This can usually be found on Twitter.
So:
On the whole, life is good. On the whole - some of my friends are having problems. Also, I'm going to feel horrible if I waste this weekend like I wasted Wednesday. But damn. It feels good to be alive, and you get to feel that only so often.
Labels: feeling good, happy
This post was posted by Unknown at 7:55 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Well, no, not fine, fine, but certainly better than last week. More, I don't know, vim in my step, or something. I guess.
I got to debug C code last night. My old adversary, scanf, no less. It was fun.
I've also been catching up on long-neglected blog-commenting (and an especial shoutout to Snake Anthony, whose blog I haven't commented on in a long while!)
Hey! I get publish! How cool is that? Popagandhi also get publish, but in a much cooler way, obviously, but I'm happy with my own wee little bit o' fame, too.
Just bought Heinz's Horseradish Sauce today. That stuff is amazing with cheese! Beautiful, beautiful!
And a page on Piet Hein's Grooks. Those things are amazingly beautiful, and incredibly insightful too. This one, for instance:
Naive you are
if you believe
life favours those
who aren't naive.
I'm also writing; it's an entirely for-fun piece (the language! it makes me laugh just looking at it, but it's fun to write in - sort of overzealously imaginative, almost surrealistically so (the similes and metaphors are strewn haphazardly across the floor, etc.). But, hey, anything interesting right now is A-okay.).
Am dreading going in to work today for several reasons. Maybe I'll fall asleep now, and go in at one. Maybe I won't, and I'll go in at ten anyway. Let's see.
This post was posted by Unknown at 6:56 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
I'm happy. Yes, I'm also sick, lonely, bored, tired, sleepy, awake, restless, irritated, overworked, and just plain angsty. But I'm happy? No particular reason. I took the day off from work because I was sick, and spent most of it lying around being sick. And yet, and yet - I had a nice session of Rome, watched a couple of interesting things on TV (including part of St. Elmo's Fire and Mythbusters - the one where they try breaking into an office using Hollywood techniques), and am ending the day feeling ... happy and fulfilled. The friends who that Valentine's Day note on my blog went out to seem to have mostly made it through okay =), and ... yeah, that's about it. Nothing bad, something possibly good, so it's a scratch above the zero line in the final call. Which is fine by me.
God's in his heaven, all's right with the world! -- Robert Browning
Labels: happy, robert browning, sickness
This post was posted by Unknown at 3:43 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Other than that, can't complain. Had a respectably nice day (very nice day, I guess, despite latent angst), and am quite looking forward to next week. Nothing specific to report, or anything; just a general sense of good humour, a feeling of being surrounded by friends, and a feeling like all my many flaws and inferiorities, just for this week, don't matter.
Besides, there's so much to do; so much of which I'm so good at. There's a brilliant feeling comes from contributing to something not so many others can, however tiny or minor it might be :).
Happy ... err, today, everybody.
This post was posted by Unknown at 4:15 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
In good spirits today. Don't really know why, but I'm not complaining! Did very little, and looking forward to maybe stuffing my face at Burger King's. Blood/urine/faeces tests come back on Thursday, and if they're clean, I'm going to go look for a dietician - I mean, even if I'm 'just' eating wrong or something, something's wrong, and I'd like to get it sorted out. Like today. I had the non-stress version of my 'problem' - woke up at ten or eight or something, went back to sleep, then woke up at twelve after a vivid dream. So: it wasn't a nightmare, and I woke up feeling really nice and relaxed, which is new for me the last couple of weeks. So that's good.
Other than that, typical laid back lazy Sunday. Trying to get my insurance issues sorted out, while at the same time looking into investment etc. Also, I need to get to the Kingston service centre and ask them why I can't format my brand new memory card. Note how how everybody's working hours is 'Mon-Fri 9am-6pm'! Well, whatddya know, that's my working hours too! Does everybody just take a coupla hours off in the afternoons to go get their insurance/investment/etc. issues sorted out, or hope that their particular firm does Saturday mornings too, or what? Hmpf.
Back to work tomorrow. Looking forward to it - not so much because of my own work (which isn't all that bad!), but because this means I get to run around doing the insurance, memory card, and all the other little things. Little things! Such brilliantnesses. Also, this week we figure out who's coming on board for UROPS. Good times.
Labels: fine, happy, just another lazy sunday
This post was posted by Unknown at 8:04 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Nice - Blogger remembers that I prefer to "Edit HTML", and sticks me into the correct mode automatically!
I'm happy. There's way too many loose strands hanging around - grad school, friendships, life decisions, medical tests, work, love, life, Spanish, et, et, et cetera. But I suppose having too much is much better than having too little.
I would still desperately prefer working in Singapore for a while. Partially, I'm just not ready for the ego-pummelling of applying all over only to be told that they only consider Honours students, or that my publication record is inadequately sparkling, or whatever. Not to mention that while I can still find tons of stuff interesting (evolution, for instance; did I really get through college and only study it in two modules?), I can't really see myself doing anything with it afterwards. I mean, can I really see myself going into full-fledged academia? If not, what would be the point of studying a bit more about evolution? It's an awful lot of money, and with my grades, that sort of money will end up mostly coming from my folks. I can't help but think it'd be a much better of that money to sit and collect interest, wait a bit while I can really give things a try and see what works out for me.
One of my biggest plus points in this dept. is that fact that, despite screwing up my way through college, I somehow managed to find myself with almost exactly the kind of job I'd thought I'd wanted to do when I was a kid - I'm entirely in charge of all programming, design, everything to do with this program other than features, and I take part in designing the some of the features as well. This is huge for me - in most of the industry, you are a part of a much larger team working on something truely gigantinormous, like Blogger or Google or Microsoft Word. I work completely alone - all the blame, all the laurels, mine all mine. It's also the kind of job that changes every day: one day I'll be figuring out why some low-level part of the program is working so slowly and how I can make it faster; on the next, I'll be figuring out which user interface metaphor might best represent a certain set of data, while on the third, I'll be getting feedback from users - real, live users - of my programs and trying to figure out how I can make it better for them. So it's a whole lot of fun because the area in which I work is so broad, because my end-users aren't some abstraction far, far away, but actual friends of mine who work in the next room, and because the work I do isn't your typical castle-on-a-cloud of programming, but good ol' fashioned how-to-make-a-machine-do-your-work-for-you. Which is always fun.
On the other hand, I suppose (sigh) that my folks and friends are right. I will want to go to graduate school eventually, if just for the experience. When it happens, I'd love it to be on my own money, or atleast on some kind of loan or scholarship or something, just so that if I crash and burn - again - atleast I won't feel guilty about wasting my parent's money while I'm at it. And what that means is that I've got to keep an eye on what kind of things I need to build up on - publications, like this one :), references, that sort of thing.
So: the big question is, 2008, 2009, or 2010? I'd love to wait until 2009 - my bond will be up, I'd have accumulated a little money for myself, and I'll have worked for three years, in different jobs, so I'll have a better idea of what I might want to do. And I'll actually have another reference - I've only really got one at this point of time, so. I can rustle up a couple of others, but I'd like a couple of really solid I've-worked-with-this-guy-and-he's-the-goods type references. And besides, there's a lot I still need to figure out in Singapore, with my health, my lifestyle, heck - just life.
So what's my position at present? I don't have one. The last few days I've been in a hey-yeah-maybe-I-will-apply state of mind, but after seeing what grad schools need (note how prominently "2nd upper honours will be fine, but err, yeah, 2nd lower also can" figures. And me without honours at all!), and then I hit the work again, and re-realised just how fun that was, too. And I really, really like living in Singapore - which I highlight to point out that if, say, MoE refuses to defer my bond, I will work off the options first. Sorry. I really do want to live here for a while, eventually, or whatever.
Or whatever. Really. The world is going to stay largely the same out there, however hard I try or struggle or whatever. Let's see how it goes. It's still extremely worrisome or whatever. I wish my parents would just get off my back about this for the next three years or whatever. I'll figure this out, yes, okay, fine, alright. Thanks for the advice, really, but please, before I explode, just back off. It's not so much to ask for.
Labels: future, gradschool, happy
This post was posted by Unknown at 2:05 am | 3 comments | Post a Comment
"A beach house," he said, "doesn't even have to be on the beach. Though the best ones are. We all like to congregate," he went on, "at boundary conditions". "Really?" said Arthur. "Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where body meets mind. Where space meets time. We like to be on one side, and look at the other."