Watch out! Homerun!!

Hey guys and gals, how's your summer going? I hit a homerun!!! All visionaries have foreseen the future, so there's not much more to say about that.

Let me update myself. I am attending CIT 129, CIT 173 and ENG 102. These courses are easy but quite time-consuming. I am so happy that ENG 102 in summer only requires one research paper, although there is massive reading. With this course, I am going to conquer English reading and become a good reader. Afterwards, I should be able to fluently read numerous Minecraft plugin tutorial papers.

This week, I built a simple drum set in my yard and jammed music with my Hong Kong friend online. However, it's very loud, and I'm wondering if my neighbors might call the police because of it. 

Feeling on MO-400

Summer has begun! It's time to pursue our goals! It took me around 12 hours separated over 3 days to complete the practice and pass Outlook 2019. Let me share my thought regarding MO-400.

I did LabSim and GMetrix practice provided by our professor. However, I found that the LabSim version was so outdated, with approximately 70% of the user interface changed. After completing LabSim, I proceeded to GMetrix and realized that I didn't even know how to answer the first few questions... If I were given one more chance to prepare for MO-400, I would only do the three GMetrix practice twice.

I think hitting MO-400 is a good start in summer. What you need is a good habit to keep learning without instruction and deadline. Then, We can easily get one more certificate for free which originally costs around $100.

The Meaning of Education

What is the meaning of education? I would say that is to acquire knowledge to make money, but there is not the case. The education is educating us to be someone's slave. Through completing assignments and attending classes daily, an outstanding student mirrors the qualities desired in a good employee. However, what we need is money but not being as slaves. 

Furthermore, At least 50% of the stuffs in school are useless for non-major students like chemistry, history and etc... Some may say that the knowledge can be indirectly applied to our life and we can make use of the knowledge to learn other stuffs. OK, why can't school just teach us investment? Those can also be indirectly and directly applied our life, and we can also make use of the knowledge to learn other stuffs.

Today we are lucky to attend IS101 which the skills we learn from can be directly applied to our work but not only indirectly make use of it, like learning how to merge mails, making good slideshows and using Microsoft suite. And the most important thing is that we meet an excellent professor and gain his attitude from him.

Summer Plans

I see Elijah and Linette are going to have a full schedule in summer. Kimberly will catch up on her schoolwork, and Garden-Prosper keeps maintaining her garden. It's also time to write down my plans.

As a phone addict, I always spend my morning on my phone. This summer, I have set a big goal for myself: to maintain a habit of not scrolling through my phone in bed and to wake up before 8 am. In June and July, I will be taking three summer courses while also earning money for my trip. In August, I will fly back to Hong Kong, meet the special girl who is my high school belle, and go on a driving trip in China with my friends. I hope she will join my trip as well.

My summer plans:

• study half of the calculus II
• learn programming
• 3 summer courses
• part-time work
• driving trip
• camping
• tell her I love her

My speaking contest result

Speed Run MO-201

It was frustrating to mindfully watch all the videos but still not know how to do the applied laboratory. Then I realized one thing: I can't learn passively. In the last two big chapters, instead of watching tutorials, I opened the laboratory and clicked on "show me" and "do this later" to learn the features and then practice them instantly. I did the remaining 10 small chapters in 2 days.

Learning something new and complicated is really tough for me. But you know, if you are learning something comfortably, you are probably wasting your time because you are not learning but repeating like at the bottom part of Bloom's Taxonomy.

After MO-201, I gained a little more persistent mentality and an active learning strategy. In the future, when I learn programming, I will dirty my hands with codes and watch tutorials at the same time rather than watching tutorials for an hour first.

Seeking for a lifestyle that's suitable for me

Elon Musk works 100 hours a week. The motivational video told me: "If I wanna succeed, I gotta work harder." Compared to him, I was very lazy in the first half of the semester. So, after the semester break, I started focusing on studies 6 days a week and resting on Sunday. The first three weeks were pretty good, but the following week, I got totally exhausted mentally and almost did nothings except for mandatory assignments. The same incident happened again last week.

I've realized that my mental health can't be healed just by resting on Sundays. My life might seem fulfilling for first few weeks, but then I would get depressed for about a week. Now, a new strategy comes to my mind —stopping all the things in my hands and watching Netflix with English subtitles every day after 10 pm as a form of daily rest—

A Outstanding Visual Aid for My COM101

I have never seen any person using a 3D model on their PowerPoints. I think that the reason is very likely that they don't even know about this function existed. I didn't know it either before finishing the 6.9.4 3D Models. Putting a 3D model instead of a picture on a slide, you must surprise your classmates. They wouldn't be able to imagine that your picture could turn around and jump until you show it off. If you put a surprising 3D model in your sides while keeping it clean and simple, you will very possible be the eye-catching and outstanding one. Their thoughts must be like: this is incredible!

My slideshow will be published on this Friday on speaking contest. I am gonna do my best and boost my grade to an A in COM101 with my practiced speaking.

Time goes so fast

My targets at the beginning of the semester:

    1. make my high school belle love me (feel like 90%)

    2. score A in courses ✔️

    3. keep making minecraft server every week (60%)❌

    4. learn coding everyday (20%)❌

    5. find an internship in summer❌

    6. study for English vocabulary everyday (5%)❌

    ... other plans are added during the semester

Looks bad, right? But I'll take that. Most of the crushes among students remain memories, but I have an opportunity to turn it into a reality. I think that I am the most lucky boy in the world. 

This semester is about to finish. Time goes so fast. All recent planning are going to the end, and new plans are coming out. Throughout this semester, my spoken English gets a lot better; my mindset has grown; my time management is still worse. People always say that learning programming takes a year. Time goes so fast. If I persistently learned coding for an hour at 7am everyday, I might have been on the halfway to succeed, but I didn't. I regret about that. I wish I could do everything when I was sleeping.

short-term plans: 4/22 Access exam; 4/29 Outlook exam

Microsoft Expert, Let's Go!!!

I was always thinking: How I could be more hardworking in studying?

The only time I felt that I was so hardworking was when I played LoL for 6 hours a day, considering I left school at 4:30 pm and 12 hours a day in holiday. It was not really so fun when you play a game for very long time every day. 3 years later, I reached the diamond rank. The strong desire pushing me to play LoL day by day to see myself to be in the high ranking. 

Maybe one of the reason why the game was so addictive to me was that I could see my improvement in ranking everyday. In reality, our improvement could be seen very slowly, compared to virtual world. Sometime it takes 3 months; sometime it takes years. I figured out the way to make me more diligent is to get the sweet of seeing the better oneself. Microsoft Expert? sounds sweet!  

PS:I was the top 1% LoL Player in 2017, Ivern main 

(professional players would be the top 0.03%)

Why people make a black-and-white spreadsheet?

Would you be willing to read through tons of data in a black-and-white spreadsheet? It looks tedious to me. If I were told to do so, I would probably end up playing games all day and then replying with a message like "Well done! Nice spreadsheet!" without actually reading it. I believe that every spreadsheet needs a template or theme. A colorful spreadsheet can become a shining star among black-and-white spreadsheets, which can increase people's willingness to read it. But of course, in the workplace, as an accountant or a clerk, acknowledging that you are doing something that no one want to read, you can just make black-and-white spreadsheets and people will give you a big thumb.

I chatted with her during spring break

My plan for spring break is nothing. I try to rest myself and recover. The only target for this spring break is to painlessly develop a routine and think as much as possible. I lost the routine of learning English at the beginning of this semester because of tiring school work and doing my own project. However, my listening and speaking level is still not enough for me to fluently speak and unconsciously listen to others. The habit I try to establish is to watch a English new and learn 30-50 vocabularies everyday. Apart from that, the only other thing I look forward to is to have a zoom call with my high-school classmate who's photograph I posted earlier. I hope I can do things more efficiently and persistently after the spring break.

Don't spend more than 30 mins a day on LabSim

I have never thought that passing MO-100 is an achievement or milestone. Finishing all the practice and passing the exam is a necessity. However, the pathway to it is not easy. Learning how to use tools on Microsoft Word from the tutorial is tedious but important. In order to finish the boring parts as soon as possible, I will skip the opening and ending of the tutorial videos and only watch the useful parts. Also, I have never looked at the text instructions. Then, I will try my best to finish the practices quickly and get away from the LabSim. If I don't want to do the LabSim tasks on a day, I will leave them for another day.

5 minutes promotional brochure

I can't believe that it can be so easy to make a good-looking flyer. When I was studying at high school, I took nearly a day to make a flyer for the promotion of the student union with photoshop because no one tell me the Word could do that. Photoshop was complicated and so I had to watch a lot of tutorials on YouTube, learning about it. On the contrary, the Word contains tremendous beautiful templates of a flyer and you don't have to build a new one from the beginning. If I was given one more chance to make a flyer, I would definitely use the Word to do it. What I need to do to make a flyer is to click on a flyer template matched with the theme color and type the words. Then, that's it.

How to finish your assignments faster

I can say "ctrl + F" is one of my favorite hot key on computer. Not only can we navigating in the word document but also in a browser. Searching some specific content in dozens of pages, I only have to click on "ctrl + F" and navigate to the page related to the keyword. This makes me look up somethings quickly especially when I'm doing a online assignment. For example, when I'm doing the Anthropology's MC questions, I can look up the keyword from the question and soon find the correct answer. Just make use of the "ctrl + F"! Work smartly and be lazy!

Minecraft Server

I am making a RPG Minecraft server with my friend and thus I have to host a server. I bought a computer for the server at my Hong Kong's home, connecting to my wi-fi. Then I downloaded the server kit for Minecraft and set it up. At the moment, a Minecraft server was done. Players could connect to my server and played ,but it was only available for those connected to my home wi-fi. That sounded like a joke for a server because we didn't even have to host a server if we were stick together. Therefore, I searched the tutorial of publishing a server on the Internet and made ports for TCP and UDP accordingly for the sake of posting my server online. Honestly, I didn't really know what they were until I saw "2.5.5 Internet Protocol Facts". I understand that through Transmission Control Protocol, players can correctly download files in high speed and connect to my server.

Send me a lossless photo please

Recently, a girl sent me her selfie from Instagram inbox and I found it pretty fuzzy. Then, I saved the photo and looked at the detail of the picture, figuring out that the size of it was only 274.02KB. Usually, a photo taken from a phone is at least 1MB above. I know that she is not using the Nokia 3310, a old generation phone, so what is the reason of the blurred selfie? I solved the doubt by reading file compression facts from chapter 1.1.14, realizing that it is a lossy file type, the JPG. It is believed that the compression algorithm in Instagram heavily alters the data and thus the selfie loses more than 70% of the resolution. The best solution would be asking her to resend it through Dropbox in order not to compress the picture or seeing the real person.

PS: the photo isn't authorized by the girl.

The Usages of Big Data

Comparing those three sources related to the usage of big data, intuitively, I can see the academic source is longest and comprehensive, non-academic primary source is medium and non-academic secondary source is the shortest and abridged. Academic source tells the usage of big data with the topic definition, detailed explanations and test results. Non-academic primary source tells the usage of big data with it's mechanism. "The more unrelated the datasets we are using in a model, the more likely they are to reveal unexpected correlations between customers’ behaviors in different settings." Non-academic secondary source tells the usage of big data without explanation. "Some hospitals use big data to detect blood infections in premature babies."

First Impression of IS101

I think the IS101 course is learning something in the real meaning of "practical" unlike History or subjects that you may never use it in workplace. At least, you won't tell a history story to your colleagues once a week or put a "history expert" into your resume, right? On the other side, after this course, I will tell every company that I am a Microsoft Office Specialist or Expert (Hope that I can get an expert certificate.) and it is possibly that I will use Microsoft Office frequently in my work.