Patrick Lam

Thoughts and travels of Patrick Lam

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.

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.

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.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Sunday, February 23, 2020

avatar

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

FEATURED TAGS
academia advocacy airport aotearoa au birds ca canada climbing covid ecology engineering hike hiking huts immigration japan mtl nz on overland overseas photos qc refugees retrospective reviews tech tips transit trip-reports us walk
FRIENDS