Life @ NCP

A week of blessings for me. For others, especially those who have to travel pass the city, this week will be a peril. 21 world leaders come to Sydney to have a VERY BIG meeting. The results: so much chaos, so much publicity and so much fuss for nothing. It is amazing to hear how Bush was sorry about the disruption he caused and yet still decided to go mountain biking in St. Ives to even create more traffic jams. I mean, going on the limo with 20+ motorcade just for a 150m walk from Intercontinental Hotel to Australian leader’s Sydney office is an overkill alright. Seems like he knows his time is going to be up very soon, might as well produce more hatred towards him as much as he can.

I took this pic on Tue night in the city. Can you see the banana skin on top of the bin? It just shows how much plastic bags went to waste (pollution…) just for the big huu-haa 🙁

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no holes on the bin

Going back to my blessing week, I am “working” from home 🙂 I did intend to work from home from Mon to Thu (Fri is a public holiday), but there were so many distraction and work stuff wasn’t as interesting as other things that I could do from home. I did manage to get something out for my manager, but not much. Other things that I do? Read papers for my assignment, which were quite interesting albeit they still put me to sleep after 20 mins of encounters. Set up my wiki, my flickr account, tidied up my blog (more plugins!), and read books – good books.

To say the least, I feel like I have managed to catch up with my uni work and that means a lot of stress taken out from me. I usually have that ongoing worry about things that I haven’t done as I’m afraid of getting bitten by them, but then I still didn’t end up doing anything either. Procrastination rules! 😛

Fantasy book.. I thought I’d try another one just to see what this one is like. I have never fancy fantasy, the story usually gone beyond my head wooosh and I won’t be able to follow. In the past, I stop touching fantasy books, be it The Hobbit or LOTR. Narnia wasn’t bad in the movie though, so maybe I will leave fantasy for the big screen only.

But I managed to get my hands on His Dark Materials trilogy. The three parts are The Golden Compass (or sometime it is called The Northern Light), The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. pyko has been recommending it for a while and as my usual copycat movement for anything that pyko does, I started reading it.

His Dark Materials doesn’t seem to be a children book to me. Just like how Harry Potter doesn’t really go too well for very young children in book 3 onwards (after Dementors start to show themselves), His Dark Materials have complicated background stories about institutions, especially churches around the worlds (ours and other parallel worlds). It peels into detail how each of the boards feed each other in order to survive, including doing inconceivable things and hiding it at the same time. As I was reading it, it was obvious to me that Phillip Pullman is not very religious. I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it, so I will keep it simple and sticking to my general feeling about each book only:

• The Golden Compass: GREAT book, I’d say the trilogy will be better if it ends here. The adventure is on and hot, I couldn’t stop reading it until the very last page of the book. The creation of the ‘other’ world is very detail, full with enchanting, rich fantasy and interesting concepts of soul: according to the book, every human has a daemon. In some other worlds, the daemons are solid and visible. They can talk, be touched, get hurt, etc. In ours, they aren’t but nonetheless it is still there and when you die, your daemon vanished. I fully recommend anyone who hasn’t read it to do so, even if you don’t favour fantasy like me.
• The Subtle Knife: I wouldn’t call it a book 🙁 To me, this one is simply a bridge between the first and the third book. It’s like ‘Oh we know what’ll be the content of two books, everything that are not very interesting, we’ll just chuck it in the middle’. The second one kills of the excitement brought up by the Golden Compass. Even until the end, the excitement level didn’t go as far (in fact, FAR from it) as the first one. I didn’t even realise that it was the ending when I read the end! Thankfully I got the trilogy series, so I was able to start the third one right after my confusion of this book ending. I won’t go through why it is not interesting since I don’t want to spoil the whole story.
• The Amber Spyglass: hell lot better than the previous, but still no comparison to the Golden Compass. What is missing from this one is the causality of the situation. All the story that leads up to this point, seems to be caused by an event happened 300 yrs ago. But what is it? I totally scratched my head when I finished the book (if you know what event caused the whole situation to arise, please tell me if I missed it, I am still hoping that that is the case). Either way, I know it is fantasy so maybe it is my incorrect view to seek for explanation of the background reason.

Nicole Kidman in The Golden Compass

If you want to read more about it, there is a good review on it but beware of spoilers. The movie is coming up for the first part of the book (The Golden Compass). Go and watch it in the movie as it will be very GOOD! (Nicole Kidman as Mrs. Coulter ((picture from http://www.randomhouse.com/images/dyn/cover/?source=9780375847226&height=300&maxwidth=170)) ) 😀

every atom of you and every atom of me ~ Lyra Silvertongue

Today is father’s day, of Australia that is. Apparently the date for father’s day varies from country to country. The most celebrated date is third Sunday in June. That’s for US, UK, Singapore, India, Malaysia (I assume Indo too), Japan, etc ((from Wikipedia)). The Thais celebrate it on Dec 05. I guess depending on what nationality you are, you’ll celebrate it on whatever day your country does it.

For us, we had a nice seafood lunch, my aunt cook a LOT of seafood, chilli / tomato crab (she wanted to make it a pure chilli crab but then steffie and uncle wazza wouldn’t be able to eat it 🙁 ). Muscle and avocado salad were also there, including risotto with eggs (yummy half boiled eggs that is). This is one of the pic I took today, looks delicious eh? 😛

nice crab

After that big lunch, we had prawns (more seafood!) for dinner, it was a seafoody father’s day indeed…

_ Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. ~Confucius_

I see my life is like in a stage of clay waiting to be molded. The clay has been put together in one place ready to be used, but I am not sure what shape I should mould it into. My academic study will finish next year with my graduation. Without a doubt, that and my industrial trainings will ensure that I can get a job after that.

There are many things that I want from a job. My highest priority: it has to be enjoyable.

I remember having to go through the subject with the worst lecturer in my life (that bastard). It was just too hard for me, no motivation whatsoever 🙁 so: zero enjoyment. I admit that it was not just his fault, it is mine too for not trying harder. I’ve learned my lesson: I will do anything to avoid that situation again. So if the basis of the job is not conducive enough to enjoyment, forget it.

I find another aspect of enjoying a job lies with the people I work with. I want it to have work colleagues like my life-long friends. People always says two brains are better than one – I’ll simplify: more brains are always better. That is why I think motivation to collaborate is the most important thing to make multiple minds work together as a giant clock. Just like grid computing can only be a ‘supercomputer’ when all the interfaces are specified properly within each cluster.

I would not be able to go through my uni achieving what I have done so far without pyko and Chii. I found many common grounds with them, thus walking (3 of us) together makes me feel a lot stronger than standing by myself. Sharing is caring, so what can be a better idea than working with them as work colleagues? 😀

Challenging work will be another one I want from a job. At this point in time, I honestly don’t know what I want to do, but I DO know what I do NOT want to do. Before in my first industrial training, I will be happy to do anything that I can help other people with, bearing in mind that it has to be useful (not just a shitty job they gave me just because they don’t have anything to do). Now though, things are a bit different. Life is too short to be spent on doing crappy job.

I’ll give you one example I thought of, people who has to write technological code of conduct for the Bank; The code of conduct I meant is basically the piece of paper that I have to sign when I got employed. The one that outlines that ’employee cannot open personal email, cannot use the Internet for anything else than the work supposed to be conducted’, blah blah blah… It is obvious to me that the piece of work is very important, especially to set the benchmark of security for the Bank. However I cannot set myself to work on it (and no one ask me either, phew), simply because it is there just to cover other people’s arse when bad things happen. It is boring, shitty job alright.

The last thing is money. Even though money cannot buy happiness, not having enough money will definitely make my life a lot harder. Most probably I won’t be able to get the kind of lifestyle I want, if I don’t have enough funds to keep me going. A good job is a job that pays off fairly. What kind of job will allow me to get enough money to live, without sacrificing the quality of the job measured by the previous two priorities?

I think this is the $1,000,000 question. And I hope I will be able to answer that as soon as possible.

(also known as compulsive skin picking or CSP) is an obsessive compulsive disorder characterized by the repeated urge to pick at one’s own skin, often to the extent that damage is caused. ~ Wikipedia

Just today I realised that I am not able to stop my skin picking behaviour for a long time. I could not remember when I started it, but I did remember doing it from as early as year 4 in primary school. Today was particularly bad, I kept on chewing my fingers’ skin until they started to swell and I couldn’t make myself to stop. I was consciously hiding my chewing from others at the office so I could unconsciously eat more skin =S yaiks…

Googling ‘skin picking’ gives me a better feeling that 1. I am not alone, there are lots of people who are doing it as well; 2. I am a light skin picker: I only pick my fingers, no other place (actually, that’s not technically correct if I include my toes >.<). But the extend to what these people are doing are quite worrying. They pick not just fingers, but face, back, scalp, hands, feet, and arms (~ Wikipedia), and other parts that are not disclosed.

damn I tried to pick my skin again just then

Self-motivation seems to be the best (and the cheapest) cure. Stef said it may be a good idea to make my fingers bitter to taste so it will remind me to stop biting when I am unconsciously doing it. It won’t stop the picking, but it will definitely help a fair bit. I am not sure what to put though, any ideas?