eng seng

8.7km in 1 hour, and my legs feel like jelly already. Running is hard....hard to beat your own timing.

I had eng seng's famous black pepper crabs yesterday with good company. No pictures taken, partly due to laziness, partly due to the lack of clean fingers. The crabs are good I must say, you can take your time to eat them and they taste great even when they are not piping hot. After eng seng's crab we adjourned to a dessert place at siglap. Rote grutze would have been ideally perfect (ha..ideal is not enough to describe the perfectness), but little chocolate cakes with cofffee was just as nice. And of course the company was even better. But I must say, dessert was a little overshadowed by excessive db talk.

Seminar slides were cleared surprisingly fast today. So I finally have time to do more reading on some techy stuff. Or do I...I fear not actually, with programme's nitty operational stuff peaking this weekend. Inevitable fact that I will have to work this weekend. Doing nothing but administrative work. Collating, sending email. Maybe I should burn my friday night instead. I hope it takes less than half a day....and then it will be another half a day gone attending seminar on sat morning. So i effectively have less than 1 day of real weekend this weekend. *resigned sigh*

I thought....my luck is supposed to change.

How many dwarfs can you be in a day

Usually I'm Sneezy in the morning, Grumpy before I have my coffee, Dopey after lunch, Doc when I am in a buzz, Bashful when ermm…on a date, Happy when it's time to chill and Sleepy at 1am.

End of the long weekend

The long weekend will be gone in another 2 more hours.  Then soon November will come.  Can't believe how the year has flown past, and I am writing this as though it's December 31st.  Come November it will be work, seminar, workplans, and juggling with new work - haven't quite figured out what to make of the new stuff.  

December will be the X'massy time, but this time it will be different. It will be 1 year since Hong Kong.  It will be 1 year since we walked down 半山 escalators from the bishop lei hotel.  I have no idea what Christmas will be like this year.

Strange things happened in 2008, things that I never imagined possible to happen on me.  Maybe I'm in some sort of a transition, for the better.  A metamorphosis to shed the quiet and satisfied me into a critical and hungry me.

thoughts from 'inner economist'

Scarcity of attention -- In our everyday life, umpteen things fight for our attention.  Hence we need to force ourselves to keep paying attention at every moment and not fall into the humdrum of daily routine.  

We must cultivate a habit of making such mental training a habit, so that we critique, analyse fast in this age of information overload.  It is too easy to go with the flow and do as you are told, which leads to the lack of mental exercise.  We must force ourselves to distill key feature of what is presented to us in the moment without delay, and keep at such until it becomes a habit, a second nature.  And especially so because while some things / services are there to make you happy (because customer satisfaction = returning customers), some things in life are not there with such a primary purpose of satisfying you.  Hence there is a need to pay attention and derive your own takeaways - i.e., engage your mind to think and analyse fast when you are presented with the facts/artifacts/proposals etc.

i feel paralysed, my ass is so painful now. The result of sat's 4-6pm db, 6-8pm badminton (geh kiang go and play singles), sunday's db and land training (with the damn squats!).  Areas of pain - neck, back, waist, butt, thighs, calves, arms.

I NEED A MASSAGE!!

awaiting the looonng weekend

today is such a long day.  I worked 13 hours, with only a 1 hr break. heck i took less than an hour for lunch.  and i missed gym because of work, the little bit of satisfaction from almost completing the seminar slides doesn't make up for it fully :(

IF

I've never liked poems very much, but this one I do. got it from a new friend.

IF -- by Rudyard Kipling
IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

The List

List of words, commonly mispronounced, wrong usage, grammar mistakes etc etc.

1. because why?
2. thats mean (correctly should be "that means")
3. par-ci-tipation
4. fa-li-citate
5. cow touncil ("town council")
6. cer-fi-ticate
7. bazzar
8. irregardless (no such thing, it's "regardless")
9. favlour
10. nowsaday ("nowadays")
    

black pepper & steamboat

There were 7 ppl at training today. I deleted my previous post.

I had a great time at steamboat yesterday though. Black pepper crab turned out good and i was stuffed.  

physics EM law

an electric charge creates an electric field around itself with a certain directional vector
by Coulomb's law,

The magnitude of the electrostatic force between two point electric charges is directly proportional to the product of the magnitudes of each charge and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the charges.

And hence, 2 charges, if of the same sign, repel each other.

And when 2 charges of different signs come close, they attract each other. When put near but not too close, the electric field that they create as individual charges are distorted. When even closer together, the resultant electric field is quite different from the electric field created by each charge.

pretty fun to apply physics to love. How different can people be when they are in love and when they are as individuals? How differently do they behave as a couple and when alone? There's no right or wrong, just interesting social phenomenons.

no more time to indulge in such random musings, got to in office early to deliberate on diagrams and models. again it's interesting, on how games like sims are modeled after real life. like how resources are limited, and how you need to gain 'points' or scores under certain parameters e.g. cooking, technical yadah yadah, before you can progress up any particular career.

such games are modeled after tjhe real world, yet in the real world, we somehow don't know how things work, but in games we do.

i'm yours or you're mine

The omnipresent Jason Mraz song, I'm Yours, it was playing when we were at dbl o sat night.  A fellow october baby who was getting high was trying to recall the title of the song.  And the whole group for a moment could not decide if the title was "I'm Yours" or "You're mine".  

Which is more desirable to you, someone saying "You're mine", or "I'm yours"? 

 

dbl o night

20 free shooters and 1 bottle of free champagne (free kind).  The free shooters tasted like fruit punch.  So the drinks count for the night is as follows:

5 lousy shooters (others had 4 because i put my glass last at the game of who-puts-the-shot-glass-last game)

2 glasses of champagn

1 vodka lime (that tasted more like lime juice)

1 vodka orange (that tasted more like orange juice)

3 shots of tequila shot, gin tonic, brandy (this is the real stuff)

2 cocktail shots of sex on the beach

2 cocktail shots of sex on the pool table

pool table shot nice, got coffee liquer inside. 

and i was up at 7am for db the next morning. 

what affects me is the response i have towards whatever event that happened

10 oct was staff conference, a rather poorly done one as far as i'm concerned. Logistically, expo seems to be too big for such an event. The too-high ceiling and black drapery as divider just screams factory and coldness. Did not take away anything useful except for 1 line from the infamous mr. khoo. I somehow have this immense dislike for him. Could be not-so-motivating motivational talks. I am extremely unaffected by such stuff. Detached, as usual.

I was explaining to my colleague why his speech was full of contridictions and invalid claims, and especially the bit on how he says that our emotional state is made up by our physiology (but note, his examples of physiology are posture, tone of voice...) and thoughts. So, while I agree that our emotional state can affect our outlook of life e.g., in high gear, we work more efficiently, are happier, think more positively, I largely disagree when he says that by changing your body posture (e.g., sit up straight, not slouching...) or tone of voice can change your emotional state. It's true that when you feel more confident, you sit up and lift your head up.  But just by lifting your head up and sitting up straight doesn't neccesarily MAKE your more confident. It may help get in trying to make you feel confident, but sometimes the pipe doesn't flow both ways.

And for thoughts. If it was so easy to change our thoughts, who will need the motivational speakers.

Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson was a book I enjoyed on neuroscience. One of the things mentioned was that when certain events occur, while emotions can be evoked in a split second because of past experience etc etc, our response to that emotion however, is not hardwired. For example, when you are driving if some car decides to dangerously cut into your lane, a natural emotional response may be anger, and for some, the "natural" reaction is cursing at the reckless driver. However, on decontruction or if you are bo liao and want to analyse the situation, you can reason that the reckless driver may be in a great hurry - maybe his wife is giving birth in the car, or some loved one is dying in a hospital. Then you may not react with the "natural" reaction of anger. Other than such analysis, conditioning can also alter "natural" reactions.

So the only useful takeaway I had from that speech is what he said on "what affects me is the response i have towards whatever event that happened". Pretty self-explanatory.

And F&N has not reimbursed me the $1.40 for their vending machine that ate my money.

Sharpen the mind

Feel like some kind of an addict, having to use 2 types of nasal spray today, snorting the suspension to decongest the sinus. viral sore throat bugging me the past week. coupled with unrestrained unhealthy diet of carl's junior, kfc and grilled fish.

I am looking forward to a change of luck after 13 Oct. I hope I will be in time for the toto draw.

When I was young(er), and topping classes in primary school, my mother always told me that when I pray, I should always pray for Wisdom. Not cleverness, not smartness, not high IQ, not high scores, not 100 marks, but wisdom. Because that is what guides us to the road of enlightenment, or something like that. I agree. And it happens that wisdom does not necessary come with age, as maturity does. It is not something you get from studying or from classes. You can study texts, scriptures, wise sayings by wise people, but what can be taken out of every lesson that life gives differs from person to person.

A tendency to be introspective lets me think a lot, and talk aloud in my mind sometimes. At times I am afraid that I get lost in the maddness of everyday life. I don't like the feeling that I can walk the route to home without needing to think to find the way as if on autopilot. Must egg myself to be more aggressive in focussing, sharpening the mind, thinking faster. And of course translate the thoughts into words so that other people can understand.

9.9km in 1h 8mins.

quality of performance today at db <- sucked

afterthought from watching Prison Break.  Credibility of "i promise", "trust me" is rare in harsh environments where it's 'each for his own' and competition for survival is intense.  But whichever case its rarity and fragility is what makes trust so precious.  Trust when broken, breaks into a million small pieces, hard to find, even harder to rebuild.  Yet, trust doesn't have to be that delicate.  People who are honest with each other, who understand and accept each other can build on the trust they have for each other day by day, bit by bit.  Harden it so that it doesn't quaver at the most trivial and paltry daily affairs.   But I suppose when there is real betrayal (however you qualify that) the trust goes down with it as well.

Of the feeling of needing to be in control, from Tyler Cowen's Discover your inner economist --

"...the more prominent the reward, the more likely it is to reduce the intrinsic motivation...  This is a major drawback of rewards and penalties.  We use them to influence the behaviour of other people.  And this is precisely what makes people feel a lack of control and and a lack of freedom.  Many people rebel against those feelings, or against the sources of those feelings, and that is why incentives can be so ineffective or perhaps even counterproductive."

Incentives and penalties (or threats) can only be counterproductive and ineffective when inappropriately applied.  Hence it is very important to identify correctly what is of value to the other party (not yourself).  A stake can have different value depending on the evaluator.  A $1million offer has a different value to a billionaire and a beggar.  A $1million offer can have different meaning to a billionaire depending on the context and situation.  Many times, you need to dig beyond the surface to see what are the links, feedback loops and inter-relations are between things.

everybody wants something

am newly hooked on prison break.  it's already at season 4, but better late than never.  the plot's exciting, despite the violence and sometimes disturbing realisation that there are such psychotic criminals around.  

What's really interesting from watching the show is also realising that you can plan for every move, but there is always 1 element that can change the entire course of action -- people.  people are unpredictable and in the show, untrustworthy.   There is constant negotiation and as Sucre puts it succintly "Everybody wants something".  That is such a true statement. With that, you determine the bargaining chips and your bargaining position, and you can begin to influence without authority.

happy?

if at the moment of death we are appraised about the life we lead, it will be interesting to know what will be used to consider a life being well-lived.  

The amount of wealth he accumulated, the amount of philanthropy he practised, the number of children he raised, the number of lovers he had, and whether or not he found true love.  None of these factors account fully for the happiness he had felt in his lifetime.  

What more when sometimes, people don't know themselves how happy (or unhappy) they are.  Sometimes, people believe that they don't have a choice.  (In fact, people who believe they don't have a choice have actually already made their choice and decided.)  Or maybe, some people trick themselves into not knowing how happy they are because they know that deep inside they are not.   

If there is anyone who can know how happy he is, it is the person himself.  It is the least we can do for ourselves, to know ourselves.  And the next thing to do, is to let no one compromise your happiness.

it is not an impossible task.  if there is trust, respect and honesty between people.  if there is love and acceptance.