Matt Chung's Site

Category: Writing

  • 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)

  • Logical Writing & Steven Pinker’s Coherence Relations

    Have you ever read a passage that flows (i.e. has cohesion) but it just … doesn’t make any sense, no matter how many times you read it? You can lexically parse the passage (i.e. makes grammatically sense) but you cannot grasp the meaning? If so, the passage probably lacks coherence.

    What is coherence?

    According to Joseph Williams2, author of Style – Ten Lessons in Clarity & Grace, a passage is coherent when the sentences merge into a unified passage. The passage’s author not only needs to link pairs of individual sentences, but they need to sequence the sentences so that together, the sentences are unified. To this end, Joseph Williams suggests focusing the topics to a limited number of concepts. By doing so, the author helps prevent scattering the reader’s sense of what a passage is globally about. Moreover, Joseph Williams suggests using “connectives”, helper words that link one sentence to the next, words such as: and, but, or, therefore, nonetheless, however, even though, despite.

    But it’s … not that simple. Should connectives always be sued? According to Steven Pinker1, using too many connectives will belabor the obvious and potentially water down the material, patronizing the reader. On the other side of the spectrum, using an insufficient number of connectives can leave the reader puzzled and confused as to how one statement follows from the last.

    Wanting to better understand how to achieve a coherence, I read the chapter “Coherence” in Steven Pinker’s book. In the section that follows, I’ll share the 13 of the different ways one sentence can flow to another. These different methods are also known as coherence relations.

    (more…)