My weekly review that normally takes place first thing in the morning on Sundays was completely derailed this time around, all because I could find the URL to a website that I had sworn I bookmarked for my wife’s birthday present. I ended up coughing up two hours of searching: searching directly on Reddit’s website (where I was 100% confident I stumbled upon the post), searching through 6 months of my Firefox browser history, and searching through 20 or so pages of Google Results.

I ultimately found the page after some bizarre combination of keywords using Google, the result popping up on the 6th page of Google (I would share the URL with you but I want to keep it tucked away for the next two week until my wife’s birthday or at least until her present arrives and I gift it to her).

How about you — when you stumble on something interesting on the internet, what steps do you take to make sure that you can successful retrieve the page again in the future? Do you simply bookmark the page using your browser’s built in bookmark feature? Do you tag that the entry with some unique or common label? Or do you store it away in some third party bookmarking service like pinboard? Or maybe you archive the entire contents of the page offline to your computer using DevonThink? Or something else?

So many options.

Ultimately, I don’t think the tool itself really matters: I just need to save the URL in a consistent fashion.

Writing

• Published 15 blog posts (half of the number are from the daily review)
• Published my daily review
• Published notes on memory virtualization
• Published test case output for Project 1 memory coordinator
• Posted a somewhat lengthy daily review
• Published a post on how to determine the length of an array when calling libvrt’s virDomainMemoryStats
• Shared white/research papers (related to memory coordination algorithms) that my classmate recommended in the class forum
• 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”
• Blogged and published an entry describing my naive scheduler for project 1

Family and Friends

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• Got around to finally calling my Grandma and video chatting with her so that she could see Elliott, who has grown exponentially over the last couple months
• Signed off on tons of paper work for the new house and pulled the trigger on selling a butt load of my Amazon stocks that will cover the down payment and the escrow costs that we’re going to get hit with on September 30th (my wife’s birthday)
• Packed about 5 more boxes worth of our belongings (e.g. books, clothing, kitchen goods)

Music

• Recorded about 5 different melodies and harmonies using the voice memo app on my iPhone, moving the recordings off my phone and sending them to my MacBook using AirDrop)
• Attended my (zoom) bi-weekly guitar lesson with Jared, the lessons focusing on three areas: song writing (creative aspect), jamming (connecting with other musicians, mainly my little brother), developing a deeper understanding of the guitar (mastery).

Mental and Physical Health

• Wrote a pretty lengthy blog post that recaps what took place during my weekly therapy session.
• Exercised maybe about 10 minutes in total combined for the entire week. Normally I’d be ashamed of myself but these days, I’m okay with slipping, cutting myself some slack. I’ll just rebuild the broken habit back up, ramping up slowly, aiming for just 2 minutes a day.

Graduate School

• I’d estimate I put in roughly 15 hours into graduate school in order to read research papers, write code for project 1 (i.e. writing a virtual CPU scheduler and memory coordinator) and of course watch the Udacity lectures.
• For the development project, majority of time gets eaten up trying to grok the API documentation to libvrt. In second place would be debugging crashes in my code (which is why I always riddle my code with assert statements, a practice I picked up working at Amazon).
• I really enjoyed watching and taking notes for this past week’s lectures. I’m taking the class at the perfect time in my career and in my graduate studies, after taking graduate operating systems and after taking high performance computing architecture. Both these courses prepared me well and provided me the foundation necessary to more meaningfully engage with the lectures. What I mean by this is that instead of passively watching and scribbling down notes, I tend to frequently click on the video to pause the stream and try to anticipate what the professor is about to say or try to answer the questions he raises. This active engagement helps the material stick better.

Organization

• Tossed out the cheap $25.00 label marker from Target and instead invested in a high quality Brother PTD600V label maker. Well worth the investment.
• Culled my e-mail inbox, dropping the unread count from hundreds down to zero (will need to perform same activity this week)

Work

• Wrapped up my design for a new feature long, getting sign off from the technical leadership team at work. Only open action item will be to benchmark the underlying Intel DPDK’s library against IPv6 look ups (which I think I already have data for)