Category: Daily Reviews
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Daily Review: Day ending in 2020/11/11
The last couple days at work have taken a toll on me emotionally. To lift me up, Jess used her arts and crafts skills to make a doll — made from Metric’s shedded hair (see featured image). Family Felt myself tear up when pushing Elliott in the stroller. The two of us were having a…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/11/05
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…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/11/04
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,…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/11/03
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.…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/11/02
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…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/11/01
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…
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Daily Review: Day Ending in 2020/10/21
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…
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Daily Review: Day Ending in 2020/10/17
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…
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Daily Review: Day Ending in 2020/10/16
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…
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Daily Review – Day Ending in 2020/10/13
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…
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Daily Review – Day Ending in 2020/10/12
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…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/10/11
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…
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First day of moving to Renton & Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/10/01
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…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/29
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…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/28
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…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/24
Today I’m posting a super short daily review given that the midterm (for advanced operating systems) opens up in about 13 hours. Writing Published on drifting apart (as part of my daily review) Published my first set of guesses to the mid term questions Parenting and family matters Held Elliott in my arms while we…
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On building online learning communities & Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/23
Thanks to my wife for encouraging me to pull the trigger and start my online study group (i.e. the “war room”) for my advanced operating systems course. Basically, the idea came about after chatting with a class mate of mine and during our video call, I realized how many of us are basically studying alone…
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On drifting apart & Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/22
Before stepping into parenthood, my wife and I would often read about other couples scheduling time for being “intimate” (aka sex), time alone just for the two parents. Without this deliberate effort, parents can fall into the trap of focusing 100% of their time on raising their children and forgetting what its like to be…
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Being present in the moment & Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/21
Being fully present as a parent all the time seems like an impossible feat. Although I’d like to think that I’m always present with my daughter, I do find myself sometimes mentally checking out. For example, yesterday, Jess had reminded me during lunch I should be in the here and now instead of scrolling on…
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(Re) learning how to doodle & Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/20
I’m (re) learning how to doodle! I’d like to incorporate art and sprinkle sketches into notes that I scribble down while studying for graduate school. Also, I just miss drawing, an activity I used to do a lot as little boy. But somewhere between then and becoming an adult I’ve lost my way, losing touch with…
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Finally clean air & Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/18
Hooray! Today is the first day in a couple weeks that air quality is considered good, at least according to the EPA. I’m so pleased and so grateful for clean air because my wife and daughter have not left the house since the wild fires started a week ago (or was it two weeks —…
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On letting go & Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/17
With working remote and establishing a (somewhat) daily routine (that has become pretty monotonous), it’s sometimes easy to forget that we’re in the midst of a global pandemic. But that reality is amplified because of the recent wild fires, forcing those of us living in the pacific north west (PNW) — and those living in…