Despite the ongoing pandemic, I am currently privileged enough to still be able to work from home. As a software engineer, most of my work can and could always have been done outside of the office. Yes, it makes collaboration a bit more different (a lot of communication is now asynchronous). In addition, not everyone has the right environment at home for remote work (no office furniture, distractions, no air conditioning, abusive partner, etc are all things that affect one's ability to work effectively at home). But for the most part, engineering work can be done outside of the office. Three months ago, my manager offered to let me work from Taiwan in order for me to be closer to my support network of family and friends. So, that's what I've been doing for the past few months. I figured it's worth writing a bit about my experience so far! Taiwan is handling COVID-19 somewhat effectively. There are currently 12 active cases, and for the most part, besides a bit more social distancing and face masks, life is relatively "normal". I wake up at 4:55 AM every day and am "at work" by 5. I have very few meetings with my team now, even with these working hours. At around 7, I make breakfast and take a break for half an hour. With the office supply stipend given by the company, my workspace is very ergonomic, and the only thing I'm missing is a second monitor. At 12, I eat lunch with my parents. 90% of the time, my laptop is closed by 2:00 PM. Afterwards, I go to the gym. When I'm done, I have around 5 more hours left of my day.

At the beginning of the year, I decided upon using [OneDrive](https://onedrive.live.com/) as my cloud backup solution. OneDrive is more of a cloud *storage* provider, but it can also be used for backups with some simple tweaks! I was originally deciding between [Backblaze](https://www.backblaze.com/), [Dropbox](https://dropbox.com), and [Drive](https://drive.google.com). I wasn't too happy with pricing for the latter two. Backblaze seemed interesting with its "just-backup-everything" approach, but I later chose OneDrive to also get Office 365 for free. One of the problems I immediately ran into was the fact that OneDrive is a storage provider and not a backup provider. OneDrive installs itself into the user folder in Windows. From there, you can just drag and drop any files you want into the OneDrive folder, and it'll automatically be synced with your account. This is simple and seems to work well in most use cases. However, for people who already have their important pictures and files and documents in a preexisting folder hierarchy, this doesn't work well. In addition, if you're like me and have a small `C:\` drive for Windows and one or more large HDDs for storing files, you'll know how nearly impossible it is to just move everything into the OneDrive folder—especially considering that OneDrive is 1TB of storage space!

If you're here often, you may have noticed that I redesigned this website recently! The previous design was created [*six years ago* in 2014](https://www.michaelcheng.us/stuff/9). Here's a slight refresher on how that looked. 

It's a strange world we're living in right now. [COVID-19](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html) has pressed a giant pause button on all of our lives. For some, this pandemic has given them the opportunity to [rethink their life and priorities](https://www.reddit.com/r/minimalism/comments/g1l0vc/coronavirus_changing_peoples_mindset_about_what/). Some people are finding the silver lining in [giving Mother Earth a break](https://www.reddit.com/r/spirituality/comments/fjhfwf/i_cant_help_but_feel_happy_that_the_world_is/). Some are saved from dead-end jobs and [make more money on unemployment benefits now](https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/fzgmgr/the_coronavirus_pandemic_has_saved_my_life/). Others are simply glad that [distancing is now a thing](https://psiloveyou.xyz/2020-is-officially-the-year-of-the-introvert-58b9ff2a9e1e). I bring up these perspectives to take you on a break from the general sentiment of negativity building up these days. One only needs to open any random news site to get more than they need of anxiety-stimulating articles. Everyone is navigating quarantine in their own way too. Personally, I'm missing the gym, as well as being able to go back home to family and friends in Taiwan. This is already almost the longest I've been gone from home. With the pause button pressed however, I'm finding gratitude in finally resolving some of that [burnout](https://www.verywellmind.com/stress-and-burnout-symptoms-and-causes-3144516) that's been causing me some stress for the past year.

This is a much more personal subject than I'm used to writing on this blog, so please bear with me. I was originally going to hold off writing this post until I had some real concrete things to talk about. But I figure now is as good a time as any to reflect on what I've learned so far. Please take everything you read below with a pretty large grain of salt, as I will not be linking to most references. I am writing what I have internalized from multiple sources over the past few years. Confidence is, it seems, something that some people are just naturally born with. We all know that someone in our life that knows how to handle just about any situation. They gracefully resolve conflict, speak with gentle authority, and have an emotional capacity like no other. Over the past 2-3 years, I've been doing a lot of casual research in the field of confidence. Confidence, or the lack of it, can manifest in so many various ways in life. It can affect our relationships. It can affect our work. It can affect our hobbies. It can affect how we deal with every-day situations.

I built my PC [a few months ago](https://www.michaelcheng.us/stuff/44). I was really satisfied -- but _obviously_ it started having problems not long after. The first one was random freezes where the mouse couldn't even move. The freezes would be accompanied by 100% CPU usage and my WD Gold drive spinning up. I managed to quickly narrow this down to the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver. I uninstalled that driver and the issue disappeared. Last September, I upgraded to 32GB of RAM. With that change, I also stopped hibernating (S4 sleep) my machine every night because I believed in the myth (?) that hibernating with 32GB of RAM would be harmful to my SSD. So I started using [S3 sleep](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Configuration_and_Power_Interface#Power_states) instead. I noticed out the corner of my eye that the machine would take a long time -- O(minutes) -- to sleep. I ignored it though, because I hadn't used S3 sleep in a while and I forgot if that was normal or not. Partial spoiler alert: not really, but [hybrid sleep](https://www.howtogeek.com/102897/whats-the-difference-between-sleep-and-hibernate-in-windows/) will do this.

Today is the last day of 2019. Looking back, I think my theme for this year has been **growth**. I learned about [crucial conversations](https://www.vitalsmarts.com/crucial-conversations-training/). I [searched inside myself](https://siyli.org/). I started meditating. I started [bouldering](https://firstascentclimbing.com/). I picked up a new instrument. I made new friends. I started working at [Chronicle](https://chronicle.security/). Recently I took some time to read through my diary entries since 2011. To me, being able to have these kinds of retrospectives was always the main point of keeping a diary. An interesting thing I noticed was the slight shift in core values. It wasn't a big change -- it was a re-prioritization. I found it fascinating that core values really don't change much, which sounds obvious when you think about what the word "core" means. But considering how much everything else in the world changes... I also noticed a difference in what I wrote about in my diary 9 years ago compared to now. I used to go into a lot of detail about everything, to the point where I'd average more than 10,000 words per month! More recently, I have around 5,000. I guess that's normal, since I have considerably less free time now than I did when I was in school.