You also have to descend

Following up on last week’s tip, here’s a near-data-disaster from Rollen D’Souza:

I decided when I started grad school that I would always keep track of my research and general course notes in repositories. This wasn’t entirely just for backup purposes. It turns out that when you want to work on three different machines — work desktop, home desktop, surface laptop — making sure they are all synchronized with your latest work is non-trivial without some automated or manual tracking software. I use Mercurial (distributed vcs) because then there is an entirely cloneable copy of all my work on every machine I work on. (Why Mercurial versus git? Another story.) I’ve gotten into the habit of pulling, committing and pushing whatever I have whenever I work on a given machine.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Monday, March 2, 2020

What's Your Backup Strategy?

This week’s tip: have and execute a backup strategy for your data.

Here’s a picture of Mount Ngauruhoe (which stood in for Mount Doom). I’m sharing a picture from my phone (auto-enhanced by Google Photos) because the better pictures are on the camera that I spent an hour unsuccessfully looking for, and which my spouse was really unhappy about losing.

Devices get lost or fail all the time. While truly irreplacable data is rare, some data is inconvenient or expensive to replace. Maybe you can’t re-do the assignment in time for the deadline. Every so often this happens to someone’s PhD thesis, which represents years of work. Don’t let that be you!

Posted by Patrick Lam on Sunday, February 23, 2020

Bring less stuff!

Happy Reading Week! This week’s life tip is, for now, most relevant to those of you not from the Greater Toronto Area, if you happen to be going home for the week. Experience shows that it will apply to many of you in the next few years.

Tip: Bring less stuff!

There is often a skill versus stuff tradeoff. With more skill you can often improvise for having less stuff. A technical example is being able to use vim versus having to use a heavyweight editor that is tied to a particular operating system. And I say that as an emacs user. But vim works in resource-constrained environments over flaky connections (use mobile shell, mosh, for such connections).

Posted by Patrick Lam on Sunday, February 16, 2020

Rock climbing in Wanaka

MP and I joined a NZAC Wellington club trip which was planned in two parts: Wanaka sport climbing and Darrans alpine granite. We only signed up for the sport climbing part. The granite part got rained out and people did more alpine objectives around Queenstown/Wanaka. Thanks to Derek for organizing!

Driving

We spent almost 0 time in Queenstown, driving directly to the Pak’N’Save grocery store just outside the airport and then to Wanaka over the Crown Range (highest main road in New Zealand!). On the way back we stopped at the “The Argonath on the Anduin River” (Lord of the Rings) and also apparently the birthplace of bungy jumping.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Look at the Details

This week, we went to the Rangiwahia Hut for a walk (“tramp”) and then to some caves with glow worms. We have seen glow worms at night in Wellington but we were here four hours before sunset, so no glow worms for us.

Today’s tip: looking closely at things can reveal unexpected details.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Sunday, January 26, 2020

Don't be a weka

Kapiti Island is a nature reserve from which the New Zealand Department of Conservation has removed non-native predators (possums, rats, etc.)

Weka is not just a machine learning toolkit, but also a vulnerable flightless New Zealand bird. The bird will steal your lunch that is right in front of you on the table and run away with it if you don’t chase after it.

Life tip: Don’t be a weka. Cooperate generously with people. Good collaborations go two ways: make sure that both parties get something out of the collaboration.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Sunday, January 19, 2020

2019 retrospective

New year, new website! I hope to start breaking out of Associate Professor Purgatory in 2020 and what I’ve accomplished in 2019 will lay the groundwork for that.

Professional

I completed my 3 year 4 month term as SE Director. It’s been rewarding but work/work balance means that I’ve had less time to spend on research.

SE Director

I was thrilled that my students successfully nominated me for the Friend of EngSoc award. It was a great token of appreciation.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Optimal travel from Montreal to Waterloo

The plan was to leave our stuff at our friends’ place in Toronto, go to Montreal and the Eastern Townships for the holidays, leave our car at my parents’ place, and then get back to Waterloo, clean the house and execute last-minute tasks, and then get back to Toronto, pick up our 5 checked bags and bring them all to the airport.

Let’s talk about getting from Montreal (well, Brossard) to Waterloo on December 28.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Saturday, December 28, 2019

Travel options from Waterloo

2019 Travel options to/from Waterloo

A lot has changed from the last time I wrote this in 2008. The options for getting to Toronto and Pearson are much better. I went to BUF a few times a while ago but now there aren’t good Star Alliance options from BUF and they’re not that much cheaper, so I haven’t done it for a while.

Here are various options for carless transportation from Waterloo in 2019.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Thursday, December 26, 2019

YOW - downtown Ottawa, December 2019

One of my strange hobbies is walking to or from airports. In the ideal case it is walking between the airport and the place I am sleeping. I flew into YOW in December 2019 and had the opportunity to take a 13km walk.

Complete gallery: https://gallery.patricklam.ca/index.php?/category/1209

Itinerary

From YOW, out on Paul Benoit Driveway past the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club, to Riverside Dr, meeting the Rideau River at Mooney’s Bay and “civilization” at Billings Bridge, then across the Rideau on Bank through the Glebe and Centretown to Albert St and my destination.