Thursday, 27/11/10
11.20pm: I’m in the hotel. My dad hasn’t slept since 3am. He’s lying on the bed now, but a minute ago, he suddenly woke up, looked at me, told me to “look at the business aspect of the house”, mumbled a bit, then explained that it was for “making sure… minimum wage”. Then he fell back asleep. I am still quite puzzled by his advice, but I will never forget his words of wisdom.
11.22pm: I have no internet. This is a diary I shall be typing, hopefully regularly, and then uploading to my blog whenever I am fortunate enough to get internet access.
11.29pm: Always be prepared. No internet for 15 days? No worries. Just be prepared. Make sure to prepare everything you need using everything you have. For me, that means a lot of things can be done to waste the boring hours away:
- iPhone. Download apps. Tons of apps. I have 131 apps. 71 of them are games. Many, many hours can be spent here. One important app is VLC player.
- Laptop (Macbook). Have lots of stuff. Games: Plenty of offline, single-player games which I haven’t touched yet. Worse case scenario: Civilisation IV. That should net me a couple of hundred of hours of wasted time. Also, videos. I have Dexter, Firefly and Mad Men, Seasons 1,1 and 1, to watch. Transfer them to VLC Player on the iPhone, and I can watch them anywhere. There’s another 20-30 hours.
- Photos. Have lots of photos, and be quite OCD about arranging them. I have nice big folder called “Unsorted” with lots of holiday photos. Generally, I perform the following process on my photos: Look through every photo. Delete any non-unique photo or boring photo. Adjust contrast and brightness (only) of every remaining photo. Save photo set at full resolution and compress the set. Copy set over to hard drive. Take photo set and reduce size to a maximum of 1500×1000 pixels for each photo. Save resized photos to iPhoto. Repeat for remaining photos. As of now: I have 5 gigs of photos to “process”. About 4-5 hours down the drain.
- Homework. … Actually nevermind, this won’t take up much time at all.
- New house. I have at least 6-7 cardboard boxes worth of stuff to move and arrange soon. This will probably never finish and I will still be unpacking things 3 months from now.
- Books. Yet to read: Revolutionary Road, To Kill A Mockingbird, Catch-22. To re-read (in case of Cambridge interview): A Very Short Introduction to Mathematics, The Pleasure of Counting.
There’s actually plenty more stuff, but it’s 11.45pm and I need to wake up at around 6am. Adios.
11.59pm: Ok, I was going to sleep. my dad woke up again, asked me what time it was, then lectured me about the importance of efficiency in business, used an analogy by comparing it to finding out about a movie (make sure there’s a good writer, etc.) then talking about how you must research a store). Then he closed his eyes and I asked him if he wasted to bathe. He said, “No,” and I said, “Good, Go to sleep.”