Brady Perkins's blog

Charlie on the MRT

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 Z

I would love to drive this as my day job.

I’m back at the airport in Boston. Today’s journey already feels a little bit familiar.

I’ve spent the past two months or so at home. I’m from New Hampshire (Concord) but as I’ve come to learn and accept, I am not from an independent and proud capital city of a place with its own individual identity and cultural background. I’m actually from Boston’s largest suburb by land area.

And although I’ve been slowly weaning myself off of the car (maybe watching too much urbanist YouTube and listening to too much of the War on Cars podcast), Concord has excellent bus access to Boston. It’s a little expensive, but I really haven’t had much to do for the past week or so.

On Friday, I came down by bus and took on the challenge of riding a segment of every transit system in Boston in just one day (not getting too specific — all the subway lines, commuter rail, ferry, trolleys, BlueBike). I was more successful than I had even imagined I was going to be. It was fun, but might not have been too smart to acquaint myself with the sights and sounds of the inside of a moving metal box just a couple of days in advance of today.

Downtown Crossing in Boston.

Although if this is the challenge I choose to subject myself to whenever I get to a particular place, I haven’t cut out very much work for myself in the next destination city — I can ride the bus to the Wuri HSR station, Green Line to the Costco, take a slow train to South District and a YouBike to Wufeng and be finished.

Taichung sounds like an urbanly-explorable place.

I’ve been having the time of my life radicalizing myself to such extremes as becoming a cycling train enthusiast — for as much free time as I have in the coming three months (I’m still not sure about the work:life balance to expect), I’m sure I’ll get to have a good time on some cross-island train journeys and with the street-width dichotomy between the north and south that I’ve heard about online. I mean, how bad could the birthplace of such memorable transit mascots possibly be?

Being from the Northeast, I think I’m a little spoiled as far as neat cities go as compared to most other Americans — we have neat brick streets, narrow roads, lots of buses and pretty good and colorful metro systems, lots of history, and plenty of tree-lined streets.

A car-free street in my hometown (Concord).

Even Manchester (in NH) has lots of frequent buses, a good commuter coach-bus system (called the “Zip Line”), really cheap fares (but still fares, which is important — you need to collect money to pay for the buses. Concord has not yet figured this one out).

Downtown Manchester, NH.

I do really agree that it is important to get the basics right if you want to have a nice place for people to live their lives. I’m certainly considering a lot of what I see when I explore locally in the context of my future — I can explore close to home, I can explore far from home (coming soon, as you know), and someday all of this knowledge might come in handy if I have to put myself down somewhere at some time in the future.

One of the neatest ways to explore a city, I think, is to ring around it on its buses. You’ll both get a good feel for how easy it is to get around in the city, and you’ll get neat views out the windows (especially if it’s one of those level-boarding citybuses that are so common these days. They’re nice, but Concord has also not yet figured this one out).

You can explore the more livable parts of Concord on foot without the assistance of the green school buses if you want — they’re mostly for commuting from other parts of town to Main St, though.

Cities with streetcars are especially cool, but the only ones I’ve ridden are the ones in Toronto (kind of abused) and the Mattapan Trolley (pretty cool, but there should be more of it).

I’ve been lucky lately with how much world-viewing I’ve been getting to do.

Bicentennial Square, Concord, NH.

But I think it’s all really because the best thing a person can to do stay sane is to get out and explore as much as is possible (even your own city!), make friends, get with friends, spend as much or as little on transportation as you want, and maybe get one of those excessively-sugary Thai teas at your local American suburban mall. I think I’ve been stuck for too long on the “grass is greener on the other side” mentality that kills — it’s really not about where you are, it’s about what you do with it, right?

That’s kind of always relevant in any context. I’m just happy I’ve reminded myself about it.

Slowly into the future I go.

And onto a plane in about two hours.

State of things

Sat, 03 May 2025 00:00:00 Z

要去高雄！

For one more Saturday, I’m sitting at the same Starbucks again looking out the same window. I came in this morning and despite not having been here for two weeks, it seems like at least one barista recognized me. How not opsec of me? I guess I have a memorable face.

Although it’s usually kind of cloudy and cold on Saturdays in Rochester during the spring, today it’s less cold and just raining.

My finals are done and I’m even mostly almost done my part of our group’s business project, so after I made some edits to our slide deck today I think I’ll be able to fully enjoy the “vacation” coming up. Expect lots more blog posting soon.

After I finish my finals every semester, I’m usually not reminded of how boring life without school really is because I have a least a day of travel back home, a day or two with my parents, and then the reality sets in. Since this semester, I’m staying on-campus for a few days before attending a conference and then going home, the boredom had its chance to realize itself as soon as I turned in my last final.

Yesterday, I took my old PC out of the closet and set it up with a Goodwill monitor and some cables (expensive ones, apparently — supply chain issues are the theme of the decade? It was over $30 for a DVI-HDMI cable, a USB-C cable, and an Ethernet cord!).

The rig.

I had donated the graphics card that had been in it — an RX 580 8GB, which is honestly still pretty great — to a friend a while ago who was trying to build a PC. The Goodwill monitor served to temper my gaming performance expectations accordingly (I can’t be disappointed that a game isn’t running at 120 FPS and 1080p when my monitor is 1024 by 768 at 60 Hz).

After using RHEL with MATE in the integrated circuit design lab for a class this semester, my number one desktop operating system of choice (when I get to choose) is now Fedora with Mate/Compiz, so I installed that, Prism Launcher, and Steam, and I had some fun with that this morning. It runs Tetris Effect pretty well (my one real requirement).

The CPU is an AMD Athlon 200GE, so the integrated graphics aren’t excellent, but also not horrible. The power consumption is (I’d assume, anyway) pretty low (I have a couple of Kill-a-Watts, so if I wanted to, I could test that. I might do that later).

This has really been my entertainment for the past two days or so (really, a day and a half).

As far as grades go, I’m at least still hopeful. The class that I felt the worst about was my circuits class, which I had a rolling grade of “B-” in before I went in to the final.

After I left the test, though (which I had plenty of time to study for, so on the final, I felt much better than on most past circuits exams), I learned about a “grade replacement” policy — the professor will replace the lowest exam grade with your final grade if the final grade was better.

After a little bit of trial-and-error calculation, it seems like that means that if I got a 95 percent or better on the final, my circuits grade will jump from a B- to an A-, which would be excellent. I’m still holding out hope.

In other news related to “holding out hope”, I still haven’t heard back about my interview yet. Actually, the conference I’m going to next week is on the same campus as my interview was, and it’d be really funny if I run into the recruiter while I’m there (especially since I learned lately that we’re going to go on a facility tour for the exact company I interviewed with and already got a facility tour of during the interview).

There really isn’t anything I want more in my life right now than this job. I’ve said that to most people I know by now. I think that my most valuable trait is the patience that I’m going to convince myself I have so that I can use it — waiting is hard, though.

Before the job, I think things have the potential to go pretty well in the next few weeks. I will at least have things to do! If I can survive the boredom of today, tomorrow, and most of Monday, I’ll have the trip to the conference on Monday night, the conference itself from Tuesday through Thursday, I’m driving home Thursday night, I have Friday to (probably) do things at home (maybe), then I’m visiting a friend on Saturday afternoon (Saturday is also Mother’s Day, so I told my mom I wanted to spend the morning with her, which is always a good plan).

Sunday is too far out for me to declare a boredom epidemic just yet, and besides, when I’m at home I can’t bother the neighbors when I try to practice Arabesques by Paul Jeanjean on my clarinet in my bedroom, so of course I’ll have things to do (it even deters those annoying dogs).

(I’m just joking about the last thing. But when I talk about the things I do with my life, it makes me sound like such a basic sheep that the embarrassment hits the signed-integer size limit and turns into pride).

The following Thursday is the day that the travel begins, and Friday is the day that my 台灣旅遊 really starts. Again, 要貼博客很多. Maybe I’ll even bring that old camera I stole from my mom and finally put it to use.

There’ll be lots of flash cards to flip and listening practice to do before then, though, because I need to be on my A-game for the entire 9 days of real travel. The next time following this that I’ll try to be back is spring of 2027, which seems far into the future. I need to extract as much value as possible from the limited time I have!

謝謝光臨！

I’ll be back reporting from 家裡 next week. See you then.

Thumbnail image credit: 毛貓大少爺, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

…

After this post had been up for a few hours, I still didn’t have much to do, so I set my PC up a little closer to an accessible outlet and started up Tetris Effect with a Kill-a-Watt at the end of the power cable.

It looks cleaner now, anyway.

The outlets in my apartment are upside-down, so apologies for the strange-looking shadows.

Surprisingly low power draw!

The reading is less than 50 W. Neat!

This is the kind of thing that kills my time around now. 再見！