Confessions of a researchaholic

July 19, 2023

Everyone has talent at 25, the difficulty is to have it at 50

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 9:09 pm
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I am not sure about the first part, but I do agree with the second part.

July 17, 2023

Faces in the waiting area

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 7:44 am
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The blood test center is full of people born in the 1930s during an early Monday morning (which I try to avoid except for fasting). I wonder if it would be full of vampires at night.

July 5, 2023

Night train

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 3:05 pm
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When trying to book my transportation for SIGGRAPH 2023 via our corporate travel site, it recommended me to take a train instead of a flight to reduce the cost and carbon footprint.
I have long been a fan of rail travel, and believe I might be able to sleep on a train recliner (which is like a business class seat on a plane) during the long journey (at least 9 to 10 hours).
However, since I have a talk at the last session on Thursday afternoon, the only Amtrak “train” available is an overnight journey with two segments for which only the first one has cabin class option.
Eventually I realized that the second segment is a bus, with rather ordinary (and uncomfortable, according to reddit) seat.

So I booked a flight instead, despite 3 times the cost and 50 times the carbon footprint.

June 20, 2023

Friendly encounter with a Rouen duck

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 10:26 am
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I almost stepped on this duck while walking on a trail, and saw it close by after hearing its quack sound.

https://youtu.be/7zoo43MwN88

June 16, 2023

Oblivion

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 2:48 pm
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I was trying to rename a bitbucket repo that I created a long time ago via an alternative account, but just could not recall the email address associated it (which would be required to login to that alternative account).
After some digging I finally found the old .edu email address for that account, and recalled that the reason at the time was that I needed that to be able to add unlimited number of collaborators to all these repos.

June 12, 2023

Tire marks

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 10:10 pm
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I saw some tire marks over a newly sealed road surface, and tried to draw them via custom brush (multi-color eye-drop) in Adobe Fresco.

June 6, 2023

T-bill auction

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 11:12 am
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I was trying to buy some short-term t-bills around the time of the debt-ceiling negotiation as the yields are likely to be higher than usual and the government might need more money from us.

I placed an initial bid (about 20 percent of my target) just to check the process, and at the end the system gave me some server error message, so I repeated the process a few times.
Later, I realized that all my (five) bids actually went through and it was just the server that was responsible for the survey at the end that was down.

June 4, 2023

Quick sketching while waiting

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 10:27 am
Tags: ,

My dad did a lot of quick pencil drawings on papers while waiting, and I did the same with fingers on a mobile phone (moto-x4 with Autodesk Sketchbook installed).

June 1, 2023

Caltrain rides

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 5:14 pm
Tags: ,

I have been taking Caltrain recently for commute while my car is in the body shop, and thus could resume a favorite activity of mine – quick portrait sketches of fellow passengers during the rides.
These are obviously not the best sketches in terms of absolute quality, but I like them given how much I can achieve in such a short amount of time (at most a few minutes and sometimes only a few seconds).

The train schedule has become sparser (and less convenient for passengers) since the pandemic, likely for cost saving due to reduced ridership, which in turn could cause further ridership reduction in a negative feedback loop.
I hope both the ridership and schedule will pick up again soon.

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