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).

Kitchener-Waterloo Restaurants

8 Sep 2016

In which Patrick Lam pretends to be a restaurant reviewer.

• Afghan: Chopan Kabob has generous and tasty servings.
• Asian Fusion: Have only been to Bhima’s Warung once, I think. Was good.
• Bahn Mi: Givral Deli near Kitchener Market has excellent banh mi with crispy bread and the right fillings.
• Dim Sum: had one (of one) good experience at Sam’s Chinese Kitchen on Victoria. We prefer carts, but they’re rare in Ontario. Nevertheless, it was good, had as many Asian-looking patrons as one might hope for, and has much less of a line than Cameron (which is fine, but popular. And who wants to wait in line?).
• Pho: at my place; or else at Pho Dau Bo, two locations
• Other Vietnamese: Wooden Boat Food Company [Jan 2021]
• Sushi: Watami in uptown Waterloo is good; Kinkaku in downtown Kitchener used to be really good izakaya but got AYCE’d :( [edited Jan 2021]
• Thai: Northern Thai excellent
• Indian: Empress of India; Amaya Express; haven’t been to Masala Bay in a long time but it was good.
• BBQ: Hog Tails (out west) / Lancaster Smokehouse
• Caribbean: Rainbow Caribbean Cuisine; plus a place at the Kitchener Market has the best Jamaican patties ever [Jan 2021: ha, now I’ve made some which are good too]
• Salvadoran: Guanaquita excellent
• Bagels: no endorsement of Woodfire Bagels but it looks promising
• Croissants: Ambrosia—they won a taste test (but opening hours are restricted) [edit Jan 2021: last I’m aware they had moved to being Ambrosia Bakery near downtown Kitchener and were no longer making croissants; try Ghost Light Cafe]
• Catch-all: we liked Hungry Ninja; Uptown 21 was good; Taco Farm used to be really good but I had a so-so experience there recently (unripe avocadoes).

Good Talks

8 Jun 2016

In my Static Analysis for Software Engineering graduate course, each student is expected to present 2 papers to the class; Software Engineering undergrads also give talks as part of their Capstone Design Project. Here are some recommendations on how to give a good paper presentation.

• Avoid bullets. When appropriate, diagrams are way better than bullet points for explaining concepts. Just because PowerPoint (or clone) makes it easy to write bullet points doesn’t mean that you should use bullet points.
• Go concrete, not abstract. In fact, if you can explain the main idea of a paper with an example, focus on the example first and then summarize the key ideas. (This works better with concepts, not experimental results.)
• Be choosy. You don’t need to present the whole paper. Just present the most interesting ideas. There’s no need to be exhaustive. The paper contains everything, after all. You’re just going over the highlights.
• Think about charts. Try to make charts that tell a story and choose the charting technology that best supports that. (See Edward Tufte’s books.)

Also check out the Lessig style of giving talks.

Lexicon

8 Jun 2016

Lexicon

Here are some academic terms that I’ve invented.

• Pre-batical. A one-year postdoc taken straight out of one's PhD, after obtaining a tenure-track Assistant Professorship, but before starting said professorship.
  Usage. Her pre-batical at UW turbocharged the start of her independent research career and let her branch out into that up-and-coming field.
• Associate professor purgatory. The period a few years after returning from one's post-tenure sabbatical where one is no longer protected from service but still expected to constantly ramp up research productivity.
  Usage. Joe's swamped with grant proposal writing and committee meetings in his associate professor purgatory.

Lexicon

8 Jun 2016

Lexicon

Here are some academic terms that I’ve invented.

• Pre-battical. A one-year postdoc taken straight out of one's PhD, after obtaining a tenure-track Assistant Professorship, but before starting said professorship.
  Usage. Her pre-battical at UW turbocharged the start of her independent research career and let her branch out into that up-and-coming field.
• Associate professor purgatory. The period a few years after returning from one's post-tenure sabbatical where one is no longer protected from service but still expected to constantly ramp up research productivity.
  Usage. Joe's swamped with grant proposal writing and committee meetings in his associate professor purgatory.
• Meeting spam. Presentations at meetings where the presenters feel that the participants should know about a topic, but where the participants' time cost exceeds the expected value to them.
  Usage. "Gee, I sure didn't get much out of that meeting spam."

Letter to Minister Bardish Chagger

28 Jan 2016

Letter to Minister Bardish Chagger

My parents

Dear Minister Chagger,

I am writing to you as one of your constituents.

I know that multiculturalism is important to you from your past involvement with the KW Multicultural Centre. Given yesterday’s deplorable news from the United States about a ban on Syrian refugees, we in Canada absolutely must take up the slack as best we can. I understand that we’re accepting a number of Syrian refugees already; way less than Germany, but more than the US, and that this number continues to increase and is slated to be higher in 2017 than in 2016. However, we’re not doing enough.

Two Views of Columbia Crest Crater (Mount Rainier)

1 May 2013

Shot above (July 8, 2009): at 14,400 ft (route to summit: Emmons-Winthrop Glacier) with David Wentzlaff and Aaron Yahr; shot below (May 1, 2013): at 36,000 ft, from AC 545 flying from LAS to YVR.

Engineering failures in real life

30 Jun 2009

So here I am staying in a hotel in Burnaby BC. Outside my window I can see a “Save-on-Foods”. Hmm. Let’s see. Save-on-Foods. Burnaby. Wait! I remember something from the Professional Practice Exam book! [edit 2020: This was well before the Algo Centre Mall collapse in Elliot Lake.]

OK, so is that the Save-on-Foods in question? Google Maps tells me that my hotel is 0.3km from the Save-on-Foods in Station Square, as described below.

Travel options from Waterloo

6 Aug 2008

Travel options from Waterloo

I’ve tried to figure out various options for carless transportation from Waterloo. Here’s what I’ve discovered.

To Pearson Airport

• Airways Transit option 1, door-to-door: 1.5hr, $80 for one direction. You have to wait for everyone to get on and off. They do tend to drive at reasonable highway speed.
• Airways Transit option 2, Airporter: 2 hours from the UW Student Life Centre, limited schedules (departs 6am, 10:45am, 1:00pm, 3:30pm; returns 8:15am, 1:30pm, 3:15pm, 6:13pm) and even less on weekends. $46 per direction.
• Greyhound to Toronto ($22, 1.5 hours) and Pearson airport express ($20). About the same cost as the Airporter, but more hassle and more schedules available. Cheaper if you have a student card.
• Get to Mississauga Square One (works if you can take the FEDS bus) and then take the GO service to the airport ($3.50). Can be extremely cheap, if you can make it work for you, and probably isn’t all that slow either.

To Buffalo Airport

All reasonable options cost about $65.

Academic Tree circa 2003

26 Jun 2008

Pull requests accepted!

https://github.com/patricklam/plam.new-webpage

Henry M. Foley (physics)
+--Joseph Frederick Traub (1959, from Columbia) [Columbia] (quantum)
                http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~traub/
   +--Hsiang Tsung Kung (1973, from CMU) [Harvard] (networks)
                http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~htk/
       +--Baudet, Gerard M. (78, from CMU)
       +--Cohn, Robert J. (92, from CMU)*
       +--Fisher, Allan L. (84, from CMU)
       +--Foster, Michael J. (84, from CMU)
       +--Hsu, Feng-hsiung (89, from CMU)
       +--Lam, Monica S. (87, from CMU) [Stanford]
          +--Michael Wolf, (August 1992, from Stanford)
             Thesis: "Improving Parallelism and Locality in Nested Loops".
          +--Michael Smith (November 1992, from Stanford) [Harvard]
             Thesis: "Support for Speculative Execution in High-Performance 
                      Processors".
          +--Todd Mowry (March 1994, from Stanford) [CMU]
             Thesis: "Tolerating Latency Through Software-Controlled Data Prefetching".
          +--Martin Rinard (August 1994, from Stanford) [MIT]
             Thesis: "The Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of Jade, 
                      a Portable, Implicitly Parallel Programming Language"
             +---Pedro Diniz (May 1997, from UCSB) [ISI]
                 Thesis: "Commutativity Analysis: A New Analysis Framework 
                          for Parallelizing Compilers"
             +---Radu Rugina (January 2002, from UCSB) [Cornell]
          +--Daniel Scales (December 1995, from Stanford) [VMWare]
             Thesis: "Efficient Shared Objects for Distributed Address Space Machines"
          +--Saman Amarasinghe (January 1997, from Stanford) [MIT]
             Thesis: "Parallelizing Compiler Techniques Based on Linear Inequalities"
          +--Jennifer Anderson (March 1997, from Stanford) [VMWare]
             Thesis: "Automatic Computation and Data Decomposition 
                      for Multiprocessors"
          +--Robert Wilson (December 1997, from Stanford) [Tensilica]
             Thesis: "Efficient Context-Sensitive Pointer Analysis for C Programs"
          +--Jason Nieh (December 1998, from Stanford) [Columbia]
             Thesis: "The Design Implementation and Evaluation of SMART: 
                      A Scheduler for Multimedia Applications"
          +--Shih-wei Liao (August 2000, from Stanford) [Intel Research]
             Thesis: "SUIF Explorer: an Interactive and Interprocedural Parallelizer"
          +--Brian Schmidt (August 2000, from Stanford) [Kealia]
             Thesis: "Supporting Ubiquitous Computing with Stateless Consoles 
                      and Computation Caches"
          +--Patrick Sathyanathan (June 2001, from Stanford) [HP]
             Thesis: "Interprocedural Data Flow Analysis--Alias Analysis"
          +--Amy Lim (September 2001, from Stanford) [Axis]
             Thesis: "Improving Parallelism And Data Locality With Affine Partitioning"
       +--Lehman, Philip L. (84, from CMU)
       +--Leiserson, Charles E. (81, from CMU)
       +--Oflazer, Kemal (87, from CMU)
       +--Pieper, Jon (93, from CMU)*
       +--Printz, Harry (91, from CMU)
       +--Robinson, John T. (82, from CMU)
       +--Song, Siang W. (81, from CMU)
       +--Sussman, Alan (91, from CMU)*
       +--Thompson, Clark D. (80, from CMU)
       +--Wu, I-Chen (93) 
   +-- Don Heller (PhD, 1977, from CMU)
+-- Joseph Sucher (PhD, 1957, from Columbia) [Maryland] (theoretical physics)
    Thesis: "Energy levels of the two-electron atom, to order 3 Rydberg."

* - Co-Chairman

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