It's kind of unbelievable that this is the first time I'm updating this in
over a year, but that's just how personal websites go sometimes. I'm about
9 months into my trainee programme at Cathay Pacific.
Work is really busy, and I'm lucky to be on some great teams so far.
I like doing AWS troubleshooting stuff (like going through
CloudTrail) and writing CDK code for my current rotation, but I also liked
keeping really up to date with security stuff and looking through
all the pentesting assessments during my previous rotation.
The NBA playoffs are insane this year. I thought nothing could
beat the 2025 Pacers but the Spurs' WCF Game 1 win against OKC
was nothing short of historical. Part of me will always hate Wemby for
beating the Timberwolves, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend?
Currently Reading:
Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco - a very fun collection
of Eco's newspaper columns in the 60s and 70s. I haven't read that much of
Eco but I did read and appreciate
Ur-Fascism.
I picked this book up for 50 HKD
at the bookstore Book Punch in Prince Edward, which is a really fantastic
community space and I want to give them all my money.
The Meek One by Dostoevsky - pretty good short story
Normal People by Sally Rooney - I have a lot of thoughts about this
book but it just boils down to me thinking, 'this is very mid'. I'm not
even mad about the 'controversial' parts and I don't care at all that Sally
Rooney is a Marxist, I just thought that some things felt shoehorned in
and the time-jump format was weak and distracting. The tell-not-show approach
was also not my style. Protagonists' internal monologues on things like 'culture as
class performance' seemed unsubtly like authorial asides, which took away
from their impact. It's like Rooney doesn't trust her readers to understand
that this book is actually about class divides, so she has to overtly
say 'there are conflicts due to class divides going on here', just
like how she doesn't trust us to understand that a character is having a
mental health episode, so she explicitly says 'Connell was having a lot of
panic attacks these days' after describing the symptoms of a panic attack.
Currently Want To Build:
Some kind of parser for this website so I don't have to literally make
these HTML pages by hand. I have no good explanation for why I didn't do
this already but it's probably the #1 reason why I haven't written more
articles.