Jack of all trades, master of none,
though oftentime better than master of one.
(Unknown)1
Hi, I’m Darren. I’ve already written a cheezy bio on my old blog (no longer maintained, but I might go back in the future), so I see no need to rewrite it. My interests haven’t shifted as much as they faded over the past year. Furthermore, the Jekyll theme of my old blog was too complicated for me to maintain at the time. Utlimately, I decided to give it another try with a fresh start on a clean slate. This time, I looked for a seemingly easier-to-maintain template even if it comes at the cost of some excess functionality. After all, I decided to use a static website over a more feature-complete and easy-to-use platform such as Wordpress because I had no need for those extra features, and I prefer to have more control over the my writing and publishing process.
A strong desire to fit in with the pack, go with the flow, and shoot for the top colleges stars in a competitive boarding high school had me rob myself of my passions one after another. But I am not satisfied with four banal years of the high school academic grindset–after all, I came to the US school system to avoid this lifestyle. In the endeavour to preserve these interests, I decided to write about them here. I hope to be able to document both spontaneous interests and longer term projects, unlike my previous blog which I tried to keep, in retrospect, a little bit too formal.
Thanks to the rather colloquial nature of this blog, I could write more frequently (as it doesn’t have to go through as many revisions prior to publishing). So long as the ideas keep flowing, I will try to keep writing on a weekly basis.
One detail that I wish to note is regarding research-oriented articles. Sometimes, I would like to cite a publicly available source from which I obtained or confirmed basic information about a topic. In these situations, I prefer using Wikipedia as a readily available and typically extensive and complete source, despite its reputation in school and the academic world as an disreputable source, citing which would be considered bad practice. Also, in general, please ignore the “Updated X days ago” marker on blog posts. I frequently go through old blog posts to edit for markdown code formatting or modify tags for various reasons, and any of those actions can trigger an update to that value. Yet another (valid) question you may have is why I always publish new blog posts on Mondays at 7:30 AM Eastern time. Well, that’s a part of my perfectionism that I couldn’t quite get rid of (yet), and it helps if I publish on the same weekday at the same times so I don’t have to worry about the “when” aspect (it also looks neater), but I might stop doing this at some point.