There is no “content” on this site. No high-value posts. No best practices. No how-tos, best-ofs, what-ifs. No critiques. No downloads. No `template literals`. No reusable components. No scalability. No adding to carts or bookmarking for later. No emojis. No selfies. No aspirational realness or press releases. No strategically-crafted life updates. No elevator pitches. No strat decks. No mission statement. No concept.

No, thanks.

One of my first websites was a CD review zine thing I maintained on Geocities. Like a classic tune let down by a bad music video, the dismal reviews I wrote were rivalled in mediocrity only by the naïve ’90s internet “aesthetic” of the site. [Editor’s note: THIS ISN’T HUMILITY, IT WAS REALLY BAD]

Then one week, while trying to recreate the visual look of Squarepusher’s Feed Me Weird Things for a review [THAT NO ONE WOULD READ], I discovered Adobe Photoshop on the Mac and I clicked my way into a new world of systems, standards, and sheep.

From time to time, he refers to himself in the third person, which can be somewhat disorienting or sound like something really momentous is going to show itself. But inevitably does not. A mechanism primarily intended to maintain a healthy distance between his work and non-work self, it remains an exercise in futility as Jaffry spends too much time at home building things on the web anyway.

Sometime between the Asian financial crisis and the dot.com bust [SUCH EXQUISITE TIMING], I started designing websites, Flash games, and interactive pieces under the moniker of ‘dullneon’. For fun and for money. It was a great way to earn cash to buy obscure books and rare CDs online to impress girls with.

To be honest, I was never a big proponent of the Oxford comma until I was persuaded otherwise by two former colleagues, a comic and a musician.

While I’m not against cloudy music streaming, I prefer buying music outright (in fastidiously foldered [THAT’S NOT A REAL WORD] FLAC files) if only to avoid the bifurcation of my existing collection.

Tragically, I listen to my high-fidelity digital music collection on a low-end Android phone because I like having a hand-held that can actually be used with one hand. I’m pretty fussy about the features I look for in a mobile phone.

[DIFFICULT TO DISCERN IF THAT IS AMBITION OR DELUSION] I’ve always wanted a phone that could natively double up as a Bluetooth mouse on any modern laptop. So until I can find some chumps on Kickstarter to pitch this to the future arrives, I’ll just get by with my OnePlus Nord.

Right now:

• My phone has been offline for more than three hours.
• My phone is on 80% battery.
• Overusing the word staccato.
• Clear sky outside my window here in Singapore. The temperature is 26°C, though it actually feels like 29°C.
• Listening to M-State on repeat.
• Have 12 unread emails waiting for me.

Because I’m a sucker for mailing lists, you’ll find my inbox overflowing with:

• Dave Pell’s indispensable Next Draft
• Quartz’s Space Business
• Smart thinking from the Sunday Strategist
• Medium.com digests with posts on how I need to wake up at 5am, amazeballs things you can do in JavaScript, and excellent reading recommendations from the National Library.

I borrow/buy more books than I probably should. [HE WAS A BOOKWORM KID AND IT SHOWS] Every time I get a new book or ten, the unread books on my shelf always laugh at me. My e-books are much more polite and don’t do such things. Because when I can’t see them, I don’t remember they exist.

My long-term memory is uploaded to the hard-drive otherwise known as the internet. Visual memories on VSCO, music listening history on last.fm, people I know on a CardDav server, and so on. Once upon a memory when I had a stable IP address, I ran my own mail server. It wasn’t that hard [ACTUALLY IT WAS] though it was a lot of work. Probably even more work now with all that spam.

That was Experiment #5322 [THIS NERDY REFERENCING IS EXHAUSTING] where I naively test if spam harvesting bots stop scraping after the first unobfuscated [THAT’S NOT A REAL WORD EITHER] email address they detect. You, dear reader, can be the second mouse who gets the cheese.

Alternatively, you can contact me on LinkedIn. But staying professionally connected with people also means consuming the convulsing stream of crap the feed algorithm serves up.

Social media software can be such a pain in the ass.

I deleted Facebook after it became an exhausting parade of product peddling, plasticised positivity, and political prattling. [HIS PICTURES OF CATS AND SUNSETS DIDN'T GET ANY LIKES] This newly excavated Quality Time™ enabled me to build this website where I have had a wonderful time talking at you.

This site was built with Tachyons, VanillaJS, and regular HTML5. Real-time data from Tasker and Weatherbit.

*I use and recommend Firefox.

I could talk all day about why we should all use Firefox, but I’m kinda in the middle of the fabulously brilliant Undone right now. That’s right, the Quality Time™ saved from getting out of social media is spent on streaming TV [AND WEEKDAY NAPS THAT HIS COWORKERS DON’T KNOW ABOUT].

Thanks for scrolling down all the way here and all, but I’ve got another episode to catch up on. So until next time…