Pieces of my life

Went to Park City in late Jan / early Feb, 2026, my first time skiing in Utah. Overall a very solid mountain.

Snow coverage was really bad, according to the locals it’s like the worst in 20 years. So many parts of the mountain weren’t open.

Here’s my review for this ski resort in different aspects.

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.