A man making two burgers at midnight is undoubtedly loving and caring, as long as you don’t mind him eating both.

I guess I have brought my blog up to code. Now the new version is ready.

One of the biggest changes is that this site is totally static, thanks to Blot.im. This means this site no longer needs a database, which is required by dynamic blogging platforms like WordPress. What’s the point of having no databases? Simply put, the site loads much faster, and the file system is simpler and more maintainable.

On my second day of using Blot, I came across the first bug. I dragged an image to my Google Drive, only to find it automatically became a blog post. This “convenience” turned out to be a nuisance because the image post cannot be removed from my site, even though I have deleted that file from Google Drive. The Blot dashboard doesn’t show the post or the image file. But on the home page, the post is live.

Thank God — it’s not NSFW! But it could be super discomfiting if certain visuals were unintentionally posted this way.

WordPress was my go-to blogging engine in the past 16 years. It’s probably the friendliest solution to both mobile bloggers and non-web-savvy beginners. But over years it has become insufferably cumbersome and sophisticated, to the point where I had to submit a few tickets for bug fixes along with their recent routine updates. The last straw was their most recent update that has corrupted the highly customized child theme I’ve used for about 4.5 years. It’s high time for a change.

After days of painstaking research, I tried and soon gave up on Jekyll, Pelican, and Hugo, among others. For someone heavily relying on mobile devices, or rather the iPhone and the iPad, they are fair-to-middling at best, far from amazeballs.

Having done all the midterms and major assignments, I think it’s time for a good sleep and maybe a brief getaway. It’s reading week anyways. Before doing those, however, I think I should update this page a little bit.

Pressures have been mounting since late July, when I last updated this Now page. Finding a nice place to stay turned out to be far more distressing than I had imagined. Fortunately I have sorted it out. Academically I guess I’m more focused than 90 percent of my classmates. The amount of time I’ve spent on each assignment or lab is significant as I’m striving for perfection. I may finish writing code in two hours and spend the next three days debugging and identifying potential issues.

autumnal thrills 🍂

leaves.jpgthames.jpggoldentree.jpguwofall.jpgparkinglot.jpgpath.jpgfallinham.jpg

When asked about my favourite song from childhood, I’d always mention Home! Sweet Home!, which was written by Henry Bishop in 1823 and sold more than 100,000 copies soon after it was released.

People in Asia may have heard various versions of this song in different languages, but the lyrics collectively — and unsurprisingly — revolve around hearth and home. For someone growing up in a broken home, this song simply struck home.

The arrangement of this recording by Sumi Jo is grandiose yet replete with pathos.

A month after leaving Hamilton, it’s come home to me what it means when people say —

There’s no place like home.

18 days toward the end of the summer semester, I finally got vaccinated against COVID-19. Despite being late to the party, I turned up in the end. Many thanks to my friends who were up for some pep talks and checking in.

With lots of errands to run, August will be hectic: getting my car fixed, finding a new dwelling place near the campus, receiving a second jab followed by a few days’ good rest, planning on the move, packing and unpacking, prepping the new place, etc.

A Telegram Screenshot

I’ve been receiving these “not gonna make my day” types of messages from time to time. Well, I’m sorry that their daughter had to experience this. But at the same time please be aware that some people with Asperger’s are also harassing LGBT+ individuals in a blatantly rude manner. More importantly, some autistic people are members of the LGBT+ community themselves. The overlap between the two identities does exist.

When texting people or posting a status on social media, we often write the word and as & (ampersand) for convenience. But does Python handle and and & the same way?

str1 = "Apple"
a = ("p" in str1) & ("l" in str1)
b = "p" in str1 and "l" in str1
print(a == b)
print(a is b)

OUTPUT
True
True

Many Python learners consider addition and increment to be similar or even the same, like a = a + 1 is basically the same as a += 1. Here are some examples to show you that they’re actually not — when “addition” is actually “concatenation.”

To start off, let’s use the increment operator += to add a name to a roster:

Victoria Day marks the start of summer, but it’s been three weeks into this (un)surprisingly hectic summer session. Two full courses (four half courses) are rendering me so deep in my books that I’ve got very little time to socialize with people, virtually or in real life. Quizzes and assignments are weekly. Zoom meetings are biweekly. Midterms are around the corner. Intellectual stimulation literally happens every single day.

I might be less active on social media than I used to. But please don’t worry. I’m not swamped with work, at least not at this point. LOL. Usually I’m just too absorbed in what I’m doing to take heed of people and things around me.

I came across an apparently simple yet intriguing coding problem:

Given a non-negative integer 𝑥, compute and return the square root of 𝑥.

Since the return type is an integer, the decimal digits are truncated, and only the integer part of the result is returned.

Note: You are not allowed to use any built-in exponent function or operator, such as pow(x, 0.5) or x ** 0.5.

LMAO… If you look up the word “unsearchable” in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, you’ll find both given examples of the word are pertinent to Chinese social media censorship.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

It’s been some 15 years since her second studio album came out. Natalie Nicole Alvarado’s third album Winter, released on January 8, 2021, is not a jaw-dropping work. But it’s always good to hear her sing. Her music has a place in the memories of my college days.

My doctor from the sleep lab called back this afternoon with a report of my sleep study done on November 17th, saying I have developed severe sleep apnea – as predicted by my family doctor and Apple Watch.

According to Johns Hopkins Medicine: