Realised I’ve not updated my “now” status in a long, long while.

Right now, geographically, I’m in Penang, the island where I was born. My ancestors have been here for more than a century. Sometimes I feel that the island calls to my blood – at the risk of sounding dramatic.

At this exact moment, I’m typing this at a quiet bookstore cafe where they serve Chinese tea and Chinese books.

A most zen place to work.

What I’m learning

I feel behind in terms of AI, but I’m taking Anthropic’s Claude Code In Action course. I may be learning Clawbot from a friend, but let’s see how it goes – I think it’s overkill for a normie like me and I don’t feel like I have many use cases for it as I like to be in control of my writing most of the time.

What I’m writing

I’m quite behind with my personal writing as work has been really intense lately. I tend to write in bulk and spurts. I recently cleared about a dozen reviews for my Chinese drama blog, Dramatea. Speaking of which, I’ve been at it for two years. It’s about time I make it official, bite the bullet and buy a domain name for it.

Likewise for this website, I have a huge stockpile to clear and schedule for the blog.

I’m trying to implement a more Posse vs Pesos approach to this blog. It’s just too easy to digital sharecrop for platforms because they make it so very easy. The worse part of it is when I PESOS, I often forget to return the content back to my website where it should rightfully belong.

I’m also sharing more links via my linkblog section, at least twice a month. I feel that with AI on the ascent and search becoming murkier than ever, surfacing only the select who know what to do to get their content seen by LLMs, human recommendations are more important ever.

Where I am, career-wise

Still at my company, ServiceRocket. Designing Content Strategy and writing about AI, cloud migrations, enterprise planning and systems. As a planning nerd, I find it fascinating, but I do miss working directly with product teams.

Habits I’m trying to form

• Strength training is more important now at my age, so I’m doing 2x bodyweight exercises per week. I don’t really like to rely on gyms; I just prefer the outdoors.
• In the same vein, I’ve been taking more walks in the park these days and thankful that I live very near one.
• Walking after meals is super healthy for you and I’m trying to implement that for every meal, especially dinner time, if possible.

News that is taking my bandwidth now

Try as I might, I find it difficult to tear my eyes away from the US-Israel-Iran war. I just find it difficult to comprehend the level of lawlessness, barbarity, injustice I’m forced to read about daily. The “heroic” nation of the US is no longer heroic in my eyes. (Though to be honest, it has been decades since it appeared that way to me.)

I used to think of the US as a flawed democracy, but now I can’t help but think of it as a fallen democracy, a rogue state.

I’m refraining, to the best of my ability, from writing about it, however. The world doesn’t need more rants about the war. I also don’t like attracting too much unnecessary attention to myself.