Ahilavati

She's my current daily ride. She's the first bike I own since coming to study in Japan. We had some on-and-off relationship for a while: I'd been going with another bikes for times, and she'd been with other guys too. Well, no jealousy here. She was also in another city for a while I was involved in a rural revitalization project, which in the end I went home with another bicycle [in addition to her still in my possession] by the time the project concluded.

I use the bottle cage for a light rain jacket as I rarely do any ride which requires me to bring some water bottle. The pannier rack is for grocery and other weird things I transport on errands. Saddle isn't that high as I often ride her with pair of slippers/crocs rather than proper shoes. The stem is slammed to the bottom 'cause the clampable portion of the fork is already so short, even without spacers and stuff.
 
The fork she originally came with was broken, she once had a suspension fork, but now I settled with 700c fork with V-brake bosses. V-brake is nice that you can fit a wider tire. But with lever designed for dual pivot caliper brake, you need to true your rim really nice to avoid rubbing, or just ignore it as long as it isn't so serious. She sports 25c at the moment which is getting duller everyday, I am a broke student.

I am learning to bunny-hop with her. I can now lift my front wheel, I can lift my rear wheel, but linking the latter while the front wheel is still on the air is not in my curriculum vitae, yet. Neither is  proper manual.

 

Sorry for the chain, I am such a poser T_T

Ikigai is (even) cruel

Ikigai is occupation-centric, hands down.

A mother might say that her reason to live is to watch/nurture/care her kid growing up. Well, she loves the cause (the kid); she may be either a good or bad parent; in the big picture, the world might not need that particular kid; and parenting costs bunch of money, time, energy, understanding, patience: all kind of resources, in short.

So, parenting is either mere love or passion. But I will take "my kid is my reason to keep on living" as wholly valid reason--not an excuse--to live your life.

Ikigai isn't even complete

You perhaps once stumbled upon this Venn diagram portraying Ikigai: "reason for being", "purpose of life", "reason to live", or whatchamacallit raison d'être. The word is represented by the character (生) which means disciple, livelihood, potential, unripe, or things along this line.




The "purpose" is divided into four dimensions: whether one is adept at it, whether one is paid to do the task, whether the thing is something others actually need (hence beneficial), and whether one is enjoying it. But somehow, the depiction of this "purpose" using this Venn diagram kinda incomplete albeit you can still dwelve deep into it, make an essay out of it, and give TED-style talks on it. Still, technically the diagram with four circles here only features fourteen sections (including negative value for all factors), while permutations of four factors yield sixteen different values in total. So where are the remaining two?




This oval-ey diagram is definitely better. But two sections are left unexplained: "good job" (what you love and earns money, but you aren't necessarily good at it nor others need you to do it) and "contribution" (what you are good at for precisely what others need, but you kinda loathe it and doesn't get paid). The first definitely sounds wasted and the later sounds like one is being "used".

So what may these two be in real life?

• prostitution is a good job: screw, hump, get paid; you don't need to be a proper porn star and definitely doing solicit sexual act isn't socially desirable conduct. If you are getting good at it, it is now either your passion or profession (or both, which is your now self-imposed ikigai). If somehow society accepts it, it is now your ikigai imposed by others, unfortunately, by being a prostitute.
• being altruistic as a matter of contribution: do good samaritan out of good will, you are quite adept at it, then you are getting tired, experiencing burnout, later running out of resources (time, energy, money, etc) to do so. Your way out being this miserable is either to start to love it for good or get some money out of it (which makes you an entrepreneur at this stage)
• entrepreneur: you aren't necessarily good at it but people needs you, you don't necessarily love it but somehow you get paid to continue doing it. So how you manage to do it? Let others with proper passion on it to do so and use others' resource to do your case, you connects will and energy, resource and passion, talent and demand.

So what's the take on this, or at least, my take on this?
Your raison d'être doesn't have to be wholesome and "complete" with love, money, talent, and acceptance of others at once. You can always define it yourself, being content with the moment, but always open up your mind for changes you are working on for the better or changes simply imposed by constraints, as things are often not quite right.

Kudos to guys at dreamstime/Toronto Star Graphic, Mark Winn, Dan Buettner, David McCandles for the wonderful graphs.

You... and (perhaps) me

Isn't it beautiful, to lead and to protect your cherished one?
Still, who shall I be? Renshaw, Hincapie, Rogers, or Martin?

migrating to larger SSD with GPT partitioning

My daily driver is Acer Aspire Switch 11, a convertible laptop with SSD on the tablet and 2.5" drive beneath the snap-on keyboard. Mine came configured with Lite-On 64 GB M.2 SSD (L8T-64L9G) and 500 GB hard drive. Soon I swapped the disk drive for 1 TB model from HGST (HTS 721010A9E630) when I got it for quite a good deal. But the SSD got to wait, I am a poor student.

 The laptop comes with Windows 8.1 (later upgraded to Windows 10) with UEFI configured which spells GPT partitioning.

Then the time for the SSD upgrade came, it wasn't that difficult. You just need the right tools for the job: replacement SSD, a bootable USB drive with Linux Mint 18 (Sarah, Ubuntu 16.04), USB 3.0 adapter for M.2 drive, and AOMEI Partition Assistant. The laptop would get a nice upgrade to 256GB SSD (Transcend TS256GMTS800)

• plug the new SSD to USB adapter
• boot the laptop to LinuxMint which you can create with rufus for UEFI booting
• dd the whole old SSD into the new one. 64 Mb block size is nice, I got 250 MB/s.
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdd bs=64M
• out with the old SSD, in with the new
• reboot into Windows 10
• install AOMEI Partition Assistant
• move and resize your partition

I tried several partition managers on Windows 10:

• EASEUS wasn't able to detect my not-so-matching partition table
• MiniTool wasn't able to move the partition (perhaps it wasn't recognizing the end of disk address properly just as EASEUS)
• lastly, AOMEI works just great with moving Windows recovery partition (located to the end of the disk) and resizing my system (C:) drive to its full size.

GPT table stays intact and the laptop boots just fine. I am a happy boy.