As stated in the title of this article, yes I just finished a deadline that was supposed to be done in the last quarter. I mean, it was completed in March. Now it’s already May 28th and 30th will be the demo day. The demo will put an end to all the hard work that has been done in the last 4 months. I would say it’s a tough time to go through all of the issues but after all, this challenge has made me more confident in maintaining and developing the platform. Since I know more about the source codes and debugging skills, it’s not going to be a big problem for me to create new features. Here are some of my updates on another thing in my life.
First of all, I’m going to retake the road test tomorrow, 29th May, and I must not fail this time, because each time I take the road test it costs me 250 dollars, 200 for the instructor’s car and a driving lesson and 50 dollars for road test registration. This is too expensive. But interestingly, a friend of mine in Germany is telling me that he spent over 3 thousand EUR on driving lessons and exams, so I feel a bit less hesitant about spending this amount to retake the test now. I mean, since everyone else is spending that much, it must be worth it to be able to drive a car in the country, right? It’s like knowing how to swim when you are going on a boat often or you know a foreign language when living in a foreign country, it’s like a mandatory skill, very handy and useful to have and will make life a lot more convenient.
Secondly, here are some random thoughts throughout my day, just to write them down so maybe it would be fun to revise and look at.
- A comparison between Apple Watch vs Samsung Watch: so I use the SS Watch 6 and Apple Watch Ultra, you know, I was being scammed by Rogers to purchase the Samsung Watch, but I take it anyway since I like to discover the tech stuff. And it comes with my mobile plan anyway, so it’s worth it. Anyway, I like the look of the Samsung Watch more, it looks more elegant. But functionalities-wise, I prefer the Apple Watch. Both suppose eSIM, but in Canada, it costs a fortune to have another line on a watch. I prefer to use an Apple Watch when I go to a gym or go outside, but at home, I always use a Samsung Watch, mostly for decoration on my wrist. It’s fun to look at the pretty stuff (like art, you know); The Apple Watch keeps track of my fitness and my calories burned so it will sync up with my phone later.
- Canada’s life is simple, everything is built efficiently. I mean look at all the products online and in-store. They are not that varied compared to Vietnam (I guess Vietnam is close to China that’s why we see stuff are more diverse), but everything here works the way it should. Quality-wise, it is very good, not perfect, but good for long-term use. The mall, the gym, the road, the house, everything is built for functionalities, not really for looks. Besides that, I like how people take care of the grass. The grasses are green, I see no dead grasses so far, and people keep trimming it looks like the whole street is tidy. I love the neighborhood here, and one of the primary reasons is the grass.
- KFC restaurant here doesn’t have rice. I miss the fried chicken with rice and gravy, it’s tasty. Here in Canada, they have poutine, but honestly, I am not a fan of cheese, I am a fan of rice with meats. But it’s alright, I can cope with it. Burritos, wraps and chicken rice bowls in Subway or Tim Hortons can compensate for that.
- I was thinking about upgrading my Macbook Pro a lot. But even if I do trade-in, I still have to pay an extra 2500 Canadian dollars. I mean that is huge, right? 2k5 for just a color change, 18 extra memory 500G SSD, and 2 more CPU cores. Is it worth it? I mean if my income is ten times like this I would immediately change it for the happy. But I guess it’s just a habit, before I even come close to being able to be comfortable in spending money, I must not waste money on stupid things, like spending 2500 Canadian dollars for a color change of the laptop. I have to suppress my feelings a lot, taking control of my emotions to not waste money. But who knows? if you see I write another article about Macbook Pro M3 then I probably already purchased it.
- Speaking more about using the current Macbook Pro M2. It comes with 16GB memory and 512 SSD. I mean this is barely enough for me to run a few docker containers and a dozen of chrome tabs. And I’m not sure why my disk capacity is always 80% full, probably because of different Anaconda environments, hundred docker images, and Python packages as well as node packages. I never store any photos or movies on my laptop so probably most of the disks are allocated for development works. If I can bump the memory to 32GB or even 48GB and the disk to 2TB, it would be just perfect. I probably will never have to think about optimizing my laptop (like wiping out the images, anaconda environments, and code repositories too often).
- Another thing about purchasing a new MacBook Pro, it’s about choosing the right screen size. I mean I see a lot of feedback about people using 16-inch laptops, once they go with 16-inch they cannot go back to 14-inch, because they think that 14-inch screen estate is too small for them to handle the work. Also, for the 16-inch laptop, you can split the screen easily. So I would say, if you prefer minimalism and want to do most of your work on your laptop alone, then go with a 16-inch, extra screen estate that really helps boost productivity, and also the battery life. But if you have an external monitor like a 27 or 32-inch monitor with 4K resolution, then 14 inches certainly saves desk real estate, and one thing I love about 14 inches is the weight, you can bring it on your bed, so a 14-inch laptop is for you. So just think about it: Do you prefer to use your laptop standalone most of the time, or are you going to use it with an external monitor most of the time?
- Reading the news, here are my 2-cents on the Ukraine war so far. First, the war should be stopped, and people should stop dying, both in Ukraine and in the Middle East. God has to do something about it to stop humans from slaughtering each other, I don’t care who is right or who is wrong, bloodshed must be stopped. But to be frank, life and death is a natural thing of this world. You know, I’m giving an example: if another human, a thief, comes to your door and plans to kill you and rape your wife, what would you do? yes, we kill. So it’s the nature of humans to be bad and good at the same time therefore we just do what we think is right. In this case, whoever starts the war first is likely to be a bad guy (like the French, American, Japanese, and Chinese who came to the Vietnamese home in the past for killing, they were definitely bad). For the current situation, Russians on Ukrainian soil are just weird, and so are Israelians on Palestine’s soil are also weird. I’m saying weird, not bad. Since I am not the person who lives in the situation I cannot understand the reasoning of both sides. But for the current situation, I think Russians are losing, since the European countries are pushing Ukrainians to start attacking Russian borders. Also, Europeans are sending their men to Ukraine, this is the thing that has never happens in the past, but now it’s happening, so I feel like folks are not scared of nuclear threat anymore.
- The last thing of the random thought of the day series is the fingerprint. My fingerprint changes every now and then, and my laptop will never be able to catch up with my continuous fingerprint update. This is strange, I mean why is this happening? Therefore I will always prefer unlocking devices with face ID. I hate typing passwords since it’s the easiest means of exposing credentials and prune to be hacked.