Mood at Stupid O'Clock

Mmm. In a mood, a mood for another stupid o'clock entry.

Reading White Fang over the Kindle PC program while listening to Lofi & chill mixes of Hololive original music does set up the right mood for stupid o'clock writing, though as far as stupid o'clock goes, this really isn't that late.

The past month has been a foggy mess, mentally speaking. It's less about me losing focus of what I am doing, but more on how the days sort of blended into each other even more easily than before. There were some moments of euphoric hope that we would be on our way out of this COVID-19 mess in SIN city, what with the successful release of my age demographic for vaccination, which was then followed by a larger influx of doses from the new batches that came in. National Day was coming around the corner, and there was a lot of positivity about how we as a country would be majority full-vaccinated in time for the greatest celebration of our nationhood.

Then a hitherto unknown cluster of cases exploded, which made the associated task force decide (hastily or otherwise---I don't really know) to slam the door back on everyone after having lightly released the restrictions. To make matters worse, just about the next day from that announcement, a high-profile homicide case involving teenagers (from my alma mater) was reported, all before the public holiday that was to happen. And with all that, the national sentiment has reached new levels of depression, with the affected business people from this new totally-not-a-lockdown ``lockdown'' actually being more vocal about how things are utter shite for them even as the usual platitudes about how help was ``always available'' to those who needed them in the situation of the homicide, among other things.

Okay, a diversion---these were things that just happened within the past week, and more importantly, speak nothing of what I meant by being mentally in a foggy mess. What I mean is, my internal clock is slowly running long, losing its calibration against what the mainstream terms as being ``normal''. I feel like the poorest of Copies from Greg Egan's Permutation City, being slowly deracinated through running at a much slower rate than the world is running. Some call this being ``blessed'', I personally am unsure if this categorisation ought to be done in the first place. I think that I am starting to reach the point where I am well-rested, and I suspect that within a month or two I would start to ramp up my thought processes towards re-integration into society once more, hopefully being in a line of work that is less ethically fraught than the one that I left.

I had been talking with people here and there, mostly folks whom I am comfortable with talking about things that straddle on that fine edge between insanity and reality. It does seem that the powers that be are still firmly entrenched, and even with the nonsense that is the pandemic, they are unlikely to change their ways. So perhaps the way out might be one where I strike it out on my own.

The true question then becomes, what can I do that people are willing to pay me for so that I can pay the bills?

That is a tough thing to think about, considering that anything that can be done by one person successfully is likely to be doable by a larger company with their army of cheap labour---experience has shown that in this part of the world, quality is of the least concern when it comes to most forms of engineering; it is always about being cheaper than the competition, and faster than the competition. ``Quality'' falls into the category of intangible non-quantifiable properties, the only one of the engineers' mantra ``cheap, fast, good---pick two out of three'' that is often alluded to in passing, but whose choice among the three was never the main point.

Everyone wants it cheap and fast, and by everyone, I do mean everyone from the smallest company to the largest public sector organisation. Quality is bullshit as far as the decision makers go, for the simple reason that it is not quantifiable, and therefore cannot be measured and compared directly in terms of cheapness (price per unit something) or fastness (time taken). It's bullshit because to these decision makers, quality is something that is so subjective that it will be indefensible against the other two when called up from a ``routine'' audit of the monies that have been spent.

It's like, why bother building an information system properly over two years when the user-interface will be obsolete in less than five, and besides, software simply cannot be that expensive right, since it is ``just lines of code'' compared to real engineering involving big iron parts and lots of electricity, right? Besides, if there's a bug, we can just patch it in production. Also, nowadays there're frameworks for everything---how hard is it to quickly put together an app (not program, not application, but this stupid word called ``app'')? I mean, my nine-year-old kid can do some thing in Roblox over an afternoon, so I am totally qualified to question you, a professional engineer's effort estimate.

😡

Man, I wrote myself angry---it was supposed to be a sort of mood, a relaxed and contemplative one, not an angry one.

Weather hasn't helped much though, with its tantrumous vacillations between hot & humid and sunny & rain (yes, I did not say that wrongly---sunny & rain). Those conditions do help in generating brain fog as the mind cannot decide how it wants to deal with things since it is so confusingly hot.

Well, by now I've run out of steam, so I will just end this entry here. If you can figure out what I am writing in this entry, that's great---because I'm pretty sure that I personally do not know what point I was trying to make throughout these thousand or so words.

Till the next update, hopefully not at stupid o'clock.