This quarter felt particularly tough for me, for various reasons. I remember being tasked as a 16-year old back in middle school to, for a philosophy class, write an essay on the meaning of life. I don’t remember the content of that essay particularly well; I remember that I took an existentialist approach to the problem. Essentially, it is up to oneself to create some semblance of meaning. I think I found the quarter more draining than normal because I was confronted with situations that made me re-evaluate some of the underlying principles I use to guide my decisions.
I’m still on the AtlasDB team. The transactions2 project I’ve been driving has finally been (mostly) completed. It has been almost nine months since this started, and it’s the largest and probably the most difficult project I’ve done professionally. I see quite a few parallels with MCMAS-Dynamic (though transactions2 is probably theoretically easier but more difficult in terms of implementation). There’s always a bit of burnout after launching these large projects, perhaps because of the substantial time and effort invested in them.
Looking forward, the lead stuff now means that I’m helping with scoping and guiding work on pretty much all the major things the team is doing – which also means that for a change I’m not actually directly leading an individual project. I’ve also continued to interview and (I hope) further refine my skills – I like the debugging facet and have kept plugging away at it.
I normally write a healthy section on finance, but it hasn’t featured as prominently this quarter. I normally update my tracker spreadsheets twice a month, on the 10th and 25th, but I missed the 10th June update completely. It’s perhaps a reflection on the importance of different things; as much as I would like to champion financial responsibility or support the FIRE movement, there are many more important things once one’s affairs are mostly in order. This was a pretty normal quarter in terms of saving and spending – there were many things that felt luxurious as I holidayed in Belgium and Japan, but a good chunk of that was prepaid in Q1. Investments seemed to pretty steadily push their way higher up the charts (I’m up a few percentage points); this is probably in part due to a fall in Sterling, though.
One thing that got more serious for me this quarter was learning German – or, as I should say, Ich lerne jetzt Deutsch. It’s a privilege to take lessons at Palantir and the instructor is excellent; besides that, I’ve also been using Lingvist (a flash-card app) to expand my vocabulary. I’ve found the grammar to be quite challenging; the myriad ways in which nouns and adjectives get declined is not something my past experience with English or Mandarin helps with very much. I often use strange mnemonics to keep track of noun gender (such as little Bobby Tables for der Tisch, a Brutalist town centre for das Zentrum, and Minnie Mouse for die Maus). Ich habe leider keine Konfidenz auf Deutsch zu schreiben – that is, I unfortunately don’t have the confidence to write in German (beyond simple phrases and isolated statements).
I travelled quite a bit this quarter, balanced between work and leisure. I visited Boston for the Palantir puzzlehunt. I also visited Singapore for Daniel’s wedding, and Brussels and Tokyo for holidays. It can be quite expensive, but I’ve been finding I need a bit more relief from the pressures of work and general administration than normal. I enjoyed these trips, to some extent in spite of very packed schedules. The Brussels and Japan trips were mainly food-focused (though the Musical Instruments Museum and Sankei-en Garden, respectively, were also standouts; I think we spent about two or three hours in each of these places, but if I was on my own I could imagine spending the whole day there). Satou Steakhouse (teppanyaki), Ginza Tamai (a restaurant specialising in sea eels, or anago) and even the somewhat more humble Toriyoshi (grilled chicken skewers or yakitori, and fried chicken or karaage) were all excellent. I’d like to go back, schedule allowing; I had a really good time.
This quarter also features a fairly large number of bank holidays in the UK, meaning that I had a number of three-day weekends (and four, in the case of Easter). I’ve started to take more interest in enjoying these extended holidays by trying to do different things (as opposed to focusing on reading, logic puzzles or things along those lines). It seems like I end up going on longer walks, and staring at coffee cups in cafes; past me would have decried this as a waste of money – and while I intellectually can’t deny that it is frivolous, I do still enjoy this.
In terms of logic puzzles, the WPF Sudoku and Puzzle GPs are almost over. The seventh round of the Sudoku GP ended last week, and it felt absolutely brutal (I scraped 325 points and a 98/414 rank). It wasn’t my worst round (that was the fourth round), but in round 4 I made steady progress while breaking a few puzzles while this time I struggled to tackle the puzzles at all. I had two good rounds in between (round 5: 51/502; round 6: 57/476). I had two decent rounds for the Puzzle GP – I’d say I’m weaker there, and I ranked a reasonable 90/384 in round 4 and 83/383 in round 5; conversely, round 6 was an absolute mess for me though and I ranked 207/349, which is my first sub-median score in a good while!
I played a lot of Slay the Spire in Q1 but this slowed down; in fact I haven’t spent very much time at all on computer games this quarter. I didn’t play very much in the way of board games as well, though I distinctly remember a Pictionary session where I managed to guess CURRY off a bunch of lambda expressions, and a few Codenames Duet clues – an AIRBASE, 3 clue for MESS, FLAG and APRON which landed perfectly, and a game which went wrong when I tried to be smart and gave a STEEL, 5 clue for a bunch of vaguely metal-related words not noticing that BEAM was an assassin – or rather, noticing that it was there, but having my mind filled with images of laser or wireless signal beams.
Musically I’m not sure where things were going this quarter. I did listen to more instrumental pieces. A good number of these were piano-focused, both classical (like Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2) and relatively modern (like Rush A and other entries in that series). Some of these also come from video games (like Fantastic Light, Ancient Flowers from the Touhou series). A common theme here might be speed – many of these pieces are very fast. Perhaps I find music to be an outlet for dissatisfaction when things are not going quickly enough.
On the flight back to Singapore, in between rounds of Tetris I listened to Calum Scott’s debut album Only Human. I think I recognised his name from his Dancing On My Own cover, though I really don’t watch much TV or listen to the radio so I didn’t know what kind of music he produced. It was mostly very listenable, though a bit on the heavier side (I guess in my opinion at least this fits his voice much better, though).
I particularly enjoyed three of the tracks on the album, though I think only one of them can reasonably qualify for my song of the quarter. The opener If Our Love Is Wrong is well put together, though more specific to Scott’s situation; the closer Not Dark Yet (a Bob Dylan cover) works well but is a bit too dark for me to enjoy – which is probably the point. My winner is the much more straightforward You Are The Reason; it’s a clean and well-executed piano ballad that seems to carry a certain gravitas. The line in the chorus about fixing what one has broken also appeals to me; I think if I look back at the songs I’ve chosen, failure and subsequent correction is a pretty common theme (e.g. Starting Over, These Days, Back from the Edge). Scott’s vocal line does get pretty difficult to follow, but it makes sense given the subject matter.
