website

Well, I skipped a few days…I realized I was able to post pretty consistently these past two weeks because I would write my blog posts during class (and last weekend, I wrote them on the Shinkansen, so effectively the same thing as class). However, this was a long weekend, and I was pretty busy without enough alone time + access to computer. I’ll be perfectly honest, it wasn’t because I didn’t have time, though. I definitely could’ve squeezed something in each day. But something about the environment influences what I tend to do. When I’m at home with the most freedom, I find I either prefer to work or end up completely slacking off and browsing the internet. When I’m out and about, it somehow feels a bit too degenerate to just be browsing the internet in class or at a cafe, but there’s a bit too much going on to go into work hyperfocus-mode, so blog-writing is the perfect activity. (Yeah, I guess I could just pay attention in class, but that would just be too logical.)

After a month-and-a-half-long haitus, I’ve finally returned! While admittedly I wasn’t occupied every single second of every day from the end of February till now, it felt like there was a constant stream of things to do and I was struggling to pick up writing and publishing again. I have so much I want to share, from some of the more significant activities we’ve been up to the past few weeks, to more small nuggets/slice-of-life-esque things that I desperately want to capture, but I’m still figuring out how to best convey less tangible things like subtle feelings of simple joys or small frustrations via this blog. It’ll take me a while to go through the backlog of experiences, but for now, I’ll just give an overview of what I’ve been up to over the past month-and-a-half.

So, I clearly haven’t been keeping up with my once-a-day goal despite the blog being on my mind a lot. I’ve been thinking about this for a bit and I think the main reason is because I haven’t made the “why” component of the blog as clear to myself as much as the “how”. I will often spend idle time throughout my day thinking about what I want to write, but when it comes to actually writing it down, I find it difficult to effectively convey what I’m feeling or thinking while also trying to capture what I’ve been doing, and on top of all of that, in a way that people who have been reading my blog might find interesting or entertaining.

Hi all, my apologies for the short hiatus - I was experiencing some technical difficulties (Github Actions randomly broke on me), and admittedly I was also recovering from travel, school, and life, but I do want to stick to my one-post-a-day goal, even if it is back-dated. I’m about a week behind, so I’ll be making 2 posts a day for the next week - one from the previous week and one from today (yesterday) which might be a little confusing. If you want to read them chronologically with how the events occurred vs the order in which I wrote the posts, maybe come back in a week to read them all.

New life post coming up soon, however as I mentioned at the end of my last post, I hit my free git-lfs limit (it was pretty low) which means I needed to find a new media solution in order to upload more videos. I asked good ol’ ChatGPT for help, and it recommended Cloudflare R2 (storage) + Cloudflare CDN (Content Delivery Network to decrease bandwidth usage). Was pretty easy to set up (~1 hr for bad-at-following-instructions noob like me), and it seems to be free as long as I don’t exceed the R2 storage/bandwidth limits, but if I do, I think it’ll be pretty cheap so I hopefully won’t be hit with a massive bill one day. Probably should’ve started with this, but it’s all good, the migration was also super easy.

Enumerating ongoing list of todo’s. I’ll probably edit this list over time. If you’re interested in any of these features or have additional feedback, please let me know!

I just spent an absurd amount of time trying to figure out how to deal with images on this blog. I’ve decided to upload images directly into the repository under assets/images as a first pass (this may become unscalable pretty quickly, but we’ll see how far I get).

I spent a few days over the past few months getting the website set up, but it’s time to launch the blog officially. I’m on my way to Tokyo now to start a new chapter of my life and I plan on making the blog the primary focus of my time while I’m there. This trip was actually the impetus of the blog, partly to document my projects and adventures, and partly a way to stay connected with my friends and family remotely.

This website was made using Jekyll against my personal wishes, not that I have anything against Jekyll, but I didn’t want to learn yet another web framework. I wanted to host it on Github Pages because it’s free and easy, and I couldn’t figure out how to make one not using Jekyll, so here I am…