I finally got the Netherlands Schengen visa I had been longing for in Dublin: a short-stay visa for visiting friends and relatives.
Because my friend was studying in Amsterdam and I was working in Ireland, and because Ireland is not part of the Schengen Area, if we wanted to visit each other, I needed to apply for a Schengen visa and she needed to apply for an Irish visa.
A practical account of finding a European software engineering job from China, from preparation to relocation.
Whether from watching domestic news while in China, or from real feelings after coming to Ireland, political correctness is a very obvious feature of the West. The common domestic view is that political correctness is rather stupid and amounts to digging one’s own grave. Yet after coming here, I found that they themselves are actually proud of it. Today I will share some of my own analysis and views on the reasons behind political correctness.
The earliest science and industrialization. To put it unpleasantly, they are “too full from eating.” Fertilizers, pesticides, mechanization, the Haber nitrogen-fixation process. Material life is relatively abundant, so they have spare capacity to do political correctness. Typical cases are various environmental organizations. As the saying goes, “when warm and well-fed, one thinks of desire.” It is like pursuing higher-sounding things such as environmental protection and poverty. Various developing countries naturally do not have this capacity for political correctness. Of course, in most cases it is also only to satisfy their own higher-level desires, just in a more respectable-looking way. Unlike our country, which spends real money and genuinely solves poverty and environmental problems.
Pride and prejudice. Put unpleasantly, “why do they not eat meat?” Under several hundred years of long-term economic leadership, people from top to bottom do not understand imbalanced development worldwide. Media and education are also all from a Western perspective. A typical case is the Swedish environmental girl. As the old saying goes, “read ten thousand books and travel ten thousand miles.” Reading ten thousand books reduces temporal prejudice; traveling ten thousand miles reduces spatial prejudice. Only when you know more and possess strong empathy can you avoid pride and prejudice.
The objective needs of economic development. Since ancient times, China called itself the Middle Kingdom because agricultural development came early and it was more developed than the surrounding “barbarians.” From the pre-Qin period to the Tang dynasty, China from top to bottom was also full of institutional confidence and was relatively welcoming to and willing to use people from different ethnic groups, reaching its peak in the Tang dynasty. Since the Song dynasty, as its relative development advantage declined, it became obviously more conservative and exclusionary. The West is now in a leading position in economic development. Developed industrialization itself leads to lower birth rates. On one hand, it needs people of different ethnicities and countries to build society and provide various services and industrial labor. On the other hand, it is also relatively confident. Therefore, political correctness characterized by diversity and inclusion, and excessive care for minority groups, has become mainstream.
Historical habits of population exchange. On the other hand, China’s unification and expansion had already reached the limits of agrarian society. It assimilated the land in East Asia that was more suitable for survival, along with surrounding areas, and therefore had less contact with the outside world. In fact, from a global perspective, Eurasia is the core continent, and the center of Eurasia is actually the Middle East, today’s Arab world. The Middle East connects west to Europe, south to Africa, and east to South Asia, Central Asia, and East Asia. This can be seen from the origins of the names Asia and Europe. Europe comes from Europa, a Semitic word meaning land of sunset. Asia comes from Asia, a Phoenician word meaning land of sunrise. Also, unlike Chinese history, which was mainly unified, the West was mainly divided. Therefore, exchanges between different peoples were very frequent and natural. Refugees immigrating to Europe today also mainly come from the Middle East and North Africa. The distance is short, there are few natural geographic barriers, and population can easily flow in.
It has been two weeks since I successfully moved to Ireland. Because I have been busy handling all kinds of things since arriving, life has slowly begun to get on track. Starting today, I will gradually share some guides for the early stage of working or studying in Ireland. On one hand, I have stepped into many pits myself; on the other hand, now I have finally succeeded at some things, so I have a bit of experience that can help everyone.
Last Sunday, I submitted my application for the Hennge Back-end(Tokyo, Japan) SDE position. After that, my mail box received a Challenge 3 email from Hennge. The challenge is very interesting. When I had enough free time on this Saturday, I finished this challenge finally. I spent about 3 hours on this. The process is here.
The Challenge link is 403 after I submitted my solution. So, I share the process from my memory.
Fortunately, the archive is here: Google Drive.
As a system with Chinese characteristics, hukou has always been an important consideration when people think about work, life, and settlement. Thirty years ago, our parents’ generation went to great lengths to convert rural hukou into urban hukou; now we go to great lengths for a Beijing hukou. Many things have changed, yet some things have not.
Fortunately, Beijing also issued its new hukou rules this year. Most of the content stayed the same, but the “separately listed quota” gave us an opportunity.
Happy New Year. There are still three days before 2021 ends, and I have finally started writing my annual year-end review and New Year outlook. Recently I have noticed more and more classmates writing year-end reviews, but I am not really following the trend. I started doing this very early, first in notebooks and later on my blog. Besides the annual transition from the old year to the new one, I also write reviews and outlooks at milestone moments in life, such as graduating from college and graduate school.
Previous year-end reviews:
Two months ago, I configured Travis CI to automatically deploy my blog in
Travis CI Hexo Automatically Deploy.
However, I found it do not work this month. Unfortunately, Travis do not support free build for public repos now. I have to migrate to Github Action in order to auto CD.
I followed this post to do that. Some changes should be applied in deploy.yml file, especially theme.
For example, my Chinese blog deploy.yml and my English blog deploy.yml.
Close auto build in Travis CI Dashboard: Your repos -> Setting -> General -> uncheck Build pushed branches and Build pushed pull requests.
| Rank | Name | Score | Finish Time | Q1 (3) | Q2 (4) | Q3 (5) | Q4 (6) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 323 / 12700 | YoungForest | 18 | 1:00:46 | 0:11:32 🐞1 | 0:27:23 | 0:42:54 🐞1 | 0:50:46 |
After 6 weeks of cruel daily check in, I am finally free from solve the daily problem everyday in cruel group. The condition of free is that the contest rank is within top 500 in the world and solving all 4 problems in weekly contest. Congratulations on me.
Recently, when using my beloved Niz Plum 66 keyboard, I ran into a strange bug.
In Bluetooth mode, the left Option key stopped working. Since my Hammerspoon setup and many other app shortcuts use it heavily, I could occasionally use the right Option key as a temporary substitute, but that was never a real solution. My work efficiency dropped a lot.
I am not sure how this bug was introduced. It was probably around the time my Mac started connecting to two external monitors.