Things to do (Oct 2021)

2021-10-06

Recently I've been feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the amount of things I want to/have to do. Although this is a problem I always struggle with, it has been especially bad recently. I roughly know the reason, which is that I took on too many things, but I figured it might be helpful to write it all down. Hopefully this will allow me to focus my efforts on the things that truly matter and drop the things that don't, as well as form a nice journal to keep myself accountable for the future. I'm going to try to regularly write these lists (maybe once a quarter) and also review old lists, to see how my priorities change. This might also allow me to better delineate my life, as the last 18 months have felt somewhat like a blur.

To avoid burning myself out, I fully expect that some of these tasks will have to be dropped or scaled back. This is expected and fine. I'm hoping that over time I will get better and being more selective about what I do and get better at time management. I understand that life will get more busy as I get older, so maybe pointing out to myself via journals that I take on too much worthless tasks will be good.

Looking back over the last few months

The last 18 months has been kind of a blur for me. Apart from a single trip to go kayaking with some of my family, including my now-9-year-old niece (wow time flies...), I haven't done anything for myself. I've also ordered a piano, but its ETA has now been pushed back from August 31st to December 31st. Luckily, the dealer managed secure a loaner that I can use for now, which would be great, except that it has some resonance problems when I play the notes B or C. Presumably, something inside it got loosened as it was moved around from place to place by the dealer.

One notable thing is that the paper that is my master's thesis was finally published [1]. It was also selected as an Editor's Choice. I've worked on it for so long that I don't even know how I should feel about it. I think I feel somewhat proud that it's finally done, but at the same time scared about in case I somehow made a mistake I didn't catch in there. In any case, now that this is done, the end of my master's is finally in sight and I can finally close this chapter of my life.

[1]

Also, earlier in the summer, I was working on the Introduction to Mobile Robotics class [2]. This effort has been put on pause, as I accepted a side-project-style position helping out with a research-style robotics project, about robot arms, primarily helping them lead the software efforts. I actually don't know much about robot arms, so there'll be more things to learn.

Professional goals

Continue working at my day job, of course.

Finish my master's degree. This involves finish writing my thesis presentation and then bugging my supervisor to set a date for the defense.

Finish writing and open source the cppasteroids project, which is a 2D asteroids-like game written with C++ and SFML. This is supposed to solidify my understanding of C++.

Finish the Introduction to Mobile Robotics class [2].

Read through some amount of the Systems Performance (2nd edition) textbook by Brendan Gregg [3].

Try running some tracing talked about in this book in my real-time Linux machine that does real-time audio to figure out xruns occur.

[2]

[3]

For my duties at the robotics project I'm helping out with:

Learn a bit more LabVIEW.

Learn a bit more about robot kinematics.

Learn a bit more about MoveIt [4].

[4]

Personal goals

Go to zoo in the near future.

Get a haircut.

Reply to a personal email that I've been putting off for a few months.

Finish reading 3 more non-technical books for the year, as I set a goal of 6 books for 2021.

Finish learning the song It's a Big World Outside from Stardew Valley on the piano.

Probably look into my housing situation for the next few years.

Closing thoughts

I was told to always keep the audience in mind when I write. This post is thus very different as I'm pretty sure this is written for my future self. The good news is, as far as I know now, my future self is probably not that different from a random gemini user who stumble upon this. I've never kept a journal before, so we'll have to see how this goes.

In terms of the todos, I fully expect to fail about half of these. We'll have to see which one I fail, probably in the new year.

Tags: todos

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