Matt Chung's Site

Category: Organization

  • Losing 2 hours searching for a website bookmark & Weekly Review: week ending in 2020/09/06

    Losing 2 hours searching for a website bookmark & Weekly Review: week ending in 2020/09/06

    My weekly review that normally takes place first thing in the morning on Sundays was completely derailed this time around, all because I could find the URL to a website that I had sworn I bookmarked for my wife’s birthday present. I ended up coughing up two hours of searching: searching directly on Reddit’s website (where I was 100% confident I stumbled upon the post), searching through 6 months of my Firefox browser history, and searching through 20 or so pages of Google Results.

    I ultimately found the page after some bizarre combination of keywords using Google, the result popping up on the 6th page of Google (I would share the URL with you but I want to keep it tucked away for the next two week until my wife’s birthday or at least until her present arrives and I gift it to her).

    How about you — when you stumble on something interesting on the internet, what steps do you take to make sure that you can successful retrieve the page again in the future? Do you simply bookmark the page using your browser’s built in bookmark feature? Do you tag that the entry with some unique or common label? Or do you store it away in some third party bookmarking service like pinboard? Or maybe you archive the entire contents of the page offline to your computer using DevonThink? Or something else?

    So many options.

    Ultimately, I don’t think the tool itself really matters: I just need to save the URL in a consistent fashion.

    Writing

    Family and Friends

    [fvplayer id=”3″]

    • Got around to finally calling my Grandma and video chatting with her so that she could see Elliott, who has grown exponentially over the last couple months
    • Signed off on tons of paper work for the new house and pulled the trigger on selling a butt load of my Amazon stocks that will cover the down payment and the escrow costs that we’re going to get hit with on September 30th (my wife’s birthday)
    • Packed about 5 more boxes worth of our belongings (e.g. books, clothing, kitchen goods)

    Music

    • Recorded about 5 different melodies and harmonies using the voice memo app on my iPhone, moving the recordings off my phone and sending them to my MacBook using AirDrop)
    • Attended my (zoom) bi-weekly guitar lesson with Jared, the lessons focusing on three areas: song writing (creative aspect), jamming (connecting with other musicians, mainly my little brother), developing a deeper understanding of the guitar (mastery).

    Mental and Physical Health

    Graduate School

    • I’d estimate I put in roughly 15 hours into graduate school in order to read research papers, write code for project 1 (i.e. writing a virtual CPU scheduler and memory coordinator) and of course watch the Udacity lectures.
    • For the development project, majority of time gets eaten up trying to grok the API documentation to libvrt. In second place would be debugging crashes in my code (which is why I always riddle my code with assert statements, a practice I picked up working at Amazon).
    • I really enjoyed watching and taking notes for this past week’s lectures. I’m taking the class at the perfect time in my career and in my graduate studies, after taking graduate operating systems and after taking high performance computing architecture. Both these courses prepared me well and provided me the foundation necessary to more meaningfully engage with the lectures. What I mean by this is that instead of passively watching and scribbling down notes, I tend to frequently click on the video to pause the stream and try to anticipate what the professor is about to say or try to answer the questions he raises. This active engagement helps the material stick better.

    Organization

    Brother label maker
    • Tossed out the cheap $25.00 label marker from Target and instead invested in a high quality Brother PTD600V label maker. Well worth the investment.
    • Culled my e-mail inbox, dropping the unread count from hundreds down to zero (will need to perform same activity this week)

    Work

    • Wrapped up my design for a new feature long, getting sign off from the technical leadership team at work. Only open action item will be to benchmark the underlying Intel DPDK’s library against IPv6 look ups (which I think I already have data for)
  • Remembering September 11 & Daily Review (day ending on 09/11/2020)

    Remembering September 11 & Daily Review (day ending on 09/11/2020)

    Yesterday was September 11. On this day, every year, Americans grieve and we are all reminded of the unforgettable day back in 2001 when the New York twin towers collapsed to the ground after being struck by the hijacked planes.

    I sure remember the day.

    I was about 12 years old at the time and on that weekday morning — like every other morning —  I was sitting crossed legged in front of our living room television, eating cereal and watching cartoons (“Recess”, the best cartoon ever) before walking to school as a sixth grader. While balancing a spoonful of cereal and milk into my mouth, the channel on the CRT television switched unexpectedly to live news, news that was live streaming the planes nose diving into the New York twin towers, bringing the towers to their knees. As a child, I didn’t understand the implication of it all and I just remember burrowing my eyebrows and shrugging my shoulders, shutting off the television and heading to school.

    The day following September 11 were unforgettable: there was an uptick of both subtle and not so subtle racism against Muslims.

    Back then, my best friend’s name was Osama, and I recall an incident that still makes my blood boil 20 years later. Him and I along with 20 or so other innocent children were packed in the classroom, all of us waiting for our substitute teacher to arrive (not sure why exactly our teacher was absent that day). The teacher for the day, white male aged about 40-50 years old, and was taking roll call, working his way down the list of student’s names on the clipboard resting in his hands.

    As he was running his finger down the list, he paused on Osama’s name, slowly lifting his gaze. He then spat out some flagrant racist comment, asking whether or not my 12 year old friend was a Jihad. Us student were stunned, confusion rippled throughout the room. And poor Osama, his head down in shame.

    Being his best friend, I took it upon myself and I marched out the room, heading full speed towards the principle’s office. After arriving at his office, I explained the situation. What happens afterwords gets a bit fuzzy but I do recall never seeing that substitute teacher again.

    This story reminds me the importance of speaking up for others, something I wrestle with these days. Lately, I bite my tongue because as an adult, realizing that it’s easy these days to offend people and I’m constantly evaluating the unique situation, taking in the context and trying to determine whether or not me speaking up for someone is warranted. Eh, it’s a never ending learning process.

    Yesterday

    Writing

    Best parts of my day

    • Singing and playing guitar during lunch break with the the entire wolf pack. Sang my acoustic rendition of “Punching in a dream”
    • Watching an episode of “The Boys” with Jess while eating dinner.  We both found the episode to be unnecessarily violent (no spoilers).

    Mental and Physical Health

    • Sprinted full speed up and down the hill for about 2 minutes, all while wearing a mask (not only to protect myself again COVID-19, but because to prevent breathing in the wildfire smoke blanketing the entire pacific northwest). Apparently, cotton masks do not block smoke particles so I apparently inhaled some amount of smoke (I deserved my wife reprimanding me for running under these conditions)

    Graduate School

    • Finished the “balancing” aspect of memory optimizer. My initial code was riddled with bugs, the program dropping the memory too fast and too much, causing the underlying guest operating systems to (presumable) swap and crash

    Work

    • Back to back to meetings. Mostly administrative, a few with some value.
    • This was one of the rare (very rare) days where I ate lunch at my desk. I don’t want to make that a habit and cherish lunch time, the one hour of the day where my wife and I and get to (sort of) peacefully eat lunch with our daughter.
    • During sprint planning, our scrum master (a colleague on my team) was driving the conversation and asking during our retrospective how we could “improve” our velocity. I shared with her and everyone else that although I am always up for improving our performance and striving to deliver, I wanted to call out the big elephant in the room: we’re in the midst of a pandemic. Things are not okay. Things are not normal
    • Cherry-picked some of my git commits into other feature branches that our team will be deploying over the next few weeks

    Today

    Writing

    • Publish notes on CPU and device virtualization
    • Publish daily review (this one that I’m writing right here)
    • Publish the terminal output from the memory coordinator test cases and their expected outcomes

    Music

    • Upload all the little melodies and harmonies captured on my iPhone.

    Organization

    • Review OmniFocus’s forecast tab to get a sense of what meetings I have this week and any items that are due soon

    Mental and Physical Health

    Poor air quality due to wildfire smoke
    • Stay inside as much as possible and limit outdoor activity (will only walk the dogs) due to wildfire smoke. In lieu of outside exercise, I’ll throw down some push ups, some pull ups (with the door pull up bar) and some light hamstring stretches

    Graduate School

    • Finish the “optimizer” portion of my memory coordinator
    • Finish the lecture on “Synchronization” (fascinating and challenging topic that reminds me of high performance computing architecture course, the concepts very similar)

    Family

    • Pack up the house into our cardboard moving boxes
    • Bathe Elliott for our night time routine
    • Sing and play guitar during lunch again (what a treat that was yesterday)
    • Sign the final real estate contract for the new house that we are buying in Renton
    • Attempt to sell some of my Amazon stocks since we need the cash for our down payment for the house (not sure if socks can be sold over the weekend but let’s just and find out)
    • Follow up with landlord over text since they did not respond to my e-mail that I had sent around regarding ending our lease since we are moving
  • Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/10

    Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/10

    We often talk about work life balance, separating the two major parts of our lives. On some level, I agree with the philosophy, believe that work is work and life is life. But at least for me, what happens at work bleeds into my personal life, and vice versa.

    When I have a shitty day at work, I feel despondent and mope around after hours and that impacts the mood for my wife and my daughter and my two dogs. In contrast, when I end the day on a good note, I tend to radiate with happiness.  For example, yesterday I was really pleased with the work that I produced (i.e. finished delivering a design for a new feature) and as a result, when I closed the lid of my laptop shut at 05:00 pm sharp (this is the time Elliott and I bathe together), my energy levels were high and I was able to stay completely mentally and emotionally — not just physically — present with my daughter during our night time routine.

    Yesterday

    Writing

    Best parts of my day

    • Listening to my veterinarian deliver news (over the phone) that both of the puppies (they’ll always be puppies in my heart) are healthy. The the little bump in Metric’s ear was just a benign cyst that they simply popped.
    • Eating a kick ass lunch: Jess whipped together an aesthetically pleasing lunch (equally tasty) consisting of a roasted cauliflower drizzled with pesto sauce and glazed pasta. All of this topped off with a blue berry pancake for a (lunch) dessert.
    • Pushing my design document over the finish line. No major objections from the technical leadership team with moving forwards with the project that will need to launch by Q1 2021
    • Watching an episode of “The Community” with Jess while eating dinner. Jess didn’t have to cut the dinner short since Elliott didn’t wake up so I consider that a little victory

    Mental and Physical Health

    • Yesterday was extremely busy at work so not going to knock myself for this but looking back, I should’ve taken just 5 minutes out of the day to run up and down the hill to get blood flowing through my body, which (surprise surprise) helps with mental health.

    Graduate School

    • Skimmed the first two research papers on memory virtualization published by VMWare
    • Fixed a silly segfault in my memory_coordinator program. I had dynamically allocated memory on the heap (i.e. malloc system call) for my array of arrays but had incorrectly calculated the number of bytes, incorrectly passing in the wrong type when calling sizeof.

    Work

    • Edited by design document, incorporating numbers and figures from AWS Networking’s document that I had asked them to put together
    • Presented my design document (for the second round) to the technical leadership team within my organization (i.e. Blackfoot)

    Family

    • Moved us an inch closer towards finalizing the home loan, collecting documents and proof (e.g. lease contract, monthly mortgages, property tax) to provide for the underwriter
    • Took both puppies to the Vet to get checked up. Nothing major to report back: thank goodness.

    Today

    Song of the day

    Discovered Hamzaa while listening to Spotify, the song showing up in my “Discover Weekly” playlist. I’ll definitely cover this song this song with my acoustic guitar.

    Writing

    • Publish notes on memory virtualization
    • Publish daily review (this one that I’m writing right here)
    • Publish the terminal output from the memory coordinator test cases and their expected outcomes

    Organization

    • Review OmniFocus’s forecast tab to get a sense of what meetings I have this week and any items that are due soon

    Mental and Physical Health

    • Throw on shoes and run up and down our hill for 5 minutes (seriously better than nothing)

    Graduate School

    Work

    • Meetings and meetings and meetings (not a really fun day) of sprint planning, Asians@ planning and development meetings, interview debrief

    Family

    • Continuing packing the house with Jess. We’re a little more than 2 weeks away until we need to finish packing up the entire house and loading up the U-Haul
    • Today’s aim is to fill up 2 more packing boxes (and label them using my new Brother label maker) and tag them with a unique ID (I’m trying out this new system that I called the “The Global Index” … will report back on this on a separate post)
  • Weekly Review – Week ending in 2020/09/06

    Weekly Review – Week ending in 2020/09/06

    Writing

    I’m getting much more comfortable with publishing blog posts that are not completely polished. The fear of letting the world see less my less the perfect propose is utter non-sense. In fact, writing and publishing frequently offers two benefits. The first is that the sheer act of writing and setting words on (digital) paper improve my craft. The second benefit of producing words on a regular cadence allows me to track my writing progression, allowing me to critique my writing over time.

    Music

    The trio hanging out at magnuson park

     

    Although I didn’t put in much deliberate practice for neither singing or guitar (apart from practicing a singing the minor scale), I did sing for Elliott almost every night while bathing her, singing “What a wonderful world”. That’s the good stuff, the whole point of developing music skills, right ?

    Graduate School

    Graduate school eats up a good majority of my free time. My studies take place before work, early in the morning, around 04:30 to 05:00 AM, and after work (around 06:00 pm). In total, I get about 2 hours a day, sometimes 3 if I am lucky.

    And when it comes to the advanced operating systems course I am taking right now, there’s never a moment of rest, almost some task to make forward progress on: from reading papers (e.g. “OS Structure – SPIN”), to watching lectures (e.g. “memory virtualization”) to writing code (i.e. a scheduler and memory coordinator).

    But I’m doing my best with the limited amount of time I have and even tracking my progress by publishing my notes from lectures and publishing questions I face and publishing technical problems that I am facing while writing code my project. All of these posts, I hope, will allow me to look back at the end of the semester (about three and a half months away) and feel proud of work I put in and the knowledge I gained.

    Organization

    Current system for organization and time management broke down. The fact that a few items slipped reinforces the fact that the tools (e.g. excel, OmniFocus) do not guarantee organization: it’s the habits and processes. The tools are only a piece of the puzzle, not the solution.

    I had missed a couple appointments and missed a couple important tasks — I hate that feeling. One reason for forgetting about these events is because I failed to book the appointment in my calendar. Another reason is that although some of the events were in my calendar, I didn’t review my calendar and didn’t receive notifications of the event.  Looking back, I can think of a couple ways to fix this. The first is to make sure that for any time sensitive tasks (or tasks with due dates), I need to plug that into my calendar right away. That’s step one. The second step is to enable notifications by configuring the event to notify my phone in advance: 1 week in advanced, 1 day in advanced and then 1 hour in advanced.

    House Organization

    Even though we’re moving into a larger home with more space, I fear that our abysmal home cleaning and organizational skills will follow us (which they will). I’m doing my best to view the dirty home as an opportunity but it’s hard not to feel like my life is spinning out of control when our kitchen looks like this:

    Messy Kitchen (2020-09-05)

    Granted, our lives changed dramatically when our daughter was born … but that was almost a year ago. So that grace period, I think, has passed. The sad reality is that we’re … extremely messy and disorganized. What is it going to take to keep the house in order?

    And as I mentioned in “I’m a messy person: it’s time for a change” post, I’m sick and tired of not my items buried underneath one or another and just overall mountains of junk piling up everywhere throughout the house; this is not the environment in which I want my children to grow up in.

    Physical and Mental Health

    Physical health has taken a back seat and I definitely want to carve out time (even if it is 5 minutes a day) to get my heart pumping. Working from home in the midst of COVID-19 has definitely contributed to lack of exercise for me — some folks have gotten into tip top shape during the lockdowns.

    But I did attend my weekly therapy session and I hope that I can somehow continue seeing my therapist (same person I’ve seen for over four years on a weekly basis) even though I’m moving to Renton, making the commute to his office unsustainable. Let’s see how this all plays out in the about 3 weeks, once my wife and I move.

  • My classmates syllabus in excel form

    My classmates syllabus in excel form

    One of my virtual class mates took the poorly formatted syllabus living on Canvas and converted the document into a beautifully organized excel sheet (above).

    I appreciate him sharing this screenshot since it saves me at least 15 minutes from copying and pasting and wrestling with inevitable formatting issues.  On top of that, I now have a better sense of what to expect over the next 14 weeks of the Fall 2020 term.

    Thanks Luis Batista!

    References

    1 – Piazza Post: https://piazza.com/class/kduvuv6oqv16v0?cid=6_f7

     

  • Creating my own digital library

    After reading Daniel Wessel’s post1 on creating a virtual library, I’ve decided take the leap and convert the majority of my books — classic literature will remain sitting on my book shelf — into digital form. To accomplish this, I invested in a Fujitsu ScanScan IX500.  The scanner runs for about $400.00. I selected this model based off of the many reviews2 touting that this scanner scans fast (duplex scan takes about 1 second for front and back), produces high-quality documents, and provides an easy to use intuitive touch screen interface. And after receiving and unpacking the equipment last night, I agree wholeheartedly.

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  • I’m a messy person: it’s time for a change.

    I’m pretty embarrassed of how disorganized and messy our house looks and feels. I forget the color of the bathroom tile since its hidden from view due to dirty clothes sprawled out across the entire floor. I’m afraid of raising my standing desk for fear of a monitor toppling over due a caught wire and afraid of one of the many mugs spilling four day old tea. I cannot wipe down the kitchen counter because of the mega sized Maggi Soy Sauce (super delicious, by the way) towering over the stacked, dirty (or maybe clean) plates. By living this way, we’re sort of disrespecting our house, not taking care of it and looking after it in the way we should.

    It’s time for a change.

    My messy desk. Just one example of how disorganized the house is.

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