Knowing when to stop

Today was one of those days when it seemed that all life was nothing but a pair of mismatched jeans. To begin with, I'm ashamed at myself- and this is a rare state of mind for me. I have a hangover, a bad one, with an aching head and stiff joints.
The one glass of wine to many had signaled itself unmistakably. It was no different from the three preceding ones, but it had gone down reluctantly and with an ugly sensation of surfeit. And even though I had taken in the message, I decided to wash it down with a glass of Hoegaarden.

I've been trying to get my head around my work today (thank god for paper-work days, a car chase today would have been lethal!) with very little success. I even resent seeing my sullen hands on top of my keyboard. Stupid, blunt little bastards!

Lack of planning

Tomorrow, I am engaging in one of my most important campaigns so far. I'm going deep inside the technological society of "Silicon Valley". I need to pose as a high tech engineer from the south having just moved to the "Bay area". At least six weeks, possibly much longer. Only one problem: I have not got a clue what I am doing, and I have nowhere to live. I'm screwed, as usual.

I blame my boss. Six years ago he sent me on a mission into the darker parts of Sweden to uncover secrets inside their industrial military complex. I was 21, ambitious and at the top of my game. But for some reason, my boss made a lot of effort to ensure me: "things will be alright". "Don't worry". "We'll back you up". Maybe I looked nervous, maybe he just thought somebody my age should be nervous. Well, I listened to him. Thinking that everything will be alright, I put off booking my tickets until 5 hours before the flight was due. I didn't check my equipment or go over my mission objectives.

When I six, I tried to steal some candy from a convenience store. The manager caught me and my friend. I've never broken the law since. It's called learning from your failures. Maybe if my mission in Sweden would have gone bad, maybe then I would have learned to plan. Leave enough time to get things sorted in case anything goes wrong.

But the mission was a great success despite me putting in minimum effort ("it's going to be alright" i thought). Since then, I've never planned. Never prepared. And I've been cutting it thinner and thinner. This very moment must be as thin as it can possibly go before it becomes a razor that cuts my wrist. I'm sitting in Las Vegas with a ticket to San Francisco- but no home, no plan, no clue. I'm searching the web for maps, hotel listings, public transport maps, events listings etc. I'm reading about American football on wikipedia and trying to listen to the people around me to pick up accents and slang. Apparently "Silicon Valley" is part of what is known as "South Bay". Mandarin speaking Chinese and Indians tend to live in South Bay. The Cantonese live somewhere else and often go back as far as 5 generations in the US.

Wish me good luck. This is my life, this is what I strive for. A moment of clarity is all I ask for, just a split second when I understand that I might be sleeping on a bench tonight. This is what I call extreme working- an adrenalin rush equal to jumping off a cliff (with a parachute of course).

My office in Iceland

My older uncle kindly let me work in his office which lies just next to the famous Hafnafjordur harbor. By now I've collected quite an impressive set of "pictures taken from my office window". Maybe I should set up a display at the local gallery.

And... CRASH!!!!

Yesterday was deadline day. I got there through two weeks of averaging about five hours of sleep per day, killing my social life, disappointing everyone and everything I hold dear, and just generally pushing myself and everyone around to the limit.

So, how did I do it? Some hints at how to turn yourself into an insane workaholic:

1. Learn from the "sail-around-the-world-alone-in-a-small-ship" people. They teach us that to maximize the impact of little sleep, you should sleep in episodes of 3-4 hours at a time. After a few days your body goes into panic mode. You fall into super deep sleep immediately, and wake up easily and quickly get back into work mode. Basically, work 10 hours, sleep 3 hours, repeat. Average 5.5 hours sleep. I need 8 hours, so over two weeks that's a massive saving for me. If you only need 6 hours, you could probably use the same technique to reduce your sleep to average of 4 hours per day.
   
2. The Propaganda meister taught me: either sleep well or eat well. So, when you are pushing it, it's critical to eat well. Don't overdoes on carbs (make you sleepy anyway), it's the proteins and minerals that need to be fully stocked.
3. You loose both your creativity and capacity for logical reasoning. The solution: use powerpoint to write out your thinking. Whenever your mind blanks, just reverse a couple of slides and you're back in your chain of thought...
4. Don't play dicewars. And ESPECIALLY don't check out kdice- a multiplayer version of the same game.
5. Wake up easily, however tired you are: connect your iPod to a strong speaker. Set up a playlist that starts with your favourite sleepy tune, something extremely soothing. After that song, add increasingly energetic and wake-y up-py songs, all of them should be your favourite songs that make you happy being alive. set the iPod alarm to about ten-twenty minutes before you want to wake up. Set the volume high, but not so high it's annoying. The idea is that when the iPod alarm goes off, it doesn't really wake you up immediately but rather slowly brings you awake over twenty minutes as you listen to your favourite music. When your REAL alarm clock rings, you should be alert and already looking up into the ceiling, ready to get started right away.
6. Just generally don't play flash games. For instance, avoid this genius of a game. Whatever you do, DON'T press that link.
7. Dedicate yourself to something that takes time out of your day, like exercise or taking chinese lessons. By jogging another part of the brain, it keeps the mind overall more alert than if you are simplemindedly pursuing only one thing.
8. Set aside a budget to invest in a couple of CDs per week. Nothing keeps the mood up when you're working on a Friday night like listening to some really great new music.
9. Don't waste time on updating your blog for a while.

And if you do this, then what is the result?
You hit your deadlines, and then you crash. I woke up at 5am this morning with a boiling temperature. My body was shaking and every part of it sore. Once I had dropped a gram of paracetamol and put on a jacket, i managed to fall asleep again. woke up again at 6pm. Nice.
Not feeling too rough, temperatures gone. Maybe I got away this time without paying too much. Hurra!

100th post!

I hereby dedicate my 100th blog post to complaining about working on a Friday.

Extreme working

I think I've invented a new concept: extreme working. The idea is similar to extreme ironing (check out www.extremeironing.com), which works along the idea of combining high thrills with the satisfaction of a well pressed shirt. My idea of extreme working combines exotic locations with the satisfaction of a job well done.



Having done a couple of work-related emails in Kuching, Borneo and Pattaya, Thailand, as well as a full month of hard-core work in Chiang Mai, I decided to push the envelope a little and try out the Aleenta beach resort (Also in Thailand). Absolutely lovely and the first time I've stayed in a "boutique" hotel. Possibly the last, too, unless someone decides to give me a major salary increase :-( While the hotel had a nice, fast internet connection, their "total relaxation" policy meant they banned phones, tvs and alarm clocks at the resort. I had to hide inside when I needed to take phone calls, and my mobile phone bill is going to be really nasty!

Why is it called a "courtyard hotel"?

A couple of additional photos of the hutong hotel that served as my office for a couple of day.
Just to rub it in. I dare you to send me pictures of a cooler workplace!

The most beautiful hutong home

Mother, I’m happy!

I am a man of my word. I promised that if I ever found myself living in a hutong I would call my mother and tell her: “mother, I am happy”. And indeed, today I find myself living in the most beautiful hutong courtyard hotel. After my trip to Hong Kong was interrupted last week I decided to try something new here in Beijing, to take the sting off the limbo I’m in. By chance I found myself checking into Haoyuan Bingguan - “the guest house with the nice garden”.
I’m spending the weekend catching up with work and admin stuff after the Hong Kong typhoons wasted Thursday and Friday. While there are much better ways I could imagine spending a weekend, I must admit I couldn’t work in better surroundings and I am thoroughly enjoying the courtyard experience.
Some people watch football, some people read manga. I try to find cool places to work. I suppose you could call me a work-geek.
Oh, speaking of nothing, I’ve lost my Hong Kong cash card… How did that happen?

Bugger

Bugger. It's raining AGAIN! And I've got a deadline today, so I can't leave my room until I've delivered. It's FRIDAY ferkristsake... oh well.

It's interesting how my psyche has developed the required anit-bodies to fight philosophical discussion. I used to be really into metaphysical puzzle-solving, but after reading a cartoon interpretation of Wittgenstein I realized that philosophy is a disease and Cobra is the cure. No, not the beer, the movie character played by Sylvester Stallone back in the 80's.

Sorry about the rambling nature of this post. It's just that the juxtaposition of the whole situation is making me a strangely free-flow. I'm in Chiang Mai, the greatest backpacker location in the world, a place of amazing natural beauty and some of the friendliest people in the world. Yet my purpose here is to finish a really difficult and time-consuming spreadsheet project. It kind of freaks me out.

I'm also listening to some really cool retro music. The blade runner soundrack, one of the Orb's soundtrack. I can't focus... It's just all... so... wolly...

I'm attaching some cool pics of some friends I made last weekend. They didn't speak any English, yet I spent almost an entire day with them, meeting their friends, going for dinner, checking out some seriously cool resorts and lakes. I did lose face at one point. I have this habit of walking off now and then and investigating my surroundings and seeing whether I can't make some more friends. i did this, but found that NO, people in that particular resort DIDN'T want to make friends, so I returned to the group I had arrived with. They were completely shocked at my behaviour, and saw my rebuttal as a major loss of face. I couldn't explain to them that it was ok, nothing risked, nothing gained etc. But they were mortified. It took them almost half an hour to get over the experience, and I'm sure they'll always remember me as the foreigner who made a fool of himself...

Taxis and bohemes

I had the most BIZARRE taxi experience yesterday. Now, taxi drivers in Singapore are quite odd to begin with. For instance, you don't tip them, they tip you. That's right. If the fare is 5.20, you don't give them 5.50 (or the 7-8 you would be expected to give in California). No, if you were a decent passenger, they give you a 20 cent tip, thanks five will be enough. They also have very strange taxi meters that favour short trips over long ones. So when you get into a taxi, he'll get pissed off if you are going far.

Anyways, yesterday I had arranged to meet a friend down in Boat Quay. Immediately inside the taxi, I realized something was wrong. This driver was EVEN MORE unhappy about having a customer than usual. He was visibly upset about the idea of driving to BQ- I assumed this was because it was far and he felt he'd be loosing money. However, on the way there he explained to me that the problem wasn't the money but that he desperately needed to go to the toilet. What do you say to that? It seemed reasonable to offer him to stop on the way, but he decided to brave it. Throughout the journey he described exactly how desperate he was to go, and quite vividly how his stomach was feeling. Alas! About half a minute away from the agreed drop off place, he suddenly hits the breaks and shouts "out!". This man really needed to go. Of course I got out, trying to find the change to pay the man his fare. i did not have time though as he quickly drove up to a cafe nearby to run into the toilet. So I walked off to the meeting point, quite shaken. It is not known to man that a taxi driver forfeits his fare.

The friend in question is actually a friend of my American-Italian friend who's now building up a movie website in Rome. Check it out: www.35mm.it
My roman friend had put me in touch with his old schoolmate from France. Pretty confusing back-story, something like half-philipino, half-spanish, lived in UK/US, culturally french now living in Singapore kind of thing. Amazingly this man seemed to knowthe answer to the age-old mystery: "what is halfway between a back-packer and an expat?"
A boheme!

Sitting outside New Asia:


YAY! It's raining cats and dogs outside. I'm working from home today to let my creative juices flow freely. It's quite a feeling sitting by the balcony, overlooking suburbian streets lined with palm-trees and listening to the sound of tropical rain. Quality of life, that's what I call it.