Heh, thinking of retirement plans these days. What to do then, after 40 years of full time employment?

It hits you. What is all the 20 years of schooling compared to twice that amount of time after that. Heh, you can fail an assignment or a test. If it is required to pass a hurdle, just do it again. At work, things are less forgiving and have more dire consequences. Break something too badly, and you’re likely to get the boot. Like my brother said, ‘Everyday is an exam day’. Ouch.

Was thinking of starting a coffee shop. Something that serves breakfast around 8am-ish, doing lunch up until 3pm, then I close for the day. It can be a viable business for six days of the week, closing on Sundays. Heh, there is the allure of having an industrial grade coffee machine at your disposal and you’d practically have free coffee each morning and afternoons before you close shop.

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Find that I’m good at being a computer diagnostician. Tell me the problem online, over the phone, give a little elaboration after checking out some details and I’m usually able to recommend a solution for the problem (if not, at least the very cause of the problem). I’ve been giving answers to computer issues over the last few days, and even if I haven’t done it for a while, prior experience makes it easy for me.

There was a time I could sit in front of a computer all day long and not figure out what’s wrong with it. However, having experienced so many hardware and software failures over the last few years, my brain has sort of compiled a database of symptoms and probable fixes for it. Heh, sometimes it feels good to be useful.

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Starting to learn and pick out things on a whole. If something sparks enough interest in me, there is always some methodological way to do or explain it. Sometimes you go with your gut feelings and experience more than the actual logic of how things are done. Heh, my favourite way has always been reverse engineering. Take the original sample and see what makes it tick. After that you emulate the process by going through a set step of processes. When I start getting bored of repetition, that’s when I rethink the process and see if there are any shortcut ways about it.

I recall the incessant grilling of students in primary school on maths questions (they do that to you in Chinese schools). We had to memorise our times tables, do the same maths questions over and over. Heh, I was too young then to understand the mechanics of it all, but practice really makes perfect.

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