西窗月

你还在我身旁

瀑布的水逆流而上,
蒲公英的种子从远处飘回,变成伞的模样。
太阳从西边升起,落向东方。
子弹退回枪膛,
运动员回到起跑线上,
我交回录取通知书,忘了十年寒窗。
厨房里飘来饭菜的香,
你把我的卷子签好名字,
关掉电视,帮我把书包背上。
你还在我身旁。

Health notes

饮食注意事项

  1. 少食多餐,一定要吃早餐。周末时间也要吃早餐,不要睡懒觉,保持规律作息。

  2. 避免胆固醇含量多的食物

  • 禽蛋,比如鹅蛋、鸭蛋、松花蛋、鹌鹑蛋、鸡蛋等;尤其煎鸡蛋
  • 动物脑,比如猪脑、牛脑、羊脑等;
  • 动物内脏,比如猪心、猪舌、猪肥肉、猪肚、猪肝、猪肾、猪肺、鸡肝、鸭肝、猪大肠、猪夹心肉等;
  • 其它食物:猪肉松、腊肠、肥牛肉、猪排骨、鸭肉、红肠;河蟹、蟹黄、蚬、蚶肉、黄油、凤尾鱼、花鲢、青鱼、虾皮、小虾米。
  1. 减少草酸摄入。菠菜、苋菜、莴笋等富含草酸的蔬菜,烹调前先在沸水中焯一下。

生活习惯

  1. 多喝水。每天喝不少于2000毫升水。

  2. 慢慢减肥,不要过度肥胖;

  3. 适量运动,不要久坐久卧。

  4. 少熬夜,心情抑郁去运动。

Quotes

于是余有叹焉。古人之观于天地、山川、草木、虫鱼、鸟兽,往往有得,以其求思之深而无不在也。夫夷以近,则游者众;险以远,则至者少。
而世之奇伟、瑰怪,非常之观,常在于险远,而人之所罕至焉,故非有志者不能至也 有志矣,不随以止也,然力不足者,亦不能至也。有志与力,而又不随以怠,至于幽暗昏惑而无物以相之,亦不能至也。然力足以至焉,于人为可讥,而在己为有悔;尽吾志也而不能至者,可以无悔矣,其孰能讥之乎?此余之所得也!

一些论文 Tips

  1. 不要使用vspace等奇技淫巧修改table/figure/caption的间距
  2. small, footnotesize 不要乱用,在不同的模板里面对应的字体不同
  3. 在最少留一天的时间来进行删改,最后一天不能对文中内容做全面大改
  4. 第一版提交最少是要提前12小时提交,看可能有什么问题;这一版可以只添加自己为作者

  5. 一定要提前6小时再交一版,这个时候,page limit一定有好符合标准了

  6. paper的writing,语法错误,必须自己重头再过一遍,尤其是别人改过之后,可能有一些不一致的地方,切记

  7. chinglish 和一定要不得,不确定用法的时候可以Google一下看有多少结果。

我的爷爷

我亲爱的爷爷今天走了,去天上陪奶奶了。

小学时候的记忆已经模糊不清了,
我只记得每年到过年的时候,
爷爷让我们把老师发的奖状拿回家。
三十的时候,
会用图钉把奖状订到墙上。
爷爷家客厅两边的墙上,
贴满了我和我哥哥,还有堂妹的奖状,
从小学,到初中,到高中,到大学。
爷爷说,这都是他的骄傲。
大学的时候,
我申请到了一次暑假交流的机会,
是留学基金委支持的。
我跟我爷爷说的时候,
把手机上的pdf给我爷爷看,
爷爷高兴的大笑。
我爸爸把红红的电子通知彩印了出来,
用图钉贴到了墙上,
就像我之前所有的奖状一样。

爷爷家有很多老书,
小时候的我经常去爷爷家看,
从论语,孟子,古文观止,
到十大将军十大元帅传奇故事,
很多事情的第一印象,
都是从爷爷家的书中得来的。

爷爷家的客厅两边还挂着地图,
一张中国地图,
一张世界地图。
我的爷爷给我讲历史故事的时候,
都会让我在地图上看看
具体是在什么地方。
一个个地名不再是抽象的名词,
而是变成了离我多远多近的地方。
大学毕业要出国的时候,
爷爷让我在世界地图上给他指我要去哪,
太平洋的对面,
陌生的圣地亚哥,
爷爷记住这些名字,
也成为了他和他的老伙计们的谈话中的地方。

初中高中的暑假,
基本上中饭晚饭都是到爷爷家去吃。
早上学习完之后,到爷爷家吃个饭。
下午睡个午觉之后,
三点多再去爷爷家吃西瓜。
热热的太阳和冰冷甘甜的西瓜,
是我对夏天最深的记忆。
学习不忙的时候,
爷爷奶奶会骑着电动三轮载着我,
绕着小县城转一圈,
有时候向南到新城区,
有时候向西到老丘堆。
绕完回家的时候,
有时会从菜市上带半只烤鸭。
我想我喜欢啃鸭脖鸭头的习惯,
也是在爷爷家养成的。

大学毕业那年,
奶奶走了,
爷爷的身体也变差。
暑假的时候,
等待开学的我,
就会开着三轮,
载着我的爷爷,
就像小时候他载着我和奶奶一样,
在县城里兜风。
我一边开,
爷爷给我指这里以前叫什么地方。

19年回家,爷爷在院子门口等我

出国读书以后,
和爷爷见面的机会更少了。
我办了个可以达国际电话的套餐,
有空就和爷爷打个电话,
问一下爷爷身体怎么样了。
每次爷爷最关心的还是我的学业,
希望我能做出一些成绩。
前几天和在病房里的爷爷视频,
爷爷的精神不太好了,
但是思路还是很清晰,
还是一如既往的关心我的学习。
爷爷,我会努力的。

爷爷!安息吧!
希望您在天上庇佑着我们!

听爸爸的话

今天和家人视频的时候,我问了我爸爸一个问题:

你觉得你这辈子遇到的最难的事是什么?

下面是我爸爸回答里的一些话。(括号里是我的标注)

人在不同阶段的目标是不一样的,对应的困难也不尽相同。如果你的目标最开始就很低,那你可能就不会遇到什么困难了。

我觉得这辈子最难的时候,是我高考没考上的时候。(我爸爸高考了两次,都没考中。)当时考上的同学后来都混得不错。那个时候真是困难啊。在家里也没有出路,不知道干什么,和家里的关系也很僵。

后来结婚成了家,有了你们俩。最开始的时候家里是真的比较困难,但是日子不也是慢慢过来了。还记得你小时候我骑着车载着你和你哥哥去上学吗?你坐在前面杠上。那个时候家里还冒(方言:欠)着钱,最后不也都还清了。

我爸爸骑了十多年的二八杠(网图)

一辈人总会有一辈人的困难。虽然父亲没有明说,但是我能感受到,在高考失败了以后,他放低/改变了自己的目标,把更多的精力投入到我和我哥的教育中。希望我和我哥不重蹈他当年的覆辙。

我又问我爸爸觉得我现在难吗?

你现在还在上学,有啥好难的。现在你读了好的大学,学到了一些本事,总是能有出路的。

你现在的阶段,还是学习的阶段,希望你能够达到你自己的目标。现在我就是想帮忙,也帮不上什么忙了。

听完父亲的话,觉得心里平静了很多。困难总是有的,希望在我降低对自己的目标之前,能够再多走一点,多年以后回想时没有任何的抱怨或懊悔,平平静静地向我的后辈娓娓道来。

Intern Life in the Bay Area

I worked in the bay area for a cloud database team in the last 12 weeks. It is my first time to work in
a real industry company. Life is quite different from grad student’s life at school. Just leave some brief notes here.

meetings

Scrum meeting: The team usually has a scrum meeting every morning 9:30am. Every one will call in the Chime meeting. The team members usually mention three simple things: what’s your progress yesterday, what you plan to do today, and anything you need help from the manager or other team members. Just several sentences is enough. This helps the manager keeps track of your progress, and can help if you need. If something worths a longer talk, the manager will talk to you later in the day.

(Since it’s pretty early in the morning, most people are still on the highway, and it’s kind of dangerous to meet and drive at the same time, the manager change the time to 10am later.)

I like this scrum meeting, it’s not like a formal meeting that you need to prepare for a long time, but you can get real-time feedback and make the goals very clear every day.

1 on 1: As an intern, the manager pretty much does not count on you for anything. You need to schedule a 1-on-1 meeting with the manager. At first, I was too shy or scared to schedule a meeting with the manager. However, I do find it’s pretty chill. Just send a calendar invitation. The manager actually like motivated persons. We have 4 to 5 talks during my 12-week internship, and we talked a lot besides the internship work.

On call

On call is the thing most engineers complain about. Since AWS does not have a dedicated team for on-call, the team who develops the code owns the code - all the team members will on call intern. If it’s a small team like 5-7 members, you will have this every one or two weeks.

I learned that they do have on-call team in Ireland or somewhere else to mitigate the workload.

The on call was divided into two levels, primary on call and secondary on call. Primary-on-call is responsible for a whole day, 8 am to 8 am the next day. If they can not solve the ticket in 20 minutes, they pass it to secondary-on-calls. So the primary-on-call needs to solve many common problems or easy problems, with the help of knowledge base or on-call wiki.

Secondary-on-call duration is for one whole week - they need to solve some problems that primary-on-call can not solve in a short time. They usually need more investigation.

Overall, the on-call workload is pretty high. That is not the fun part. I asked my mentor if they have some tools to help them with the on-call work, since most time the diagnosis rely on coredump and gdb. The mentor told me they were trying to automate some solutions from the wiki, but they still need much human effort.

Design

My project was not very well designed in the beginning. So I need to work with the mentor and PE in our team to define the work until the third week of the internship. Later, I spend tons of time writing the docs about the design and start the implementation around the sixth week. Since the software I worked on is still close-source, I don’t think I should touch the details of the code. However, I feel that the overall design is made by higher-level engineers (like Principle Engineer) or the managers, while the micro design for the implementation is determined by the SDEs. The scope for the SDEs are still very limited.

Bay area fun

TODO: I will probably write more things about travels in the bay area when I’ve got more time. Most pics are on the instagram.

Switching from iPhone to Android

My iPhone 6s has been with me for 3 years. I love iPhone but it’s time to let it go : (1) 16G storage is really a pain for me even though all the photos are stored on cloud and (2) the battery can not last for a half day even though I got a new battery.

At this time, pixel 3 is on big sale, so I plan to give Android a try, as well as Google project Fi.

One month after I switched from iPhone to Android, I list the following pros and cons for the Pixel 3. My views have been changed a lot after six months. If you want to know my newest comments, scroll down :)

Pro:

  1. Good camera. I shot the following pic near the California Temple. Really good night sight. Even though it only has one camera in the back, the complex pic tuning algorithm shipped with Pixel makes the night pic even better than iPhone 8 (even iPhone X).
  1. Google assistant better than Siri.
  2. OLED screen. The color is really amazing when you switched from a Phone which is three years old;
  3. Unlimited Google original photos storage. As a heavy Google photo user, this indeed saves me some money!
  4. Airpod. The sound effects of Airpod seems to be better with pixel. The connection speed is the almost the same as with iPhone, and the double-click control still works.
  5. More customizable features like lock screen, and widgets! I really missed the widget.
  6. Charge really fast. 18W charging makes 5W iphone charging a joke.

Cons:

  1. Android emoji is too ugly.
  2. Two fancy front camera useless to me.
  3. Swipe up twice to show all apps, extremely stupid.
  4. No front touch ID.
  5. Really bad icons of the apps. The default is round and small, but some icons are really bad in this style.
  6. App store does not have enough apps with high quality. And the default apps have really bad quality. I really missed the iOS calculator and iOS voice memo.
  7. Chrome on iOS is even better than that on Android. For example, I really love the gesture control of Chrome on iOS, e.g. close a tab with gesture. I really can not understand why they do not have the same feature on Android.
  8. Google assistant (GA) doesn’t support Chinese. = = A great pain when Google assistant can not recognize my poor English. GA also can not recognize Chinese names even though I have them in the contacts. :(

I was expecting the new Pixel 3 can last for two years, but it will probably not according to current experience.

Main complaints

  1. WeChat fits poorly on Pixel 3. Or the Android version of WeChat is poorly designed!!
  • WeChat now eats 3GB out of 64GB storage on my pixel 3, and I can not clean the cache (mainly old pics in the friends circle). If I want to clean the cache, I have to re-install the app, which means all my chat records will be lost. However, on iOS I can choose to clean all the cache and only keep the chat records.
  • My Pixel feels like a hot potato when I do video chatting in WeChat. Even my old iPhone 6s does not have this problem.
  1. Battery issues. The battery can not last for a whole day with normal use. This is only six months after I got my new Pixel!!! I have to get a separate charging line in work place. (The wireless charing suite was unreasonably high.)

These two issues make me feel really bad for the six-month Android experience. And I believe more issues will appear in the next few months. Even though I hate notch screen, I am now considering go back to iPhone, probably with a cheap XR.

墨西哥续签

本文仅仅是个人在墨西哥蒂华纳renew F1 Visa的经历记录,绝非指南或者攻略,仅供各位看官参考。

在跑了三次(或者四次)蒂华纳之后,我终于在今天拿到了自己的新签证并回到了美国。虽然只签到了一年,但对于明年回国回家应该是够了。结合去年(2018)去蒂华纳签证的经历,我把个人的经验在这里分享。

参考网上攻略

行前在墨西哥签证,我主要参考了以下两篇文章,对于一些常见的问题都有了一些回答。

第一次Tijuana签证

2018年五月第一次去墨西哥签证,相对来说比较顺利。周一去ASC拍照,拍照的时候预约是12点,但是11点就到了。ASC的工作人员也让我们提前进去拍照了,看来不需要严格遵守时间的要求。

周二早上面签,我们住在了大使馆附近的City Express Junior。距离比较近,走过去大概12分钟。我们预约的8:30的签证,但是7:50就到了,工作人员让我们又等了半小时才开始排队。签证过程比较顺利,拿到了一年签。visa上面有一行
Original clearance received XXXXXX,是一个一年以内的日期。可能是因为上次check不到一年,这次就无需check了?

周二下午和周三上午再Tijuana的革命大道和海边附近玩了一下,除了建筑和车破了一些,感觉和San Diego没啥差别。

周三下午3点拿到签证,立刻前往Otay Mesa的边检去过关。记得是以新Visa入境,需要和border的officer说清楚,要交$6.00 去搞个新i94,请准备好现金。排队办i94的人很多,可能要排1小时以上。

第二次签证

2019年5月去签证,过程就非常曲折了。下面显示了我四次从Otay Mesa的日期。

第一次是周五去ASC拍照,早上8点出发,过关之后很快10点左右就到了ASC去拍照。拍完照在旁边的Los Arcos 吃了个饭,感觉还不错。

周一早上7:30去签证,我果断被check,交了study plan, cv,导师cv,还有一堆东西。然后要求我提供一张5535表格。我当时拿回护照,然后赶紧去Otay Mesa边境过关。这时我的Visa有效期只有一天了,虽然我的I20还有很久,但是边境的officer看起来非常困扰。然后让我去办i94。在我进小黑屋办i94的时候,那个officer主要问了我是不是还是同一个program和我为什么去墨西哥。我当时全部实话实说,他打电话请示了一下长官说我可以进美国,不需要新i94。心惊胆战的我赶紧跑了。officer提醒我,我买的那张空白的i94的卡不能带走,但是可以专卖给别人。我就赶紧卖给后面排队买卡的老墨了。回去之后感觉填5535表格,把15年的travel history和public media都写了。此时是5月20。

6.14号,在三周之后,我接到了一个来自马里兰的电话,通知我可以去贴签了,问我下周是什么时间有空。我立刻约了下周一早上。

周一(6.17)早上,我起了个大早,7点钟就到了边境。没想到我在边境被墨西哥的officer拒绝入境。我当时的美签已经过期,也没有有效加拿大签证或者申根签证。之前从未听说有人被墨西哥拒绝入境的,我当时就慌了。如果我被墨西哥拒绝入境,一定是需要通过美国边检再进入美国的,如果美国的CBP不让我进,那我可能就要被遣返(deport)回中国了。

当时越想越乱,然后被墨西哥的officer待到了美国的边检那里。万万没想到我碰到一个非常好的officer,看了我护照和I20,告诉我可以入境,也无需新的i94。没想到那么顺利,惊魂落魄的我赶紧进了美国。

被陆路拒绝入境的话,我只能尝试打车或者开车去墨西哥了。在咨询了一下之前开车去墨西哥的同学之后,我决定开车过边境去提华纳。没想到完全没有人查,就像停车场一样,自动拍了一下车然后栏杆就开了。旁边几个墨西哥officer有说有笑,完全没有查。

我开车到了美国大使馆,旁边有一个停车场,收费50比索或者3美元。这个时候还是8点,我把包寄存了在大使馆门口的车那里(2.25美元),进去交了护照和I20,被告知第二天才能取。我开车去了附近之前住过的City Express Junior,把车停在了那里,有围墙且不收费。在旁边的Starbucks坐到了下午三点,去大使馆又问了一下,确定当天取不到之后又订了一天的宾馆。

第二天下午取到了护照之后(拿到了一年签证),赶紧开去边境。因为看不懂路牌,在Google map的导航下开错了很多次,最终终于到了边境。开车排队一个半小时之后终于到了车辆边检。我和officer强调了我是新的签证,需要i94。officer就让我往前开到了一个检查的停车场。旁边都是被要求开后备箱检查的小货车,我一个F1学生显得格格不入。因为有有效visa和20之后,我一点都不慌。在咨询了友善的officer之后,我又去买了i94的卡,排队办i94。又排了一个小时之后,终于办好了手续。开车过境相对于陆路入境来说,主要是多了开车排队入境的时间。我开到旁边的星巴克,点了一杯抹茶拿铁,惊魂未定的回家了。

总结 & Tips

第二次签证的过程异常曲折,让我有些不敢再去墨西哥签证了(真香预定)。有一些个人觉得重要的事项总结如下:

  1. 更换新签证之后,入境需要新i94。有很多边境的officer其实并不知道应该怎么弄。
  2. 进入墨西哥确实是需要有效的美国/加拿大/申根签证,或者墨西哥签证。但是由于墨西哥边境一般不查,所以很多人(比如我)并没有在意。其实提前办一个墨西哥签证还是挺好的,如果美国边境不让入境还是可以待在墨西哥。
  3. 如果签证已过期且没有拿到新签证,在边境闯关回美国目前还没有见到失败的,但是风险依然存在。我见过的最悲惨的小伙伴是第一天被告知approve,可以第二天来取。结果回去之后通知被check了,第二天回去拿护照准备回美国的时候发现已有的签证被cancel了。这种情况只能在边境找officer碰运气了 :(
  4. 关于步行还是开车去墨西哥,其实还是推荐步行的。在墨西哥打车真的很便宜。开车的话回美国排队很久,1.5小时已经算比较短的了。但是开车来墨西哥没人查是真的。不过也有听说开车来墨西哥被查的,概率较小。
  5. 关于5535 check,在国内之前有很多3个月以上的案例,本人能3个星期拿到实属幸运。也有小伙伴等了3个月毫无消息的。不过和国内比,去墨西哥签证能在美国等,不会影响学业。

签证的时候真的是体会到了人在异乡为异客的感觉,身份的限制对一个F1 student真是太大了。最后祝大家都能拿到签证!