Day 8/30.

Main work: incubators.

ICT army reservist Day 1.

Quite scary to drive in camp. A few odd rules that are different than on normal roads like only 30km, no overtaking etc.

When I walk into the canteen, I felt a surreal feeling that I’m back ‘here’. It wasn’t a good feeling, but also not a bad feeling. It felt unreal, that one day I am doing my own things in the outside world, and suddenly when in camp, there is fear and rules that I have to follow. And the constant judging of people.

When I met up with my camp bunk mates, it felt good to see them. We had non stop catching up with them. However I did not feel like there were strong learnings or takeaways from our conversations.

I caught up with G on his long distance relationship. I could relate as I too have been through it. His girlfriend is in Korea. He flies there twice a year to see her. She doesn’t like Singapore and has no plans to come here. I saw him diligently doing his Korean workbook practices amidst loud conversations at the table. I thought it was really impressive how he could focus like that. I learned that he paid $99 for a 1.5 hour one-on-one lesson to learn Korean at a language school. He has spent about $3k on lessons already. It seems like he will be moving to Korea in a couple years. He also runs quite a bit - he brought his shoes today but I had a really bad headache, much worse than normal, so I couldn’t exercise with him.

I always look forward to talking with YK about tech stuff, though I realize our skill levels are far apart. When he talked about training image generation models, I was interested but mostly for pure understanding and hopefully to make some money from it one day, rather than pursuing it seriously for now.

I was happy and surprised to learn both YK and YT have been going to BFT 3-5 times a week for the past 6 months since July. That’s impressive dedication and expensive! $148 every 2 weeks.

J got a Korean girlfriend now. JH proposed to his girlfriend in Japan - glad to hear he went with a lab grown diamond ring.

Tmr plan: hoping to talk to T tmr, any latest new best buys he gotten. not sure what to talk to yt about. hope to talk to jh about his work and life. d, im not sure. he just got a gf through friends contact. c, maybe marriage life.