Crazy kid

[coolohoh]

So this just happened on LINE chat. (Rephrased)

Friend: You are the mods of so many LJ comms
Me: Yeah...
Friend: And you're also working
Me: Oh I'm learning web dev now, so next time I can make my own LJ themes
(Well, at least I'll be able to know exactly what I'm doing when I modify themes)
Friend: And when will you sleep and meet up with friends?
Friend: Vampire?
Me: I don't meet up with friends that much
(I don't have that many RL friends in the first place. And everyone is busy. Like... 2 doctors? A journalist whom we gave up contacting years ago? Ok, one friend just came back from UK after her PhD, but she's busy running around setting everything one might possibly need to do after migrating from another country. [technically she's coming back, but practically it's the same...] Plus, I'm anti-social, and these days, my anti-socialness has reached quite a high level...)
Friend: You are like q (I think q's pet phrase is 'sleep is for the weak'... Or was that someone else hmm...)
Me: I sleep 4-5 hours a day
Friend: You know that you are crazy?


LOLOLOL.

Yup. I very well know that.

And I'm going fucking mental with this boring excuse of a job. Like this whole week I basically accomplished nothing formal work wise. Like nothing. The FIA didn't work properly. Engineer came down yesterday, and today it still wasn't working, the values for ammonia was weird. Then at midnight I got an email from DJI phantom (yes, that shall be the nickname for the new rf - who isn't that new anymore and therefore needs a new nickname) that even the NO2 and NO3 results were wrong. FUCK. And I already tossed the extra diluted samples. FML. Like seriously. Do you really, really need the NO3 results? If it was just NO2 and ammonia I can do without the FIA and we'd have gotten the results like LONG ago. *sigh*

DJI seems to think that FIA is really good but it kinda sucks. It's a crapton of work and I seriously don't think it's any faster than doing things the manual way. Only because of the stupid ammonia solution used in measuring NO3... That made my eyes really dry and basically made me (temporarily) blind. And makes your throat hurt too. If not for that... I wouldn't use the FIA at all...

*shrugs*

Oh wells.

At least I'm listening to a crapton of podcasts at work so I'm not completely wasting my time.

Like I have 49 active podcasts that I subscribe to now. Of varying frequency and length.... Including a lot of weekly and even daily podcasts. And I can listen to all those and even catch up on some back episodes of This week in Microbiology and This week in Parasitism. The episodes starts to build up when I don't do lab or don't listen for a while... But on lab days... Well. I listen to my podcasts at max speed... Overcast has a wonderful variable speed function though, so in reality it's around 2.2 - 2.5x speed. So an hour podcasts finishes in less than 30 mins and so on. In just an afternoon of lab, for say like 4 hours? I can go through over 9 hours worth of podcasts. That's a lot of podcasts that I listen to. And I often listen when commuting too. That's another 2-3 hours of listening a day. Yup... Definitely need a lot of podcasts to keep my mind occupied. These days I can't listen to podcasts at regular speed anymore. Like... Why do they talk so slowly geez! It absolutely puts me to sleep. I don't understand 100% of the hardcore science podcasts, but hearing some terms get repeated over and over, I still learn something. Maybe 30-70% of each podcast, depending on how much attention I'm paying to it, and of course, the subject matter. The rest? The tech stuff and stories? Not a problem man. I understand them fully.

I realise that I'm a person who's easily bored. And well, it's not really a new realization, nor a recent occurrence. I threw myself into gaming starting from secondary school while still doing reasonably well at school, even though our school curriculum and homework was seriously demanding. Like, we'd be doing presentations every other lesson, and then have a few projects and tests all in the same week. And projects like 'build a model of dna packing', and 'build a toy based on the principles or either the motor or the generator'. And you do those stuff from scratch, and do up a report, and maybe a presentation. Like wtf kind of toy are we supposed to build geez? A toy! Using self-made motors or generators! It was hard... But fun times. Of course, I was the chairman of my weiqi club too. And an avid gamer. Utopia, runescape... Neopets probably stuck around for a bit longer before I stopped that. Not before I dabbled in some html on my pet pages though. I think I only started maplestory pretty late. I was a hardcore gamer too. Well, still am? Kinda. It's vainglory for me these days.

And when I say I was playing maple... I was doing plenty of research about all the classes, builds, items... Writing my own guides, being the 'leader' in forums. Even helping hidden-street.com to update the database. I was doing all that crap. All while preparing for my A levels. Heck. I played maple throughout uni. Like in my FYP aka final year project aka undergrad thesis days, it was like 'maple? or do fyp?'. Cos I did a bioinformatics project, and I was already using a mac at that time and doing either required a complete reboot of the system into either mac or windows. And I played for days at a time. (Still got an A for that.)

Yup. So I've always been keeping myself occupied one way or another. After maple, it was Arashi and LJ that stole my attention. Watching Arashi shows and picking up Japanese. Writing fanfics. Doing super detailed bangumi reviews. Later on doing subs, and then managing a ton of lj comms.

Always something to keep me occupied.

And now it's learning web-dev I guess. All because I wanted to start another new website. Well, the website and me wanting to learn programming has been a thing for years already... So it's high time. And since I was at a loss on which programming language to start with, and since I chanced upon this amazing website called 'Freecodecamp', I ended up deciding to do web dev instead. The main tipping point was my own website I guess. I initially wanted to use WP like I did with Nihongo Manabu. But there are some specific ways I'd like my website to look, that I've yet to find in a WP theme. So why not build my own? I initially wanted to get *something*, some form of a website up and running by end of Dec, but with a holiday in China taking up the bulk of my two weeks leave, I don't think I'll be able to make it. Let's see if I can get something up by Jan instead. Oh wells.

Making the content of the site would be as hard a task as designing the site I guess... Esp the parts that involve drawing web comics. Even if it's stick figures. Because boy do I suck at drawing.

We'll see how this new venture goes. If it goes well, I might say goodbye to being a slave to stupid and ungrateful rfs in the lab forever. Be my own boss. Than I don't have to deal with the crappy office and lab politics. (In exchange, I'll probably have to deal with tons of hate comments/mail on the web?)

Like I'm just so sick of this shit. All the stupid rules and policies. And the lack of passion. And I don't think that it's easy to change even with a new workplace... As long as I'm in this country. Why? Because the whole culture here, the government policies, create such an environment.

So, so sick.

I want out.

And perhaps more so than a PhD, programming is my way out. I keep saying I don't know what area to specialise in if I were to do a PhD. I still don't. I like learning about everything and anything. And I have liked computers, been more proficient at it than my peers, since a long time ago. It's about a week into the code camp though so it's still too early to tell how I'd really like it. But so far, it's been fun. It's quite like working in the lab in many ways. You meet obstacles. You can't get something to work. You check back on your code, or recall your steps, and think about what might have gone wrong. You check the error messages. You check the unexpected results. You deduce what went wrong (google and ask around if you must), and then try again. And again. And each time I hit the run button on my code it's like doing a new round of experiments. Only that in programming you typically get your results way, way faster than in science. It's all just an experiment and I like experiments. If you don't know how things work, you try it. Just like if you don't know what a button does in that new equipment software, you hover over it and see what help text appears. And then you click on it. Because what's the worst thing that can happen? You break something in the software and maybe you have to restart the program. That's pretty much it. Why can't people learn to use the software themselves? Why can't they do anything? Arghs. Once again it leads back to how I'm smarter than everyone around me. Not because I'm a genius, but because they are just. Arghs. Low in standard.

All that politics and lousy people management. So many people have come and go. Really dumb management really. Like. I can do so much more sophisticated things than what you're making me do now. You're not even using me at like 50% of my full potential. Pfft. Pathetic. Maybe not even 30%. Oh wells. But I'm not appreciated for my efforts anyway, so I'm not even willing to give you my 100%. Unlike when I was working with unsup. I was like putting in 200% effort. Lol. Now? You're just not worth it. I'm happy to spend my brain power learning something new instead.

So far so good. I'm not completely new to all programming, since I've dabbled in html since a long time ago. Primary school in fact. Making neopets pet pages. And then with my numerous blogs. And even just typing my LJ entries in html mode. Or modifying themes so that they look the way I want. Making IRC chatbots (ok, just modifying them). Playing with IFTTT. Then my short-lived attempted at learning R (well, I did go through about 6 chapters in the book...?) and then putting a basic python code together. And I've always had a touch and go relationship with programming and stuff, so it's not completely new. And I can learn fast when I already have a little inking on the subject matter. And I've had a lot, a lot of informal experiences with coding.

Alrights. That's all for now. Back to writing down notes for all the past challenges I completed over the 5 days of freecodecamping. Yup, I even managed to build two simple webpages at work on wedn too, when the engineer was trying to fix/troubleshoot with the FIA, and DJI didn't give me like ANYTHING to do. I can't be bothered to ask her for jobs anymore too, after all the times she neglected me. She came to find me too, and only asked me to do something like late in the afternoon. Like, didn't it ever occur to you that you should have asked me to do that in the morning? Then you wouldn't have had to do it today. Geez. Oh wells. It was all good. I had fun trying to make my webpages and I revised quite a bit of coding, and learnt a few new tricks too.

Let's see where this crazy kid ends up.

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