I’m winding down for the night, in the bed with my Macbook Pro, and just before drafting up this blog post, I snapped a few photos with my DSLR to practice my photography skills. I was really looking forward to taking this 5 week photography course. I was looking forward to it and disappointed that…

Yesterday Highlights of the day Connected with some friends over phone calls Talking with friends over the phone almost always lifts my spirits. Over the years, through some tough life lessons (including divorce, burning out working at Amazon) that I no longer place all my eggs in one basket. I follow this mantra for multiple…

Family Assembled our Berkey water filtering system. The instructions are quite complicated, actually. In addition to reading the manuals, I had to pull up a couple instructional YouTube videos to make sure that I was priming the filters correctly. Took Elliott on a late night walk. She had missed her nap and we needed to…

My favorite part of the day was waking up to a video that Jess recorded while I was asleep, a video capturing a little frog dancing on our window facing the backyard. My wife: she’s super cute. Work Hosted and moderated a tech panel on career growth and promotions. On behalf of Asians@ at Amazon,…

Family Jess and I felt nervous about the presidential election results while watching the news online. Despite Biden leading in the polls, just as Hilary four years ago back in 2016, I’m sitting at the edge of my seat as the results come in, not confident at all that Biden can pull off a victory.…

Family Elliott and I drove to Lowe’s home improvement store and picked up a new faucet. Normally, Elliott will cry after sitting in the car for more than 10 minutes but not this trip. She did amazing and the two us had a blast at Lowe’s and she helped me select our new faucet since…

What a weird morning. Totally forgot the the time changed, the clock moving back an hour (i.e. we gain an hour), and found myself studying and working at 03:30 AM (instead of 04:30 AM). When I first woke up and glanced at my Casio watch, I debated whether to get out of bed or not…

Work Defined a data specification (in the form of a protobuf definition) that’ll be used to help drive the conversation between us and our customer. Our customer (AWS Networking) will be vending us data but its unclear (at the moment) what data they will be providing not only to us but to other teams. So…

Family Went on a cleaning binge. Not sure why sometimes I get totally obsessed with cleaning but yesterday was one of those spurts. I had watched about a dozen YouTube videos (from Clean My Space) on cleaning tutorials, followed by vigorouly scrubbing down stove tops with baking soda and vinegar, buying cleaning supplies (e.g. micro…

Home Maintenance Watched several YouTube videos on mowing grass. I found an awesome YouTube channel called the The Lawn Care Nut. I had been searching around online on good content that will teach me how to maintain and care for my front (and back) yard.  Now, although the owner of the YouTube channel tailors most…

Family Took Elliott shopping at Safeway while Jess took her work call. We picked up some avocados for our morning smoothies and some blackberries and blueberries (side note: why does a palm sized box of blueberries cost $6.00). While paying for our goods, our cashier awkwardly pulled down her mask for Elliott to see her…

Graduate School Wrote up my analysis on the various barrier synchronization algorithms that I implemented. I had to describe the various algorithms (e.g. dissemination barrier, tournament barrier, centralized sense reversal barrier) for the documentation that will accompany our code and experiments as part of Project 2 for advanced operating systems. Finished watching lectures on Active…

I’m thrilled to be “off call” in about 4.5 hours, no longer tied to my pager and no longer anxious from possibility of waking up to the sound of nasty alarm. Really, the anxiety revolves around the randomness and the unknown of being paged.  What’s also variable is the length of these engagements: sometimes the…

My body aches from the first day of moving houses, my body sore from all the loading and unloading of tightly packed boxes from the house and into the back of the 15″ foot U-Haul truck. Rant U-Haul at Burien employes some of the most unprofessional staff with the worst customer service. The staff were…

Yesterday … was exhausting. A few times throughout the day I actually felt my body shut down and I nearly fell asleep while working. Although I cumulatively got like 7.5 hours of sleep, my sleep was constantly interrupted since Elliott has been (presumably) teething and letting out these screams at 1:00 AM and 3:00AM and…

Questions I thought about during the day How did society overcome the Spanish Flu and how did the people during that time return back to normal? I doubt some vaccination ended the pandemic… so how did we all get over it? And how will it be the same (or different) this time around with COVID-19…