What a week! But before I recap what happened, I'd like to share two principles of mine.
Principle 1: I refuse to go out alone with a female friend who is married/have a steady boyfriend. Now I know and they know that friend means friend, but the person who does not know me as well may develop some weird thoughts about what is going on---why be someone else's stumbling stone? As a corollary, I prefer creating group chats that contains both the couple and I for coordination purposes. The reason for this is much simpler: whatever is said to my friend will definitely make its way to her significant other. In which case, I'd rather make it more direct and clear to avoid ``telephone game'' syndrome.
Principle 2: If you are a sit-down restaurant, I don't mind if you make me use your stupid web site to make an order. However, if the only way you are allowing me to pay is to enter my payment information into the same stupid web site, then I'm walking out if alone, or it will be the last time I eat at your place if I'm with others and cannot easily leave (I'll get someone else in my party to pay through your stupid system). Two such sit-down places have been black-listed by me for this (that udon place in UTown, and the replacement restaurant out at NUS Alumni House), and today, I added a new one: Nando's.
See, the card has a chip on it. And the payment system as provided by the bank is simultaneously faster and more direct for payment than the stupid web site way---I do not like sitting at the stupid table just to enter 20--23 digits worth of numbers (16 digits for the card number, then another 4 for the expiry month, and maybe an extra 3 for the CVV2 number). And with the ubiquity of surveillance camera, some fucker can just review the video and figure out what those information are, should they so choose.
``But MT, you can just add your payment information to like your Google Pay/Apple Pay, and then use it from there...''
...and if I lose my phone, fuck me. No thanks.
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Today's a leave day to make up for the fact that 2025-07 has no public holidays. I could have gone for yet another long-ass cycle, but my heart really isn't in it, and more importantly, I needed to make some supply runs.
The most important is meds. This is a normal run that I need to do about once every quarter-ish, on average.
The next is replacement shoes. I think I last got my daily work shoes back in 2023, and they have developed some very interesting holes through the leather due to wear and tear from walking too much. And so, I had two pairs to replace them.
``MT, why two?''
To alternate. It makes the shoes less stinky, and more importantly, they retain their shape much better when allowed a full 24 hours to chill out in between uses. I would have done the same for my boots if I wear them often enough, but I don't, so it's just the one pair for now.
The last is a new external HDD. The current one is 4 TB (that's SI prefix there), and it has been years. So it's time to get another one. I was scouting earlier, and saw a Western Digital Duo Book that could go up to 44 TB---in the form of 2× 22 TB hard drives in RAID 0 configuration. It was tempting, but I didn't end up getting it for a couple of reasons: it was a ``desktop model'' that needed an external power source, and 44 TB is stupid large. Even if it were reconfigured to 22 TB via RAID 1, that is still a stupidly large amount of data to work with---if I lose data due to the hard drive going bananas, that's a stupid amount of data to lose/restore.
So I just got a 5 TB one, and as I am writing, I am doing the necessary data transfer from the older HDD to the new one. It still sucks though---one of the syncing operations has an estimated 2.4k min, or nearly 2 days. And since both hard drives each need a USB-A port, I'm out of a mouse---no games involving mice for these two days.
Oww.
But the supply run was successful. That Nando's thing happened, and I just ate at Josh's Grill nearby, which was excellent.
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In other news, my Ninomae Ina'nis merch has arrived. I now have a nice hoodie of octopuses, and it is really cool! I mean, it's warm too, but you get the idea.
Volumes 5--7 of the Flute Sheet Archive has also arrived, but since it requires a USB-A port to access, it might as well be in the mail still.
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Mentally though, I'm a mixed bag now. A little this, a little that, a little something else.
Overall, I'm functional. But am I thriving?
I don't know.
Till the next update then.
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