Not Work

A page for the things that have nothing to do with my research and academic work.

Running

A few personal bests:

• Half-marathon — 2:21:32
• 10K — 1:02:12
• 5K — 28:28

Three half-marathons down and counting.

Cycling

I ride on the road and also off-road, and I do most of the mechanic work myself, everything from bottom-bracket installs to derailleur adjustment. Favorite places to ride in the Phoenix metro area: the West Valley, Scottsdale, and the Paradise Valley area, plus Papago Park for off-road.

Photography

I enjoy taking photos during runs, walks, and travel.

You can see my full gallery on
Unsplash.

Homelab

When I want to tinker without a deadline, I run a small self-hosted setup, a home server running Ubuntu. This is an effort to move towards open sourced alternatives for some common cloud applications in an effort to “own” my data. So far, I have been successful at replacing Google Photos with Immich, Google Home with HomeAssistant, Notion with a combination of Obsidian + CouchDB.

The switch has had its own set of challenges, at one point I lost all my self-hosted photos which made me realize the importance of having multiple backups. It scratches the same itch as research: figuring out how a system works by running it end to end myself.

Reading

Beyond research papers, I read a fair amount for some time away from research. I am drawn to non-fiction. I like understanding other people’s experiences and what they took away from them. Some current favorites:

• Why We Sleep — Matthew Walker
• Permanent Record — Edward Snowden
• Deep Work — Cal Newport
• The Courage to Be Disliked — Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga

Currently reading Empire of AI - Karen Hao.

I dip into fiction now and then too, some favorites:

• The Drift — C.J. Tudor
• Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir
• The Godfather — Mario Puzo