Jeffrey's Thoughts

Investing

I would consider myself as risk averse. I haven’t capitalized on any of the trendy stocks and whatnot, but in general I am comfortable with my investment strategy. I think that is one of the more important things about investing. There are tons of investment videos and articles out there, but if I try a strategy that I am not comfortable with, if it does bad then I would dwell on it for a while. If it does well, then perhaps I get overzealous and make even riskier decisions.

I had a conversation with a friend recently that I should probably take more risks at least financially. After thinking about my current strategy and how I can iterate on it, I think that I would be comfortable with contributing more.

My thinking is that I’ll have the majority of my investments in mutual funds and index funds. Then, I’ll have some stocks that I’m tracking just for fun. I’ll choose these based on random articles that I read or advice from friends/family and after some research. I don’t really know much about the various metrics that are in financial reports and such. I try to read a little bit about the company mission and their products. If I am comfortable with what they are doing, then I am willing to buy some shares. After that, I want to get a core of dividend stocks. I keep reading about passive income and multiple revenue streams and blah blah blah. I sat on the information for a while, but I finally decided that it could be a good thing to consider. For these stocks, I’m probably just going to get companies that I think are solid and stable. Since these stocks will not be a large percentage of my portfolio, I’m not going to be gaining much from the dividends in the near future. Then, over the months and years, I’ll contribute more to each of the investments and I hope that they’ll grow enough to the point where I will have enough for retirement.

Over the long term, I’ll consider adding real estate to my investment strategy. I’m not really sure where I want to spend the rest of my life and I don’t think I’m settling down any time soon. I am pretty against investing in real estate that I am not living in. I’ll start investing in real estate when I am ready to buy a place and live there for an extended period of time. If I ever move from that place, I’ll think about renting it out. Renting comes with some headaches, but that’ll be a problem to think about for future me.

Chess

I’ve played chess recreationally for a bunch of years. I don’t remember when I first learned how to play, but I think I was in a chess club in elementary school. There weren’t very many other people in the club, but it was neat to learn the basics with other people using a chess board on a wall – it was a vertical hanging board that had little pockets so you could place the flat pieces without falling off (if that makes any sense). Anyways, I think our club had a mini tournament and I did pretty well. After elementary school, I didn’t pursue it any further, just playing with my family on occasion and perhaps a few times with my middle school and high school friends. My memory is pretty horrible when it comes to this sort of thing. In college, one of my roommates was really interested in chess. He had played when he was young as well and he actually competed in local tournaments. His enthusiasm for the game reignited my interest in the game and led me to play more, online and in person. I never beat him, but it was fun nevertheless. I find the puzzles / tactics of these chess websites really fun. lichess and chess.com have really nice puzzles that only require a few moves to complete, but they aren’t trivial. Also, they have a nice feature where they try to give you puzzles that match your chess “rating”. Nowadays, I spend more time playing these puzzles than I do against real people. I think that the puzzles have helped me think a bit more critically about the game, but I also feel that in a real game, I am unsure when I am in a puzzle scenario or not. This definitely arose when I recently played a high school friend in a game with a 10 minute time limit. I could definitely think of some good moves to play to take advantage of the board, but I wasn’t thinking quick enough to win. That is why I prefer the longer style of games. I plan to only play chess for fun, but we’ll see – if I do somehow unlock the secret of the game through these puzzles, I may consider playing more frequently.

Some pictures of the food I made between jobs

Eating ramen with an egg

Usually when I eat ramen, I would like an egg to be included. The egg is usually available by default in restaurants or as an add on. When making ramen at home, that is not always the case. But, I try to buy eggs before making ramen so then I can have the combo. In high school and college, I ate ramen regularly and I’ve improved my technique of making ramen with an egg. Of course you can cook the egg separately in an eggsized pan and then put the egg on top of the noodles, but sometimes having a poached egg is better. Through trial and error, I have been able to accomplish this task.

Boil water
Put ramen noodles into water (don’t separate the noodles)
After a couple minutes, gently separate the noodles, but keep them closely packed together. The goal of this step is to form a “pocket” that will hold the egg in the center of the noodles.
Crack the egg and put it in the noodle “pocket”. If you did it correctly and if you are lucky, the egg will stay in the pocket long enough for it to get poached.
Cover the pot for a few seconds to get the top of the egg gently cooked.
When the ramen is done cooking, eat the food. The egg should be poached and ready to eat. This may take a few times to get down since the timing in which you add the egg matters and making the noodle “pocket” can be tricky.

Hopefully by the end of it, you have a nice poached egg and some ramen to enjoy!

Love Island UK Season 1

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I watched this show. I knew it was a reality TV show, but I wasn’t sure if I would like it or not. I thought it was actually pretty entertaining. The people on the show were generally quite attractive and I enjoyed listening to all the slang and their different accents. Also, all the drama that came up was great to follow. It’s too bad that these people had a total lack of privacy and literally nothing to do at the villa until they received a text message from the producers, but I guess I can’t really feel that bad for them since they probably knew these things going into the show. It was a bit weird how they kept talking about the “outside”. It was like they were in prison or something and they were waiting for their freedom. This was exemplified by the islanders’ reactions to when they were able to talk to their family and friends back home. In general, I would recommend the show for people who like to not have to think and just sit down and watch people gossip. Another thing that struck me was how much the people cared about their public image. Zoe went on for a few days about how her parents and church would look down on her and Max was always worried about how the audience viewed him. I guess it makes sense since the audience decided who won the show, but I thought that it was a bit excessive. If there was a Love Island US, I don’t think I would’ve enjoyed the show as much. A big chunk of why I liked it was because of the difference in culture between me and the people on the show. Watching this show with friends is a lot more fun than watching by myself. That is probably true about a lot of shows, but just being able to crack jokes and experience their stupidity with others was wonderful.

minifyEnabled = true

In my Android app, I wanted to try to minify the apk because it would reduce the size of the deployable and it would make it slightly harder for other people to read the code and understand how it worked. For some of the external libraries I used, they gave instructions on what to add to the Proguard file, which was pretty helpful. However, I also used the Android Couchbase Lite 1.4 library. There were no Proguard instructions for this version of the library – there were instructions for Android Couchbase Lite 2.0, but when I tried those, the deployable still crashed when running. After searching the web for a while, I discovered something that helped. I added a few lines to the Proguard file to keep some libraries and it turned out to work.

-keep class com.fasterxml.jackson.core.** { *; }
-keep interface com.fasterxml.jackson.core.** { *; }
-keep class com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.** { *; }
-keep interface com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.** { *; }
-keep class com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.** { ; } 
-keep interface com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.* { ; } -keep class com.couchbase.lite.** { *; }
-keep interface com.couchbase.lite.** { *; }

After adding these lines, I was able to run the built minified apk on my phone without any problems. After uploading the apk to the Google Play developer console, I noticed that there were a lot of warnings saying that the apk was using non-SDK interfaces (https://developer.android.com/distribute/best-practices/develop/restrictions-non-sdk-interfaces). I didn’t receive that warning in the build I uploaded that wasn’t minified, so I assumed that it must’ve been because it was minified. I’m not sure if I am going to push the minified apk out to the production Google Play store because I don’t want the app to potentially crash for users. However at the very least, Android Couchbase Lite 1.4 is able to be minified.

Kuroko no Basket Review

This is not only one of my favorite sports manga, it is one of my favorite manga series. I don’t remember if I’ve read Slam Dunk, but whenever I think of a basketball manga, I think of this. In general, I enjoy the stories with the signature moves, the powerful main characters, and the story line of defeating powerful opponents to reach an end goal. I don’t think that this story is very unique since it follows the same guidelines a lot of other action manga take. However, I really like the characters, the art, and the arcs.

I connect with Kuroko a lot. I thought it was so cool that he was such an integral part of the team even though he was not a main offensive player – he was a top tier supportive player. When I play basketball recreationally, I try to be more of a passer and a defender – mostly because I’m not confident with my ball handling skills. So, seeing him excel on a team was encouraging. All the other main characters, such as Kagami, the rest of the Generation of Miracles members, and the Uncrowned Kings, were all pretty great too. The specialties of the Generation of Miracles were phenomenal. I was fine with their skills being slightly unrealistic, but they weren’t so unrealistic that it didn’t make sense. Like players in the NBA could do something similar to what these guys were doing. Since each of Kuroko’s middle school teammates were on a different teams, each basketball game was interesting to read. For me, Kise’s copying and Midorima’s shooting prowess were the best powers in the series.

In terms of the story line, I don’t remember reading any chapters or set of chapters and thinking that they were filler or unnecessary chapters. I like seeing characters train and improve. There was a purpose to each of the games that they played. As Seirin improved, it was great to see the other teams improving as well. Also, since there were so many likeable characters, it was great to see some of their character development as opposed to only one or two characters getting the bulk of the development.

Exercising

I have been relatively athletic for the majority of my life. Growing up, my parents put my brother and I in a variety of sports. These included swimming, soccer, basketball, baseball, lacrosse, and running. The main goals of participating in sports were to meet new people, have fun, and maintain a healthy lifestyle. I think they accomplished all three. I didn’t end up sticking with most of them, but I appreciate my experience with the sports.

Nowadays I am mostly focused on running, swimming, and dancing. I picked up dancing after my brother started. I thought he was doing some cool stuff and I wanted to learn some cool moves. Breaking takes a lot of work, but it is rewarding in terms of being able to do something special with your body. Swimming is probably my favorite sport out of the sports I’ve participated in. When I swam competitively, it was fun for a while and I enjoy being in the water. I don’t go too often anymore since it is a bit of a hassle, but I always enjoy swimming in the water. When I go to the pool now, I feel like I should still be able to go as fast as I once was. As a result, I get tired pretty quickly. Same with running. I keep thinking that I can run so much faster than I can.

Even though I am a lot slower than when I competed at these sports competitively, I started to dislike the sports at the end of my career. So, getting back into them at a more recreational level is good for me. It’s not as fun, but I don’t dislike doing it. For most of my college life, I didn’t do much exercise. I don’t think it was a problem, but I was so fed up with running. Now as a person in the workforce, I don’t know what I would do with myself if I didn’t exercise regularly. It helps my mental health tremendously. There are so many times where I feel like I would go insane with what was happening at work and my personal life, but exercise takes my mind off things and reset. Also, I have a lot more free time than I did in college so it is a good way to pass the downtime I have after work.

Books and Manga

I like reading books and manga. Reading gives me a way to escape my own reality and enter the lives of the characters. Learning about how the different characters interact with each other and the decisions that they make makes reading exciting. Additionally, it is important for the story to make sense.

While reading some of the Russian classics, I was frustrated about how long the books were and how a lot of the details did not seem to be relevant to the overall story. However when I watched the movie interpretations, most of the details were lost and it made me realize that there is a certain feeling or purpose to the excessive detail. In this particular case, it made the story more interesting and invokes more of the reader’s imagination – I thought the movie was rather bland since it simply went through the story hitting each of the plot points.

That being said, I enjoy watching TV and movies as well. The main reason I don’t like watching them as much as reading is because the time commitment. Movies and TV shows can take many hours to complete whereas a manga chapter can take very little time to complete. Books take a while to read as well, so maybe I like reading manga more than reading books.

In general, I like getting introduced to stories. I wish I was a good storyteller, but I don’t usually have very many stories to tell and I wouldn’t say that I’m a very good speaker or conversationalist.

I have preferences on what I read and watch. I like exciting stories with action, adventure, and magic / superpowers. However, I also enjoy slice of life stories as well. I have preferences about drawing styles, but the story is what ultimately keeps me reading. One thing that I have found funny recently is the names of some of these manga. Like they are such long names and they describe exactly what is going on that it is funny. One such title is “A Story About Treating a Female Knight Who Has Never Been Treated as a Woman as a Woman”. Like there could definitely be a better title for this, but this is the translated title and it accurately describes the premise of the story.

I like discussing some of the more popular things I read with people I know and it is cool to hear their perspectives on things that I may have glossed over or simply thought differently about. One problem with me though is my memory for these types of things is not that great. Like after reading One Piece for years, my memory about the details of their journey is quite bad. I know the gist of most of the stories I read, but remembering the details is not something that comes quickly – especially if I hadn’t thought about that story in a while.

I’m willing to provide some of my manga suggestions if anyone is interested. I won’t say that my taste is that great, but I think I’ve read a lot of relatively decent things by now. Some of my peers mentioned that I could use the blog to rate stuff, such as anime or manga. I will definitely consider that. However, I think rating manga is different than rating movies because there are a lot of chapters. It seems like some TV shows are rated on an episode basis and then an overall series basis. I read too many things to rate something on a chapter basis, so I guess I could rate stuff as a series and give a brief explanation for my rating. If the thing I rate is an ongoing series, then I can update the rating if necessary.

Some of my interests

I’m still not sure what I want to use this blog for. So, I’ll talk about some of my interests and see which ones I want to write about more.

Some of my interests include reading books and manga, exercising through sports (dancing, running, swimming, etc.), juggling, sleeping, eating, and starting new things.

The next few posts will expand on these interests and why I like them.