Pieces of my life

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.

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.

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.

Stupid, but chill.

Taiwanese born between 1994 to 2004 are obligated to serve in the military for 4 months (it’s 1-year for those born before 1994 and after 2004). It is divided into 2 phases: the 1-month training phase and the 3-month serving phase. My experience in the training phase can be seen here. For the 2nd phase, we are assigned to various troops all over the territory semi-randomly. Each batch of soldiers in the training phase will have lots from different sets of troops, and for some reason, the lots for ours were all troops in Taichung, which is our hometown. What was crazier was that, there was quite some lots for the military hospital, which is arguably the best place to serve the 2nd phase.

Full collection of my wonderful 大兵日記.

Each conscript of the ROC military is required to write 2 entries each week, one for your thoughts about a given topic, and another as your general journal about what happened in the past week.