I wasn't really intending to write anything for a while. But then I realised to my horror that yet another fortnight is upon me and I should probably say something interesting here. Thankfully, that ``something interesting'' aspect has been graciously taken care of by life itself.
This post is mostly about the comings and goings that occurred on last Friday and Saturday. If you haven't realised by now, I was involved in the Our People, Our Music performance hosted by the Singapore Chinese Orchestra in part as a rally for all the Chinese orchestra afficionados (and musicians), in part to provide a grand ``soft'' opening for the newly reconstructed National Stadium (or Sports Hub, depending on who you ask and when) and in part to break some Guinness World Records while we're at it as an early ``birthday gift'' for the 50th anniversary of Singapore's independence from everyone else.
I hadn't really intended to join in the rehearsal on Friday. For one, it required a full-day's worth of leave due to the timing, and for two, it was likely to become one of those rush-to-wait, wait-to-rush moments due to the sheer complexity involved in moving thousands of people about. Hell, even when I was at the company level of my BMT unit, it already took us some time just to coordinate the movement of a platoon with expert human movers (drill sergeants), and if we scale it up to the thousands involved with less competent human movers (volunteers), the effect was going to be multiplied by ten-fold at the very least.
But in the end, my incipient headache was the deciding factor. It was probably worth the effort to get my ass out there and then spend the waiting time trying to rest while making good use of the actual time that was used for the rehearsal. I took my whole day leave and joined in the rehearsals on Friday.
Travelling to the new National Stadium wasn't that big of a deal considering that the bus ride was catered for. It was once we were in the holding area (Hall 1) where things started to get hairy. The throng of people that were there was not something to laugh at, and to make matters worse they were mostly school-going children. I have nothing against children, but the sheer numbers of them meant that things weren't going to be smooth sailing, because I was a kid once and I knew how rambunctious they can get when they are away from school and are at what is effectively a field trip. It was packed but it never did devolve into outright chaos---the most was mere inefficiencies in terms of movement (and itchy fingers with respect to expensive equipment; but more on that later).
The food was alright. I had erred on the side of caution against shrimp paste anything and ate vegetarian for both days. It wasn't the best of choices because at the end of each day I found myself demanding an extra McDonald's fillet meal to fill me back up to something more tolerable, but it sufficed.
One of the biggest problems that we faced from the get go was the problem of synchronisation. The conductor of a five thousand strong orchestra must necessarily be bloody hard to see from all corners of the field, and to counter that they had a camera that was always directed at him to capture his conducting actions to project on to two large jumbotrons that were facing the field in the direction in which the mega-orchestra was facing. The catch was of course latency, something that Prof Dannenberg taught me a long long time ago during the Computer Music class. And in this case, the latency was bad---there was a delay of between 250ms to 500ms between when he does his action and when that action appears on the jumbotrons. Now, if everyone followed one or the other, there would be no problem, and since we are talking about a large number of people, of course everyone followed the conductor differently. The resultant cacophony was jarring---we were off by up to one quaver in some places. It was terrible. I highlighted it to a crew member who managed to feed back up to the control team who told the marshal at some point about the issue and somehow it ended with everyone synchronising with the conductor as shown on the jumbotrons.
The conductor himself had to make his actions early relative to the sound he got from the monitors to ensure we all played in time, something that made me respect him all the more.
So with the synchronisation problem fixed up by the time we got to our third major rehearsal (two on Friday, one on Saturday before the event), we were gold.
My corner of the section was quite sad. Apart from representatives from our orchestra, the rest seemed a little lacklustre in comparison. I'm not sure if it was because they didn't really play/didn't know how to play, or that I was paying too damn close attention to keeping in time with the conductor that I had tunnel vision and could not pay any attention to what they were up to. All in all though the section managed to pull through and things went by smooth.
We managed to set/break two records too: largest Chinese Orchestra and largest Chinese Drum Ensemble (see 早报 article here).
If you have been paying some attention to my rambling, there should be one big question in your head right now. Largest Chinese Drum Ensemble? Where did that one come from?
The culprit: pellet drums or 波浪鼓.
Among the pieces that were sent out roughly six months earlier was a percussion piece that I was pretty sure no one really cared about except those who played percussion. It turned out that piece actually had parts written for the pellet drums, which everyone in the mega-orchestra was issued on the first day of the rehearsal by virtue of it sitting on our seats. Talk about a shocker, considering no one except the percussionists even have the sheet music for that piece. Nevertheless, all those problem were easily dealt with---we ended up playing a game of Simon says with the SYCO members who sat at the front of each section where the micorphones were.
My original pellet drum was finally replaced by another one when our seat positions were shifted as they tried to compact each section to remove the empty seats. The replacement was actually of an inferior quality---it sounds hard to believe that it is possible to get something of an inferior quality when we are talking about mass-produced goods, but it's true: one of the rivets holding the pellet was placed in reverse, giving it reduced holding power. And so, during the rehearsals, when I was playing on the pellet drum, that pellet flew off and disappeared. I thought I would never see it again until happenstance revealed its location just as we were done with the performance and were heading back. Needless to say, I picked it up and reattached it to the drum once again. I knew from the get-go that the pellet drums were some sort of souvenir (it was a logistical nightmare to collect 5000+ pellet drums; moreover what the hell were they going to do with them given that they had stuck on both sides of each drum stickers commemorating OPOM 2014?) and was actually quite glad that I could find the missing pellet. Now that bugger is sitting in the display case with all the other random pieces of memoramblia I have collected while living this life.
I think I'm out of stories to tell for now. I had told a lot of them before to my mum, but somehow writing those out feels more of a chore than anything else. Maybe I'll write something more abstract and coherent next time.
Monday, June 30, 2014
Sunday, June 15, 2014
Thursday, Friday Happy Day
I am always tickled and amused whenever a friend references something that I had written in any of my blogs (this one in particular of course) in meatspace. It shows that I've not been writing into a void, and really helps in delineating those who care and those who care not. I must also make a note that I am officially writing at stupid o'clock once again, and if things get all rambly and angsty, it's to be expected.
Anyhow, the weekend is upon us again. YT got back on Thursday on schedule, and we met up and hung out in the afternoon, eating a whole lot of good food and talking about all manner of crazy things, bouncing between the mundane (catching up on the various antics that our mutual friends have been up to, comparing battle scars on stupidity observed in life) to the sombre (wondering about how life is treating us, how the future looks like (hint: generally bleak)). I'm still digesting some of the stuff that we had gone through; it was a long chat, and much of what was discussed belongs to the subconscious processing unit simply because of the nature of the matter. I will withhold them in my memory and say no more about them here. One thing that was interesting was the tentative plan of synchronising trips to San Francisco to visit Victor---I'm trying to figure out if I should make an additional trip to Boston this time round to visit Xiaolu, but that is something that needs to be thought through and decided upon only nearer November.
Brian visited SIN city again, this time with Ko. We explored the southern tourist trap of Singapore, namely the Marina Bay Sands (MBS), Art/Science Museum, Gardens by the Bay, and VivoCity/Harbourfront. It was the first time that I had got my ass into the Art/Science Museum. They were having a dinosaur exhibit, as well as the photograph exhibition of Annie Leibovitz. Of the two, the first felt exactly like the popular science it was meant to be. Knowing more about anatomy made comparative anatomy on the reconstructed skeletons actually more interesting, and I think that I actually had more fun at this exhibit than at the previous one back in the Science Centre. If the dinosaur exhibit was the clear epitome of popular science and the mainstream, then the photograph exhibition was the polar opposite. Annie's forte was in taking portraits, and the manner in which she takes them (and the people of whom she took photographs of) were, for a lack of originality, provocative. We are talking about taking the extraordinary, the ``celebrity'', and recasting them in a light that shows their humanity despite the deification that we bestow upon them, with the effect where their humanity is depicted in a manner that does not belittle their existence, but rather enhance their stature in that it shows that beyond the celebrity status, they are still like regular people, identifiable outside of the sphere of their fame, sharing the same kinds of basic human emotions the way we do; approachable.
The traipse through the MBS, Gardens by the Bay and VivoCity/Harbourfront were mostly without incident, except for one. Bloody hard-selling nincompoops at the Guardian shop at the MBS near the food court. We were in there, I was looking for a bottle of tea or coffee, while pointing out the citronella oil patches to Brian and Ko for them to consider as their secondary defense against mosquitoes. Ko was talking to the pharmacist to get a hold of some hydrocortisone cream to help reduce the inflammation from the various bug bites he got from their Ubin trip the day before, and I was just about to pay for the bottle of tea I found. Immediately, a skin care sales woman came up to me, pointed at the visible rash on my arm (I was wearing a short-sleeved polo T-shirt with some mild visible heat rash), and told me in Mandarin that she had a product that could help me ``fix'' that. I told her firmly that I wasn't interested, but she lingered for a bit before walking away. I thought that was the end of it and went on to pay for my stuff and gave a stink eye look to Brian, who probably never saw me get so miffed before.
When I was done with buying my bottle of tea a different sales woman came up to me and told me about her skin product that could ``help with my complexion''. Mind you, we hadn't left the damn store yet. It wasn't crowded either, so apparently the modus operandi was ``if at first you fail, try again, even if the potential customer has already firmly said no to the first try, and was visibly annoyed''. I was so pissed I could break someone's leg. But I kept my cool, and told the interloper firmly that I wasn't interested. To avoid having to do time for assault, I walked out of the damn store, signalling Brian to follow me.
Idiots. I can play the get-out-of-my-country card and say that they were both of PRC descent and didn't look naturalised nor understanding to the typical Singaporean leave-me-the-fuck-alone response, but it's really not worth it nor is it accurate; sales staff that are clueless are clueless, and they come in all shapes, sizes, nationalities and what not. I think they should secretly be thankful I had the good sense of sparing their lives from their lack of tact by walking away. And I will stop here on my diatribe on this event---I can go on, but again, it's really not worth the effort.
``Horlicks Balls'' ice-cream from the Gardens by the Bay gift shop really tickled Ko's uhh something. Both he and Brian had no clue what ``Horlicks'' was, and was understandably making all the wrong assumptions. A pity that Ko was lactose intolerant, otherwise he could easily try out one ``Horlicks Balls'' for himself to learn of its flavour, and of the flavour of the malt-drink we all love as Horlicks.
So much for Thursday's and Friday's happenings.
I know Brian will read this at some point (I don't know when), so this piece of news is for him since he asked: that blind date is not happening. My friend conferred with her boyfriend about the... complication that the candidate girl was going through and they had [wisely] made the decision that she was probably not ready for the kind of serious relationship that I was looking for, and for the sake of everyone's sanity, have decided that it was best to not do the introduction. Funnily though, my friend promised to keep an eye out for a compatible girl for me, even though I didn't actually say anything about it. I'm not sure what to feel about that; it was just more amusing than anything else.
Hmm... I don't think there's anything else to add. Work is picking up again, the weather is getting more atrocious, and the June school holiday spirit is starting to affect me slightly. I guess most things are well in life and the only way that I can go is only forwards.
Anyhow, the weekend is upon us again. YT got back on Thursday on schedule, and we met up and hung out in the afternoon, eating a whole lot of good food and talking about all manner of crazy things, bouncing between the mundane (catching up on the various antics that our mutual friends have been up to, comparing battle scars on stupidity observed in life) to the sombre (wondering about how life is treating us, how the future looks like (hint: generally bleak)). I'm still digesting some of the stuff that we had gone through; it was a long chat, and much of what was discussed belongs to the subconscious processing unit simply because of the nature of the matter. I will withhold them in my memory and say no more about them here. One thing that was interesting was the tentative plan of synchronising trips to San Francisco to visit Victor---I'm trying to figure out if I should make an additional trip to Boston this time round to visit Xiaolu, but that is something that needs to be thought through and decided upon only nearer November.
Brian visited SIN city again, this time with Ko. We explored the southern tourist trap of Singapore, namely the Marina Bay Sands (MBS), Art/Science Museum, Gardens by the Bay, and VivoCity/Harbourfront. It was the first time that I had got my ass into the Art/Science Museum. They were having a dinosaur exhibit, as well as the photograph exhibition of Annie Leibovitz. Of the two, the first felt exactly like the popular science it was meant to be. Knowing more about anatomy made comparative anatomy on the reconstructed skeletons actually more interesting, and I think that I actually had more fun at this exhibit than at the previous one back in the Science Centre. If the dinosaur exhibit was the clear epitome of popular science and the mainstream, then the photograph exhibition was the polar opposite. Annie's forte was in taking portraits, and the manner in which she takes them (and the people of whom she took photographs of) were, for a lack of originality, provocative. We are talking about taking the extraordinary, the ``celebrity'', and recasting them in a light that shows their humanity despite the deification that we bestow upon them, with the effect where their humanity is depicted in a manner that does not belittle their existence, but rather enhance their stature in that it shows that beyond the celebrity status, they are still like regular people, identifiable outside of the sphere of their fame, sharing the same kinds of basic human emotions the way we do; approachable.
The traipse through the MBS, Gardens by the Bay and VivoCity/Harbourfront were mostly without incident, except for one. Bloody hard-selling nincompoops at the Guardian shop at the MBS near the food court. We were in there, I was looking for a bottle of tea or coffee, while pointing out the citronella oil patches to Brian and Ko for them to consider as their secondary defense against mosquitoes. Ko was talking to the pharmacist to get a hold of some hydrocortisone cream to help reduce the inflammation from the various bug bites he got from their Ubin trip the day before, and I was just about to pay for the bottle of tea I found. Immediately, a skin care sales woman came up to me, pointed at the visible rash on my arm (I was wearing a short-sleeved polo T-shirt with some mild visible heat rash), and told me in Mandarin that she had a product that could help me ``fix'' that. I told her firmly that I wasn't interested, but she lingered for a bit before walking away. I thought that was the end of it and went on to pay for my stuff and gave a stink eye look to Brian, who probably never saw me get so miffed before.
When I was done with buying my bottle of tea a different sales woman came up to me and told me about her skin product that could ``help with my complexion''. Mind you, we hadn't left the damn store yet. It wasn't crowded either, so apparently the modus operandi was ``if at first you fail, try again, even if the potential customer has already firmly said no to the first try, and was visibly annoyed''. I was so pissed I could break someone's leg. But I kept my cool, and told the interloper firmly that I wasn't interested. To avoid having to do time for assault, I walked out of the damn store, signalling Brian to follow me.
Idiots. I can play the get-out-of-my-country card and say that they were both of PRC descent and didn't look naturalised nor understanding to the typical Singaporean leave-me-the-fuck-alone response, but it's really not worth it nor is it accurate; sales staff that are clueless are clueless, and they come in all shapes, sizes, nationalities and what not. I think they should secretly be thankful I had the good sense of sparing their lives from their lack of tact by walking away. And I will stop here on my diatribe on this event---I can go on, but again, it's really not worth the effort.
``Horlicks Balls'' ice-cream from the Gardens by the Bay gift shop really tickled Ko's uhh something. Both he and Brian had no clue what ``Horlicks'' was, and was understandably making all the wrong assumptions. A pity that Ko was lactose intolerant, otherwise he could easily try out one ``Horlicks Balls'' for himself to learn of its flavour, and of the flavour of the malt-drink we all love as Horlicks.
So much for Thursday's and Friday's happenings.
I know Brian will read this at some point (I don't know when), so this piece of news is for him since he asked: that blind date is not happening. My friend conferred with her boyfriend about the... complication that the candidate girl was going through and they had [wisely] made the decision that she was probably not ready for the kind of serious relationship that I was looking for, and for the sake of everyone's sanity, have decided that it was best to not do the introduction. Funnily though, my friend promised to keep an eye out for a compatible girl for me, even though I didn't actually say anything about it. I'm not sure what to feel about that; it was just more amusing than anything else.
Hmm... I don't think there's anything else to add. Work is picking up again, the weather is getting more atrocious, and the June school holiday spirit is starting to affect me slightly. I guess most things are well in life and the only way that I can go is only forwards.
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Excitements
I know, I know. I copped out again after having taken a four-day break of some sorts and reverted to using six-word stories. It's not as though I had deliberately planned for that---I was trying to deal with a silly tension headache while simultaneously trying to contain all manners of excitement and trying to keep a level head in this ever increasingly hot weather, the kind where one immediately feels muggy just from stepping out of a cold shower.
So, all manners of excitement huh. I'll bet some of you who are reading this are wondering just what kind of excitement are there. Well, allow me to enumerate briefly. Over Friday and Saturday, I was half-expecting a text message from a friend who was to inform me of the details for a planned blind date that she thought would be an interesting fit; such a date was planned to occur on Sundays, hence the wait with half-expectations. There were some... complications with respect to the original plans that she had made with her boyfriend over this girl, but we'll just leave it as such for now and not talk about it. Over Sunday I was excited for the arrival of Edythe-II as well as the watching of the new X-Men movie with Moo, Paul and his wife. Those were the main excitements that were keeping me up and making me feel too tired to give a damn about writing.
Of course there are more interesting things that have occurred in between. After nearly a month of running computations and ahem hosting, I finally could reboot Elysie-II back into Windows to play a bunch of games over the weekend. One of the games that I had wanted to start on was Unepic. I had heard of interesting responses from KK about this a long time ago, and had gotten the game from GoG some time back, and I was finally going to give it a go. Man, it was totally worth it. It had a rogue-like sort of feel, very similar to Rogue Legacy for example, except that there isn't any perma-death. So the pressure was actually off the game play and learning-by-dying, which actually gave a little more time towards the small puzzles and the hilarious dialogue. I won't spoil it any further, but considering that I had only played a quarter of the game by this point, there really isn't much else that I can say about it. The platforming felt a little stilted though, the manoeuvrability of the protagonist is surprisingly mediocre---it was impossible to say move in a direction and change weapons at the same time. This also meant that cool platforming tricks like side jumping up a platform immediately above the one that the protagonist was standing on was basically impossible.
I had also started on Bioshock, and suffice to say, the horror ambience was starting to get to me. I'm starting to wonder if I'm not really a fan of the horror/survival genre. Most of the FPSes that I play and particularly enjoy are those that involved relatively fast action, with lots of heroic moments, like Borderlands 2 or even Serious Sam. Deus Ex: Human Revolution actually took me a while to get to to complete it, and till date I still haven't completed Doom 3 and Quake II despite restarting on them every few months. Hell, I don't even play Left 4 Dead 2 anymore. But that's probably a slightly different story.
Oh right, Edythe-II. She's a Fujitsu S904, Intel Core i7, 8GiB RAM (4GiB slotted and 4GiB soldered, going to get an 8GiB RAM stick to up to the maximum of 12GiB) with Intel HD Graphics 4400 and a 1TB hard drive. And those aren't the real reason for me getting her. The answer lies in the form factor---13.3'' screen with a resolution of 2560×1440. Well, screw the fact that she is running Windows 8.1 Pro and therefore has a useless Metro UI and the whole App marketplace concept as well as the touch-screen mechanism. That the screen has so many pixels at such a density meant that I could literally use GNU Unifont as the default coding font for all my terminals without having to sacrifice the total character cell count, as opposed to using the Proggy fonts series. This doesn't sound like much, but really, GNU Unifont is more useful than the Proggy series in that it is pan-unicode in nature, which makes things much more coherent when mixing multiple languages. GNU Unifont has the added advantage of actually being taller than its width, something that is false for the Proggy series (they were all 8×8 compared with 16×8 and 16×16).
More pixel space also means that using tools like Scrivener and FL Studio become more viable, something that I will be doing a lot from this point onwarrds. I have two novels that I want to write (more like three based on NaNoWriMo standards, but no one is counting). I had heard of Scrivener and was contemplating its use in organising more complex novels as compared to the slice-of-life stuff that I had been beating out time after time, and bswolf gave what I would consider a glowing recommendation for the tool since he was using it to organise his own novels. But on a small screen, Scrivener doesn't show off its prowess that well, and so Edythe-II was obtained.
Anyway, this week is a short one. Soon YT will be back in town for a meet up, which is good because I have someone more sane to talk to that isn't related to work, and Brian is actually in town right now, but I will only be dragging him all over the bloody place come Friday where I had taken leave just for that. And with my proposed architecture for an access control service approved in principle, things are just getting peachy.
Now, if only that blind date were to occur, and I have some luck and meet someone who is compatible...
So, all manners of excitement huh. I'll bet some of you who are reading this are wondering just what kind of excitement are there. Well, allow me to enumerate briefly. Over Friday and Saturday, I was half-expecting a text message from a friend who was to inform me of the details for a planned blind date that she thought would be an interesting fit; such a date was planned to occur on Sundays, hence the wait with half-expectations. There were some... complications with respect to the original plans that she had made with her boyfriend over this girl, but we'll just leave it as such for now and not talk about it. Over Sunday I was excited for the arrival of Edythe-II as well as the watching of the new X-Men movie with Moo, Paul and his wife. Those were the main excitements that were keeping me up and making me feel too tired to give a damn about writing.
Of course there are more interesting things that have occurred in between. After nearly a month of running computations and ahem hosting, I finally could reboot Elysie-II back into Windows to play a bunch of games over the weekend. One of the games that I had wanted to start on was Unepic. I had heard of interesting responses from KK about this a long time ago, and had gotten the game from GoG some time back, and I was finally going to give it a go. Man, it was totally worth it. It had a rogue-like sort of feel, very similar to Rogue Legacy for example, except that there isn't any perma-death. So the pressure was actually off the game play and learning-by-dying, which actually gave a little more time towards the small puzzles and the hilarious dialogue. I won't spoil it any further, but considering that I had only played a quarter of the game by this point, there really isn't much else that I can say about it. The platforming felt a little stilted though, the manoeuvrability of the protagonist is surprisingly mediocre---it was impossible to say move in a direction and change weapons at the same time. This also meant that cool platforming tricks like side jumping up a platform immediately above the one that the protagonist was standing on was basically impossible.
I had also started on Bioshock, and suffice to say, the horror ambience was starting to get to me. I'm starting to wonder if I'm not really a fan of the horror/survival genre. Most of the FPSes that I play and particularly enjoy are those that involved relatively fast action, with lots of heroic moments, like Borderlands 2 or even Serious Sam. Deus Ex: Human Revolution actually took me a while to get to to complete it, and till date I still haven't completed Doom 3 and Quake II despite restarting on them every few months. Hell, I don't even play Left 4 Dead 2 anymore. But that's probably a slightly different story.
Oh right, Edythe-II. She's a Fujitsu S904, Intel Core i7, 8GiB RAM (4GiB slotted and 4GiB soldered, going to get an 8GiB RAM stick to up to the maximum of 12GiB) with Intel HD Graphics 4400 and a 1TB hard drive. And those aren't the real reason for me getting her. The answer lies in the form factor---13.3'' screen with a resolution of 2560×1440. Well, screw the fact that she is running Windows 8.1 Pro and therefore has a useless Metro UI and the whole App marketplace concept as well as the touch-screen mechanism. That the screen has so many pixels at such a density meant that I could literally use GNU Unifont as the default coding font for all my terminals without having to sacrifice the total character cell count, as opposed to using the Proggy fonts series. This doesn't sound like much, but really, GNU Unifont is more useful than the Proggy series in that it is pan-unicode in nature, which makes things much more coherent when mixing multiple languages. GNU Unifont has the added advantage of actually being taller than its width, something that is false for the Proggy series (they were all 8×8 compared with 16×8 and 16×16).
More pixel space also means that using tools like Scrivener and FL Studio become more viable, something that I will be doing a lot from this point onwarrds. I have two novels that I want to write (more like three based on NaNoWriMo standards, but no one is counting). I had heard of Scrivener and was contemplating its use in organising more complex novels as compared to the slice-of-life stuff that I had been beating out time after time, and bswolf gave what I would consider a glowing recommendation for the tool since he was using it to organise his own novels. But on a small screen, Scrivener doesn't show off its prowess that well, and so Edythe-II was obtained.
Anyway, this week is a short one. Soon YT will be back in town for a meet up, which is good because I have someone more sane to talk to that isn't related to work, and Brian is actually in town right now, but I will only be dragging him all over the bloody place come Friday where I had taken leave just for that. And with my proposed architecture for an access control service approved in principle, things are just getting peachy.
Now, if only that blind date were to occur, and I have some luck and meet someone who is compatible...
Sunday, June 01, 2014
Advice? What Advice?
There comes a point in time when I must acknowledge that I have outgrown the epoch of life where I knew answers to anything and everything and therefore could be considered somewhat adequately qualified to give advice to people. It used to not be this way. Among those of my age group, I tended to be the most well-read, the most knowledgeable, and tended to pride upon myself on my dispassionately rational break down of problems and providing simple and workable solutions. Many of my acquaintances (I refrain from using the word ``friend'' here) come to me seeking advice and help, and I was known to give some rather useful ones from time to time.
Then I grew up, and nothing seemed to be understandable.
It took me nearly a decade to work out just what was wrong. It wasn't that I had lost my touch in being well-read, knowledgeable and dispassionately rational in breaking down problems into simple solvable parts. It was that the people I had been working with have changed. And since they have changed, the types of problems and eligible solution space have morphed too. Back in the day, one was always confined by some framework or another, be it from the perspective of education or, well, there wasn't any other alternative, was there? But when applied to the real world, or at least, a much larger framework that is life, the eligible solution space becomes hamstrung by the ineptness and limitations of the people seeking the said advice. Some solutions are easy to implement, but they are illegitimate because they cannot be successfully implemented by the person involved.
Of course, that was what I kept telling myself each time I found that I could no longer advise people effectively. Then, while I was showering earlier today, I hit upon yet another plausible answer: I was the one living in fantasy land and therefore have no right nor the information to provide proper advice to anyone.
I used to think I lived a hard life. Bad skin, relatively low income family, having to seemingly fight for everything that I needed. Then I realised one thing---since I was deemed somewhat more intelligent than my peers, my life beyond that of primary school was basically gilded. Choices were made easy during that time period because the number of choices at that level of gildness were few; there was little trade-off to worry about. Many of the choices that needed to be made had obviously correct ones. Compared to people who had middling abilities and modest home incomes, I had way less things to actually weigh and choose from than they. Which meant that I couldn't exactly learn a lot from the decisions that I had to make. Which also meant that unless the person has lived a similarly gilded life, I had no right to give them any useful advice.
That was what I did over the last decade. I had to overcome my helpful nature to turn it more callous, to literally shut the hell up as much as I could unless spoken to directly by someone asking for advice or help. World's a big place, with many people. I'm no Pope nor US President, so I can't actually help them all. Moreover, why bother helping anyone when I'm not qualified enough to help it?
Then I grew up, and nothing seemed to be understandable.
It took me nearly a decade to work out just what was wrong. It wasn't that I had lost my touch in being well-read, knowledgeable and dispassionately rational in breaking down problems into simple solvable parts. It was that the people I had been working with have changed. And since they have changed, the types of problems and eligible solution space have morphed too. Back in the day, one was always confined by some framework or another, be it from the perspective of education or, well, there wasn't any other alternative, was there? But when applied to the real world, or at least, a much larger framework that is life, the eligible solution space becomes hamstrung by the ineptness and limitations of the people seeking the said advice. Some solutions are easy to implement, but they are illegitimate because they cannot be successfully implemented by the person involved.
Of course, that was what I kept telling myself each time I found that I could no longer advise people effectively. Then, while I was showering earlier today, I hit upon yet another plausible answer: I was the one living in fantasy land and therefore have no right nor the information to provide proper advice to anyone.
I used to think I lived a hard life. Bad skin, relatively low income family, having to seemingly fight for everything that I needed. Then I realised one thing---since I was deemed somewhat more intelligent than my peers, my life beyond that of primary school was basically gilded. Choices were made easy during that time period because the number of choices at that level of gildness were few; there was little trade-off to worry about. Many of the choices that needed to be made had obviously correct ones. Compared to people who had middling abilities and modest home incomes, I had way less things to actually weigh and choose from than they. Which meant that I couldn't exactly learn a lot from the decisions that I had to make. Which also meant that unless the person has lived a similarly gilded life, I had no right to give them any useful advice.
That was what I did over the last decade. I had to overcome my helpful nature to turn it more callous, to literally shut the hell up as much as I could unless spoken to directly by someone asking for advice or help. World's a big place, with many people. I'm no Pope nor US President, so I can't actually help them all. Moreover, why bother helping anyone when I'm not qualified enough to help it?
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