It’s been almost a month since my last post, so here is another round up of stuff I’ve been doing to keep life interesting. And this starts off with jumping out of an airplane.
Camping for the First Time, and More
I’ve been in NC for a year now. That sure was quick. To celebrate my first year in North Carolina (at least from my perspective :mrgreen: ), I went camping in the Outer Banks with a group of people. For those of you who are not familiar with NC, the Outer Banks is a string of narrow barrier islands on the eastern coast of the state, and they are known for their beaches and vacation homes. It was definitely a good way to mark my first year in NC. I also did a few other fun things other than camping, which I’ll mention in this post as well.
An Obituary for My Manga/Anime Blog
This is the first post in a while that is not about me visiting places and having fun. Up until yesterday, I had a blog called A Product of Wasted Time in which I wrote about anime and manga, and it was hosted on Blogger. That blog is now no longer exists because Blogger had recently received a number of DMCA complaints about my blog for copyright violations. Apparently just writing about particular anime episodes and manga chapters is infringement. I have never shared full episodes or chapters on my blog; I only write about the series I was following. At most, I had a couple of screenshots or one/two pages of a chapter included per post so I can put funny captions. But hey, I understand Blogger has the right to police their service, and I’m not mad about having the blog deleted. But still, R.I.P., A Product of Wasted Time.
Out and About
I’ve been back from my vacation in Canada for a few weeks now. Work is busy these days, but I still try to continue my weekend warrior ways and explore places nearby… and even a little further away. Here are the pictures and highlights from the last couple of weekends.
Canadian Rockies Road Trip
Two weeks ago I flew back home to Vancouver for vacation, and during said vacation I took part in a family road trip through the Canadian Rockies. I’ve been a to Banff and Lake Louise a long time ago when I was a kid, and it was about time to revisit those beautiful places. Also, my family has never visited Jasper National Park, so that was part of the trip too. And we also stopped by Kelowna to taste some Okanagan wine. We had a great trip and saw some of the most beautiful scenery you’ll find in Canada. This post is my account of the trip with plenty of photo highlights.
Random Outings
Just thought I post some of the fun stuff that I’ve been doing in North Carolina. I’m actually back home for vacation, but it’s a short vacation. I’ll post about the family road trip I took with my parents in a later post. As the title indicates, this is just highlights of random fun outings I’ve had while living in North Carolina. Start by watching the video below.
Power System State Estimation using a Direct Non-Iterative Method
Today I share a paper that I’ve been working on for the last 3 years. This is the first research journal paper that I’ve ever published, so it is a personal milestone. I post it here just to show that my PhD studies weren’t completely unproductive, given how most PhD students usually have a few journal papers on their CV when they graduate. The topic of this paper is the major topic in PhD dissertation, and I also have an earlier conference paper on this topic. It’s been a long time coming for this paper, and I’m glad we finally got the paper published. Hopefully I’ll have a few more publication as I continue to work in the power industry. Read below for the abstract and link to access the full paper.
Replacing My Car’s Engine and Cabin Air Filters
Today I just replaced my car’s engine and cabin air filters, because they were due for replacement according to the maintenance booklet. This is the first time I did any of the maintenance myself on my current car. I had replaced the engine air filter on my old car, but my current RAV4 is nothing like the ML350 that I had, so this is a new “experience”.
Long Time, No Post
I realized I haven’t updated this blog for several months. Just posting to show that I’m still alive and kicking. It’s not that I have been working so hard that I didn’t have time to post, but I just haven’t done anything that I thought was worth posting on its own. This doesn’t mean I haven’t been doing anything. I try be out and about on the weekends, especially now that the warmer and nicer weather of spring is upon us here in North Carolina. I visited a lot of the local parks, and I’ve tried a number of restaurants. I don’t know if I can be classified as a foodie since I don’t think my taste buds are very discerning, but I like trying new restaurants and I love delicious food. I haven’t really traveled outside of the area I live… at least not for fun. I had business trips, but I can’t really do touristy stuff when I am on the clock.
Below are some photos of some of the fun stuff I’ve done over the last couple of months.
A Low-Rank Matrix Approach for the Analysis of Large Amounts of Power System Synchrophasor Data
I was randomly looking at my Google Scholar account and saw that a conference paper with my name got published, and so I’m sharing the paper on my website. The paper was for the 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, and it’s something that I worked on when I was still at RPI. I only helped with a section of the paper, and hence my name is pretty far down the author’s list. Still, it’s never a bad thing to have more items to put on my publications list, and a sincere thank you to my talented co-authors for their hard work. The topics covered in this paper is actually something that I find very interesting. The ever larger amounts of power systems data produced by synchrophasor devices produces problems for analysis and storage, and the ideas outlined in this paper have potential in alleviating these issues. Read below for the abstract and link to the full paper from the conference website.