April, 2013 - cushtie.com - Page 3

Month: April 2013

  • Worried by a sign

    There’s a sign at Outram Park MTR that says “This station is protected by about 40 security cameras”. That strikes me as unnecessarily vague. Singapore is somewhere that you feel people are diligent about following rules and doing things correctly, not just installing security cameras at random and failing to remember how many you have.

  • This little piggy…

    I was trying to impress my wife the other day by telling her about adjectives related to animals. There’s ovine, for sheep, and bovine, for cattle, and ursine, for bears, and avian, for birds, and equine, for horses. And, of course, porcine, for pigs. “Porcine?” my wife asked, incredulous. “That’s ridiculous!”

  • Seeking the wrong goal

    “I don’t know, it feels like my life is devoid of purpose.” “Isn’t there anything you could do that would make a difference to the world?” “Well… I could take up making nuclear bombs like my brother.” “I don’t want to live in the middle of nowhere in Sweden!” “Don’t worry, we could live in […]

  • Sulking and coding don’t mix

    I had an unsuccessful hour of trying to teach myself R today. I’m trying to build a tool to scrape information out of Twitter and then do clever things with it, but sadly it’s not working. What’s more frustrating is that it used to work. Then I upgraded.

  • Recovery

    I meant to run a race today, but like a fool I stayed up until 2 this morning watching The Shield, a violent US cop series. That removed any chance of getting up in time for a 6:30 start, which meant I stayed in bed until almost 11 this morning, only rising in order to […]

  • Consequences

    Predictably enough, today was an utter write-off; I spent the morning nauseous and crapulent. I couldn’t face food or water until mid-afternoon, and only felt like a human being in the evening. And then the weekend musical celebration of something or other started up.

  • Overindulged

    After work, we went for a quiet drink: it had been a long week with much to do, and it was good to ease gently into the weekend. Four bucket-sized glasses of Hoegaarden later, things were going a bit south. If we’d stopped then, instead of starting in on the wine, things might have been […]

  • Possibly genius, probably a terrible idea

    I know what to do – let’s just sue the government!

  • Sick of returning to vomit

    I’m coming down with a cold, which is a ridiculous thing to happen in a tropical country. I have muscular pains in my legs, my head aches and my voice is deterioating into a whisper. I’ve taken vitamin C, paracetamol and chocolate and still I feel quite, quite grotty.

  • Settlers

    Near my office is a cafe called Settlers; it’s in a row of shops and bars that starts with a vaguely lacklustre bar and ends with one of those karaoke joints where there are no windows and you have a terrible (but possibly unjustified) sense of foreboding when you walk past. Having said that, Settlers […]