Rest of January

Thought I should one last post for this January. Despite my retirement, I kept myself busy with reading (both religious and mathematical) books. Had spells of bad back like today and took (normal) pain killers. If it is really bad, then Tramadol is taken, but this will make me sleep for most of the day and the sleepy feeling lingers a few days after.

Most of my time at home are spent on organizing my collection of papers. Accumulated too many papers and there is a sense of regret of doing so. Had so many research interest and once I got deep into a topic, much of past papers will be dug up. Will explain about my research interests in another future post. It took me quite awhile for me to figure how to arrange the vast amount of papers (classifying them appropriately was a problem since some papers may trigger a few different areas of interest). Right now, I have thought out the following arrangement of papers. Nearby my working desk, are the active topics of research and papers I considered valuable and may look them up in near future. In the store room, near my room's balcony, I will have my quantum papers (quantization, quantum foundation, quantum information) and mathematical papers, which I may or may not refer to. Other papers on network science, general relativity & cosmology, high energy physics and other mathematical papers will be stored in the upper parts of my book cabinet shown below (above the books). These are probably less frequented areas of research at the current state of interest (they may change, of course, dependent on what my future job is). The upper shelves are harder to reach and I often need the red ladder shown below and even this is not sufficient to reach the topmost shelves properly.

Note that I have not even started rearranging the books as yet. In fact, I have another collection of papers at my son's balcony (see below) that I have not touched yet, but I'm targeting to finish the arrangement of these papers before Ramadhan, God willing.

While going through all these, dug up some of my old notes from my random readings of papers before I got busy with all the admin work.

Now with more time at hand, will restart these random readings and note taking and hope to blog about them, Also, I dug out some books that I have not seen for ages (kept at the inner parts of the store at home as well as in my previous office).

Most importantly, I retrieved back my certificates, which I had misplaced during the renovations.

Some probably think that I'm hoarding a lot of books and papers, perhaps showing my ambitious nature of acquiring as much knowledge as I can. However, I think it runs in the family. I remember my father collected a lot of magazines and he kept details of our family neatly in the diary - a skill unfortunately, I have not really picked up. My late eldest brother was a book collector himself and he had kept many technical reports and papers too.

To a lesser extent, my other brothers and sister did too; and some inherited the skill of keeping records of our larger family. My musician (youngest elder) brother had an extensive music and magazine collection. When he had to move from the quarters in Jalan Davis, I helped kept some of his music tapes and magazines with me. Some I had to bring to the office of not enough space at home. When I had to clean up my office end of last year, I asked for his permission to dispose some of these. At home, initially I wanted to donate music magazines to a friend. Since during clearing out our store rooms, we had other things to dispose off, we hired a person to help recycle them elsewhere.

Felt guilty disposing all these; I still have interest in music but not as deeply as my brother.

Moving on to other things; recently, I was contacted by an old friend from Adelaide days. He was my house-mate for a major part of my student days, i.e. Ahmad Suhaimi Mustafa. He is living right here in Seremban 2 itself; he said that he waited until I was not busy (retired) to contact me. We had a nice chat at a local mamak restaurant.

The other house-mate then was Abdul Halim Ramli (now carrying the title Dato') working at Customs Department. My step-sister used to inform me about Halim some time ago but I did not manage to contact him properly then (and knowing he's a Dato', I tend to be shy). Anyway, we are planning to meet up some time in the future, God willing.