Now
I wrote this update from my apartment in Cleveland, after a grocery run at Costco.
Priorities
- Landing a job
- Graduate!
- Finishing the Upper Room Japan iOS application
- Having fun
Projects
Learning about online privacy and security
Taking Computer Security and Data Privacy inspired me to get my online access setup more seriously, but it took me a while to get around to it—better late than never!
I now use ProtonVPN regularly, and I occasionally use Tor when I want to access a website “anonymously”. However, I’ve learned that using Tor over VPN isn’t ideal, so I’m still working on getting my VPN configuration so that Tor traffic isn’t routed over it.
Becoming more comfortable on the command line
I have gradually been making the shift from a pure VSCode user to someone that can be productive without it. I’m learning how to use Vim and set up my own development environment. You can see my progress on my dotfiles repository.
Stretching my programming skills
I am trying to stretch my programming skills by doing a lot of small projects, but I’m finding that it is rather difficult to get them to a point where they are ready to share, or I just never get around to them. I’m going to have to work on that…
Media
Slow Productivity by Cal Newport
I finished So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport a little while ago, so I’m going to try Slow Productivity as well and see what I can learn from it. While some parts of So Good They Can’t Ignore You didn’t really click for me (Bluesky post about this), Cal Newport just does a lot of thinking about this so I could recognize that there were valuable insights in there if I had the patience to work through the parts that bothered me.
We’ll see how it goes.
LessWrong Forum
I still check in on LW occasionally, but it is become much less frequent than it used to be. I mostly just read the curated posts and think more deeply about those than read a bunch of content and think less deeply about each of them.
YouTube
I’m trying to cut it out (< 30 min a day). Some weeks it’s < 15 min a day but other weeks it’s more like 2 hours a day.
Recent Highlights
(Doing a cold plunge during) a trip to California with my roommates
We swam, played pickeball, biked around SF, and skied—all super fun. On the last day, I did a cold plunge in Lake Tahoe (for $50 from Anthony). It was pretty cold!
Now I need to figure out how to make rent next month (O_O;)
Racquetball Tournament with the CWRU Racquetball Club
Octavio from the club invited me and my friends to participate in the racquetball tournament (at Baldwin Wallace) with the rest of the club. I was a bit nervous but it ended up being a lot of fun. It was cool to see how much better the players from the other schools were who had proper coaching and years of experience. It definitely showed that everyone from CWRU just played for fun without coaching or anything like that. I managed to scrape by with a win in the intermediate division for singles, but Miles and I got destroyed in doubles.
Joining Bluesky
I switched from X to Bluesky because I got a bit tired of the algorithm there, and the fact that it was headed by Elon Musk didn’t help at all. Joining Bluesky has been great. I follow a bunch of developers that are working on Bluesky and the underlying protocol, and seeing their work inspires me to do cool programming things and post about it too.
It’s also been a good vessel for documenting my thinking on what I read.
This is a now page. I was inspired by David Sparks’ now page.