05 July 2017
Finally got the mood to exercise. First session of P90X3 got my core and limbs trembling. Had to sit down to shower and even now my abdomen trembles when I lean forward to type without resting my elbows on the desk. The mug of water in my hand is reminiscent of a certain scene in the first Jurassic Park movie.
The 7th will be an uncomfortable day.
06 July 2017
As expected, my thighs and abs are aching. Surprisingly not my arms except for my upper shoulders, probably because I'm very cautious with them not to strain them too hard since they need energy to brace for any difficult positions that may dislocate my shoulders. After all, I've dislocated one that one time while I was rushing a pushup to stand up near the end of a P90X session, and I don't really know how it happened.
07 July 2017
Can feel it. Since last night, I've been feeling warmer than before, exactly how I used to feel until the last few months. Even 25 degrees C is a little too warm for me, and I know that because of the thermometer-cum-hygrometer on my desk. It's also got a clock but judging from the dried stain inside after opening it, the battery probably got so old it leaked, so now replacing the battery doesn't work, ergo no clock.
Anyway my guess is my metabolic rate has been raised and I'm burning more energy even when I'm doing nothing.
Life is slightly more uncomfortable now though, feeling warmer constantly in a humid tropical climate. Makes me miss the cold. Maybe I should consider Canada instead of NZ for the big trip.
Just heard of Vicuña, an animal that cannot be reared and bred commercially. An adult produces roughly a quarter kilo of wool, and harvesting it involves a bunch of villagers encircling an animal and slowly approaching it till they're close enough to shear it. Once upon a time, they used to hunt and kill the animal for it instead, but this stopped when the animal almost got extinct, recovering in numbers only during recent decades.
The cheapest pure authentic vicuña wool product is 4000USD for a scarf, and an off-the-rack jacket typically belongs in the lower five-digit range, also USD, while any jacket under 15k should be viewed with suspicion. In other words, a pure vicuña sports coat, off-the-rack and not even tailored/bespoke, from Italy can cost as much as a 2-week cruise on Silversea. You know, the cruise line with the 24/7 butler service and free flow minibar in every room.
Basically, if you're wondering why it's so damn ridiculously expensive other than its rarity, the vicuña wool is said to make cashmere feel like straw. Or something like that. This is all hearsay; I wouldn't know - I haven't even seen the wool in reality before.
I'm interested because this is related to my line, but this is akin to a physics teacher reading about the inner workings of SpaceX rockets: I know how awesome it is but this stuff is way beyond anything I'll ever work with in my lifetime. However, knowing what real cashmere feels like, I can only imagine that putting on pure vicuña wool apparel should feel like wearing a piece of cloud.
Finally, "ñ" is Alt + 0241.
08 July 2017
Pretty good deal from Watsons for 48 pieces of 650ml dehumidifiers at $60, or S$1.25 per piece. In comparison, the so-called budget shops sell these at $2 each.
Also bought a 5mm-thick yoga mat at S$20 through their purchase-with-purchase promo. Definitely not the cheapest I've seen but seems to be worth the money because not only is it as thick as our last one and feels harder, it also has a black-coloured bottom half that clearly has a better grip than the usual yoga mat material. This last bit is particularly good as the last one has been slipping too easily when I have my hands or feet on the grounnd while the other is on the mat in the downward dog pose. I'm tall enough that it's sometimes too much trouble to carefully rest all four limbs on the edges of the mat. Anyway hopefully it actually has a good grip.
This dude is eating 70-year-old combat ration. 72 years, to be exact.
That beef bouillon smelled like cheese but still made edible beef soup. Honestly though, if I were a soldier surviving on that, I would have simply swallowed it like a pill. Maybe crush it a little if it was too big, but there was almost no chance I would savour it slowly as a soup, not in the situations this packet was meant for.
The coffee was as if it doesn't have an expiry date! Obviously I wouldn't try any instant coffee packet that was left lying around on its own for 70 years, but if it was sealed in its packaging like all instant coffee packets are nowadays and then further sealed in a watertight can like that one, yes I can believe it can last as long as the can stays sealed. The sugar was expected, given how we use sugar to preserve dehydrated fruits.
The chocolate bar (2oz = 57g) surprised me though. Does it even contain dairy? Maybe a tiny bit at most, which would explain the off-smell.
Basically proves that you shouldn't just throw food away solely because it's past its expiry date, especially for canned food. I usually judge by feel and then by sight followed by smell to gauge if food is edible, and there have been instances when food went bad before its expiry date.
Anyway his videos are really interesting since I've been eating a lot of Singaporean combat rations in the last several years and I do have some interest in history.
09 July 2017
Wow... my shoulders are still so weak from yesterday's The Challenge session that I can barely do a lot of actions, including anything that involves raising my arms above my shoulders. Even grinding my coffee beans was slightly more agonising than usual.
This is new. I've never needed more than a night to recover. At most there is an ache but not weakness by the second day.
12 July 2017
No, massages don't seem to work on me. Lots of pain followed by lots of throbbing pain, but all my aches remain, just like my past experiences with massages.
15 July 2017
Sometimes I wonder why some people love their country. Patriotism is a celebrated trait now but different things were celebrated in different places in different parts of human history that may seem strange, or worse, to people now.
Back let's not get side-tracked. Why are people patriotic? I know its benefits to a society, but people are not that rational when it comes to feelings, and that's where the question is aimed towards.
So the fundamental question to me, at the moment, is: do they love their country for what it is or the idea of their country?
Because the latter must be really well-informed and probably very liberal. To love a country for what it is, one has to embrace everything in it, including the stuff that people don't really want to think about. For example, in my country, do all patriots really understand and accept legalized gambling, the death penalty, the Raffles bubble in the upper echelons of our society, the fact that pawn shops are prospering to the point of having IPOs, and various parts of our history not taught in schools?
Or what about the meritocracy that once existed? Why does it feel like meritocracy is only present between the lower and middle class? The only meritocracy that goes above that level seems to only apply to the merits of a person's networks.
Moreover, most of us don't know that many people. In fact, from the time we start working, most of us seem to keep our social circles at the status quo or smaller. In other words, we gradually insulate ourselves from the rest of our countrymen.
In that case, isn't the most comprehensive image of our country in our minds based on the media and the same friends we have had for a very long time? And the people we meet in our daily lives, of course.
Does it make sense to say that we don't actually love the country, but the piece of the country we interact with?
21 July 2017
Started with 1580MYR, spent another 150MYR on a pair of jeans, came back with 6800MYR.
Adding in the expenses $12 for the ride home, converting it to 36MYR, rounding it to 40MYR, further rounding the difference to the nearest 100, that makes a net gain of about 5000MYR.
All thanks to the Texas Holdem at Genting's SkyCasino, with the 5% jackpot coming from my 7-card royal flush (royal flush formed from my 2 cards and at the 5th community card) that amount to just over 5000 MYR.
This isn't a huge number, but it's still good to win a bit of money overall.
The process of handling even just the fraction of the jackpot is that they had to go through the entire deck of cards extremely thoroughly (it seems they have a set of SOP for that) like checking every single card in the deck multiple times by multiple supervisors who were called in just for that, made calls to some mysterious people I'll never know about, and took down my particulars and even took scans of my passport.
To top it all off, after everything was done and the dealer was changed after that one single game we played with her (it was my first round at the table), I scored another triple aces (pair aces in hand, plus an ace among the community cards) in the second game.
The story ended at that point when the dealer was instructed by a supervisor to raise the minimum bet from 25MYR to 100MYR, causing all players to leave. When I returned after cashing in the chips, only one guy was playing at that table, still requiring a minimum bet of 100MYR.
He had taken the seat I vacated.
25 July 2017
The bak kut teh 肉骨茶 and salted chicken 盐焗鸡 in KL really is awesome but it's because they really love their 当归 （female ginseng) so they put a little of that in both dishes. The original salted chicken is really just salt and chicken, with spring onion as garnish when serving, so what we had was a Malaysian variant of the dish.
26 July 2017
Weight hasn't gone down but fitness is definitely improving.
Some girl is apparently jealous to some extent about me being attached with Van. To be fair, I did say that I would date her, but that was a few days before I met Van and had had a few drinks. In Van's case, I didn't just say I would date her, I simply did it. Sober.
She seemed like a friend to the both of us and we did occasionally confide in her in the past, but now that I know that she's been saying all kinds of nonsense about Van behind her back really made me realize I'd inadvertently escaped a major shithole there. Best part was that she told another girl I was "supposed to date her". Made my day. Well, if a girl has been single for a very long time despite having at least one really persistent fan (read: stalker) and a rather significant number of guys expressing interest in her openly online over the years, there have to be at least a few good reasons behind her relationship status.
13 Aug 2017
So a question: why didn't the British leave Hong Kong after WW2 the way they did in Malaya and Singapore?
I've read about that little part of the history of Singapore and Malaya, and it happened because not only of the corruption ingrained into the local society by the desperation caused by the Japanese Occupation, but also because the British raised taxes dramatically without any effort in rebuilding the infrastructure here.
What happened in Hong Kong back then?
23 Aug 2017
Well, weight's gone down finally after switching to a pseudo-vegetarian diet for over a week. Last night's dinner was the most extreme with half a kg of jackfruit (weighed with seeds) and a whole brocolli, boiled (and cut before boiling, of course).
Today I'm 98.3kg before breakfast and passing motion, as compared to below 101kg before restarting P90X3 after returning from San Francisco. There was no significant weight loss until about 2 weeks ago when I began eating more vegetables, fruits and rolled oats, but this week, I notice that I feel weaker but not tired, as in I don't feel sleepy.
Somehow I've been feeling the craving for meat less. Good I guess, but it looks like I need to put more meat back in my diet.
24 Aug 2017
No more updates from AJ Hackett after notifying me via email that I've won bids in all 3 categories of Giant Swing, Skywalk and Bungy. Seems that they have also removed a few bidders above me in Bungy because the last time I checked, a few minutes after the end of the bidding period, I was a few positions lower than the one they told me I'm in.
Not #1 of course, someone went mad and made a bid of over S$6000 just for the #1 Bungy spot IIRC.
Also thought about the HK issue. I think it began with the self-consoling thought that everything was going to be ok in a century when they would be returned to China. Then as they got wealthier than their neighbours over the decades, the income gap between the locals and the British never became a major issue, because no matter how bad it was, they could just speak to any number of refugees coming in illegally from China and knew it could have been a lot worse. This was probably what happened after WW2. But how did they do better than the people of mainland China?
So I checked Wikipedia and apparently lots of people from the ROC went there as refugees during the civil war. That was during the time when the ROC was losing everything beyond Taiwan. Most of these were skilled workers, and they were followed by businessmen from Shanghai and Guangzhou escaping persecution in China later. That was the perfect mix that led to Hong Kong becoming the first of the Four Asian Tigers in the 50s.
