Which is why, over the years, days like today have turned out to be a bit of an anti-event for me. I’d try to avoid these sorts of things, and make comments like “I wish I could go to sleep the day before, and wake up the day after” (the wifey says: true story).

After 28 though years, I’m slowly realizing that it isn’t the actual day that I fear, but the anti-climaticism* of the day after, which scales according to how much fun the actual day was. This sentiment was far more pronounced in my primary school years, when #2202 would land smack in the middle of my mid-terms, and usually on a school night. Imagine that, Chinese-Malaysian student going out to Pizza Hut for dinner with family on a school night, during exam period.

Oh boy.

All I can say is, gosh I’ve come a long way, and how blessed I am to have the people that I have around me. At the rate that I’m going, I’m destined to be one of those stuffy old farts who tells you “Making friends is for youngsters. You stop making friends after <insert figure inversely proportionate to cynicism>“. Indeed I have, but somehow, it hasn’t stopped a handful of outrageous beings from reaching out to me and wiggling their way into my life.

The gifts, card, messages, gestures, tweets have made my day, and the impending school-night dinner will top it off beautifully.

While there are still traces of dread of the dip that tomorrow may bring, I’m going to be present, and grateful.

Happy #2202 to me, come what may.

* Speaking of anti-climaticism, I once thought, how cool it would be to celebrate 22-02-2222, until I realized I’ll have to wait over 200 years.

Back in my early teenage years, computer operating systems (read: Windows) would age and deteriorate with use. No, this wasn’t some time-limited DRM or SaaS strategy. Just poor engineering. So, 2-3 times a year, I would make it a point to do a “fresh” reinstall of the operating system to keep things humming along optimally.

If you’ve got everything in place, I discovered that performing a reinstall can be a very rewarding therapeutic zone-out activity. All you’ve got to do is step through a long sequence of actions, and stare at the screen in between. If you follow it correctly, you’re rewarded with a brand spanking new computational canvas upon which you etch out your digital life, all over again.

Kinda like how some people like to sort their wardrobe by wavelength, or rake tiny pebble around in a zen garden. Except, you get a faster computer at the end of it!

I’m not sure what got into me back then, but I was doing this reinstall thing so often (probably because I’d always find a new way to ruin the system) that I perfected the process of getting my computer from bare metal to a functioning Windows NT 4 workstation in under 15 mins. Yes, you read right – in less that a quarter of an hour, I could drop a blank hard drive into the system, install the operating system with drivers, and be surfing the ‘net on Internet Explorer 5.5.

That was what I did for fun.

Fast forward to yesterday, I’d recently commissioned a brand new VPS to run some of my clients’ websites, and it was 1999 all over again for me. Selecting and rebuilding the server with a CentOS 5 image, updating and hardening the machine. Setting up BIND, and Apache, and MySQL. Meddling with Postfix, ssh, iptables, etc. Did someone say multiple versions of PHP over FastCGI?

Every time I go over the steps again, I try to take the “advanced” route for a component or two. I’d attempt to perform manually something that was previously done automatically through a pretty GUI. This time, it was setting up mail forwarding. It used to be all point-and-click through a cPanel Reseller account, but I spent a good few hours tweaking it by hand, and understanding a little more how email plumbing works.

Fascinating, and incredibly satisfying.

Maybe next time, I’ll try and roll out a Gentoo or FreeBSD box.

It’s become something of a daily routine. Ride to the station, look for the yellow lines on the platform (they tell you where the major carriage breaks are), and board one of the edge cars.

Park the bicycle, wake up laptop, fix up tethering. Refrain from hitting up the slippery slope that is Hacker News, pull up the my text editor, and start writing for my life. Funny how writing doesn’t require an active Internet connection, but I can’t settle in until I know that I’m connected.

Still a struggle some days, like today. It took a picture to get things going.

Thank you for keeping on with me.

But back to the question about kids and library trips, mom used to take my brother and I to the library when we were young.

My most distinct memory of the whole experience was how sick I’d feel right before we made a trip to the library because I’d misplaced the soon overdue books we’re needing to return. It was then in my early years, I learned that being stressed out is a luxury one cannot afford when the the car engine’s started and the whole family is waiting in the driveway. I also learned that if you’re planning on hoarding lots of stuff, they should ideally be digital and indexable.

But I digress. My second distinct memory is that of the state library we would frequent. Upon entrance, it had two clearly defined section: a section for children, and a section for grown-ups. You could tell which was which by the way spaces were furnished, and how high the bookshelves stood, but you could also tell because the kids’ section smelled like children. I’d always try to steal a whiff from the grown-up section: the smell of grown-up knowledge and wisdom.

The only times I got to enter the grown-up section were when we were about to leave. Mom would send me to get dad who was busy looking up some motorcycle manual, or something about stock markets, or something about computers. Oh, what joy for me – shelves taller than the eye could see, amber coloured monochromatic computer screens to look up books, and… THEY HAD AN UPSTAIRS: double delight!

I would take my time to browse through the shelves as though I were looking for something, while hoping for the day I could understand what lay behind the incredibly serious looking covers with photo realistic pictures and titles I couldn’t pronounce.

Those trips to the library gave me something to look forward to. The whiff “knowledgeable” adulthood ever so gently nudged me to grow up a little quicker, if for nothing other than to be able to reach for the higher shelves.

I fear my kids may not have this experience. Their earliest recollections of knowledge repositories may very well begin a 4-coloured logotype, a blinking text cursor, and a button that says “Search”. What’s a seven-year-old to type in the box? How’s a child going to search for something that he/she doesn’t even know exist? And how’s a child to defend him/herself from the every increasing ubiquity of attention grabbing advertisements that seek to colour his/her mind for their commercial purposes.

I sure hope we don’t screw it up too badly for them.

Here’s a snippet I created to generate invalid data from a valid key-value array. It’s really handy for testing. Feel free to use it.

Just be careful, the number of combinations it comes up with is 2^n - 1. So the number of invalid combinations from an array with 10 key-value pairs will quickly balloon to 1023.

Do drop me a line to let me know if this has been helpful for you.

Coming up to a quiet traffic-lit intersection, it suddenly dawned upon me that once upon a time, a human being had to perform the very manual task of directing traffic at an intersection. Given that I was commuting to work, I couldn’t help but think of Mr. Expert Traffic Conductor waking up one fateful morning in 1868 to find that he wouldn’t be going to work that day because some machine with light bulbs had just replaced him.

That made me think of other such jobs were replaced such a long time ago, we forget that a human once had to devote his or her life to perform the task, day in, day out. One example is the elevator operator. A another one, the telephone operator.

More currently, I’m inclined to believe the reason a good portion of the human workforce still have their jobs isn’t because machines can’t yet perform them, but because the economics still swing in favour of hiring a human being over building and employing a machine equivalent. ‘Still’ being the operative word.

This is why it puzzles me when someone aspires to be more machine-like with their work.

Granted, I’m not unfamiliar with the fact that the more work one is able to perform per unit time generally translates into higher productivity which, in most cases, increases one’s income. Also granted, I’m acutely aware that every higher-up dreams of commanding a cohort of machine-like human beings; so for an underling, the contortion one’s humanity often presents itself as a wise career move, until you realize you’re just a stop-gap while the real machines creep within range of the corporate budget.

Still, the days of such “machineable” careers are severely numbered. You can trust me on that because bringing such a reality to past is implied in my job description as a software developer.

On the surface, it says “make better software to empower human beings”. What it really means is “make software so that we don’t need to pay that guy to sit there all day and click his mouse”. True story.

So if one is to derive any stone cold career advice out of this, it is to steer clear of the competition.

Instead of aspiring to be more machine-like, seek to be less. Spend time cultivating the things that are uniquely human – traits like creativity, beauty, vision, intelligence, compassion, inspiration. While this almost precludes you from scoring a mindless, well-paying, short-term job, at very least you won’t be out of one when a machine does better.

As part of the waiting process, I’d set aside a small partition to install the latest release of Ubuntu, and try to use it for a few days. My most recent endeavour saw me booting up a copy of Ubuntu 11.10.
And here are the reasons why it’s still not ready for me, and why Windows 7 is still my best option.

‘Suspend’ is unpredictable It’s been the case a few times now, where I’d quickly close the lid and slide my laptop into my bag to get off the train or something. Only to find later on, the machine still running, and the fan going full blast to keep the temperature under control amidst the thick padding.

Monitor switching I’ve got a docking station with 2 external monitors set up at home. When I dock the machine, I expect the desktop to quickly detect that it has docked, the laptop lid is still closed, and there are two external monitors that it should use for display. Same thing for undocking. It should figure out that the monitors have disappeared, and it’s time to switch back to the laptop screen.

(nice to have, but not deal breaker) Evernote on Linux, please.

And that really is why I’m still stuck with bleepin’ Windows 7, because it works so well with the hardware. Not a day goes by where I dream of a real shell and proper virtual desktops.

No, and I’m not getting a mac.

It was a nice cloud-ish day. There was likely a drizzle that ceased 2 hours prior, which might explain the puddle that caught my eye.

Earlier, during train “leg” of my commute, I was glancing out the window, keeping tabs on the weather. I had my work pants on instead of my cycling tights, which means that if it rains, I’ll have nothing to change out to. (And no, cycling tights is not part of the approved workwear list).

But right there, in the span of 7 meters, I was presented with a forked path. Wet or dry. Wet, or dry. Wet or, dry.

I’d just recently put a pair of fenders on my bike, and I’d trialled it out in the crazy wet. If I so chose to go right through the puddle, I should come up dry, right? Right?

A second thought butted in, what if, during the rain, some of the splatter sneaked past the fenders and found its way onto you? You would’ve never known, because you were all wet anyways.

Here was my chance to try it out; and for some reason, not having anything to change into perchance my fenders fail me made it all the more exhilarating.

So I picked up a the pedaling and went straight for the puddle. It was sheer joy hearing the splatters, yet not feeling any of the moisture. Some might even say, it’s the reward for my trust in my fenders.

Needless to say, that bug of a doubt was quashed for good.

My wife and I have been married for almost two years now, and as many couples would know (being very careful with my quantifiers here), one is able to roughly gauge the health and pleasantness of a marriage by the GDP within the relationship, and how evenly the production load is spread across the parties involved.

To be sure, when one gets married, one enters a contract to produce to the best of one’s ability for the welfare and to the benefit of the other party. This implies that one has a sufficient supply of produce to last the full term of the contract (“till death do us part”), which implies that such a supply exists, and finally assumes that one has access to such a supply. This is why in the standard issue wedding vow, you’ll find clauses such as “in sickness or in health”, “for richer or for poorer”. It’s a poetic way of disclaiming “It’s going to be hard, but we’re going to give it our best shot”.

Oh how hard it gets, ‘specially on days when consumption is high, production is low, and there isn’t enough give to go around.

Which is why I’ve started to appreciate the value of extravagant ceremony, because on such days, invoking the memory of the promises exchanged, the symbols enacted, and the presence of loved ones somehow activates an reserve stash of patience to wait out a little longer, or grace to smooth over the harsh rocky road.

Putting aside the harmful effects of ceremonial vanity and blind traditionalism for a moment, I can’t help feeling that my generation is at risk of incurring a nett loss as a result of our anti-ceremonial, minimalistic tendencies. Not a major critical loss, mind you, but one of significance akin to a Swiss Knife missing its toothpick when you’ve got a tricky sliver of meat stuck between your back molars.

So here’s one for deeply meaningful, and ridiculously awe-inspiring ceremonies for the sake of the things that are most important to us.

Oh, and by the way Happy Valentine’s Day.

First, those of you who have been curiously clicking through my “New blog post:…” tweets would have noticed that I’ve made a real big effort string together at very least a post a day (You’re reading my eleventh consecutive post, thank you for asking). Blogging daily has been my little way of intentionally producing something with latent time that I have, as opposed to mindlessly consuming.

Second, my dear wife (upon my request) bought me a Kindle DX for my impending birthday. If you’re not already aware, the Kindle is representational of a whole new class of, what I’d like to coin, hyper-consumption computing (HCC) devices. In my own opinionated, un-peer reviewed definition, these devices are design with only to serve a single purpose – making the consumption of information as frictionless and pleasurable as possible.

Why it is in every device makers’ interests to excel at such a goal is a topic for another day, but the bottom-line is, such devices, if not engaged with active intention, can very easily and quickly dull the producer in each of us.

Yes, it dulls the producer in you.

Allow me to expand on the concept of producing something. Going out on a photo shoot is producing, browsing through endless Flickr streams is consuming. Baking a cake is producing. Reading food blogs is consuming. Going out on a bike ride is producing, watching Le Tour on television is consuming. Learning a new chord progression is producing, watching YouTube videos of Super Mario covers is consuming. Pulling out a few tools and tightening up your creaky chair is producing, wandering around Ikea is consuming. Assembling Ikea furniture is gray, but you get the idea.

I think sharpening and polishing that producer edge is really important for the following reasons.

1. Producing completes a learning process. One reaps the full benefits of learning when one is forced to reproduce that body of knowledge. For example, when I had to write up a half-semester syllabus for the Interactive Media subject for the Bachelor of Multimedia program at RMIT, it was the hardest thing, but it was also the best educational experience I ever had on the subject.

2. Production is a sign of life (in the broadest, most generalised sense of the word). Live trees produce fruit; wooden shelves don’t. Polar bears produce young; not so, fur rugs. Players on the court tear muscles, grow stronger, nimbler, livelier; spectators, not so much, Et cetera.

3. The act of producing brings with itself the very therapeutic effect of a flow. Where stuffy corners of one’s life is pushed out, the vacuum inevitably draws freshness in – basic laws of thermodynamics. Or for the more poetic, Jordan River vs Dead Sea.

So the next time, right before you engage in an activity, make a mental note:

producing or consuming?

Hopefully, you’ll be all the richer for it, and the people around you should be so lucky to share in goodness of your produce.