I moved from Taiwan, a densely populated eastern Asian country, to Phoenix, Arizona, at the start of the year. Here are some of my observations.

I had my first nihilism at high school / college.

Being raised in a protective and rather wholesome environment, I naturally became full of morality and ethics as a child. This obviously changed when I experienced my late teen existential crisis, questioning the essence of life, the universe, and everything.

As a rational person, I came to the conclusion that the universe is materialistic. There’s no God, no creator, we just happened to exist. We this kind of premise, the obvious deduction is that morality is a social construct, and there’s not any intrinsic meaning to life. Morality is just the general consensus of a specific group of people in a specific time & space. Without a higher being, a creator, or a God, it’s impossible for absolute morality and an intrinsic meaning of life to exist. We view many practices that were common in the past to be immoral, and at some point in the future, we’ll be viewed as criminals for exercising something that we do every day as well.

Holding this kind of view, I continue my life as an ethical and hard-working absurdist.

There are so many kinds of commercial cat food out there, from kibbles to canned wet food to freeze-dried raw to frozen raw. At first glance, raw food seems to be very pricey, but is it really the case?

I’ll use the food that my cats eat to do a price comparison, by weight and by calories, for each type of food.

Made my first ever Fettuccine Alfredo today, and it was so good.

I joined two labs in the CS part of our department, including 2 years in Hung-Yu Wei’s Wireless Mobile Network Lab and 1 year in Polly Huang’s Network and Systems Lab. I published one IEEE conference paper and one IEEE transactions paper related to game theory and resource allocation in wireless communication as the first author in Hung-Yu Wei’s lab. This kind of output is pretty impressive for an undergrad, but unfortunately, all the work is extremely worthless. I learned almost nothing apart from how to publish an academic paper and the academic gained nothing from my “contribution” either.

If 2022 was the year of progression for me, then 2023 is the year of boon. I got a lot of things without really putting in too much effort, basically an anti-2020. I got to travel a lot, play games a lot, spend a lot of time with my special someone, and many things went in my way. There were some torments and significant setbacks that I am too embarrassed to even mention, but overall, this year is still overwhelmingly positive.

As long as you keep your phone’s location on, Google Maps will create a map for the locations you go to for each day, called Timeline. However, currently it’s not possible to show the map for, say, a whole week of activities, but only for one day.

To create something like that, you’ll need to go to Google My Maps and create a new map with the data of your timeline. Here’s how to do that.

I went to Iceland with my family for a 13-day self-driving trip in 2023 November. Here’s our itinerary and my review of each of the spots we went to.

I got into the Department of Electrical Engineering at National Taiwan University in Sep 2019 and graduated in Jun 2023. There were a lot of ups and downs, but in the end, everything turned out to be okay.

MacOS is the best operating system for desktops, but it still leaves a lot to be desired. Thankfully, there are a lot of third party apps you can install to make your experience so much better.