Get Natural Sunlight!

March 16, 2020

I was thinking of this tip even before things got exciting, but it applies even better now in these times of social distancing. This week’s tip: get natural sunlight! It’s easy to be a nocturnal Software Engineering student. I don’t recommend it. As human beings, we do benefit from exposure to natural sunlight and the resulting Vitamin D. In Spring in the northern hemisphere, the associated extended daylight hours would normally be making it easier to do this.

Second month (plus 10 days) in Wellington

March 8, 2020

We’ve now passed the halfway mark for my time in New Zealand, even with an extra 3 days courtesy of Air Canada/Air New Zealand—they rescheduled my return flight from 29 Apr to 2 May and I didn’t notice until I got the seat change email. I’m totally fine with an extra 3 days in New Zealand. Classes have started again. I guess it’s like September in the northern hemisphere. Days are only 13 hours now, on their way to 10.

Beyond Diet: on red pandas and doing better

March 7, 2020

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.

You also have to descend

March 2, 2020

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.

What's Your Backup Strategy?

February 23, 2020

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.