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Showing posts from February, 2024

Too slow at getting ready

Takes me 35-40 minutes to get ready for the gym despite setting out my clothes the night before.  It needs to take 20. I got up at 4:35 and could’ve had 45 mins of lifting if I left by 4:55. Instead I left by 5:12 which is ridiculous. I’ll only be lifting for 25 minutes now. Summer is coming, and I have a slight excuse due to jet lag, but today’s the last day of that BS. Time to analyze and figure out how to be ready in 20. 

running2win is such a piece of crap lmao

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What on earth happened to this site? I can't even save my races anymore. I am paying $3 a month for this crap. 

no more living in pigstyland

I had a motto during my gap year -- "Never let the apartment get dirty".  I deep-cleaned the entire thing myself, twice a week, except for my brother's room and bathroom. And thus, with the exception of those two rooms, the apartment was consistently spotless.  I also didn't do super well on the GRE and made little progress on my personal projects during that year. A huge part of it was just enjoying my first taste of freedom from constant homework since the age of like...I don't know, 9? But another part of it was that I spent so much time cleaning that I didn't get any personal work done.  (And to think some part of me still wants to go back and get that engineering degree eventually. Well, I am going to put that off for quite a few years and just self-study.)  Now I clean sporadically and the apartment turns to crap almost as soon as I do.  I'm going to achieve something similar to what I had back in 2019. I will make this place nice. It may not be as i

Shots fired.

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  Dang Universal, savage lol

dear Google, I'm gonna hurt you

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Check it out...in Docs this is so wrong The spelling "alright" actually used to be incorrect -- slang, much like ain't , that was not considered syntactically valid in English. Back in my early days on Serebii Forums I used to be a complete grammar/spelling nazi with that word. I didn't know much about how to critique stories back then, so I would automatically go to copy-editing because it was technically against the rules of the fanfiction forum to only  leave praise (and as a reader, I'm pretty easy to please and am always scared I might discourage a fellow author if I'm too critical, so it was difficult for me to find negative comments to leave other than copyedits).  These days, that particular rule isn't enforced (and I'm not entirely sure it even exists anymore) so I mostly just chill with the small collection of fanfics that I'm currently keeping up with. Chill, vibe, and praise. I leave critiques for my alpha reader groups.  For whatever r

Debugging: stop goose-chasing

This is something that happens to me almost exclusively in school, but sometimes at work too. It's when I'm trying to fix a bug and I'm running out of time. It never happens with personal projects. In the case of my thesis, my current set of bugs could actually push back graduation and force me to pay more tuition.  It's when you think you almost have the solution to your bug, and you're running out of time, so you keep frantically trying random tiny things based on half-baked leaps of intuition. Then suddenly it's 8 hours later and your back hurts and it doesn't work still.  I fixed my biggest issue with my foam simulator but my shader is having major bugs with data transfer. The values are correctly inserted but all get set to 0...somewhere before rendering. Even though the shader works in other scenes and doesn't lose the data.  I started to get so frustrated that I nearly broke something. My github commit comments were also angry. Hopefully the one p

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downscale? never mind.

Downscaling for the past 2 days hasn't helped much, to be honest. I am still stuck on the same bug despite extensive  debugging, and my neck hurts.  Timeboxing will force efficiency. As such, I am going to build a new schedule. Though it will still be focused on my biggest priorities -- master's thesis, piano pieces, and edX -- it will not eliminate anything.  I should have learned by now that all downscaling does is create more local optimization  problems :) And when you get stuck on the same problem forever, you start spinning your wheels. It becomes counterproductive.  Though I will still find ways to squeeze in extra debugging for this push, I will no longer kill other aspects of my life. I am trying very hard to debug this before the weekend. But even if I do not, I will  figure this out.  All I can say is, I really hope this is a syntax problem, like I plugged something in wrong...and not a problem with 3D needing significantly different math than 2D.  But I'm almost

downscale

I thought I was finally over this cold, then halfway through research meeting, I started to feel really sleepy...and kind of off...and my throat hurt again, and...yeah. Back on the sick train. Back home to suffer!  I start working next week so this had better go away asap. I sure hope it's not a sinus infection or something. It feels like winter 2023, i.e. like it's never going to end.  I have to get this master's done, as it's been taking far too long. As a result, this is a temporary  downscale of each pursuit I do, only lasting a few weeks before getting back to normal.  This week I have to  finish thesis code, at least to the point of having a working proof-of-concept in 3D prep all my piano pieces for Sunday finish Dynamics and Control on edX (don't need to be done with the final yet) do onboarding for my job I'm dealing with a running injury and still too sick to go to Orem Rec. So, that will be reduced. Other reductions: Only go to parks on nice days. If

Quickposes beginner certificate!

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I have finally achieved 20 hours of gesture drawing practice to get the Quickposes beginner certificate :) Looks like the daily warmups are paying off. 

The plan...

I've thought a lot about what I want to do, and this is the high level.  For goals, I will follow the PACT method (seems more intuitive to me than SMART).  By April (or June): Finish CS master's degree.  2024 - 2027, including while finishing master's:  Work full-time.  Review all of CS. Master Linux, graphics, all the concepts. Get some cloud and mainframe certs.  Get IT and cybersecurity certs: Google, CompTIA, CCNA, CCNP Data Center, and a pentesting cert. Create a homelab, and continue to work on gaming PC.  Do various coding projects, including a mobile app, a game, and an in-depth website revamp.  Get insanely good at Leetcode and Kaggle.  Work at art, computer graphics, and novel writing every single day, no exceptions.  Practice music regularly.  Continue exercise regime, building muscle and getting faster.  Self-study physics, engineering, and math. Especially focus on engineering that can be done with a CS degree: embedded systems and automation/control engineerin