Shouted at

After staying up too late last night reading a gargantuan blog post about why the US isn't good at Olympic weightlifting, I woke groggy and exhausted this morning. Then I spent another hour reading about why the US isn't good at Olympic weightlifting.

I don't know why I behave like this. I have no interest in Olympic weightlifting. It's not that I don't think it's a sport - it must be, because it's ridiculous to think of somebody doing a clean and jerk in a non-sporting context - and the idea of fairly small people picking up very heavy things is amusing, but it's not something I'd go out of my way to watch.

Or read a 20-page blog article about.

Faster?

I lost an afternoon of my life hammering my head against the stony face of a database, and got home late, where I then lost another hour of my life playing SSX.

Fruit Ninja

Yesterday I had five minutes to spare, so I turned on the tablet and played a few quick games of Fruit Ninja.

An hour and a half later, I was still slicing simulated fruit in two by swiping my hands over a touchscreen. Fruit Ninja is terrifyingly addictive; with every game, I would say ‘just one more’ and then another game, and another, and another. The game is a little vicious; if you don’t do well to begin with, it starves you of the more exciting bonus fruit, and tosses only single fruit up at you to slice. If instead you start off strongly and slice a whole series of apples and oranges with a single swipe, the game flings more fruit at you, which means more chances to get combo bonuses and the sought-after bonus bananas. So it becomes more difficult, as there’s much more fruit flying around, but you have a much greater opportunity to get a high score.

The Four-Hour Windup

Heading home in a taxi this evening after a boozy afternoon in Pui O, the conversation turned to awful customer service, and some friends' approach to dealing with unhelpful companies with inflexible policies and unfair charges. They'll actively spend as long with customer service agents as possible, tying up corporate resources with unnecessary queries until they feel that the company has expended an equivalent cost to the extra fees they've charged.

Comedy post-mortem

Last night I had fun at the club, although the crowd were confusing as ever, laughing when I wouldn't expect them to and sitting in silence when I thought they'd laugh uproariously. I thought my Twitter joke was a winner, but the only laugh it got was a ghostly chuckle from a comedian hiding behind the curtain in the green room. You had to not be there, I guess.