Thoughts

Introduction A floor desk is a desk which requires you to sit on the floor. They are usually lower to the ground. I’ve always had a pretty big vendetta against chairs. With the amount of articles, videos, and research done showing how bad they are for our posture, you’re most likely sitting in one anyways because – how else are you supposed to work? Four months ago, I moved to Seattle and I had to furnish my apartment from scratch. I knew I’d be working from home a lot so I definitely needed a desk setup that I was happy with. After everything I heard about chairs, I really wasn’t motivated to pay a lot for the traditional desk + chair set up. After all, if I’m going to spend 8+ hours a day on it, is there really no other healthier/more sustainable option? ...

Learning without continuously doing makes mistakes hit harder. … We always think that learning is a good thing. For the last three years, I’ve definitely thought this way, and tried to learn as much as I could in my time at Penn and outside of it. But I’m starting to realize that some of my learning has actually set me back a few steps, and has not only taken away from time I could’ve spent with my friends and family, but has actually made it harder for me to get better at new things. Now that I’m finally starting to understand what this bad learning is, I definitely don’t want others to fall down the same path as me. So today, we’ll talk about what this bad learning is, why I think I did it, and how to overcome it. ...

A running list of things I like. All of these things have made a pretty big impact on my quality of life this year, and I hope some of these can for you too. Food Don Memo’s Chicken Burrito McDonald’s McChicken Lucy Ho’s Azu Chicken Fried Rice Platt Hot Chocolate Software Typora - A way faster/cleaner alternative to Word Alfred (universal copy paste feature is unreal) Notion Whimsical (for diagrams) TickTick iTerm2 Books/Readings Atomic Habits - James Clear The Last Lecture - Randy Pausch The Dip - Seth Godin Westgate, E. C. (2020). Why Boredom Is Interesting Courseload CIS 555 - First CIS class that truly made me feel ownership of the code I wrote for homeoworks. No implementation stubs, etc. OIDD 490 - First solid introduction to behavior psychology + behavior change for good OIDD 245 - Really taught me how to go out and get things done on my own in the data science world (i.e. web-scraping data + getting good insights) Music The Blue Stones Lil Wayne Oh Wonder Maître Gims Misc Z-lib for free books and the iPhone Books app for a quality reading experience. Netlify + Hugo + Markdown for making it super easy + almost free to make this blog (Shout-out github student pro-pack for a free domain for one year) Healthy Minds Meditation Program: bringing a scientific approach to behavior change Learn X in Y Minutes

Like a lot of people this past year, I’ve been forced to eat many more meals at home rather than outside as a result of the pandemic. Moreover, from the increased number of meals made at home, my grocery store bills have been way higher, and I’ve realized that eating healthy is actually really expensive. For many who don’t have the privilege of eating healthy, how are they doing? A better question could also be, how are we doing to help them especially in these unprecedented times? ...

Introduction I love Thursdays. At Penn especially, Thursdays for most of us are when we’re done with our classes for the week, and we can just max and relax. When it’s Thursday, it feels like the next school week is a forever away and is a problem for the “future me” to solve. In the same vain, there’s so many things right now that we constantly delegate to a new and better “future us” to solve, at way bigger time scales. If I asked you to imagine your yourself 10 years from now, what would you think? Would you be smarter, more confident, better rested? Would life be more stable/fun (even more than it already is)? Chances are, if you’re like me and a bunch of other people, in ten years, so much would change that you probably see yourself as more settled, and all of those unsolved problems (career, love life, etc.) would have just magically been solved. Also, for a smaller number of people, the sheer amount of stuff you would have done in ten years probably makes you think that you’d be living such a different life that you might little in common with who you are now. ...