Blog
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Every day for the past two weeks, my friend’s stream of Facebook posts poured onto my timeline, engulfing my entire newsfeed with photos of him and his latest girlfriend, having such a comical time together. They can’t get enough of each other. They really can’t. They are glued at the hips. They must share every dish of food. Pictures…
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I’m pursuing a master’s degree in computer science and most of the schools I’m applying to— Seattle University, University of Washington, University of Southern California — require that I take the general GRE (graduate record examination). Although I don’t necessarily agree with standarized tests, especially the GRE, I recognize the necessity to establish some sort of bar for…
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Working the normal nine to five job leaves little time for personal reading, which is why every morning, as soon as I situate myself on the bus, I immediately rip out a book from my backpack and read. I guard this meager time like a gambler and his poker chips. Without these short thirty minute rides to and from work, I…
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My plan on completing Data Structures and Algorithms in Java by December 31st, 2016, requires changing my reading strategy. Reading technical books cover to cover, like a novel, is rewarding but inefficient and impractical. How about a different approach ? I’m applying active reading principles from How to read a book[1] and A mind for numbers: active reading by questioning author’s intention, indentifying questions author…
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I’m an early bird. I find that I’m the most productive with a little extra time in the morning, which I devote to personal development — meditating, reading, and writing. I wake, usually, to the sound of the alarm; today, though, I woke up naturally. Or so I thought. I glanced at my watch. 05:30AM. I gave…
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I’m slowly working through “Computer Systems from a programmer’s perspective” [1] , struggling every bit of the way. I stopped beating myself up about it, though. The code snippets below are in C. The first function, inplace_swap, swaps two integers. The code itself looks lacks intent but I promise you, it swaps two integers. The…
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Last week, an e-mail was sent out to an internal mailing list [1], looking for volunteers to lecture on data structures & algorithms topics, but nobody replied. I jumped at the opportunity. I volunteered to lecture on binary search trees, without any previous knowledge on the topic. Why in the world would I volunteer to…
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Look through my history, and you’ll find how infrequently I post on Facebook, however, I strongly encourage you to watch this short video clip, especially if you are approaching 30, like me, and plan on having children. This video poignantly touches on the issues, revolving around teenage homosexuality and bullying, that our younger generation is…
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I studied Spanish in high school for four years and 10 years later, I’m embarrassed that I can’t form a comprehensible or grammatically correct sentence. I traveled throughout Europe last Christmas and was impressed by the number of bilinguals. Most people fluently spoke a combination of English, French and German. My second language, Vietnamese, however,…
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I’ve been very sick this past week … coughing phelgm, swallowing pain, and battling headaches. Two nights in a row, an uncontrollable cough prevented me from sleeping. This morning, however, I awoke without a sore throat. It goes to show you how much I take you for granted when I’m healthy. My elation at regaining…