It is 12:11 a.m. on January 1, 2022. The new year arrived before I quite had time to react. It feels as if the countdown into 2021 was only a short while ago, and yet another year has already slipped by. After sending New Year’s greetings to a few friends, I opened the keyboard and started writing this down.
Some people have joked that 2022, when read in English, sounds like “2020 too.” I don’t really buy that. At least, I hope it won’t be that. I hope this year can be a fresh start, a new beginning.
Looking back, 2021 was mostly a plain year. Nothing enormous seems to have happened, which makes it hard to decide where to begin. So I’ll start with school.
On December 30, just two days ago, I went back to campus for the defense of the project that would substitute for my graduation thesis. The result came out the next day: “Good.” That was also the highest grade given in this batch, so there is nothing to complain about. The substitute project was a national-level college student innovation project from earlier, and it had already been completed successfully, so the defense itself went smoothly. I think I did quite well. What remains now is to finish the foreign-language translation and the literature review, and then graduation should be within reach.
The first half of the year was the second semester of junior year. There was nothing particularly special about it, except that ordinary classes kept taking up time that could otherwise have been used for studying other things. In the second half, there were no more classes. So in November—yes, after staying at home from the July break all the way until November—I went to Shanghai and began the life of a drifting office worker there.
Financially, one fairly major thing did happen. On February 1, my credit card was used fraudulently for a charge in pounds sterling, equivalent to more than 4,600 RMB at the exchange rate at the time. That gave me my first-ever experience of filing a police report, and it also taught me a lesson: if I temporarily raise a spending limit for the occasional large payment, I must remember to lower it again afterward. After several months, the dispute on the acquiring bank’s side was resolved in my favor, so I did not have to pay that amount myself. As for the rest of the financial side of life, no money fell from the sky, I did not win any big prize, and there were still plenty of places where money had to be spent.
As for hobbies, especially networking, there were no huge moves this year. I was still going online every day under my own real-name ASN, more or less as usual. But I did become much more comfortable with configuring Juniper devices and writing and using automation scripts around them. In the second half of the year, I also bought a cheap NFX250 from the United States with a friend to replace the SRX220. In the end, the shipping cost was quite a bit higher than the price of the device itself. Near the end of the year, thanks to a friend’s support, I joined their network NOC work as an outside helper, got to touch some interesting networks, and picked up some rather unusual experience along the way.
Technically speaking, I did not make much progress this year. The only additional “language” I learned was a DSL: Nix. I had known a tiny bit about it before, and then Teacher Cao spent a period of time enthusiastically preaching it every day. At the same time, I happened to be planning improvements to the Luogu judge machine, and Nix really is quite suitable for judge environments. So I dug into it and wrote some Nix for that use case. After finishing the code, I left it sitting for several months. Finally, after NOIP ended in November, the judge machine using Nix to manage its environment went online.
I also personally shut down a website this year: OI in Hand. As the only relatively large public project Tianhai had at the time, it had actually stopped being developed back in 2018, and two or three years ago it had already more or less lost its reason to keep existing. Still, starting in 2013, it gave me, cyy, and others a great deal of development experience. I poured a huge amount of my middle-school energy into it. Looking back now, I still feel very happy about that time.
I continued participating in FRC this year as well. Under the larger shadow of the pandemic, the official competition still could not really happen, but Hangzhou did have RCC. I continued hanging out with Dr. Liang’s team. But I am no longer young enough to throw myself into building the robot day and night, so I could only do odd jobs, help Dr. Liang with some matters, and enjoy the youthful atmosphere at the event. This year I also found time to pass the Class B amateur radio license exam, which means I can now operate on shortwave. Before the exam, I had been using the IC-705 I got from Yuyan this year, sitting on the 50 MHz band and making contacts with operators across the water.
Around late August and early September, I went to Changsha to handle some Tianhai-related matters. In Changsha, I met Brother Matian in person for the first time. His home happened to be especially lively during those days, so by coincidence I also met one of his elder sisters and several other relatives. They were all very kind people. This trip was more or less my first time going out for leisure since the pandemic began in 2020—let’s count it as travel, at least. Outside of the things I had to take care of, I spent some free time walking around Changsha. I visited Orange Isle, where Mao once wrote “Qinyuan Chun · Changsha,” drank Chayan Yuese, which I had previously only seen in friends’ social feeds, and had a very happy week.
After going to Shanghai, I finally had the chance to attend all kinds of concerts. Otherwise, making a special trip to Shanghai just for a concert would be rather expensive. I had been looking forward to this for a long time, but in the last two months of the year, Luogu, the graduation project, the defense, and various other tedious project matters kept me from freeing up the time. There is still plenty of time ahead; I can go in 2022. I had originally bought a ticket to the Rainbow Chamber Singers’ New Year’s Eve concert, but because of the graduation-project substitute defense and related matters, I was not in Shanghai for New Year’s Eve, so I sold it on Xianyu. That unlocked the achievement of selling something on Xianyu for the first time as a young person.
Writing while slowly remembering things, I suddenly found that it was already 1:30 a.m. At the end, I want to thank the family and friends who accompanied me through the past year. I am truly grateful that you were there, and I hope we can keep going together in the new year.
Now comes the roll call: (as in previous years, cannot be made public), daughter, younger sister, (not ready to reveal), lxm, Gogo, kkk, ltt, laosb, Dianxin, twz and other friends; cyy, Wandaidai, Brother Matian, Jack, Houge, Heshen, dd, beru, Wu Xiaoban, Teacher Qiao, Teacher Cao and other foobar colleagues; colleagues at Luogu; classmates such as wyy and Lin’er—listed in basically no particular order. You played with me, talked with me a lot, and brought me a great deal of happiness. Thank you.