It’s been almost 3 months since I’ve posted here so it’s time again to share what I’ve been up to. The warmer and less rainy weather in Spring meant more opportunities to go hiking and enjoy the great outdoors of the Pacific Northwest. Here are some photo highlights of my adventures through spring of 2019.
I ended up getting an unexpected new laptop. True story. I was happy with my 2.5-yr old Dell Latitude E7270, but an issue popped up and I ended up with a newer Latitude 7390 2-in-1 as a warranty exchange. Here is what I thought of the replacement and a quick comparison to the E7270.
Other than working and hanging around the Pacific Northwest, I also recent took a family trip to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon. I haven’t been to Las Vegas since high school, and have never been to the Grand Canyon before. It was a fun trip, and here are some highlights.
I haven’t posted here since my big road trip to move across the country from Raleigh NC to the Seattle WA area, and that’s more than 3 months ago. During this time, winter has come and gone, and here are just some photo (and video) highlights of what I have been up to during my first winter in the Puget Sound region.
I’ve accepted a new job in the Seattle area, and this means moving from the Triangle region of North Carolina all the way across America to the Pacific Northwest. I could have just flew and had everything shipped, but taking a road trip across the USA has always been in my bucket list, and this was the perfect opportunity. I ended up taking a 12 day road trip with family across the continent and saw a lot of interesting and beautiful places along the way.
Our trip route took me from Morrisville, North Carolina to Seattle, Washington through 12 states and around 3400 miles. I had to do all of the driving and therefore chose one of the shorter routes. It was still plenty of miles through the plains to the mountains, and thanks to the unpredictable November weather, we had to drive through rain, snow and high winds (not all at the same time). It was a tough drive at times, but we made it to our destination in one piece. Keep reading for the highlights of my road trip across the USA.
Looks like 2018 will end up as a year of big changes for me. I quit my job as power systems engineer that I worked for more than 4 years, and I am going to try my hand at a different industry. I am taking a chance with the move, but the potential upsides of the opportunity was too good for me to pass up. As for my old job, it was definitely a valuable experience and I learned a lot. Things didn’t always go smoothly, but it was my first full-time job and I’ll always remember the times I spent there. In this day and age, changing jobs every 4-5 years is pretty common, so it was about time for me to make my next move as well. I am currently in the processing of preparing for the long distance move, and I’ll be taking some time to travel before I start my new job. I am excited about what the future will bring. Wish me luck.
August has rolled around past us already, and that means TonyJiang.com is another year older. This website you are reading right now has been online for a dozen years 
Isn’t that amazing 
Ok, maybe not that amazing, but 12 years is not too shabby.
Just like the last few years, I don’t have much to update on the website, since I didn’t work on it very much. I’ve been busy with work and other things. Hopefully I’ll find some time at least to paint the backgrounds for this blog. As with the last few years, the traffic and ad revenue are still on the downward trend. If I learned anything from my anime/manga blogging days, it’s that you have to keep creating relevant content to get readership, and I certainly haven’t been doing that. My little travel and gadget blog posts are mostly for my own amusement, after all. Still, thanks to everyone who visited during the past year, and onwards to another year of TJ Online.
It’s the middle of September already. Although it still quite warm where I live, summer is pretty much over, and it’s time again to recap the fun and adventure that I’ve had in the past three months or so.
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Drones have become more and more common over the last 5 years, and I finally got into the game. The drone I got is the Tenergy TDR Sky Beetle. As with a number of my gadgets, I won the Sky Beetle from an online sweepstakes. With a retail price of about $45, the Sky Beetle is a neat little drone that has some tricks up its sleeve. Read on to find out my first impressions of the Sky Beetle.
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The conference paper that I presented at the 2018 IEEE PES T&D Expo in Denver has been published online, and I’m happy to share it here. This paper is related to the non-iterative state estimation method that I’ve worked on during my grad school and at my current job, so I did put a lot of time and effort for the method to get to this point. As usual, this paper is probably only interesting to those in the electric power industry, in particular to those who are interested in synchrophasor applications. Read below for the abstract and link to the full paper.