I’ve been trying Typst in my work for some time. For those of you who don’t know, Typst is a new language/tool for typsetting technical documents. Its goal is to be a better alternative to (La)TeX, which as probably everyone in the academia would agree, has not been pleasant to use. Different people might have different problems with LaTeX. For me, it’s mostly the gibberish error messages (such as “Undefined control sequence” followed by some weird string I’ve never seen), confusing package compatibility (some package for some reason can’t be used together with a package in the dependencies of acmart?

Today I want to spend some time talking about… time. Before I start, our dear timer, please forgive me for trespassing into your territory. When I was in high school, we had this kind of mandatory morning reading session at 7:30am every day. Now you might think, wow that’s very nice, such a perfect thing to cultivate young people’s interest in books and knowledge and encourage us to form the habit of learning something new every day.

This was the second speech of this pathway project. It was based on the first speech but improved with feedback from the evaluator. How the Pandemic Has Transformed Me “Jason, any plan for the weekend? Wanna try this new barbecue place?” “No thanks. I’ll just stay at home.” “Jason, do you want to go hiking at Bukit Timah during the holidays?” “No thanks. I’ll just stay at home.” “Jason, how about coming to my place to play Nintendo Switch together?

How the Pandemic Has Transformed Me It was 11 in the morning. I was just up and madly digging through my messy closet, disgruntled at how fast I had run out of clean clothes. It didn’t take long before I had to admit defeat. After throwing on a smelly T-shirt I had worn the day before, I rushed out of my 10 square-metre room with a basket of smellier T-shirts, slamming the door behind me.

I will record my Toastmasters speech scripts on this blog. “PM1” in the title means that this is for project I of the Presentation Mastery pathway. Shared below is the first prepared speech I’ve delivered at NUS Toastmasters. I also wrote about the experience in this post. Good evening, fellow toastmasters of NUS! If you don’t know me yet, my name is Jason. I came from China to Singapore in 2019 to pursue a PhD degree in computer science.

On Tuesday I finally delivered my first speech at the NUS Toastmasters Club. Preparation This first speech (or “project” in the Toastmasters jargon) was supposed to be an ice breaker. The goal was to introduce myself to the fellow Toastmasters. Needless to say, the first thing that came to my mind was something akin to a simple “standard” self introduction where one mentions his or her name, background, hobbies, etc. But that would be problematic.

Hey folks! Do you like reading history? I personally enjoy it. To me it’s stories as appealing as fictions but much more relevant. It’s fascinating, isn’t it, to read about events that our own ancestors once witnessed, reconstruct societies which were so distinctly different from ours yet still connected to ours through gradual stages of change, and ponder over the fact that today is part of the history which will be looked at by our descendants in the same way as we look at what we call history.

Since I finished my qualifying examination on Tuesday, I have been thinking about what my ensuing journey as a PhD candidate should be like, or rather, what my new journey should be like. Nothing external to myself is going to change in future. I’m still going to stay at the same lab, work with the same group and follow the same advisor. I am not even going to change where I sleep.

This blog was created in 2018 but fell into a long streak of silence soon afterwards for some personal reasons. I did not manage to allocate time to regularly update this site and weeks later almost forgot its existence. Now that I am in a position where online activities start to play a more important role in my career as well as my daily life, I have decided to resurrect this blog from the dump yard and put my blogger hat back on.