Fun

Today something good happened in my life. I will share more when it is appropriate. Overall I am exhausted, having worked hard for a while…but also really happy.

Tiger’s birthday is coming up! This princess is going to be two years old. Her meowjesty is almost a fully grown adult cat now. She is less active compared to when she was a kitten (and I miss the little sweetheart of 3 lbs), but has the charm of an adult cat’s glory.

Here is a bucket list, and it will be actively updated (and hopefully also actively checked) in the future.

Below I added some updates from 04/04/2022. The newest updates were made on 01/25/2025.

This winter I took my very first paid time off (PTO) in my life after starting a job. During a period of 18 days, I have taken a total of 8 flights, both domestic and international. Being a statistician I am quite interested in numbers, and being an aviation amateur I want to view the routes I have flown. In this short post I will share three websites that I have found to be very useful.

I have been a Mac user for more than 6 years now, yet occasionally I have been attracted by Linux. Compared with Mac, I like the complete openess of Linux systems and the communications in the Linux user community. I started with Ubuntu, and after some time of usage I did not like unity, which was then the default GUI. Being a newbie, I did not realize I could change the GUI, but went on to try Debian. I do not remember how that went. Trying Arch Linux was quite challenging, as the installation itself was rather complicated and took me more than an hour, doing the partitions, configurations…I must admit there is a steep learning curve for Arch Linux - to know AUR, learn to use pacman instead of apt-get, etc. I still think it is a good distribution (that has so many die hard fans), and it is very flexible in the sense that you can tweak everything and make it really ‘yours’. It just did not appeal to me. Therefore I finally chose Manjaro - the distribution that uses rolling release, but is easier to use than Arch Linux.

Some good practices on R, Python and bash programming, as well as a little note for myself.

R

• Use .rds when saving only one object instead of .rdata, as readRDS() will allow you to assign a name for the object, while loading the .rdata will maintain its own name, which can be inconvenient when you are running many replicates of simulation using one set of core code.

Good tools can often boost productivity. I enjoy using the macOS a lot because of its Unix nature, delicate GUI, and its abundance of apps. It has been a important teammate for me on my academic path. In this post I would like to summarize the apps that I use the most often, and why they are recommended.