I’ve been on break from university for the past three months now, having finished my finals from the last term at the end of April, so I’ve been sitting at home stewing around for a while. Some people took the time off to go get jobs or internships, some are busy watching Love Island all day, some are doomscrolling, and the rest are likely gooning.

Like in Phineas and Ferb, “There’s a hundred and four days a hundred and thirty two days of summer vacation / ‘Til school university comes along just to end it, / So the annual problem for our generation / Is finding a good way to spend it, / .. like maybe” (and then a lot of emptiness).

I didn’t really have a clue what to do with my summer, unlike most people, so I’ve just spent it doing basically whatever came to mind at a given moment in time, and that’s led me to some strange places. I thought I’d write a few of them down, with some pictures from a digital camera I got not too long ago.

sitting around in the library

I spent something like a month and a half of summer vacation just sitting around in the library each day with a few friends of mine, initially just my best friend and then it turned into a whole group of people going together. I initially was going to brush up on stuff that interested me, like working on my summer research project and code from random papers that interested me (posts on these topics are certainly to follow in /λ/).

Yes, he is that dumb, but he attends one of the best schools in the USA (one of those Boston schools, let’s just say that), so I concede that he really isn’t that dumb.

the fourth of july

I went and saw a big fourth of july celebration nearby. This event might need its own post as I got a whole lot of cool pictures from it, but the coolest (in my opinion) is this gem of my friend flexing while a firework goes off (kind of):

Look at that muscle! Ladies, beware!

perusing the city for cafes

My parents’ place isn’t too far from Houston, so I travelled downtown fairly often during a span of 3-ish weeks to various coffee shops. As a Vancouverite, proper coffee/tea shops with calm atmospheres for getting work done is like a natural habitat, I suppose, so I was hoping to replicate the sort of feeling I could get just walking into any mom and pop shop back in Canada, but Texas has the problem of all their shops either being massive chains or unduly overpriced.

All of the Vancouver-feel coffee shops in Houston are tucked in the most gentrified parts of downtown, and the only place that I found to make any real amount of sense was a shop that’s nearly underneath an overpass (Spongebob style) in a somewhat shady part of town known as Tout Suite. The staff were real friendly, so that was great. They made a point to remember my name really fast for some reason, even though I only went a small handful of times.

What was also cool was that there was a section of the place where people would write on the walls, and I found all sorts of messages and blogs written on the walls from people who has visited the place in the past.

This is a picture I took of the windowsill looking outward to the street. It really is almost right under the underpass, separated only by the road. It really feels like you’re just tucked away in a part of downtown.

I spent a lot of my time at the cafe either working on my ELIZA implementation in Common Lisp or the Linear Algebra in MATLAB workbook I had checked out from the library, both of which should have posts over on /λ/.

I think, all in all, it was a fun experience. One of the coolest things I found written on the wall was a Thought Catalog link that was just written as thought.is/author/dyn-lagrimas, and a friend and I went through some of the posts and found them incredibly interesting (but obviously, depressing). It really sounds like the person that wrote it was going through a lot of stuff, but it was fairly profound stuff, honestly.

it’s that dammmmn phone

I got rid of my old phone (sort of). If you look in the photo of me working at Tout Suite, you’ll notice that I have a Samsung Galaxy A32 with a yellow foam case, but the screen had cracked and I was finding myself constantly addicted to short-form content like Instagram reels and YouTube shorts and whatnot, so I decided to just completely kick smartphones altogether and switch to using a flip phone.

I bought a network unlocked TCL Flip Pro off eBay for about 30 USD. From there, I switched to just downloading mp3s from archive.org and bandcamp for music rather than paying 5 USD a month for YouTube music any longer, and rather than getting my news from YouTube and Reels (terrible, I know), I set up my phone to use an RSS reader with some news sites (mainly CBC for Canadian news and Google News for American news), this website (I like to read back my own articles sometimes), and then a bunch of programming/FOSS interest feed aggregators (like Planet Lisp, Planet SBCL, Planet Debian, etc.). It’s super cool!

Here’s an example, this very website running on the TCL Flip Pro through its default RSS reader and web browser. Pretty cool!

Additionally, I’ve been using headphones far less now, and have been opting for wired earbuds from the dollar store instead (mostly just for Zoom calls, though).

stacks and stacks of books

So, after a while, my temporary British Columbian license expired (and ICBC never sent my proper card to my address back at Place Vanier), so I was unable to drive after July 13th (as I had to forfeit my Texas license to get the British Columbian one). Therefore, I’ve been stuck at home all day ever since that happened, and because that spelled the end of my library adventures, I started spending all that time I would have spent at the library or driving just reading. I bought a ton of new books and also grabbed a bunch of books of the shelves in my house (mostly old financial and self-help books my dad bought when I was really young when my family was still living in Vancouver), and now my whole desk looks like a miniature library of its own.

This is the right side of my desk, and already in frame you can see a whole bunch of books.

And this is the left side of my desk, with even more books! So many, in fact, that I’ve started stacking up my laptop on two of the textbooks.

What has been really interesting in the process, as well, was buying a bunch of books off eBay. I bought the following books, mostly Physics textbooks/workbooks,

• Thermodynamics by Enrico Fermi,
• Introduction to Special Relativity by James H. Smith,
• Primer of Quantum Mechanics by Marvin Chester,
• Problems in Quantum Mechanics with Solutions by G.L. Squires, and
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, and when you purchase a book off eBay, sellers will often throw in discount codes and rewards and such (because if you use the rewards code, then the sellers will also make a further profit from affiliate marketing for the brands).

Weirdly enough, on buying Catch-22, they not only sent me regular discount codes like for DoorDash or Paramount, but also a code for an online dispensary! Isn’t that strange! Recreational marijuana is perfectly legal in both Illinois (where I bought the book) and Vancouver (where I live), but not in the state of Texas, where my parents live, so I thought that this was an interesting addition to a package that the seller knew was going to Texas, a vehemently anti-weed state.

Woe is me, I guess. Maybe I could have read Catch-22 and really felt like I was flying up high in the sky with Yossarian while reading, but instead, I’m grounded like the rest of us.

I also think that it would be interesting to point out this cool bookmark I found in between The Picture of Dorian Gray, a book I hadn’t picked up since early into university.

A decorative photo reel taken of my friends and I. How cute!

I had completely forgotten that this set of photos existed, but it really is one of my favorites. I think I can end this post on this. It’s weird looking at this photo and knowing that I live with one of the guys in it now (and at the time of this photo, I think we had only been friends for a few weeks or so before it). Life changes, friends! Life changes!