Not too much to report this week. Not because nothing happened, but because I wasn’t at diligent in capturing this week’s activities; I was on-call this week and carrying the pager almost always disrupts my flow, this week being no exception. My pager alarmed me out of bed several times (e.g. 12:30 AM, 2:30 AM, 4:50 AM), throwing off my rhythm, confusing my body’s circadian rhythm and making me wake up at unusual times. In addition to the thrown off sleep schedule, on call constantly interrupts my trains of thoughts and whatever I happen to be doing at the time gets dropped. This results in me forgetting to write my days down.
Family
See you next year Christmas Lights
I tore down our Christmas lights.
Our home owners association requires we tear down all decorations within two weeks after the New Years. Too bad. I wish the decorations could be left up a little longer. Our house would look warmer. Plus our neighbor’s decorations were something Elliott looked forward to walking pass every day. She’ll just have to wait next year to see her “No No” — her “snowman”.
Insane child brain development
This past week, Elliott’s motor and linguistic skills are exponentially growing.
She basically mirrors everything we say. For this reason, we need to be even more careful since both Jess and I have tendencies to swear like a sailor. Last thing I want is a 16 month year old walking around dropping F-bombs.
Apologies to the wife
On Thursday evening, I apologized to Jess after snapping at her.
My short fuse, I think, has to do with a combination of lack of sleep (due to being waken up in the middle of night due to being on call) and the frustration I often feel from her constantly instructing me how to do when it comes to Elliott, what I consider trivial things: I know how to do place a bib on my daughter. The micromanagement can sometimes make me feel incompetent as a father and I think that’s the root of my frustration.
Home maintenance
My dad and I rolled up our sleeves and repaired the broken down dryer. About three weeks ago, the unit stopped working, the drum no longer spinning.
After surfing the internet forums and watching about a dozen tutorials on YouTube, I ordered new parts — rubber drum ring, idler pulley — and after disassembling the entire dryer and replacing the parts, the repaired dryer not only works, but runs exponentially quieter. Before fixing it, you’d press the start button and the dryer would just scream! Not any more; no sir. The dryer now sings. In the end, repairing the dryer aligns with my philosophy of taking care of the things we own, instead of just chucking things out the window and buying new ones.
Graduate School
Graduate school is going really well this semester. I’m learning a lot and the material piques my interest much than I had anticipated.
This past week, I read both the required and optional readings; these readings, combined with watching the lectures, shifts my perspective on how I approach analyzing and building distributed systems. Normally, when designing systems, I would employ physical clocks for tracking time, using technologies like network time protocol (NTP). But I’ve learned a new way to track time: logical clocks.
They are essentially counters that monotonically tick with each process event and we can implement them using different techniques: Lamport’s scalar clocks, vector clocks, matrix clocks.
Music
Fingers on my left hand re-blistered. That’s because I’m practicing and playing guitar a lot more than usual. When I have downtime, even for a minute or two, I grab my guitar hanging off the wall. Sometimes I’ll run scales; sometimes I’ll advance my fret board knowledge by memorizing the position of notes; other times I’ll record myself practicing a guitar cover (most recently “Jolene” by Dolly Parton and Blackbird by the Beetles).
