Category: life

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I took the car to work today

Brother has been overseas for a couple of weeks now, tasking me with giving his 4-wheeled bundle of joy a bit of a stretch every now and then to keep her nimble and her battery topped up.

So today, instead of my usual bike/train arrangement, I schemed to drive the car to work.

While gobbling down my morning muesli, I couldn’t help feeling excited from the novelty of my grand plan. Just to be clear, in all my university and working years, I’d never found myself in an arrangement that required a daily commute behind the wheel from yours truly.

As I entered the garage, I was greeted with a perky chrip-chirp upon announcing my presence with the remote. Tossing my backpack in the back seat was sheer delight. Starting up the car and pulling out of the basement, divine.

My very first traffic light intersection, though, obliterated all sense of excitement and novelty. Glee morphed to dread. Within mere minutes in, the desire to savour every bit of this very curious journey quickly evolved into a wanting to get off the road as soon as possible.

All this while going in the opposite direction of peak traffic.

My daily commute to work over the last 9 months has always been akin to a favourite wrinkle on a pillowcase that never goes away no matter how hot you turn up the iron. Irrespective of how similar the cultural background, social-standing and lifestyle, it is the kind of conversation material that leaves the conversing partner with little to add to, and beckons change of topic. In a tree data structure, this would be a leaf node.

So to keep things interesting, I’d come up with a variety of statements to at least afford a good chuckle, easing the transition into a change of topic.

If I’m feeling eco-friendly, I’d spout something like “It’s one less car on the road”.

Money wise? “Cheaper than a car and petrol”.

Health conscious? “I get a good dose of exercise without even trying”.

Zen: “More than an hour every day to quieten my mind and sift through my thoughts”.

Feeling a little bit fancy? “It’s like getting driven to work every day”.

Oh so productive: “I get to sort out all my emails during my commute. See my 3G phone, it’s got this data tethering thing…”

…

Up till today, they have been well varnish pieces of wood scraps that I’d so carefully glued together, polished and stowed away in my quiver of self-conviction, just in case someone scoffs, or levies a page out of the very South East Asian my-ride-is-my-pride gamebook against me.

But today, something changed.

As I trudged westward on the “sparser” side of the road, eyes squinted and limbs baked in the the pre-evening sun, concluding my ridiculous* commute, every one my excuses made up for the sake of conversation-flair, turned to teak encrusted in gold.

How genuinely lucky am I, to be able to bike and ride the train tomorrow.

*total distance: 54.68km
total time: 1h 53m
total moving time: 1h 10m
avg. speed 28.64km/h
avg. moving speed: 45.74km/h

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Try something old

Here’s a weekend idea for the our ADD generation.

Don’t learn a new programming language, or another framework, or try another to-do list tutorial. Don’t try a new dinner place or a new recipe. Don’t start on another new idea. Don’t buy a new domain name. Don’t redesign your blog. Don’t sign up for a new social networking account. For goodness sake, don’t update your online profile.

Instead, try something old. Give it another go. Dust off that old startup idea. Do something a second time. Write part two of your blog series. Refine that recipe. Finish that book. Have coffee at that old café you stopped patronizing after you broke up two years ago. Trying adopting that noble habit again.

Because good things take time, and ‘new’ is an overrated knee-jerk reaction for our generation.

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Ego driven

I got off the train, hopped on the bike, and thought to myself,

“What a nice Friday for a relaxing commute to work”

At the first T-junction, I spied with my eyes just a few meters ahead, a fellow rider on a bike much less sleek than mine, sporting awfully color-uncoordinated florescent garb.

“Surely yours truly, on a freshly serviced bike, in tastefully selected attire, could easy ride past him without breaking a sweat”

4 minutes in, he just pulled further and further away. Just as I was ready to admit defeat, a white ute drives past me. It its wake, two riders rode on far sleeker bikes, sporting far more coordinated team jerseys and tights – at car-speeds.

Crushed.

So much for a relaxing ride into work. My ego drove me to work today.

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Why I’m learning Emacs

In my high school years, I was one of those kids who spent every spare moment geeking out at the school computer lab. The teacher in charge there had a background in software development and was a bit of a nerd himself (thankfully).

Once in a while, a new copy of Microsoft Internet Developer (MIND) magazine would appear in the lab (he’d purchased it). I would eagerly flip through it and attempt to digest its contents.

If you’ve ever have had the privilege of reading one of these magazines, you’ll recall that every feature article had a little callout box at the start that said something to the effect of:

To get the most out of this article, you’ll need to understand Microsoft IIS, MSMQ and ASP

These articles were very technical, and my teenage grey-matter struggled to grasp the concepts presented. Which is why the callout box proved invaluable to me because at very least I knew what those labels were, which meant my journey didn’t need to come to an abrupt end; rather, there were detours that I could take en route to enlightenment.

So I would put down the magazine, seek out some 4-inch thick QUE tome, and wander merrily down wherever the path led for as long as my teenage attention span could last.

Needless to say, I usually didn’t last long enough for the chapter numbers to turn double digits, much less get back to the magazine article that I so wanted to decipher. A month would go by, a new magazine would appear, along with new set of keys for me to acquire in order to unlock the wisdom of the “grown-up professionals”.

How little things have changed.

Just this week, I stumbled upon Steve Yegge’s Tour de Babel. Lo’ and behold, a new carrot was presented to me:

All of the greatest engineers in the world use Emacs. The world-changer types. […] the greatest software developers of our profession, the ones who changed the face of the industry.

And that is why, sucker that I am, and despite having spent the last 5-6 years barely getting comfortable in Vim, I am learning Emacs.

My head hurts like hell because of my vim inclinations, but here’s hoping over a decade in, I would get a little further than my teenage self.

Have you got a story about how or why you pick things up? Share below, or join the discussion at Hacker News

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Expert Conversations

Time and time again, I find myself amidst highly qualified individuals. Take the previous weekend for example. We were hanging out at a cafe after lunch. Present there were a panel highly trained individuals whose combine knowledge would span the disciplines of psychology, dietetics, mechanics, geoscience, econometrics, and multimedia (and that’s just counting the formal paper certificate stuff).

What puzzles me is how little we get to converse about the very things that we invest most of our waking hours working on.

After asking around for a bit, it came down to an infinite number of variations circling around two main themes:

  1. I don’t think it’s interesting.
  2. I don’t think anyone else is interested.

Responding to 1, I’d suggest that one would seriously need to reconsider the career that one has chosen. It’s one thing to attempt to objectively gauge the interesting-ness of a particular line of work; it is a completely different matter for one to give five seventh’s of ones adult life to something that bears no interest even to its beholder.

As for theme number 2, very few of us have cultivated the skills required to engaging domains of knowledge beyond what we are accustomed to, myself included. In other words, it is not your fault, but you could try cultivating an interest in what others are working on.

I don’t know how such a skill would be cultivated, I sure wasn’t taught any of this in all my years in the education system, but I’m going to learn to be interested, and I’m going to try and seize every chance to celebrate the abundance of expertise around me.