Patrick Lam

Thoughts and travels of Patrick Lam

You also have to descend

2 Mar 2020

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.

What's Your Backup Strategy?

23 Feb 2020

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!

Bring less stuff!

16 Feb 2020

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).

Rock climbing in Wanaka

12 Feb 2020

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.

First month in Wellington

31 Jan 2020

Sabbaticals are a large block of unscheduled time. Time always passes. Have I done stuff in my time in Wellington so far?

Professional

I’ve started a number of collaborations with colleagues in Wellington, and am thinking of a survey paper and an essay in particular. I’m excited about contributing to these projects. I hope to have more to report in my February update.

In other news I have a climbing-related submission to the Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism (sadly an Elsevier journal) which got a revise-and-resubmit. Progress!

Look at the Details

26 Jan 2020

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.

Don't be a weka

19 Jan 2020

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.

January 2020 Reflections

13 Jan 2020

Bryan Cantrill (of dtrace fame) writes about engineering performance management.

https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/1216491216356823040

He suggests the following five questions for engineers to answer twice a year.

  1. What are you most proud of in the last six months?
  2. What did you learn?
  3. Where did you struggle?
  4. What are you anxious about in the coming six months?
  5. What are you excited about in the coming six months?

Most proud of

Having recently removed the se-director email from my Thunderbird, I realized that this role consumed a lot of time and energy. I am most proud of having completed my term and helping students, both in the moment (advising and leading the advising team) and through program changes.

Patrick Lam's Research Publications

1 Jan 2020

Refereed Publications

Posters and Presentations

Theses

Other publications

2019 retrospective

31 Dec 2019

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.

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Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo; patrick.lam@uwaterloo.ca

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