The personal blog of a regular guy

It’s been a year since I’ve left home and started pursuing graduate studies in the United States. It seems like the older I get, the faster time passes. This one year anniversary is the perfect occasion to write my yearly reflections article. Since I had to relocate and settle down in a new place, my first year in graduate school has been quite eventful… when you compare to my years as an undergrad student at least. The article actually starts from the summer of 2010 after I graduated with my bachelor’s. Keep on reading if you want to find out what I’ve been up to in the past year.

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Tonyjiang.com has been on the net for half a decade.

Writing that sentence makes me feel old, but at the same time I do feel a sense of accomplishment for keeping my domain online for five years. Due to my busy life of being a graduate student, I really haven’t done much to my website in the 2010-2011 period, but that doesn’t mean that there is nothing worth noting down. For one thing, traffic and ad revenue underwent some substantial growth. Read on to find out the details.

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The title says it all. Today I noticed my car’s check engine light was on, so I decided to pop open the hood. I wasn’t expecting to find anything since most of the time check engine lights come on because some sensor malfunction, but what I found was a mess inside my engine compartment. There was insulation foam all over the place, and a plastic compartment was clearly chewed open (see pictures). I popped the hood a week ago and the car was perfectly fine, so it must have happened in the last few days. Judging by the damage, the culprit is likely a rodent. There are lots of squirrels where I live, but it could be rats as well. I’m not sure why they suddenly decided to attack my car now given I’ve had my car for three months now and park at the same lot. The good news is that the car still drives, but that doesn’t change the fact that this sucks since it’ll probably cost at least a couple hundred to fix if not more, and who knows if whatever did the damage will return after the repair. Maybe it’s time for me to start shopping around for rodent repellent. In the meantime, I decided to park on the street to see if it’ll stop our little furry enemies from coming back.

The culprit chewed open the plastic box and left pieces of grey foam all over the place.

The engine bay after I cleaned up some of the foam. Notice that there is more damage above the engine (yellow foam).

I survived my first academic year as a graduate student, and my adviser was nice enough to let me have a bit of a vacation before I start my summer research work. My parents came to visit, so it was a family vacation. Over the last three weeks, we went to New York City, Washington DC, Philadelphia, and Boston, so basically the major cities in the northeast/eastern part of the United States. As always, the post contains an account of the trip accompanied by some thoughts and photos.

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Another school semester/term has come and gone. This is my second term as a graduate student, and somehow I managed to survive. So once again this is my thoughts on my courses from last term. Just like the 2010 Fall semester, I took only three courses, but they sure weren’t easy.

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There comes a point in one’s life (especially in North America) when a person buys his/her first car, and I have finally reached that point. I managed to survive my first six months of graduate schools without a car, but it’s inconvenient not having one in a small/medium city where there are lots of highways and not a lot of public transit. After looking for several long months including through the bitterly cold winter, I finally bought a car, and what did I buy:

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It’s time again to write about my last term of studies and the courses I took. This is my first term as a grad student and I managed the survive the term… barely. As a grad student, I didn’t need to take as many courses as an undergrad, but the courses were still handful on top of project work I have to do. I took three courses last term, and here are my thoughts on them:

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I had one of my wisdom tooth extracted about a week ago. I’ve always been resistant to going to the dentist, but the tooth in question was a bit slanted and had a big cavity in it, so that’s why I decided to have it pulled. The extraction process wasn’t too bad since the dentist put in plenty of “freeze” so I couldn’t feel any thing but pressure, and the tooth came out relatively easily. The first day was a little tough though since my saliva still had blood and the freezing took a long time to wear off, but the recovery process has been fine so far. I ate only soft foods like congee, can soup and mashed potato for the first three days and was careful about using the other side of the mouth, and there hasn’t been much pain. There is sensation at the operation site sometimes, and sometimes there is a smell (probably food got stuck in the hole), but I don’t think I’ve developed dry socket anything nasty like that. Hopefully the recovery will continue without hiccups.

This is the first adult teeth that I’ve lost. I still have my other wisdom teeth, and I’m hoping that I can keep them cavity-free so I don’t have to get them pulled. I have my doubts though given that my teeth are quite cavity-prone.

First post of 2011! I hope all of you had a happy new year. For this year’s first post, here is another article documenting my attempt to repair electronics, and this time it’s for the video card of the six year old Athlon XP PC that I built myself. Similar to my last repair article about LCD monitors, the video card was also afflicted by the capacitor plague, and thus I had to get out my soldering iron once again and replace some capacitors. I’m no expert at repairing electronics, so this just goes to show what you can do with a little bit of research, some inexpensive equipment, and the courage to try.

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Yesterday I joined the millions of people across the world who are traveling back home for the holidays. My first term as a graduate student is over and done with, and my adviser was kind enough to let me return home for Christmas and the New Year. My last few days were pretty hectic since I had three final exams on the two days prior to my flight, and I was pretty burnt out by the end of the third exam. I don’t think I did as well as I could have on those exams, but hopefully it’ll be good enough for “A”s. Traveling by air is also a bit of a pain these days (especially since my flights are a couple of hours long), but the fact I get to spend the holiday at home with family is worth it.

As for my plans for my time back… well I don’t really plan on doing anything other than relaxing, enjoying family company, and working on my thesis project. It certainly isn’t warm in Vancouver, but it’s still warmer than the city where my school is located. Having lived in Pacific Northwest for so long, I’m not used to cold temperatures, so coming back home is a way of escaping the cold winter over there.

That’s all I have to say for this post. I hope all of you who read this will have a happy holidays .