February: mostly work, plus Tongariro Northern Circuit

March 4, 2021

Remote teaching has definitely been grinding along and keeping me busy this past month. The workload has been different for the fourth-year undergraduate course versus the graduate seminar. Aside from teaching and research, there was also returning from the Tuatapere Hump Ridge Track at the very start of the month, the Tongariro Northern Circuit at the end of the month, and the Jumbo Circuit in the middle. No new areas of NZ visited, but did re-visit old locations.

2020 (not travel)

February 10, 2021

My non-travel retrospective for 2020: work, life goals, and hobbies.

January: Back to School, and Hump Ridge

February 7, 2021

Back to school! Classes started on January 11 and that’s been keeping me busy this month. More about that below.

Book review: Overload by Kelly and Moen

January 14, 2021

I was wandering through a Wellington City Library branch and picked up Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do about It by Erin L. Kelly and Phyllis Moen, a book published March 2020. I don’t usually read management books but I am interested in how people work in 2021; work-life balance was cited in Minister Navdeep Bains’s recent resignation, for instance (of course it always is for politicians), and discussed in a Globe and Mail Opinion.

Graduate Seminar Presentation & Discussion Tips

January 14, 2021

Updated January 3, 2022 for Winter 2022 offering of SASE. In which I share my opinions about what makes for a good paper presentation for a graduate seminar course, say ECE 750-T5. Logistics We’ll aim for talks of about 30 minutes. During the discussion period (Wednesdays), the presenter will kick off the discussion by summarizing their evaluation, and we’ll talk about the strengths and weaknesses of each paper and how it can inspire your future work (whether academic or industrial).