Pieces of my life

In early November I went to Iquique, Chile with our paragliding community to fly, under the lead of our instructor. It’s my first time flying outside of the US.

2024 is a year of evolution for me. This year, I

• moved to the US
• got my own place
• started my first (and second) full-time job
• became a car owner
• received a decent Bay Area big tech SWE offer
• became a cat owner (of 2)
• started to ski black diamonds

I moved from Taiwan, a densely populated eastern Asian country, to Phoenix, Arizona, at the start of the year, and then to San Jose, California close to the end 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.

Ever since taking a solo academic trip in Scotland, I’d been longing for another solo travel. Fortunately, as I got into the 4-month military training only a few weeks after I graduated, I still got enough time to go traveling before full time job starting in January 2024.

I fell in love with skiing at the start of the year in Japan, and it was approaching winter when I got out of the military, so naturally I picked Switzerland as my destination, with the focus being skiing.

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.