Overview

From December 13th to December 25th, I was on vacation in Seattle, Washington. I inhabited three friends’ places across my trip, each with a varying degree of transit accessibility. It was a trip I desperately needed after a strenuous semester that pushed my abilities to manage changes in my work and personal life to their limits, and was one that I took full advantage of. I chose to travel somewhere dear to my heart from my childhood and adolescence; I had been to Seattle three previous times, first in 2010, then in 2015, and finally most recently in 2018. Each time I stayed with relatives in the city, but now for the first time, I decided where I would stay on my own and had full agency over my itinerary.

Hello from the other side! I spent a considerable amount of the time between October and now working on two labs: these were malloclab and tshlab. As the name may suggest, in malloclab, we have to implement a memory allocator. In tshlab, we have to implement a simple linux shell.

Malloc

I have undoubtedly spent the plurality of my time these past few weeks implementing malloc. Malloc is a great assignment for a systems class, as it lets you explore a rich program design space where implementation decisions you make can have a great deal of influence on the benchmarks of your program.

Hello!

I am sorry about the four month gap between posts. Once I began writing my post about the trip I took to New York City and Washington D.C., I found that I had contracted a common disease: poster’s block. I could not come up with a working idea for what I wanted the scope of my post to be; it oscillated between trip summary, photo catalog, general thoughts, but mostly some unsightly linear combination of the three. I should probably not take these formatting and content choices too seriously, since this is a personal site, but I have an urge to write well whenever possible.

On July 4th, I finally was able to realize the event I had been building toward for the last month: I hosted the Transit and Furbanism panel at Anthrocon 2025. Alongside me were Nick, Teg, and Kezl. The talk had 374 registered attendees on Sched and the room was at, if not considerably beyond, the seating capacity for the venue. The panel lost very few attendees as it progressed.

An overview of the presentation

The talk consisted of four main sections:

Happy 6/21! :3

Over the past week, I have gotten quite a bit of work done on my panel for Anthrocon.

Much of that work consisted of dry runs: taking the P1 from the stop in front of the Westin hotel to East Liberty station, timing each stop, measuring “capacity”. It occured to me that if any significant fraction of the 140 (!) people who registered for our panel wanted to participate in the ride-along, it would be logistically difficult to accommodate. Pittsburgh’s weather is also a factor to consider: last year, I saw someone suffer heatstroke in the registration line. It has been hot and humid recently. Should we discourage fursuiting on the trip?

I was recently informed that the panel proposal I submitted for this year’s Anthrocon has been accepted. Great! After the last two years, I am happy that the panel is going to be official this time and I can’t wait to see what the turnout is like.

On the subject of the panel, I have thoughts about what I want to talk about. As of June 1st, I am the only Pittsburgh resident on the panel. As such, I know a lot of operational things about the system and would be the best equipped to explain its usage. Aside from :q this, I am contemplating writing about some of Pittsburgh’s history to illustrate how transit evolved to its current form.

This is my first post on this site. Nice!

I am setting up this site as a place for some of my thoughts, writings, and notes on various things. I intend to keep this site more up-to-date than I have my previous attempts at sites.