Just feeling like blogging a lot these days.

If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.
- Tallulah Bankhead

I read that quote a couple of days ago and absolutely believe in that statement. I don’t mind making mistakes and suffering from it. At least having suffered from the humiliation and knowing you were wrong, you’d at least pick yourself up and do the right thing in the future. It also shows you have the guts to make mistakes and own up to it. I don’t regret anything I have done (or at least I try not to), but I sometimes wonder what it’d be like to go back into the past and do things differently. Heh, it’s not like computer programs where you have a convenient Undo button to experiment with stuff and fix it up later on. Life’s not like that, and it affects me in making me more cautious of decisions.

I used to make decisions knowing of the consequences of my actions. There has always been a simple formula, to do the thing that caused the least damage or harm to myself and other people. It didn’t matter if that meant reducing all the benefits that came with taking a risk on something that might have had a better outcome. It’s called gambling in a sense, but these days, I’m thinking of it more along the lines of calculated risk. Heh.

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Heh, looking at my room now. There’s a Playstation 2 sitting in the corner somewhere (friend just returned it). Have a 24″ LCD monitor that has the TV input jack so I can actually plug my PS2 (technically half mine) in. Used to have it plugged to the small TV in the living room and recalled freezing my butt off playing Final Fantasy X during winter. I’d have frozen toes and fingers, but I was so engrossed in the game I wouldn’t mind it at all. Friend joked to me to just drag the TV into my room and play in the comfort of my own bed. I could actually do that now, but life has gone pass just vegetating in front of a screen playing games.

Relating back to making mistakes, these days there is a stronger sense of responsibility towards things. I wonder, what happened to that kid in me who seemed so carefree? Contrary to the exterior, that was a time when I worried about the future, about my social life, about purpose etc. These days, there seems to be a vague plan for everything and one needs to be disciplined enough to see things through. Things seemed shaped more or less. No longer could I crash and make up for lost sleep later. Weekdays for work you have to have enough sleep, enough food to keep you going through the day. Weekends you just try to do as much fun stuff as possible until you realise another week has gone.

Working life gives you the capacity to afford all those thrills in life. However, with the new found financial independence, also comes with it the shackles of financial responsibility. Not that it sounds that bad, but I keep reminding myself of the story of the ants who worked hard collecting food in summer while the grasshopper lazed around basking in the sun. You can guess the outcome of that story.

Heh, I do believe the human soul feeds on being needy and wanting everything that we don’t already have. I guess it’s this type of thinking that keeps me grounded in reality and not demanding too much from others. Somehow, it also provides you with the capacity to give instead of receive.

I think.

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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