Speedstor's Blog

 Writing daily worked well for me a couple years ago, and seeing that I have made a lot of mistakes in the past 7 months, I'll see how it will help me again. I hate to restart the blog on a bad note, but today, I will talk my very strong and bad habit of watching YouTube. I cannot past an hour without typing youtube.com in the address bar. Because I can easily find ways around any, literally any, blocker for YouTube, I recently redirected all YouTube addresses to the IEEE Transactions on Electronic Devices . With this "setup", I find myself instinctively ended up on the IEEE site, and then immediately going to the address bar again to type in youtube.com repeatly for 2 times. That's how bad this habit of mine have become. The surface reason my bad habit was formed is quite typical. Firstly, watching YouTube is very low friction. Secondly, I was able to maintain the baseline of my life with the 4 hours that I lose entirely every day. My mind has to work the least when

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 It turns out that I could not handle 6 classes, a job, and a school club that occupies the whole weekend. What is interesting is that it took me 6 weeks to realize this. There are many things that made it hard for me to accept surrender: When I'm falling behind, I would just think I am not trying hard enough and should just try harder. For certain things/subjects, it is very easy to catch up, but I don't know which these subjects are and would assess it wrong It is very easy for me to seek inefficiencies I perform throughout the day -> there's definitely room to improve I am stubborn, and I do not want to choose quitting as an option Although I am now admitting that it was too much for me to handle, I still firmly believe that if I had better time management and focus, this workload is at least sustainable for a quarter. Tricks for efficient work that I have picked up during this time includes sleep when can't focus, don't eat carbs/be full during the day, value

Last week was the adjustrary phase for my new schedule. I have 7 courses, and trying to get into a club with a workload of 15 hours. I slowed down on this Thursday and Friday, but still got the minimal done. There are still a lot of asterisks to graduating in a year. Even if I can do it, it isn't necessary the best course of action. Just like how I went into college to potentially get into a higher job position, taking another year of college might extend my reach in the job hierarchy.  I wrote an incomplete blog post last week trying to talk myself through some challenges I had with coding my OS. This week, I want to figure out the vague details (oxymoron :) )to my schedule. My class schedule is more or less finalized* 1 , And I have figured that my Saturdays and Sundays should not be class related to forcibly make room for additional learning. If I get into SEDS, then those days are for SEDS. If not, I will read through the textbooks for the classes of MAE 3, MAE 30B, MAE 131A,

It is funny how unproductive my last year has been. Reasons for it are countless, but my spiral into no-work-land can be easily described: I watch around 4 - 6 hours of YouTube every day, play Rocket League for  2 - 3 hours, try to work for another hour, and the rest is left to food, cleanliness, and sleep. Oh god did I make it easy for myself to describe my life in the past year. Well, to make myself feel better/worse, this schedule does morph into "only" 3 hours of Youtube and a deleted Rocket League during a week before Finals, but I don't think that constitutes anything. All this had given me a 3.914 GPA, and a half Junior standing at UCSD. Writing this brief description of my life makes me disgusted at myself, and here I am turning to what had worked before to try to correct my path. Reasons for my downfall What didn't help was the discontinuation of this blog. I stopped writing when I went to UCSD because I thought it was a waste of time: I kept writing about wh

 I'm pulling an all-nighter, making the time of writing very costly, but I am not productive :). So, I might as well write a blog :D. Today, I want to capture my initial view about university, undergrad. For the first couple of weeks, I conclude that it is just High School, but you pay more for less just so that you can prove you can do with less. Since then, the characteristics grew with the addition of:  being a series of well-tuned stepping stones towards real life in cities slotting people into competency (and ~wealth) ranks -> gather people with similar interest and minds a designated place for learning and exploration (so to constantly remind people of the goal, and push them forward regardless of anything). train people in specialized professions remove a substantial amount of friction from normal life (food, work, indecisive futures...) So universities, or at least mine, are the easy gradient route compared to being plopped into society. And I actually have things to do,