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December 24, 2012

What happened? Don’t panic! Or maybe do, I don’t know!

Christmas Eve (maybe Christmas by the time this post is published) and a looming birthday together with the knowledge that you will be one year closer to the big 3-0 can make you make some crazy decisions. Like deleting your entire Joomla site (not that there was much on it anyway) and installing WordPress instead.

Why the change? Well it was obvious I wasn’t getting very far with Joomla. I liked it, and its versatility, but having had experience with it on the office website I realise it takes a LOT of work to get it looking good/doing what you want and while I used to spend hours on my Geocities and Blogspot sites as a teenager, there was no way I was going to spend that much time on this website. I just want something that’s ready to go, and while it may look a bit templatey, at least it’s not Joomla-style templatey and I can deal with this.

So do I have any big plans for this site? Yes and no…

…I want to yell “YES I DO” as I have this amazing project in mind. But it all comes down to time pressures and, realistically, with my goal to learn mandarin and (I guess I can finally say this in public) moving to China for a few months for some good old language immersion, this project will have to be shelved until that magical period of time when I will have more time. Whenever that will be, I don’t know.

So, for now, I’m going to throw up a few skeleton pages to accompany this blog (post) and hopefully I will fill these in within the next week or two, before i go back to work.

So, will anything ever come of this website? It remains to be seen! I readily admit it is not one of my top priorities for right now, but it is something I have kept on meaning to do for the past few years, so having it up and out of my mind will definitely be nice.

Happy New Year!

admin

January 1, 2018

I wanted to write a post doing a short, meaningful review of 2017, but I got stuck going into a bit too much detail. So I might have to do that later. In the meantime… I’m kind of excited about 2018! I don’t really have much *planned* persay but I just like the idea of the opportunity to work on myself.

Dec 31, 1995 strip of Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

Let’s go exploring!

Of course we *always* have that possibility and in the past I never really saw the hype about New Year Resolutions… especially as mentions of them always came with the assumption that they would be broken!

But as the years go by and I find the time in my days filled with “clutter” it’s refreshing to find a time to deliberately stop and breathe, review, reflect and plan. Who do I want to be, what do I want to achieve, how do I get there, and is there anything that I am doing that is stopping me from getting there?

So, for this year in no particular order, I’d like:

To be healthy! I’ve been struggling with constant tiredness for almost two decades now and it’s of course affected my life quite a bit. I’d really like to see what I can do, if anything, to not be constantly tired and, at the very least, I’d like to be just less tired if I can’t eliminate tiredness altogether. This might very well mean changing my lifestyle and spending much more time on managing my health, but I can deal with this if it means I’m more effective with the rest of my time. This means I have to go to the doctor to get some bloodwork done, get some advice, and implement. Implementation may mean planning meals, scheduling in exercise and sticking to bedtimes.
Read and digest non-fiction books. I actually have a huge list of non-fiction books I want to have read, but I’m not actually good at putting in the time and effort to read them. I’ve kept track of the books I read this year with Goodreads (here’s my Goodreads year in review) and I’ve read 6 non-fiction books this year. That’s actually not bad, but it would honestly take a lot of effort for me to remember much of what I read in those books, despite me thinking “Wow, this is really interesting!” as I read them (particularly Sapiens!) So… I think my goal for this year is to read 6 non-fiction books but this time write up some notes during / at the end of the book to recap.
Revitalise, construct, strengthen and maintain important friendships. One of the things I most loved about 2017 was getting back in touch with some friends I’d lost contact with. I also met new people and made some new friends. I have unfortunately been really terrible at maintaining some current friendships though, even though they mean quite a lot to me. So I am going to make the effort to revitalise important lapsed friendships, maintain and strengthen important friendships, and make the effort to make friends with people I think are cool. What this means in practice is I will set aside fears of rejection and reach out to old friends and new ones, and reserve time each week to maintain current friendships.
Be less stingy! I’m no longer a broke university student, or 20-something scraping a living in London. This revelation has led to somewhat flagrant and oftentimes wasteful spending on myself (mostly food). What I hope this will mean this year is that I will budget to give more to causes I deeply care about and I will spend money on apps / content / etc. I appreciate and find useful.
Start budgeting again. I’ve been pretty lax on my budgeting in the past year but I have to say I was quite excited to start up the YNAB today and create a “fresh start”. I’ve also reinstalled “Fortune City” on my phone today to give me some incentive to log my expenses!
Restart my Chinese. I’ve pretty much ignored my Chinese learning this year which is a huge shame, so I hope to restart this. This means I will schedule time on Memrise and Clozemaster everyday.
Release a version of my app. I’ve been talking about this app for 2 years now… now it’s time to write it and release the first version! This means I will need to find some time to learn about Android development, write the app, and figure out how to release it on the Play Store. I will take a major public holiday to start this work.
Manage my personal inbox. I don’t spend much time in my personal inbox. I go in, see if there’s anything worth reading, and usually exit without reading anything. Part of the problem is that it has over 3,000 unread e-mails and it scares me. So today, I went and I cleaned out the majority of those (I’m down to 27!!!) and unsubscribed from a bunch of e-mail lists. It felt so good! And also, I found a paper somebody had marked me as an author for that I had completely forgotten I’d contributed to. Yay! But from now on I need to stay on top of my personal inbox, be ruthless in unsubscribing from e-mail lists and clear it down to zero at least every week.

Wow! Looking at this list I’m a bit scared. I probably won’t complete everything, but it’s better to get a little bit done than nothing at all. My next step is to figure out how much time everything is going to take me, schedule it into my days / weeks / months, set reminders if applicable and make it as easy as possible for me to do these things.

Also, shoutout to Tim Harford who has provided a list of books to help people with their resolutions. Maybe I’ll start on those for my non-fiction books!

On friends and vocations

admin

March 15, 2015

I went out to dinner and drinks last night with some people I’d just met and someone I’ve known for a very long time. She brought up the topic of how I probably wouldn’t like one of her friends because he worked in coal. One of the guys then turned to me and asked “Do you think it really works like that? That you wouldn’t like someone just because of their job?”

And I thought about it, and I said Yes, and gave the example of someone who worked in advertising for a tobacco company. He didn’t look very convinced, but dropped the topic anyway.

I’ve been thinking about it some more. Is it unreasonable of me? Shouldn’t people have the right to earn a living without me judging them?

The answer is: probably, yes, but it’s a very grey area. Is there something else you can do? Are you creating more harm than good? Are you deliberately enabling death or sickness or treading on human rights?

Some people make the mistake of letting degrees of separation get in their way. I think about it this way. Would you be friends with a serial killer who killed for kicks? Probably not. How about a contract killer who killed indiscriminately, so long as there was money involved? Also, probably not. How about his personal assistant/secretary, then? They’re not directly killing anybody, but certainly enabling the contract killer to. And they’re just doing their job, anyway. And so on and so forth.

I’m not saying that, for example, somebody who works for coal is necessarily a murderer, some nth degrees removed. There is no doubt they are providing some good for the world - energy, afterall, is what gives us our current high standards of living. But they must also be thinking about the negative impacts of their work. Is there anything they COULD be doing to counteract that? Is the company they are working for engaging in coal for the meantime and encouraging the global transition to sustainable (both in a green, and in a constantly replenishing kind of way) forms of energy and investing in research and development in those areas? Or are they holding back a global move to more sustainable forms of energy and deliberately muddling the waters on how laypeople understand the science of climate change?

I’m friends with somebody who works at a tobacco company. Her job is to find out the pathways through which tobacco harms people and try to reduce or eradicate those harms altogether. That’s fantastic. I’m not a fan of tobacco companies, but that’s the best form of enabling of a tobacco company I could imagine. If she succeeds, I won’t even care about whether anybody works at a tobacco company or not anymore.

I also don’t like the argument “If I didn’t do it, somebody else would do it”. Then why you? Why can’t you do something constructive?

At the end of the day, I know. People are just trying to get by. But there are ways and ways of getting by, and the educated, privileged people I tend to meet often always have choices, and they have chosen.

Hello World…

admin

March 9, 2015

….It’s been a while.

It’s been such a long while, in fact, that I forgot my password and it took several tries for me to log in.

I would like to start getting thoughts down on this platform again though, and have had a few topics rolling around my head. Rather than scare myself by promising I’ll write a separate, long, detailed post about each one, here is a one-shot update with poorly researched, ill-informed, not very well thought-out thoughts. You have been warned.

First up – the JIS rape trial. In case you are not aware, I am an alumnus of Jakarta International School (now known as the Jakarta Intercultural School due to a weird law that was passed in 2014 banning the use of ‘International’ in school names in Jakarta). I’ve been staying well clear of talking about this because a) Hopefully no one cares what I think about this case that has nothing to do with me and b) I disagree with the conversation that’s being had around this trial.

I’m SURE that not personally knowing anybody being affected by this trial makes it a lot easier for me to say what I’m about to say, and I apologise ahead of time for offending everybody I’m about to offend. Because what I basically disagree with is the flat-out blanket agreement by the JIS community – including alumni who have never met anybody involved with this trial – that the mother is clearly making up allegations, the child is fine, and all the accused are innocent.

And that makes me squeamish because it’s ~~a bit lot like~~ exactly the same as calling rape victims liars, that they’re fabricating their rape allegations and the accused are clearly innocent because ~~they’re football players~~ ~~they’re football coaches~~ they’re JIS teachers, and therefore upstanding members of the community for goodness sakes (and I’m very sorry to Mr Vahey’s family, who I do know, but I’m trying to make a point here).

I’m not saying that the accused have done what they’re accused of, because I don’t know. And, unless you’re the victim or the accused, neither do you. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be crying out for the Indonesian government to be upholding proper legal procedures, certainly we should be asking that they do this, not just for the accused, but also for the victim. Because, at the end of the day, something has happened to this child. Maybe he was raped, and that is a terrible, terrible thought, but by trying to believe it didn’t happen doesn’t make it not true, and if it were true, wouldn’t you want to find the perpetrators and see them held to justice. Maybe his mother is insane, in which case he probably needs to be removed from her custody and the Indonesian courts of law should look into that. But the thing is: We. Don’t. Know. Can we just please ask for the Indonesian courts to Do The Right Thing, fully investigate the case, hear all the evidence, and try to really figure out what has happened?

I know, this is a little late, as the trial is over and we’re just waiting for the verdict. But I kind of felt like it needed to be said.

—-

Okay, that was a bit heavy, and I apologise. Onto the next thing. I’ve started a Coursera course on programming in Android for mobile applications, partly because my brain gets way too excited about creating useless excel models and needs some real programming and partly because apart from an Easter weekend attempt at making a game, I’ve never programmed for mobile before.

Well, I haven’t gotten very far. Because, even though it was easy enough to download and install Android Studio (after installing the JRE, of course), it’s like every time I want to take the next step I find something else I have to download and install, or change the settings, or point something to a path. And right now, I’m stuck trying to get my DDMS to talk to my Android Studio debugger. And that’s the thing I’ve always hated about programming. The actual programming? Not actually that hard (from memory, because I haven’t actually managed to get to programming yet). I read a blog post recently by a programmer who said that he spent a lot of time installing and learning linux, studying which text editor was the best for coding (VIM or emacs? VIM or emacs???), setting up the text editor, etc. etc. etc. and at the end of the day… when he finally got a programming job… they all used an IDE because it was the easiest thing to use. Basically, the point was, that as a beginner, the learning curve is so damn steep, and that’s even before you start programming. I left computer science 8 years ago and I’m wondering…. why is that still the case?

—–

I recently finished Ben Goldacre’s book ‘Bad Pharma’ and would highly recommend it to anybody who’s interested in their own or somebody else’s health. A real eye-opener about how much evidence there really is in evidence-based medicine and I hope to write a summary here one of these days. That doesn’t mean I support ‘alternative therapies’… unless they’ve been tested out to be effective. And for goodness sakes, no to the homeopathy and yes to the vaccines.

—-

Speaking of books, I recently turned 30 and would like to do a ‘Books I read before I was 30 and which changed my life’ list. I don’t want to name it ’30 books I read before I was 30′ because that’d be too long or ‘Books you should read before you’re 30′ because just because they changed me doesn’t mean they’ll change you. So hopefully I’ll get that up one of these days. I’ve been keeping a list on my phone as they come to me, so I have a general idea of how many they are. About 10, if you’re wondering, and you’d like to read through them.

—-

I’ve never had a gym membership and never been to the gym before this month. However, thanks to a friend, I’m trialling a closeby gym and taking Les Mills’ Bodycombat and it’s been pretty fun! I haven’t had the opportunity to punch and kick much recently, and it’s essentially punching and kicking thin air, and actually more just aerobics disguised as martial art, but I’m really enjoying it. I have a bad feeling that 22 year old me would have SO disapproved / thought the whole thing was ridiculous, but she was far too serious.

So once my trial runs out I’m going to see if I can try Muay Thai.

Alright. That’s it for now I guess. See you guys next time.