It’s been ages since my last post.

It’s not that I haven’t been trying to write, but lately I find it increasingly difficult to finish a post, or even a thought.

Just look at the amount of drafts I have pending, some of which dated back several years.

Even as I’m writing this, I’m not entirely sure if this will eventually make it to the blog page, or end up as another draft. Still, I needed to start writing again, or I might forget how to. Tonight is the Eve of the Lunar New Year celebration here in Vietnam, but I have no doubt it will be much later until I can finish this blog post. We’ll see.

With my wife having to lie in bed all day, I’m now responsible for making breakfast, lunch and dinner. Between preparing meals and doing the dishes, I can now barely have enough time to work on my day time job, let alone some 30 minutes to write out these thoughts. It’s tough but it also gives me a whole new level of respect for my wife, she’s been doing this for years without complain, I don’t know how she managed to pull it off while running a successful start-up, such a super human.

On a personal note, looking back on 2023, there wasn’t anything particularly eventful that I can recall. It wasn’t a bad year, per se, but it wasn’t a great year either. I visited the hospital a whole lot, perhaps more than any other year up until now. My parents had all kind of health problems as they slowly approaching 70s, my wife had a severe case of food poisoning on our only out-of-town trip of the year, we booked a 4-star resort in Vũng Tàu only to cram together on a tiny hospital bed in District 1, HCMC. And as I sit here writing, we just got back home from a week long stay in Đông Đô Hospital. To be honest, I could really use a year without going near any hospital but at this rate, things are probably not going to change this year.

But 2023 wasn’t all bad, I still managed to learn many new things. I finally got an entry level 3D printer (Kingroon KP3S Pro v2) and printed a bunch of useful stuffs, wow’ed a couple of friends, learn how to modify basic meshes to I can make things fit my need. On top of that, there’s also the AI stuffs. 2023 was the year of AI explosion, and I managed to dip my toes in some generative AI stuffs. Learned how to use Stable Diffusion, MidJourney, ComfyUI etc. Realized how useful AND dangerous this stuff is (seriously, if you post a photo of yourself on Facebook these days, you might as well be naked, as that is only a few clicks away). My only regret is that I still don’t have anybody to teach these stuffs to. I love sharing knowledge but haven’t a platform to do so.

I haven’t finished writing yet but my time for today’s up, and because I don’t want to start this new year with yet another Draft post, I’m going to hit Publish.

Happy New Year