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

  1. MCO 2.0 Days 4, 5 and 6 - A breakthrough

    Saturday. I've been guerrilla writing. I pretend not to be writing, walking up and down the house "chilling", and when I least expect it I sit down and hammer out two paragraphs. It's a battle of wits between myself and myself. Sometimes I win,... Read more

  2. MCO 2.0 Day 2 - Day:1, Me:0

    Thursday. Today is one of those days that you end it feeling, ok, day. You won this time but tomorrow I'll get you back. I've been suffering from some sort of writing block in my work, which is not a good affliction in the best of times but worse when... Read more

  3. MCO 2.0 Day 1 - Here we go again

    2021 is wasting no time and getting down to business immediately. Second week of the new year and we've been handed another MCO (Movement Control Order - strict lockdown), as we hit a record daily cases of 3,300+. Malaysia declared a state of emergency,... Read more

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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

  9. 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

  10. 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