Got a few messages from worried people, so quick update: I’m not dead. Yay!
Can’t believe it’s been a year since I last posted. I hear people say it’s good to write down diaries as notes for your future self, so I’ll try to summarize the things that have happened since then (in no particular order) down below.
- I went on a summer internship (for the sweet, sweet 1 credit) and got an offer to return as a full-timer after graduation. I don’t have to job hunt, very cool.
- I went to the ICPC World Finals and got destroyed by the problems (and the other teams) (and the Egyptian heat 🫠). I’ll be participating again this year with some people from my lab, but we’re only in it for fun, so we’re probably not going to do it super seriously or anything (+ I don’t really like the global ICPC organizers for personal reasons and would prefer not having to deal with the event too much).
- I started listening to music again. It’s of course not as enjoyable as before, so I don’t do it as much, but I’ve coped most of my mental block away — I even went to a few lives from some bands I liked (with earplugs)! My tastes (clicky here) have definitely shifted a bit to the more indie side.
- I started learning the guitar on this super worn-down acoustic guitar a senior from my lab picked up from the trash. I’m in the progress of switching to an electric guitar I bought since it’s easier to play electric in my own room (no noise complaints). I spent 5 hours making NeuralDSP work on Linux (peak).
- I passed the JLPT N2, but my (spoken) Japanese still sucks super bad. My karaoke grind has helped my pronunciation (and only that) a lot. I’ll keep at it until get 100 points on DAM (PR is 94.8 now).
- …I installed Windows 11 for Call of Duty. I uninstalled the game ages ago, but the OS is still there. I never really boot it up unless I’m about to play Valorant.
- On a related note, I think I got bored of playing video games. I mostly only play when people invite me to, or when I’m so bored there’s literally nothing else to do. I need a new hobby (or a new game)…
- I dumped Chrome and started using Firefox purely for aesthetic reasons.
- I switched my main IDE over to IntelliJ. Reasons in no particular order: Thing is smart as hell (even with (especially with) the LLM slop disabled), I like Kotlin a lot, I have a free student license, JetBrains brainwashed me, and it can eat 20GB of memory for all I care (I have 40).
Pretty short summary overall. I might (or might not) write some short blogs on each point to talk about them in detail, but the TL;DR is I’m alive and doing relatively pretty okay.
For future reference, you can quickly check to see if I’m still alive or not by looking at this Twitter (not X) account. If it’s still Tweeting random stuff in either English or broken Japanese, then I’m probably still alive.
I’ll also start doing weekly-ish write-ups for the programming competitions I participate in, if purely just to bury the more depressing entries of this blog at the bottom just in case some HR people come through for a background check lol.
That’s about all for today. Thanks for reading (and the worried messages if you’ve sent me any)!