The Weekend Issue

Feeling somewhat down today. Not quite sure why. Ate two squares of dark chocolate and still feel the same. More or less. Went to granny's place just now, saw some old photos of her and my cousins.

Feel like I'll feel better going to work tomorrow and coding. Looking forward to doing some housekeeping of the code I hastily patched together on Thursday. Did I let everyone know that we stayed till 1 am on Thursday? Then on Friday I woke up a quarter to 6 pm.

Went running yesterday (Saturday), MacRitchie too packed with cars, so went to Botanic Gardens. The routine would be for everyone else to go there early and run first, then I'll join them on the second leg because I'm so weak.

In related news, bought a new handsfree set for my phone because the old one spoiled, then after that went to look for shorts, but size 34 is slightly tight (I like my clothes baggy, just in case), and the next size was 38.

Oh, and on the issue of handsfree, the Nokia original ($18) is of much better quality than the compatible ($8). The compatible didn't work! Also, the earpiece had a hairline crack, and it also was rather unfinished. A little sharp plastic bit sticking out. And the foam is like crap.

Clarification: "good taste" means taste aligned with respected critics, same as I consider good taste in poetry as taste that is correlated with respected poets.

I feel somewhat better after talking to my lovey. Anyway, I went to check out the new RJC campus on Saturday after the run since I was in the area. And it's fucking nice!

The whole place is damn spacious, the ground floor is like a huge extended void deck, with classrooms and stuff on upper levels. Everything is spread out, luxurious and langourous.

There are TVs hanging from the ceiling here and there, not sure why, a whole lot of them, really. The parade square is in this cool central location on the second floor, above the canteen. From there you can see lots of the school. Can see the tennis courts also elevated condo-style.

Each tutorial room has a projector (plus OHP), the kind you can plug a laptop to. There are "seminar rooms" too, for cosy, free-form discussion groups. There are no less (and possibly more) than 7 computer rooms, each with 20-30+ computers.

There is a central server room whose temperature is to be kept to 23 degrees Celsius. I'm dying to take a look at what is in there. Wonder how many server racks are in that place. Also have several display cabinets of various trophies, the 'A' div boys hockey championship is there.

And there are lifts all over the place, two by two. I saw a GP notice board, which was pretty interesting, describing the general subject areas that they set essay topics on. For example, politics, arts, maths, science, then for each of these they outline the kind of things they might ask, and give sample questions.

I think I saw a theater room, and there was dance studio also (though I don't like dance, I think dance sucks). Eating at the Bishan S11, I saw that there's going to be a new National Library at Bishan between the S11 and J8.

Met my hockey teacher, who was staying there, and was outside his door. He noticed that I was um, how shall I say, not so fit. But I had just gone running!

Did some programming on Thursday, working on a macro that I had written some time before for Yinglan. Eugene was working on the same thing, and my macro was more or less working, just not tweaked, and the data was not in a nice table form.

So Eugene was doing the thing manually, and Sam helped me get the data into a table, and I did some unrelated photocopying, and some copy-and-paste, find-and-replace coding. Mostly because I was lazy to think. Anyway, the code worked, and in a few seconds the macro did about 10 times the work Eugene did in an hour or so.

But, like I said, will have to redeem myself by refactoring the code tomorrow, which is quite a trivial exercise, but much needed. Just need to use an array instead of having the same block of code appear 10 times. Can also definitely modularize it much more.

I'm of the opinion that we don't really have to go "reward" people for their passion. If I have a passion for programming, being able to do programming is reward itself. You only have to "bribe" people to do their work if they don't really enjoy it in the first place.

As long as the job covers my expenses, I would take it up if I have a passion for it, and would certainly be more willing to cut down on expenses than take up another job that pays better but I don't really like.

So really, why are we throwing money at ministers? I guess politics sucks the passion out of people eventually. And also I guess because the "we" throwing the money are ministers themselves...

Played badminton with Eugene on Wednesday, had a good workout. Was telling him as we were walking out about "fatigue-induced gaiety", how things seem funnier when you're really tired. He said he hadn't really experienced it. Then Thursday came and we OT-ed till 1 am.

I've officially told my boss that the website is more or less done. Hope I don't run out of fun things to do. Will have to look around for more projects and get busy, otherwise might get assigned to boring stuff.

Is life better than death? Would you rather die peacefully in your sleep (given a week's notice if desired) or live a few more years then die a horrible death, perhaps get mauled in a car accident and be in agony for an hour or so then bleed to death?

Hope the coming work week isn't so crazy, but it probably will be crazier than it has been. I guess this kind of sentiment isn't interesting for most readers. Will keep it to myself then. Will try to put a poem up soon.