Weekly Notes #5

29 Mar, 2026

Mar 23-29
A normal week full of work, uni, and running.

Throughout the week I ran 4 times in total: 6km,6km,5km,10km. I also swam 1km on Thursday.
I usually run loops around a reserve near my place. One day there were so many people running, and we accidentally formed a single file running together (?) Like a run club except we just happened to be there. Also the other day I went to Centennial Park and it's a heaven for running, I should definitely go on a weekend morning.
This Sunday (today) I had my first running event in Sydney: Run2Cure 10km at Botanic Garden overlooking the Opera House. I use it as a mid-way check point for my 2-month half-marathon training session. I did not run that much in Jan and Feb because all of the relocating stuff, so in Mar and Apr I have to keep up the KMs if I want to run safe and enjoy the upcoming 21k in early May. The hills in Sydney are no joke, but the weather is perfect (after 2 days of storm). I did great and reached my 10k pb!

movie 《与龙共舞》1991，王晶导演，刘德华主演。I was talking to friends at class and they could not believe I missed this one, but I am not a huge fan and it took me 3 days to finish...

I finished Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia A McKillip, now keeping a momentum of 1 book a week. I wrote a review here. It is a unique kind of fantasy that I have not encountered: folklore of the past, events of the present, time intertwines and folds, characters outlive their age, magic, books, languages, love and so on. The plot is whimsical and not very structural, it kind of flows from character to character, time to time, I never know what the next chapter might be about. The writing feels "light", probably due to the structure of the story. It is not a hard book, but I feel there are many deep topics behind the flowy plot that readers can interpret on their own. The plot development gets more and more interesting as we get to know more about the "truth" of the folklores through the FMC.
I started reading The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson. I know of this version was quite popular among readers, and I wanted to give it a try. I have read Iliad in Chinese translation, didn't have too much thought for it. I also disliked many of the Greek myth retellings, overall I had mixed feelings for the females depicted in those stories. But this year I want to learn more about ancient Greek and Rome, so I decide to read it. I found a neat interactive map that could be useful.

a local HTML interface for travel photos on a map
- I was transferring photos from my GRII's SD card to my hard drive, and I looked at all my photo folders of the past decade, I rarely (or never) opened them after I dump them in to the drive for storage. I need to do something with it! Then I saw Emma's map , it's so neat! I would like something similar but different. My photos (big files) will remain offline, in my machine, thus the interface will work local only as well. So far I don't find the need to share the entire vault. Then on the map each dot represents a trip page contains a photo gallery, simple. I tried Vibe Coding (I did not think this phrase had anything to do with me) using the free version of Claude, and it works really nicely. I need to manually curate the photos and write in JSON. To do that I use a Python script to get all the picture's file name in the folder, so I can copy to the JSON file quickly.