Brady Perkins's blog

Magnetism

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Zhongli of just last Friday...

As per the schedule, I’m no longer on the tiny island of big dreams. I’ve been drawn back home by the inevitable pull, as happens every few months.

But I think I took some of the energy I earned over there back with me. That was the plan, too.

The past few months have been more than a little bit of a juncture in my current life. Maybe that sounds dramatic. It kind of is. But I’m still trying to find out what I think my future is going to look like (as everyone does in their early 20s).

I’ve been happy lately with my notable lifestyle wins. Like, as I’ve made relatively clear in all my past posts and writing, I sort of identify myself as one of those radical Internet urbanists. I obviously don’t have any kind of credentials or even much experience living in a city, but I guess I know what I want (and what I want is evidently to ride more buses).

I did do a lot of bus riding in Taichung (the 中興乾線: I would shout out the rest of the “small crowd” who frequently ride the wheels between Wufeng and downtown, but it’s really not a small crowd. Like, I’d imagine it’s one of the most efficient transit lines in the entire city, because I’m pretty sure in its relatively small citybus-sized footprint it carries at least 5,000 people per day over weekends).

And while I was gone, I convinced my dad to sell the family spare car, because by the time I left I was the only one using it (driving it between Rochester and home and everything). I decided that the best way to adopt the mixed-modal transport methods of the future was to just get rid of my car and make it work (I mean, Rochester has a bus network so dense it’s hard to read the map).

So I’ve got the habit and the means to become the biggest public transit aficionado in the Erie Canal-Northern New England corridor (the bar is low and the sprawl is high).

Anyway, it’s the small wins that count. Yesterday I took a bus down to Boston because I wanted to go to the Microcenter in Cambridgeport and get some of the electronics components I’d need to rebuild the project I was working on in Taichung (so I could have a copy here for video call troubleshooting purposes).

And while I was somehow even unable to find individual transistors at Microcenter – resistors and capacitors for some projects, I guess, but no TIP120s – as per request of a professor I met at the Taichung university whose last request to me before I left was that I send some nice winter landscape photos, I did get myself a nice pigeon shot on the bridge over the river from the Green Line station at Boston University.

The pigeon trot.

And a photo from my front yard here for good measure (we have a nice winter snow going, it’s very “White Christmas”-ish but a little too late):

Actually nice snowfall!

Anyway, I went to the Microcenter and stayed on the floor in the electronics section sorting through a stack of microcontroller boxes I picked off the shelf for about half an hour, and then I bought them and walked up Magazine St (a neat looking neighborhood) to Central Square station on the Red Line.

With my new reference for metro styling being the spotless and brand-new Taichung MRT, riding Boston’s metro system was a little different. But, I’m not going to lie, I think I prefer it. Maybe it’s blind patriotism, but I’m a fan of the “lived-in energy” – I forgot about how unbeatable and… vibeful American urbanism could be when done right. I’ll pull some comparison images from the archive:

The venerable Red Line.

The sparkling Zhongjie.

You know, the Green Line wasn’t even screaming that loudly when I rode it yesterday. Either previous Green Line riding experience wore down that portion of my range of hearing, or they’re actually fixing things.

I’m finally becoming a little more familiar with the great city that’s been only about 90 minutes south of my hometown my entire life. I’m hardly a Boston native, but I am a proud New Englander, and the phrase “drive ’till you qualify” comes to mind.

Maybe when MBTA commuter rail finally comes to Manchester, that can become “ride the train ’till you qualify”. The future is nigh (2029, here I come!).

But during the past week that I’ve been home, I’ve had a good time working through the last bits of communication about the future of my internship work (the aforementioned troubleshooting of project over a video call), I’ve gotten some good rest in, and I’ve seen my dog again.

So in a few days, when I get to ride the Amtrak train from Boston to Rochester, I’ll be fully recovered from the jet lag and ready to get back to school for the first time since last spring.

Other than the one active class that I took just to fill my second “activity elective” (I will never understand why, after graduating high school and whatnot, forcing college students who don’t want to to play sports with each other is apparently such an important and necessary part of the curriculum), I have only classes I’m interested in (engineering ones, language, and hopefully getting back into at least one of the performing ensembles).

Now that I’m out of my gen-eds, I mostly realize that making students try things that they don’t want to and take classes in subjects they don’t like is definitely one of those cases where being somewhere you don’t want to be and having a severe lack of confidence is a shared part of basically everyone’s experience, and that it’s good for people.

Mostly, I feel grateful that I’m now able to recognize people who don’t ever step out of their comfort zone by the look on their face in a situation that makes other people uncomfortable (hello, many people over 30 and the one person in the introductory criminal justice class every year who chose this as a major).

So I’ll choose to feel good that I’m finally getting into the wheelhouse I chose for myself while simultaneously taking comfort in the fact that I don’t have to read any philosophy textbooks any time within the next few years or so. And this past internship has definitely cemented most of the skills I’ve learned so far, which does a good job at compounding the confidence.

I hope all this confidence I’m taking into the new semester is actually meaningful toward my class performance, but at the very least, I’ve never felt this good about my course schedule before, so I’m relishing it at the moment.

But I do feel more fulfilled with the lifestyle and career developments I’ve made over the past few months. The professor I had in Taichung seems interested in having me back, and I’m definitely interested in not having to stress about finding another internship in the near future, so I might take him up on that as soon as I can formally submit my application to return and keep progressing with something new, like data collection.

I've now made a very well-behaved device.

I’d love to go back to Taichung and get myself a real apartment (even downtown) – since I didn’t do the earthquake drill so the dormitory is no longer an option… – and maybe even come back with a friend who has some set of skills that makes my work easier (and we could share the apartment and have a good time together and everything: it could be excellent).

And although I don’t think I want to return to the lab for grad school, I do think that making career connections like this (especially ones that stand out on a resume, even just for their location, like having worked in Taichung stands out to most American employers), I think I should have an easier time finding other jobs or applying to grad school overall in the future (laboratory experience, especially, and a name on a few papers has to look good when trying to go past a bachelor’s).

So even though it’s been four days since jet-setting from Taoyuan, I think life experience sticks. Like, you’re just kind of going through life drawing in the environment everywhere you go. And that makes me feel good, because it gives me solid justification to keep going out of my way to have neat experiences. And I feel lucky to have the opportunity to have such good experiences.

Although I am back at a Starbucks writing a blog post, so some things don’t change so much.

Basically self-explanatory.

I’m looking forward to Friday’s rail-riding. Amtrak trains are, apparently, as fast as the Tze-Chiang express trains in Taiwan – you can verify with this cool site I found out about yesterday, but the trip is still going to be something like ten hours because of the sheer distance between Boston and Rochester (it doesn’t look like that much on a map, but apparently that’s like the length of two Taipei-to-Kaohsiungs).

I’m sure I’ll post some pictures on my Instagram, too, which is fairly new and I don’t think I’ve promoted it at all yet.

Thank you for the visit!

Sweater weather

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Taichung's Da An Beach.

For the first time in several months, I put on a jacket today. Just for the evening, but all day before then, people were asking me why I wasn’t wearing one.

I mean, everyone I know here is from Taiwan, Indonesia, or India, and I’m a New Englander, so that’s my excuse. After all, it was only around 18 C/64 F with some mild wind.

But for the amount of “stuck-ness” that I’ve felt over the past little while – feeling like I can’t finish this project I’ve been working on, like I’m not really learning as much as I thought I would here, and kind of like my summer just still isn’t over, I was a little satisfied to be able to wear a jacket even for just a few hours tonight. I think that’s what they mean by “the winds of change”.

Anyway, I think I finished the first build of my main project – an air-pressure control device. At least, the first iteration of it. Like, right now it’s a stepper motor, solenoid, and Arduino bolted to a wooden board with a Mean Well power supply and some wires. The stepper motor driver and pressure sensor are floating on the wires that they’re plugged into the Arduino with. It’s kind of hack-y, but it works.

I never thought I’d get there. And, even better, my professor today told me that the next thing I should work on is making it better by designing proper components for it, like a real case and a PCB! So now I get to actually finish this project in a state where I might be more proud of it.

So, overall, the stress is starting to decline a little bit.

I even went to Sanxia Old Street with some friends.

I left the campus again after I got out of work, just out of habit because I always do, not because I had anything in particular to do in downtown Taichung.

I’ve been riding the Green Line MRT everywhere, so my “downtown Taichung” world has become restricted to the best stops along Wenxin Rd – but that’s not too bad. I actually have a decent selection of Donutes coffee shops to choose from.

And if you ever need to use the bathroom in Taichung, ride the MRT to Wenxin Forest Park first. And bring sheet music, because there’s a piano in it. And your ears, because the in-bathroom speaker music is an arrangement of assorted full-length versions of TMRT station train arrival themes in the style of a cafe-study music compilation.

But today I rode the MRT to City Hall because I decided I wanted to go to the Shin Kong Mitsukoshi – it has a Muji in it, and those usually have nice things. I was looking to maybe buy a sweater for the newly-arriving fall. And my shoes have a big tear in them now, and the foam is coming out the side. So I wanted to maybe look at new shoes, too.

The Muji is on the eleventh floor, so I had to walk around a fair bit (just to find the elevators), and after leaving the Muji after having found nothing I liked and heading back down, I used the escalator. The entire building was covered in Christmas decorations, with Christmas music over the radio, too.

I know Western traditions and things like that are popular here, so it wasn’t unexpected. Actually, I’ve seen this kind of thing up and around since the beginning of the month. But the weather today made it feel a lot more “right”, and the Shin Kong Mitsukoshi building is almost styled like a New York City department store – I’m not from NYC, but there was something about riding down the escalator for ten floors and taking in the ambiance that reminded me of that one time I went to New York City for the holidays with my parents when I was 13. Oddly nostalgic.

The sky is clear and the trees are leafless.

After not buying anything at the Shin Kong Mitsukoshi, I got back on the MRT and rode to Sihwei Elementary School (the secondary name is “Erfenpu”, which I feel like is more fitting for a random MRT stop in the middle of a downtown Taiwanese city. I feel a little out of place getting off at an elementary school, especially as a Westerner here, although I’m used to people thinking I’m probably an English teacher by now).

I at least felt confirmation in my decision to postpone my participation in the holiday consumerism when I saw a giant painting of Jay Chou and a sea turtle supported by the International Wildlife Federation on the way down the escalator.

I’m now at, of all places, another Donutes coffee shop (these are great – they’re all over Taiwan and they all never close). Talking to the cashier was another one of those times where she kept insisting on using English and I could clearly tell it was because she wanted language practice, which I can really understand, so I smiled and said “thank you” when I picked up my order and then started eavesdropping on the people next to me who were talking about some guy’s transportation habits and some place in Taipei by Lungshan Temple.

They have their own mistletoe on the handrails around the waiting line and Christmas jazz playing over the radio. Maybe it’s corny, but it actually does feel a little homelike to have it like this.

But as far as trying to fit in a little better in the parts of Taiwan that are less familiar, I am progressively struggling less. Not successful just yet. At lot of it is definitely in my head, especially my language insecurities.

This morning, I woke up to the dormitory services people scooping my roommate because he forgot to sign his name on the late-night entrance sheet yesterday. That interaction was all in Mandarin and I could understand none of it except for my roommate’s 「但我在睡覺！」. I have an unread copy of a book I bought at the Eslite in Xitun a while ago still sitting on my desk shelf. I should pop it open. My reading comprehension abilities are way better than I think I give them credit for.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

You know, I think language learning is all about targeted practice. I’ve learned most of my Mandarin this year, with my lack of Chinese classes since April, listening to Mandopop on Apple Music.

I noticed the other day, when I was sitting on a bus and annoyed that whoever set the music changed the captions from Mandarin to English halfway through, that I was actually pretty good at translating the English captions back to Mandarin in my head (the only language practice I could come up with). A lot of the lines even rhymed, too! I’ve learned so much Mandarin from KTV that I think I’m fully fluent in cheesy love songs.

So, I thought, it’s got to work the same way with other language skills. I just have to find people who want to talk about things that I want to be good at talking about. There’s a conversation table here – at Asia University – that I’m at that I could (and should) join – but if I read and do that, too, I think I’ll give myself a decent shot at getting much better. I’m only halfway through my internship, so I still have time to make progress.

I’ll have to pick that book back up. It’s about world politics and similarities between the geopolitics in and around Poland and around Taiwan. I’m not sure where the idea came from, but if I can read and understand more than just the first two sentences that I read in the bookstore before I bought it, hopefully I can at least be able to write about eastern European history in Mandarin soon.

As far as lifestyle, though, I’ve otherwise been doing well for myself here. Yesterday I went to get hot pot with a friend for dinner, and he took me on the back of his scooter. I’d never ridden one before, but it’s something that I could get used to.

The next receipt lottery drawing is in less than a week, so I’ll just have to win enough money there to buy one of those things.

Chilling in Wufeng.

After that, I’ll just have to take an LoA from RIT, get myself an ARC, change my driver’s license for a local ID and, umm… find myself a part-time job as an English teacher at a high school in Dali or something.

Actually, I need a work permit for that, too. But I already have a commemorative wallet bag from Taichung Municipal Dali Senior High School, which is very nice and convenient and I will definitely be in the only person in all of upstate New York with Dali Gao-zhong merchandise when I return.

Whenever I introduce myself to someone new at Asia University, they jokingly ask me why I don’t stay for longer.

Earlier today, I met the president of the university, and he said the same thing. He asked what my major was. I said electrical engineering, and he told me about Asia University’s (really well-ranked) electrical engineering program. I told him I knew. You know, I have already looked at these things.

So even if this isn’t my home, I feel like the people I’m meeting are doing well to make this feel like a solid second home. And, you know, it’s impossible to predict the future. The other day, I was talking with a coworker-friend and somehow we got on the topic of my future study plans. I think I said that maybe I’d ask our professor about graduate degree options here. He said I wouldn’t have to, because the professor would ask whether I did or not.

Ya-Da’s a cool place. And now, it’s got weather to match.

Until Saturday.

Thanks again!

Taichung redux

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Meatball bowl. With soup.

Sometimes, stories just kind of tell themselves.

Yesterday, I was told that the chest x-ray that I got at home before coming to Taiwan wasn’t detailed enough (no picture), and that I’d have to get a new one along with a blood sample done in order to be able to continue living in the dormitory. By Thursday (two days?).

So yesterday afternoon I was sailing around by bus and went to three different hospitals to find the one that could get me in. It was China Medical University hospital in North District, pretty far from the university in Wufeng by bus (although not if you want direct service: today I learned there’s a shuttle between the two because they’re sister institutions).

Anyway, I was in a little bit of a rush. And I was a little agitated and kind of stressed about this last-minute dormitory health check scenario, since I really didn’t have much time and, worst case scenario, I lose my living situation (?).

I went through the physical at CMU Hospital and headed back out to get back to school sometime in the evening. And I didn’t think to check my pockets or backpack, so I was surprised when earlier today I got a call from an unknown number followed by a message telling me that it was CMU Hospital letting me know that I’d left my passport with them and that they were keeping it at their desk.

I told them I’d be back tomorrow morning to pick it up, since I was kind of busy today, but then about an hour later I had a meeting with my professor and — through some tangent of whatever conversation we were having — I mentioned that I had left my passport at CMU Hospital and he decided that I needed to get there right now. I mean, he was probably right, it was important.

So he went to drive me to the university hospital with the shuttle service to CMU.

Unfortunately, though, when we got there, we learned that the timetable for the shuttle bus listed on the web page is old and inaccurate. The shuttle bus wasn’t going to come for another 30 minutes. My professor told me at first that I could just go sit in the lobby at the hospital here and wait for the shuttle, and then looked at me and back at the steering wheel and just decided to drive me straight there immediately, which was kind of surprising. I mean, he’s a busy person. I felt kind of bad for taking up his time like that.

We sat in the car and just talked to each other for around 20 or 25 minutes, since the trip to North District is a lot quicker by car without all the stopping (it’s Taichung’s turn to implement transit-priority traffic signals!). I ran into the hospital and ran out with my passport a few minutes later.

I was still thinking about how nice it was of him to be driving me like this on the same route back when he looked over the side of the road and asked if I wanted food. I told him I was all set, since I assumed he probably had something to go back to at school, but he just kind of actioned his way through my thin shield of politeness and we U-turned right in front of a meatball stand by the side of the road.

He asked if I wanted soup to go with the meatball. I said, “no thanks”. He bought two.

I’d love to imagine what the woman behind the stand was thinking seeing him sitting there on the seats right in front of the stand like that, with me on the side looking all like a clueless foreigner.

It was great, though. The meatballs and the soup. There’s bamboo in the soup, actually, which I hadn’t realized was edible before.

After I took a few bites, the professor said to me, “I bet you wouldn’t go somewhere like this by yourself.”

I admitted that that was probably true, but that I usually didn’t like going to restaurants by myself, anyway. I said, “I’ve been to some of the night markets, though. Like, Zhongmei St and Yizhong St and around there.”

“Sure, but those are for tourists. This is real.”

…

“I know.”

…

When you find someone who’s skilled at reading people, and at interacting with people, and at being a person, I think that that definitely goes way beyond languages and cultures and whatnot. Sometimes appreciation is necessary.

After work today, I went downtown with someone I know from work here and the weather had really cooled down. Actually, he asked if I needed a jacket, but it was still warm, which was kind of funny. The wind was strong for a little bit. It’s been pretty deafeningly hot and humid every day, so this is a nice change.

Then I went to the hardware store. I know I’m far from a local, but it’s still funny to me when I go to the hardware store to buy hot glue sticks and rubber tubes and the cashier behind the register isn’t sure if I speak any Mandarin, like maybe I’m a tourist who just came for the exceptional texture of Taiwan melting adhesive (?).

I know I tend to be obsessive, but I’ve stumbled across more of what I like in Taichung just living my life than I have walking around looking for it. And I think that’s by design. If you go looking, you’ll find the most obvious things first. And if that’s not what you’re looking for, you’ll never find what you want.

So, really, I do think that this city is a great one. But I’ve learned that the best way to appreciate it is not to try.

I’ll probably pause posting for a while. I always appreciate the read, though.

晚安！

Central City

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My new desktop wallpaper.

I’ve gotten most of the urban exploration out of my system over the past weekend and am now beginning to really appreciate the city that I was destined to discover.

The image comes from here.

Maybe that’s a somewhat dramatic way to put it, but as a new resident of the largest city in Taiwan that isn’t Taipei and, specifically, the district that is apparently home to the National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra (?) (!), I feel good.

I’ve toured a decent bit around with the help of the buses and a little bit of Internet guidance. I probably didn’t go the exact “tourist route”, but I did try to make sure that I could understand the city from the perspective of someone who is staying here (at least, who is here for three months or so).

I’ve also taken a lot of pictures, which I might as well use to describe what I think about the whole area. I could try to do one of those Internet urbanist-style city reviews, which I think I may have done enough photography to do!

Not until I was at a dinner on Friday did I get out into the city (since I came in the middle of the week and started working right away). The place that we went was in Dali, which is fairly dense but right on the edge of Taichung’s urban sprawl network.

A bike in the... bus lane! 差不多吧。

The morning after, I went to the Wufeng First Market, which is in Wufeng but out on Zhongzheng Road and fairly far from where I am. It’s also not bad, and I forgot how dense Taiwan gets given the smallest possible number of people living close by. The market was packed, and this really isn’t something that you see outside of a big city in the US. Impressive!

Zhongzheng Road in Wufeng.

Later on that day, I was too obsessed not to try to make my way downtown for the sole purpose of visiting the Green Line MRT. Some people say that public transit can’t be a tourist attraction, but clearly, those people have never seen an elevated traincar with cutesy eyes painted on it and a vending machine full of merchandise just out front.

The views from the TMRT are actually very nice because the whole system is elevated, but you can’t see it in this photo because it was nighttime when I shot it (being that the train is packed during the day and I wanted to avoid being insensitive with my phone camera out in the crowd).

Pastel colors and good views!

But, then, most of Taichung is still built on the bones of the relatively old structure that you see in most major Taiwanese cities — dense neighborhoods connected by enormously wide roads built during the early KMT years and cars and scooters whipping down at breakneck-and-end-your-life speed.

The sprawliest parts of the city are further north and west, where there’s more going on but less density to build on top of. It’s mostly Beitun, Xitun around Taichung Central Park (ironically placed way out at the edge of the city), and some parts of Wuri away from the HSR station.

Other than around Taichung Central Park, the worst part about Taichung’s car-centricity is that it tends to hit all at once: as soon as you get far enough from the urban core, even if the density stays, the sidewalks and tree cover will abruptly end and you’ll be plunged into a giant, wide road putting your life on the line walking directly next to traffic that doesn’t seem to mind getting right up to your shoulder and having nowhere to hide from the blazing sun and suffocating humidity.

Taichung’s weather is a little more stable than in the north, and seemingly more manageable than in the south, but it’s definitely best when you get some help. Being stuck in a pavement island in Taichung, even in October (still firmly “summer” in Taiwan), is pretty uncomfortable.

Kind of like Florida. Hot, and big wide roads.

Image above credit: WC-QHS, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

At the very least, Taichung’s bus system is pretty world-class and unlike anything I’ve ever seen or used. Chains of buses line the streets throughout the whole city, and a lot of the routes are fully electrified, too. Routes like 台中客運 Taichung Bus 200 and 304 make the TMRT’s lack of extensivity and 2034 completion timeline for the Blue Line easier to handle, provided you’re okay with fitting a metro’s worth of people onto a single-car-sized bus at rush hour (around 10 PM if going south. Just a warning).

It’s difficult to tell if the city knows what it’s doing and is building out urbanism in the same way that most American cities are slowly starting to do, or if they’re still stuck in the past’s version of the future. A strange thing to note is that the Green Line MRT, which runs along Wenxin Road, goes mostly through parts of the city that aren’t really pleasant otherwise. Either they want to ride over the heat and pavement of Beitun in an air-conditioned train as a victory lap or they’re trying to make up the difference by throwing these communities a bone. The center of the line is at a wealthy area and Taichung City Hall, but a lot of the outskirts don’t have much going on around the stops.

There are certainly a lot of places on the entirely other end of the spectrum, though. Xitun is really two-sided because of that contrast between Central Park and its other main attraction up in the northwest corner of the city, the Feng Chia Night Market.

Feng Chia at night has just about everything to see: music, stalls everywhere for food, drinks, clothing, anything else you’d find at a market, and it’s really huge and really dense.

What they mean when they say 「熱鬧」!

I stayed there for a long time, and the air conditioners over the crowds actually helped me get a little bit more comfortable after walking across a large chunk of Taichung Central Park (really a combination of the air conditioners, the cooling down as it got darker, and the massive apple milk that I bought from one of the vendors).

It was a lot to take in, but everything I was taking in was good. Night markets are like that. An easier-to-access one is the Yizhong Street night market, which has a good sweet potato ball vendor but otherwise isn’t as big or impressive. It is definitely functional, though, and certainly a good time.

Toward the east end of Yizhong Street is also a little neighborhood with a “Box Design Hotel” and some brick streets with colorfully-lit hot-air balloon sculptures. That would definitely be on my list of considerations if I were looking for a hotel to stay in in the future. For now, though, I have my dorm.

In the morning, there are also a good number of more centrally-located places to relax. I wanted to get some work done and found this really neat little cafe with good online reviews called the Fleet Street Cafe. If you’re in Taichung and you want to go to a Western-style cafe that doesn’t charge Western-style prices and where you can sit in a little miniature bookstore looking over the narrow streets of 中區, this is your place. I stayed for over two hours and actually got things done! It’s a good slow-grind environment.

Like being in an Internet chill-cafe-study video.

And into the evening, there’s another relaxing place not far away with a strange English name: “Audit Village”. It is, though, just a direct translation of the name “審計新村 ShěnJì XīnCún”/ShenJi New Village (I guess maybe it just sounds nicer in Mandarin).

When I was in Taipei I talked about how much I thought the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park / Songyan was cool, and this was kind of like that, except it was an old dormitory complex used by employees of the provincial auditing office. It actually converts into a little market-park really well, too, like those kinds of things seem to do, except without the intense tobacco smell that might either repel or draw you in in the case of the Taipei version.

Chill study music, too, but live!

Speaking of Taipei, if you miss the feeling of money and skyscrapers blowing out of the ground and ringing the bells of the cash registers and consumerism all around you while watching sports cars with “XXX 8888” license plates drag-race down the business district, Taichung’s 7th Redevelopment Zone has you covered (Qi Qi! 七期). Never before have I seen a city government do too good a job at reinvigorating the local economy.

Qi Qi!

Image above credit: Victor Liu, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s this kind of place that serves to remind you that you do have it all right here. Or, at least, that those ones up in the towers have it all right here.

But, actually, not far from Qiqi is the 春水堂 Chun Shui Tang restaurant, apparently the originator of bubble tea (and, somehow, Taichung remains out of the imaginations of pop culture worldwide? Where are my anime-inspired Wenxin Road metro dark-mode Wallpaper Engine backgrounds?).

Most of the city, though, within the sprawly edges and in between the highlights, is fairly normal and honestly pretty nice. Especially around Central District just above and below the train station and a little into Nantun, West District and southern Xitun. A few more pictures for good measure:

A little greenway near Luguang Village.

Luguang Village isn’t quite the most notable neighborhood on Taichung’s map, but notably interesting to me is the fact that their FamilyMart still has the old doorbell tune (the one that plays in Japan and elsewhere but not anymore in most parts of Taiwan). Actually, it plays both (they just Band-Aided the new tone on over the old one, which I found way too amusing when I first walked in).

Nantun has some nice neighborhoods with the greenery and narrow streets that you see in some nicer parts of Taipei, but without exactly the same level of density:

Lots of plants and scooters!

And in some places, even when there are cars, at least they’re old, small, and brightly-colored (I actually saw a decent amount of this, and not one oversized pickup truck outside of the Toyota dealership near the Wenxin Yinghua MRT station!).

Green and orange for contrast!

For the busier parts of the city, Taichung Park (the park that is actually located in the center of town) and the canal along Zhongming South Road make for some decent urban environments.

Taichung Park.

Zhongming South Road isn’t around anything that I really needed to visit, but I did find myself walking around West District and, for the lack of sidewalks and tree cover in that area, especially, it was a good thing to see.

Zhongming South Road.

So, after all, I feel like I’ve explored Taichung enough to feel comfortable that I’ve seen it, and secure knowing that I have places to go on the weekends (whether it be to get work done or to buy sweet potato balls). And I can feel pretty proud to live what I choose to believe is both the world’s next great city and the home of the future Taiwanese president (當然是盧市長吧！). It’s not even a hot take, I’m pretty sure it’s just all political analysts’ prediction.

I’m writing this in my dorm with some roommates who I’m gradually getting to know. I’m living in the “international student housing”, which they keep separate (I guess maybe that’s worth doing).

I’ve been here almost a week. I’m grateful and I’m going to try to make the most out of the rest of this year.

I appreciate the read again.

來台中吧！

“bonus bopomoment”:

che ku!

And an addendum from the future: South District is nice too. The sidewalks not only exist, but they’re wide and there are trees everywhere. It feels like what I imagine one of those old New York City expensive neighborhoods feels like.

And there’s a big hardware store by Taichung Rd., the 大台中五金百貨, which is the only reason I ever go down there. There are closer hardware stores to my university, I just like having an excuse to walk through South District.

多謝大家！

Charlie on the MRT

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I would love to drive this as my day job.

I’m back at the airport in Boston. Today’s journey already feels a little bit familiar.

I’ve spent the past two months or so at home. I’m from New Hampshire (Concord) but as I’ve come to learn and accept, I am not from an independent and proud capital city of a place with its own individual identity and cultural background. I’m actually from Boston’s largest suburb by land area.

And although I’ve been slowly weaning myself off of the car (maybe watching too much urbanist YouTube and listening to too much of the War on Cars podcast), Concord has excellent bus access to Boston. It’s a little expensive, but I really haven’t had much to do for the past week or so.

On Friday, I came down by bus and took on the challenge of riding a segment of every transit system in Boston in just one day (not getting too specific — all the subway lines, commuter rail, ferry, trolleys, BlueBike). I was more successful than I had even imagined I was going to be. It was fun, but might not have been too smart to acquaint myself with the sights and sounds of the inside of a moving metal box just a couple of days in advance of today.

Downtown Crossing in Boston.

Although if this is the challenge I choose to subject myself to whenever I get to a particular place, I haven’t cut out very much work for myself in the next destination city — I can ride the bus to the Wuri HSR station, Green Line to the Costco, take a slow train to South District and a YouBike to Wufeng and be finished.

Taichung sounds like an urbanly-explorable place.

I’ve been having the time of my life radicalizing myself to such extremes as becoming a cycling train enthusiast — for as much free time as I have in the coming three months (I’m still not sure about the work:life balance to expect), I’m sure I’ll get to have a good time on some cross-island train journeys and with the street-width dichotomy between the north and south that I’ve heard about online. I mean, how bad could the birthplace of such memorable transit mascots possibly be?

Being from the Northeast, I think I’m a little spoiled as far as neat cities go as compared to most other Americans — we have neat brick streets, narrow roads, lots of buses and pretty good and colorful metro systems, lots of history, and plenty of tree-lined streets.

A car-free street in my hometown (Concord).

Even Manchester (in NH) has lots of frequent buses, a good commuter coach-bus system (called the “Zip Line”), really cheap fares (but still fares, which is important — you need to collect money to pay for the buses. Concord has not yet figured this one out).

Downtown Manchester, NH.

I do really agree that it is important to get the basics right if you want to have a nice place for people to live their lives. I’m certainly considering a lot of what I see when I explore locally in the context of my future — I can explore close to home, I can explore far from home (coming soon, as you know), and someday all of this knowledge might come in handy if I have to put myself down somewhere at some time in the future.

One of the neatest ways to explore a city, I think, is to ring around it on its buses. You’ll both get a good feel for how easy it is to get around in the city, and you’ll get neat views out the windows (especially if it’s one of those level-boarding citybuses that are so common these days. They’re nice, but Concord has also not yet figured this one out).

You can explore the more livable parts of Concord on foot without the assistance of the green school buses if you want — they’re mostly for commuting from other parts of town to Main St, though.

Cities with streetcars are especially cool, but the only ones I’ve ridden are the ones in Toronto (kind of abused) and the Mattapan Trolley (pretty cool, but there should be more of it).

I’ve been lucky lately with how much world-viewing I’ve been getting to do.

Bicentennial Square, Concord, NH.

But I think it’s all really because the best thing a person can to do stay sane is to get out and explore as much as is possible (even your own city!), make friends, get with friends, spend as much or as little on transportation as you want, and maybe get one of those excessively-sugary Thai teas at your local American suburban mall. I think I’ve been stuck for too long on the “grass is greener on the other side” mentality that kills — it’s really not about where you are, it’s about what you do with it, right?

That’s kind of always relevant in any context. I’m just happy I’ve reminded myself about it.

Slowly into the future I go.

And onto a plane in about two hours.

A slow month

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Toronto's skyline from Ward's Island.

After a month off, I think I need to come back here and talk things out on my blog again. I ended up back in Toronto lately and took a nice skyline photo, though.

I’m back at home now, and I’m sitting in the new Starbucks that just opened last year within scootering distance of my house. I’m lucky enough to live near the downtown center with the highest walk score of anywhere in my entire state (96! Rivals New York City, but definitely not as big).

I would’ve gone to one of the other infinitely better coffee shops around here, but I’ve wanted to sit down at the Starbucks and do the blogging here like I do in Rochester, and besides, all of those other coffee shops close at 3 PM anyway (as I write this sentence, it’s 2:54 PM. Not really a chance to get in there for any significant time).

The past month or so has been a little bit much. I got torn away from Rochester at the beginning of August, just as I was starting to have fun and get to know the area with the help of friends who have more of a life than I do and have the courtesy to show me how to exist a little bit more actively than I have in the past.

Since leaving my internship in Rochester, I’ve gone back there twice: one to help a friend move and then once to help me and my roommates move in to my new apartment on-campus.

While I was staying in my Airbnb for the few days before I left, I couldn’t help but notice what a neat little neighborhood it was in and how charming the house was (I was on the third floor, in the attic, and the stairs creaked but in a sort of endearing way, something that other guests had commented on in the guestbook left on the desk in the room).

Rochester has some nice historic scenes. The house I was staying in was built a little over a hundred years ago, and aside from the possibility of asbestos insulation, that kind of three-story home in a small city downtown is, personally, my ideal living environment. Especially for how well-decorated the Airbnb studio loft was.

And besides that, when I came back for the weekend about two weeks later to help the other friend move, that friend had done the math out about the potential money-savings of living off-campus: a 1-bed, 1-bath apartment in downtown Rochester seems to be about ~$1,000-1,200 per month on average. Split it with a roommate (even if they’re sleeping on the futon in the living room) and that’s only $500-$600 a month: a lot better than the cheapest student housing, which averages out to $625/month for all the time you’re allowed to live there as a student (so the full year minus the three summer months).

Besides, those downtown apartments (or the ones in neighborhoods near downtown) are all pretty walkable, and Rochester has a slew of interesting places that are well-established and thoroughly charming (South Wedge, 19th Ward, North Winton Village, Pearl-Meigs-Monroe, and the east end are all pretty dense).

So I’m a big fan of Rochester now. Me and one of my new roommates walked around downtown a while ago taking pictures of buildings and scenes:

The world-famous abandoned subway of legend.

Bus & bike: I can't tell if this is better or worse than bikes with the cars.

A vintage postcard-esque view of Rochester's Powers Building.

Rochester's complete skyline.

Every Rochester urbanist’s favorite topic of conversation is, of course, the subway. There’s even a whole dedicated website, rochestersubway.com, complete with a subway map replicating what the system might look like today if it had been let to continue development instead of being decommissioned in the mid-1950s (one of which, of course, I ordered).

The Rochester community wiki, too, rocwiki.org, is fairly out-of-date on a lot of the pages but serves as a great source of patriotism for the citizens of Smugtown nonetheless.

After doing more exploration, both in-person and on the Internet, I’m much more in love with the city than I had ever been when the only parts of the region that I’d seen had been RIT and Henrietta. The thought entered my mind to try to renew my driver’s license in Rochester after it expires next year, so that I could register to vote in the city and become a little bit more involved in local politics and that sort of thing (being an active citizen, the should-be and would-be favorite pastime of every American).

Even if I don’t, I’m still beginning to browse Zillow across ZIP codes 14604, 14607, and 14609 pretty religiously and thinking about my future helps me feel better after a past month that hasn’t been great.

Besides, a New York driver’s license is portable to anywhere in New York City, and if I ever become too ambitious in the future, that might be a nice bit of leeway to provide myself. As a Google Street View hobbyist, images of upscale Park Slope neighborhoods are promising.

Until then, though, I still have my October-December Taichung City internship to work toward. That’s an exciting travel destination, for sure, but now that I’m starting to make friends in Rochester and that I have roommates who I really get along with, I’m a little sad to be leaving it all behind to venture 8,000 miles away so soon. I guess I’ll have to tell myself I’ve learned how to make friends. I’ll have to prove it to myself by seeing how active I get to be with my coworkers around the great second-largest city in Taiwan and the homeland of the KMT’s next presidential candidate, Lu Shiow-yen (I’d say I called it, but actually, I read the prediction in a Taipei Times column).

Not that any of that matters, because if registering to vote in Rochester was a stretch goal, it’d take an entire lifestyle shift to meet the goal of registering to vote in Taiwan.

It would seem like my sphere of influence is growing every day. It now stretches from Portland, Maine to Toronto, down to Boston, and with exclaves in the Sea-Tac airport and across northern and central Taiwan. I can at least say that I’m going places physically, even if my life feels like it’s at a little bit of a standstill.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of the summer, it’s that ambitions are a little bit meaningless, influence is pretty useless, and all the money and resources in the world won’t do anything for you if you don’t have friends. And I can definitely say now that I have friends.

Picture below.

My brother and sister.

I’ve heard that the best way to live a long life, feel the most fulfilled, and even avoid cancer is to stay social, get out, be friendly and meet people. So no matter where I am over the course of the next few months and then the next few years, that’s what I’ll be trying to do.

Thanks for the read. I’ll be back at some point (maybe not soon, but soon enough).

And, of course, I’ll see you then.

About me

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Me as a baby with a lobster hat.

Thank you for visiting!

This is my blog. I use it for keeping track of life and sharing on the Internet, in hopes that the people reading are cool and nice. If you’re here, you probably are. Thank you.

My primary hobbies have developed over time and all sort of fit together. They’re most of what I write about on the blog. I’m a fan of:

中文
Urbanism
Politics & history
Photography
Electric things

I’ve studied Mandarin for a few years, I’ve listened to lots of podcasts about city design and the climate, and my mom taught me to appreciate the power of protests. I like taking photos on bad digital cameras (I have a Sony Mavica FD83 and an iPhone 3G for that purpose). I like any espresso (good, bad, Starbucks, whatever).

I’m from Concord, New Hampshire, but I’ve been going to school at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York for a few years now. I’m still an undergrad. I started out majoring in microelectronics/electrical engineering/that sort of thing and then added a double-major in Chinese language.

…In fall 2025 I’m in Taichung City, Taiwan trying to make career connections and doing intern things in a research group. Taichung is truly the world’s greatest underrated and underrepresented city (the bus capital of the world, jazz capital of Asia, and the home of Lu Shiow-yen, 3:15 PM milk tea, and the super fancy Chun Shui Tang restaurant chain that originated boba tea for the world to enjoy). If you’re not in Taichung, you can enjoy the soundtrack to the city, or, at least, its tiny and short but adorable metro system….

…In spring 2026 I’m in Rochester again, taking mostly EE classes for the first time in my undergrad and hoping that it will make me feel more focused. I think, overall, I’ve learned a good bit about myself, how I think, and how I want to live in the past couple of years, so now I’m looking forward to the future just a little bit more. I no longer have a car, which I feel like is ironically going to raise my quality of life a lot (I mean, I like walking. Buses and trains are also great. Again, I got super into urbanism and I have no regrets).

I try my hardest to love the places that I go, and I’ve been successful so far. While I can’t readily travel wherever I want, whenever I want, I do love traveling and especially “being a tourist in my own city”. I walk around, take pictures and then edit them obsessively while stumbling down the sidewalk using my smartphone like a tourist with no shame.

Rochester is a place that is both easy to love and easy to hate (see: optimism and pessimism on rocwiki.org). Considering that it’s where I’m going through my college experience, seeing things, starting to have a life, friends, and things to do, I prefer to stay optimistic. I encourage other people to do the same.

On this blog, I’ll mostly write about the places that I go and the things that I see and do as they relate to my interests (seems like a good general description of any blog, actually). I like keeping the topics focused, but the things that I write about usually just come out of my fingers, through the keyboard and into the screen.

Thanks for the visit. I hope my words are valuable to you, somehow. That’s the goal, anyway.

See you around!

Life

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Headed aboveground!

I’ve been gone for a while. I think I need a real break.

The past week has been a lot: it started out with something neat, though, and I wanted to share a little bit.

Since I’ve had my car on campus at school, I’ve been wanting to make a journey across the lake and see the city on the other side, and this summer I made a friend who self-identifies as as much of a city person as I do and who is equally impulsive. Last Sunday, we popped into a car together and crossed the border and got on a GO train to Toronto.

That was the beginning of the giant wildfire cloud that blanketed the entire US northeast and Canadian woods for a while, and visible in a lot of the pictures.

I did take a lot of pictures. I’ll give away a few (I love taking these)! I’ll definitely upload some to my Wikimedia Commons profile, too:

The view stepping out of Union Station.

The TTC, a surprisingly nice metro.

Taipei or Toronto? The tram tells all.

This isn’t all of the pictures, but I did try some poutine and rode plenty of TTC (although I missed the trams, since none of them were traveling from places to places that both me and the friend I was traveling with wanted to go).

I did hit Chinatown and a Muji in the Chinatown (my favorite store). If there are two places in any North American city that I feel obligated to visit when I show up, it’s the Chinatowns and the historic districts (looking for charming brownstone shots and anywhere with brick roads).

The distillery district: even nicer than I anticipated!

Chinatown felt surprisingly like Taipei, and Corktown and the distillery district scratched the other itch as well as it could’ve. I also missed the Toronto Islands, which I hear are a ferry ride away (fun) and also historic and adorable.

I’ve discovered, with all of this friend-making and city-walking, that what I enjoy the most is making good friends and seeing and trying new things.

As much as I thought, when I left Taipei for that one-week trip those few months ago this year, that what I was missing was something I couldn’t get in America, I’ve more than proven that wrong: my personal bar for satisfaction in life is much lower than I imagined, and I think that’s a good thing.

I’m laying down in bed with my laptop now. Life’s gotten in the way a little bit lately, and the plans I had for this month have fallen out of possibility. I’m back at home early from my summer internship. I’m thinking about the future even more than I usually do, because I can’t help it now that I don’t have much else to occupy my time.

My bedroom at home.

In that bedroom photo, you can see my super-cool new giant teddy bear. That was a gift from a friend. He’s even more stylish with my Bopomofo handbag that I’ve now strapped around his shoulder.

Rather than give a rollercoaster series of events, as I tend to do, I think I’m going to take a break for a long time. A month, two, or maybe more. I’ll come back in the future and report back, but the blogging bug has been sufficiently squashed over the past while.

I'll be home for a while. At least some parts of home are nice.

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoy my posts and I hope you check back in a little while if you remember. I’m sure I’ll have plenty to talk about.

See you then!

Having patience

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Just have faith.

Sometimes it’s really hard to wait for something, especially if you’re in the habit of being a little bit nervous. I think I’ve gone down that path a little bit too far this summer.

Image by: Kuba Bożanowski from Warsaw, Poland, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Like cool-looking desk setups — although I’ve already moved a lot of the furniture out of my apartment, I bought a new laptop case with a built-in stand, a new mouse, and upgraded to the macOS 26 public beta. Now I have a cool workstation as portable as flipping some magnetic folds and a switch on my mouse. Pretty classy!

The folding system on the case is neat.

This past week has been good: I cut caffeine just after writing my last blog post, so it’s been an entire week that I haven’t had any coffee, tea, or anything caffeinated like that. I think I’m fully over the withdrawal now, so I feel pretty good. That was just on my personal list of things to do over the summer.

I’m also almost done the major overarching projects for my summer internship. That involves the business-proposal project thing that was required by the class that me and every other summer research intern in our department got forcibly placed into. It also includes the presentation for the process project I’ve been working on with solar cells and our cleanroom’s usual methodologies for making them.

At least I’m somewhat proud of the second one. The first one will be nice to get over with.

And so I like to think it’s with those projects nearing completion that I’m cleaning up my responsibilities and personal schedule a little bit. Once this week is over, I’ll be moving out of my current apartment permanently and into an Airbnb for a couple of weeks, but it seems like a nice one in a decent location (I’ve driven by twice now).

Besides, with the extra free time that I never really didn’t have, I’ve been able to hang out with people outside of work, which I think is making up most of the highlights of the year. I loved traveling in May because I think having all those friends around and doing things all the time is just satisfying, you know, humans are social. But it doesn’t take the exact same hard-to-attain circumstances to make that happen more regularly.

So me and my coworkers have been getting up to things lately and becoming more of a friend group, which is always for the best. I’m hoping that in the future I can have such a good group of people to work with at all my other jobs, but I’m not really sure how reality is. Anyway, doing things with friends on afternoons and weekends aside, I can even bite the travel bug a couple more times before the summer is over.

Two weeks from now, I’m planning on going to Chicago to visit a friend and help him move back to school here. While we’re at it, there’s probably going to be plenty of subway-riding and tourist-attraction-gawking (he’s not from the city, so it won’t just be me looking for guidance, we’ll get to be decent tourists as a group. At least, that’s the plan).

Chicago's one-of-a-kind city-owned, city-operated transit mode (unlike their streets).

Image by: Acediscovery, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Although I wanted to ride the Amtrak to get there — holding up my end of the self-promise to ride more trains this summer — it took me too long to figure out that the Amtrak website doesn’t handle round-trip bookings very well and to just book two one-way tickets by searching for one-way tickets in and out of the destination, and with all that waiting, all the ticket prices are very high now. Besides, all those trains are regular, slow trains.

So, earlier today, I revisited the plans that came out of my choosing the wrong embassy to get my visa at that I’ll need for my planned internship in Taiwan this fall. I wanted to go to Washington, so I decided to make that happen. And with all the Internet’s love for the concept of a Boston-to-DC HSR, I finally thought that it’s now or never as far as booking those tickets.

Since I don’t live in Boston, I need some way to drive there and park for a reasonable price and somewhere reasonable to drive. Since I know the Boston’s metro system serves as a commuter rail system pretty well, I thought it might make sense to park at a commuter rail station and ride in to the main train station, South Station, on one of the metro lines.

It seems like the Red Line is the most reliable for this early in the morning, so I’m also going to plan to ride the Red Line into the Amtrak station. Riding the metro to the big train station and taking HSR several hundred miles to another major city — sounds like good railways to me! It’ll just be annoying to have to get down to Boston by car. There is a bus from my hometown/region to Boston, but I might as well drive. I’m from Concord, NH, so I’d like to take a short opportunity to complain about the several-times vetoing of the plan to extend Boston’s MBTA commuter rail to Manchester and Concord — in whatever far-away universe that there “wouldn’t be enough ridership” you could probably afford to take some lanes off of Interstate 93 and reduce the speed limits and tolls, too.

New England conservatism sometimes rears its scraggly head at the dumbest possible times.

Regardless of my hometown’s lack of metro connections, I will be able to make this trip and you can already bet I’m looking forward to taking as many pictures as is reasonable and blogging all about it — I’ll be gone for only a few days, but I’m sure that will be enough time for me. I’m going to be riding plenty of Washington metro, too, and might as well get some gifts for those people I worked with on the (much more fun) business proposal project with for the one-week Taiwan program in May. I forgot to bring anything when I visited the first time, so it’s only right that if I’m going to my own country’s famous capital I seize the opportunity to share the tourism with others.

Ornate designs on the train station walls.

Image by: Frank Schulenburg, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

And since the train out of Boston is the new, next-generation Amtrak Acela — mind-numbingly expensive to book (more than a plane ticket!) but not much more than the non-HSR alternative train — I’ll be able to review the recent attempt at a Boston-to-DC HSR and judge if it fills the quality train void that I hear our nation might still have. I don’t know — I won’t declare anything until I can put my money where my mouth is. For the time being, I’ve put more than enough of my money where the Amtrak tickets are. I’m hoping it’ll have been worth it.

These coming two trips, the ones for August, are then two and four weeks out. Not much time to wait, honestly — I only have one more free weekend before the travel starts. Then, I have just under two more months until the most exciting journey begins: I’m leaving for Taiwan on September 25th — the second time this year — and not coming back before the beginning of next year. It seems like a good plan. If all goes as intended, I’m staying in Keelung for a week and getting prepared — giving the gift bags, getting a SIM card, being a tourist enough to satisfy for a little bit — and then moving down to Taichung by train (obviously my favorite way to travel).

I’ve been reading a lot of news about Taiwan this past summer to try to stay up-to-date on current events there in an attempt not to be clueless once I show up. That worked well enough the first time.

And as horribly depressing as just the concept is of having to hold the Han Kuang military drills and air-defense protocol tests, the fact that a perfectly peaceful society has to live in existential fear every day because of an infinitely-larger bully directly next door, it’s hard not to be at least a little inspired by some of the things I read in that news.

There are a few Taipei Times articles that show the best and worst of modern-day Taiwan — especially recently with the magnitude of the 大罷免 and the first round of votes.

It’s unfortunate for those in the recall movement that they didn’t quite get their way on the largest batch of KMT lawmakers. But the fact that it made it this far in the first place is a pretty inspiring story of dedication to democracy and exercising civil rights.

This article is a good summary of all that went on.

My favorite short story from that article above is the one about the man getting an ambulance from a hospital to a local polling station at an elementary school so that he could cast his ballot. It seems like there really are no good excuses for abandoning civic duty!

The civic duty doesn’t just end yesterday, though. A new article came in to the top of the front page of the same magazine just today, reporting on a pretty infuriating angle.

This article is about a certain international take on the results.

If the phrase “the pot calling the kettle black” doesn’t come to mind, then maybe a more accurate way to put it is the “big heavy cast-iron pot calling the brand-new shiny silver kettle black”.

It’s that and every wailing, screaming tool they’ve sent to international sporting events to steal, shame, and get in the way, tear down flags and harass singing children. Xi needs to sit down at the lunch table and talk out his issues like an actual grown-up.

China is a great country with great people, an interesting, diverse culture, and a great history. I wanted to take a moment to point out how easily one man’s selfish ambitions can overshadow all of that and make it almost completely meaningless. Suddenly, Xi Jinping has reduced the Middle Kingdom’s great presence on the world stage to one of a wailing toddler. If you’re going to ruin lives, at least do it with professionalism.

So aside from my desire to clearly state my personal opinions on these politics and to ask people to educate themselves, I wanted to express my hope that everyone on both sides of this one-sided argument are at least safe. If Taiwan does someday become part of China, it’s better than it happen because some powerful deep-blue figurehead sells them out than because cities were run over by tanks and people killed. Toying with people’s lives en masse has never, ever, not once in history ever been a good, productive way to make change. As soon as the ones in the smoke-filled room start treating their own citizens and others like they’re all chess pieces, humanity and civility dies.

But there really aren’t too many societies in the world that I’ve heard of that have shown such inspiring commitment to, and respect for, their own civil rights, how easy they are to lose, and what makes them possible. A mental image of the ambulance zooming to the polling station keeps replaying in my head. Whether he voted for or against the recall in his district, I can only wish I had that kind of dedication. When that spirit dies, a little bit of the human spirit dies with it.

So all I can really do is wait patiently and hope that all that perpetual stress fades away into history. Maybe an odd source for a quote, but in one of the worlds in the video game Myst there’s a city that lives under gray clouds that never clear. The game tells the story of a war that happened in the past between the people of that city and some faraway aggressor: at the end of the war, the aggressor was deterred, but not defeated. The clouds over the city were the clouds of the war, and wouldn’t disappear without a definite conclusion. While the aggressors had been sent off and not returned for many years, so that the people in the city could live in peace, the clouds never faded away. Every day, these people wake up and look up at the sky so that they can be reminded of that war and at least be grateful that the past — and everything that’s happened since — is over.

I know somebody the other day who was talking about this to me. He had a particularly pessimistic view on it, seeming like it was certain that Taiwan would face the PLA within the next five years. What was worse was the reason that he cited — that, after all, the ROC had lost the Chinese Civil War.

The only thing I can do in response is to remind people to educate themselves — nothing is that black-and-white. Whether you believe that the ROC is still real or not, whether you acknowledge it as a convenient political compromise, a dying anachronism, or otherwise, remember that the people living under it today have already seen decades of unerasable horror. To sell out the people of Taiwan just because they still live under that banner is just as shallow as all of America’s uninformed hatred of the People’s Republic.

No matter green, blue, red, teal, or whatever shade of the world’s broad political spectrum, remember that if we can’t live in harmony, the least we can do is let each other be while we sit oceans, seas, or even just straits apart.

I understand that Xi wants the “rejuvenation of the great Chinese nation”. Start by winning hearts and minds, not wars. Perfectionism is the enemy of freedom.

And besides, the entire great Chinese nation has already been rejuvenated. The CCP is forcing this insecurity onto themselves — an insecurity that they seemed to have developed somewhat recently when compared against the long timeline of Chinese history.

I appreciate you reading all of what’s been sitting in my head for a while — I won’t get so political in the future.

Thanks again. I’ll be back next week.

Ups and downs

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It's a two-way flow.

Life is about them. I guess that’s the whole point. Sometimes, even when you know these things, it’s hard to take it to heart — but I think it’s a worthwhile lesson to learn, right?

Image credit: Antonio Tajuelo, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I’m back at my favorite not-very-little 咖啡店 that shall remain nameless (for sake of preventing too much repetition). I ordered the Starbucks “Horchata” syrup in my latte, and despite the exotic naming, it tastes exactly like French toast. I mean, it’s pretty excellent — still would have to be pretty memorable, though, to compete with the Pandan latte I had at the Korean restaurant I visited on Wednesday (the coffee in the last post’s thumbnail).

Despite the beginning of the week having been very eventful, the latter half of the week was pretty well-stocked with action, too. I’m pretty grateful for some of this week’s happenings — I’m not sure what I did to deserve finally making it into IIPP, having such a nice weather-night visiting around the town on Wednesday, and then — just yesterday — having such a productive morning (despite the work building being closed for fluorine vapors coming out of epoxy that never got poured). Truly, a week for the books.

I was online with some friends much later last night than I usually let myself stay up. We were playing Minecraft, which is always a good idea, and when I finally packed up and went to bed just past 11 PM, I wasn’t really able to sleep very well. It was just one of those nights — thinking about how I haven’t been able to get in touch with my PI for IIPP, I popped open my laptop to make sure that my secondary email was working (the one I was using as my IIPP contact email).

I sent an email from that inbox to my university inbox to make sure all was well. I sent the email, looked in my university inbox, and saw something else — an email from the PI! Pretty nice. I was surprised and grateful — he also CC’ed that other inbox, and about an hour later the email showed up there. It’s kind of a slow email service (mail.com — a little outdated, but works fine enough for a secondary address).

So I have my PI’s contact info now. This is nice — hopefully soon I can find out what my housing situation is going to be over that term. I’m hoping I can get an on-campus dorm at the university where I’ll be, optimally for free. I’ve been looking at Airbnbs, though, too — they’re very expensive (I’m assuming they’re all aimed at the foreigner-tourist market, which I can’t say I’m entirely separate from, but I at least would like to not fall into the trap if I can help it).

I mean, the place where I’m supposed to be moving is Taichung, which I can’t imagine is the tourist capital of the world, Taiwan, or anywhere (exactly what I’m after!).

♪ 要去台中！（溫度還好太陽湊合）♪

Credit: bryan…, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Speaking of Airbnb, I found housing for myself after the expiry of my lease for my actual apartment. It wasn’t the same one I was originally requesting on Wednesday — that seller never responded, and probably just doesn’t want to rent to college students, which is understandable — but I’ve got a nice one now and I’m looking forward to staying there. It’s nice that Airbnbs are reliably pre-furnished — I find nice decor charming, but never quite have the guts, vision, or creativity to put together a well-decorated room using just my own brainpower, so having Airbnb hosts do it for me keeps it interesting.

Now, when I was looking for this Airbnb, I found that it wasn’t available for what I’d assumed was going to be my last week of work — I couldn’t even book it the full way through my last full week there. After talking it through with my professor, though, it turns out he didn’t really expect anyone to show that last week anyway, and I have a friend who needs to be to a wedding by the weekend before. Besides, I want to visit the friend with some extra time for us to wander around the (definitely more interesting than Rochester) city where he lives, so I’d like to cut my work off at around the time that my Airbnb is up to go visit him. And so goes the plans for my month of August — Airbnb, visiting a friend, going home. And toward the end of the month I’d like to see what it takes to get my visa (I’ll have to have my housing settled by then, though).

I still can’t go back and change the mistaken embassy selection that I made for that first form, when I had to provide some of my plans for getting to the other ROC, 8,000 miles away. I’m still planning on taking the train — next-generation Acela will have to be what I do, and it’ll have to be interesting — but if I’m going that far out of my own way, anyway, I might as well stay in DC for a few days and see the sights and whatnot.

I haven’t been since I was about 11 years old (almost ten years ago) — in the good old naive days when Obama was president and we’d all thought that the country’s first Black and female presidents were going to serve back-to-back. We all think history makes sense until we see it play out in real time…

Anyway, being a tourist in your own city is one thing, but being a tourist in your own country — especially as an American — is bound to provide some neat opportunities (for discovery, photos, you know). National Mall shots may be coming.

And you know I’ll be blogging, walking up and down the train, testing the food, looking out the window, gauging the speed and the quality of the seats on the way down the Amtrak, but on the way back I’m going to spend the whole time staring at and stroking the shiny Taiwan visa I hope I’m able to get without too much issue. So, overall, I think neat opportunities are ahead past even the coming month.

I really do need to be orders of magnitude more grateful than I’ve been all year for the things that are happening to me this month, next month, and for the rest of the year — I’m not sure what I did to deserve some of these opportunities. Maybe I’ll head back on up over to Taipei and visit Dadaocheng, the home of the love god temple, the only one I made an attempt at praying in. The gods of love and the Beautiful Island have certainly been kind to me this year.

So while I’ve had my bored periods in the past few months, and I’m probably going to have more before mid-September — I have a month to visit home, but not too many plans — I consider the ups to more than outweigh some of those downs. To be honest, I think I complain about boredom too much, anyway — at least when I go home I at least get to visit my parents, who I really don’t see enough anymore (I, as with everyone who can, should always be calling my mom more often. Spreading the news — count the days since you last called your mom. Call your mom).

Ups and downs are a constant of life. Whenever I’m thinking of complaining — about being bored, about uncertainty — I’ll just have to remember the things I’ve gotten to see before and the things I’ll probably see in the future. A day, a week, or even a month of stagnation never really hurt anyone. In fact, in the end, it’s probably good.

It’s like that old medieval theory of music: that you should listen to music that covers moods that you don’t experience usually in order to keep the humors in your soul balanced (or however the phrasing went). The universe will balance the humors for you, whether you like it or not.

And remember, too, that luck is a combination of random chance and recognizing opportunity. Always be prepared to recognize and take those opportunities — I never got anywhere basking in my own pain for thinking I was too unlucky to get very far in my goals. And that Martin Luther King Jr. quote about any progress being good, whether it’s running, walking, or crawling, is relevant, too. As long as your goals don’t change, you’ll get closer to them.

And now that I’m done with my sugary caffeinated french toast latte, I’m feeling almost as good as I did that one time I drank an entire pot of oolong tea. I paid for parking at the Starbucks until almost noon, though, and it’s only 10 AM. Maybe I’ll just walk around my favorite little neighborhood here and try to find things I’ve missed passing through at car level during prior visits.

I think I’m going to actually take a blogging break for a while this time. I appreciate the readership (而中文版的博客貼可能快要做，希望你要看一看）and I’ll be back once enough notable things have happened to consitute another newspaper article-or-so’s worth of content.

The skyline of Qiqi, a place where I don't live. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Credit: 毛貓大少爺 from Taipei, Taiwan, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ll be back!

Short words

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Pandan latte and spicy tuna.

One of the promises I made to myself this summer that I hadn’t yet achieved, as of yesterday, was eating food good enough to warrant photography. That wrong has now finally been righted. This was my first time trying Korean food!

This has been an eventful week — I’m supposed to be working soon so I’ll have to be relatively quick, but I needed to get some words out again. I’m in that mood.

Monday was quiet, but Tuesday was judgment day — July 15th. The first day of IIPP acceptance letter releases. I woke up that morning to an empty mailbox, so I had some breakfast and got in the shower. Just at around the time I was opening the bathroom door, the letter got into my mailbox, and opening my inbox again at work later that morning, I saw it. If only I had seen it earlier — I could’ve avoided the tense muscles that I had with me for the rest of the day (and the consequent running at top speed to the library to get the forms to sign and scan).

That is to say that the letter was a good one! I made it. I still don’t have direct contact with the professor yet, but I’m infinitely grateful and still have no clue how it was possible that I got in to this IIPP program. I’m already trying to make plans for the rest of my year, now that I can and I have a clearer idea of what I’m doing.

The first step is to find housing for August — my lease expires at the beginning of next month (still). I requested an Airbnb for most of the month, but still haven’t gotten a confirmation on the booking request, so it’s up in the air where I’ll be living in a few weeks’ time.

I also can’t do much in the way of working toward more in-depth plans for the IIPP internship period because I still don’t have contact with my paired PI. I’ve emailed him a few times already, but I’m not sure whether he’s read them or not. In any case, I consulted the AI bot assistant again and it told me to wait for the PI to initiate contact. When the approval documents get released to the institutions in about a month, I hope he contacts me with them (because they’re necessary for the visa application).

As an aside somewhat related to the visa application — when I was plugging in the institution for obtaining my visa, I entered TECRO (the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office) “in the United States” (the office is in DC). I hadn’t realized there were locations identified with more specificity: TECO (“Taipei Economic and Cultural Office”, sans-Representation … ?), and one of those TECO offices is a little closer to home.

I’m a New Englander, though, so I got into some Internet talk at one point in my life, getting excited by some proclamations being made by a small group of influencers — Internet train aficionados claiming that a Boston-to-DC HSR would be the greatest boon to Atlantic settlements since the Puritans founded the Beantown those few centuries ago.

It seems like I can’t fix the mistake I made on the IIPP portal: I’ll need to go to DC. I would’ve chosen TECO in Boston. Now, it seems, I have a problem whereby the solution involves traveling from Boston to DC.

So imagine my delight when I learn about Amtrak’s relatively new “next-generation Acela” trains — a Boston to DC line with a top speed of about 150 mph (just over 200 km/h!).

You will hear more about this in the future (one of my other as-of-yet unfulfilled summer promises to myself is to take a nice train trip somewhere…).

A next-generation Acela pulling in next to the MBTA Purple Line.

(I was able to find a good number of recent pictures on Wikimedia Commons).

Credit: 4300streetcar, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I also wanted to mention that a few people have answered the survey linked in the bar above — thanks for that! I also really appreciate the guestbook comments. Somehow, I manage to attract only nice and supportive people to my blog. Hopefully I can continue to stave off the trolls.

Thank you all for the readership! It’s almost 9 in the morning. I should get to work — I think our cleanroom is finally fully operational again (well, 50 percent operational — that’s how it goes).

See you all again soon!

Keeping on

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There are nice bike paths here, but also this Ram 1500.

I guess I’m as hipster as I ever was. I’m back at the Park Avenue Starbucks, which I haven’t been to in a while. It’s pretty chill, this is a nice area.

After I posted on Wednesday about the bike trails I was so happy to discover, I continued biking all around town every afternoon after work. I’ve been doing it for the past three days in total — on day two, I didn’t go too far, but I went further again yesterday — I went back to the center city on the bike and took a somewhat roundabout route — I’m still not great with directions.

Impressed with my ability to keep it up so well, I woke up today feeling like a complete lump. All movement was hard, and I stayed in bed for all of the morning, even though I woke up at 6:30 AM. I regretted my previous high degree of enthusiasm.

But, anyway, I guess I wasn’t tired for the worst reason. I took a shower and did some house chores around noon, and then I decided I’d like to go somewhere to sit/blog/read — my collection of physical books and novels about historical Taiwan is still growing. I’m now in possession of my copy of Heaven Lake by John Dalton — I’m three chapters in and it’s already better than I ever imagined it would be. I had assumed it would be set in the 1960s or 1970s, because the main character is a missionary — it’s actually set in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which is even more interesting to me (an interesting time to be set in that place, for sure).

And the biggest hesitation that I had about reading the book — that the main character, a fairly sterile-sounding Christian missionary figure about my age — would be too unrelatable seems to also be not quite the case. The author maybe predicted that someone like that would be a hard sell to get readers to really connect with on an emotional level, so it was nice that that main character has his moments very early on that make him a more impressive presence in the story (like the short interaction where he buys his first motor scooter).

After reading a little more: that main character is certainly anything but sterile. The book is maybe a little… romantic for my taste until it gets to the good part where he’s taking a train across China, but I can definitely say that the story is extremely well-written and this is an impressive work. Just beware the high degree of love talk and… inappropriate behavior.

I guess I won’t spoil too much (I can’t, I’m not that far in myself). I had one left over Chunghwa Republic bill to my name leaving the island those two months ago, so I’m now using it as a bookmark.

Laptop, coffee, and Heaven Lake by John Dalton.

Anyway, the way that I got here was by car. I really didn’t feel like biking all the way into the city center again, assuming I’d wake up tomorrow feeling even more thoroughly gutted — maybe I’ll buy an e-bike someday. They’re pretty expensive, though. If I had more internship money, maybe it’d be possible.

I’ve been reminded this by many friends now and really need to start taking it to heart in a more permanent way — I keep worrying a lot about these issues that, in the end, it seems like I don’t have much control over. I still feel bad driving cars because I can see and feel the CO2 leaving into the atmosphere — sure, it’s not optimal, but someday I’ll be able to move to a different city. For the few years I’m in college, I guess I shouldn’t worry about it so much that it cripples me.

And it’s a nice reminder to myself that I have yet to meet somebody my age who doesn’t feel the same way about that issue, so the further we push into the future, the more people my age get into positions of power, the more we’ll be able to do something. They say it’s on Gen Z to fix the problems that the 20th-century world generated. I guess that’s not the worst thing. It always takes time — 「慢慢的改變」 (that phrase is in my head from a Mandopop song I know, I’m sure, but I’m forgetting which one).

Anyway, at least I have a bicycle now, so when I’m not too tired I can go most places I’d ever want to without burning gasoline.

I still haven’t heard back about my application for the biomedical research lab internship through IIPP — the more I bike and get exercise, the better my mental state becomes and the more hopeful I am. It seems like they may not have sent out any acceptance letters just yet, so that I haven’t received one doesn’t seem to indicate anything, although that’ll change soon. I have no way of knowing whether I’m doing well in the running or if I’m about to be cut for the quota…

I’d like not to get my hopes up too much, but the potential reward is just too high. I still can’t stop thinking about the possibility.

As far as my current research lab internship goes, I got my to-do list done this week much more easily than I ever anticipated that I would. I even got almost half of my presentation done, which is due at the end of the month — I wrote the abstract in about half an hour (ten minutes for the first draft, ten minutes of revision during the weekly meeting, and then ten more minutes of revision the next day with the professor sitting right next to me). It might not be the best or most descriptive, but it’s the best I can get right now and now it’s done. So that’s at least good.

So all that remains to be done is to finish my first process/trial and to get some results (at least that’s the fun part). I’m making plenty of connections with the relevant people to help me with design and organization and those types of things, so I’m even able to write down my process in the tracking system for myself now and for future use — I even got an account on Fabublox yesterday, a software for making diagrams that show the process steps and a little 3-D visual of the silicon as it goes through.

I think I’m getting better at all this — my undergraduate research experience might actually be becoming worthwhile career development!

I’m also promising myself and all my friends to stop complaining about my inability to find an internship. If I stop complaining, the universe might finally forgive me and let me have one (that’s the only idea I have left after all these many months). Also, complaining kind of rubs on my emotions after a while. The more negative things I say, the more I believe them.

It’s kind of like remembering to be a good person and smile more often — it’s actually helpful, as much as you might not believe it, but it’s way harder than you might think.

But then, I think that the universe rewards people that work hard to have a positive outlook, because after all, the universe is all perception, anyway.

(Have I ever mentioned the time that a friend told me about the theory that all of our universe is inside of a black hole inside of another universe, which is another black hole inside of a larger universe…)?

「要感謝
這條小蟲，給我機會…」

This dog is just missing a pair of sunglasses.

Here’s a nice dog shot to help lift your mood and prepare you for whatever potential internship rejection letters you might have coming into your own email inbox.

The world is hard. It’s always been hard. That never stopped decent people from living their lives in it, anyway.

(I’ve been turning a lot of blog posts into therapy sessions lately — maybe I should go out and take some more photos).

I’ll try to be more regular soon — I’ll probably be back within a few days or a week.

So I’ll see you all then!

Skill issues

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The dog is kind of ugly from the front, but cute from above.

A lot more problems than you might think are ones that can be overcome with only effort.

There are two things that I care about enough to call obsessions: studying Mandarin and nice cities. The first fell into my lap over the course of my education, and the second one was wired into my brain by the obligatory Internet sources (YouTube urbanists, other people with the same opinions…).

And I know for sure that language learning — and especially urbanism — are topics that a lot of other people are into, too.

So I wanted to point out a few things about today’s world that I didn’t realize until just after I got out of work today: that all the time that I spent lamenting my city’s lack of linguistic diversity and lack of non-car transit methods was just myself inflicting pain onto myself.

In the last hour of my day, our professor came down after his series of afternoon meetings, and since we didn’t have much to talk about, the conversation veered off a little quickly. Soon enough, we were talking about exercise, running and biking, and our professor — who seems to be pretty into jogging — mentioned that there’s a well-maintained bicycle path network that goes throughout Rochester. I’d heard about it from another friend before, but he biked all the way from here to Buffalo and tore something in his ankle doing it, so I assumed he was a little crazy and I wasn’t quite brave enough to go out looking for what he meant.

But after the conversation with our professor, I was certain that this was the right time: I just brought my bicycle back from home over this past weekend, and I was looking to test it out (and make sure a tire wouldn’t fall off after a few days of riding). So I got out of work, ate some food to load in the energy, and got on the bike with no particular destination in mind.

I went all the way downtown, I went to my favorite convenience store with the good soymilk, I found three different bike trails, crossed the High Falls bridge twice, and totaled two hours of exercise. Incredibly satisfied with getting all of this out of my system, I went back home and walked over to the convenience store near my apartment to buy a VitaminWater.

I was pretty satisfied with my ability to get around without gasoline. That’s a point toward being the change in the world I want to see (at least, the resistance to change — the one in the climate — and whatnot).

At least I know I can go to multiple Starbucks.

And as far as language learning, I was even able to get that down today — on my way out of work, I met a friend who I’ve already passed repeatedly several times over a few weeks. We were both walking out of work, so we stopped and talked. Somehow we managed to stumble into the topic of my love for learning Mandarin — although I’m not sure I got the magnitude of that love across to him fully well — and him being Chinese, after a minute or so he said he’d help me with a quiz.

The quiz ended up just being talking about what I had for lunch today for a few minutes in Mandarin, but the language practice felt good. And after all that KTV-ing to myself in the car and in my bedroom, I thought my pronunciation wasn’t too bad. I was happy, we talked about Chinese languages for a little bit — as it also sometimes turns out, Mandarin was a second language for him, too, since his first is Cantonese — and he drove me home because he seems to have felt bad that I live a little far from campus.

So all the time that I spend resenting not living in a place with good non-car transportation and a lack of multilingualism seems to have been moot — it was just a skill issue.

And I think, sometimes, when you think something strongly enough, you can act on it with whatever you have. It could always be better, but it could always be worse, and as they say about universities — it’s not about the school you go to, it’s about the effort you put in.

So whether I get this IIPP internship I want so badly or not, it’s not the luck or the opportunities that make the person. It’s the passion.

「不患無位，患所以立」

As an aside, I wanted to share these —

Some helpful Chrome/Firefox extensions I’ve been using for practicing my reading ability:

Pinyin Web — add Pinyin to Hanzi (parses words)

Zhongwen — hover over words to reveal meanings (and pronunciations)

Light in the tunnel

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've got all I need right here.

I needed a slight break from posting for a little bit while I collected myself and got some sleep.

There isn’t always a single reason why you need a break, right? I’ve come to realize that over time. Sometimes, life’s dust just builds up inside your mind and you don’t realize you need to clean it until you’re slipping on the dust bunnies just trying to get to the bathroom.

These posts don’t come together well unless I really get time to collect and analyze some thoughts over a period of a little bit, anyway.

Last time I posted, the thumbnail had this funky red light tunnel in it and I spent a lot of the post complaining about how difficult it was to start a career. It’s definitely difficult, but complaining doesn’t necessarily get me anywhere unless I have somebody really in-tune with me to listen to it while I spill. Another mark on the side of “know your audience” — I can vent like it’s a therapy session to my mom, but I should hold it in in public. And maybe also on the Internet.

Complaining or not, looking for fall internships hasn’t gotten any easier, so I’m still thinking about these things every day. I’ve made some headway in the past number of weeks, though.

The star of my stress for the past few weeks has had to do with a particularly fantastic opportunity through “IIPP”, the “International Internship Pilot Program” — it’s run by the National Science and Technology Council in Taiwan, something I regret not having heard about sooner.

Luckily, I have a stress duck.

It was unbelievable to me that a professor on the platform would choose me in the matchmaking process for the role that they had opened, but after an invite, seeing the listing, a formal invite, accepting, and the professor filling out the consent form, I got matched with a professor on the job-seeking platform. I couldn’t believe that — my luck is usually never so good to me. The role was as an intern in a biomedical engineering/research lab, something that I seem to have a growing interest in.

After the matchmaking finished, I found out the current state of the IIPP acceptance process — because of a high volume of matchmaking in the first five months, most of the roles were filled by mid-June. I first found out about the platform right after its closure, and had assumed I was too late.

The week that I was able to enter back into the website was the one week that they had reopened to fill a final round of about fifty openings: during this week, many people must have been making matches in the system. Definitely more than 50.

This final batch is going to have the acceptance of all its individual matchmaking pairs — professors and students — decided by committee. So, even though I was able to get a match made, I’m not clear just yet — and they’re choosing the people that they accept by nationality. They want diversity, but I’m from the US — I’d assume there’s already a lot of US students accepted into the program, so I’m not so sure that I have a good chance at making it.

But, I swear, if I do get accepted, I might be crying tears of joy. It’d be the day my career actually began — and I wouldn’t have to worry about another required internship until 2027.

I like to consider myself realistic, though, so I’m still applying for jobs that I might have a better chance at — actually, I recently contacted a friend about a role at a company he’s interning at right now in the fall. That’s near home, and at a company that is also doing biomedical engineering work (a field I’ve decided to take a try at understanding because it seems to be, again, the kind of interesting and legitimately-fulfilling work I was talking about trying to find in that last post).

Career plans aside, I’m regaining my sanity on my own time, too. I went back home for the July 4th weekend — a paid holiday, like Juneteenth — and my parents rent a campsite that I met them at. I had pancakes for breakfast on Friday morning — they were great, but they reminded me a little of scallion pancakes, the kind of Chinese food you can’t get at a restaurant in the United States. So, after returning back to Rochester, I set out finally trying to figure out how to make scallion pancakes.

I also got to visit my adorable sister.

After a short bit of research, it seems like they’re just flour, water, some seasoning and scallions (with some oil/butter/lard/whatever for goldenness). I assumed it couldn’t possibly be hard, so I bought some flour and gave it a try.

I’ve made one attempt so far (yesterday) and they came out decently after the first one, which was too thick. It’s basically like a tortilla, but with more sesame and onion. I overmade on the first practice run, but tomorrow morning I might have another go with a small bit of flour in a little food container to see how I go after about an hour of practice, some rest, and a little bit of remaining beginner’s luck. I don’t have a rolling pin, but then again, neither did the scallion pancake vendor that I visited in Da’an District.

They were decent, but not decent enough for me to share a photo and not be a little embarrassed. “The flavor was there”, I say.

But soon enough, I might be good enough at this to fly over to Taiwan and be my own employer — you know, frying up hot onion pancakes at five in the morning on a side-street making a few hundred NT an hour. A respectable profession to be sure, and definitely an excellent way to learn a language.

And aside from food, the other thing I said I’d do all those weeks ago flying back — “flying across the world with the power of stories” or something along those lines — has been going decently. I put down my Taiwan history reading obsession for a little while after finishing The Hell Screens by Alvin Lu — a really, … vibe-ful novel, to be sure — and after realizing that a lot of new editions of books that I enjoyed (even the famous Formosa Betrayed by George Kerr and A Pail of Oysters by Vern Sneider) were all published in their modern editions on Amazon by a single press that had recently gone under, I made sure to have physical hardcover copies of all the highlights.

I had, actually, already ordered them, so the validation was nice. I’m potentially overusing my newfound paycheck money for questionable means — then again, Wu Li-pei’s memoir is so thick with amazing storytelling it was a wonder it all fit in that epub in the first place. It feels much better as a solid, three-dimensional object sitting on my desk.

Two Countries, Wu Li-pei’s memoir, is the only one that’s come in so far. Once the rest are here, I’ll be able to start reading the new one I also bought — Heaven Lake by John Dalton — and I’ll be more than prepared for the Taiwan history book club of my dreams.

In all seriousness, these are neat stories that offer a neat perspective. I do think I understand the world a little better for having read them.

You know, the theme of the week seems to be preparedness. Last time I got paid, I put 80 percent of it in my savings account and then spent the rest of the week counting pennies. I worry about finding internships because I never have too many applications going anywhere at once. Going to work is a little uncomfortable when I feel wholly unprepared for whatever next thing I’ll have to do.

…and this was a lesson I’ve learned before. When I did well in my first job interview in April, I reminded myself that it wasn’t luck, it was because I was prepared. When I did a passable job at giving my business presentation in Mandarin during the trip in May, I reminded myself it was because I had gone over it so many times before. They say luck is a combination of chance and preparedness, right? So maybe I should just remember that, and even if I don’t see the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel”, I can at least let there be a little light in the tunnel.

And since I know I re-read my own blog posts, hopefully I’ll see this and remember in the future. It’s probably good to keep track of life lessons learned in some kind of physical format (maybe I should have a therapy notepad).

Learning life lessons aside, I can continue to be propelled forward by the absolute hit media that will be Heaven Lake when it arrives, and this Mavis Hee song I heard for the first time a few days ago.

When I sing, I like to replace “愛” with “請你讓我實習工作”.

See you in another little bit.

Notes from walking around

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Roots in a sidewalk.

Today is one of those days where you notice more than you usually do just walking around.

First, I made a decent overhaul to this blog this morning — I split off all of my 中文 posts into their own site — you can click the new language switcher in the top-right to get there — making use of Hugo and the Zen theme’s really excellent multilingual site support.

From now on, it will be more of a reliable schedule and better content (at least, that’s my intent).

I’m going to aim for one Mandarin post a week and one English post a week (and they should both be relatively meaningful and interesting to read). If you have feedback, too, don’t hesitate to leave it in the new survey linked both in the navbar and in the last post before this one (available on both the English and Mandarin feeds).

You know, I’m starting to treat this like a media production rather than a personal project. That assumes that people read this, which I can’t take for granted at any one point in time. But if someone stumbles across this in the future and is happy to see the amount of content ready for them, that would make it worth it. Also, I love organizing (as you may know if you’re one of the few people who does read my blog).

Anyway, after doing all of that this morning, I finally got ready to leave the house around one in the afternoon and went everyone’s favorite local Rochester 便利店 to buy a ramen bowl (apparently they sell dishes here) that I had seen a few days prior that looked nice. I have ramen, but no desire to eat it because I have no good well-shaped ramen vessel to put my noodles in.

I went to the store and bought the bowl and a bottle of the good soymilk (my bar here is much lower than for the noodles) — there are definitely two distinct different types of cheap bottled soymilk, though, there’s the store brand at most American grocery stores — bean milk — and the kind that you sometimes find in Chinatowns and in a real 便利店 — “sweet bean water” (if you’ve had it before, you know what I’m talking about). The type I got today was from a Chinese brand and it was a good example of the latter, so I was happy.

On my way out of the store, I had to walk a different path than usual because the local free parking was being repaved (the only place with a free parking lot that’s not miserable to be around — it’s surrounded by the backsides of main-street buildings and the front of a local hotel, simultaneously hiding the hotel and the parking lot, which is a good example of having your nice environment-cake and eating the minimum parking requirements, too).

While I was going down the sidewalk, I noticed this sign for a new local restaurant:

zhēn d Hànyǔ Pīnyīn!

I’ve never seen Pinyin with the tone marks outside of a classroom — the fact that they’ve got it on the sign there is kind of interesting, but I’m not a linguist enough to try to dissect the inner meaning of this like those professor people on Language Log. I’m just a student, so I can only think it’s interesting.

But I think the fact that the tone marks are there indicates a knowledge of the innerworkings of modern Chinese-language phonetics that only somebody who wasn’t a native speaker would care enough about to add to their branding.

As in, think of the ways that a native speaker probably interacts with the phonetic system on a daily basis: in Chinese brand names, addresses, location names, anything needed to be made international. The Pinyin input method, both on computers and on smartphones — all of these don’t require use of the tone marks.

Most Chinese city names, for example, are usually spelled without the tones, the input method doesn’t require them, either — a native speaker probably remembers them well enough not to need a reminder — so why are we now seeing tone marks on this sign? What made the marketing team think to put them there?

It’s either a try-hard or an AI responsible for this.

There are a lot of similar restaurants in the area catering to a similar audience — this is a pretty university-heavy part of town that I don’t live far from, and this area is on the campus of a medical school with a large number of Chinese international students, which is neat. It’s a little bit like the “Chinatown of the future” — that is to say, more English and more boba.

After that, I went to a decidedly much less nice area with a Target, and I was in and out fairly quickly.

A Japanese message on a Volvo dashboard.

To my surprise, on the way out, my car gave me a dashboard message in Japanese — it was too quick for me to get it on camera, and I couldn’t get it to happen again.

This has happened before, but it’s only every few months — every time it does, too, it goes away so quickly I can’t usually get a picture.

Actually, I was able to capture a photo when the car gave the message again a few days later. I still don’t know what it says, but that’s what it looks like.

So I thought I’d throw that in to the bucket of uninteresting brief conversation topics related to language. I don’t know Japanese anyway, so it’s not like I could have read the message even if I had caught it on camera.

But it is somewhat interesting that I got this funky Japanese dashboard message in a Volvo, which is a Swedish car brand (and my understanding is that modern ones are made in China). Unless a Japanese car manufacturer does contract work, I have no clue why this is the way it is.

That aside, I should probably leave the computer to go for a walk — all of that reorganizing posts this morning burned my eyes in from staring at a screen so long. I even use dark mode in the terminal — it’s no use! I should get some more fresh air.

I’ll be back in less than a week, but I’ll try to make the next one a 中文版的 for evenness and the always-needed writing practice.

See you soon!

Time sails

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a charmingly grainy boat photo.

Like a boat. These ones are from a public domain image I found on Wikimedia Commons, which has that old-time postcard feel. I’m a fan.

As in, when you’re first leaving port, everything happens so fast, when you’re in the middle of the ocean, everything is so monotonous that you can’t really tell time at all anymore, and when you get close to the destination everything slows to a crawl.

That’s a good quality analogy for the day.

There are only six days left until I get my first paycheck, and that’s really the only thing I’m waiting for by now. After that, I’ll have money to go do interesting things and visit places. I might even be able to afford a train ticket somewhere neat. Or a plane ticket — but planes just aren’t that cool.

Since photography is the best way to feel like a tourist in your own city, the other day I went around Rochester trying to find some neat environments and take photos that accurately represented how nice they were. I was more successful than I thought I’d be, and I’ve already posted some of these photos on Wikimedia but I’ve made a few touch-up edits since then (using the built-in photo editor on my iPhone, which is still where I take all my photos).

First, I discovered the nicest place to visit that I’ve seen in Rochester so far — probably its most famous landmark anyway (or one of them) — the area around “High Falls”.

The waterfall itself looks like this:

High Falls with a train passing by.

But, even nicer, there’s a really nice pedestrian bridge over the river in front of the waterfall (which is where I took the photo). Complete with Rochester’s public scooter rentals, there’s a bike & scooter lane in the middle painted green for good vibes.

Rochester is going to achieve Copenhagen soon.

And on the other end of the bridge, there’s a small historic district called the “Genesee Riverway” with some office buildings, restaurants, and some public spaces. As is apparently a good indicator of a quality city, there were even some children playing around by a small park on the side of the road (not visible).

I'm an Internet urbanist now.

So, overall, it doesn’t seem like I have to go that far to find neat places to walk around. I just need my exercise!

I also walked around the East End a little bit and updated my since-deleted collection of photos from the first time I discovered downtown. It still looks nice, and its bike lanes are even green now, too:

I like court buildings for one reason or another.

The nicest downtown neighborhood in Rochester is definitely still around Gibbs St., which is where Eastman and all the downtown performing arts are. There are also two coffee shops, and Java’s is still on my list of places to go sometime (I’ve been holding out because I think it’d be better with a friend).

I should've brought my clarinet.

And, finally, since it was around sunset time I was able to get my best-yet photo of the “I <3 ROC” sign in the city center, now with the lighting just right. This has a few touch-ups as compared to the Wikimedia version that I uploaded, and I might update that one soon.

Truly a city of nonzero note.

With all these photos as of late, I’ve had to move my blog to GitHub to be able to manage the data sizes and be able to post on a Starbucks internet connection reliably!

I’m back at the Mt. Hope Starbucks — as always, since the Five-Star Bank Starbucks (easily punnable but I’ll withhold) — still hasn’t been finished yet. There’s a market going on just outside, which is pretty neat. I’m not sure there’s anything there worth buying, but I’m all for public events in neat neighborhoods.

All of this talk about cities and environments is just myself trying to make myself feel better about being otherwise bored and feeling a little held back. If I could find an internship in a neat place, I’d be happy, and if I could get rid of my car, travel more, that’d be cool. I mean, everyone feels that way, especially at age 20, I’m sure.

There’s an airport so close to my apartment that I see (and often hear) planes come up and touch down every day. If the tickets aren’t too bad and I can get enough free time, I could use some of my summer money to at least go to Boston or somewhere more interesting than here.

I want to live in an interesting place first, and then not backtrack on my 中文學 second. I’ve been listening to exclusively Mandopop for quite a long while now, and occasionally I get a song with simple enough lyrics that I can comprehend the general feel of it without having to use a translator — I often have to use the karaoke feature on Apple Music, though, to see the lyrics in writing, because without the tones it’s kind of hard to tell what singers are trying to say (if you’re like me and don’t have whatever linguistic intuition would come with being a native speaker, I assume).

I don’t know if it says something about my personality, but all the Mandopop that I’ve liked the most have been breakup songs. I’ve never even been in a relationship.

Other than discovering myself through 25-year-old pop songs, I started using Anki, too (and I haven’t done my deck yet today, so I have that to look forward to). Nothing I can come up with here seems to be quite as high-quality as shopping at the Dongmen Market, but determination is the most important thing not to lose.

For now, though, I’m at my research internship learning how to blow up nine-stage oscillators. I really understand how competitive overclocking became a sport, now — especially since I can go to work to “experiment with old wafers”.

So, from now until next Friday, it’s amateur attempts at process improvements, a blazing fast (or maybe lightning fast) 10 MHz oscillator, and some presentation skill development. Then I can decide what to do with my newfound monetary freedom. At least I have a nice job now.

See you all then!

Spring cleaning

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A beach.

I’m too obsessed with cleaning. Physical cleaning, organizing, wiping things down, and then organizing my work, clearing out my head — “obsessive” is the right word. I don’t think I can fix it, though.

Over the spring, I did a lot of cleaning in my apartment. That will be an especially nice thing to have done come August, when I need to move, but I didn’t necessarily need to start thinking about it so far in advance.

Yesterday, I took my bicycle — the back tire had fallen off and it’s been sitting outside for about two months now — and donated it to Goodwill.

I wanted to replace it with an electric scooter (a nicer one to replace the one that I used to have last year, that had been stolen), but then I started having second thoughts. I do like walking, and everything around me is within walking distance. Then, I started thinking about the student buses and how I might be able to get around with those, but being missed by one and then realizing the following bus was the wrong route and seeing that the routes only run once per hour killed that dream very fast.

So I drove to my favorite Starbucks by that convenience store with the imported food and got lunch instead. This isn’t too far, so I guess I won’t waste very much gas money making this car trip once or twice a week.

There are some more items laying around my apartment that I’m not sure I need anymore, and since I’m not sure how I’m moving in those few months coming soon, I want to make sure that the things that I do have are all things that will fit in my car all at the same time (because I don’t want to have to rent a storage unit). My room feels nice and isn’t too large, so that’s at least a good thing. I’ll probably go back in and keep throwing out more things with time that I don’t really need (like my roommate’s bathroom rug. He doesn’t even live here anymore).

My mind has been cleaned pretty well by not having so many separate classes and assignments to be thinking about at the same time anymore, although I do have one class (a technical-business thing that everyone doing research over the summer was automatically enrolled in) — I’m sure it’ll turn out fine, but I’m in way over my head (I am the youngest, least experienced person doing research right now, even out of all the undergrads. I mean, I’m barely even doing research, to be honest, I’m just an intern!).

I still have to look for positions for the fall, but if that’s my primary occupation outside of work, at least I get to focus on it. I’m unsure whether any one that I had on my “keep track of” list before it got so short I erased it are ever going to come to anything — the job market overall right now looks horrible, still, and the site I was using to try to go after one particular opportunity (a different research position) seems to not be allowing account creation for the rest of the year.

All of this, and I’m a little sad that I don’t have many friends outside of work at the moment. Maybe I should start inviting the group out to dinner or something, but no school gets pretty lonely even for a self-identified introvert as myself (I don’t know what my four letters are, maybe I should take one of those personality tests).

At least on this blog I can have one-sided conversations with at least one person!

Sometimes, talking things through is just helpful because I never believe myself in most situations.

Right now, I just want to believe that I’m doing a good job at working (meeting the base threshold for intelligence), making some amount of career headway (networking and getting my resume out), not behind on other tasks (coming along in this other class just fine — we’ve been together and at the same place in our weekly group meetings), and holding to my personal values well enough (driving to Mt. Hope on a few occasions per week is a good compromise between keeping the car battery charged and killing the Earth with gasoline fumes).

And I know I’m prone to worry too much about things that don’t matter at all. Maybe some extra sleep and a little bit of caffeine are helpful.

Lemon man, who's always there for you.

I can never tell if writing about these things on my blog is too self-indulging — but, I mean, I do use my blog like an online wall of therapy, and it does feel good.

So thank you for reading this! My friends would get annoyed if I spammed them with these thoughts over text all the time.

It’s much more organized inside my brain now.

Be back later!

Structural improvements

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My quest for good urban environments.

The week is already going by nicely, but not too quickly. At least, I enjoy my new job way more than I’ve ever enjoyed my old ones.

The picture in the thumbnail is the first of (likely many) attempts to try to find good urban environments in the vicinity to make me feel less insane — I’ve already spent more than $100 on gas money in the past week (that’s, like, three tank refills), but the isolation of the metal box I need to get anywhere around the city is depression fuel in itself.

Luckily, I have Mt. Hope, Park Ave., and the campus here. Although, all are too far from each other for me to walk between them. Mt. Hope even has 樂生活 Joy Mart, a neat little store where they sell melon bread and 「經典港式奶茶」, which I hadn’t known was a thing at all until this week, but now I drink it every morning. It is like $1.00 per bag, though.

Because I have to start work soon, this is a quick post, but I also wanted to mention the other things that are good for sanity — first, walking to work in the morning (which I can do because both home and work are on campus), sleeping well, eating well (more restaurants are open around here than I had anticipated), and having interesting material to read — especially the last one.

I heard about the book Orphan of Asia by 吳濁流 Wu Zhuoliu (pretty sure I got the characters right?) — for a story about a 20th-century small-town citizen of the Japanese Empire, the main character is surprisingly relatable (I think some things just transcend cultures). I’ll try to refrain from spoilers, but the story has its ups and downs. It’s sort of expensive on Kindle (you can get a paperback copy for cheaper, actually). I will also probably do that soon (after my first paycheck).

I also cleaned out my photo library this morning. The more I get nice art representing the places around me, the more I appreciate them — that might be a little bit of a life hack. I recently opened an account on Wikimedia Commons to showcase (and make public and public-domain) some of my best photos — you can get the link at my new links page.

Actually, this new page seems to be a good way to lend my Web presence a friendly URL without my having to pay for a domain (just look at the URL bar above this blog!). Regardless, I think everything here is easy enough to navigate for now. I apologize for the straight week of inconsistency, things will go back to stable now (Update: it’s been a few days and I just registered the domain brpe.cc to use instead of that chunky old one. It’s for the best).

This shot is not too far from Rochester:

Lake Ontario beachfront.

This is nice nature, but I seem to be (at least lately) more into finding places with the right amount of compromise between interest and beauty. More cityscapes will follow.

As the lights in the room next to me start to turn on, I realize I should probably get off the blogging and start being ~~productive~~ an intern.

I’ll be back soon!

Goals for coming months

Thu, 29 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

哎呀。

I’m still exceptionally sad after having returned from vacation a little sooner than I wanted to.

At least I have more media to remind me of it all — a new episode of the Taiwanology podcast came out this week (a good listen and only once a month as of late) and I still haven’t finished Wu Li-pei’s memoir.

I have the next few months to fill with whatever it is that I can find to do.

I’m a big proponent for traveling as number one mental stimulation — there’s no better way to learn — and the phrase “being a tourist in your own city” keeps ringing through my head, so this summer, since I have a reasonably-paying job and some additional time now, I figured I could start journeying outward and trying to see things.

Plus, that’ll make excellent blog content, and that’s where my priorities lie. Truly, I’ll always do it for the views/reads.

So, I think in the next few months, I’m going to want to see whatever it is that’s within a day-trip distance from where I live in Rochester, NY. I think the most obvious thing to do is to go to Toronto at some point — I mean, that must be an interesting city and it’s only about a three-hour drive from here — so you’ll probably see that at some point.

I also got addicted to riding trains during my eight days abroad (between the 捷運 and the 高鐵) and I think it only remains for me to see how the trodden-down American and Canadian rail systems compare to the ones that are now my benchmark.

It’s clean, it’s fast, the ads are kind of adorable, and the Metro Taipei company licensed Shiba Says to make all of their public service announcements, which is definitely adorable. I mean, don’t you just want to ride that?

快速！

Anyway, in Toronto, I heard there was a 海底撈 on Yonge St., and I need to get some friends to go to there with me so we can get hot pot. Or, even better:

早上吃得飽，上午吃得好，晚上吃得少，身體就能好。

I’m incredibly food-motivated. I’m now going to go insane if I don’t find a solid method for obtaining scallion pancakes and soup dumplings in North America. Even better if I can bring my scallion pancakes and soup dumplings on to a train.

So, if I want to itemize my goals, I can write:

Make friends
Go places
Eat food
When I go places, do it on a train (because trains are cool).

And then maybe

Travel in my mind with the power of reading (using physical books once I have money so I can stop buying region-locked epubs with my Kindle).

I want to be one of those cool kids with a full bookshelf.

Recently, as soon as I got back from Taiwan, I met up with a professor I had started contacting while I was still there (because the professor who was with us in Taiwan gave me her contact). She had also traveled to Taiwan last year and is apparently famous enough to have a Wikipedia page, so I was honored to get some conversational time with her in her office while we shared our love of Kuai Kuai, convenience stores, and people whose nice stereotypes are mostly actually true (Taiwan: the Canada of the East).

And, also, she had a contact with a professor at 國立清華大學 National Tsing Hua University who was looking for a lab assistant from the United States.

Anyway, not only did she have a bag of 乖乖 sitting behind her desk, but she also had stacks and piles of books, with a full bookshelf overhead to boot. Overall, I was impressed. And, we wave to each other walking by in the hallway now. Truly, this is the power of networking.

I’m getting better at keeping track of my connections and potential future career threads, and I’m starting to find the ability to pull more of them over time. I’m still looking for fall employment, but at least I have some better career skills now (although that doesn’t stop today’s job market from being absolutely abysmal).

It's more than just the food that I miss, I promise.

If you haven’t guessed it by now, I still have more than enough pictures from Taiwan to fill any post and guide any discussion. While we were company-shadowing last Wednesday, we went to a public coworking space on Xinyi Rd., and this neat little wood bear was in there. This is the kind of thing that makes me wish I could intern in Taipei — that and that when we toured the Songyan Cultural and Creative Park later that day, they showed a neat compilation of the morning routine of an intern at Songyan.

Sometimes, I just wish I hadn’t chosen engineering as a career path so that I could move to Taipei and intern at an artistic park. I mean, that’s just cool. Songyan was probably one of my favorite places to visit in Taipei, especially because of its lack of touristiness (none of the staff, except for our tour guide, spoke English, but the tour guide was pretty cool and had that funny accent of an old Taiwanese guy who definitely speaks fluent Japanese).

My LinkedIn banner is the unused south tobacco-plant room at Songyan, which still reeks of 菸草 and was more than an aesthetic. Something that surprisingly seems to really belong at an artistic park (unlike all of the anime cutout people that were around in the visiting-artist section of the park, not to mention the entire Windbreaker merchandise store in the back corner of the main building).

Adaptive reuse. You know, secondhand smoke.

That room was neat, but this decorated window just nearby was even more so:

Taiwanese industry pre-semiconductor is pretty inspiring.

I really hope not too many fellow 外國人 figure out that this place exists, because neat historical and creative landmarks like this are what I travel for.

I know that these cultural, historical, and artistic parks are something that Taiwan is somewhat well-known for, because I know that there’s another one in Chiayi — I heard of it just before visiting — and I even saw the building during the taxi ride back to the 高鐵 station.

I didn’t go, though, and I’ve heard Chiayi’s is pretty underwhelming — I know there must be more in other major cities, though, like Taichung and Kaohsiung, both of which I plan to visit beyond by couple of brief stops in the 台中高鐵站 on our ways between Taipei and Chiayi last week.

And, there have got to be some similar landmarks around here, too. I’d love to assemble a list of landmarks to visit in Toronto, so that once I get there (potentially during an upcoming long weekend) I can stay for a few days and have time to ride the train to and from there. The tickets (and traveling overall) are kind of pricey, though (not any more so than the gas it would take to drive, there, though) so I’m going to have to wait a few more paydays so that I can be prepared for that kind of thing. I’d definitely love to report back on my findings.

So, anyway, these are the thoughts that have been floating around in my lonely nugget for the past many jet-lagged days of severe allergies and slight confusion as to what my new job entails. I’m still not officially cleared to work yet, but I’ve been hanging out with the team during their work days and trying to help just to get a feel for what’s going on.

I’ll be back soon with a little bit more to say, I hope. Time is what you make it, right?

I’ll send a picture of my epic bookshelf once it’s full.

拜拜！

Beautiful island

Tue, 27 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Happy.

I took a lot of photos over the past week and a lot of them have been making good wallpapers on my devices since then.

(Maybe not the thumbnail one, though. That one’s just cute).

In order to share the love with others a little bit, I wanted to post some of those pictures here like a wallpaper collection.

It really is a “beautiful island”. Some of these are repeats from past posts — this is just a compilation.

Downtown Chiayi.

This is downtown Chiayi, a totally underrated city and a decent crossroads between urban environment with landmarks and country town without too many other tourists (at least, not American ones).

Xinyi District.

Some parts of Taiwan really do look like America. This is a pretty colorful photo, though.

CKS Memorial Hall.

中正紀念堂！This is one of those works where you really need to separate the art from the meaning.

Jiufen.

Jiufen is a neat town with a cool old street, and it’s got some nice mountain views. Actually, it seems like most of 新北 New Taipei City looks like this.

Ketagelan Boulevard.

Usually, Taiwanese street names are pretty predictable. One that seems fairly common is 介壽 Jieshou, “long, sturdy life” and a play on Chiang Kai-shek’s name in Mandarin (蔣介石 Jiang Jie-shi). I think today’s 凱達格蘭 Kai-da-ge-lan Boulevard (named for local indigines) is Taipei’s former Jieshou Boulevard. The Japanese architecture at the Presidential office, though, is pretty striking.

Alishan railway.

The Alishan railway is pretty much the most famous tourist attraction around Chiayi, to my knowledge (other than the many turkey rice establishments).

A collage-art wall.

This was inside of an office building for a company we shadowed. Again, very colorful! Looks cool.

Taipei from the Maokong Gondola.

This is a view of lower Taipei from the 貓空 Maokong gondola in Wenshan (technically part of the MRT, apparently). On an Apple laptop, the sun rays line right up with the notch, which is pretty classy (I have a Macbook Air).

The big giant egg.

This is from a conference room in the same office building for the company we shadowed. This is in Xinyi District (the part of Taipei that looks like America in a lot of places). This looks almost like Manhattan. The building in the center is the Taipei Dome (known in Mandarin as the “大巨蛋”, “big giant egg”, which I love).

Yehliu.

This is the same nice shot that I got from 野柳 Yehliu Geopark. I posted it last weekend, but I wanted to put it up again because scenes like this are exactly how Taiwan got the name “Ilha Formosa/Beautiful Island/美麗島”. It really is.

All of these shots came from my iPhone SE 3, not a bad phone, but not one known for its incredible camera. It wasn’t me or the phone that made these look good — it was just the stunning number of epic landscapes. Seriously. It’s a beautiful place.

I hope you enjoy!

Flying free from Formosa

Sun, 25 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

讓我淚流！

After eight days of fantasy vacation-land, I’m back to reality, which is sad.

It was especially nice that we were travelling on a school program and had prepared by talking to group partners (locals) over Whatsapp/LINE/Instagram, because I couldn’t imagine seeing what Taipei has to offer without that kind of help.

It was also especially helpful for myself to have studied up so much before I went, although I think it was more the other way down the cause-and-effect chain: I started seeing neat content about Taiwan online and found an opportunity to go there in this class.

I had ended up finding some podcasts and books that prepared me pretty well for understanding the history, what to see, and what to know.

I listened to:

Laszlo Montgomery’s China History Podcast, History of Taiwan series
Every episode of Formosa Files
Every episode of Formosa Files 中文版
Every episode of Taiwanology (from 天下雜誌)

and I read

A Pail of Oysters by Vern Sneider
Formosa Betrayed by George Kerr
A Taste of Freedom by Peng Ming-min
Fireproof Moth by Milo Thornberry

and I started reading Two Countries: My Taiwanese-American Immigrant Story by Wu Li-pei.

Two blogs I found I liked were also “Pinyin News” (the author seems to be an interesting political figure?) and “Language Log” (not much to do with Taiwan, but there’s someone who writes on there sometimes about 台語 and that person seems cool).

I also found a decent current-events news source in 天下雜誌 Commonwealth Magazine, which has both English and Mandarin editions (although the content is different between the two). The English articles will usually have one turn into a Taiwanology podcast episode per month.

These are all really helpful resources for understanding what to expect before you make it to the 美麗島. But, it took me about a year to make it through all of that. I guess I came prepared. I’ll admit, though, I’m a slow reader.

Even with all that out of the way, I’m still absolutely in the honeymooning-love phase with my affection for this place.

Everything is beautiful, adorable, convenient, cool, and interesting. The mountains are everywhere and always covered in fog, there are delightfully stupid cartoon ads everywhere, there are at least two FamilyMarts per block in Taipei, prices are reasonable, and the food is all fantastic. Especially soymilk and scallion pancakes in the morning — right near our hotel was 天津蔥抓餅 Tianjin Onion Pancake on 永康街 Yongkang St. You can’t get soymilk there, but you can get it for $35 NT a bottle at any of the nearby Seven-Elevens.

And if you want a decent entire breakfast for super cheap, you can go to 永和豆漿 Yonghe Soy Milk near 善導寺 Shandao Temple, right near 阜杭豆漿 Fuhang Soy Milk (the trendy touristy one that’s admittedly really fantastic but always busy). 永和 Yonghe is right next door and pretty good, too. Not a tourist attraction, but better value than you’d ever get in the United States.

Peanut rice milk was new for me.

This was from 永和豆漿. I had never heard of “peanut rice milk”, but I love that this and the soymilk can come out hot if you order it that way. I think it tastes better than cold soymilk, but I just tend to not like cold things anyway.

The peanut rice milk in the photo was pretty great, but I think I still prefer soymilk.

On the other end of the day, there was a place (also on 永康街 Yongkang St, like the 天津蔥抓餅 Tianjin Onion Pancake booth), called 芋頭大王 Taro King, and the mango shaved ice goes pretty hard (as shown below).

Especially good at 11 PM with friends.

So, overall, Taipei is a great place for food.

Other than the capital, I couldn’t resist getting on the HSR, even though I didn’t have a particularly good reason — I convinced a few friends to go with me to 嘉義 Chiayi City, and there, we got some good 嘉義火雞肉飯 Chiayi turkey rice (which they’re apparently very serious about).

Where do they get the turkey?

I swear this restaurant was excellent, and if I remembered the name I’d recommend it. It has fourteen reviews (all five stars) on Google Maps at time of writing, and it’s right nearby Hinoki Village (someone there pointed us to it).

An hour-and-a-half HSR ride to Chiayi, of course, for that turkey rice was well worth it. And we saw Hinoki Village and the Chiayi Art Museum, but those were less important. I thought Chiayi was the greatest place I’d ever been when we stepped out the front door of the train station onto the bus terminal and some dude starts running at us and yelling in Mandarin asking us where we’re trying to go — no conversational strong-arming to try to evacuate the English as would usually be necessary in the 北市.

Food really aside, there were also beautiful landscapes about everywhere. These are mostly the north, but number two is 嘉義 Chiayi. I have other really good photos, but they have people in them (complete strangers who happened to be in line-of-sight of the camera), so maybe not on the Internet. But trust me, Chiayi can be a pretty photogenic city in the right parts.

The most iconic iconic landmark I've ever seen.

It doesn't know it's beautiful.

At the city center.

From above.

Full of interest, full of history, and definitely large.

Some of the activities that we got into while we were there included touring 政大’s campus, going to 新竹 Hsinchu City’s God Temple Market and going to 大山北月 Big Hill North Moon in the mountains of Hsinchu County, which was pretty beautiful. On the way back, we popped out the KTVs and the microphones and started blasting it down the Zhongshan Expressway, an experience that everyone deserves at least once in their lives.

We also saw some of the obligatory landmarks, like the 國立故宮博物院 National Palace Museum, 中正紀念堂 (say it like the MRT announcer) Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, and I took a morning to ride out to 228 Peace Memorial Park, something I was surprised we didn’t do as a group.

I think having an environment where I could use Mandarin anywhere, instead of just during group meetings and classes, was also extremely helpful. I think I improved by about five miles over the course of the week, and that, in combination with all the KTVing (on the bus, at a KTV bar, at the lunch table, pretty much anywhere) removed about just as much of the insecurity wall around my mind. It was definitely necessary for my learning, I think.

And from a learner’s perspective, it was fun seeing Taiwan’s famous inconsistencies and anachronisms out in the wild. I kept maintaining a photo collection of every instance of 注音符號 Zhuyin Fuhao that I spotted out in the wild. Here are some highlights:

By the road.

In the bathroom.

At the park.

On the train.

At the museum.

These aren’t so much anachronisms, but I did also see some of that world-famous 阿扁拼音, with the obligatory amount of postal and Wade-Giles-inspired sequences of letters for names of larger cities that already have their names established (Tamsui? Keelung? Kaohsiung? … I mean, most people know how to pronounce them anyway, and if they don’t, the train announcer will correct them).

And, of course, there’s the bopomofo handbag that I bought at 平溪 Pingxi. At least one graphic designer has their priorities straight.

So, 終於要說：if you have a nice working knowledge of Mandarin, Taiwan is awesome. If you don’t, you have to stay in the touristy parts, and those people who speak English can be kind of stuck-up sometimes. Especially at 大稻埕 Dadaocheng. The temple is nice, but go elsewhere if you want food (the scenery is neat, though).

Also, be prepared for squatty-potties.

If you want a city that’s cool, go to Tokyo. If you want a city that’s different, go to Singapore. If you want to step foot into an adorable island society with fun people, excellent food, history, politics, sometimes-questionable traffic safety but an unquestionably beautiful landscape, go to Taiwan.

I know I plan to go back!

Until then, I have to do working things and live my life here in English-land where my Zhonghua bucks don’t buy even a third of a latte at the local Starbucks (or anything, for that matter).

886!

Formosa fever

Sat, 17 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The mystical land of legend.

So, this is it. The first day of the rest of my life!

Just kidding. I have to leave in eight days. So sad.

I’ve had a pretty excellent time in the one day since the plane landed (actually, less than that — I didn’t get too much sleep last night and exchanged it for a nice first day full of doing things).

I haven’t had a haircut in a long time, and the humidity is too much for any poor weak American hair product I might’ve packed to be able to handle, so my hairstyle’s already changed. One step toward evolving into my final form of world traveler with zero insecurity.

This isn’t exactly a Taipei city review — that’s something I can do later if I get the opportunity and have the desire — and most of the travel I did today was in New Taipei City / Xinbei anyway, so I haven’t really seen all that life in the great capital has to offer.

The first thing that I did today was go to 阜杭豆漿 Fuhang Soy Milk, which I had never heard of but realized their status when I found that Seven-Eleven apparently sells and brands their flagship product. Seems like I was the only one who had never heard of it!

As was to be expected, they were running a very efficient business. The person sitting across from me was a vlogger, which was an interesting thing to see. She had a microphone out and a camera pointed at the food and was making a YouTube video right there in front of me.

Not that I’m any better, because I took a picture, too:

Seed bread and bean juice.

It was excellent, I’m not going to lie. It’s the only soy milk restaurant / Taiwanese breakfast joint that I’ve ever seen, so I didn’t have a benchmark in mind, but it was definitely better than any fast-food breakfast I’ve had in the US, and it was only $85 NT (a friend gave me the bit of the 油條 for free).

After that, I went back to the hotel room and made myself a cup of coffee using the complimentary kettle, which got really hot near the wall jack that had the loose connection and certainly didn’t fill me with confidence. It hasn’t started a fire yet, and it’s not too late to alert the hotel staff who’re at the front desk about three steps from my hotel room door…

沒事吧。

One of my professors and our tour group went together on a tour that the professor had scheduled, so in the morning we went to the 野柳地質公園 Yehliu Geography Park, which I had never heard of. I didn’t take the obligatory photo of the queen’s head rock formation because we got that as a group, but I got some nice landscapes:

A great wallpaper.

This was just to the left of the 女王頭. It didn’t have a tourist path right behind it, so I was able to get a legitimately nice-looking photo (the path in the background adds some interest, anyway). This looks like a macOS wallpaper! I expect some Taiwanese beauty in the Apple stock collection soon.

A really nice looking photo in today's weather.

I felt the desperate urge to take this photo after standing outside in the 90 percent humidity for over an hour. It’s a wonder nobody was trying to swim in there…

Really, I got used to it after a while, anyway — it isn’t as bad as somebody who likes to complain would have you believe.

We popped back on to the National Highway No. 1 afterward to get some views in at 九份 Jiufen, which was a nice turn to the other end of the oceanfront-wetness-to-mountain-breeze spectrum. It seems like I wasn’t the only one who felt that way:

Like the MRT mascot, but in real life.

We got lunch there, and there was this neat bird sitting to my right on a pole in front of a pretty excellent mountain view.

I don't know what kind of bird this is.

All of these landscapes are made even more beautiful by the humidity so intense that it’s visible — that’s just the Formosa fog. Apparently, everyone here lives inside a Playstation 1.

We shopped around at stores for a little bit, and then left to 平溪 Pingxi to do the same thing. The center shopping road has train tracks running through the middle, and after messing around with writing on a fire balloon for a while, taking some pictures with it, and then launching it, the train actually came — I hadn’t been expecting that, so it was funny when the person helping us with the fire balloon started wildly waving her hand away from the tracks right after we launched it.

Fortunately, we avoided the rain the whole time we were outside, and it picked up on the way back to Taipei. I think it’s up now, but when I first walked back in to my hotel room I was prepared with my raincoat and the shoulder-strap bag that I had bought at one of the stores covered in the characters of my favorite writing system. Clearly, the people here have excellent taste in both graphic design and phonetics.

I could be a model in that outfit.

My group partners for the project that brought me here in the first place told me raincoats weren’t stylish, but they’ll have to reconsider when they see me in this.

I might need to lay down and prepare for that job interview I still haven’t finished the recording for before we go to eat out tonight. Being that we’re staying on 信義路 Xinyi Rd, that’s at 鼎泰豐 Din Tai Fung (Ding Tai Feng).

It may also be a while before I really come back with a lot more content to share, because I anticipate being pretty busy — that’ll be good because I’ll spend a lot of time collecting neat info and not blogging, and I’ll come back in about a week with a big blog post to share. Now might really be the time to become an Internet city reviewer!

謝謝光臨！

I’m going to pop over to a 小七.

Contact at Sea-Tac

Thu, 15 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I saw it, but someday I'll ride it.

It’s my second blog post for the day. I had to re-date this morning’s as being from yesterday to get Hugo to put them chronologically in the feed, so I apologize for the bad record-keeping.

I think I should feel jet-lagged, but the six hour flight from Boston barely felt like anything. The day still feels normal.

But it could be worse, and in fact, it soon will. In about three hours, our plane is going to start boarding & I’m going to be strapped to a chair on a fancy winged bus for fourteen hours, which I’m sure won’t be the greatest experience of my coming week.

I’m finally in Seattle, now, though, which means that I can’t say I’ve never been out west before — although aside from the view of the tram that I caught leaving by on some tracks parallel to the international departures terminal and a higher proportion of evergreens to other deciduous flora, it looks pretty much the same as the east.

I’m not sure what gate my flight is leaving from, since the flights to Taipei weren’t shown on the departures board & the ticket doesn’t have that information (just says to look at the departures board). I’ll be able to learn soon enough, because I think the board’s going to update & worst-case scenario, the international departures gate here isn’t very large and I could just scan it over with my feet and eyes. It seems right now like I’m at the right gate, but at the moment it’s got a flight leaving to Seoul (a really cool place that I’ve love to go, I hear, but I don’t know any Korean and I didn’t buy that ticket. Someday).

I got some neat pictures while I was in the sky flying across the US — these are over North Dakota, Washington, and some random part of Seattle — the last one isn’t particularly beautiful as much as it looks strikingly like SimCity 3000.

Boxes on the ground.

This one is the one that people talk about when they mention that 1-square-mile land plots rule that came around sometime about two centuries ago, but that us in New England never quite caught on to.

Big mountains.

I never realized what people were talking about when they discuss the vast expanse of the Rocky Mountains. If they’re epic enough to be as clearly visible from an airplane as they were for me, I guess they live up to the hype. And they’re beautiful to boot.

Does life imitate art?

This isn’t the proper part of Seattle, but seems like quintessential suburban America. Much better-looking from the top-down than from ground level, I think. I’d like to find the part of Seattle with all the good public transit and the Space Needle. Someday, I’ll come back.

I’ll have another post like this tomorrow when I land for the final time, but I’ll be busy on the airport (I’ve never been on an international flight before and have no clue what this entails), so I’ll wait until I get to my hotel room to write that up.

I’m as excited as ever. Just highly caffeinated and impatient as I stare at the gate looking to see if this is the right one. I’m probably going to make an exercise trip back to the departures board after I’m done here anyway.

The world is neat. This is a new experience for me.

Thanks for checking in again, multiple times a day. It keeps me occupied!

I’ll be writing more again soon.

Checkpoint one

Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Jet setting from Beantown.

For leg number one of the long journey, I’m sitting in the wrong terminal at the airport in Boston waiting for a flight to come that doesn’t leave for another two hours.

I’m at the wrong gate because the gate I’m supposed to be at has a different flight boarding in about half an hour, but it seems to be packed, and there isn’t much space over there. The gate I’m at is a different flight (to Los Angeles), but it seemed a little emptier. I’m within easy viewing distance of the right place, though.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do for the next two hours, but that’s standard airport fare. I’ll just listen to podcasts now so that I can start reading on the first flight.

One exciting note from the past few days is that I managed an interview at another company I’d really like to intern at — ASML — but it’s an “asynchronous, virtual” interview and I have to record myself answering three questions and then write a response to six more. I’m going to spend some of the plane time getting my thoughts down — I’ve already done two practice questions from the video portion — and once I’m in the hotel, I’ll use the single room-time that I have (even if it isn’t much) to try to record the video portion.

Apart from planning for the near future — the upcoming very long two days/day and a half/day (it really depends how you think about it) — I have the upcoming one-week program, the flight back, and then a few months of being a research assistant. I’d like to squeeze as much knowledge and experience out of these nine or ten days as I can, because it’s what I’ll have to keep with myself all summer.

I only took a backpack through airport security. That’s all I have right now — it has my clothes, toiletries, phone, Kindle, and laptop, which is reasonable. It’s a large backpack. I might want to buy a suitcase at some point, but that’s a problem for later the way I see it — I didn’t have a problem getting into the gate with just the backpack, and it took about ten minutes from walking into the airport to getting through security, so I’m hoping to keep it that way.

I’m only blogging now because of all the extra time I built in to my schedule today — it was potentially a bad idea, although I felt good about myself when the usual I-93 exit to the airport was blocked by construction work that there wasn’t any kind of notification of online (it must be new, I guess?). Changing highways to I-90 and getting off there was fine, though. Someday, I’ll just be able to take a train or a bus from home to Boston (you can take a bus now, but I’m still waiting on the Boston-DC high-speed rail, so any train dreams in and around Boston seem feasible to add to the plan. I’d like to propose the extension that cuts through Portland, Maine and Concord, New Hampshire — everybody seems to forget about the cooler places!).

My writing feels a little less-than-coherent to myself at the moment. Just saying hello to my two-person readership, both of who I know are from Boston and probably asleep at the time of writing. Thanks for the inspiration, this is a shout-out.

And for my mom, who I think looks around here on occasion.

I’ll be back in about eight hours, equally bored and ready to judge the facilities at Sea-Tac, my first view of the timeless American West.

有趣吧。

再見！

Image credit 4300streetcar, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

For your reading list

Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hitting the books in Hit the Dog.

I know I haven’t posted in a while, but this week has been fairly boring. Last week, too. It’ll get better on Thursday, when I’ll be back in full force.

In the meantime, I’ve been watching more news and feeling more overwhelmed by the world. Feeling overwhelmed by modern society has been happening to people for ages, and it’s why we started studying history (to make sure that we don’t let it repeat itself too many times).

I see people make a lot of contrived analogies between America, with its new that guy at the helm, and however many other fascist societies of the recent past. Donald Trump is the new Hitler, the new Francisco Franco, Mussolini, anything in there.

But I think that there’s a clear analogy to be made here with a bunch of reading material available for the learning that people aren’t making — and it’s probably a more useful analogy, too.

If you’re reading this and you’ve never read Formosa Betrayed by George Kerr, you totally should. The book is $6 on Kindle and about $45 paperback, so it’s kind of expensive, but Donald Trump is the new Chiang Kai-shek, so if you want to know what the future could hold, it’s in there.

The more you pour through the pages, the more you’ll know what I mean.

I was talking to a friend the other day about Trump and his ability to dominate the news headlines and the TV (I mean, being TV famous is his “thing”) and when I asked how much of this he thought we had left, he said, “well, you know, he could always declare martial law and just sit in the Oval Office until he dies”, to which I let out a little too much of an enthusiastic, terribly depressed laugh.

The US legal system is several hundred years old, has seen more than enough of governments rising and falling worldwide, and somehow that’s still a provision that’s allowed. I’ll have to look more into that (?).

Anyway, if you’re a bored and sad anti-fascist, this is one of those good history books. And it’s written really well. If you want more where that came from, you can also read Peng Ming-min’s memoir, A Taste of Freedom, which takes place a few decades after Formosa Betrayed, but is written and formatted similarly to the other one (I would assume that might be because George Kerr was one of the editors).

I’d like to tune out the news and live my life — and I’m pretty sure I can do that if I put enough mental effort in — but before I go, I wanted to mention the quote that one of the people in Formosa Betrayed — I think his name was Mr. Chou (Zhou) — mentioned about overbearing political organizations.

There’s always an element of good. Chiang and Chiang Jr. were trained by the Russians, sure, but there were some other people in the KMT that had good intention, and through all the disorder and corruption, those people would occasionally come to power. The solution for fixing things isn’t to run — I say get in there and become active.

I mean, in the US, I still don’t think it’s nearly as bad as in mid 20th-century Taiwan, so maybe if you live here you can just let your local officials know how you feel or vote out the bad ones. It’ll start working after a while. Maybe even occasionally vote some lower, trustworthy-looking officials from the other party into office to let them prove themselves.

You might end up liking them and voting them for mayor or something even more important. You need to reward the good in the political system, rather than just hating on the bad (the bad will always be there).

Or, just turn off the news, brew a coffee, and read some books about interesting history. Then, when you’re done, throw them to your friends, too.

I’ll be back soon, and maybe even with some pictures to show for all this talk about the Ilha Formosa!

See you then.

Thumbnail image credit: Foxy1219, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

State of things

Sat, 03 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

要去高雄！

For one more Saturday, I’m sitting at the same Starbucks again looking out the same window. I came in this morning and despite not having been here for two weeks, it seems like at least one barista recognized me. How not opsec of me? I guess I have a memorable face.

Although it’s usually kind of cloudy and cold on Saturdays in Rochester during the spring, today it’s less cold and just raining.

My finals are done and I’m even mostly almost done my part of our group’s business project, so after I made some edits to our slide deck today I think I’ll be able to fully enjoy the “vacation” coming up. Expect lots more blog posting soon.

After I finish my finals every semester, I’m usually not reminded of how boring life without school really is because I have a least a day of travel back home, a day or two with my parents, and then the reality sets in. Since this semester, I’m staying on-campus for a few days before attending a conference and then going home, the boredom had its chance to realize itself as soon as I turned in my last final.

Yesterday, I took my old PC out of the closet and set it up with a Goodwill monitor and some cables (expensive ones, apparently — supply chain issues are the theme of the decade? It was over $30 for a DVI-HDMI cable, a USB-C cable, and an Ethernet cord!).

The rig.

I had donated the graphics card that had been in it — an RX 580 8GB, which is honestly still pretty great — to a friend a while ago who was trying to build a PC. The Goodwill monitor served to temper my gaming performance expectations accordingly (I can’t be disappointed that a game isn’t running at 120 FPS and 1080p when my monitor is 1024 by 768 at 60 Hz).

After using RHEL with MATE in the integrated circuit design lab for a class this semester, my number one desktop operating system of choice (when I get to choose) is now Fedora with Mate/Compiz, so I installed that, Prism Launcher, and Steam, and I had some fun with that this morning. It runs Tetris Effect pretty well (my one real requirement).

The CPU is an AMD Athlon 200GE, so the integrated graphics aren’t excellent, but also not horrible. The power consumption is (I’d assume, anyway) pretty low (I have a couple of Kill-a-Watts, so if I wanted to, I could test that. I might do that later).

This has really been my entertainment for the past two days or so (really, a day and a half).

As far as grades go, I’m at least still hopeful. The class that I felt the worst about was my circuits class, which I had a rolling grade of “B-” in before I went in to the final.

After I left the test, though (which I had plenty of time to study for, so on the final, I felt much better than on most past circuits exams), I learned about a “grade replacement” policy — the professor will replace the lowest exam grade with your final grade if the final grade was better.

After a little bit of trial-and-error calculation, it seems like that means that if I got a 95 percent or better on the final, my circuits grade will jump from a B- to an A-, which would be excellent. I’m still holding out hope.

In other news related to “holding out hope”, I still haven’t heard back about my interview yet. Actually, the conference I’m going to next week is on the same campus as my interview was, and it’d be really funny if I run into the recruiter while I’m there (especially since I learned lately that we’re going to go on a facility tour for the exact company I interviewed with and already got a facility tour of during the interview).

There really isn’t anything I want more in my life right now than this job. I’ve said that to most people I know by now. I think that my most valuable trait is the patience that I’m going to convince myself I have so that I can use it — waiting is hard, though.

Before the job, I think things have the potential to go pretty well in the next few weeks. I will at least have things to do! If I can survive the boredom of today, tomorrow, and most of Monday, I’ll have the trip to the conference on Monday night, the conference itself from Tuesday through Thursday, I’m driving home Thursday night, I have Friday to (probably) do things at home (maybe), then I’m visiting a friend on Saturday afternoon (Saturday is also Mother’s Day, so I told my mom I wanted to spend the morning with her, which is always a good plan).

Sunday is too far out for me to declare a boredom epidemic just yet, and besides, when I’m at home I can’t bother the neighbors when I try to practice Arabesques by Paul Jeanjean on my clarinet in my bedroom, so of course I’ll have things to do (it even deters those annoying dogs).

(I’m just joking about the last thing. But when I talk about the things I do with my life, it makes me sound like such a basic sheep that the embarrassment hits the signed-integer size limit and turns into pride).

The following Thursday is the day that the travel begins, and Friday is the day that my 台灣旅遊 really starts. Again, 要貼博客很多. Maybe I’ll even bring that old camera I stole from my mom and finally put it to use.

There’ll be lots of flash cards to flip and listening practice to do before then, though, because I need to be on my A-game for the entire 9 days of real travel. The next time following this that I’ll try to be back is spring of 2027, which seems far into the future. I need to extract as much value as possible from the limited time I have!

謝謝光臨！

I’ll be back reporting from 家裡 next week. See you then.

Thumbnail image credit: 毛貓大少爺, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

…

After this post had been up for a few hours, I still didn’t have much to do, so I set my PC up a little closer to an accessible outlet and started up Tetris Effect with a Kill-a-Watt at the end of the power cable.

It looks cleaner now, anyway.

The outlets in my apartment are upside-down, so apologies for the strange-looking shadows.

Surprisingly low power draw!

The reading is less than 50 W. Neat!

This is the kind of thing that kills my time around now. 再見！

Now, one more week

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A nice geometric wallpaper for the summer.

I know that I wrote a post yesterday, but now I’m sitting here on a Saturday morning and couldn’t help doing the thing that I usually do.

Besides, I feel like yesterday’s post didn’t finish the week exactly like I wanted it to.

This is the busy Saturday that more-or-less begins the things that I have to do this week — getting started early is satisfying, anyway. The things that I have to do aren’t particularly important in the long-term, though, so it’s still kind of low-stakes. It will be fun, I think.

The main thing that I’d have the most reason to be worried about is our orchestra performance in the afternoon, since I never feel completely prepared for these kinds of things. This is going to be my last performance with any kind of ensemble for a long time (until at least next year), so I’d like to make it good, though.

Once that’s done, then tomorrow I can finish my group project with my partners for that business class. That will be two things off of the list. I’ll have time in the afternoon to finish that take-home exam for the other class, and then the only things I have left to worry about are finals and the lab report (conveniently due after the tests).

I still feel a little bad about a group assignment a while ago that I took it upon myself to do in its entirety (but kind of incorrectly) because we couldn’t find a good group meeting time/we couldn’t get everyone together before the deadline. The professor said it was okay because it was just practice and not graded, but I had a hard time getting the feeling of “incompleteness” out of my head.

Anyway, we’re set with those things now.

In other words — those are things I already had on my mind yesterday — I also feel like my mind’s been going a little too quickly lately. Like, I need a vacation — even better reason to get the class project done before I go to Taiwan so that I can spent all our time off doing vacation-ish things.

I feel a little bad talking so much about the trip, especially around some friends that aren’t going on it, because I know it’s a cool opportunity and I’m a little sad that those people can’t go, too. I had one friend who applied and got technically accepted, but everything didn’t work out and so he’s still not going.

I just think that sometimes, I spend too much of my time showing my cards and saying exactly what I’m thinking, and the only person that that really benefits is myself, so that’s probably not great.

Both metaphorically and literally — in the Mandarin conversation table that we’ve been holding at school, we often play cards at Friday meetings and I can’t keep those things close to my chest. I’m horrible at games. The game is 升級, which I also don’t really know the rules of too well. Only enough to know ~what I’m probably supposed to do at any given moment.

Anyway, I think I need to stop waiting for the things that I think will make my future better to happen, and instead just reframe things a little.

If I feel like I talk too much, or if I feel a little unprepared for job searching, or anything along those lines, I should probably be able to remind myself that this is all part of learning. All those people who are better than me at these things went through the same learning process. I think the two banes of progress are perfection and hyper-attention.

So, in summary, I’ve still shown my cards here, but that’s okay because the blog is on my team (or, we’re playing doubles in 升級 or something because only 7 people showed up to the conversation table today).

I practiced not telling people everything I was thinking all the time by not telling anyone it was my birthday yesterday. In place of a birthday cake, I went to a specialty grocery store and bought some durian cakes because I’d just learned about them and if there are two things that I learned I liked recently, it’s durians and 鳳梨酥. Unfortunately, not so many other people like durians as much as I do. But now I have most of the cakes to myself.

I’ll just jab a candle in the top of one of them and celebrate in my apartment. I don’t think I can light it though, I’m pretty sure that’s against the lease agreement.

第一作業，第二大考，就成功了！

下個週末見。

Still feel like blogging

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The picture of the day.

I don’t have a picture in mind to put at the top of the post, so whatever is there is something I found after I was done writing.

I’m going to be pretty busy over the weekend, and I felt like blogging anyway right now, so even though it’s Friday (right at the end of the week), I’m going to say that my weekend mood-recovery begins now & I’m feeling like blogging some words out right in this moment.

This has been the last full week of classes, so next week I have my last group of Monday lectures, reading day, and then all my finals. At least I know that in about a week it’ll all be over and I can sleep properly.

Right before this, I got into the writing mood by way of a lab assignment that I had thought was due Monday. I somehow corrupted the PDF with the requirements on it, so I went online to download another copy and noticed that the due date got pushed back from April 27 to May 4. There’s no feeling of productivity quite like working on something slowly, but watching the due date get pushed back way further than is necessary to compensate.

This means that I just have a presentation to give with my group in the Taiwan-business class today, and we might have our business plan practice document to rework (last week I did the whole thing by myself, and I even did it about the wrong company…). The professor said it was fine anyway because it was just practice for the business plan we should be writing with our group partners, but now I’m confusing myself.

Anyway, I have that to worry about and this lab report.

After the business class ends at 12 today, the first one won’t be a concern anymore. I have the rest of the day to finish after that and pretty much only the lab report to think about long-term — in the same class as the lab report, we have a take-home exam due over the weekend, but it’s two questions long and I might just do it on Sunday afternoon. Regardless, I should be feeling good about my progress in all the classes by the end of Monday.

I tend to get overwhelmed by finals week. I think that’s the point, though. I just want to get it all done. This is all that’s on my mind, I guess.

I’ll still have assignments to do after finals week, but only for the business class, since it doesn’t end until the end of May (because of the traveling part). I have a meeting with my group partners this Sunday morning, so if we’re efficient we can potentially just get the whole project ground out at once. I’m hopeful. We only technically need to produce two deliverable documents (the business plan and the pitch slide deck). After that, the whole of the business plan is just thinking out the details, which I consider myself good at.

We do have an orchestra performance tomorrow, though, and those videos should be good (in all hope). I’ve now — somewhat unfortunately — been promoted to “acting first part” clarinet for this half of the semester and couldn’t have possibly been less mentally prepared: I thought I didn’t have stage fright that badly, but now I keep shaking during solo sections (even though they’re not that large in the pieces we’re doing now). I’ll just need to turn the brain off for a while and play the things and feel the emotions while I’m up there. I have friends in the orchestra (right now) that I don’t intend to lose…

Outside of school, I still haven’t heard back about my job interview last Wednesday. I’m a little worried — they said it’d be a “week or two”, so we’re still not near the end of the time frame, but I can’t not get concerned — but today is my birthday, so if they send the email sometime later on then that’d be really fantastic. I would never have gotten a better birthday gift in my life.

I’m currently sitting in a place of about 70 percent pessimism and 30 percent hope about my career prospects over the summer.

No matter what happens, though, it’ll at least probably be interesting and a decent learning experience. I’m pretty sure I have a backup plan, still, as far as just staying here and working over the summer, and I’d have time to find a job for the fall in that case, but that’s a lot less certain of a prospect than having it sorted out now at my dream employer, so I don’t want to make too much out of those possibilities.

So, basically, right now, I’m unemployed but still overwhelmed by work.

I’m just waiting for the things “to get good”.

聽到好消息我就回來。

那後見！

The end of the beginning

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A rainy day and a city road.

Someday, it might be in my best interest to stop with the dramatic post titles. But, honestly, sometimes it just works.

But that aside, you’ll never guess where I am again — because you don’t have to — you can see in the picture up there that I’m at the same Starbucks that I sit at every Saturday morning to do this.

Today, though, I’m facing out the other direction through the window. You still have to fit change in your life somewhere (although it is also still raining. At least it’s now warm and raining).

This week was nice, but went by quickly. On Tuesday — and this was kind of unplanned — there was a conference at school for people in my major (all the professors were there, all the seniors were there showing off their senior design projects, it was pretty neat). I went just to see who I would be able to connect with there (in person and on LinkedIn) — I shook the hands of a couple of professors that were very well known to everybody but me. Events for networking! I should’ve started with those sooner!

Wednesday was the interview for that dream internship I want over the summer and fall terms (again, the drama just fits here). It’s a pretty interesting-sounding position, especially if the thing I’m interested in is metrology and testing semiconductor devices (which, again, honestly: it is). They told me I would hear back in a week or two, so I’ll have to remain all over my email inbox, as I usually do.

Even more interesting was the place where the interview was — there’s a semiconductor fabrication facility owned by the state government that’s pretty far from where I go to school, but a long drive that was well worth it. Not just that, but I heard yesterday of another conference that one of my professors is looking to take students to. It’s the second week of finals, but luckily for me I don’t have any tests that week — I told him I’d like to go. It’s on the same campus where I just interviewed (convenient and cool! This is a place I want to get to know).

So I officially deem this period of my personal history the “end of the beginning” (so I hope), the point at which I stop being confused about my future and not sure what classes I like and when I double-down on all of the things I think I might be good at in order to improve my career prospects and become a better person.

Or something along those lines, whatever helps me sleep at night (in combination with the occasional melatonin supplement…).

I checked with the registrar earlier this week to (hopefully) confirm that my double-major is now registered in my academic plan, and if all is well then next spring semester after I, if all goes well, come back from my long, happy, and fruitful internship of great success, then I’ll only be taking electronics and Mandarin classes. Another step toward the future, I think.

The other step toward the future that’s quantifiable is the birthday that I have coming this Friday (so I’ll be 20 years old, a very clean and round number that’s a multiple of 2, 4, and 5). After that comes the thing that I consider the event to look forward to in the next week — the orchestra performance the following Saturday, by which I hope to be in possession of this really epic barrel.

The small things, maybe. I mean, it’s not that small, it’s a pretty nice barrel — my clarinet professor had one and let me try it the second week before my last lesson, and it was a pretty miraculous solution to my tuning and intonation pains. At least, that’s how I remember it — I don’t know, I’ll have to wait until I have one. But I hope to have one soon.

Island cityscape sunset.

Image credit Ludovic Lubeigt, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Just yesterday, we were back in the 國際語言文化創業課 and the professor who’s going to act as our tour guide in Taipei was giving us a summary of the travel itinerary for the week. Over the course of the class, we also saw a couple of Taipei cityscapes, and it’s surprisingly nice (I’m mostly used to American cityscapes) except for the strange discrepancy between the height of the Taipei 101 and every other building around it. I thought I’d share.

I have one or two meetings remaining with my group partners before I go there to meet them in-person, and we’re sort of working on our project (but still, really, near the beginning) — I took one of the presentations that I gave them a while ago and decided we could turn it into our final presentation, but first wanted to convert it from a LaTeX Beamer to something editable online.

I took the PDF slideshow and put it into a PDF-to-PPT converter online, and the result was surprisingly good, but it still wasn’t necessarily group-workable — so, I uploaded the .ppt version to Google Drive, and then after opening it in Google Slides it converted it to a .pptx and opened it using the Google Slides online viewer, where you can invite other G Suite accounts. I invited the two group partners and reveled in how surprisingly intact my Beamer was in Google Slides form after 3-4 conversion steps. Technology truly is great.

The professor who was giving us the tour summary yesterday said that last year (the first year that they ran this program), the groups ended up spending most of their time in Taipei finishing their project because they hadn’t done it before the trip, and recommended against doing that because Taipei is an interesting place with lots of things to see and we should be seeing them instead of making a slideshow in a hotel room. I agree.

Anyway, it turns out that we don’t have any activities planned for the Sunday of the trip, which means my first two days there are free — the Saturday and Sunday — and I have a little more independent travel time before the program than I thought I would. I still have no clue what I should do, but I do know that I like trains and that the 高鐵 is fast, so my options are open, but I don’t think I’ll have time to see distant things like 金門 or lower Okinawa (if I went there, then I could technically say that I had “been to Japan”, which would be fun).

Aside from looking forward to these things — the same things I’ve been looking forward to forever — I have one more week here at school. That’s one more week of assignments to do — at least they’re all on my to-do list now & nothing else comes in to fill the empty spots of the assignments that I’ve just completed — but I do have a sizeable lab report due in a little over a week (and there’s some oxide thickness data that nobody thought to write down, which is unfortunate…).

After these things are done, I might try shutting my blinds before I go to bed and seeing when I wake up. Maybe I’ll do it for a week or two and collect some data.

我用了一些月注音符號輸入法輸入繁體字，但有一點不方便，打字很慢，昨天開始用繁體拼音。我一些月前也用繁體拼音，但覺得用注音讓我了解別的中文方法。大概是這樣，但還不方便。

我覺得要是你是中文學生，你就應該在鍵盤用拼音，在手機用注音，有的時候試一試在計算機用注音。但，在中文課別人都用簡體中文。考試的時候，問題用簡體字，我的回答用繁體，好像我當「抵制」。

在台灣，可能要讓我很高興因為環境都有繁體字，特別好看。很期待。

I can’t think of anything else to do except for finish those assignments all over my to-do list. In a week, hopefully things will be better.

Be back then! Thanks again for reading.

Nice things

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A nice clarinet with an unfortunate defect.

Everybody has a love-hate relationship with nice things. They’re nice, for sure, and they can be fun, good for learning, and nice to look at.

This week, I started with a nice thing. The thumbnail picture is of my clarinet, which I went into a practice room with on Tuesday morning. The weather that day was pretty unfortunate, it was dry and cold, so I had some lotion on my hands when I was putting it together. I gripped the upper portion a little too hard, and a nub came off the key that you can see up there. Now, it’s wobbling around.

I got sick of the wobbling around pretty fast, so I put a rubber band on it to try to keep it in place until I could get a proper repair done. Unfortunately, I neglected to realize that the chemical usually used to coat rubber bands tarnishes silver really badly after a long period of contact, so now I have a black ring where the rubber band was.

With those silver-plated keys, it seems like the nicer something is, the more likely it is to go wrong. It’s the extreme of Murphy’s Law — not only will anything that can go wrong go wrong, but if the stakes are higher, things that you didn’t know could go wrong will find a way to go wrong.

I’ve had this for about two years now, and it’s been really great. I got it brand new (which is definitely not something that I think even most Buffet R13 owners get to say about theirs…), and while I might be pulled out too far and playing on a low-pitch mouthpiece during a concert, or too picky about the quality of my reeds, or slightly out-of-time during a solo because I’m nervous or I lost count or I’ve never seen a conductor indicate two consecutive fermatas like that before — this is the thing that brings me the most joy in my life out of all the things. I’m a big fan of the wooden stick.

Sometimes, I feel a little bad about how nice it is, especially when I realize that people that are better at me than this (and who I really respect) have instruments that are not quite as top-tier. I can only try to get better so that I can support all those people with my nice thing.

As soon as I had my problem moment on Tuesday, I emailed a nearby good & reputable instrument repair shop and got a quote on a repair and a time frame (relatively cheap and short, I guess this happens all the time, but as a non-professional, I can never be too sure what I’m getting myself into).

I gave it to them yesterday, but still used it in rehearsals all week (that left-hand key is only really used for the sucky middle B fingering, which I always tried to avoid anyway because it sounds pretty bad and requires a lot of force down on that key to even get it to sound — my professor had a piece of paper under the other end of the mechanism on her clarinet to fix that, but I didn’t want to think that much about it).

It sounded great all through those rehearsals, even with the floppy key and the black mark.

With all hope, I should be able to pick it up again in about an hour or two and bring it back home in time for a concert by an acapella group that one of my friends is a member of. I’ve got to be supportive to both people who expect me to clarinet nicely around them and to friends who know I enjoy music.

Balancing it all is very fun.

So, at the end of the day (or, especially, at the end of the week), broken keys and black marks might suck to look at, but you just have to keep playing it anyway knowing that everything is still fine in the long-term.

The key that’s broken might even have you creatively inserting the good middle B fingering into passages where you would otherwise have given up and used the bad one.

…

This week, I had my last clarinet lesson for the semester, since my lessons were longer than the recommended length & I had perfect attendance all through the semester. I exhausted all my lesson time almost a whole month before I could have. It’s a little sad, since those lessons also make pretty good therapy sessions (not that I pour all the problems in my life out to the professor, but, you know, a music is worth a thousand words).

In other news, we’re a month out until I’m traveling from the Flower City, ROC, to the City of Azaleas, capital of the ROC.

Just now are me and my group partners actually starting to understand and work on the project that the class is supposed to be entirely about.

Our language lectures have already officially ended, but we’re still sort of meeting in secret with the Chinese professor for a few minutes before & after the language lecture that me and one other person had already had immediately after anyway (circumstantially also with the exact same Chinese professor).

I’m looking for travel plans outside of the things we’re planning to do as a class. One of the professors will be there guiding a lot of tour activities, but I’d really like to see something other than city (although I think we might be going to Yangmingshan, not sure, I haven’t checked the itinerary in several months…).

One member of our group here made the suggestion that we all pop on the 高鐵 and bullet over to Chiayi County to enjoy the oolong tea before climate change brings acid rain to Taiwan’s former most famous export (and, you know, nobody told me to end that sentence that way, but it’s true).

At the moment, I’m expecting to bring just a backpack, the clothes on my back, and enough money to buy a commemorative shirt at every notable landmark that I visit. Especially the venerable Drinking Water Museum, which I somehow found a scan of a parking ticket for on the Internet (kind of interesting!).

And you know that if I have the slightest second of free time to go to Computex, that might happen, especially if international cool guy Lai Ching-te shows his face there again like he did last year (I’m leaving a lot of links today).

A Taipei Water Park parking ticket

Image credit Solomon203, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Although I don’t consider myself enough of a “technology enthusiast” to really enjoy Computex, I’d like to see an event as large and as famous as this one just to say that I did.

And I should limit how much I talk about my lack of interest for consumer technology, because part of it might imply that I don’t care about today’s technology industry at all, and I need to ace this Wednesday’s coming job interview, otherwise employment for the rest of the year will become a much more difficult task to handle.

I’m sleeping less every night, and crossing my fingers so hard they’re bruised enough to look tarnished, kind of like the rubber bands on the silver-plated R13 keys.

I mean, I’m joking. I just might vomit in a minute or two. I have a presentation to practice.

I also have a lab report due tomorrow evening, so I should definitely start putting my writing skills to a more productive purpose for at least the next few dozen minutes…

…augh. With all hope, the real proverbial black tarnish should be removed from the left-hand B key of my spring semester by the end of the week. Hope to be back then!

I’ve got a week to handle and some polishing to do.

下個星期見！

Counting down

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Starting to love this place.

I couldn’t help but head back downtown for another half an hour to take a few more pictures of neat-looking spots. The weather hasn’t improved at all since last week or the week before, so this really is springtime. At least that gives all of the photos a similar feel.

I have less than a month until my final exams now, and then only a few weeks between then and the beginning of any future summer internship — with the trip to Taipei in there somewhere.

I’ve made good progress toward most of my long-term goals this week, but a lot of them came together just yesterday — it was an oddly productive Friday.

During one of my morning Chinese classes, I had a friend who’s also doing an EE-Chinese double major (although he’s in a different EE program) inform me that his advisor let him know that a study-abroad could count as an internship, too.

That seemed like a good thing to know, so at the end of our classes an hour and a half later, I ran to my advisor’s office and asked him about this too (with a preparatory email to let him know what I was getting into). The answer was that nobody had done it before (which I interpret here as a no, to be fully honest), but seeing as of my two semester internship blocks the first one is this coming fall, this had me additionally motivated to keep looking for a job opening.

An additional conversation about a job application and my resume turned into scheduling an hour meeting next Tuesday with the career services office, and only an hour later came an email bearing my first invitation to an interview at the company I was most hoping to get my first internship with!

I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to fill the hour career services meeting at first, but now I think I have plenty to discuss.

If I can get this internship, it’ll both make my resume look better for any potential future internships, give me a pathway to trying to get noticed on the job in the hopes that they renew my internship and give me next summer, too, and gets me much less stressed about having my required internship blocks done before spring of 2027, when I plan on studying abroad. Three fewer reasons not to sleep at night.

For the time being, then, my job is to project my enthusiasm, my ability to learn, and my experience. In about a week and a half, I’m going to drive a few hours/cities away in order to have an in-person interview and to give a presentation about some of my relevant projects. I’m already counting down the days.

Before then, though, I have two exams this coming week. Yesterday, I had a friend with a decently large homework assignment to do about digital logic — most of the same things covered in the digital systems class I took last year — so I told him I’d sit next to him and try to be helpful.

I usually appreciate study-grouping, as someone who now lives in an “off-campus” apartment and can’t really get any peace in my bedroom.

While he was doing that, I was trying to do some circuits homework and couldn’t figure out how to get the parameters of a bandpass filter out of the transfer function. We’re going to be tested on that in less than a week, so I have some office hours to attend — it doesn’t help that at the beginning of the unit, the professor said that “this content is the hardest to understand out of this whole class” (why do they say that? I think it’d be much more helpful if professors were there to reassure students that this isn’t too bad and that they’re here for our learning, which I understand to be the reality).

Now that the end of the semester is on its way, I put together the obligatory list of projected class grades using the data I’ve got at the moment. I currently seem to have a B in both of my engineering classes this semester — obviously the important ones — so I plan on trying to recover a little bit after getting somewhat lost in the past unit in circuits. The second exam this week, for the other engineering class, is for my IC Technology class and is about diffusion, which I think I understand a little better. I have some homeworks to reference and this professor is usually nice enough to hold review sessions one or two days before any given exam.

I’m definitely doing okay in other classes, though. Both of my Chinese classes this semester are As, even if I’m starting to hit the part of my education where I know enough to know the sheer volume of what I don’t know — and the part of the semester where thinking becomes a little more difficult. I was reviewing one of the presentations that I made with the professor yesterday, and we didn’t get past the title slide before she looked at what I had called the presentation and commented, “…that’s so English!”.

Writing is challenging, but speaking is even more difficult, too. I seem to have an easier time just listening to people who know what they’re doing. If there’s one thing that being a language learner has taught me, it’s that everything just comes out better when you think before you speak and listen a lot.

It’s that and it’s remembering not to compare yourself to other people — the eternal struggle. My long-term internship search has brought me to LinkedIn many times, and on one or another doom-scroll I’ve seen a number of people giving the advice to remember that every day, the only thing you need to do is be better than you were yesterday. Nobody’s comparing you to anyone else — self-improvement is your own process, and it can go as slowly or as quickly as you want. I’ve just been keeping that in mind lately, and it’s been making my life a little easier.

So this week, I just need to remember to think before I speak, listen a lot, go to office hours, and to have confidence. If I can keep those up for another two months, I think I’ll be okay. After that, I have no clue. Hopefully I’ll be working my dream internship.

…

Since I went back downtown, I took a few more pictures of an area — the east end — that I missed the first time. I think this is supposed to be the attractive tourist part of town, but it seems to have a reputation for a reason. It’d be nice to come back when the weather is better.

A courthouse at a neat angle.

I think a lot of these buildings are standard to major cities. I don’t know exactly where Rochester lies on the “major city” spectrum, but I’ve always lived fairly far from any urban center, so these all look pretty cool to me.

Seems like a chill street.

I noticed this street on Google Street View when trying to make a tally of the places that I missed when I visited last week, so I had to go in-person. You can see exactly which campus this is on — probably the best college in the area — and for all of the work they do here they definitely deserve the aesthetically-interesting space to do it in. I’m sure there’s more to see, and I’ll be back.

A building of questionable age.

I’m not sure if this building is objectively notable at all, but this was a neat photo with the street signs and the tree overhead. For a building that’s got an engraving of that kind of company name on the front, it still looks very clean and well-cared for. I don’t think this company is still in the building (and I’m not sure they even still exist), but this is some key urban mood-setting.

I’ll be back with two fewer exams to do and less than a week until career judgment day. Waiting will be hard.

Thanks again!

Corrections

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A street corner.

I was reading yesterday’s post and I just couldn’t help but make a few corrections and additions.

I’ll be concise, but I said a few things that were clearly wrong:

Rochester isn’t “like Toronto, but worse”, it’s “like Toronto, but better”.
My Bb clarinet can play most of these runs just fine, just not one of the trills.
I’m not terrible at Mandarin, I’m passable. I think.

This post is definitely sleep-deprivation induced, but I haven’t had a good night of rest in quite a while because I’ve just been moving a little fast.

I’ve been organizing a little, then organizing a lot, I’ve been trying to grow my confidence and get a little more in order than it’s been in the past. I’ve been mostly successful, but I think the most important thing for me to know is that if I move too quickly, I tire myself out.

My resolution for the month of April is to feel better, move slower, get better sleep, and to stop trying to track my progress so hard that it gets in the way of my learning.

No matter what context you’re in, I feel like that’s a good thing to remember. At least, it is for me.

再見！

Touching concrete

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The city at work.

I’m back at Starbucks, which is where I do all my blogging now. I’m like a diplomat, but instead of being surrounded by the law of my home country, I’m surrounded by 2012.

Although, I didn’t want to just take a picture out the Starbucks window again like I did last week — it looks the same now as it did then. It’s been springtime lately, for sure — raining and everything — but not too bad, just enough to make you grateful it isn’t snowing (which it did this past Wednesday out of spite).

I always like to remind myself not to complain too much, because I feel like I’ve got it pretty well — I have fun in school, learning things I enjoy, I know neat people, I have hobbies, you know. But, lately, I’ve just felt the need to express that it’s nearing the end of the semester and keeping up with the coursework is getting a little difficult (the thing that electrical engineering students the world over will tirelessly remind you of).

Now, a lot of this classwork is in courses that I took voluntarily — absolutely didn’t have to — because I thought the idea was cool, chief among these being the language special-topic business class I’ve been taking where we communicate with some Taiwanese classmates to present business suggestions and give presentations in Mandarin (they do it in English). I’m terrible at Mandarin, they’re great at English, we’re all learning together. I love it.

Every two or so weeks, though, we’ve got reports to write, and I do enjoy writing, but I didn’t realize that sometimes even coursework I enjoy can be stressful — this seems to just be the nature of the human mind (“oh, no! I’ve given up a minute amount of control, the world is ending!”).

That and a couple of very nice, appealing-looking job openings were made known to me over the course of the past week and I’m more than looking forward to hearing back as to how my applications are going in those — one of them was my first successful connection with someone on LinkedIn for a real purpose — I got someone to verbally confirm to me that a job opening was real and send my resume manually to the hiring manager! That made me feel somewhat more productive than I have in the past.

You know, if you haven’t connected with me on LinkedIn and you know who I am and what my face looks like, feel free to plug in — I need a network, for sure, because I need employers to know I’m legit (or something along those lines). I had a friend tell me in my 4-connections-on-LinkedIn days that I wasn’t distinguishable from a bot, which is something I’ve heard more times than is optimal…

So, if all goes well, I’ll have a career at some point. Seems like a necessary development to be putting so much time and effort into — I just thought there were more jobs out there. The world is hard.

Career aside, hobbies are also going well. I got a few fun & interesting parts on pieces in orchestra this concert cycle, so I’ll get to have my short sound-effect solo-length-of-time of fame the day after my birthday when the next concert is this coming April. I was listening back to our recordings from the last concert, too, and one of them sounded real good — the one with my other co-clarinetist making the whole of our venerable two-man operation. While we’re as quiet as you’d expect two people with tiny sound sticks to be in front of a full-sized orchestra, his solo was sounding real good & the post-performance fist-bump got caught clearly on camera. We’re going places.

Although, I’m running into some music now with A clarinet parts (the bane of the existence of anybody who likes nice things) — transposing is hard & sounds pretty bad because my poor Bb clarinet was just not built to play these scales, so I went scavenging on eBay for the potentially-usable remains of whatever 90-year-old instrument I could find, and I was somewhat successful — I didn’t get the listing, but I had found a good one at one point (it was a little expensive and didn’t have much time left on it, but it proves that I guess I might be able to get one for a decent price in the future if I’m diligent enough). Maybe I’ll just rent one, although it’s unclear whether even that’s possible, since most people don’t seem to care about the half-step disparity between “clarinet” and “slightly larger clarinet”. The single model they stocked at the Music & Arts near where I live was out of inventory (A Buffet E11, so pretty nice, but expensive & they didn’t have it in there anyway).

I might have to run to the Music & Arts near here where I go to school & see what they’ve got — I certainly can’t afford to buy a brand-new Buffet E11, but I could try to rent one for the month, which might be the way to go. I just got my tax refund, so if that’s enough to cover it, maybe I’ll be set.

Meanwhile, my attempts at artistic expression are extending a little further outward, because I’ve been traveling a little more lately being that the weather is venturing above the freezing point — the thumbnail photo is one that I hope to shoot after I’m done writing this and doing some more of my assignments due tomorrow. I accidentally stumbled upon a nice-looking part of town the other day when I took a wrong turn coming home from Target. Maybe I could plug in a few spots near there into Apple Maps and see if I can’t get a nice view to capture on my phone camera — it was foggy yesterday, which made the city look a little bit more epic, but springtime rainy-city photos are neat, too.

It’s 35 degrees, raining, and I’m in a city that I’ve lived in for a year and a half but never really seen. What a time to be alive!

I’ve got one more month to bear before I get to do a little bit of traveling to an even more epic city, of which you’ll definitely see some (probably even more rainy) photos.

Thanks to all those cool people who’ve followed me on Neocities and/or left a comment in the guestbook. 我聽說有的人喜歡我用中文的句子。我剛剛開始用「ㄅㄆㄇㄈ」鍵盤打字，所以正好需要練習。我一定應該繼續。謝謝評論！

Hope to be back with more neat photos, a neater duality of clarinets, and well-written 中文句子。

下個星期回來！

Thanks again.

…

After writing the post, I decided I was serious about trying to find photogenic spots downtown. The particular downtown is Rochester, NY, where I’ve lived for a little while and never really seen, so hopefully you’ll appreciate this little downtown walking-tour summary of what I saw after I was done at Starbucks.

A row of scooters — truly the future of mobility.

I had to walk to my car on the way out of Starbucks, and couldn’t help but notice the public scooters. I was making a presentation for that business class lately about scooters being introduced to American cities, so that we have something to use on the streets that’s a little more environmentally-conscious than a car. I know scooters — and increasingly electric scooters — have already taken over Taiwanese streets, so for an assignment where we had to pitch an expansion plan for a Taiwanese startup into the US, I suggested Gogoro and said that they should start by introducing their battery-share plan and a special store in New York City. I hadn’t even realized then that the city where I already live was already sprouting a public scooter-share system of its own. Congratulations to the Rochester city government for being a few steps ahead of an optimistic youth and most other American cities!

A big clock, in case you lose track of time on the job.

I had to drive to a parking garage downtown, since the part of the city I was in before was a little detached from the rest. Rochester has a big urban highway system called the “Inner Loop” which seems to be in the progress of being dismantled, although I still had to get on it to get into the actual city (although I think I now know a route I could take without doing that, since I left using normal roads). I’m not sure what it is being built around this clock, but this was the first thing I saw after leaving the parking garage. This is a very nice-looking clock, and I’m sure the area around it will be even nicer some time in the future!

Downtown proper.

After a little bit more walking, I found a nice area in the center of town with this big light net and some open space. There were maybe too many cars, but there was still some neat scenery to be enjoyed. There were some restaurants and an art gallery here. Pretty upscale, seems nice.

Some open space with a big

This sign in the middle of town is pretty neat, especially since they show off the city logo in the middle of the big “O” — far better than the grainy image & some words that my original hometown calls its seal. This kind of reminds me of the big “TORONTO” sign in downtown Toronto, which doesn’t help Rochester’s somewhat strong “like Toronto, but worse” atmosphere — I mean, “worse” is in the eye of the beholder, and this is where I live now, so I choose to enjoy.

Old buildings, a fire staircase, and an old church.

This church was a pretty neat sight, but I couldn’t get a good view. It’s behind a few older apartment buildings, but that green oxidized-copper accent style looks pretty good. I can imagine people who live in these apartments get a nice view.

A Starbucks,

It seems like they’re building a downtown Starbucks for me to do more blogging at soon. You’ll know when this is done.

"...until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream", dr. martin luther king, jr.".

For a place covered in concrete and fencing, this little park has some nice graffiti and demonstrates a clear attempt at making the downtown area more lively, although the city was pretty empty when I was walking around because it was gray and drizzling.

Another row of scooters.

I can’t get over all these scooters. Some time soon, I’ll have to come back and figure out how to rent one of these out. They all have a QR code posted on them, so I think there may be an app or website that I’d have to use to pay. I’m not sure how charging is managed — they might just have city staff running around to docking stations and replacing batteries whenever it’s necessary. Not sure if each scooter has a reporting system for battery charge. If it is this way, they’re already winning against Gogoro — this is the future I’m rooting for.

A grass square in the middle of downtown.

Cities need greenspace, but I’m always appreciative of designers riding the lines between an urban environment and something natural. I love big, built-up urban regions covered in vines and plants, and this little patch of incredibly well-cared-for, bright-green lawn inside of the part of town called “Innovation Square” seemed like a neat shot.

A curvy walkway into a big college building.

Another thing that adds interest to cities in my eyes are walkways connecting buildings, which seem to be pretty common in cities where the weather’s never great. Rochester still gets pretty consistent, pretty rough snow and ice storms for a long chunk of the year, so there were plenty of these for me to spot across town. This one had a little curve to it — very retro-modern?

A stray scooter in an outdoor seating area.

This was another upscale part of town with some restaurants and outdoor seating. It was a nice place to be, for sure, and somebody left their loaner scooter just sitting here — I’d say that the number of stray scooters I was spotting while just passively walking around added a whole lot of character. More cities need city-wide scooter-share. During the summer, maybe I’ll end up at one of these restaurants at some point — today was mostly a sightseeing day, the city overall never got busy.

A Hilton Garden Inn and an empty alley road.

I’m not sure why this little alley stood out to me. It was surprisingly empty, but there was a pretty large operation going on at this Hilton Garden Inn — it had two of its own parking garages, although one was hotel guest-exclusive and the other was a public one intended for overflow customers, which was the one where I was parked. I spotted this on my way back to the car. I think the little bend at the end of the road is what gives this boring alley a little bit of personality.

A circular shape on top of a building, which is clearly a UFO.

In case you hadn’t figured it out already, Rochester was built using SimCity 2000 (and without “disasters” disabled) — we’re late-game enough for the UFO invasions to start. A good enough reason for me to leave while there’s still time — this picture was only about a two-minute walk from the car, anyway, pretty convenient. I was narrowly able to avoid abduction.

I’ll definitely be back here when the weather is a little nicer, although rainy cities are sometimes neat for exploration when it’s not too bad. The rain picked up once I started driving home, so I really did happen to leave just in time — I’ll have to track the progress of that Starbucks online if I can find any info, since that seems like a prime spot for relocation of my blogging activities.

I hope you appreciated my photographic tour, I’d never been here until today. This is a neat place, for sure.

More words will come your way next week!

Today, tomorrow

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The end of a world

I finally figured out Creative Commons attribution — Wikimedia Commons puts the proper attribution in HTML form for you to copy-and-paste when you download an image. This one’s the “end of a world” — feels epic. Somehow, I’m in the mood for that kind of thing at the moment.

Courtesy of Wardiverde, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s already been a week since I came back from home for spring break, so it’s true what they say about time flying — it happens all the time, and you can’t do anything about it.

I’m not complaining, being that I have some exciting things coming up in the next few months (I hope) — I’m pretty certain that that research role I may have mentioned before (and which I’ve been after for about a month now) is just about mine, but you know, I still think an internship in industry is probably better and worth keeping on trying to find. Oh, well — it’s not like this is really a compromise for me, I really want to do research while I’m still an undergraduate — I want to have a hand in this kind of thing but can’t really see myself staying for grad school — so I’m still looking forward to it.

About a week before then, I’ll have that trip I’m so excited about. Last week I discovered the drinking water museum and I’m certain that this is the first plan on the docket for day 1, before the actual program begins and I’m actually busy. This is history, and it’s water, and that’s cool.

We’re about ten weeks in, but I think that it’s really now that my semester is settling down and getting steadily better — at least, as of right now — and what I mostly mean is that, yesterday, I discovered that one of the practice rooms below the student union has a mic & speakers in the wall. I can now duet with myself as freely as I please.

That, and I recently started using Yellowbridge flash cards & I realize that this (flash cards in general, I know someone else who uses Anki but I couldn’t find any decks that I liked) is probably most people’s default learning resource for getting far — while I’ve always felt like the Chinese classes I take at school move slowly, I think you’re meant to find external resources for self-learning like this. I like Yellowbridge because the site is very nice-looking, there aren’t any ads if you pay (there are if you don’t, but it’s still worth using) and most of the HSK flashcard sets are free (not the 6 and 7-9 ones, but if you’re that good already, you might as well just become a paid subscriber because this is clearly part of your lifestyle).

Sold by the fact that Yellowbridge has an option to study HSK flashcards in traditional characters and that you can use the arrow keys to move through the flashcard viewer, I became a paid subscriber after using the decks for only a few days. It’s $25 for six months. I’d rather have flashcards than groceries, anyway. Besides, this is part of my lifestyle.

With all of these recent discoveries on my side, I’ve been having a good week.

So far, this morning, I’ve managed to wake up cold again, realize that the thermostat’s been off since we had nice weather that one time on Wednesday and that the inside temperature has dropped to ten degrees below what that thermostat is set to (so I turned it back on), do some of those easy-points reading assignments for my circuits class, and this morning, I drove to Starbucks because I still have several dozen dollars in Starbucks credit given to me across Christmases and birthdays of past years & now that I have a car, I can explore around town going to different Starbucks and getting coffee and food for free.

My view from today's Starbucks

That store on the right side of the picture in my view out the window — Joy Mart — is excellent. My favorite store. They sell four or five different flavors of 大白兔. I might drop by on my way out the Starbucks to get some more of that. That’s also where I got the cheese latte of thumbnail-image quality those few weeks ago, too.

It’s probably going to rain later today, but at least it’s not snow and it’s about fifty degrees (F) outside — this is my personal preferred kind of weather, although that’s definitely because I’ve just resigned to nostalgia over practicality as far as what I consider to be a “nice day” — this is what a springtime birthday in the northeastern US does to your soul.

Speaking of views of streets, one of my hobbies as of late’s been going on to Google Street View and examining the area around the hotel we’ll be staying at for the one-week program — and beyond (because I need to do more on my two days off than just go to a water museum).

Definitely out-of-the way, but an excuse for a first 高鐵 ride — it’s a wonder how some places even manage to make street corners look cute.

Mopeds be zoomin'.

That’s in the “Like Taipei, but more humid” … “Like Taipei, but with Cs instead of Qs” … land of fable. Regardless, visiting a place like Kaohsiung would be cool, despite people’s reports of “It was nice, but there was nothing to do there so I just got back on the train and went back to Taipei”.

The world is small, and distances are short, but time is shorter. Hopefully, I’ll be able to put these plans into action soon.

I should probably get out of the Starbucks before the rain starts.

I’ll be back here (on the site and probably at the Starbucks, too) next week.

Thanks!

Halfway there

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The essence of modern life.

As in, halfway through the semester. Feels like progress.

I didn’t have any good pictures to put as the thumbnail here, but this train photo spoke to me when I was browsing the pictures of the day of this month on Wikimedia Commons. Plus, it’s from the homeland to which I’m so patriotic.

I feel like I did my job resting properly over break, because I’ve had a good morning so far. I’m writing this post now waiting for access to the practice room that I booked, which will be highly necessary considering that in orchestra we’ve got a concert on Wednesday and the last impression of a progress report that we got from the professor was “we’re still very far from ready”.

I did practice plenty over break, so I feel like I also did my job in that regard. I’m having a lot more fun with music programs now than I ever have before, but I feel like this’ll be my last semester doing too much of this before I decide I make a better audience member.

Elsewhere on the to-do list are an exam that I’ve got on Wednesday morning — for which I feel surprisingly okay on the content right now, and feel like it was definitely a good call on that professor’s part to put it right after break — and waiting two more months before the one-week trip to Taipei that I’m so excited for. Yesterday, I was browsing around Zhongzheng district on Google Street View trying to find neat landmarks to visit to fill the two days off that I’ll have during that week, and I discovered the Museum of Drinking Water. I think this and a trip to 228 Peace Memorial Park would make for a good few hours that I can handle on foot alone.

Besides that, I underwent a little bit of a caffeine detox over the past few days & then, this morning, I bought a latte, so I’m feeling a little bit jittery. I should definitely invest in becoming a tea person.

But otherwise, I’m still rolling forward. Like the train. So things are good.

(^O^)／

The thumbnail image came from Wikimedia Commons and can be found at this link.

What to do today?

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My green iPod.

I like organizing and cleaning, and my mom seems to be on board with me doing that here now that I’m home. So, maybe, that’s what I’ll do.

About the photo — when I came home, I had a package waiting for me — last December, I bought an iPod Shuffle 2 on eBay and I left for school the day before it arrived. Now I have it in my hands! I did have one of these when they were new, but I was in preschool and my parents bought it for me because I was the annoying kid who wouldn’t sleep during nap time. They bought me a cheap iPod so that the music would keep me quiet. That one was blue, but I think the green one looks nicer now.

Aside from that, it’s always hard to get used to the distinctly different places to be that are school and home — I mean, for one, I can’t get around here at all without a car. There are roads everywhere. I can’t take a walk to the store because that would take several hours.

I could drive downtown, though, and take a walk around. The weather’s nice today — it’s going to get to a high temperature of something well above freezing, which means that spring is truly springing now. For the first meeting with my study-abroad group partners, I gave a little presentation on myself, the city where I go to school and the city where I’m from. As part of showing these places off, I had to remember the cool things to do that actually do exist around town.

Downtown, once I got there and parked my car, would have a cool little coffee shop, a nice square, a candy store, multiple places to get lunch, some places that are probably photogenic (although I stole one of my mom’s old cameras a while ago & loaded it with an SD card intending to make it my primary limited photo-taking device for the forseeable future. I forgot it at my apartment at school).

Whatever I do, I’d like to be really relaxing. I’ve been a little tired lately, but I haven’t necessarily realized it with all the momentum of the mid-semester. I can’t stop rambling about nonsense in most of my sentences, though, which in the past would’ve been a dead giveaway that I need sleep. The placebo from the daylight-savings clock shift was a good head start — I should try to continue the cycle of 睡得香 as long as I’m here at home for the week. The bed at home is infinitely more comfortable than the larger one at my apartment.

I could get my bicycle out and try to ride it around — although the only real destinations that I’d have would be downtown/near where the people are and, seeing as it’s a Monday and there’s traffic around, I don’t think my mom would approve of it while I’m around her.

I recently got myself a Legere european-cut synthetic reed for the clarinet & it’s pretty fantastic. No preparation, no soaking, no adjusting (I don’t even have an adjustment tool, I had to borrow one from a friend the last time I used one). I started practicing with it a few times yesterday and the dog doesn’t enjoy my noises (or, he really enjoys them and he’s trying to sing along).

I could bike to the middle of the woods and practice out there…

…but then I’d just annoy the bears.

哎呀。

Maybe I’ll just clean the kitchen.

And keep writing blog posts.

And then I’ll be back next week!

See you then.

The rest of my week

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I saw this a while ago. Mr. Potato Head says hi.

I went searching the Internet for Mandopop out of interest & now I can’t get the cheesy KTV songs out of my head…

Otherwise, though, it’s been a great week so far. I’ve definitely been tired, and the weather’s been so nice that my seasonal allergies are back (disappointing) and I’m back to taking allergy medication (usually, this climaxes in a bout of migraines every few days for a number of weeks during the summer, my least favorite seasonal pattern).

This is my schedule for the rest of the week —

Clarinet lesson (fun)
Gen-ed music class (also pretty fun, basically like high school. I was supposed to take this my first semester…)
IC Tech lab (fun, but I’m always exhausted & it’s three hours long. Maybe today I’ll have some caffeine beforehand.)
Concert band rehearsal (very fun. You know, maybe Thursday’s just a good day of the week).

Then, on Friday, I have

IC Tech lecture (probably will be interesting, I don’t know, it’s at 9 AM so it’s after my morning energy burst but before I have my daily momentum going.)
That class where we do study abroad things (it’s getting pretty good right now because we have the contact info of our study abroad partners & I’m going to get to meet them for the first time soon.)
Mandarin class (except it’s going to be online & the second half of our lesson 3 test is asynchronous. 不行……)
Chinese Conversation Table (the favorite student organization of me & everyone I know. Never a single asynchronous assignment!)

Then I can drive home.

And meet this cool new puppy my parents got. He’s pretty cute —

可愛的小狗

I don’t have much else to say, honestly, but I’m surprised with how well I’m holding it all together this week so far considering that it’s a week before break (usually, those are pretty bad & everyone’s exhausted). Career fair was yesterday, and I handed out five physical resumes. A few of them even got marked up a little bit. Hopefully one of them goes somewhere — I won’t keep my hopes up, though.

This week, every day, for breakfast, I’ve been making drip coffee into instant oatmeal. Just mentioning it because it’s pretty good & I’ve never heard of anyone else doing it. You should try it. It’s sugar, caffeine, and carbs all in one mug.

下個星期我回來。

那時候見！

Adorable.

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Starting the day 得对

这是真的中国菜。

I thought the explanation for lack of cheese in Chinese food was that most Chinese were genetically lactose intolerant. Then the power of this creation is unleashed on humanity and spits in the face of all my preconceived notions.

I haven’t tried it yet, but I will. I found a store earlier this evening that stocks a lot of imported goods (mostly from China & Japan) and it was a gold mine of quality content like this. There was also a good-looking “chicken meat floss seaweed toast bread” that I might have to come back to buy soon.

There’s nothing more to what I have to say today — just, a PSA: you never know what you might find when you look for random things. I was with some friends who were trying to find Pokemon cards.

You might strike gold. Cheese gold. Powdered cheese gold in an imported bottled latte.

A new morning ritual for you, right there.

拜拜大家。

Speed writing

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

An underrated wallpaper

This is what I’m doing today — I’ve got 20 minutes until my first class starts…

…but the blogging impulse came on & I think the thumbnail image from my post this past weekend isn’t super aesthetically-pleasing to have on the front page of my website. I want to make this page nice-looking and nice to read!

As far as plans from the recent past goes, I’ve made progress

Beginning the discussion about a summer research internship
Two emails further into the double major application process
I’ve got my housing decided & it’s with people that I know (with one spot free to be filled by a stranger — we still have yet to find out who)

I also did some theming on my laptop & I have it looking pretty nice — nice enough to be worth sharing. If you have a Mac and you’ve never enabled the “Silver Aerogel” theme, it looks pretty cool.

Frosted glass terminal window. If this were a real terminal, it'd have cataracts.

I steel feel a little bit of a strange combination of on top of my assignments & a behind, because of the number of liberal arts classes I’m taking this semester while simultaneously being an engineering major — I’m just trying to get caught up and finish my gen-eds, but it’s made for a strange schedule for the time being. Not to say I don’t enjoy it — I have a rehearsal, sectionals, and a concert all back-to-back this afternoon. That’ll be cool!

I still have an engineering-related class to go to in ten minutes, though — all my morning classes are the STEM ones, so in effect, I start every day with some electrical math things & then it turns itself around pretty quickly. Next semester will either hit like a truck or be the most refreshing thing I’ve ever felt — I can’t wait to find out which.

Spring break is half a week closer, and with the weather still so nice I’m really hoping to bring my bicycle back to campus from home (maybe even ride it around while I’m at home). Spring is springing — usually it needs a little bit of help around this time of year and/or acts like my electric kettle has been as of late & heating the water up a little, then letting it cool back down and then actually bringing it up to temperature (maybe I should buy a new kettle, each heating cycle is progressively longer than the last).

So, at the end of the day, things are going. The university career fair is exactly a week from today, which is exciting and stressful (as all exciting things are) — I’d love to have an internship lined up for the fall right now (especially before I go home for a week to regenerate brain cells — I want to have one less thing keeping me up at night).

At the beginning of the day, though (now), I need to get to class, so I’m going to end this here for now.

Hopefully you appreciate the better thumbnail photo.

I’ll be back!

A week is gone already

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How the words come out.

One week’s passed already since my last post.

I didn’t feel like just finding another nice landscape that someone else took and making it the thumbnail image — I do that pretty frequently. I didn’t have any good pictures lying around in my phone’s photo library, so I thought I should just find something around me to take a picture of. Without getting out of my seat, I decided to share the view on my end. It’s pretty simple.

First of all, this week was very, very dry and cold & some of the heaters in the classrooms were broken — it was still better than outside — but if anyone knows anything about meteorology, it’s probably that cold fronts get followed by warm fronts. I forgot about that, and so at least my conversation about the weather can turn positive — it’s really beautiful today. I don’t think it’s above freezing, but it basically feels like springtime compared to Monday and Tuesday. 挺好！

Second, the things that were going to happen this week all went pretty well — housing selection is this coming week, I managed to (at least, so far) get my way into a 中文 double major (但是我還要等一個學期當“真的”中文專業） and, amid my excitement, am getting a little more rigorous about my class planning for future semesters. I think I have it all worked out, but you don’t know for sure until course selection time comes.

I still don’t have an internship, which I’ll need to graduate, especially if I want to use one of my free semesters to study abroad (which, right now, is the plan). I’m revisiting my plan to potentially try to become a lab assistant for one of my professors, which I really think would be the best possible outcome. I think most of his research is in thin films, and I haven’t taken the mandatory “thin films” class yet, but I think he knows I can learn and that I try.

The last thing I’ve been doing for the past few days is attempting to cut out caffeine, which (my old hot brown of choice was coffee, but that’s pretty highly concentrated) has now resulted in my compromising with myself by way of discovering that tea is pretty good, too. I mean, whatever works — I think tea is cheaper anyway, so it’s at least better for my wallet.

So, all in all, pretty excellent week. I thought I had a fever yesterday because I was cold everywhere I went, but I think I just needed sleep (was lacking energy & didn’t bring my winter coat to campus). It was also pretty windy yesterday. I got some sleep & I feel pretty great now. Again, it always works and never ceases to amaze me. It’s almost like humans were built to survive on a regular sleep schedule — I wonder if anyone else has ever figured this out before?

Looking ahead to the future — I can’t stop thinking about my plans for studying abroad now. I mean, I think there are clearly smart and clearly dumb ways to go about this, so with my years of opportunity to plan (two, since I told the head of the Chinese major program that I planned to study abroad spring 2027), I should really focus on doing a good job. I have to go through the college application process again, more-or-less, but under a slightly different context. Things to not mess up include:

Getting proper scholarship funding
Finding a program that’s priced reasonably to begin with
Finding a good program with a good course selection
Finding a program in a place that I really want to be (probably Taipei)
Having the proper courses done already before I go (this is one of the reasons why I need to wait — two classes I should’ve taken this year weren’t offered)
Getting a program that occurs during the time frame I want to go (optimally spring of two years from now)
Talking to people who’ve already done a program of this type so that I can stay informed

The last one should actually be achievable, since I was — in my first email CC’ed to me as a prospective Chinese major — told about a session that might be held sometime in the coming month which is for this exact purpose — getting study-abroad students to talk about their experiences. I really need this, so that’s pretty exciting too.

This is all very exciting, overall. My mom always told me, when I was first looking for and entering college, that as the course material gets harder, it’ll get more fun at the same time if I choose something that I’m really interested in and really want to learn. I wasn’t exactly seeing that and, in my attempts to find a good compromise between a useful degree in a growing industry and a fun one where I get to learn about history and culture and be a liberal arts student, I set the end-goal in my head as double-majoring in Mandarin, thinking that it’d be pretty unachievable.

The fact that I’m working through this now makes me sleep way easier at night. First world problems, I know — still, it’s really cool. Hopefully my dreams don’t come crashing down with course conflicts — I talked to the Chinese major program head about this, too, and it seems like we’ve constructed a pretty resilient roadmap for me. If I can get my internship blocks filled and I have the opportunity to study abroad spring 2027, I can take the required “Professional/Business Chinese” class for getting the major while I’m doing that, instead of having to take it here. That’ll make my life a little easier. That, and since I’m completing the final prerequisite for the rest of the Chinese classes in the program right now — Intermediate II — I’ll be able to take whatever classes I want in the future. If one of the lower-level classes doesn’t align with my schedule, I can just skip ahead & take the science and technology Chinese course or something like that. I have some flexibility. Let’s hope it stays that way.

So, hopefully my prospects stay good & the weather stays equally nice.

Spring break is in a few weeks — once that comes, it’ll probably feel great to go back home, as long as the way that I have to do that — the car — stays in good shape with the battery & everything (I mean, I haven’t touched it in several weeks and it was complaining about a low charge back then. I should probably start it up & fill it with gas & drive it somewhere to make sure it’s still okay).

Spring! 春天！ A good season.

We could probably all use it right now.

謝謝光臨。

下個星期見！

My publishing streak

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Solid precipitation.

Now that I’ve done my writing practice — both of yesterday’s posts — I can write the rest of my thoughts out for the weekend.

I’m attracted back to my blog a lot now that I’ve updated the layout & theme a little bit. I keep coming back here and it occurred to me that, not only am I a little bit bored in between studying for an exam that I have tomorrow, but that I also have a little bit more to add before I can feel like I’ve really extracted all that I can from this place for the time being.

This week, I have a few things to look forward to:

An exam tomorrow morning (at least it’s in the morning, so I’ll have the rest of my day to try and forget about it). It’s in IC Technology, so an important class, which means I can’t make any stupid errors. We’re allowed to bring a notes sheet, so that’s nice.
A meeting to discuss adding an Applied Chinese double major (this is on Tuesday, so still fairly early in the week). I’m not sure what exactly there will be to discuss in the meeting, but I’ve already laid out my potential roadmap several times & I think I have one that’ll work. I just need to get the relevant people with authority on board to let me in to the program.
Housing selection times, which get emailed out on Thursday — I’m trying to room with people I know already, unlike in my first year, but also somewhere on campus, unlike this past year. We just get to know our selection times this week, but I get to at least hope that our group’s is acceptable.

One thing I don’t have to look forward to this week is the weather — the picture above is from today. It’s been a little warm lately and been snowing a lot. Since it’s warm, the ground is warmer than the air and the snow’s been melting on the walkways and turning to slush. The temperature drops by about 20 degrees tonight, so it’s all going to turn to ice, and it seems like it’s going to stay that way all week. I had better get in my penguin-walking practice to avoid severe spinal damage (or I’ll just minimize the amount of outdoor walking that I have to do, which I usually go for during the winter anyway).

All of these things aside, I feel like the semester is heating up a little bit in a good way. I feel a lot more in control than I have in the past, although this is definitely because the classes I’m taking now are relatively easy compared to prior semesters. I’m just catching my schedule up, so hopefully, I can get into a reasonable balance of academics & confidence again sometime soon. I’m looking for a summer-fall internship, so this should be next spring — the semester that I’ve been preparing my schedule for all these past two years (at least, that’s what it seems like now — this is my last semester with required gen-eds).

The other thing that’s going to have to heat up soon is, again, the weather. I thought Lunar New Year was supposed to be the beginning of spring, but I haven’t seen any meaningful difference since the wood snake rolled onto the calendar. Last winter was really mild — maybe the dragon breathes fire. I never hear the groundhog day news anymore, either, so the future remains unclear.

You know, people talk about the weather everywhere & all the time. I think it gets old for some people. I only look forward to spring because it comes with the end of the semester (and I guess my birthday too). Just, a good season overall. Once it’s over and the weather gets too hot, I’ll start looking forward to next year’s.

Regardless of how stale the things that I care about are or how good my writing is when I’m talking about them, I appreciate the read — maybe I should just start traveling. I don’t get on enough trains. I don’t have any spring break plans yet, so anything is possible.

I think I’m empty for now. My writing queue is cleared.

I’ll be back next week.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟

I didn’t realize there was a fish emoticon, that’s cool — just found out about this today and see no problem signing off with it.

拜拜🙏 ！

The blogging track

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Another nice landscape.

I might be off of it a little bit.

Lately, I know I’ve been dumping a lot of my weekend and nighttime thought processes into my keyboard and publishing it here. I think that that doesn’t generate work of the highest quality — if I wouldn’t do my homework at a particular time, maybe I shouldn’t be writing either. Or, at least, I should do more than ramble (although controlled rambling is a proven-effective form of therapy, right?).

The picture up above is another really nice Wikimedia Commons photo of Mount Petros in Ukraine (eastern Europe is pretty beautiful on the whole, I think). The author is Михайло Пецкович, Львів — I don’t know how to read Cyrillic, but it’s good work, right? I’m sure if you copy & paste and look up that name, you’ll find more work and the person behind it.

I need to come across a little more level-headed.

So, I’ve found another Hugo theme that I think is a little cleaner than the old one, I’ve updated my profile picture and I’ve removed my resume from the site here (the one on this page was a little out-of-date anyway).

At the time of writing right now, I’m sitting in my bed on a Saturday morning waiting for my clothes to finish drying. The weather is supposed to be horrible today, but I’m meeting with some people on-campus later. All I can hope is that the busses are running — I don’t think I want to walk in any of those several inches of snow we’re supposed to get across today and tomorrow. I’m here cleaning up my blog and trying to project a more level-headed Internet being now that I have sleep (I think this is the inflection point where my semester starts to get better again after the bottoming-out of flu season and weeks three and four).

I’ve got another exam this coming Monday, so I should probably be prepared for that, and then I’ve got a little presentation project for a small gen-ed that I had to take — I was supposed to take it my first semester, but I missed out on that — at least there’s a new professor teaching it now, and he’s pretty cool. The old one was good — this is a music gen-ed and I’d already had him for concert band — but I think the old one had a very low opinion of me (as anyone who met me as a freshman probably would have) and I’m trying to project myself a little better with the new one. So far, I’m doing about fifty percent okay.

All this is to say that I have some work to do this weekend, but I think I can take it at a reasonable pace, and only recently have I really discovered the wonders of getting rest on the weekend — it’s actually more helpful than you’d think.

I’m currently in the midst of a several days-long process of bugging some representatives of a hiring team for a potential internship employer that I’m trying to corner before the career fair comes at the beginning of next month. So far, they came to my IC Technology lab, where they saw and — hopefully — appreciated my nice and efficiently-implemented XOR gate, good-looking resistor where I shaped the doped region to look like a resistance circuit symbol, and a transistor (somebody can find a use for all these three things on one chip, I’m sure), then they held an info session that I sat at for 90 or so minutes.

My really wonderful IC layout.

The day after, they came to my IC Technology lecture in the morning, where I made sure to sit close, make plenty of eye contact, and ask good questions, and then they showed up on the first floor of the engineering building, so I made sure to get in line and make sure they left with a copy of my resume and transcript. I sincerely hope they’re sensing my enthusiasm.

I need to get myself an internship — I’m also currently trying to 得到我已经很想做的中文专业 get myself a double major in “applied Mandarin” and find myself a study abroad time & location — but other than that, I’m trying to get rest and eat food that makes me feel like a living organism instead of a malnourished lump.

可能我应该在这个网站写更多中文句子。我一定需要练习，再说我刚才发现我有的时候会说中文的比以前好。好像我真学到很多！我以为了这不会发生。

谢谢你们看！

Thank you for putting up with my acceptable writing, “controlled rambling”, and questionable Mandarin.

I’ll be back soon!

Real contributions

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I'm basically a software developer now.

I finally contributed to an open-source project! I’m almost a real programmer now.

I fixed the spelling of a word.

One word.

Here.

It was so worth it.

You can thank me later.

I corrected it

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Mds 2.

If you read yesterday’s post, looked at the screenshot of that room layout I posted and thought that you could make some improvements, you were right.

Maybe it was only bothering me, but I put this room together pretty quickly and I wasn’t paying that much attention. I looked back at the picture a few times and wanted to make the room look like it should.

So there we go. This is nicer.

If you want to try your hand at this, too, you can do that here.

☜(⌒▽⌒)☞

A new snapshot

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Dog.

I was late to the 21st century to begin with, then for the past 20 years I’ve managed to do nothing but “grow up”…

…at least the dog is there for me.

In the spirit of the new year, I have to at least begin by acknowledging that this is the first time I’ve retained a blog’s content from a December to a January.

Although I couldn’t help but move to a different content manager and a new domain before January, since I was bored with all that spare holiday time. I resolve, this year, to be happy with what I have and to stop messing with things. I’ve said this before, but this time I’ll have to prove myself. Building trust is a skill.

Regardless of my indecisive experimentation with things that shouldn’t require any maintenance, I’d like to resolve some of my other bad habits now that we’re halfway through the decade already. I’ll say this: this year, I resolve to make my words more valuable.

I think that, as a whole, I need to think more about what I say, but still be more outgoing, I need to keep my word a little better, and I need to be more confident in myself when I’m speaking in general. To be perfectly honest, the greatest thing I’ve learned since coming to college was how to interact with people. Whether you say you’re an introvert or not, humans are social creatures and fighting biology is futile. I think it’d be nice if I gave myself the gift of being a regular, personable human.

If you don’t know this about me, too, I tend to incessantly reorganize more than just my blog. I’ve changed emails ~4 times in the past year, and graphic design might not be my passion, but interior design certainly is!

Here’s what my room in my current apartment looks like now (it actually hasn’t changed too much since when I first moved in in August, which is unusual for me. On the contrary, I just finished repainting my bedroom at home earlier this week).

My real bedroom in my apartment.

I’m a little limited by my lease agreement — I need to keep the yellow walls, I can’t sell all the furniture, you know, I don’t own this place…

…but I did find this neat little game a while ago, called “My Dream Setup”. It’s on Steam, and gives you free reign to fulfill your greatest interior design dreams for only $6. There are add-ons, but I don’t have any of them, and you don’t really need any of them. I made this nice looking room using it just yesterday (the walls are a similar shade of green to what I just repainted my bedroom with).

What my bedroom would look like if I really lived here.

This room could even look a little better. I probably shouldn’t have put it on the off-white background that matches the color of the walls in my actual bedroom here. I’m a little sick of that color already.

But, anyway, this (the first picture above) is the space that I’m living in going into the new year, so I thought I’d put a picture up, since I always like to change things.

This year, I have some other resolutions, too. Like a lot of people, I’d like to be more outgoing and well put-together, but I’d also like to put myself out there and achieve some early career goals. A number of nice job openings have come up on the on-campus job board as of late, so I’ve applied both to the library and as an assistant at the fab. Either would be excellent — the library is a cool place, and as a microelectronics student, I’m looking for any way to get my foot through the fab door so I can actually learn what goes on in there. My resume is looking pretty dry until I have actual experience.

I also need an internship for over the summer (and for the fall, too). I have this stretch goal to get myself a Mandarin double major before I leave, and after many backs and forth (is that the proper plural form?) with my advisor and with an associate department head from the Chinese program, I’ve managed to get myself a plan to take all the classes — everything but the study/internship abroad that make up the requirements to actually get the major degree.

So, I need an internship, and it would be even better if I could get myself one in Taiwan, somewhere in China (as long as they stay a level 2 on the US government travel advisory list, something which was only achieved recently and for which the future seems a little uncertain), or Singapore, or anywhere else where the people would probably speak a reasonable amount of Mandarin.

This is also the year where, if all stays going well, I can go to Taipei later on in May and see some of those things that northern Taiwan is famous for (you know, night markets, scooters, musical garbage trucks, window cages, lots of rain, Seven-Elevens…), and maybe I’ll be able to travel south or to some nearby countries too (I might try to get myself a layover in Tokyo for a few hours on the way back if I get to book my flights with that much precision).

I’m regretting not bringing my hat, gloves, and bicycle back to school with me, too, after realizing how well these sidewalks get paved during the winter. I wasn’t ever behind the dorm buildings last year, and besides, the winter was pretty mild — there’s actual ice and snow on the ground now, but none of it’s on the sidewalk, so I think leaving the bike behind was a missed opportunity. Besides, I learned about Bike Index lately (from the excellent podcast Darknet Diaries) and feel prepared to own a light transportation device again after recovering from minor theft auto last November. I’ll have to wait until March, when I’ll have a week to go back home and get it.

Until then, I have some clarinet to practice if I hope to secure myself a place back in the concert band, and I have some people to talk to and emails to check if I want to make sure I can get myself back into the orchestra, and I have some eating, sleeping, and positive self-talking to do to convince myself that I can do those things better than I did them last semester.

Thanks for the patience (and for managing to find my blog continually, even after I moved it again). This time is the last, I swear!

Net improvements

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Laptop mug.

…do you get the pun? I’m in that kind of mood today. Please enjoy.

I was feeling a little limited by the paid aspect of my old WordPress presence. It’s nice software, but I’m not super patient with the block editor and I can get more customizability using a static site generator. I still keep my domains registered at WordPress and I might create another site there some other day.

Hugo, the static site generator that I use now (and used to use) is easy to set up, it builds sites quickly and it’s completely free and open-source. WordPress is free and open-source too, but I had been using WordPress.com hosting, which isn’t free if you want some of the features that I had been using (attaching a domain name, using the twenty-twelve theme…). I have much more freedom in Hugo, and I can use whichever hosting I want. This doesn’t even require PHP, which is extremely nice and makes for a lot of flexibility.

I haven’t attached a Disqus account or any kind of other mechanism for commenting because the comments on my old blog weren’t being used too frequently (and not by anyone who I didn’t already know — I guess we can just text).

I’ve also added my resume to the site, mostly to provide links to some of my projects and reports for easy access.

Thank you for the support and the patience! I really do appreciate it.

The El Nino is over

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Winter weather.

…and I’m ready for the winter.

I’m really ready for this semester to be over. I’m not sure if, for the past few weeks, I’ve been sustaining myself on only the hope of going home for Thanksgiving, but I did that and it felt good. Then I came back. Now I’m tired again.

So, finals week starts now, we had some nice winter weather a while ago (and it’s all melted away now because we’re in a little bit of a “warm” wave) but it at least had me appreciating nature. (Update: it’s Thursday and the snow’s back. All morning, the weather outside has definitely been delightfully frightful. Nice!)

The other season that ’tis for is for fun orchestral music (which ’tis always the season for) and a nice place to experience some of that is right here at this link. There’s a playlist with these recordings in it, but I wanted to start it halfway through and couldn’t get the link to do that reliably.

My favorites are Danse Macabre (at the link), the John Williams one, and the Petite Suite (my new favorite piece of music, I think, ever written). I am also a little biased toward the clarinet line toward the end of the harp section in Danse Macabre for no reason in particular.

And then, I’m not sure how the Williams recording came out so well, but it did, and it goes hard (especially at 110 percent speed!).

So, to the tune of the “dance of death”, I’m going to go make an attempt at being prepared for my circuits and statistics finals, which are back-to-back tomorrow at the earliest two time slots. Truly, this is the soundtrack to my life.

Just one more week!

Serendipitous beauty

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Two caps.

I learned that word in high school English.

I was in circuits lab today, and I took some surprisingly aesthetically-pleasing pictures of some capacitors connected to a frequency generator. These are some nice profiles! The nicer one is the one that got made the thumbnail, and the one below…

…in that one, you can see the melty spot where I fried an op-amp last week.

It’s almost midnight. I need sleep.

One cap.

It’s that neat blur in the background that makes it look like a modern smartphone’s portrait mode. I have a modern smartphone, but it’s an iPhone SE (so a single camera). Regardless, I’m a firm believer that limitation breeds creativity.

Go off and take your own cap shots!

Human innovation

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hero.

I bet you never thought you’d be nostalgic for the good old days of Windows 10.

Over the past day or so, I’ve discovered a few neat things on the Internet that I felt like sharing.

First — I always had some kind of obsession with having full control over my Internet experience. If you had known me about a year ago, I had a SearXNG instance themed to look like old Google, and I even tried customizing a web proxy to make browsing the Internet look like it did in 2012 (to only moderate success).

Well, I guess other people feel the same unquenchable nostalgia that I do, because now we’re seeing actual programmers put actual work into making tools that do these things.

First, I learned about a browser customization tool called Geckium. It makes new installations of Firefox look like versions of Google Chrome from the good old “don’t be evil” days. Too bad Geckium ditched the nice site design from its predecessor, Silverfox, which also looked just like the iconic old Google Chrome download page.

Silverfox.

Isn’t that just beautiful? I had to go to the Internet Archive for this (an old version of silverfox.neocities.org).

Anyway, after I found out about Geckium, I kept going and, through a Reddit post, learned about StarTube — a userscript for Tampermonkey that (requires a dependency I’ve forgotten the name of — it’s on the page and can also be installed as a userscript) replaces the modern YouTube layout with a nicer-looking, more functional, surprisingly nostalgic one (that wasn’t that long ago, was it?).

Geckium.

Augh. I can’t believe how quickly time passes. I’m not even old.

And I hope you believe me when I say I think these are practical modifications, too. Everything feels faster, cleaner, and easier to understand. My favorite argument is to always take the engineer’s perspective, and I hope I can convince some other engineers to take their arms up against the graphic designers of the world.

Unrelated, but similarly exciting for no objective reason — the venerable, the tried-and-true, the age-old reliable Mac Mini — finally got a redesign!

Mac Minis litter schools and trash cans alike around businesses where I live, and remembering that the last Mac Mini design came out when Snow Leopard was still new is a good enough reason to cement it in the history books by discontinuing its surprisingly heavy, large flat squarish profile for good and replacing it with something that looks more suitable next to those big monitors in Apple Stores that are three times as expensive as the computer itself.

Mac mini.

Isn’t it adorable?

If I had $500 burning a hole in my pocket, it’d be out the other end and into an Apple Store right now. Unfortunately, I don’t, and I might be more of a Windows (10) guy anyway. I bet that thing would boot into Asahi Linux, though, faster than you could reach around to the back of an old Mac Mini to plug in a USB flash drive.

…it seems like every day, we take two steps forward and one step back.

At least we’re all doing it in sync.

Thanks for reading!

This time, you might really need it

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Window plants.

I know this is a time for a lot of people in the US that keep up with any amount of political news. I walked around today, and all day, nobody said anything. That’s probably a good thing. I shouldn’t care so much about government, but you know, I have to live in a place with a single figurehead all the way in the front, so I guess it’s natural to care who that person is.

Whether you’re happy or disappointed, it’s always a good time to add another track to your (existent or not) orchestral/wind ensemble music library, and this time, it’s even a little different! I bought a Switch a while ago, and since I had Switch Online, I got a notification about it when that new “Nintendo Music” app came around. Being someone born in the mid-2000s who has the obligatory fondness for Nintendo games and their music, I thought I’d try it out. Plus, the Kirby Star Allies soundtrack is on there, and that’s already a killer app for me (not that I’ve ever played anything more than just the demo for the actual game).

Anyway, my uninformed, but still interested, musical mind stumbled across the fact that Pikmin music’s instrumentation is usually all orchestra (I just haven’t played too many Pikmin games, I guess). Pikmin 4’s definitely going the “relaxing & cute” way of many Nintendo games in the past few years, and it’s entirely welcome. In the list of top tracks from Pikmin 4 — a game that listening to the soundtrack to might lead me to eventually buy despite never having considered myself a Pikmin fan — was the closing-credits theme, which is just 漂亮得不得了!

You see, I’m getting this week’s grammar practice in, too.

Anyway, it’s just incredible. And, it’s in a really slow 3/4, but it isn’t super “waltz-ish”. I don’t know much about music theory, but I think that the effect is cool.

If you need music to sit out, stare into the sunset, and eat baby carrots to while watching a colony of ants lift a breadcrumb down a wall to some tiny anthill in the grass, this is it.

I hope “Nintendo Music” doesn’t get these YouTube channels taken down, because this is truly a public service.

Enjoy!

Somebody stole my scooter!

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ai scooter.

*I finally made use of that AI integration with wordpress.com — my scooter didn’t look like the one in the picture, but it was the same color, and the company that manufactured it did in fact use those letters in their name (not in that order, but 差不多一樣).

Actually, this happened about a week ago, but I think I’ve fully accepted that I’m never going to get it back now, so I might as well just complain about it on the Internet.

Op-sec just isn’t my forte, I guess. Whatever. It’s fine. I can walk.

If you happen to see a white NIU KQi 2 Pro with the front logo scratched off and missing (I took a pretty hard fall on it a couple of times in one trip… I had a little bit of a cold and definitely shouldn’t have been riding a scooter…), you know that it has a nonzero probability of being formerly mine.

I did detach it from my NIU account (which I also deleted, since I don’t have another NIU scooter), so whoever has it can actually use it. I couldn’t remotely lock it even if I wanted to, because all its wireless connectivity is over Bluetooth.

I see it this way: if they accidentally lock it by holding the power button for too long (since that’ll auto e-lock the scooter and keep the wheels from turning until you unlock it again using Bluetooth), then they had it coming. If they don’t, then they stole themselves a free scooter. No hard feelings here. At the end of the day, I was the one who spent the money and then didn’t tie the lock tight enough.

If you reading are the one that took it — have fun. Return it if you feel bad. I’ll forgive you.

To you all — have a nice day.

Quality content

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Fab tree.

It’s here — continuing my blog as an online artistic outlet, here’s some music to go with those paintings!

And some more “paintings”.

Sometimes, this is just fun. Especially finding neat pictures of things that don’t usually get landscape scenes, like this semiconductor fab here below with the neat-looking tree.

I’m enjoying myself. Hopefully, you reading this are too.

Pink sky.

I still haven't taken my art gen-ed

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Red tree.

But that hasn’t stopped me from expressing myself with the power of, err, machine-generated watercolor effects over the top of neat pictures that I took in order to make them look more dreamlike and magical and like I’m even somewhat skilled in the graphic arts!

Actually, I used the iOS app “Waterlogue” for these, and it’s still up on the App Store (although I think it’s on the older side, I’m not sure how many updates it still gets). You can just feed in pictures and then they’ll come out stylized. You can choose a number of different filters ranging from technical drawings to old portraits, but the watercolor one is the default for a reason.

They look good, I think! The train one should look familiar, but it was a good take and looks even better in wishy-washy hand paints.

Just in case you need it

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Orient express.

Some days, you just need something to lift your mood a little bit. In case you find yourself in the kind of pit that only an adorable concert band piece can lift you out of, here’s an amazing recording of one that sounds like a train.

It was recorded by the incredible, timeless, handsomely-accomplished wind orchestra of the east capital.

Every time the woodwinds and percussion make a whistle noise, remember that we live in a world where this is possible.

Have a nice day!

Updates to the infrastructure

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Day three.

As anyone who knows my blog can tell, I’ve moved. Again!

This is a bad habit of mine, but experimenting with technology is the only way to learn, right? Self-hosting and renting all that rackspace was getting very expensive, and I didn’t really want to deal with it anymore — I’m now on wordpress.com, and with a new domain to boot.

I’ve also (as you can see in the featured image) added a nice rug to my bedroom. It adds some very nice flair. In case you’re wondering, the water-bottle shower curtain rings didn’t last — I sucked it up and spent the $8 at Target to get some regular metal ones (nickel, I think).

This is another short post, since I’m a little tired and the semester is getting into me once again (not a bad thing, though! It’s exhilarating). I should go on a little bit of a walk and then start grinding like a true grindset student (fill in the blogger’s equivalent of a /s here).

Anyway, WordPress proper seems to have some generative AI features that creep me out a little bit right now. If I ever feel like a masochist, you’ll know. It even seems to be able to generate pictures…

And I’ve switched from elementary OS to vanilla OS, then back to the good standard Fedora 40. Distro-hopping is one old habit that’ll die hard.

Thanks for sticking through the (short and sudden) transition!

Move-in day!

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Day one.

Today’s been the first day that I’ve been fully moved in to my apartment, and although I was unsure how my experience would be before I got here, since I’ve arrived it’s been pretty nice. I’m pretty happy with my living situation here, I guess, although I won’t recommend it for fear of doxxing myself (the ever-present danger of talking about your life on the Internet).

Overall, it looks nice. I did put some effort into that — the furniture was provided, but of course none of the bedding/printer/amenities came with the room, so it was able to be personalized. The shower curtain didn’t come with the shower, either, and upon forgetting to buy rings to hang the curtain that I bought at Target, I accepted the engineering challenge.

Curtain.

So far, all I’ve managed to do is get myself in, get set up, and explore a little bit on that electric scooter that I bought in June, which is finally very useful (!).

As I was typing this, I also managed to open up this absentee ballot that I got in the mail — I can now vote in the primary for the political party that I guess I’m affiliated with now, and so I have my first foot in the door toward the timeless privilege of participating in democracy. Nice.

I just need to sit still until classes start at the beginning of the week. That’s when this all really gets good.

Thanks for reading the short post!

Fresh Apple

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Fresh apple.

The Apple ][ — is using the brackets to type the title out cheesy? I mean, clearly it’s stylized to look neat and computery.

Anyway, I’ll say that I’m mostly done. I’m missing a key component (being the RESET key), but since this is a II Plus, not an original II, I don’t need to press CTRL+RESET to get to BASIC (I think that was an addition that they made to the II Plus ROM, but I don’t remember where I heard that—regardless, my machine works this way), so it’s not a huge deal (I can just turn the thing off and on again to reset to a clean prompt).

So, first, I took the whole computer apart. I brought the case pieces into the bathroom and gave them a good scrub and a little shower.

Apple bath.

The cleaning went fairly well, because I had some Magic Erasers, which tend to do a good job on plastic if it’s just a layer of dirt and/or oil.

Washed apple.

Besides, as is visible in the photo, after it was clean the whole case looked pretty acceptable even without any whitening. I realize that early on, Apple computers (both II and Macintosh) came with their cases pre-yellowed just a little (they made the stylistic choice to ship a nice, rustic beige). It looks very classy.

After I was done with the cleaning, I tried to get at the only functional problem that the computer had, which was the keyboard. At first, I thought it was just the mystery signals that were a problem, but after a little bit of testing and troubleshooting I found out that the key switch for the “zero” key was also broken.

I took the whole keyboard apart and cleaned in between the PCB and the switches, and I also resoldered all the switch connections with new, lead-free solder.

Apple keyb.

(Don’t worry, the above photo was taken before the dusting).

After this, I put it all back together, but didn’t have any luck. There was no improvement (it was at this point that I figured out that the “0” key was broken. I tested all the others, and they all seemed okay for now, but I know that old keyboards can be unreliable as a rule, and all tend to use different, strange, sub-optimal mechanisms).

Since I don’t have time before leaving to move in to my apartment later this week to wait for an eBay item to arrive, I figured that instead of ordering a new switch on eBay I should just take the switch from the RESET key (which did work) and put it in place of the one for the 0 key. I threw away the old 0 key switch, since it was my first attempt at removing one and it was a little destructive.

Missing key.

But, after that was done, the 0 key worked just fine.

000.

After that, I put the whole thing back together. At some point, I’ll find some very satisfying and very clicky switch to throw in place of the RESET button, and I’ll call it a net improvement. Maybe a “period-accurate bodge”. A rustic bodge.

Clean machine.

The whole computer looks nice, but still has that problem with the extra signals when I type too fast, but that’s not a terrible problem and I fully expect that this keyboard is going to go down the gutter within the next decade anyway, so I’m not going to spend too much time trying to make it perfect.

I also attached an audio cord out the right side of the computer via the cassette jack to try to load some games from Apple II Online Game Server, but couldn’t get cassette loading to work. I’m pretty sure nothing is broken, since the friend I got it from was able to get it to work according to his reporting, if I remember correctly (?). I might just be too much of a Gen Z to figure out how to load games from cassette. That’s fine. I’ll take the loss for now.

Anyway, I’m happy that I had a project to occupy my time yesterday and today, and I think that this came out pretty well (and I even got the thing for free!). The Apple II Plus is peak 1970s (or, according to the date codes inside the machine, early 1981 in the case of my unit) computing, for sure.

Thanks for reading!

A solution to that problem

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Rotten apple.

More will come later, but here’s a summary for now.

I have a friend with ready access to a good harvest spot for e-waste, and he uncovered this a while ago — he used it for a little while, and to my knowledge he even played a few games on it loading over the cassette jack (since the audio files from old cassette games are readily available on today’s Internet), but doesn’t have a purpose for it any more and has given it to me in a condition about the same as it was when he found it.

So, here it is — a trash-picked Apple II Plus that I got for free with a little black-and-white CRT included! Extremely classy. A restoration project — something to do in the last week before I return to school!

Monochrome apple.

The case is a little dirty. Once I took the computer out of the kitchen with its bright daylight bulbs overhead, I could get a better picture of just how nasty this thing got sitting underground for a little while. And, as you can see, there’s a missing key (it should be “RESET”. According to the friend, that key may have not been missing when he got it, but we don’t know where it could have possibly fallen off to).

Apple skin.

And while every key on the keyboard does work, there’s a strange problem with the signaling when I type too quickly on the left side of the keyboard. It generates some extra ghost signals that are probably the fault of a little bit of corrosion on the keyboard’s PCB, which shouldn’t be too difficult to deal with. In the image below, all I typed was “ASDF”.

Asjdf2.

Again, I will come back with more information later. Until then, I’ve got to go run and buy some Magic Erasers. Fortunately, comparing the inner plastic to the outside, the color difference is barely noticeable, which means that this case probably doesn’t need any kind of whitening. It’s a little brownish, but not any further than what’s probably caused by the thin layer of dirt and oil.

All this being said, it’s time to crank up the synthwave tunes! See you later.

What to do?

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Gnome.

Right now, it’s still the morning. I’m still sitting at my computer and listening to podcasts — that’s just what I’ve been doing for a lot of time within the past week or so (my physics class is finally over, so I’m on a little bit of a vacation).

School starts in about a week and a half, which is fun and exciting, and I can’t wait, but until then I need to make money, see people, maintain a minimum baseline for mental health…

學中文有意思一點，不過我每天只能一，兩個小時做。But, don’t worry, I haven’t given up on it yet, especially not considering that my actual class starts up again in less than two weeks.

The problem with going places is that it wastes gas that’s pretty expensive for someone who isn’t receiving a paycheck at the moment (this weekend, again, is the flea market that I can use as an opportunity to make some money, but that isn’t exactly a reliable source of income). I might try to find someplace interesting anyway, since that’s always a fulfilling way to spend time.

I could go on a walk. There are some neat little nature trails around where I live, which is a good thing about living in the middle of the woods, although I guess that if I actually lived in a city there wouldn’t be nature trails, but there would be many other things to do within walking distance…

On other notes, I found a cool open-source Firefox-based browser that I’ve been enjoying using for the past few days. It’s called Zen Browser, and I saw a lot of random instability and crashing at first, but it wasn’t just limited to Zen Browser, it was also the case in Epiphany, so I think it had more to do with my highly unstable Internet connection (although when trying to download the featured image for this post, the browser did crash again. Oh, well, it’s almost worth it, because everything else about this is so polished). It’s available on Flathub as “io.github.zen_browser.zen”.

I’ve also switched distros back to Elementary OS 7.1, and noticed that it exists firmly in the Flatpak ecosystem. Flathub has a lot of neat little programs on there, although a lot of them are now themed for GTK4, which looks really out-of-place on the Elementary OS desktop environment. Oh, well — it’s the price you pay for both software freedom and a really polished experience at the same time.

I’ve also started trying to make full use of the PC that I built a while ago (it has an Athlon 200GE and an 8GB RX 580, so it isn’t the greatest gaming rig of all time, but it’s definitely powerful enough to feel meaningful and I’ve been having fun with it). I was thinking for just a moment about selling it, since it’d probably be reasonably valuable at the flea market and I thought I needed the money, but I think if I sell this thing now, I’ll just want to build another one later and, at the end of the day, it’d probably have been a waste of money. Plus, all the cool kids have gamer boxes these days.

I hope that I don’t have any classes so demanding that they force me to use Windows in the coming semester, like I did last semester (just joking, that digital systems class was excellent). Maybe I could get away with a virtual machine now that I have a decently powerful system.

So, at the end of the day, I have all the material goods that I could possibly need to keep myself occupied for the coming length of time. I just need to get creative with them.

Thanks again for reading!

Things that don't go to plan

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Apple.

A lot of the time, that’s a lot of things. They even wrote a whole book about it (“the best-laid plans…”).

I thought I would be able to move in to my new apartment earlier this week (because the first rent payment was due a week ago), but after calling, it seems like I’m not able to get my keys until the 24th (nearly the end of the month)! That seems fairly unnecessary — I mean, if they’re spending two weeks cleaning in there, I’d be more than happy to do it for them — I’m good at cleaning, right? I would hope so. I would also hope that I could clean a single empty bedroom in under two weeks.

Anyway, I left my part-time job in preparation for the plans that didn’t end up happening, so now I’m at home, just kind of sitting here and regretting, kind of wishing that I’d read a little bit more of the lease agreement (more than just the… title?). That’s my fault, although I think it’s fair to say that I’ve never heard of an apartment charging a month’s rent for a month that they don’t let you live there.

I have a class to finish, though, so I’ve been working on some assignments for the past few days, although not too much — there’s also a quiz that goes live later in the morning, which I’d like to get done. The final is live on Friday, then we get a little less than a week to finish it, which will be nice. I hope I don’t do badly. I should get studying (for both today’s quiz and for the final). Other than that, we have one more lab left. It’s a physics class.

Following all of this, my beloved phone for the past few months (since I bought it off of eBay) has been the Unihertz Jelly 2, which has done everything I’ve needed and been an excellent little piece of hardware, although I was a little upset that the battery wasn’t removable. My parents want to FaceTime me once I’m back at school, though, and weren’t happy with the reliability and quality of the cross-platform FaceTime implementation that has been a relatively recent development of Apple’s arm being forced into actions they wouldn’t have otherwise taken (I can smell the malicious compliance in the video quality). So, yesterday, I took some of that money (the money that isn’t replenishing anymore because I don’t have a part-time job anymore) and spent it on an iPhone SE 3, which is neat, and makes my parents very happy (they can even track my location now, too — I think I sound sarcastic, but honestly, it’s probably a good thing if it really does make them feel better). I had a $150 Apple Store gift card in my wallet from a MacBook that I bought at a flea market and then traded in to the Apple Store (that is a brief summary of just one of my many stories at that flea market), so the cost was subsidized just a little (although, technically, getting that gift card was a net loss of $30).

Anyway, now that I have this iPhone, I’ve also got a 3-month free trial of Apple Music (that I’ll probably continue to pay for once the trial period is up…). I’ve been having a lot of fun with some of this Anders Enger Jensen synth music that I didn’t have access to before (his music is on Bandcamp too, and I did have a Bandcamp account in the past, but that has since been deleted since I was still getting most of my music from the Internet Archive). That’s been inspiring — fun — whatever. Apple Music is a legitimately good service, although $12/month could be a little bit steep depending on how you think of it (that’s the same price as YouTube Premium, which also includes YouTube Music). At least Apple Music doesn’t suffer from it’s a Google product, oh my goodness syndrome.

So, the next time I run around to that flea market, I’m going to try to make some sales to make up for lost money. Then, the next day, I’ll finally be able to move in to my apartment. Augh!

Until I take some good photos with my new iPhone, today’s featured image is from the wallpaper collection of Linux Mint, which is honestly one of the best sources for pictures overall. This one in particular is from my first version of Linux Mint, 17.3 “Rosa”.

Thanks again!

Podcasts and this photo

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Train.

To help us get around this big world, we have trains like this one that I saw the other day. And that’s really cool.

A while ago, I was looking for podcasts to entertain myself, since my library was a little short and I wanted to branch out and learn about something new (until now, most of my podcast library has been technology-type podcasts). As a quick recommendation, I think that the weekly Linux news podcast from The Linux Experiment is pretty entertaining and informative and whatnot.

Anyway, I managed to stumble across another completely unrelated podcast that equally stole my attention, a podcast about Taiwanese history called Formosa Files. Considering that my two favorite areas of interest are science and technology and then Chinese language and history, I figured Taiwan wasn’t too far off (although I really don’t know that much about, you know, Literary Sinitic and Confucianism and dynastic rule and all those other key elements of Chinese history, since the classes at my school are really just the language part. They leave the culture minute to us, and so while I’m still unsure of what exactly the four principles of Confucius are, I’ve seen plenty of Genshin gameplay).

Those two podcasts are both pretty good and worth listening to (The Linux news one is really only for Linux enthusiasts, but Formosa Files makes a good attempt at being readily accessible and a good listen for anyone. Even if you don’t care about Taiwan, it’s human history. And if you’re trying to learn Mandarin, they’ve started putting out episodes in that every Tuesday—even putting out exclusive content as of late, instead of rewritten reruns—where one of the hosts interjects with English pretty often, which I think is supposed to be helpful for Taiwanese listeners trying to learn English, but is also helpful for listeners like me who, you know, are only really good at English). Then, today, they put out the long-awaited TSMC and Morris Chang history episode, where it was kind of funny when they had to read out the definition of “transistor”.

To everyone reading, thank you for staying with me, it always feels good to have Internet friends and a one-way channel for communication.

Netbook!

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Netbook.

I found this thing at a flea market yesterday for $10. It’s pretty great. I installed Debian 11 with Raspberry Pi Desktop (which hasn’t been updated in around two years, but it’s still cool as a novelty). It even plays games and holds a charge!

Boing.

Raspi netbook desk.

Raspi netbook hand.

Sometimes, this is just what you need to call a deal. Who says thrifting is dead?

Every week is the same

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Peacock.

Yesterday, I saw this peacock. It seems pretty chill for a bird that usually is a symbol for pompousness and flashiness. Never judge a peacock by the type of bird it is, I guess…

After living so many weeks, it surprises me that it took this long to figure out that every one is the same. I mean, like, they always start on Monday or Sunday or whenever it is that you think that it starts, and then seven days later the whole thing starts over again.

Or maybe it just feels that way sometimes. I don’t know. We should have one week every year where we run through the days backwards just to mix it up a little bit. Kind of like during the Daylight Savings Time switch in the fall, when it’s 2:00AM one minute and then an hour later it’s still 2:00AM.

Anyway, in an attempt to make it a little bit less monotonous I’ve started trying out some new hobbies. I already owned a few plants, so I decided to buy some more plants, and I’ve been building a little garden on my dresser next to the window. I got one yesterday that’s a few succulents inside of a neat looking little rock. I have no clue exactly how to take care of a succulent, and this one was kind of expensive because of the neat looking rock, so let’s hope I don’t ruin it.

I’ve also started actually using my notetaking Kindle for reading, which to my understanding is what people are supposed to associate with Kindles/Amazon/wasn’t it just so much better when Amazon was a bookstore and not an AliExpress knock-off?

At first, I started reading Vern Sneider’s A Pail of Oysters because that’s a period of history that I don’t know a whole lot about (like, post-WWII East Asia/China/Taiwan) and I wanted to get myself a little bit better perspective. It was a pretty well-paced, understandable, well-written thing, though, and it kept my attention really well. I finished it earlier this week, and I decided that if I liked Vern Sneider’s writing so much, I should read his other famous one, Teahouse of the August Moon, which I only knew was a comedy about something Okinawa (I don’t really know that much about WWII or about Japan). So, I started reading, and it was also really well-written (I mean, that’s probably why it got so famous). Unlike A Pail of Oysters, though, it was definitely intended to be a comedy, and the humor was pretty great (although, as I always warn everyone, I think everything is funny).

The book also did a really good job at giving a little bit of perspective to the target audience of closed-minded Westerners like myself. As I was nearing completion, I went to Target to buy some tea (because, apparently, that’s where we go to get the tea?) and came back home to finish—I wanted to get some sushi at some point, too, but I haven’t gone out for that yet (maybe for lunch later today?). I still drink my coffee a little too quickly, but I can work on that. As a vegetarian, though, all the talk of sweet potatoes and soybeans had me feeling a little bit patriotic.

So, anyway, giving myself a little bit of perspective and some escape has had me feeling like maybe every week isn’t so much the same as I thought. I mean, it’s really up to me whether I have the ambition to go out and try something different when I have the time. Once I finish my physics class, who knows what I can get up to? I have a passport application in processing right now. If I have that back before school starts, maybe I could just drive around freely and see if I end up in New Brunswick or one of those places up there across that arbitrary border they drew in the middle of this corner of the world. And then, once the school year starts, I can try to put it to even better use.

I mean, I don’t know, dreaming about the future is the only thing that can keep me sane, so as long as I write about whatever I’m thinking about here, I’ll probably say a few things that are a little bit too hopeful or a little bit of a reach. But, really, a study abroad would be cool. Employment abroad would be even cooler. Really, I just want to see things and to learn things.

The longer I wait, the more prepared I can be. Have I mentioned “好好學習，天天向上” yet? I read it when I was checking out after buying the MDBG Chinese-English dictionary that I wrote about a few blog posts ago. It’s a neat short phrase that you can keep repeating to yourself so that you don’t forget your study time.

Sometimes, people say that my generation isn’t as motivated as they were in the past, or something along those lines. I think that the path to motivation looks like “freedom > creativity > planning > hope > work > motivation”. Whenever there’s a break in there, it’s a little difficult to recover the whole thing, but writing it out like that makes it easier to imagine how you can put that back together just for yourself. When we use them responsibly, I think, books/movies/podcasts/video games are good ways to help build up the creativity. Learning is hard when you feel like the information you want is far away, but when you have those well-written books or some good teacher to give the information to you in a way that sticks, that also makes learning/working a lot easier.

All this is to say that the semester starts in about a month and it’s going to be great.

I just need to not die before the end of my physics class. Lowering my GPA constitutes dying.

Thanks for reading!

Neat photos

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Lights.

I took a few photos a while ago that I thought looked nice. They were on the blog in a separate post, but I thought that I should recompile them and put them back with a nicer gallery type setup so that you could just click on them to view.

I also took the opportunity while doing some of this maintenance on my site to change the theme. The new one is called “BlogBD”, and it looks pretty nice, except that I was struggling with trying to apply a header image and had to settle for a solid color that looked okay. Hopefully this site isn’t terribly ugly—my taste in Web design is something approximate to whatever it is they have in Japan, I think. It’s a vibe, for sure.

Here are the photos!

My first electric vehicle!

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Niu scooter.

The NIU KQi2 Pro came in the mail earlier than I expected—I had it before noon this morning, actually, which was nice because I wasn’t working today and got to take it out of the box and get everything set up with plenty of time. It was cloudy, though, and that turned to rain for most of the afternoon, so I didn’t really get much chance to try it in full, although I’ve gotten generally used to the controls just going around my neighborhood. It’s pretty nice!

You do need to connect it to the Internet through the app to activate it, though, and then critical features like customization of the maximum speed, remote lock/unlock, regenerative braking settings, and the rest are all done in the app. It’s fine, though, I guess—the app gets my location data, but only when I’m using it, which isn’t while I’m riding the scooter (my phone, the Unihertz Jelly 2, also has very aggressive memory management and turns off any app that’s unused for more than about fifteen to twenty minutes. I can’t figure out how to change this, but it hasn’t been too much of a problem, and it does save battery life and keep performance high and the phone from ever getting hot). Besides, at least it isn’t Google getting the data, where they might be able to do some damage with it and the help of local data brokers and marketing agencies.

I’ve also been looking around the Internet for more Mandarin learning tools, since I feel like I’m a little imbalanced (I don’t really watch any Chinese dramas, read, uh, Danmei novels, or whatever it is that other people learn Mandarin for…)

I stumbled across r/ChineseLanguage, which is actually one of the few remaining relatively wholesome Subreddits. I’d recommend it if you’re bored for a while and want to relate with some fellow members of the HSK2-sphere (there’s a nice distribution of advanced learners and beginners on there, so I don’t feel alienated! That’s neat). I’m always a lurker, though. I don’t have a Reddit account, so my fun ended after reading the past few days’ worth of threads.

Anyway, after doing the lurking, I decided that I needed a reliable source of challenging content that had characters, definitions, and pronunciations. I installed a Firefox extension called “Zhongwen” (it seems popular—if you put your cursor over some hanzi, it’ll tell you the definitions. If you put it at the beginning of a phrase, it will tell you what the phrase means). I bookmarked 天下雜誌 “Commonwealth Magazine”, a Taiwanese news outlet that also puts audio transcripts for all of its posts (I think this is pretty common in the online news media world, but it’s a good bonus for language learning). Most of the articles seem to not be confusing or excessively politically charged, although I’m not sure if growing to expect that is something that we’ve only had to do in the land of the ( -> ) red, ( <-> ) white and ( <- ) blue.

And then there’s always the classic Hūndì Dūndì for those of us who truly believe in the meaning of the 兒化 (with Gwoyeh Romatzyh on the side for comedic effect, ai ia!).

Finally, I’ve also decided to finally discontinue the old SearXNG instance that ran on this server (on a different domain—it was at justsearch.ing). I think I was really the only one who ever used it—I got a friend to check it out once, but SearXNG just isn’t a drop-in replacement for other search engines like Startpage. Little things, like my server being a little slow and searches taking a while, or searches occasionally failing, just made the experience feel a little “less than premium” after a while.

So, today, I tore down the instance, pointed the domain to a parking page and turned off auto-renew. I took down the Docker container and I made a Kagi account. So far, it’s been great—not only is everything very fast, but customization is even easier than it was on SearXNG!

Custom kagi.

I also pasted the Kagi Oranginum CSS into the “Custom CSS” field, which is a nice theme and one of the few that seems to work with the new UI that Kagi has rolled out just this year. The whole UI is a little big at first pass, but I realized that I preferred the Web browsing experience more anyway when I turned my “Zoom” page-rendering scale setting in Firefox to 80%. Changing the font size in Kagi only affects the text—the rest of the UI elements don’t scale to match, so anything other than “Medium” looks a little strange.

Anyway, Kagi comes with other features that I didn’t expect to be attracted by, either. Kagi has a GPT called “FastGPT”, which is kept separate from their primary search engine (I like compartmentalization, and I can imagine most opinionated Internet citizens are the same) and, jumping at the opportunity for some 中文學, I had a conversation with an AI, something that I’ve been holding off on for as long as possible in an effort to resist change for no reason.

Fastgpt.

It seems to produce results just as good as any GPT（可是我的小腦看不懂）!

And, of course, with an actual fleet of dedicated servers, Kagi search is faster than my SearXNG was.

I know I’ve reported on things that I bought on the Internet today a few too many times in the few blog posts I’ve already written, but hey, you know, I’m having fun.

One thing that I think has also been a net improvement to my life has been this neat Firefox theme that I found (and when I say neat, I really mean neat, I mean, it’s pretty clean). It’s called Solarized Light, and it’s a very nice color palette. I also changed my macOS terminal to match. My eyes are happy, and I don’t have to resort to full-hardcore dark mode!

So, at the end of the day, thanks again for reading. This post was a little long. I hope this doesn’t subconsciously set an unmatchable standard for every blog post that stresses me out into not writing anything else for another three months—that would beat the point of the blog being a personal center for self-expression and low-tension vibes.

謝謝大家！

A neat online tool

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

大家好！

Teng.

This has nothing to do with anything, and everything to do with my off-hours Mandarin studying strategies. I was looking around the internet last night and I found a neat tool, which also has an offline version. It’s a Chinese-English dictionary—I used to use the Yabla one until it went down earlier this week—this one has a little bit of additional information, too, like HSK levels. I’m not sure how the vocabulary from one to the other compares, but this one also has an offline version; on Mac, this is a dictionary that you can add to the “Dictionary” application, which makes it pretty clean and elegant and match with the rest of the user interface.

這是我找到的中文詞典：

我希望你們喜歡，我已經能看這個詞典很好用。

If this is useful to you, I recommend you check it out! The full version is $15.95, which isn’t terrible, even if it’s just a dictionary. A paper dictionary would probably cost more than that, and this one is nice to keep around.

It can even do personal names of a few famous people (just see the thumbnail photo).

再見！

Going with the flow

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Briel brigels.

Although I haven’t taken any good pictures with my phone lately, today’s Wikimedia Commons Image of the Day fits the theme of this post well, so it’s today’s thumbnail. It was taken by Agnes Monkelbaan and you can find it at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Breil-Brigels,_Lag_da_Breil-_Flem._23-09-2022._(actm.)_11.jpg.

“Going with the flow” is something that I think I’d like to do more of. There’s a cycle that just keeps repeating: I get some momentum, I get some sleep, I get some caffeine and I start coming up with ideas. During the semester, I work on projects, I work on schoolwork, and then my sleep schedule keeps declining and declining until I catch bronchitis or something from the person across the table from me in physics class and then I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck for the rest of the week.

Maybe that was just a first-semester thing. You know, just adjusting to the germs in my new semi-faraway environment (I go to school something like seven or eight hours away by car from where I’ve lived all my life — it’s certainly not a distant land, but far enough for them to have some strains of the flu that my immune system has never seen before).

Anyway, I’d kind of assumed that I would be safe from that over the summer. I’m back home, less classes, working will make me more tired, I’ll be more relaxed — what I got, though, was the residue of that school-year energy. I keep signing up for more and more days at work and trying to make more money, coming back and studying for the summer class that I’m taking, you know, on and on… then, a few days ago, I caught some cold or whatever. Completely unrelated to everything else happening in my life.

But sometimes getting just a little bit sick is a good thing. It always changes my brain a little and makes me calmer and more reasonable. I don’t have the energy to be impulsive. I’ve been taking a shower in the morning and at night. I mean, I’m really not that bent out of shape, I’ve been living my life completely normally for the few days that I’ve had this little, you know, whatever it is — it’s been just enough to make me realize that “going with the flow” is the philosophy in life that I want to try to adhere to. I have my own beliefs and goals and ideologies and whatnot, but, like, if something is terribly beyond my control and I keep worrying about it, that won’t do anything. Cool heads and chill people get things done.

We’ve also got a giant heat wave coming in (I live in the northeastern US, which should make a good bit of sense for most people reading). It was almost a sauna outside today, but it’s supposed to keep getting hotter — with all the negative thoughts swirling around, this had climate change more on my mind than it even usually is. You know? I mean, that’s the big issue that no one person can solve and that everybody stresses about. First, at a personal level (which really isn’t where I think we solve this problem, but anyway…) I don’t feel like I’m an atrocious weight on the carbon footprint of humanity — I live in a town where most of the power comes from a hydroelectric dam anyway (I’m just lucky for that), I’m already a vegetarian (not in a pretentious way, I just really like soy-based food products), but I do have to drive around my mom’s old SUV because I live in a town without public transportation. 哎呀。

I had already been thinking about a certain thing for a while, anyway — they seemed popular enough on campus — I’ve really been looking into buying an electric bicycle or an electric scooter. Electric bicycles tend to be expensive (usually upward of a thousand dollars), and they’re big and kind of a shiny target for people who want to steal vehicles (on the car-free campus at my school for which I’m so grateful, stealing bikes is the only and highest form of grand-theft-auto, which makes me worry about it slightly more). Scooters are smaller, lighter, and cheaper, so after a little bit of on-and-off research, I bought a NIU KQi2 Pro. I mean, I know this “NIU” company was created by the former CTO of Baidu and they even advertise as a selling point on their website all the user data that they collect in order to improve their products for city travel, but it was only $450 at Best Buy and, you know, hopefully I can just use it without connecting it to the Internet.

So, anyway, electric scooter aside, all I can really do myself to fight climate change is to get educated, so I’m going to start trying to do my research where it counts (not just about which electric scooter I should buy). I’m going to try to listen to some climate-change informative podcasts, and I find any good ones I’ll recommend them here. And to survive the coming week, I’ll just have to stay hydrated.

Until the hole in the ozone layer closes, global temperatures regulate themselves, and tech companies start respecting user privacy, I appreciate you for reading! I apologize that I’ve just realized now that in the WordPress theme I use (“Twenty-Fifteen”, the default one from nine years ago), the thumbnail images for posts are downscaled so low that they look pretty fuzzy on most modern displays (even on my 2015 MacBook Pro, which is of course from the same year and has a Retina display that makes those image thumbnails look less than optimal). If you like any of the featured images, I’ll start putting links to the full-quality versions at the top of the blog posts. I’ll even edit my first post to include the same thing.

Thanks again!

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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