Category: Blarghing

I initially intended to blog to make tons of money. That didn’t pan out well, so I’ve changed my goals to things more manageable. For one, it’s a tool for me to survey my mental fortitude at the time of writing. Posts tend to get depressing as I go through rough phases of life. Otherwise, it serves as a tool to memorialize my life.

Recently, I’ve realized my writing skills are decaying. Forcing myself to write helps to sustain what I’ve built up in my undergrad years. But this is all in English, and does little to help with communicating in Chinese. Truth is, the vast majority of my family only really speaks Chinese. Isn’t it ironic that the children of immigrants gradually lose the language that connects them with their roots?

I’m glad there are others who voice this opinion. I hope your rest is peaceful.

Two notes

1. Just finished “The Things We Wish Were True,” which was one of the Kindle first selection. In a lot of aspects, it was very similar to A Spool of Blue Thread: white, American families with a lot of complexity lying behind their histories. The two books used those secrets to advance the plots, which mostly consisted of… fairly typical stuff in the case of TTWWWT, with a small twist at the end.

   Overall, the book just seems to move along so slowly with a writing style that’s not as beautiful as I wanted it to. Oh well.

2. Batman Lego is pretty hilarious…

Verifying a stiffness matrix isn’t too hard. See the following PDF file. Otherwise, once a stiffness matrix have been verified, the mass matrix can be too with a few lines more code.

Instead of a Poisson problem, discretize the heat equation such that the steady state is our Poisson problem with an easy time stepper (say Euler). Note that we will have to invert our mass matrix at each step and have a mass matrix multiply. Then we should see that the solution dotted with the force vector approaches the same value as above.

As it turns out, the DG homework wasn’t that ridiculous. If you stripped everything down, and use a little bit of built-in numerical quadrature, then it was actually pretty fun. It turns out that programming all these solvers naturally lends itself to a abstract class with abstract methods paradigm with a few main functions (i.e. solve) that seems to be shared between all the problems.

On another note, I really fucked up meatloafs today. Didn’t season well (bland as ever) with too little bread and zero eggs (whoops, lesson learned). In the end, it was a bland piece of beef which fell apart very easily.

Finally, my god was the Aussie final spectacular. Federer’s backhand was immaculate, arguably better than 2006-2010 levels. Nadal’s passing shots were insane, forcing Federer to hit from the baseline.

I’ve wanted to watch “Kubo” for a few weeks now, but with the recent gif popping up… it just makes it so much cooler. How many people in the world have the technically and modelling know-how to do this… it’s mind blowing.

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I was riding the Silver line bus on the way back to Providence today. Something must have went awry with two passengers. The first thing I heard was “I’m going to punch you in your ****ing face.” Turns out an inconsiderate women bumped into an unforgiving man and ruined the mood of ten other passengers.

On an unrelated note, I’ve been going through “A Gentleman in Moscow.”

I guess I finished the trilogy starting with the Queen’s Poisoner in less than a week. As for today, I’m still suffering a bit of “post book depression” and I couldn’t sleep much last night. Investing that much time into a fleshed out story with great characters does that to a bored person, but I don’t regret it.

(Semi-spoilers ahead, but it’s pretty obvious IMO).

I really did enjoy the story. The series got better as the books went on as Owen and the other characters developed into adults with distinct, personifiable traits. Wheeler did a good job in giving the major characters their own tone, and actions (though the supporting characters lack the same treatment such as the captains).

I think by far my favorite characters were the tragic lives of the poisoners: Ankarette Tryneowy and Etayne. Somehow the deaths of the advisor and friend of Owen hit me pretty hard. They both were selfless with little indication that they tried to pursue their own agendas, with one dying with unrequited love on her mind. I might start reading the prequel later this semester to keep my mind sane.

As for the actual plot, it’s solid overall. I’m still a bit confused as to the role of the mythical set used in the last book, and it’s actual powers. The supernatural in this series lacked in explicit boundaries of the power, and often there were magical ex machina moments. Still, this was historical-based and it did show a little with some GoT-esque politics (though nothing as deep or gruesome) rather than a pure good vs bad.

It’s too bad the language was a bit at a lower-level, though it is expected as it’s a young adult novel. I’m tempted to buy the 4,5,6 books coming up just to see what happened to the kingdom. One aspect I really digged was the time skips. It was well-paced and actually done in a fashion such that the plot never slowed down.

Whelp, time to find another book.

Some idiot posted on Craigslist with a wrong number. Now I’m getting texts with people thinking I’m selling a truck. I’m not.

First sign:

Is the toy still 4 sale. How many miles on engine and what kind of tires. Thx
Did u sell the toyota.
Im working but can call u on break.

Later, he even sent me a voicemail. Finally, I found out the culprit when someone used an app to text me directly from CList.

Are you interested in trading for a jet ski

Finally, I get a better offer:

I’ll trade you a AR 15 for your Toyota truck.