Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/28

Questions I thought about during the day

• How did society overcome the Spanish Flu and how did the people during that time return back to normal? I doubt some vaccination ended the pandemic… so how did we all get over it? And how will it be the same (or different) this time around with COVID-19 ?

Feelings

• Excited to watch lectures on Distributed Systems a topic I’ve been interesting in for a very long time. Funny how I actually build distributed systems at work but don’t have my computer science foundation on the topic except I’ve done one off research on CAP theorem etc
• Throughout the entire day I was just extremely fatigued from waking up due to screams that little Elliott let out throughout the night. I’m guessing she’s teething?

What did I learn

• How to use pragma C preprocessor with OpenMP. Although at work we have some pragma definitions, I haven’t myself dove into why and how. I’m still confused as to the exact details of the pragma definitions but seems like (in this particular case) that by putting in pragma omp parallel, we are signaling the compiler to inject some code that will run once on each processor

Family and Friends Matter

• Walked the dogs at Northacres park with little Elliott and Jess. Elliott looked super cute with the neon orange beanie that her mom bought her on Amazon

Graduate School

• Glad I took the exam the day before yesterday (instead of yesterday, when the window to take the exam closes) since I was completely drained of energy yesterday. Honestly, if I had taken the exam last night, I’m pretty confident I would’ve bombed it
• Watched a couple lecture videos on Distributed Systems and learned a couple new terms like event computation time and message computation time
• Watched the first couple video tutorials on OpenMP, the YouTube learning series taught by Tim Mattson, one of the original and core developers of the library.

Administrative

• Disassembled our wooden kitchen table using my Makita drill and the allen wrench adapter. I broke down the table so that it would fit inside the 3 yard waste bin that I rented from Seattle Public Utilities for the week. My hope is that we dump our unnecessary junk instead of packing them into boxes and hauling it to the new house
• Scheduled a 20 ft. U-Haul truck for the move. I had to call into the help line because I want a one way drop-off (i.e. from Seattle to Renton) but their website doesn’t currently allow you to extend the number of days you are renting a truck. I also learned that U-Haul has very low inventory and they currently forbid renting trucks for more than one day (unless it’s a one way drop off)
• Confirmed two appointments for the day: in person notary (due to COVID-19) for signing paperwork for the house and Wells Fargo appointment to transfer escrow money.

Work

• Lots of back to back meetings yesterday and some unexpected ones (e.g. a 05:30 pm invite for a project that I’m leading)
• Added some counters to my code to verify the behavior of my new feature that I’m developing