Date Location Time Distance 9/15, 3:35 PM Clark Field 25 min 4.5 km "Somerset Maugham once wrote that in each shave lies a philosophy. I couldn't agree more." –Haruki Murakami One of my favorite books is "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" by Haruki Murakami. It's not a bestseller or pageturner, but the charm is in the mundaneness of the book, it's an account of his running endeavors as well as musings on life.

So I'm big on minimalism— I know it's kind of a meme on the internet. I think there's a lot more to it than black clothing and Instagram photos of empty rooms. Minimalism is the radical response to the rampant consumerism encouraged by corporations, and a rejection of the idea that the set of objects you have is in bijection with how happy you are. To be a minimalist is to embrace boredom and shun consumption.

This is possibly the most descriptive title I've ever written! I've always an interest toward cycling. After reading Murakami's "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running", the urge to compete in a triathlon was awakened within me: I was so close too! I ran a marathon in February 2020, check. Swam for a couple years, works as a lifeguard: check. The only thing that was left was cycling.

Back when I went to TAMS, I took "graduate" level coursework before, which had concurrent enrollment for both undergraduates and graduate students (each having their own course number, eg Math 4500 for undegraduates and Math 5600 for graduate students). To be honest, they weren't very difficult. It felt like an accelerated undergraduate course, but still an undergraduate course. The pace was above average but not unmanageable, and the homework was very reasonable.

If you didn't know, I host my own mail server here at mail.simonxiang.xyz (don't try to type that into your browser). Although setting it up is usually a long and forlorn process (or so I've heard), for me it was actually quite simple. There's a YouTuber out there that goes by Luke Smith that wrote a nice script to easily set up mail on your new server. If you just read the README and make sure you have all the requirements set up on your domain registrar and VPS provider, it's a two minute process to run the script and be on your merry way with a fancy new email server.