Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/03

Writing

• Blogged and published an entry for my daily review
• Blogged and published an entry on L3 Microkernel

Mental and Physical Health

• At the park, ran around in circles while holding Elliott in my arms … that sort of counts as exercise, right?

Music

• Nothing at all

Graduate School

• Migrated from my Virtualbox environment to Digital Ocean. My local Ubuntu instance kept crashing, the KVM service unable to start up the guest operating systems. The instances would just hang for no reason and instead of wasting time troubleshooting, I’d rather focus on the code itself
• Wrestled with libvrt’s documentation and finally was able to collect CPU statistics using the API (see snippet below). The documentation sometimes says you need to pass in a struct when they mean pointer (and vice versa)

cpuTime: 119900000000
root@aos-kvm-ubuntu-18:/tmp# ./vcpu-scheduler 
Num domains: 2
Active Domain IDs:
2
1
State: 1, nrVirtCpu: 2, cpuTime=311380000000
Domain CPU Stats:
cpuTime: 162140000000
cpuTime: 144030000000
State: 1, nrVirtCpu: 2, cpuTime=268990000000
Domain CPU Stats:
cpuTime: 142960000000
cpuTime: 119900000000

Work

• Firmed up my design document at work, addressing other engineer’s feedback that was sprinkled in the Quip document
• E-mailed Asians@ so that they include my upcoming event in the newsletter

Organization

• Using my ScanSnap IX1500, I scanned all my loose documents (e.g. tax statements, W-2 copies, etc) and then shredded them, clearing up space on my desk and just overall getting a little more organization

Friends and Family

• Popped into Wells Fargo Bank to transfer earnest money to the escrow company. I had originally tried calling the bank at around 04:00 AM (when their support center opened) to have both enable wire transfers on my account and bump up the transfer limit but quickly realized that sending tens of thousands of dollars should be probably be done in person at the branch
• Unexpectedly watched Elliott for the about 3 hours yesterday. Jess was already running behind for the inspection for our new home located in Renton and Elliott was still napping. So instead of waking her up, she left her with me in the middle of the work day and now I truly understand the plight of parents all around the world, parents who need to work from home while taking care of young children: it’s impossible.
• Scheduled follow up veterinarian appointments for both Metric and Mushroom. Metric’s ear developed a little fissure in her ear, looking as if a tick made a home and then evacuated. And on the back of mushroom’s neck, there’s a maybe 5 or 6 white head looking bumps that are located in the place where I had applied her flea medication a couple weeks ago

Today

Organization

• Call Well’s Fargo (again) and see if they can bump the limit on my wire transfer since I want to avoid going to a Wells Fargo branch due to COVID-19
• Migrate straggling sticky notes that are sitting on desk and process them into “Writing Ideas” or “Inbox” in Omnifocus

Graduate School

• Finish memory virtualization series
• Write a few more lines of C code to get a better sense of how I’m going to write the scheduler (all a bit fuzzy right now). Not sure how scheduler is going to integrate with KVM and not sure what algorithms I’ll select and implement

Work

• Meet with principle network engineer to close out open questions on my design document
• Attend weekly operations meeting and discuss events that popped up throughout the week

Family

• Carry out morning routine: walk with Elliott and Jess and the dogs, blend up a delicious strawberry and blueberry and banana smoothie (thanks to Jess, who picked up the necessary ingredients from Trader Joe’s yesterday), feed the dogs their raw food
• Reply to loan broker and see if they can lock in the 2.875% rate for our mortgage
• Hold a discussion with Shuk (our realtor) and finalize what issues that popped up during home inspection need to get fixed before we move forward into the next step

What are you grateful for?

Spending 1 on 1 time with little Elliott yesterday (despite needing to watch her last minute during a work day). I cannot really explain it but I think I’m developing some sort of paternal love for my daughter, feelings that I’ve never experienced before, not for any human and not for any of my beloved pets. I cannot really describe the emotion … but she’s able to put a wrinkle in my nose just by sitting there and shooting me a smile.

Feelings

After 3 hours of watching Elliott yesterday, I was wiped out, taxed physically and emotionally. That little 11 month year old crawls faster than a rattlesnake and I’m having a hard time keeping up with her. She puts everything in her mouth, from dog hair to shreds of paper (but I would like to call out a victory from yesterday, a proud dad moment, when I was able to free a piece of paper from her mouth before she swallowed it: dad goals).