What is new in my life? A lot of things actually. For starters, today is the first day of my sophomore year at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. It was a rather uncerimonious start as there was no move-in day, no meeting up with friends, no going to the dining hall, and no walking around the campus that I desperately miss. Instead, I woke up to my 7:45 alarm this morning, stayed in bed for 3 minutes and then got up and did my morning routine. Once ready, I popped on the 8am zoom call for my B.S. general education requirement, BIO 151. The professor seemed nice and for the first time, I saw a lot of students turn on their cameras on the zoom calls. I joined in this too hoping that it would increase my attention for the class and my retention of information. I am very comfortable with biology and do not find it hard to grasp and absorb which makes me hopeful fo this class. Right after, I hopped on to another zoom call for my Scientific Computing class. Both classes were moderately interesting and will definitely have something to offer. After a bout of laziness and youtube (my youtube python bot was written last week on Thursday! But it is broken) I headed into work at AirCycler to continue programming Bubbles Upcoming, I will be getting a puppy in all of six days from now and I am very anxious/excited for it. I look forward to it as a transformitive and learning expirience that will bring me a best friend, ‘a man’s best friend.’
Yesterday (8/23/2020), me and Lillian decided to leave early in the morning to head out to Captains Flats. We saw lots of wildlife: moon snails, hermit crabs (a huge one too), birds, horse-shoe crabs, crabs, dead sand dollars, and even living sand dollars (first time seeing those!). The morning fog had still not lifted and we found ourselves far away from shore and withough any visual references to where land could be. We left our phones on shore as to not get them ruined by the salt water and the sun was far overhead making it difficult to discern the cardinal directions. The only thing that guided us back to shore before the tide went too far out was Lillian’s Apple Watch, which she had downloaded a compass app onto days before. We started heading west and eventually we ran into a guy and his dog who was able to point us in the right direction. He was standing quite close to shore but it was completely impossible to see through the fog. This was a lot of fun because it was a small ‘survival-like’ scenario but was not dangerous at all. We made it all the way to shore (Thanks Dave and Bodie) and even kept most of our dead sand dollars intact.
Last week for me was a bit of a blur but a couple of cool things happened.
Today I have also been exploring Mini-PCs, NUCs, and SBCs looking for a solution to my small but powerful and cheap server wanting problem. I don’t have to have it look perfect do I? I might need to actually start allocating some discresionary income.
Yesterday evening, after preparing for school and such, I finally got around to finishing ‘Red Rising’ by Pierce Brown and boy, oh, boy, that was one good book. It truly kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time. So many twists and turns, artfully crafted sentences, rich and deep characters, intertwined destinies, all so great. I loved every moment of it and ordered the next book to read.
That’s all for now! Been feeling inspired by a couple of people around me (Russotiro, NODE, and others) to write my own theme for hugo, or just style my own webpage using html, css, and a little javascript. I love the look and simplicity of nodes webpage