Welcome!
This is the personal website of Jun-E Tan.
I'm an independent researcher who has many interests on the side. This is where I document my explorations both professional and incidental. More about me here.
The website is perpetually in the making, so do check back for updates.
Latest blog posts
Death by thousand pin pricks
It's been two days after the US Elections. Votes are still being counted. This morning in the hospital I saw the news blurb go, and I translate from Malay, "Biden is confident to win, Trump has already declared victory". The surreality of the... Read more
Hello Lockdown My Old Friend
Day Three of Lockdown, Version 2. KL is now a red zone and a conditional movement control order (CMCO) has been issued. Over the last two weeks the situation had worsened rapidly and we went up to more than five hundred new cases per day, from a... Read more
Deleting my CouchSurfing Profile
I've just written to the Support and Privacy teams of CouchSurfing.com to give me a copy of my data, and to delete my profile. This was a difficult but easy decision. Difficult, because CS was a very important part of my life. I studied CouchSurfing as a... Read more
Second half of the year
We are now officially one day into the second half of the year. I thought that I would commemorate this momentous occasion with a blog post and do the usual bitching about how time flies. It's funny that a lot of conversations with friends on times of... Read more
Day 83 - Summing up the last 3 months.
Monday. We're moving towards a new phase of MCO, this time called Recovery Movement Control Order, and it's until end of August. Most restrictions are off as far as I can see, apart from indoor sports and probably some services that would involve crowds.... Read more
Day 80 - It sticks.
Friday. I'm writing this post in the morning. It's finally Friday. I feel like I've sleepwalked through this week, even though I worked, ate, slept, as usual. Even managed to practise the guitar and burn the pot making soup. But all through a haze of... Read more
Day 78 - Law and order!
Wednesday. What is there to report? Apart from eight full days of demonstrations in the United States, not much. The 24 hour news cycle has been a soul-sucking black hole. Trump's antics are so theatrical that it's a wonder that this is real life that... Read more
Day 75 - Untitled.
Sunday. The world is not too uplifting at this moment, to give an understatement. I've had to impose some level of digital detoxing on myself, to resist the temptation to check the news every five minutes on my phone. Reminding myself that whatever is... Read more
Day 72 - The tightrope of life.
Thursday. I look at the date and it means nothing to me. This afternoon I found in my backpack a receipt from Langkawi, dated 26 February 2020, and it took me a moment to realise that that was only and already three months ago. My time perception is... Read more
Day 69 - Skeptical, shrewd and excitable
Monday. Yesterday I used my new-found knowledge from the Computational Social Science course and did the following: I scraped all the content from my blog with a web scraper, and ran it through IBM Watson's Personality Insights. It purports to "gain... Read more