Confessions of a researchaholic

For physical exercises we were told not to hurry through difficult parts as these indicate our weak spots that we need to work on more thoroughly.

This applies to mental exercises as well.
I used to avoid tasks that I don’t like, but now I reflect on the underlying reasons and do these for the sake of training my mental weak spots.

A friend of friend, asking for career advice, said that he/she knows only what he/she does not want to do but not what he/she wants because he/she is used to do what being told.

If you do not know what you want for yourself, nobody else is going to figure that out for you. And even if they tell you, it is for them, not you.

Our education system is focusing more on technical than the much more important life skills, such as how to interact with other people, how to live a happy life, how to manage emotions, etc., which we tend to learn in an ad-hoc way.

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.

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.

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.