Last night, my family went to have a buffet with the extended family to celebrate 中秋節 (mid-autumn festival). Now, depending on ones particular mindset, the goal of a buffet is to either:
- Obtain maximum enjoyment for a fixed price, or
- Try to get as maximum value out of your initial outlay — usually via cramming as much food into the stomach as possible.
Now, the above sounds similar to the Knapsack problem, but this discussion is beyond the scope of this post. All that should be noted is that it is very rare (nigh impossible) to simultaneously satisfy both of the above two points.
What this post is concerned about, is the latter of the points — as I believe many people out there (particularly Asians) adopt the “eat your money’s worth” mentality at a buffet. Even when they’re quite satiated, they’ll keep shoveling food down just so they feel they’re getting their money’s worth.
Of course, most non-professional eaters hit rapidly diminishing returns once they reach a certain level of fullness. Beyond this point, each morsel swallowed no longer brings enjoyment — you’re simply eating for the sake of value (i.e. trying not getting ripped off as much).
Those of you who have been on gastronomic adventures with me, often hear me talking about different stages of fullness. This is simply my own metric for describing the level of fullness in a somewhat consistent manner. That way, if I tell someone that I’m “stage 3″ full, they’ll know how I’m (and more importantly, my stomach is) feeling.
The only problem is, I’ve never formally defined these different stages. And so, without further ado, I present to you — Keith’s Stages of Fullness.
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About two years ago, Optus made an announcement to let the world know that they’re relocating 6500 employees to “a new, state-of-the-art, campus-style headquarters in North Ryde”. This relocation was scheduled to take place from July 2007.
Over the past two years, I’ve seen their new headquarters evolve from just a huge patch of dirt into the campus that exists today. I haven’t been inside the campus to have a look, but it’s meant to be pretty impressive — ponds, water features, gardens, restaurants, etc. It has even been described as a small city in itself.
And so, as of about two months ago, the new inhabitants of this North Ryde’s mini-metropolis started rocking up. Having an extra 6500 neighbours turn up in the space of 2-3 months changes things somewhat… and not all of it is good. The following is what I’ve noticed to have significantly changed over the last three months or so.
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I’m still in the process of clearing my backlog of photos — there’s now roughly about a month’s worth of photos left to sift through. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for them though… I come home from work and all I feel like doing is to just zombie out and recharge.
Maybe I’ll do something mindless that doesn’t require much thinking, like watching a movie, or just even staring into space…
Anyway, I’ve updated the gallery. Click here and here to go to the two new albums directly.
I’ve noticed that recently I’ve done a lot of experiments with clients that included facing their fears. It’s actually not that difficult technically to do it, but emotionally it is quite scary for clients. Many times it is the anticipatory anxiety that is the worst, rather than the actual experience of the feared thing itself. I’m going to write a bit about how to face your fears below for you all so that you can tackle any fears that you may have 
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Just a heads up that I’ve changed to a new web host, and so there might be some teething issues as things get migrated over.
It’s now on a US-based server and that means a whopping amount of bandwidth (3 TB per month, up from 6 GB) as well as a generous amount of disk space (300 GB, up from 1 GB). Oh, and it’s also half the price of my old one, which is always good…
Mmmm… off-site storage with backup — time for a bit of rsyncing.
Anyway, as it is plainly obvious, this blog is also sporting a new look. Joyce said she felt the previous look was kinda dark and pretty plain. Now, it’s bright and pretty plain. I happen to like simple layouts — less clutter and the focus is on content as opposed to eye-candy. What do you readers think of the new look? Drop a comment below.
Also, in upgrading Wordpress, there’s been some issues with UTF-8 encoded characters (something to do with the new Wordpress database format) and hence my old posts that contain Chinese characters in it are somewhat corrupted. There was a script to fix things, but it looks like it didn’t fix all of them.
Bah.