I was googling “volunteer opportunities for 12 year old” because I expect she to receive an invitation for National Junior Honor Society in Jan 2027, and right now for this school year we don’t have volunteer hours. It’s a bit harder to get volunteer hours for 12 year old due to their age. But here is an article I came across and thispicture: St Louis Crisis Nursery caught my attention. I saw at least 12 people were passing the diaper box on stairs – it seems to me for practical purpose, we don’t need that many people. But we need them for photo op or some other reasons (mental health benefits for volunteers).
This is similar for the college application nowadays too. The top schools expect a perfect essay and portfolio for applicants, and that include volunteering too.
Keep in mind I believe most if not all non for profit organizations are doing good, it’s just the way we are organizing or doing things sometimes seems to overly superficial to me. I understand it’s not my job to judge other people or the organization, but sometimes this just seems too obvious.
That being said, I am sometimes guilty of this sort of thing as well. Because I live in the society and I want the best of my kids, and if anyone knows good volunteer opportunities for 12 year old, please let me know as well. You can leave comments below, or email me at minjie dot xu at gmail dot com. Thank you.
Don’t throw away the mailer from AT&T. I vaguely recall the account manager mentioned this a few months ago before the installation of fiber internet. The debit card (a physical card) came probably a week or 2 after I filled out the claim information on the web. Here is AT&T website. I already used portion of the $100 for my daughter’s Target and Michael’s store trips this morning.
Below is notes are myself:
GMail – “All Mail” doesn’t show spam mail or mail in the “Spam” folder. For Electronic Gift Card sometimes we need to check the Spam folder.
Teresa Chen Jia, Chinese female singer. Jia was born in Beijing，and she was a devoted Teresa Teng’s fan as she grew up, listened to Teresa’s songs, and imitated Teresa singing. Many people think her voice and performance are quite similar to Teresa。She is very good at piano and she also can compose and write lyrics. She has published 17 albums: many of which are very well received.
I will add a playlist for English songs she has sung.
I will create separate playlists for her Cantonese songs and Mandarin songs later.
PS
I learned about and listened to Chen Jia since last year (2025) actually. Previously I talked about other singers. Most recent article was re: Zhao Naiji
We have using GitHub Copilot probably for 2 years now. First used as a tool for code view, and then expanded as plug-in inside the IDE (both IntelliJ and VS Code). We can ask all kinds of questions in the conversation dialog. Personally I used it to generate unit test code a few months ago.
While the tool is helpful both in code review and in software (or application) development in general, recently I also noticed two issues, both are annoying. And it seems the issues are somewhat related to what Martin Fowler said in his recent blog post “I don’t like LLMs“.
Issue one: it gave totally irrelevant code review comments. I don’t know where the comments originated from, but the tone it used again reminds me of the Mr. Fowler’s post. For me the only solution is add my comments in the Copilot code review comments and move on. It’s not the only time Copilot code review provided this kind of comments. The overall tone from Copilot is
Issue two: this one honestly stumbled upon me, and took me a while to understand the rationale of Copilot’s mistake. I asked Copilot to fix an issue of “unnecessary mockito stubbing” during unit testing. Note the code was generated by Copilot, and what it does was: to remove 2 lines of code which is not supposed to remove, while the correct solution is to remove the same 2 lines of code in a similar function. The main difference between the 2 functions here is one fucntion is with togglz off, while the other is with togglz on. It kept doing that for a few times, until I realized I can manually do it by removing those two lines in the correct function. I think in this case Copilot still is helpful to me – but this small incident reinforced my thinking of “trust but verify” for AI generated code.
At the same time, I read a bit of “When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering?” (Substack link, I came across it from LinkedIn) by Pragmatic Programmer aka Gergely Orosz. It sounds like he is more bullish on AI or AI generating code. Note the Substack article was written in last Nov or Dec.
Another related observation is, I notice sometimes colleagues would say: let AI do the algorithm or something like that (the implied meaning seems to me is we are not as smart as AI).
One counter argument is: the big tech companies are the ones leading the charge using AI to generating code, but at the same time their code quality sometimes are horrendous, such as the Uber Driver App – e.g., this personal experience I had when I was delivering for Uber Eats.
Last but not least let me share a short talk I came across from my friend and a professor in management science at my alma mater Huazhong University of Science and Technology, as shown below. In Chinese. I assume you can ask ChatGPT or Google Gemini for translations if needed.
Once I was single and really not much complaints, another time … it was probably year 2017, I worked 2 days out of the 4 day Thanksgivings holiday – I was married and have family everything, and I got into a fight with my wife partially due to my work load. I was not in a good mood; and then she told her friend that I was going to China etc. and said that I could do a favor for the friend by bringing stuff from the US to China. I told her that we already agreed that not broadcasting my upcoming China trip to avoid those kind of potential hassles. So I used that as an excuse of being upset: I said to my wife that you were not very considerate, considering that I was working my tail off in last few days. And now you bring in unnecessary/extra task for my China trip.
Looking back this is not a really super important issue (do friends a favor). But working itself has added some pressure to me, and working extra hours and especially during holidays not voluntarily is something I want to stay away from. Because relationship with my wife is much more important than work, at least in theory it is. I think because at that time I was the main breadwinner in the house, my job has some extra pressure. It’s still being that way for the most part, in last 10 years or so, my wife did start working, but I think I am still the main breadwinner. I hope over the time (in the near future) I can have other income in addition to work my 9 to 5 job: I am still working on that aspect too – not blogging for sure. But something else.
I took my 2020 Camry to dealership for oil change yesterday. The advisor gave me a heads-up: there will be a few (or couple) filters and rear brake replacement at the next oil change. I recall I watched a YT video from budget mechanic re: changing own brake pad and rotor. This is the video – How To quickly Check Your Brake Pads and Rotors – Don’t Waste $$ Changing them Too Soon!!
While I was watching that video, I came across another insane level of DIY car repair videos, e.g., this one – I changed my Subaru headgasksets in AutoZones parking lot. The total is about 14 hours. In addition to removing, organizing all the things, putting them back in the right places, I was also impressed by the genius of SteinFab Garage at Home Depot (surfacing the head gaskets).
Btw, I found both videos have a good “story telling” components to it – somewhat like a Netflix series – and that is an important part of getting the users’ interest to continue to watch – to see the end results to say the least. But at the same time, I believe most viewers won’t be able to perform the work both pros performed – it’s just way above average Joe or Jane’s head. I think I would probably try the brake pad replacement, if the opportunity comes. I am also interested in getting a diagnostic tool for car (code scanning tool).
One was actually last year, as I recall. But I still remember: it was about a year ago. Today I received another news that one of the colleagues passed away. Note I have worked remotely since pandemic in 2020, and I only saw the second colleague in person a few times. I may have seen the 1st colleague once in office, during one of the few times I visited office – it was probably the Indian holiday of Diwali. I went to the memorial (or visitation, it was a traditional Indian ceremony at a funeral home).
As I wrote this, now I recall another colleague passed away and I went to the memorial (or visitation) too: it was almost 2 years ago – if my memory is correct. That was a hard one because I believe that young colleague likely has depression and although they didn’t explicitly say the cause of death, I can sense it was likely suicide.
Remote work can take a significant toll on mental health by substantially increasing isolation, loneliness, and psychological distress, especially for employees who live alone. [1, 2]
Key Mental Health Impacts
Isolation and Loneliness: Remote workers spend about 1.1 additional waking hours alone per day compared to on-site workers. Those living alone face an 83% higher chance of experiencing zero human contact during the workday. [1, 2]
Rise in Mental Distress: A major study published in Science links remote work to an increase in symptoms of anxiety and depression. It accounts for roughly one-third of the overall rise in national mental distress seen over recent years. [1, 2, 3]
Increased Medical Care: Remote employees show higher rates of consulting mental health professionals and using prescription psychiatric medications like antidepressants. [1, 2]
Blurred Boundaries and Burnout: Working from home makes it harder to “clock out” mentally. This leads to longer hours, chronic stress, and emotional exhaustion. [1, 2]
PS 2026-9-23 I went to the visitation for the 1st colleague I mentioned. Sadly to learn it was suicide. He is very likely younger than me, single and he left behind his dad, his brother, an aunt and an uncle. The crazy part is he has a few nice used luxury cars and he has will (arrangement) for the cars, for example his aunt will get the Mercedes,
In progress. I am on round 2, using a round head screw instead of the flat head screw – my first impression is the round head screw has a bit more friction. Let’s see if this stays.
