Patrick Lam

Thoughts and travels of Patrick Lam

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.

Optimal travel from Montreal to Waterloo

28 Dec 2019

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.

Travel options from Waterloo

26 Dec 2019

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.

YOW - downtown Ottawa, December 2019

26 Dec 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.

Recommendation Letter for Laurie Hendren

11 Nov 2019

Recommendation letter for CS-Can Lifetime Achievement Award

I am writing to strongly endorse the nomination of Prof. Laurie Hendren for a posthumous Award for Lifetime Achievement in Computer Science. I’m honoured and also sad to be writing this letter. I’ll get back to it later, but no mention of Laurie would be complete without discussing her infectious laugh, which somewhat offsets the sadness.

Laurie has been an inspiration and role model for me from 1998 through 2018 as an undergraduate student, postdoc, faculty member, and administrator. I hope that in my own career I can continue Laurie’s outstanding legacy to some extent. I’ll mostly describe my perspective on her teaching and research, which were parts of her job that she obviously loved.

Biking to Amqui

8 Apr 2018

An epic trip from Waterloo, ON to Amqui, QC and back via Campbellton, NB, to referee in the judo provincial championships. Trains, bikes, planes, buses. We’ve got it all!

Bagotville

9 Feb 2018

Getting lucky with IRROPS enroute to Bagotville.

Yotel: A Review

3 Nov 2016

Capsule Review

Markets itself as “luxury”. The hard product is comparable to business class on a plane (which is much easier to provide since a Yotel doesn’t have to fly), but not comparable to 4* accommodation on land. Is fit for purpose. Comparable to a Hampton Inn with 10x less space. Beats a hostel or a, say, America’s Best Value Inn/Super8, by far.

More Words

A couple of days after arriving in Amsterdam, I realized that the first of my returning flights departed at 7AM. Working backwards, I’d need to leave the hotel before 5AM. Yikes! I looked at various hotels near the airport, but the required shuttle negated many of their advantages; it doesn’t take long at all to reach Schiphol from Centraal (but long enough, if aiming for a 7AM flight).

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

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