was a labyrinth of sorts, and it was completely made of wood; you could see the outside through the gaps in the walls and floor, and the walls came up to roughly waist height, and above that was a lattice, also of wood, full of ivy and other climbing plants with tendrils. I was there alone, but in front of me (in the beginning of the dream) was a small group of strangers, which included a young man. I was going along the path, stooping slightly to avoid some of the lower-hanging tendrils, when I saw movement amongst the ivy. It was a snake.<br />
<br />
The rest of the dream was one long interminable sequence of me on my knees, moving as slowly as I could towards any direction that looked like the exit, trying desperately to not attract the attention of the snakes; the snakes were apparently blind to slow movements but had sharp ears, and I had to get away from the young man, who was excitable and would scream at sudden points. I woke up sweating from that dream.<br />
<br />
The other dream came a couple of nights ago; I was walking through a shopping district with some friends, but not anybody I actually know in real life; they were merely a group of unidentifiable friends. We went past a particular corner on which stood a two-storey shop; the lower storey sold perfectly innocuous things, but the second storey (which unmistakably belonged to the same store as the lower storey) had walls of glass, through which one could see people doing things that would (if done in public in real life) have resulted in people covering the eyes of nearby children and screaming to the nearest police officers about flagrant exposure and worse. In my dream, I made up an excuse for the rest of the group to go on without me, upon which I went back and forth past that shop several times to make up my dream-mind; upon which, after my mind was made up, I went into the shop and went to the second storey, and found it completely empty. Disappointed, I went to rejoin the group; none of them said anything, but I knew that they knew that I had gone to visit the second storey, and they were wordlessly disappointed in me. And then I woke up.<br />
<br />
I don't interpret anybody's dreams, let alone mine; but these dreams were strange ones.<br />
<br />
And on to the waking world...<br />
<br />
My parents bought a house, about ten minutes from where I live. They're expecting me to move into it, and stop renting (and therefore stop needing to pay rent), by the end of this month... it's not furnished at all apart from a few small necessities like clothesracks and cleaning tools. Still, I'll probably move the remainder of the non-necessities in tomorrow, and then do a bit more cleaning, and then... well, and then we'll see. I'll have to notify the landlord, of course, and complete the moving, and figure out how to pay the bills and things (as in literally where to go to pay the bills), and get a good broadband line in, and then the furnishing... I read somewhere about the benefits of standing tables and now I want one too.<br />
<br />
So that's that for that - quite simple and straightforward really isn't it...<br />
<br />
My job is where I'm properly terrified right now. Not quite terrified; but I'm certainly apprehensive... Basically the company's about to do a bit of expanding, and the GM has enough faith in my direct superior to take him off to the new branch - which leaves me to replace him in all his duties. I'm not one of those people blessed with a deep and abiding sense of self-worth and confidence, though, and the idea is slightly frightening to me. What if I'm already at my level of competence and this will lead to a Peter Principle? And with all those people under me... And so much still to be done. These two weeks are hectic, and I haven't done half of the things I want to do and new things keep coming up to be done all the time.<br />
<br />
I read somewhere, once, that most people stay at their first job for six months or less and then move on. In my case I've managed to stay at this company for more than a year now, but haven't spent more than six months in one position - I was in Purchasing for a little less than six months and now I've been the Lab Head for six months going on seven and I'm apparently on the verge of becoming the Senior Engineer... I told myself at graduation that I'd like to be one of those people who join a company and end up staying there for ten years or more, but I never thought it would happen. It's a bit frightening to suddenly be told I'm about to be the second-highest-up in the department, second only to the Head of Department, especially when I know how big a goofball I can sometimes be and when I know how my brain fritzes out on me. I hardly dare take it, but it seems like a clear direction from God. After all, I know myself well enough by now to be sure that I'm a good follower, if a rather sarcastic one, and not terribly good at leading. At least, I think so; I've never been told so.<br />
<br />
My GM thinks I need to care about people more, and be more active, though. I haven't the foggiest how I'll do those.Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-46685010331274193162012-09-17T17:10:00.001+08:002012-09-17T17:10:59.722+08:00Full PlateGood heavens. It's been a long time since anything new appeared on this page, hasn't it? But then it's been a long time since I wanted to write the way I want to at the moment. I don't know why, but words and sentences have been churning in my mind for awhile... maybe it's just that a lot of things have been percolating and now they're brewed and I might as well set them down somewhere. It's better than letting them stew in my mind.<br />
<br />
And yet now, looking at this blank page, my mind wanders and cannot be pinned down to write of anything. It's very annoying, but it does show the state which my self-control has fallen to. I'm not very good at reining in my thoughts or impulses, and that's a great failing in me. But let us then impose some kind of order on things, and I will cover the main spheres of my life.<br />
<br />
Work is going somewhat well. We had audits some months ago, and the findings are still being responded to because the auditors apparently went on leave or something of the sort, and so all we have to go on are our own memories of what the auditors wanted done. There are as always a lot of things to do and follow up on and work at; but at least at present it is more that we are waiting on the customer to give us information rather than that they are pressing on us. It is maybe not a very satisfactory situation, but it is the better alternative until the customer becomes more organised and better able to follow their own procedural demands. I still find it difficult to control my inspectors, though; perhaps I feel that they are somewhat justified in complaining about the workload when they had been told beforehand that their pay would be proportional to the audit findings, and their pay increased by a large percentage (so I'm told) but they did not get any bonus. Personally I think that's perfectly well, because with a bit of saving-up the additional pay will outstrip the bonus, but they'll have none of that. At least they obey me, if somewhat sluggishly, and certainly (I think) they respect me enough to take my instructions seriously.<br />
<br />
I'm starting to also look into other bits of the department that have direct contact with me; there's a rather interesting coding challenge in one of them, because our customer has a lot of specifications in a lot of documents that only briefly to each other (and never state which version they're referring to). Which means a lot of testing to see if I can get MS Excel to store a list of all those documents and specifications and use a couple of fields to pull up the relevant information based on type and date. It's a challenge so far, mostly because the documents are all many-to-many related and that rules VLookup out immediately. I've been having a bit of luck with dependent lists, though, so I might try that out next.<br />
<br />
The senior engineer's been taking me out for dinner a lot lately, with the result being that my belly is getting noticeably more rotund; he favours pizzas and all-you-can-eat steamboats, and I--being the incredible foodie that I am--tend to devour everything in sight. The pizzas aren't so bad, except when we overestimate our hunger and accidentally order enough for three when we're a party of two; but at steamboats I tend to eat about three or four heaping plates. I'm something of a minor legend around the office by now, because he finds it a stunning ability and tells everybody so. We talk a lot during dinner, of course; he needs the listening ear and it's good learning for me, and we're pretty friendly anyhow. But some time ago he asked me how I saw myself in five years' time and I said I hadn't any idea, and he said that was the wrong answer. He basically sees himself in five years as having an MBA (or a PhD?) and being either the owner or manager of somewhere, and being able to drive a nice car--he favours Peugeots.<br />
<br />
If you read my blog very much, you'll recall that I thought of defining my ideal life some time back but gave it up in a fit of fatalism. But I think I should try and set it out anyway, just so I can come back again some time and laugh at myself for being so silly. It's not a five-year plan, of course; but it'll help me in my going.<br />
<br />
We'll start from the basics, then; my ideal life contains rhythm. By which I mean that I think of my life as having some fixed, recurring events, generally on the order of a week or month, with some space in between for unexpected occurrences--which means, first, some sort of employment with fixed hours and not occurring every week. It also means a church to go to, a place to swim, a place to get groceries, a place to have sundry services done--haircuts and suchlike, where I can go to have stuff done or to do stuff.<br />
<br />
I should prefer that the employment be one where I can fully use whatever skills I should have, where there are challenges that I can be confident in solving (given sufficient time and effort and guidance as needed), and where I can form enjoyable relationships. I don't really care that it should place me in a high-income bracket or that it should place me in authority over other people, but it does matter that I should do something that doesn't insult my intelligence or force me to insult other people's. (In fact I don't think I would mind the kind of position where I had interaction with only a limited number of people, with occasional encounters with others.) Perhaps I will have a Master's in Business Admin.; it seems a useful thing to have.<br />
<br />
I would also like to live less than an hour's travel from the workplace (at maximum--this means assuming a jam, accidents, having every traffic light on the way be red, etc), and to live a certain distance from the city centre.<br />
<br />
At this point I have an impulse to delete all of the above and laugh at myself for even trying to do this. It's all so patently ridiculous, isn't it? and stereotypical of a young man like myself to even want to do it.<br />
<br />
But let's go on anyway; there is no point doing this halfway.<br />
<br />
I should like to live with people; I don't think I'm the marrying kind, or even the dating kind, as my previous attempts at this have ended quite disastrously. But I am certainly the befriending kind, and I would like to live with good friends. I think I would like to also be on good terms with my neighbours. I don't think my place of living will be particularly lavishly furnished; I think I could get along quite well with a futon or mattress, a functional kitchen, a fridge, a TV (for the Wii), a table and some chairs--maybe a lounger, a futon, a rack on which to hang clothes, and a good Internet connection. I might have beanbags for the sheer luxury of it, or a hammock. Maybe even a washing-machine. I certainly shouldn't mind a standing punchbag and a bicycle and a nice electric piano--so perhaps my demands aren't quite so modest.<br />
<br />
Well, on to more concrete matters.<br />
<br />
The house my parents bought is almost ready to move into, and I will be moving just as soon as the renovations are complete, the paint is dry, and it is furnished; I will almost certainly have a landline installed, and then put up all the rooms except the master bedroom and mine for rent--cheapish, too, since the rent will only cover utilities and the place will be quite unfurnished. I don't know if I'll throw a housewarming party; the guests will probably go in and say, "this is Spartan!" I'm putting off the move a bit, though, since I'm already comfortable in this place--by the end of this month I'll have been here an entire year. But it has to be done, and so it will be, sooner or later. It's not like I've accumulated very much stuff in the past year, anyhow.<br />
<br />
And so that's that. Five-year plan? At the moment that just goes "furnish and move into new place; befriend neighbours; rent rooms out; get experience at work, take on more and more responsibilities; potentially apply for and go through an MBA course, most likely locally". I can't see very far beyond that.Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-9413362892551896632012-05-27T15:42:00.000+08:002012-09-17T15:43:15.168+08:00Misread Attitude<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">It’s been a rather terrible week; or at
least, last week was. I’ve been tired all weekend just thinking about it, and
having to go to work tomorrow and face it doesn’t help. I can only hope this
coming week will be better, but I don’t expect it to be.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Last week was the preliminary audit week
(for lack of any better descriptor); our main customer sent an auditor to
wander the place for three days asking questions and so I spent all of the
previous week frantically trying to get everything in place. My boss had, quite
nicely, set out a number of requirements and I just ticked them off as they
were accomplished or at least set in place to the best of my ability. All the
same it was quite frustrating seeing things happen so slowly, partly due to the
strange placement of the work breaks and partly due to my subordinates not
being terribly enthusiastic to finish all their tasks on time because getting
to work overtime gets them paid time and a half, so assigning any task within
half an hour of a break means that they’ll dilly about doing something and then
only <i>start</i> on it after the break. And
on Monday one of them simply didn’t turn up for work, despite me having said
repeatedly that this was a very important audit and we wanted to be as prepared
for it as possible, which led to me rather overworking the other subordinate
and me.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">And then on Tuesday the lab was audited
(now you know why I was so fixated on the Monday absence) and we found a huge
bunch of things that I hadn’t double-checked beforehand or had put aside to
resolve when I had time—in passing, I probably shouldn’t do that anymore; I
never do seem to find this magical period of time when I can sit down to
resolve non-urgent-but-important issues and then they tend to fester and blow
up on me—or that I had simply never yet got around to doing. It was all quite
uncomfortable and embarrassing, especially when I was supposed to be answering
all the questions but got tongue-tied and quiet and my boss had to fill in
everything for me. And on Wednesday the results came out and the lab got the
lowest passing score even though the auditor made special emphasis on me being
new and the lab having been a significant improvement since last year and
having been an absolute disaster the last time she saw it. Which makes me
wonder why the lab didn’t get a negative score during the last audit, but
that’s water under the bridge.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">It’s not like I have no action plan, of
course. Most of the observations she had are easily sorted out—I already set
them all into a task list on a time line and expect them all to be prepared
and/or in place by the end of June, barring surprises—but I hadn’t expected the
bosses to be so emotionally invested in it. That may be my biggest failing yet:
I care about the lab and that it didn’t do well rankles with me, but I wouldn’t
explode with rage or disappointment about it: I’m detached, as always. It did
poorly or at least not as well as we thought it would do; we made mistakes;
these are the mistakes, here’s what we’ll do about it, let’s set out a plan of
action that seems reasonable, we’ll move on and improve. Not so the bosses: one
gave my subordinates a half-hour speech about the importance of sticking to
rules and regulations and the SOPs and the other gave me a half-hour tirade
about the importance of being obedient and having a good attitude and having
common sense. (I think that comparison highlights quite nicely that one of them
is primarily Melancholic and the other is Choleric. And I, of course, am
Phlegmatic, which may be the primary reason I get along well with people until
they start expecting me to do lots of work in very little time.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">It’s not like they don’t have their points,
of course, though I could probably argue that none of the auditor’s
observations regarded an SOP not being followed, more like a guiding principle
being laid aside. But that would just show my poor attitude. I don’t know,
sometimes, what to say to make things better. Actually, I <i>never</i> ever, in any case, know what to say to make things better. My
default reaction to sad, frustrated, irritated, or otherwise non-happy people
is to go “poor ickle INSERTPERSONNAME” and maybe pat them on the back. I don’t
think it ever makes them feel better but that’s why I’m not a professional
therapist. And it wouldn’t do to go up against the boss and go “no, my
attitude’s fine! LOOK AT IT” because that would just prove their point, though
I haven’t the foggiest how to go about remodelling my attitude. That’s why,
when people say I’ve changed somehow, I can only accept their opinion because I
can never tell if I have, except after a long time. But I could never tell you
the difference between me, now, and me, two months ago, unless you asked me two
years from now and even then I would probably not know. Probably two months ago
I was more cheerful.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">I should probably go to visit the boss’s
office tomorrow for a long talk; we haven’t had one of those in a long time and
maybe that’s what’s contributing to the current tension. And I still need to
prepare a presentation for some paperwork that’s long overdue, and set up a
couple of reports, and reformat some forms to make them easier to use, and in
the middle of all that find enough work for my subordinates to do so that they
don’t get bored.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">I went to the bookstore today, to get some
things for the lab that made up a major observation during the audit.
Apparently being an auditor makes you distrustful of everything that everybody
does. I should cultivate that habit, except I would go insane from the effort.</span></div>
Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-53289248750053306422012-05-19T15:42:00.000+08:002012-09-17T15:42:35.024+08:00Unbustle My Life<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">It turns out that I’m quite capable of
going a full day on quite little sleep. At least, I’ve managed to do it today,
though it’s quite uncomfortable and I don’t plan on doing this often. But then
it’s not quite been a normal couple of days. It’s not even been a normal
week—although, I must admit, normalcy is not a quality often found in the time
that I experience. Which is a good thing according to my GM, but then his views
on a lot of things are alternative to put it mildly.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">To put things simply most of this week has
been rushing things out to prepare for audits next week; somehow every time I
think we’re quite ready, I go explore a little bit and check or some issue
comes up and then it turns out we overlooked something and now we have to start
a whole new task. On the upside it does mean less things overlooked now than
before, but the obvious downside is that I keep wondering what I’ve overlooked
during the latest check. And Friday night there was a birthday celebration and
then Saturday morning there was a bit of training because the SOPs have
undergone a fair bit of revision and then just now I helped out with the church
youth because they needed a big car and my Pajero counts as a big car and the
whole upshot of it is that I fell asleep around 2am and woke at 7am, left the
house at about 7.40am and only returned at 9.30pm. I didn’t even get my weekly
swim—I hope to get that tomorrow, because my belly’s horribly large and flabby.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">I attribute that mostly to my father’s
presence; usually I would have a large lunch and no dinner, but now I have a
large lunch <i>and</i> dinner, which of
course sends the waistline rocketing upwards.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">All the same I do wonder a bit if I’m
rather too busy for my own good, sometimes; I spend more time in the lab than
at home, at least on weekdays: in the entire almost-a-month after my transfer
I’ve only left on time twice, I’ve had about four half-Saturdays including
today, and in fact I have an entire book for a weekend reading assignment that
I’m supposed to have a mind map of by Monday (but I probably won’t, because my
reading speed may be that high but one takes time to assimilate information
well enough to map it out). On the other hand, I’m single and free and
all—though a crush on one of the people at work that I may be wishfully thinking
is mutual is getting badly in the way of my thought processes—and so if I were
ever to try being a workaholic now would be a good time.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">I spent the Mothers’ Day weekend in the
ancestral home with my grandmother, who seemed to appreciate it. There was
unfortunately a bit of family drama, with people feeling underappreciated and
other people feeling stepped-on and other people just wanting everybody to shut
up and move on and so on, which I don’t think has been resolved yet because it
blew up into a series of angry postings on each others’ Facebook Walls (and of
course then there were the fights over who got more likes). It was all rather
silly, I thought, and yet still…</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">I was offered bananas yesterday that had
just been offered to a little shrine; I think I’ve somehow gotten into the good
books of the aunty who runs a mixed-rice stall and so she offered me the
bananas, saying the blessing of the gods would make them sweeter. I never
thought I’d be living out a Bible verse; but since I was eating with two other
Christians and a free-thinker I had to decline them. Though they did look like
quite nice bananas and if the other people hadn’t looked so shocked at the
whole thing I probably would have eaten them anyway.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">A bit of a thought came to me just now
about the whole foreign labour issue. Not that it’s very fresh but it’s still
an issue, if one listens to the things that get posted sometimes… It seems to
me that the whole problem about the foreign labour in Singapore is that they
live cheaply (because their pay doesn’t get cuts for CPF and so on, and they
don’t need to buy houses and cars and so on) and that they are taking up jobs
that should be going to better-qualified locals for some reason or other. So it
would seem that removing either issue would make things better: either that the
cheap living is taken away somehow, by taxing the foreign workers or putting
some kind of measure in place that makes them just as expensive as locals to
hire. Although, assuming economics still actually works, jobs will probably
just go wherever the newly-cheaper labour is and then people will still receive
letters saying “We’re so glad you came for the interview but other people are
just <i>better</i> than you”. I suppose it
will warm their hearts to know that the other people were born in the same
country as they, and hadn’t been born elsewhere and travelled over for whatever
reason.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">(It’s also a bit weird the way they seem to
assume that people will travel hundreds of kilometres to be mean to people
they’ve never met, but nobody ever said self-made victims were rational.)</span></div>
Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-36356209556021067562012-05-11T15:41:00.000+08:002012-09-17T15:42:05.012+08:00Breaking<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">…and like all good resolutions, the above
is broken already. I suppose I should be proud of myself for remembering to
write this post in the following week, but that’s cold consolation.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">I’m quite sleepy. I’ve been this way for a
good part of the week; very often I’m staying awake through sheer willpower and
if I were to rest my head on anything and close my eyes I might very well just
drop off and not wake up until somebody leaps on my head in a very exuberant
wake-up call. That, if you’re wondering, is a very bad thing because the
whiplash might kill me or the impact might break my spine, but then not many
people have that sort of jumping ability anyway. I should probably go to sleep
except I want to type this up so as to have at least one thing ticked off my
mental to-do list, and besides tomorrow is Saturday.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">I don’t know if this tiredness is due more
to the fact that I’ve been getting an average of 6.5 hours of sleep a day for
the last few days, or that I, an introvert, have been relentlessly surrounded
by people ever since the transfer, or that I’ve been forced to admit how little
I know about a certain procedure and that my lack of curiosity about it has
been rather a hindrance to work, or that I’ve been in three meetings in the
past three days (and five if you count long phone calls as two-person meetings)
and each meeting has left me with its own to-do list (and some of those
overlap), or that I’ve had a throbbing feeling in the tooth that I thought had
had its nerve pulled out and I’m starting to fear that the dentist did a
botched job somehow, or the little bits of drama floating around the people
around me, or all of the above combined. At any rate I’m tired and want rest
and solitude and a bit of quiet where I can just sit back and pretend that the
outside world doesn’t exist.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">That’s probably the part I’ve liked best
about the transfer. As the head of the QA Lab I get to just park myself in the
lab all day behind my screen, occasionally emerging for meetings or to issue
orders to my lab technicians or to scribble bulletins on the new whiteboard I
got for it (such a convenience that thing is!) or to run a procedure or to
riffle through files, and basically I get to make it my little territory where
people who enter need to show cause. Of course my back is still to the door and
so I don’t always know who’s entering until they’ve entered, but a little
mirror that I shall obtain should fix that. But the lab is still my little
place of quietness where for the most part it’s just me and my techs, and sometimes
just me because the techs get easily bored if I don’t issue orders and they
drift off in search of things to do. (Which my manager is getting quite fed up
with and so I’ve had to tell them that they are always to remain within sight,
or calling distance—which, given that the lab is in close proximity to the
production floor, is much shorter than you might think—of the lab.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">But it’s come with its own kind of stress;
the lab is critical in its own way, I still need to justify my actions (and now
the actions of my techs too), and you wouldn’t believe the amount of documents
I wade through daily. The factory deals in air fresheners and so there are
master lists of flavours, flavour components, test methods and records and
forms and verification and specifications, equipment inventory and calibration
and maintenance, operating procedures and safety procedures and so on and so
forth; I spent nearly two days on just one SOP and there’s one more to be
finished off next week, and spent most of today going through one file (which
eventually was split into two files plus two small plastic folders) and linking
it to its equivalent record in the system. And that’s just the paperwork,
because there’s also equipment that I need to bring in to satisfactorily call
the place “fully-equipped”, and tests that still need to be set up and run and
cleaned up afterwards, and suppliers and other departments to deal with on the
way, <i>and</i> on top of that I have my two
lab techs who both seem to know everything and still know nothing—either
because nobody’s ever told them before or because they’ve forgotten, I’m never
quite sure which, but I’m making sure to explain as much as possible to them
about everything I do, so that if I ever take a day off they won’t collapse in
helplessness.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">I think there’s definitely a streak in me
that defiantly proclaims that though the mountain flee and the sea boil, by all
that is within me <i>I shall not be found
unreliable</i>. Or something like: nothing irks me more than failing to
deliver; but sometimes I can’t help it. Like this week; my to-do list stretches
out miles and miles and I seem to only be able to whittle at it because every
now and then something comes in and upsets the whole thing and then I have to
stop and wait or do something more urgent first.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Ah well.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">It’s Mother’s Day this weekend; I think I
shall spend it in the ancestral home, with my grandmother.</span></div>
Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-48454579116431523792012-05-01T15:40:00.000+08:002012-09-17T15:41:40.634+08:00Hither Thither and Yon<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">I suppose the first of May is as good a
time as any to start on new resolutions. Here’s one: I resolve hereby to write
a new post every week. I used to be quite able to, and I do not think I’ve lost
that faculty or that facility; but of course now I have a great many more
distractions and demands on my time and sometimes it does seem as if the effort
of sitting down somewhere and shutting out everything that I need or want to do
and spending a half hour or an hour just remembering and recording is beyond
me. I don’t suppose anybody’s been hanging on me and waiting for my next post
and screaming in silent despair every day that goes by without an update; but
in time to come I think it would be nice to sit down and look back and smile in
indulgence at my past self.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">So, because I can’t necessarily say
everything in between the last post and this one—mostly because I haven’t got
Internet access at the moment and have forgotten when the last update was—I
should perhaps spend a little time to create a local backup of all my posts
just in case of strange and unlikely catastrophe—but in any case I don’t know
what I’ve said before and thus what more there is to say, and so you will have
to make do with what I can be certain you do not yet know (and I can fill in
the blanks in a later post); which means, then, that this post will mostly
concern my last couple of weeks and the most recent weekend. You won’t be
short-changed anyhow; they’ve been an eventful time.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">You probably know that when I entered this
company it was as a purchasing officer. Over the last six months I like to
think I’ve steadily improved, and I suppose the vaguely rhythmic nature of the
work helped in that regard—it was a job that very much had a certain scheduled
feel to it, and even if one was often chasing deadlines one at least had been
expecting to be chasing those deadlines, and if one hadn’t been expecting to
then one was quite justified in feeling a little wronged. All of that changed
about—let us see—the 13th of April and so it has been two full weeks since I
was transferred into my new position as the Personnel of the QA Lab. There were
various reasons for the transfer, of course, ranging from suitability to need
to… well, let us save time, and let me not risk the anger of my GM (even if the
likelihood of him seeing this or you telling him is remote), and say that the
transfer was necessary and urgent and that was why it took effect on a Friday.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">My previous post as purchasing officer has
been taken by a young, very pale, slightly chubby lady, whom I spent all of
Wednesday and Thursday acquainting with the systems and the demands and duties
of the post; since then I still receive queries from her about various odd
things, but it pleases me rather to say that she seems to have acclimatised
quite well; though of course that may be due to her being a quick study and not
my own doubtful skills as a teacher.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Anybody who knows me knows my opinion on
great changes. As far as I’m concerned this new position counts as a change of
jobs, which if I remember correctly merits a quite high score on the Stress
Meter, quite on par with marriage or something like that; and even if the
Stress Meter says nothing about it at all this is still a Great Change. In fact
if you were to ask me, I’m <i>more</i>
stressed out about this new position than I was about my last one; I’ve got
less training since there is no senior officer to teach me this time, and it’s
turning out to be quite different from what I thought it would be like, and
there’s an audit coming up in a couple months’ time, and the GM is breathing
down my neck about having the place absolutely perfect for the audit. It’s
probably the last part that has my nerves the most jangled.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">So what does the job entail? What if
somebody asked you what you thought a Lab Personnel might do? In my case the
only experience I’ve had with labs comes from school and university, and the
only people whom I knew had a job revolving around a lab were the lab techs,
whose job might be essentially summed up as “telling people how to do the
things they need to do and then cleaning up after them”. And so that was what I
thought the Lab Personnel job would mean—me being in the lab all day and doing
tests and presenting results and so on, as necessary. Which, as it turns out,
is certainly part of the job, but not nearly half of it: the Lab Personnel is
also responsible for a variety of documents (some generated elsewhere, some
self-generated), maintenance and/or improvement of the facilities and equipment
and layout, the lab techs (of which I have two), and various other lab-related
people (i.e. people not directly under me but who need the lab facilities or
documents). And so a great deal of my working time has been looking at the
system and trying to figure out how it came to be in the state that it is in
and wondering what I can do to spruce it up so it becomes foolproof, and in the
meantime responding to crises that arose due to the system being the way it is.
Which leads to something of an essential conflict between myself and the GM, at
least in working-styles, which I’ve only had time over the weekend to reflect
on (that tells you how busy I’ve been! or if it doesn’t, consider that I
frequently work 13 hours a day) and it does look like he’s the kind to effect
change from the outside—make the outside look nice and the structure will
change to suit that, is his theory—while I’d prefer to go straight at the
system and the flow of things—get the important things set in place and the
other things will just fall right, is my theory. Of course he’s the one with
decades of experience, so I’m doing as he says as much as I can; it just
niggles at me that while I rearrange labels and put up various documents and
instructional posters (which are important tasks, don’t misunderstand me; it’s
just that they wouldn’t have been my first priority of action), there are
documents floating around and a system that seems to not incorporate nearly
enough double-checks and feedback loops for safety. So that in effect is the
Lab Personnel’s job, as far as I can tell, right now.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">And it’s been stressful; I snapped a couple
of times last week (as in I spoke more forcefully than intended, not that I
broke in two), both of those times because things seemed to be piling up on me
and I didn’t at all like having to run about. The lab at this time is still
underequipped, I’m still not fully trained in all the tasks I need to do, there
are a few things that need doing that will take a great deal of time that I
don’t quite know where to get, I still don’t like the current layout of the lab
(for one thing they’ve got me seated with my back to the door and that makes me
very antsy), and I still don’t know what fires will come, if any. I almost
think this is God’s way of driving me to dependence.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">And then came the past weekend—sweet,
blessed relief! It’s been a four-day weekend: Saturday and Sunday are regular,
and Tuesday (today) was Labour Day; and as it happened there was a coronation
of a new Agong (or Sultan? I never did take an interest in these things) which
gave us an extra public holiday and the company chose to have it on Monday,
thus giving us four days off in a row. I took the chance and escaped to
Singapore.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">For all the goodness and kind intentions of
the people in the local church, I still haven’t settled in fully. I don’t know
what it will take for that to happen—time, certainly, at least. But a fair few
other things, too; it’s a family church, which means that everybody there grew
up together and has already got years and years of history with each other;
it’s a small church, too, in a small town. Being me, I have absolutely nothing
in common with any of them, except for some hobbies and interests; one of them
went to NTU, too, and was in my batch of students though obviously not in my
course. I think this is illuminating: during his course of study he returned as
many weekends as possible to Johor to be with his family and the church. I
don’t mean to disparage: this kind of strength of bond is good, and
praiseworthy. But it’s also the fact that they are already, so to speak, a
complete set that prevents me from settling in. There is nothing they need new
members to do, or even that they want new members to do; and as a result I may
join in their services and activities and so on, but the strong sense is that
they got along quite fine without me and they will continue to get along quite
fine without me, and to try harder to interpose myself into this place will
upset current dynamics in ways I can’t at all understand because I’ve not been
there for the past twenty-five years of my existence. This is, obviously, just
my view of things. From their side of things I’m probably very stand-offish and
cold and unpredictable and completely without accountability, weather-like in
my coming and going. I don’t yet see any solution to this uncomfortable state
of things.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">But in any case I went to Singapore for a
breather.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">It’s been great fun. I’ve had meals with
friends and reconnected in a way you can’t do over Facebook, and spent time
with people and hung out and chitchatted and read and discovered new places and
things and people. I didn’t manage to spend time with all the people I wanted
to, though; that would have taken time I didn’t have. It’s a pity. But I did
enjoy the time I spent with the people I spent it with. Perhaps their sheer
disconnectedness is what helps the most; here in Malaysia I have contact only
with the people at the company, or my father, or the practical strangers (let
us be frank) at church, while there I have the people of Crusade or the old
school-mates or the people of the House of Bread. And it’s no toss of the coin
which I’m closer to. And already I miss them. I don’t know yet when I’ll next
be back there, either; I used to think I’d go back very often and things have
not turned out like that at all.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Still, life goes on. And I still need to be
strong, and efficient, and reliable, and clever, because my work demands that
of me; and so on and so forth.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Today I shaved for the first time. I am
twenty-five and today is the first of May and outdoor procreation has not
occurred, but I have found a new hair-stylist (recommended to me by the grocer,
she’s apparently still very new at her job) and I have blisters on the inside
of both my soles in roughly the same place and I’m not sure why. And I have
shaved for the first time, with a RM2 safety blade from Gillette (or at least
it is my first time out of necessity, for my first-ever time moving a shaver
across my skin was back in NTU when I found an electric shaver in the common
bathroom and was wondering what it was and tried out the hypothesis that it was
a shaver and was proven right). I suspect this may become a weekly, and then a
daily, requirement. But it’s nice to know my hormones have finally kicked in.</span></div>
Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-60232027502925320272012-03-10T13:01:00.002+08:002012-03-10T20:32:33.733+08:00Latenight OvergoSo, today's March the 10th--it's practically a month since my last post. But being the person I am, there's very nearly nothing about my personal life that needs updating, because the car still needs repairs and I still do pretty much the same things every week.<div style="font-style: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; ">I suppose it bears mentioning that I haven't gone back to the ancestral home since the last post... It's possible that I don't really feel terribly welcome there when every trip back seems to be an opportunity for them to ask me to please take away everything that I may have ever put there (and in their eagerness this has started including cousins' stuff that they forgot was theirs); and even when there there's very little to actually talk about... one of the results of a nomadic life is the complete inability to join in on in-jokes or stories about how somebody did something particularly amusing at some point in time, which was like the other time somebody else said or did something else different but similar. The other thing, of course, is that I've got used to having my Saturdays all to myself for my chores and swimming and more or less sitting around vegetating or doing whatever else needs doing.</div><div style="font-style: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; ">Like income tax, I really should get around to doing that at some point.</div><div style="font-style: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; ">So my personal life is perfectly bland, other than that my manager played fashion advisor to me a week or so ago and now I have a couple new shirts, a pair of new pants, and a pair of new glasses that I have mixed opinions about; I've also started having oatmeal for breakfast, the same way I used to way back in TARC when I was going for my A-Levels, except that this time I'm using more raisins and not letting them stew too long--I used to leave the stuff around until everything was just about to fall apart, which may explain why it took me four months to finally decide to open that tin of oats. Surprisingly it's been pretty good, and just as surprisingly I'm running out of oats faster than I'm running out of raisins and honey (I prefer the former, really) and may at some point even need to buy a jumbo can of oats so that the raisins and honey will run out at about the same time. I quite like it when I run out of a whole set of things at a time, it's so much more convenient that way; and I've been eyeing a tin of Nestum for some time.</div><div style="font-style: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; ">Work, on the other hand... bleargh. I don't know if it's me or something, but the troubles just never end; of course a certain amount of it is my lingering communication troubles--Mandarin is not my first language and English is not the first language of anybody in my vicinity and this has caused a fair bit of trouble when people ask for me to generate reports and I come out with something completely useless--</div><div style="font-style: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; ">--these days my theme song, as I told somebody the other day, is Jonathan Coulton's Big Bad World One, specifically the line</div><div style="font-style: normal; "><br /></div><div><i>what if the best that I can be/ Just isn't good enough?</i></div><div><i>Isn't it better not to know?</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>juxtaposed against I'll Have Confidence from the Sound of Music:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>So let them bring on all their troubles</i></div><div><i>I'll do better than my best</i></div><div><i>I have confidence they'll put me to the test</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>and they certainly have done so. I've lost count of all the things that have gone wrong, but not the ways they've done so; at least, I think I could quite comprehensively compile a list of mistakes I've made and how I've tried to fix them and how successful these efforts have been, but it doesn't look like I've had any stunning successes so far. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but I don't think I am; if you ask me, I'm half-convinced that everybody else seems to overestimate me. But then that's probably also my personality--I'm more used to thinking of bad things as my fault than that of anybody else. At the moment I really haven't any idea how to fix the underlying fault--which really would be more useful than my current stopgap measures--but Googling "how to be better" is completely useless.</div><div><br /></div><div>My GM said he doesn't think I'm forgetful, just absentminded because I still don't/can't focus fully on the things I'm doing, which I did a bit of thinking about and he does make sense. After all I approach my work as a series of tasks, each of which is composed of a series of steps, and very often when I'm doing one thing I'm also at the same time wondering what to do next, or alt-tabbing to MSN, or half-listening to nearby conversations, or mentally playing a song in my head, or trying to keep a To-Do reminder up as well, or waiting for something, or worrying about something else; I might not call myself a multi-tasker but it does look like that's what I am--and I remember reading somewhere that multi-tasking leads to shortened attention span, forgetfulness, etc (because we're not computers and can't mentally alt-tab without losing some data). And somebody else suggested recording everything, which is another thing to try out next. So I suppose this means I should try doing something and fully focusing on it and its implications while doing it and keeping that up for the next week or so and see how it turns out.</div><div><br /></div><div>All the same, I have at least two difficult conversations coming up next week because of one overlooked email back in January and because of one miscommunication a couple weeks ago.</div><div><br /></div><div>I wonder, though, sometimes, whether it's more important for the speaker to be clear or for the listener to pay full attention; probably both. The Geography of Thought says that different cultures tend to emphasise one or the other, but it's starting to look like the people in my vicinity emphasise convenience--speakers expect the hearers to put in the effort to understand them and so don't necessarily put much effort into their outgoing communications, while expecting speakers to put in effort to make things easy to digest and thus don't put too much time into incoming communications either. I don't know how many times I've heard people complain that they have no time to read emails, which makes me half-wonder what the point in sending them emails is--there's no point wanting to be kept informed if you can't absorb that information, is there?</div><div><br /></div><div>Still, that's a new lesson learned--to save the loquacity for this blog, and to email people in point forms. It offends my sense of language greatly, of course, but it seems a necessary pain.</div>Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-5498151345574431752012-02-11T14:03:00.002+08:002012-02-11T18:57:21.894+08:00Song and GlanceI'm spending this weekend in the ancestral place--originally I had two items on the agenda, which were 1. get a haircut and 2. get the car door hammered back into place (I put a rather bad gouge in it while leaving church a few weeks ago, which has a rather straight and narrow gate that opens pretty much directly onto a ditch--the city planners have some things to answer for--and it's been on the To Fix list for awhile now); so far I've only managed to get the haircut, because apparently mechanics don't work very reliably after 11am on Saturday and I couldn't get hold of the family people who know mechanics before 11am.<div style="font-style: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; ">But this is going to be less of a what-I-did post and more of a what-I-think post, though the things I think are brought on by weird things that happen while I do things... so it'll be a bit of both, really...</div><div style="font-style: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; ">"Let us converse."</div><div style="font-style: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; ">I've been acclimatising quite well, I think, to work and life and the people at the local church, though not without a few hiccups along the way; I've made a few adjustments to the way I go about my business that seem to be working out quite well, I'm making friends at church, and my life is going along relatively smoothly, if rather occasionally being full of aches and pains and general oddity.</div><div style="font-style: normal; "><br /></div><div>Last Sunday, for example, when I went and played badminton for a couple hours with a bunch of the people from church, and decided that the great thing about playing sports with people is that you get some idea of their personality from the way they play. I, for example, play <i>way</i> beyond my expected endurance because the other guy seems to be enjoying beating me down even if I haven't played in two years and am already gasping in side-splitting pain, and I gloat a great deal when I win, but do it politely; some of the others take the game as an opportunity to give a sort of running tutorial, and so forth. I found it quite enjoyable for the most part, apart from the resulting soreness; and I got a reminder after the whole thing was over about my tendency to be less than perfectly prepared--I'd expected to drink about 1liter of water throughout the entire thing, but ended up drinking a fair bit more than that and was quite fortunate that other people had gone and bought water from the store at the badminton courts (which, I must say, had horribly jacked up their prices to nearly extortionist levels) and didn't mind me taking a few gulps; and I also forgot to make sure my car keys were with me, and again was extremely fortunate (thank God for small miracles!) that they had fallen into the bag of the guy in whose car I was riding--to save petrol everybody had carpooled as much as possible--and he'd noticed but left them in on the off chance that they might be useful.</div><div><br /></div><div>And they were, very much so.</div><div><br /></div><div>All the same one feels a distinct... cultural difference, at least; maybe I'm just being oversensitive to these things, or maybe I'm a lot less Malaysian than I should be (though, I must say, "being Malaysian" is a very difficult thing to define indeed), or something. This was particularly brought home to me on Sunday evening, after badminton; I and several people (most of whom had also gone to badminton, which is how I got invited along) went to a local karaoke place, apparently one of the most popular in the area--which should mean it would have the best local selections of songs, right?</div><div><br /></div><div>(I should note at this point that I have been to karaokes before, in Spore, and my thoughts here are very much the same about those, except <i>more</i>, if you get the idea.)</div><div><br /></div><div>I think karaokes could be greatly improved by having websites on which they provided information like a list of songs (arranged by language or performer or whatever, similar to iTunes in layout perhaps) that they had available, and made them available in advance: they have online booking services, don't they? Might as well have a playlist of maybe three or four songs ready for when the party arrives and then the singing can start immediately without everybody wanting to let everybody else choose the first song. That way you could also see in advance whether the karaoke had the songs you wanted to sing, and you could submit suggestions on bands or songs you thought would be a good addition--I don't know where karaokes source for their tracks and videos, but it would be nice. And all this is because on Sunday night I went with a bunch of people to the karaoke, and I was (I think) the only person there who knew nothing at all about Mandarin songs and instead knew a whole bunch of relatively (over here) unknown English performers <i>and</i> didn't like the more well-known and popular performers, due to always paying attention to lyrics.</div><div><br /></div><div>And that led to the other people picking songs about angsty, pale, too-thin people starving to death in isolation on an island full of dead trees while the corpse of their presumable ex floated downstream accompanied by withered branches and leaves, and me looking back and forth at the song list that was all too devoid of performers like Scissor Sisters or Plain White T's or Jonathan Coulton and settling for the Beatles' O-Bla-Di-O-Bla-Da. And then getting weird looks from everybody else. And then realising that, if I'd had the choice (and had picked) Maxwell's Silver Hammer, I'd be getting <i>even weirder looks</i>. And from then on all my songs were Michael Jackson (and the MV had not got subtitles, which says something about the target demographic of that karaoke chain) or Green Day (which got me weird looks again) or SCANDAL (and the subtitles were in kanji instead of romanji which rendered the song unsingable). It's probably a good thing, usually, to stand out from the crowd, even if hippies have made that much less desirable than it would usually be; but at karaokes the whole idea is to get everybody singing together instead of getting people looking at you in wide-eyed wonder and then having them later on comment "...well, you've sure got unique taste, don't you".</div><div><br /></div><div>This was later expanded on by my senior officer, because the whole department goes out for lunch together (we're that small a department) and I happened to mention that I'd gone for a three-hour karaoke session, though most of it was spent listening rather than singing. And then she commented on a favourite artiste of hers, later on after lunch in the office, and I said I didn't know who that was. Upon which she went "how can you not know X, she is pretty and has a wonderful voice" and I shrugged and tried to grin sheepishly, which probably didn't have the mollifying effect I intended for it to have.</div><div><br /></div><div>At the moment I don't know if this disparity in musical tastes (the only English songs they picked out were things from the Pussycat Dolls and GLEE, which is worrying) is emblematic of some deeper difference that'll be a problem later on in getting to know them better; I've already swathed myself in enough commitments here that I don't want to just up and leave. But the fact that the idea has already occurred to me is telling. Not that I'll be telling any of them any of this, of course; if they've been observant enough to notice then they'll either ask or wait for more information, and if they aren't then there's no need to stir things up.</div><div><br /></div><div>(My father is convinced that I'm some kind of miracle people-reader at the moment, I think, since he keeps tending to ask my opinion of people we've both only just recently met. I haven't any idea of whether he wants a second opinion on his first impressions or if he wants to be corroborated or if it's something else he wants. Still, it's nice to be able to talk to him and feel like I'm actually contributing something to the conversation--and this being a fairly neutral topis of discussion there's no problem with us both dragging out the big guns.)</div><div><br /></div><div>In other news, I'm going through my second root canal; the root canal proper was completed last Tuesday evening, and the next two visits to the dentist's will be for the crowning, which Wikipedia assures me increases the lifespan of the now-dead tooth by up to six times, which is rather enticing even if it does take a quarter of my salary.</div>Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-77283679428468524102012-01-30T20:05:00.003+08:002012-01-30T21:33:03.594+08:00Called to WakeWell. It's nearly a month since the last post... and of course plenty has happened since then. Even if nothing had I would still be able to type for an hour about all the nothingness that had happened, and now I have three weeks to fill in. Not that I will, of course; but I might as well record some of the things that, hm, stand out more in my memory from the past month.<div><br /></div><div>I suppose it would be a good idea to start from, let's say, about two weeks ago--the week before the Chinese New Year week-long holiday, since that was quite a time. So we'll start from that.</div><div><br /></div><div>It wasn't a very good week; not many of the weeks preceding it had been good, either, since what with one thing and another it had always seemed like everything was a rush to get things together before the factory shut down for the week; and when your entire job scope revolves around future planning (and not very dependable a future either), having one week effectively rendered null and void is something of a handicap. The week was made slightly worse by the fact that family was coming to visit; not that the visit was a bad thing in itself, but there were a lot of things to be arranged that they hadn't, and so needed to get done on the fly. And as a result I was more or less deprived of transport that week, since they took the car to do their gallivanting, and so spent the entire week slightly sleep-deprived since I had to rely on coworkers to ferry me back and forth between house and office. And of course even before that there had been problems since the folks in So Hour didn't want to have to ferry the family around and wanted me to take leave off of work--with less than two days' notice when the normal procedure is a week--and got rather agitated when I refused. But that was worked around when the flight got diverted to KL due to morning mist, which was abnormally heavy all that week and only lasted that week. And what with rushing to get everything completed on Friday along with some rather desultory celebrations (a lucky draw and distribution of oranges) it wasn't a very nice Friday at all.</div><div><br /></div><div>That work week ended on Friday evening, when I worked until nearly 8pm in something of a productivity frenzy (and because I had no way to get anywhere other than colleagues or public transport); eventually it ended when the parents arrived, having driven down from KL that afternoon, and fetched me from the factory to the house to pick up laundry and other necessities, and then we headed to the ancestral home, which we arrived at about two hours later, after making a detour or two to avoid the jam and consequently winding up on unfamiliar (to me) roads, which was a pity because my father was obviously tired, but I couldn't take over since the GPS was broken at the time--we found out later that it had simply gotten one of its ports messed up and a bit of tinkering with a safety pin fixed it, but that was later.</div><div><br /></div><div>Chinese New Year was a haze of travelling and relatives and food and a toothache that began, I believe, on Tuesday and simply got worse over the next few days; not to say that I didn't have some good times, but more often there was a terrible throbbing in my lower right jaw and a sharp pain whenever I shut my mouth or bit into anything, and as a direct consequence I didn't have very much of an appetite for that entire period. An indirect consequence was that I was also constantly taking painkillers of various strengths and credibilities (I still have two sets of pills claiming to be traditional herbal extracts) and was constantly slightly doped--one of the people I met during that time told me that I seemed a very focused person, which may have had something to do with it being dinnertime--but one of the more major pleasant surprises I had was seeing that one set of my cousins have grown up, against all my expectations, into quite decent human beings--at least, for the time we spent in their house. I think I shall observe their future growth with interest. In meme-speak, faith in humanity RESTORED!</div><div><br /></div><div>And now it's after Chinese New Year, and there's a lot to deal with; my tooth will undergo a root canal over the next few weeks, and I think I shall crown it for the sixfold improvement in prognosis, according to Wikipedia (for a total cost of about a thousand and six hundred), which will destroy nearly all my savings so far (despite my frugality, I never do manage to save up any amount worth consideration due to things like these); and what with the car needing repairs (an estimated three to four hundred, and that's just for the obvious things) and me needing new glasses (at the very least four hundred)... admittedly, my pay check comes in soon and I could pay for all of these if I live a little carefully and the Chinese New Year red packet money will help a little; but still, my life seems to be a great big ball of fixer-upper right now and certainly could do with a bit of toning down.</div><div><br /></div><div>And I have an ulcer, too, caused by constantly over-favoring the toothache when I still had it; at least that I can deal with by application of salt water.</div>Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618319.post-44211682535968890262012-01-06T21:37:00.000+08:002012-01-15T21:37:45.298+08:00Revolve Around Office<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">There are times, like now, when I wonder if I’ve ever been really competent at anything in my life. Not to say I’ve not been able to do some things well, and enjoy doing them; I’ve managed to win two NaNoWriMos in a row even if I’ve never been able to make it to the celebratory gatherings, and I still retain a little (very little) of my ability at the piano, and every now and then I even say something witty that I hadn’t just read somewhere and was waiting for an opportunity to use. But I never seem, come to think of it, to really have been good at whatever it was that I was being expected to do.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">At least, I don’t think I was ever a good student. And now, even three months after starting work and having been confirmed as a passable worker, I don’t think I’m anything like my own definition of competent. It’s possibly personality; the way I think bleeds over into the way I work, and there’s very little I can do to stop it; the same goes for my co-workers, of course. My senior is the slow, methodical type, and given a blank slate the first thing she would do would be to get all the documents to prove that somebody had been authorised to give it to her and had got all the documents in place, signed and stamped and filed, and even then she would insist on getting emails to say what she was supposed to be doing with it and who was going to verify that she’d done with it what she was supposed to. Which is all very admirable, even if it sounds rather horrible (I’m always afraid that someday she’ll ask me what I think of her, and I’ll say she’s very slow and very careful and asks a lot of questions and she’ll take it as an insult). I’m not quite like that; I seem to be the kind of person who likes a sort of idea of how things work and why and what makes them tick and go and stop, which may mean I’m a rather weird fit for the position I occupy but does mean that when it comes to generating documentation and data I’m quite proficient. Which my boss said, when I asked for her opinion of my performance—that I’m terribly careless and I tend to just tell people what I’d like, very nicely so as not to stress them out, and then what I want doesn’t happen because people forget things when not reminded constantly; but I do generate wonderful documents.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">I’m just being a little depressed today, maybe. It’s been a rough couple of days at work, what with things going wonky with various things that really shouldn’t be going wrong and all sorts of sudden changes and bits of news and things; just yesterday there were at least four different crises that came up over the course of the day, and today two of those crises just went on unsolved and another couple popped up and the upshot of the whole thing was that I was blamed for responding wrongly to a couple of crises (one from last week and one from three weeks ago), though the blame was probably at least slightly deserved since I ought to have noticed and told somebody. It’s just that one of the hardest lessons to learn is that one should never trust one’s own judgment, even when independence is supposedly a valuable trait, and one has to keep on telling other people when things are going wrong or else one gets flak for covering up stuff. It’s a lesson I’m still learning.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Not that work is entirely a vale of tears; I do enjoy it, which I thank God for. The co-workers are great people and I’d much rather they chew me out than just shrug their shoulder in silent resignation and deal with everything and slowly reduce me to the level of my abilities—at which point I’d never grow more; the work is challenging and fun, and every now and then there are assignments or situations that force me to be all creative or clever or something and those are fun too. And then every now and then one gets unexpected little compliments or things and that tends to brighten the day up a bit. But work does take something out of one: energy, at the very least. I don’t know how anybody manages to both work and manage a family; when they ask if I feel lonely at nights the natural first response is to wonder where I’d have the time or energy to do anything of the sort when I constantly leave the office after seven and sleep by eleven, with chores and computer games and videos and books to occupy me.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">…posts like these are, I think, the main reason I will never ever add anybody from the office on Facebook. Google+, maybe, but not Facebook, just in case they get a curious streak and go reading through my posts; it would do weirdness to my reputation.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">My self-consolation strategies are simple, though; I sit and eat and read and listen to music or play a game and eventually go to sleep. It’s probably not very healthy, but there’s something comforting about just sitting around and having somebody croon something soft and slow and sad over my laptop speakers while I munch on something sweet. Though I’ve stopped eating dinner more than twice a week, after reading somewhere that if one is an office worker then one can jolly well survive on two meals a day or less. It saves time and money at least. Tomorrow I’ll probably go swimming—get out to the pool around five and sit around in the pool soaking up water ‘til eight and drive back with cramps in both legs or something; I’ll need to buy goggles though, since I lost my old pair somewhere.</span></p> <span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:11.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:SimSun;mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">Sleep is a very valuable thing these days. </span>Panthera Sapiens Ellipsishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15014155097942129222noreply@blogger.com0