Every time someone asks me how to say something in Thai, I freeze for a couple of seconds before giving them a translation that is technically correct but probably sounds unnatural.

This is because there's usually little time to go through all the intricacies of navigating one's social standing, mood, gender identity, etc, to come up with the perfect words for the situation.

To illustrate this conundrum, let's look at the myriad of ways to say "I" in Thai.

"What was the most difficult problem you have solved?"

"What have you worked on that you're most proud of?"

These are two of the most common questions I've encountered in interviews. After hearing them the first time, I went back and tried to retrace every single project I'd worked on in order to prepare for the next time.

In the process, I realised that I'm creating a list of my achievements, albeit professional ones. It is a list of impacts I've made in my work for the past 10 years. It is a list that I can look at and reflect on my worth. It is a list that needs to keep growing.

From now on, I'll be collecting my achievements. I'll be collecting my achievements not just so I can tell people "Hey, I've done these.". But I'll be collecting them so I can ask myself "Hey, you've done these. Now what will you do next?".

Facebook recently announced that users can upload and publish their PGP public key on their profiles. This seems like a great way to assure you that you are getting a genuine key, assuming that the key owner's Facebook profile is intact.

I created my first PGP key a long time ago, hoping that I'd be exchanging encrypted (or at least signed) emails all the time. But it takes two to communicate. I have already published my public key on my profile. So if we are friends on Facebook, you can try downloading the key and send my an encrypted message.

Google is shutting down Google Reader.

Google Reader has been the heart of my information consumption. It's not just a really fast feed aggregator. It allows you to dig through a blog's history conveniently. I'm quite disappointed to see it go.

I've now moved my feeds to Feedly. The process was smooth. Let's see how it will live up to the expectation.

Couldn't believe I'd say this. I kinda prefer Windows 8 over Ubuntu 12.10 now. Had to install Windows for thesis writing and it feels faster and smoother. Maybe I fucked Ubuntu up a bit (continually upgraded since 7.04). Also the bonus is games! Still have to go back to Ubuntu for coding stuff though. Too many dependencies.

Have you ever moved into a new place and found stuff the previous occupant left behind? Notes, CDs, small appliances. I like that. There's some weird feelings attached to it. It's not the joy of getting free stuff. It's something alluring. Almost voyeuristic. It makes you feel like you've inherited a part of their life. A part of their experience they had in the very same intimate space.

I was rummaging through the living room cabinet the other day to collect electricity bills previous occupants left. I found a CD. It's a folk album by an American artist named Pat Hull. It's lovely. I wonder if the owner listened to it in the morning like I do.

There's also an old laptop left in the house. The screen's backlight is broken. I thought of bringing it to my office and connect it to a monitor, and I did today. It seems like the previous owner was a talented painter and musician. There's some scanned paintings, some recordings and a massive library of jazz and Irish traditional music on it.

Thank you, my flatmate(s) whom I never met.

I was wondering how you can keep digging in Google Reader for old posts from an RSS feed.

It's actually very simple. Google have been archiving posts from every feed people have subscribed through Reader.

Lately I've been getting these strange encounters with my past self. There are several times that I followed links or searched for something and found that they're already visited. Sometimes I recognised it. Sometimes I didn't. It seems like the information overload has rendered some information insignificant to my brain in the past. But then why did I stumble upon it again?

I feel somehow touched by things that go on over an extremely long course of time.

It took around 500 years for Stonehenge to be completed. Considering the life expectancy that time, it's like more than 10 generations. I don't think the last generation of the builders would have any idea about the first, let alone us.

The same feeling happened to me when I read a Japanese comic called "Blame!". The protagonist happens to be immortal. His mission has been going on for so long that he forgets the exact purpose. How long is it? In one scene he has to walk through a room the size of Jupiter.

Recently Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com just funded a 10,000-year clock project called The Clock of the Long Now. It's just like Stonehenge of our generation. People in the future would be totally oblivious of the purpose of it.

Maybe it's not how long it takes that touches me, but how relatively insignificant life is. In Arthur Dent's words, what a sad little blip of an existence...

Surprisingly, there seems to be no perfect solution for me to synchronise website bookmarks between my web browser (Google Chrome) and my Android phone. Maybe it's too much to ask for something free, secure and effortless.

Many people suggest PhoneMarks, which seems to be nice, but I just don't want to grant my Google Docs access to other companies than, well, Google. People also say that Dolphin Browser supports bookmark sync but it seems to use bookmarks in my Google account as well.

Maybe the problem is I'm so used to Google Chrome. The soon-to-be-released Firefox 4 looks quite nice and has a native bookmark sync feature (to Firefox Mobile). Still, I don't know if it will convince me to leave Google Chrome.