CE students about grad school

October 23, 2020

I wrote this in an email to a Waterloo Software Engineering student, but it’s worthwhile to put on the Internet more broadly. Let’s take a step back and talk about graduate school vs undergrad. For a PhD essentially all of the action is in your thesis and very little is your courses. Of course you’re not signing up for a PhD at the moment but instead a Master’s, so it’s not quite the same.

Weird LaTeX error: File l3backend-pdfmode.def not found

October 23, 2020

For the past few months, LaTeX had been completely broken on my computer. I’d been hoping it was something systemwide and that upgrading LaTeX would fix it. Nope. I’d tried mitigating using different engines. Turns out, xelatex produces different line breaks (!!) and lualatex was somehow incompatible with acmart 1.73 on my computer (metric data for lmroman10-regular not found). Computers are great. Here’s the pdflatex error message: ! LaTeX Error: File `l3backend-pdfmode.

New-to-me bicycle

October 15, 2020

Back in January I had spotted a garage sale in Paraparaumu. There were two bicycles. I got up early at the airbnb and walked to the sale at the Kāpiti Collective early Saturday morning and saw that there was a $20 bicycle and a $200 bicycle. [… Some months later,] I bought a new bike in Plimmerton and rode it back home. While walking to the seller’s place I noticed that his neighbour had a bunch of bicycles and a motorcycle, so I figured (correctly) that he would have a bike pump. […]

New Zealand Restaurants

October 3, 2020

I consolidated the list of restaurants we liked in New Zealand from my monthly summaries so far. Considering how few days we spent in Christchurch there are a surprisingly large number of restaurants from there. In general we’ve been doing a lot of cooking at home. Wellington Upesh Kitchen: Our favourite Kelburn take-out place, Malaysian and South Indian Harbourside Market: Sunday market with food trucks Best Ugly Bagels: Montreal-style bagels

September: Canterbury and Level 1

October 2, 2020

Spring in New Zealand Once again, spent two-thirds of this month in Wellington. The other 10 days were around Christchurch and Kaikoura. Currently no trips planned until November 27, although perhaps Auckland for not-Nationals judo tournament in early November. We are moving 700m down the street tomorrow though. The lease on our current place ended and so we looked around for alternatives (although a fun fact is that, like in Ontario, a fixed-term lease automatically becomes periodic upon completion in NZ and needs to be explicitly non-renewed 21 days before the end date).