I’m (re) learning how to doodle! I’d like to incorporate art and sprinkle sketches into notes that I scribble down while studying for graduate school.  Also, I just miss drawing, an activity I used to do a lot as little boy. But somewhere between then and becoming an adult I’ve lost my way, losing touch with that part of my artistic side.

Although it makes sense to just grab a pen (pr pencil) and give myself permission for the creativity to flow out, my instinct was to perform research online and find a doodling course or find the top doodling books. Now, I did end up signing up for a 30 minute online recorded course produced by local Seattle artist Cathy Wu and I did purchase two E-books authored by Mike Rohde, whom I discovered via Sacha Chua’s blog. However, at the end of the day, I did end up doodling (so did my wife) over dinner instead of watching television like we normally do during dinner.

Writing

• Published my weekly review

Parenting and family matters

• Watched Elliott at 6:00 AM for about an hour so Jess (a tired mom) could squeeze in an extra hour of sleep. During this early morning, Elliott and I kept each other company while I packed up and unscrewed the wooden Ikea desk downstairs. I was originally using my drill to unscrew but Elliott let out a little pout that signaled to me that the drill was too loud. So I ending up switching to a Phillips screw driver, which took me probably twice as long to disassemble the table but who cares.
• Witnessed poor Elliott throwing up mountains of avocado and blackberries, her poor body. She hasn’t thrown up that amount before (and hasn’t thrown up in general for the past 5 months).
• Picked up two loaves of Challah from The Grateful Bread for Jess since it’s Rashashana weekend. I had called in to place a hold on Challah but none were available. But I ended up driving to the bakery anyways and low and behold they had just freshly baked three loaves!
• Swung by Broadfork cafe and scooped us all up some vegan lunch: Egyptian lentil soup (probably my favorite soup ever).
• Created a melody on the ukulele and sang lyrics to the book “You must never touch a porcupine”
• Elliott and Jess and me spent (at least) an hour laying out on the lawn of University Village (thank goodness for their fake grass, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to sprawl out) after picking up dinner from Veggie Grill (as I type this out, I realized how often we are dining out but whatever, we’re in the process of packing and moving homes in two weeks)
• Walked the dogs at Magnuson Park.

What I am grateful for

• Metric being the best dog. Ever. Yesterday I took the dogs to the park with Elliot while Jess received in home physical therapy. The park was packed (everyone distancing themselves and wearing masks of course, apart from 1-2 people who think they are above everyone else) and not too far from the fenced entrance was a group of children, about three or four of them, between the ages of 6-10. Metric rushed to their little circle and greeted them, her long nose brushing up against their elbows for a little hello. Then for the next 10 minutes, while holding Elliott, I watched as the kids would toss a light green softball ball for Metric to fetch and watch Metric retrieve the ball for them and return slobbering it out at their feet. Over and over. The kids loved it. In fact, one of the kids jogged over to their mom and yanked on her jacket, asking if they could take the dog home. The little girl’s mom whispered that German Shepherds.

What I learned

• Concept of cache affinity scheduling
• Learned what hardware multi-threading . Basically allows hardware to switch out thread that’s currently running on its CPU, avoiding the need to get the OS involved

Where is my money going?

• (2) Watermarked PDFs on Sketch note taking by Mike Rohdes
• The iPhone 11 Pro. I debated this purchase for over a week, feeling guilty about spending this amount of money — on a stinking phone. But given that I haven’t upgraded my phone for almost 5 years and given that I take lots of photos of Elliott and the two dogs, I figured a solid investment is worth it.
• App for drawing (pretty relaxing and beautiful)

Thoughts

• Learning about CPU affinity reminds me of the scheduling algorithm that I came up with for a large project at work. We implemented a “sticky” algorithm but really it was an affinity based algorithm similar to what I’m learning in OS. Cool to look back and say “I sort of got it right” without fully understanding or knowing the theoretical roots, relying on intuition instead
• A more sophisticated algorithm may not always be preferable. Maintaining more state (trading off memory) may not be our ideal situation. It’s a trade off and explains why we may want to limit the number of metadata to store, especially when a system may run thousands of CPUs (although I’ve never worked with any of those systems before).