As an introvert who prefers to stay indoors most of the time, there are goals that I want to achieve but within myself rather than achieve it by going outside. I always look back to my past for reference, to find lessons learned or patterns that make me become a better person. Being better, it’s all about better health, better financial status, and knowing more about the world around us, especially becoming an expert in my own field, of course, I always want to learn new skills, as long as it’s not become a distraction. But most important of all, is being able to stay balanced. I used to blame other people for making me unhappy, like blaming family and girlfriends. I mean they are important for sure since in most cases, they are the only ones I want to speak with, you know, for socializing purposes. I don’t need many friends, of course, if we have friends like we used to have in high school, to hang out and have fun and gossip, it will obviously make you a happier person. But over time, we would realize that to grow and to be a better person, to have more wisdom, no one can help you better than yourself. So being a reliable person is like top priority at all times.
To sum up, what I have changed so far in 7 months, I have doubled my stock capital gains in the last 7 months, I spend money responsibly, and I eat food more responsibly. I don’t overspend, one thing I learned is to keep a minimum of 1000 cash all the time, cash I mean 1000 CAD in your primary cheque account. It’s because I have a scheduled transfer to my stock /ETF account (mostly TFSA). Although sometimes I do need to spend money a bit more like I have to buy my own hair dryer, my own vacuum cleaner, and after canceling the gym membership, I realized that this winter time, I almost never go to the gym, so I buy a pull-up bar, a push-up bars. I bought a coffee machine, and a mini fridge for drinks that I never use, I bought a griller also, it’s called a waffle maker I think. I bought extra backlights for my bike to improve my visibility when I do biking in the dark, also having more than one backlight as a backup is also important in case the primary light is broken or out of battery. I don’t bike that often anymore, just because it’s colder now, it’s under 10 Celcius degrees most of the time, so I feel like it’s better to stay at home for the next 5 months or so. November, December, January, February and March. Will I be crazy by staying at home like that? Don’t worry, I still have some friends back in Vietnam to speak with, if I do not have anyone, I will talk with my dad. I still maintain a connection with people, I know that without talking to anyone, it will be a disaster. Overall, my spending is still at an acceptable level, but I feel like I do spend money on hobbies sometimes like the fridge is a waste of money for sure. And if I can stop buying snacks, that would not only save me money but also improve my health. I’m trying to clean up all my foods (by consuming them) before I make the next grocery purchase. For now, my pattern consists of mostly beef, chicken thighs, berries, yogurt, orange juice, diet soda, potato, bread, and noodle cups. I’m still seeking less processed food, I used to consume a lot of cold cuts, and sausages.. then I realized that it’s too much fat and did not even taste good, I stopped buying them. Cutting down on refined carbs like bread and noodle cups is also important as well. Anyway, I do try to enjoy life from time to time by buying stuff and eating different kinds of foods. But one thing that is significantly different from my life in Vietnam, is that I extremely rarely eat out: from 5 times a week to 2 times a month.
From this point, if you were my friend, you would care about my relationship, because you would think it’s one aspect of life that makes you happy right? It’s correct, having a relationship is 3rd stage of the hierarchy of needs, it’s just behind food, clothing, housing, and security (physical, and financial). I do not know any girls here in Canada. Over 50% of the population (I read somewhere) are immigrants, in my city, and I don’t like to make friends with South Asian people, even native people, I just don’t feel like having a connection to convert them into close friends. I mean, I can talk to them, but hey, even in Vietnam I don’t even talk to Hanoians or Vietnamese much, it’s not that I discriminate or try to be isolated, I just don’t feel like I want to talk. It’s my genetics. Of course, if you want to gossip with me, I do want to do that from time to time, especially on a nice weather day, outdoors, when I want to go out, but most of the time, I want to stay in my room, writing blogs like this. Sounds weird right? But to be frank, I would state this again and again, the only one who can be really close to my heart, is my loved one, my future girlfriend / future wife. That’s why I’m quite selective in terms of finding a partner. She must have the wisdom and share similar thoughts with me. In terms of saving, investments, hard work, family first, good hygiene, taking care of health, etc. I’m not perfect but we want to be better together, right? We don’t even need to be perfect, we just need to set a goal to be better, happier, that’s all.
Other than that, I still have a bunch of Udemy courses I want to take, recently I spent a huge effort in learning to improve observability in the system, like traffic monitoring and tracing and so on. Things like the site and open telemetry are the tools that I’m trying to master. Maybe I will have a blog post about that. You see, I have been thinking about building my own K8S cluster here in Canada for a while. I have my network system set up, but the issue is that the wifi or internet here is not stable enough for my network to live. So if I have my own cluster, it’s going to cost me a minimum of 2000 CAD, which I think I could just upgrade my own laptop and install Minikube instead. And you know what, you can even use Minikube in your Mac and external storage with NAS and NAS CSI. I thought that was the most convenient solution. But as I want to minimize effort more often, I think about multiple clusters, you know, for different projects. So it’s better to have virtualization on my own machine. Maybe use Parallel to create VMs, and then each VM will be a minikube cluster? The most important thing is that these minikube clusters must be run in X86 machines rather than ARM like we have in Apple silicon chip machines. Overall, it’s still a cost-effective solution I want to think about, the lesson learned in the past is that, as a one-man team, I have to minimize the amount of work I need to do, you know, to use time more effectively. since we have a lot of valuable things and priorities to do.