Here's My Story

Game like Ristorante Italia  is what Ban would call an Agricola clone. Apparently, Agricola was the game that popularised strategy games that are heavy on resource management. Pret-a-porter is yet another clone but more complicated. Basically, you play as a designer (company) with the ultimate aim of generating the most money (among all players) in a year. You do this chiefly through designing, producing and selling collection of clothes during fashion months at the end of each quarter. There are also other ways of earning money but that requires purchase of certain resource. The resources that available for you are: Credit from bank Contracts Buildings  Employees Clothes design 3 different sources of materials PR/Trend/Quality designation or some money Credit from bank will incur interest each month until the fashion month where the borrowed amount will need to be paid back. If you are unable to pay maintenance cost of your resources (if applicable), you will...

Turned out that I didn't need to worry about being rehired . The current project hasn't ended but the actuary had already asked me to help him in another project. Yay! That means my work has been good enough for him. The next project is much bigger and in fact I have no experience in doing the stress-testing part (though I'm familiar with its concept and in theory what to do with it) but neither does the actuary hahaha. However, he has a few ideas and I'm sure he will or already has bounced some ideas with fellow actuaries. So he offered to guide me with clear instructions if I was willing to be on board. I told him that "clear" was a word not normally associated with actuaries :P That project is expected to start soon. Yet, shortly later he approached me for another project! Again, it's a project that I have no experience in but also almost clueless in theory @_@ I decided to politely decline the invitation as I feel I'm already a little stretc...

It's been awhile since I last (and apparently first lol) touched on this. Since then, my car was sent to a workshop, near my home in Seremban, for servicing. Among other things, the mechanic fixed the oxygen sensor. It was blinking indiscriminately for quite sometime. From what I understand about the oxygen sensor, essentially it supposed to help to optimise the ratio of petrol to oxygen and thus minimise wastage of petrol. I was curious to know whether this has been true in terms of petrol cost per km and thus I charted the cost separately after the repair. (Well, that was one reason but admittedly an afterthought. What really happened was that I messed up my the amount of petrol pumped into my car just before the repair hahaha). Hmmm, ignoring the obvious outlier, it doesn't seem to make a difference, does it? The average cost before and after the repair is RM14.5/km and RM15.5/km. I didn't measure the margin of error and thus can't comment on the signific...

I boiled watercress soup before in the past. After that, I gleaned some tips from my sisters about making the soup base. Basically, this time, while boiling the chicken (I used chicken breast but left the skin intact), I continually scooped up scum and oil from it so that it would be as palatable as possible for Ban. Ok, even I wouldn't like the scum and less oil is definitely better. I had enough ingredient to make two pots of soup and each pot can feed me for 2 dinner. So I split the ingredient into two and had the first pot to myself as Ban was away. I also added a few peppercorn. While making the soup base, I soaked the watercress in water as I understood it to be notoriously sandy. After boiling the soup for just over an over and continually scooping up scum and oil, it tasted good enough to put in the watercress (after washing it thoroughly). I know that I probably should have boiled longer (I heard people normally boil for hours @_@) but I did want some taste left in t...

Ban's brother bought this book recently and, for reasons unbeknownst to me, he brought it over to Ban's place and recommended it to Ban. Mind you, Ban's brother has many books of which some I'm sure he hasn't taken the trouble to do that too. One of Ban's initial comments was that it was quite suitable for children...until he read more of it hehehe. It has a little bit of gore and partial nudity but the latter kept to a minimum. As for the former, that's littered all over the book. Yup, rites, remember? Hehe. I like the idea of the main characters being dogs (and one single cat). I like the first story the best because it fits my idea of what dogs may know, by stretching my imagination a little. However, when magic comes into play, that's when I go like, "Huh? It's like they're humans in the form of dogs". Think of it like the Charmed sisters battling evil here and there, with an underlying major villain behind these minions, exce...

When I mooted the idea of being a freelance actuarial consultant few years back, one of the first few questions posed by my ex-boss and his colleague was what sort of company I would establish. Frankly, at that time, I didn't think that far. I thought I could help a few projects here and there to get additional income. I was like, "Huh? Need to set up company? That serious?". However, they knew what they were talking about especially since one of them did set up a small company. In addition, last year, the same question was asked by an actuary in KL when he asked me whether I was interested in helping him with some projects should the need arise. With the current project from Singapore undergone and hopefully finishing soon, I thought I should register my 'business' as a sole proprietorship. This will likely make life easier for payment to be made to me later. I had researched this for the past couple of years and from there I started the process. I knew one...

As stated in a previous post , I was hired ala freelance to assist an actuary in a project. So far, I had put in about 19 hours of time spread unevenly over 7 days, including 3hrs 25mins spent on reading and understanding the relevant regulations and the use of the actuary's templates. Time spent on a day ranged from 1hr 5mins to 5 hrs 40mins. My aim from the start was to perform the task as carefully as I could and to provide any help along the way e.g. check for internal consistency, informing the actuary of mistakes in his templates and performing short analysis when highlighting issues so as to facilitate discussion. There as a mistake I made towards the end of the calculations but luckily the actuary spotted them. That flustered me a little bit and so I doubled my effort in checking before passing the spreadsheets back to him Nevertheless, I believed (and hopefully it's true!) that I had done quite a good job so far. Hopefully it'll go smoothly until its complet...

I read the Riftwar saga by Raymond E. Feist last year. This year, William lent me three related books (oddly enough, there isn't a name for this trilogy), co-authored by Feist and Janny Wurts, that set out "an epic saga of the world on the other side of the Riftwar". The former was about the world of Midkemia while the latter was about the world of Kelewan. So far, the only common character between Riftwar saga and the first book of the latter series, Daughter of the Empire, was Lord of Shinzawai's second son but he was mentioned briefly a few times in the passing in the latter and thus didn't have any impact on the story of the book. It sounded like he, or at least his House, may play a larger role in the latter two books. I enjoyed reading this book. It was more about political intrigue than combats. Not complicated though. There were combats but few. However, what struck me as quite unbelievable was this: The main character, Mara, had never been groomed...

As I blogged previously , there were fewer flowers during summer than spring as observed during my recent trip to Australia. I took photo of this flower (below) because it looked distinctive and somewhat vibrant compared to everything else I saw. I'm surprised how well it turned out given that I was using my gimpy 2MP camera phone and it was quite a close-up shot too. Hmmm maybe I can use it as wallpaper or something.

Sometime last week, I received an e-mail from an ex-colleague asking me whether I was interested in helping him with a actuarial project - a task that I could work from home. After discussing with my sisters and Ban, I accepted it. I'm nervous as I have not actively used my actuarial skills for more than 2 years but I am keen to use do so albeit at a much preferred slower pace (rather than handling 6 projects at the same time!). On Thursday, I received information to get me familiarised with the templates. I did my best to read and learn to use the templates as much as possible and then responded accordingly before Ironclaw session that night. I tutored a family friend's son in Math on Friday morning and did some work after lunch before heading out in the evening for dinner and boardgames with Ban and another friend. Half of Saturday was occupied with work. At one point, I was getting a little frustrated with trying to figured out the templates (I'm used to Excel 2000...

Usually when I go to Canberra, it's spring season and the flowers of varied sizes and colours motivates me to take photos of them. It was, however, summer during my recent trip and there seem to be fewer variety of flowers still in bloom. Instead, there were plenty of birds.