I’m still trying to do my 2 months summaries! I’m just 4 months delayed. That’s ok though. Also, sorry about the terrible formatting on this post.

Without further ado, here’s a summary of November and December!

Trips

  • Visited Boston (3 days)
    • Mainly hanging out with friends
    • Lots of biking

  • Mexico City (8 days)

  • LA (1 day)

  • Dad (3 days)

  • Biking 200 miles along the Northern California coast (4 days)

  • Thanksgiving (2 days)
    • Monterey Bay Aquarium!!

  • Jane Goodall’s film
  • Big Sur

  • Lots of planning was required for Boston, Mexico, LA

Co-living Related

  • My Coop
    • Bit of gardening
    • Set up printer
    • Slack presentation
    • House meetings
    • Hanging out in house.. generally
    • Cleaning
    • Play testing “Random Coping Chess” — housemate’s kickstarter game
    • Kittens
    • Work weekend!
      • Made shelves

  • Officially initiated :)
  • Cooking
    • Laksa
    • Granola
    • Pizza
    • Pesto
    • Dumplings
    • Mole enchilladas
    • https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/quinoa-with-moroccan-winter-squash-and-carrot-stew-233714
    • Lentils, various vegetables, learning more about spices

  • Housemate (Karen’s) talk about her time in Chile (1yr)
  • Other houses nearby
    • Continued goal-setting with friends each Monday
    • A couple dinners
    • Thanksgiving!
    • Helped make a swing set
    • “Create” nights

  • New years party

Tech tech tech

  • Web surfing
    • News
      • Tesla
      • Net neutrality
      • Tax bill
    • Crypto research
      • Probably most interesting: https://lightning.network/
      • Bought $10 of bitcoins
    • Watching random companies
      • Starsky robotics
      • Sourceress.io
      • Sphero (wow they’re building soo many cool toys)
      • Zulip (it’s now a new company!)
  • Playing with new tech
    • Rust programming language
    • Coda.io
    • Calculist (funding the project $1/month)
    • dynalist.io
    • inboxwhenready.org
    • Firefox 57
      • Built in rust!
      • But darn, lots of addons don’t work
    • duckduckgo.com
  • Finished my programming languages class
    • Rust memory management
    • JIT compilers, garbage collection algorithms
      • go optimizes GC for low latency
    • The two axis of what distinguishes languages are garbage collection (runtime vs compile time vs none) and typing
      • Sad that it’s so hard to make a language.. so much support around the language needed
      • Sad that it’s hard to jump between languages.. interoperability is poor
    • Professor guest lecturer.. talking about SMT solvers
    • Alex Crichton guest lecturer
  • Finished my databases class
    • B+ trees are sweet!
  • Bought an iPad Pro + Pencil (returned it once, but on the second time decided to keep it)
    • Playing with Notality, and some drawing apps
  • Mini AI Car event at the Red Victorian in SF, met an old co-worker there
    • I love how this deep learning is silly and fun
  • More software design studying
    • Also made a case study on some poor design decisions in Django
  • Talked to two companies I thought would be interesting to work at
  • Contracting for Boosted Boards

Misc

  • Habits/making life better
    • Clipping nails instead of biting them
    • Roughly watching sugar intake
  • Random fun
    • Stanford rap dance show
    • Tree world adventure

  • Generally keeping up with friends.. meals, playing board games, mini adventures
  • Stanford master’s application (2 weeks part time)
    • GRE studying
      • Restored a flashcard tool I made in high school to study vocab:
    • Getting recommendations
    • Statement of Purpose (took a full day)
    • Research lots around this.. other masters programs to apply to.. acceptance rates, price, refunds

  • Drawing
  • Alice walker talk
  • Petting zoo <3

  • Bought tickets to Salt Lake City
  • Spent a little time finding ways to find random fb events
  • Piano

  • Sustaining
    • Making sure healthcare is still working for new year
    • Cleaning car – had some dampness problems
  • Thanksgiving planning
    • Put together this biking plan, which ended up not happening: +October Adventure (Yosemite!)
    • Also had a few other ideas that didn’t work out
  • Misc. physical activities

  • Biking
    • Friends and group rides
    • Professional bike fit (didn’t help much in the end)
  • Badminton
  • Hiking (Perusima Creek Trail, Skeggs)
  • Running (almost always by myself)
  • Exercising every day
  • Reading
  • All my purchases on Amazon
    • Bike related
      • Gloves
      • Biking shirts
      • Saddle
      • Bike seat (x2, swapped out)
      • Bike cleats
      • Water bottle holders for bike
      • Bike multitool
      • Bike patch kit
    • Backpack
    • Sleeping bag
    • Phone
    • Phone case
    • GRE books
    • Ipad pro case
    • Ipad pro screen
    • Battery bank + cable
    • Magnetic fridge storage basket
    • Bike lights

Not great/Can improve

  • Time sinks
    • Decisions and planning
      • I’ve been playing with one idea: make decisions faster and use the saved time to make that decision a good decision (this works great for smallish decisions). But I still need more strategies!
      • Sometimes writing emails/messages take a real long time
    • Over optimizing, especially when money is involved
      • Data backup
        • Backing up google photos (concerned Google is the only owner of all my photos)
        • Related: getting dropbox under 100gb
      • Bike (and selling my other one)
      • Bluetooth trackers
      • Bash infinite history attempts
    • Researching people and things rabbit holes
      • Youtube stars
      • Linkedin/Github
      • Crypto
      • Tesla
    • Not getting out of bed quickly
  • Eating more than I need (weight is fine, but I just eat until I’m really full)
  • Ways I wish I could improve
    • More “risk” taking
      • i.e. More cold emails
      • i.e. Give free hugs
    • Reduce worrying about pleasing others
    • Being more confident/outgoing in certain situations
      • Improv could help
    • Would love to figure out what “work” I should do. I’ve been playing around with the idea of working in new industries for a short time, but haven’t done much research here