Patrick Lam

Thoughts and travels of Patrick Lam

The TranzAlpine and a day at Arthur's Pass

Here’s the third part of this South Island trip. Part 1: Heaphy Track. Part 2: penguins, Mount Sunday, and Christchurch. Part 3b: BreakFree on Cashel.

On my list of “things to check for re-opening” was New Zealand railway trips. So when I saw that the TranzAlpine was re-opening for $75 winter fares, I talked MP into a trip from Christchurch. Like the Heaphy, this trip leaves you far away from where you started, and on the wrong side of the Southern Alps. The train is logistically easier because at least you’re in a town, Greymouth. But that town is still remote enough that one can buy a starter home for $95k. The solution here is easier than for the Heaphy though: you just take the train back.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Saturday, August 22, 2020

Pohatu Penguins at Akaroa, Mount Sunday, and Christchurch

Our South Island trip had three distinct components, so it makes sense to post about them separately. This is part 2. Part 1: Heaphy Track. Part 3: Arthur’s Pass and the TranzAlpine. Part 3b: BreakFree on Cashel.

Full galleries at https://gallery.patricklam.ca/index.php?/category/1227.

July 10: French-themed day in Canterbury

More pictures from July 10

After a big day on July 9th, finishing the Heaphy Track and getting to the suburbs of Christchurch, we were scheduled to go see penguins in Akaroa with Pohatu Penguins. MP signed us up for their maximal experience, including getting driven up to the crater rim and enjoying the scenery of Akaroa Harbour, followed by walking down the last bit of the first day of the Banks Track, an evening penguin tour, and sea kayaking the next morning. Well, the maximal experience didn’t include food, but that was good for us. It’s nice to self-cater on trips.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Friday, July 24, 2020

BreakFree on Cashel (Christchurch): A Review

tl;dr

Exceeded expectations. Great value-for-money.

Related Work

See also Yotel: A Review, a stay in AMS Schiphol Yotel back in 2016 after a conference.

Staying near the bus stop

For our night between getting off the TranzAlpine round trip and taking the 7am-bus-then-ferry back to Wellington, we wanted a place close to the bus stop. The BreakFree was as close as you could get (3 minute walk), and also cheap, at C$63 (NZ$70) for an “Inner Urban Double”. More expensive than the Mount Somers Holiday Park at NZ$55, but way more posh, in a more central location, and in particular, with better mattresses. (A review on the Internet also mentioned the mattresses). Apparently cheaper than Yotelair Schiphol, but who can compare prices in these pandemic times anyway.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Wednesday, July 15, 2020

Moderate multi-pitch in New Zealand, March 11, 2020

On our previous trip to the South Island we stayed around Wanaka cragging and hiking. Although the Darrens were still washed out during our visit, The Remarkables feature some multipitch climbing. In particular, our borrowed Queenstown guidebook listed a dozen climbs above Lake Alta (aka Dimrill Dale). We’d go to Lake Alta and then up to Double Cone and find a moderate climb. To Lake Alta Alpine starts are well advised but difficult, especially after riverboarding the previous day, having dinner in Queenstown with Waterloo students on exchange, and getting back to our Frankton airbnb at 9pm.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Tuesday, April 21, 2020

An Exciting Trip to Mount Taranaki, March 17-18, 2020

Almost as if anticipating a lockdown, we had planned back-to-back-to-back trips for the middle of March. We’d just barely gotten back from Queenstown on Thursday, March 12 (but that’s another story), and had scheduled 4 days to climb Mount Taranaki, which I’d seen from the plane on the way in to Wellington back on January 1, 3 months and so long ago. Events would catch up to us and prevent our subsequent trip to Melbourne. At least we didn’t have to do a visa run anymore.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Beyond Diet: on red pandas and doing better

This week I was busy writing code for a research project I’m working on here in New Zealand, so no travel pictures from me.

Here is a red panda in the Wellington Zoo (photo credit: Marie-Pascale Desjardins, as well as for suggesting this tip).

It turns out that red pandas and giant pandas are not related aside from both being cute animals. Giant pandas have a 99% bamboo diet, while red pandas are at 85% bamboo.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Saturday, March 7, 2020

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

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

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