Life

Life the last few months has been fun.  I have been feeling restless and craving adventure.

The weather last winter was amazing - in the 40s F every day, warm enough to not need a jacket to walk around.  We're paying for it now with our hot summer - hitting the 90s F. 

Nonetheless, we try to enjoy the beautiful outdoors with its lush greenery.  Today we hiked Wallace Falls State Park with our good friends, B and P.   There is something innately soothing about tall moss-filled trees, ferns, and waterfalls. 

Work: graphics performance analysis

Being an engineer at heart, I love hearing about what people do for work or for their hobbies, because I am fascinated by processes. 

In case you are curious about my job, it is to make my team's product cool 8-).  In the thermal sense.

Program managers provide us with pain points - places where they want less latency or power usage.

We are lucky in that our job is made quite simple by sophisticated tools that have been provided to us, in order to measure, visualize, and understand the factors that contribute to latency and power usage: the utilization of various processors and co-processors, and the bandwidth on various memory buses. This helps us identify bottlenecks and figure out where and how to optimize code. 

I love performance analysis and working on platform code - it is data-driven, and involves a lot of creative thinking and problem solving.  I love getting a chance to take the time to scrub code until it shines. I prefer platform development to application development, which I feel is more fast-paced and feature-driven, and places less emphasis on being solidly written.

There's a time in the mountains, in the morning, when the ground is shrouded in mist, and suddenly it rapidly rises, revealing the shining sun.  I feel so grateful to be alive when I experience moments like these. 

Happy New Year!

Dearest friends - wish you all a happy 2015 - hope that it brings you all that you wish for.

The last year was nice.  Evan sat and crushed the WA bar exam and landed a job.  My brother and his wife gave birth to an adorable baby girl.   Evan and I visited the Pacific beaches in Washington and were astounded.

As for New Year's resolutions, I resolve to be more healthy: drink more water, run more regularly, and meditate more.  I feel that these three goals are reasonable and can be realistically accomplished.

Last year's resolution was to be more comfortable alone.  I think I may have succeeded too well - some days I feel like such an anti-social grouch that I just want to wander into the forest and stare at trees all day.

All in all, I feel pretty happy and content.

I look forward to going on adventures and expanding mental and social horizons in 2015, and wish you many happy adventures - be they external or internal - as well.

Some interesting things about Washington's physical geography

Washington's landscape is diverse - it has everything from desert to rainforest.  The city of Seattle is surrounded by water and mountains on both sides.  Mount Ranier is a behemoth of a mountain, rising 14409 feet from near sea level.  It is considered one of the snowiest places on Earth, and takes up so much of the moisture from the west, that an immensely dry rainshadow lies to its east.

Seattle is nestled between the Puget Sound, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean, and Lake Washington, a large freshwater lake.  The Olympic Peninsula is to the west of the Puget Sound, and contains a large temperate rainforest, formed from an average annual rainfall of 140 inches.  For reference, Seattle's average annual rainfall is 37 inches and Denver's is 14 inches (rainfall equivalent including about 60 inches of snow per year).

Seattle is also surrounded by mountains on both sides - the Olympic range to the west and the Cascades to the east.  The Cascades have been formed by the subduction of the Juan de Fuca Tectonic Plate under the North American Plate.  For information on the formation of the Olympic Range, see this site.  Mount Rainier is Washington's only 14er, while five of the Cascades are active (or potentially active) volcanoes: Rainier, Baker, Adams, Glacier Peak, and most famously, Mt. St. Helens.  Rainier and Baker can both claim to be the snowiest place on earth, by different measures - Rainier by average annual snowfall and Baker by having the single snowiest year ever recorded (though there are some places in Japan that claim the title).

Anticipating a visit from a loved one or close friend brings feelings of such joy, love, and excitement. 

Happiness

What compels a person to pack their bags and move away, far from family, friends, and the familiar?  For Evan and I, like many others, it was to pursue new opportunities and for a breath of fresh air, a chance to experience something new.

There is something very palpably exciting about change. The move seems to have reignited some long buried exuberance for life and optimism in both Evan and me.  For the first time in a while, I feel content. 

There is something uniquely enchanting about Washington. This morning, when I was leaving for work, the world felt so still and the air was so misty, I just stood there dumbstruck for twenty minutes, wondering how it was that I felt I was seeing the world for the first time.

I don't know why it is the simplest things in life that bring immense pleasure - a laugh with a friend, an interesting insight from a stranger, a cup of good coffee (what Seattlite wouldn't put that in the list? :-)), and a hug from a husband.  I feel fortunate to have these things and a chance to feel such contentment.