I am still stuck in the holiday mode. Every night, I struggle with the thoughts of working or playing games. Cyberpunk 2077 is very addicting. Even if there is no quest, I can still have fun by wandering the street and killing the NPCs who are committing crimes. By doing this, I can hoard the new weapons, breaking down for components, or sell them for eddies. Then I would upgrade my equipment and repeat. It is mindless, but thrilling in a sense. I love it.

Anyway, I cannot abandon my current project. I am currently designing a static site and want it to have search functionality. For that, I needed either a database or searchable indexes. I choose the latter. I built a second site to do the indexing of the pages. It would have the functionality of listing all the indexed documents and adding new/editing existing documents. To make the whole process easier, I think it is necessary to have the functionality to parse a well-formatted HTML page and extract all the pieces of text, then feed it to the indexing engine. I will work on that next. Now, I am working on finishing the functionality of displaying existing documents for editing and saving the changes back into the indexed repository. It is going to be a lot of fun with this small project.

After Death Stranding, I resumed playing the game Cyberpunk 2077. When I first played it, I had trouble aiming. So I spent at least half a year playing Mass Effect, and Far Cry 5. I was hoping playing these games could help me improve my game play. Now that I have completed Death Stranding, I continued with Cyberpunk 2077. It turned out to be a great game, once I got out into the open world. I loved the combat in the streets against the random encounters. And it turned out, that it wasn't me who had an aiming problem. Well, I do. But the game itself also made it difficult to aim.

The static site using the Jetty server is going well. I was actively working on it because I was on vacation. I am getting myself some time off. Gaming is becoming addictive at the moment. I am hoping this is not going to become a real issue. I think I can pull myself out once the new year starts. I will probably drop the static site and go back to working on the Twitter replacement project. There is a lot of work to be done there. And the work is getting interesting.

When I started playing Death Stranding, I wondered when I could finish that game. It looked pretty daunting at first. So I stopped for a while. I picked it up recently and finally finished the game. Apparently, at the normal level, the game is easy to play. The cinematics are pretty cool. What surprised me is that at the end, it shows cinematics for an hour and a half. It was unbelievable. I was getting a bit bored with it. At times, I found the game relaxing, all I had to do was carry stuff and walk. I am glad it is over. I will pick up a new game soon.

What is tough about the end of the year is that I get bombarded by news and ads about discount items. I get promotional emails from Temu at least three times a day. And I got numerous "reminders" that the Xbox Series X is $349 at Walmart or Amazon. I almost placed an order. Then I thought about the renovation, and the number of consoles I had, all the games I had, I didn't have time for a new console. Maybe I will get one at the end of the year next year. The constant reminder of consumerism is the ultimate mechanism that can wear down a man's resistance to buy things they desire, just look at Mr. Money Mustache. Anyways. The holiday season is almost over, and I will not get a new console.

No, I am not abandoning this site. Yes, it has been 9 days I didn't update. That doesn't mean I was lying flat. I was busy working on my new site. I was having a great time with it. I did a lot of writing. To my surprise, I have a lot to write about when it is something I am interested in.

Anyway, my plan is simple. I will keep most of the site static. The part of "Contact Us" will use the back end for message processing. Also, I will design a new way to handle content searching, probably using Lucene. It is going to be an interesting project.

I am almost done with Death Stranding. It is an interesting game. Don't know why people wouldn't like this game. I think it is relaxing. It also gives me a lot to think about.

Recently I started designing a new website. It is called "F*ck Yeah Fishing". I was using this as an opportunity to learn. I want to go back to using the J2EE application server for hosting Spring web applications (via a WAR archive). I want to use the latest Spring Framework, Thymeleaf markup, and WebJars to create this website. In the process, I will learn how all these latest technologies can be integrated to create a website from scratch.

I was also bored with the current Twitter replacement work. For that, I have completed the work of adding images. Adding MP3 streaming is partially working. I still need to add the functionality of displaying MP3s to be chosen for posts. After that, I will work on associating a post with a YouTube video. There is a year's worth of work to be done. I am taking a break from that.

I have learned a lot from the new project. At first, the Slick Slider wouldn't work with the latest JQuery and Bootstrap. I had to replace it with Bootstrap's slider. The collapse-able header failed to work, and I had to fix the data attributes on it. Since the new site is mostly static, all I need to do is fill in the text and images for most of the project. The hard part is designing the mechanism for saving user's data. I don't know what that is yet. We will get there.

I will end this memo with a mention of my well-being. I have felt a slight agitation recently. And I don't know what is affecting my mood. I could be bored because there is nothing else to do, being restless, or worrying about my short-term financial status.

It is closing to Thanksgiving. And I started buying stuff. This is the time of the year when things are at the cheapest prices. I took the opportunity and upgraded my work-horse PC again. I upgraded the memory from 16 GB to 32 GB. My reasons are simple. I needed the extra memory to run Java Eclipse, my sample applications, and ShortCut for video editing at the same time. When all these run simultaneously, it would use all the free 15 GB of memory. Doubling the amount of memory allows me to do all without my PC getting squeezed. And so far, the effect is awesome! This is my first time using a PC with 32 GB of memory. It is a giant leap for me.

I also bought a bunch of games for myself. I spent $94.72 for the nine games. That is an average of $11 per game. These games are definitely in the price range of a watermelon. I love it. The holiday season is the best time to stock up on new or used games.

I know I have not been updating as frequently as I should. There is not much going on recently. My life is a routine. I start work at 9 AM and finish around 5:30 PM. Then I would take my kids for after-school activities. During the weekend, I had to chauffeur the kids some more. I have spent most of my free time either reading or working on my new project. I just solved a big issue with the application. It uses both JWT and cookies for authentication. The authentication cookie is managed on the Angular side. The way I designed the mechanism for this is not working correctly. Sometimes, when the user logs off, and then logs back in, the images attached to the posts are not displaying. After extensive debugging, I realized that the bad cookie was overriding the new cookie because it did not have an expiration date and it did not have the proper path. So the bad cookie lingered on. I finally fixed it by properly setting the expiration date, and setting the path of the cookie, so that the old one can expire after the time is up and the new one will always be set for the base path of the end point. This is one hell of a bug.

My house was invaded by yellow jackets. I killed about 100+ and saved all the dead ones as fishing bait for next year's local fishing expedition. I had to freeze all the dead ones in the freezer, or they would rot. Sometime this fall, I tried the yellow jacket as bait and it had some good results. That was why I decided to try these insects as a new type of fishing bait. I have a small side project, and this is part of the plan.

It took a while, my 2nd Temu order finally arrived today. I bought three pairs of scissors and four pieces of mechanical pencils. I need them for drawing. And I saw a lot of fountain pens on Temu, so I bought two. At last, I bought a French curve ruler for drawing. Last night, I bought six notebooks, and some more ink pens. They are for writing. I love these little things. I don't remember when I started loving these. I only remember when I was young, I couldn't afford them. And at this point in my life, I want to possess them. I bought a sketchbook, 100 pages. I haven't used a single page. I need to find some interesting ideas to draw on that sketchbook. We don't want good things to be wasted.

There is not much going on since the last memo. There was one big rain for the day. Towards the end of it, the roof leaked a little. I went up and did some more patching. We were done for this year. There will be a big renovation of the house next year (adding two bedrooms and one-and-half bathrooms). I will let the construction company fix the leak.

I bought some stuff from TEMU. The quality of the products was questionable. But the price was unbeatable. The only problem is that I had to wait for two weeks before the items could arrive. After the first order, I placed another one, getting some mechanical pencils and fountain pens. I always wanted some fountain pens.

I installed MX Linux on my old Dell computer. To my surprise, this OS consumes much less resources than Linux Mint. And it appears to be more stable than Linux Mint as well. Although it does not use the systemd services. It is a great travel companion PC for me.

The war in Ukraine is still ongoing. Although it is fading into the background. The war between Hamas and Israel has just started. In my generation, I have seen 6-8 big conflicts and countless smaller ones. The situation with the world is getting worse, yet the bad things are affecting US or China. I feel like we are the generation where bad things just happen to the poor and unfortunate countries.

I went to JFK airport to pick up family members from the trip to China. The drive is about 2 hours long one way. On the day I took the trip, I charged $65 to the iPass responder. When I got home, I checked, out of the $65, only $1 left. The two-way trip took a bite of $64. At the airport, I had to wait more than 2 hours for the people to come out the exit. It turned out that there were only two customs officers on duty that night, And they had to screen thousands of travelers. I left my house at 7:45 PM and got home around 2 PM. And after that day, I was tired for the whole week. I felt like a huge chunk of energy left my body. This is what aging feels like.

The handle of my old fishing rod always bothered me. When I bought it at Crystal Pier in San Diego, it was already used. The handle was made of some type of polyethylene foam material and had a few minor cracks. At the very bottom part of the foam material was chipped away. It looked aged and ugly. I kept it because after I got this rod, I was always able to catch fish with it. It was the lucky rod. Today, I did some cleanup of this rod. I straightened the line on the spool wheel. Part of the line was tangled. That took a while of pulling out the line and pulling it back into the wheel. Then I tried to fix the rod handle. At first, I found some white polyethylene foam pieces (from Costco fish wrap). I cut the pieces that match the crack at the bottom of the handle and super-glued them to cover the crack. Then I used the electric tape and wrapped it around the handles, both the small portion at the top and the long portion at the bottom. Now the fishing rod looks new and stylish, to a certain degree. I am very happy how it has turned out.

I had to fix the roof leak again. During the Tropical Storm Ophelia weekend, part of the chimney cover got busted open. The water was pouring in wildly. As a result, the water streak appeared again on the same wall in the attic room. I went up the roof and found the crack when it was raining. Due to the heat and code, the siding around the chimney cracked open under the pressure. I used some foam insulation spray to seal it first, then a lot of roof wet patches to patch it up. After that, I did several more patches to make sure. Hopefully, it will last.

What a great way to end this summer! I caught this trout on Saturday 9/16. This is the first trout I caught. What a lucky day.

This is the best Goku drawing I have done in years. I think I finally graduated from the self-taught manga drawing university.

This will be a short memo. Before the school year started, I bought a pair of earbuds for my son because the school requested them. It turned out to be a pair of very cheap Bluetooth earbuds. I have resisted such luxury 2-3 years ago. The reason is that it is so easy to lose the earbuds. After I tried this pair of cheap wireless earbuds, I changed my mind. I bought a pair from Amazon and connected to my Linux desktop. The process is not very hard. And the problem of losing is not an issue as long as it does not leave my desk. Watching for the health of the battery could be another issue. But I already have a lot of other batteries I check regularly. This is one more added to the list. So far, I have enjoyed the new earbuds. It is one step towards getting rid of excessive wires on my desk.

There is not much going on with the house. Three things were broken. The first is the doorbell. It hasn't been working for a long time. The second one is the big flashlight. The batteries died. Lastly, the water pump for the sink in the garage wasn't working. At first, I tried to fix the doorbell. I replaced the small battery for the button at the front door. It didn't work. I opened the doorbell device and found out it used the same batteries (the big-D batteries) as the big flashlight. I bought one package of 14 batteries from Costco, enough to fix both. It worked once the three batteries in the doorbell device were replaced with the new ones. Plying the thing off the wall wasn't easy. But the fix (replacing the batteries) was easy enough.

Fixing the big flashlight wasn't so easy. I bought the flashlight for emergency. And the batteries also died. One of the batteries was corroded. Once I replaced the batteries, it didn't work. I had to do the same cleaning as I did for the small flashlight. The cleaning was difficult. I couldn't reach the connector under the light bulb because the tube was long. I had to use a barbeque skewer to scratch the connector. At first, it didn't work. I shook the whole thing, and some dust finally fell off. Magically, the flashlight started working. I was thrilled when it started working again. It felt great when the hard work seemed to pay off.

I am not sure what was going on with the water pump in the garage. It stopped working after I painted the flat roof white to deflect the sunlight. I used the sink to clean up the roller brush. Soon after, the pump under the sink stopped working. This is the second time it has stopped working. I have disassembled the pump and cleaned it. Still, it wasn't working. I waited two weeks, thinking I needed to buy another pump, and it came back to life. I didn't figure out why it was broken or how it could be fixed. As long as it works now, I am OK with the pump.

I have finished Mass Effect Legendary Edition. Now, I can concentrate on my personal project.