Matt Chung's Site

Category: Parenting

  • 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)
  • Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/09

    Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/09

    After freeing a spider into the front yard, I noticed that the coffee mug (in which I trapped the spider in) was decorated with a beautiful web that the spider must’ve spun overnight.

    Almost every other day, I spot a spider dancing across the white walls of my bedroom. Instead of squishing them to death like I did when I was a little boy, I catch them and release them into the front of back yard, trapping them underneath a cup and sliding a 8×11 piece of paper underneath.

    Yesterday

    Writing

    Best part of my day

    Received such a thoughtful and warm e-mail message from one of my recent subscribers, a classmate of mine.  We had connected over LinkedIn and I originally reached out to him, thanking him for subscribing and essentially asked him what drew him to my blog. In this e-mail response, he sent me a touching message stating how he finds it inspirational that I’m able to share my stories on my blog and that I’m able to be vulnerable.

    Mental Health

    BLM (black lives matter) Poster hanging up on window

     

    My therapist and I unexpectedly spent the entire 50 minute session untangling the tension between him and I, tension that developed when I brought that the most recent invoice he handed me included a charge for a session that I had cancelled.

    I had originally wanted to kick off the session with some good news with my therapist, share some moments that had brightened my days. But as mentioned above, this conversation got derailed because of the incorrect invoice.

    Cancelling my sessions happen regularly.  Unfortunately, I cancel every 5 weeks due to the cadence in which I am “on call” for work. History shows that, on my current team at work, I will get paged: sometimes at 12:00 AM, sometimes at 3:00 AM, sometimes at 10:00pm. You just never know. As a result, I give advance notice and cancel my therapy sessions to avoid getting dragged out mid way through to handle an operational issue.

    Under normal circumstances when cancelling a session, I take on the responsibility of making up for the sessions and finding another slot. But given that I’m a new father and we’re in the midst of the pandemic, I had asked him about 6 months ago if instead of trying to find another day to come into therapy (which is expensive in terms of time and just plain out infeasible with my schedule) and make up a missed session, he could just not charge me and instead we’ll just miss one sessions once every 5 weeks.

    Long story short, I felt blinded sided that he would suddenly charge me when for the past 6 months he has not been charging me. For the remainder of the session, we basically worked through the conflict, talking about why he did what he did, how that made me feel, how it impacts our relationship and trust (short and long term), and so on.

    Ironically, the emotional skills that I’ve developed with dealing with confrontation were learned right there in his office. That’s been a big part of my therapy over the last four years, learning how to take a stand and deal with conflict facing me, instead of always defaulting to my gut reaction: fleeing the situation. Of course, there are some situations in which some people simply cross boundaries and the conversation just needs to end. However, in most situations, conflict is not always a bad thing and in some ways, can nourish and grow a relationship.

    Graduate School

    Began working on the memory coordinator (part 2 of project 1), the assignment due in roughly 2 weeks (on September 21).

    Work

    Met for an hour over (Amazon) Chime with a colleague working in AWS Networking, an organization that we partner with — well they are sort of our customer — to deliver networking features for EC2 networking.

    Participated in a ticket bash, all of us focusing on closing tickets — some human cut and some auto-cut by monitoring system — that crept into our queue over the last couple months

    Today

    Writing

    Publish notes taken from watching yesterday’s lectures (or lectures from a few days ago)

    Organization

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

    Graduate School

    Work

    • Update Quip document in preparation for design review meeting (next item below)
    • Lead the second design meeting for a document that I put together for the new feature we’ll be launching in Q1 2021.
    • Meet with my manager for our weekly 1:1

    Family

    • Take Metric and Mushroom both to the veterinarian at 11:15 today. Metric’s pointy German Shepherd (right) ear has sort of a little hole in it and looks as if some sort of inspect or parasite carved out pimple sized home. Mushroom developed some sort of allergic reaction on a small patch on her back, in the location where I had applied the flea medication (same one I’ve been applying every month for the last couple years).
    • Pour some of the smoothie that I make every morning into a sippy cup for Elliott and into a big girls cup for Jess
    • Finish collecting paperwork (i.e. statements for my rental property, etc) to nudge the underwriting process along

     

  • Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/08

    Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/08

    The most interesting side effect of writing these daily reviews is that they stir up meaningful conversations with my wife. Apparently, much of what words I set on paper never make their way out of my mouth (despite thinking that I did verbally share them). Surely this situation of my brain tricking me into thinking that I already communicated something is not unique to me, right?

    This disconnect between what I thought I said and what I actually said makes me wonder how often I fail to articulate the thoughts running through my mind.

    Yesterday

    Writing

    Shared quotes that I captured while watching an inspirational video created by Veritasium, the YouTube video titled “My Life Story”

    Published my notes on “Introduction to Virtualization”

    Best part of my day

    “I have not just a house, but a home, a home filled with love”

    Blinds up means Elliott is awake!

     

    The best part of my day is looking through the living room window and seeing Elliott (bouncing up and down) and Jess cradling her, the two of them standing on the couch and waving at me as I pulled up in the drive way around 7:00 am, around the time when I return from walking the dogs in the morning. Normally, our living room blinds sit shut and we only pull them up during the day when Elliott is awake because our miniature Australian Shepherd tends to bark at every person and crow walking up and down our (busy) hill. So seeing the blinds open as I park the car reminds me that I have not just a house, but a home filled, a home filled with love.

    Graduate School

    Started watching the lecture series on “Shared Memory Machines”. Much of the material is review (from operating systems and compilers and high performance architecture) but I like the feeling of drilling the same material multiple times because every time I revisit these topics, I understand them just a little more, gaining a tad more intuition of computer science.

    Organization

    Dynamo LetraTag – cheap $25.00 label maker that I tossed into the bin

     

    I ended up throwing away the $25.00 label maker that I purchased from Target a couple days ago. The device landed in the bin because the paper cutter kept jamming after every other printed label. Not wanting to waste money, I spent about 10 minutes disassembling the device, unscrewing the mini Phillip screw drivers screwed in on the back, but trying to fix the label maker was a lost cause so I ended up purchasing a higher quality Brother Label Maker that runs about $100.00 (a heavy duty case included).  Sure, it is a bit expensive for a label maker but I believe in paying for quality, paying for items that should last a life time (if they are maintained properly), instead of buying lots of cheap items that get tossed out.

    Work

    Mostly took care of administrative items, like scheduling meetings that I’ve been dragging my feet on. I feel like the first day of the week, I’m normally the most unproductive and have to ease my way into the work week. No exception to yesterday.

    In addition to tackling those low hanging fruit, I met with other teams within AWS to help root cause some packet loss within the EC2 network.

    Today

    Writing

    Publish notes taken from watching yesterday’s lectures (or lectures from a few days ago)

    Organization

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

    Graduate School

    Wrap up the lectures on “Shared memory” (should take another 30 minutes)

    Start writing some prototype code for collecting virtual memory statistics as part of memory coordinator project (hopefully can squeeze in about an hour of concentrated focus while Jess continues with the night time routine, which starts with Elliott and I bathing in the tub.

    Mental and Physical health

    Attend weekly psychotherapy session. Outside of seeing my therapist (Roy), I realize I rarely talk to anyone (apart from my wife) for an extended period of time. I’m wondering how I will continue these sessions when I move to Renton … we’ll find out in a couple weeks.

    Work

    Operational ticket bash. Our ticket queue is trending towards triple digits so our team will be dedicating the day to closing as many tickets as possible. This is the first ticket bash I don’t expect these dedicated days to become a habit.

    Family

    Tell Jess I love her. Same with Elliott. And the puppies So easy to go throughout the day forgetting how blessed I am. Should do the same thing with the rest of my family members and friends too.

     

  • Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/07

    Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/07

    Yesterday

    Writing

    Emotions

    • I disassociated and my mind wandered into its “own world” after my wife Jess asked me to watch Elliott later that afternoon.  I think part of the reason why I got so worked up had less to do with her request (cause I actually had a blast with Elliott for that 1 hour) and had to do more with an uneasy feeling caused by my being “stuck” on the school project, which translated to “I have a lot to do with no little time”

    What am I grateful for?

    • The fact that Jess and I can work through conflict and continue as a couple to develop ways to flesh out issues. Our system is not perfect. I like to disconnect and gather my thoughts. She likes to talk issues through and resolve them then and there. We’re meeting somewhere in the middle.

    Physical and Mental Health

    Elliott and daddy and boeing creek park
    • Hiked with the dogs and Elliott (who sat on top of my shoulders most of the walk) and Jess at Boeing creek park, a hidden gem. That park and its thousands of 100 feet ever green trees makes you feel as if you teleported to another world, a world that reminds you how beautiful and how strong nature is. We had witnessed the powerful wind knock down one of the trees and reminded how, as humans, little we are and how we should respect nature

    Music

    • Came up with another beautiful sounding harmony (basically a I-IV-I-V-III-IV progression) that I should capture in my voice notes (will do that shortly)

    Graduate School

    • Finished up the majority of part 1 of my project, writing a scheduler in C that balances virtual CPUs on physical CPUs running on my Xen server. Only piece remaining is adding a “stabilization” feature that does not shuffle CPUs around. This should take maybe another hour of focused attention
    • Read the requirements for part 2 of the project, which sounds like I’ll be emulating a “balloon” driver, a driver that expands and contracts depending on whether the system as a whole needs more or less memory, respectively
    • Finished watching the lengthy video series on “CPU & Device Virtualization”
    • Began watching an even lengthier video series on “Shared Memory Machines”

    Organization

    • Culled all the lingering, unread (and read) e-mails sleeping in my inbox. Amazing how many e-mails that I do not read so I unsubscribed from quite a few newsletters and disabled e-mail forwarding on my undergraduate academic address since I receive nothing but warning notifications around tornado weather

    Work

    • Nothing. At all. Thanks to the three day weekend (appreciate it labor day)

    Friends and Family

    • Finally remembered (thanks to revising my to do list for the day) to video call my Grandma, who hasn’t seen Elliott for a couple months now.
    • Watched Elliott for an hour while Jess ran off to her appointment. Most memorable moment as a father was seeing Elliott stand up (she’s getting so good at holding this position) and with a little assistance (her gently resting her palm in mine) took one of her first steps. Who would’ve known something so little sparks so much joy
    • Packed and taped up our first moving box, the box filled with all sorts of textbooks that were previously sitting on our bookshelf. Oh yea, also off the kitchen table and carried it outside, placing the table in the front yard so that anybody can pick it up (for free). These little moving victories helps me feel as if we are gaining traction and momentum with this major house move

    Miscellaneous

    • Talked on the phone for 45 minutes with our Loan Broker, who did an excellent job describing the different roles and parties involved in a home purchase transaction. So many terms I was unfamiliar with including: the broker, the lender, the underwriter, the title company, the escrow company. More on this on a separate blog post

    Word of the day

    reprisal actions on the part of his troops were brought to his notice in reports made to him

    Definition

    Reprisal – noun – an act of retaliation.

    Today

    Writing

    • Publish post on notes from graduate school and/or a post on how my C skills have sharpened thanks to self studying, graduate school, switching teams at Amazon (2 years ago)

    Organization

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

    Graduate School

    • Continue watching lecture on “Shared memory”

    Mental and Physical health

    • Run for 5-10 minutes (not much but these little minutes add up) since I’ve been feeling sluggish lately and tired of seeing my belly begin to sag over my waist (physical activities are just unnecessarily harder when you pack on a few pounds)

    Work

    • Send e-mail to three senior engineers who will be participating in my panel
    • Send meeting invite with Rahul so that they can share their presentation with me, the one that will take place in the first 10 minutes of my panel discussion

    Family

    • Check in with Jess since she’s right: I review my days and plan out the next ones so meticulously but fail to include her (and others) as part of my daily equation.  My argument was that she’s so important and implicitly included as part of my day. But is that true? Not sure if I buy my own excuse so I’ll sit and muse on the idea.
    • Review my list of “Contacts” since I haven’t touched base with many people — friends or family — since COVID-19 hit. Actually, COVID-19 has nothing to do with the fact that I rarely reach out to people. I’m so insular and in my “own world” and it’s easy to forget to reach out to loved ones

     

  • Daily Review – 2020/08/26

    Daily Review – 2020/08/26

    What’s your chief aim for today

    • Write and publish one piece on this blog
    • Review Inbox and Important projects sitting in OmniFocus (this was a miss yesterday)
    • Put in 1 hour study session before and after work for advanced operating systems (seems unlikely since I woke up at 05:00 instead of 04:30 and made the fatal mistake of checking my work laptop first)
    • Continue to chip away at writing one-pager design for a prototype for new feature at work
    • Drive from Seattle to Renton in the early morning (while express lanes are flowing in our direction) to visit my sister and my new niece (Charly) who was born just a few hours ago. Looking forward to seeing my mom, who lives in OC but who is visiting us up in sunny Seattle for a few days now that Charly has arrived

    How did yesterday go?

    • Pretty good (although Jess says that I’m always a bit more on the edge, a little less patient, when I’m on call and getting paged throughout the week
    • Felt good about squeezing in early morning and after work study sessions. I admit that I find myself taking the longer path on some homework and reading assignments, but then I remind myself that my purpose of graduate school is not to just get a master of computer science degree but to learn, to grow, to change the way my mind thinks. So I find solace in my decisions to reading a little more than necessary, generating and answering my own questions while reading the textbook
    • I did not review my inbox (or personal e-mail, really) in neither OmniFocus nor my excel backed project list. Need to remind myself that to trust the system of getting things done (GTD), I need to establish a routine of extracting to-do items out of my brain and into the same location — every time. And of course, reviewing that list (which as I mentioned as part of this post, I did not do)
    • But I am consistently writing, editing and most importantly, publishing on my blog, a strong cadence unfolding. In some ways, I am carrying out Jerry Seinfield’s “Don’t break the chain” strategy1, a self motivation tool

    Word of the day

    The men set off in fear and trepidation

     

    A few days ago, five-star basketball recruit Keion Brooks was asked about his level of interest in the Louisville Cardinals and expressed some trepidation2.

    trepidation – noun (n) – a feeling of fear or agitation about something that may happen

    What are you grateful for?

    • Jess dropping off snacks at my desk, fresh slices of peaches and toast covered with peanut butter helping me relax while tackling on call

    Feelings

    • After not speaking to my dad for 2 months and then very briefly video chatting with him on his birthday (August 23rd), he now is suddenly active on WhatsApp, sending Jess and I random links to Facebook, his way of communicating with us. I’m unsure how to engage with him: I’m never sure actually, how we — as a family — should move forward when we’re this entangled since dealing with addiction in the family is a complicated matter. Oh well. I’m not in this alone: I have Jess. And we’ll sort it out. And also, I need to remind myself that I need not figure this out all alone.

    References

    1. https://medium.com/@MrBuzzFactor/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-hack-don-t-break-the-chain-8d1944b8323d
    2. https://grammarist.com/usage/trepidation/
  • Daily Review – 2020/08/25

    Daily Review – 2020/08/25

    What’s your chief aim for today

    • Recover from waking up from 03:00 AM from being woken up from operational issue
    • Write and publish one piece on this blog
    • Review Inbox and Important projects sitting in OmniFocus
    • Put in 1 hour study session before and after work for advanced operating systems
    • Chip away at writing one-pager design for a prototype for new feature at work

    Word of the day

    You cannot geld the human race

    Geld – verb (v) – to deprive of vitality or vigor

    What are you grateful for?

    • Having a steady income and job that I enjoy despite being in the midst of COVID-19

    Feelings

    • Tired as I type this out since I got paged out of bed for 03:00 AM for a NOP (no operation) issue at work

    Yesterday

    • Woke up naturally (i.e. without alarm) at around 04:15
    • Felt good about being able to connect the dots between theory and practice (when reviewing out to generate virtual private numbers using a BITMASK and SHIFT operations)
    • Followed my morning Routine (e.g. walk dogs at local park, blended fruit and vegetable smoothie, warm up chai, write)
    • Pulled into Discount Tires for scheduled appointment to replace punctured front left tire
    • Finished reading chapter on paging systems while waiting for tired to be replaced
    • Recorded a short little melody and harmony on my iPhone while playing guitar for Elliott and Jess during lunch
    • Ad-hoc shopping at Target to pick up size 4 diapers, bottle scrubber for the kitchen, plastic hooks to hang the broom, stasher reusable zip lock bags
    • Ordered and picked up sushi for dinner (avocado rolls, cucumber rolls, croquette and vegetable mini tempera  udon soup)
    • Chopped up fresh vegetables and stored them away in the (just purchased) stasher bags
    • Cut up Jess’s recently purchased book, scanning the book using my Fujitsu IX1500 ScanSnap and then converting the document in mobi format using calibre (new open source software I discovered while searching stack overflow)
  • Little Elliott has found her voice

    Little Elliott has found her voice

    [fvplayer id=”1″]

    Just a short little video milestone of Elliott finding her voice, which sounds raspier than usual since I think she may have overdone it yesterday, making this “ah ah ah” noise for 14 hours.

  • Daily Review – 2020/08/18

    • Seems like my mind and body know to wake me early in the morning (around 05:00 AM), a small window in time in which I can cram in a lot of work before everyone else wakes up
    • Thinking about daily reviews rolling up into weekly reviews, into monthly reviews, etc
    • Out of the corner of my eyes, I witnessed a spider dashing across the room, so I caught it and temporarily placed it under a glass jar, the spider now sitting table and birthday card (will free it later)
    • Jess and Elliott accompanied me this morning, the two of them joining me on my daily dog walk (a couple photos below)
    • Caught Metric red handed: she was about eat her poop, so I slapped the kitchen window, freaking her out, at which point she ran inside the house
    • Watched half an episode of The Community — I love Abed — while eating dinner with Jess
    • Elliott woke up non stop during dinner, not giving Jess a single moment to relax or really even finish dinner in peace (one day this will change, they say)
    • At work, focused on reviewing team member’s code reviews, deploying some of my new features (to us-east-1)
    • Squeezed in two major study sessions, one at 05:30 AM until work (with dog walk in between) and one in the evening (this session focused on me stepping through multi-threaded code using the graphical debugger, me switching threads and inspecting the instructions and stack)
    Tired puppy from chasing the ball
    Tired puppy from chasing the ball

  • 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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