Matt Chung

Crashing and burning during lunch & Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/16

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by

Matt Chung
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I had mentioned yesterday that I slept horribly, waking up early and starting day off at around 03:45 AM. That wake up time was brutal and as a result, I crashed and burned in the afternoon, leveraging those precious 30 minutes of my lunch to nap in my wife’s / daughter’s bedroom (a room with an actual mattress, unlike my office, where I’m sleeping on the floor on top of a tri-folding piece of foam).

I slept so well during that afternoon nap that I didn’t hear the ear piercing alarm that I set on my TIMER YS-390 ; luckily I warned my wife before hand and had asked her to wake me up just in case I overslept. Thankfully she did.

Yesterday, I had suspected that I woke up so early and slept so poorly due to the loud air conditioner shaking on and off throughout the night, but I’m 100% confident of what woke me up this morning at 03:00: my daughter belting out a loud scream (and then immediately fell back asleep).

Yesterday

I’m in great company while working from home. Here’s metric sleeping by my foot

Writing

  • Published my daily review

Best parts of my day

  • The afternoon 30 minute nap. Seriously. The nap makes me wonder how I would’ve taken that sort of break if I were not working remote and if I were working back in the office?

Mental and Physical Health

  • Attended my weekly therapy session with good old Roy. As anticipated, we followed up on our tension filled conversation that occurred last week. What was comforting and brought me solace was that he opened up (just a little) and shared that he was similar to me in the sense that he often will take on additional work that just needs to be done, a person who sees a hole and fills it. That conversation made me think of the term transference: “a phenomenon in which an individual redirects emotions and feelings, often unconsciously, from one person to another.”

Graduate School

  • Watched no lectures yesterday (as mentioned, I was like a zombie) and instead ran my programs (i.e. virtual CPU scheduler and memory coordinator) across the various use cases, collecting all the terminal output that I’ll need to include as part of the submission

Work

  • Conducted an “on site” interview. I say onsite but because of COVID-19, all interviews are held over (Amazon) Chime.
  • Debugged an unexpected drop in free memory and realized that it pays off to be able to distinguish memory allocations happening on the stack versus memory allocations happening else where (like shared memory in the kernel).

Family and Friends

Miscellaneous

  • Got my second hair cut this year (damn you COVID-19) at nearby hair salon. I love the hair salon for a multiple reasons. First, the entire trip — from the moment I leave my house, to the moment I return back — takes 30 minutes, a huge time saver. Second, the stylist actually listens to what I want (you’d be surprised how many other stylists get offended when I tell them what I want and what I don’t want) and gives me a no non-sense hair cut. And third, the hair cut runs cheap: $20.00.  What a steal! I don’t mind paying more for hair cuts (I was previously paying triple that price at Steele Barber).

Today

Mainly will just try to survive the day and not collapse from over exhaustion. If I can somehow afford the time, I’d like to nap this afternoon for half an hour. Will gladly trade off 30 minutes of lunch if that means not being zapped of all my energy for the remainder of the day.

Writing

  • Publish “Synchronization” notes (part 2)
  • Publish daily review (this one that I’m writing right here)

Mental and Physical Health

Graduate School

Work

  • 1:1 meeting with my manager Tim
  • Follow up with fuzzing issue and determine whether or not the issue can be reproduced on other hosts

Family

  • Respond to my brother-in-law, who I shared my article with and who wants to get into writing and asked me what tools he suggests