A space for my thoughts.
I don't write anything too serious on here; these are mostly shower thoughts from an engineer. My new year's resolution for 2024 is to write one article per week on average. Browse on the navigation menu on the left or type in the search bar at the top to look for articles. Click on the links in the footer to view my homepage, send me an email, or visit my other online presence. Enjoy!
I've been practicing trench composting for over a year now in my small garden. It's been a good way to eliminate waste and improve soil health. By putting food scraps back in the ground, it adds nutrients to the soil, sparking life and feeding my plants. It also gets me going outside and a good discipline to hold myself to - not to mention the more time I spend at my garden, the more I'll inadvertently care for it. However there's some plant-related topics I want to get off my chest.
I highly despise fake grass, which is also known as artificial turf. It not only prevents natural plant growth, but it is actively harmful to the environment.
It's a little stressful when you're driving exactly the speed limit (of course, I would never go beyond the posted speed limit) and someone zooms by you at 10, 15, or sometimes 20+ miles per hour. As a bonus, these people will usually weave through traffic too. What's so important that you'd risk your life, and several other peoples', to save some time? Maybe, man's gotta poo. Who knows? But something I do think about, is how much time are they actually saving, assuming they don't get into a crash or stopped by the police?
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I'm reviving an old series here. This one branches off of story #5, where I split up my Gmail account to use a custom email for each online account. But now, instead of exposing my Gmail account, I can use one of the custom domains I own to send and receive emails, directly in my Gmail mail client, for free! For example, I can now send and receive emails from an address like example@nicfv.com. It was an adventure to figure out this project and quite a lengthy headache at times.
nicfv2024 was a big year! I completed and exceeded both of my New Year's resolutions, did a lot of running, visited 2 new countries, and worked on a lot of cool projects. Let's go over the 2024 recap for this mysterious individual named Nicolas Ventura.
It's crazy to think, but coming up on two years now, I purchased my condo. I absolutely love it and have no regrets, but there are some things I wish I had considered. Here's a short story of what I wished I could tell myself those 2 years ago, and things (specific to me) that are really important in finding a place to live.
It's no secret that I'm developing a series of npm packages. The primary reason I'm doing this is for code reuse. I want to build up more complex programs using as much of my own software as possible. Second, the packages I'm developing might also benefit other developers. Also, the secret third reason I'm doing this is just for fun. Although there have been times where I really questioned my secret third reason. One of those recent times was when I changed my development strategy from maintaining several independent repositories to maintaining just one monorepo containing all my packages.
I'm currently writing this from my laptop running Kubuntu 24.04 in a public space; Peet's Coffee. (The matcha latte here is good.) I had some difficulty connecting to the public wifi. Luckily, I had my smartphone with me, which gave me options.
Anything can be a lot like the game of rock, paper, scissors, if you try hard enough. At least, it ought to be. I'll use this analogy for my proposed rules for crossing the road. It's a dangerous game, and maybe this idea could make it a bit safer.
Every year, thousands of tech giants, computer nerds, and NERSC staff alike flock to the conference on Supercomputing. Normally, from NERSC there's such high demand to attend that many staff are denied travel assistance. Maybe since it was my first time, I got a free pass. Several of my colleagues went the year prior and only had good things to say, so I wanted to know what it was like for myself, and maybe learn a thing or two along the way.