There are many things I love about Canada, but as it’s now October I should warn you: winter is not one of them. It’s so cold here that going outside feels potentially fatal. Of course, last winter (my first) was particularly bad as the result of certain situations and the 51 day bus strike (which […]
At the moment, I’m taking a class in Combinatorial Algorithms. You can probably gather from the things that I write about here that this is not my passion… however so far it’s better than expected. We’re moving onto backtracking. If you know a functional language such as Haskell or ML (I know there are others, […]
I’m concerned I may be addicted to the internet. Yesterday there were various news articles about a study from Taiwan and we have a list of symptoms (emphasis added): Internet addiction is usually characterized with symptoms such as spending a lot of time online, an inability to cut back on usage, a preoccupation with online […]
I went to therapy today. Perhaps I shouldn’t admit that in a public forum, but I hope those of you that read this don’t think that seeking help when you’re struggling is something to be ashamed of. I’m not going to go into the details of what caused me to end up going to see […]
Marcus Buckingham is writing a great series at HuffPost at the moment exploring why women are less happy. You can find all the articles here. What The Happiest And Most Successful Women Do Differently – gave me the most to think about, although others have too (did you know – having children correlates with less […]
There was an article in the Ottawa Citizen the other day about international students. Apparently at Carleton, 1 in 5 graduate students is an international. Of course, this averages across all subjects – my experience is that in Computer Science (and likely the rest of Science and Engineering) the ratio is higher. When I first […]
Being so busy this week has got me thinking about the concept of “having time”. We all have 60 minutes in each hour and 24 of them in each day for however many weeks, months, years or – hopefully – decades we have left on this planet. We just can’t know how long that is. […]
I’ve wasted a chunk of the afternoon having a bit of a panic attack. This morning I had physio on my knee, followed by an hour of time hanging out in SITE waiting to meet with the guy who’s course I’m TA-ing (I read some of the 60 page book chapter I’m carrying about with […]
I had an argument with a friend yesterday. He’d been a little economical with the truth and I found out and was angry. I found out via Facebook – of course. Facebook knows everything. This propelled me to write this post I’ve been thinking about for a while. The thrust of the talk that I […]
I was reading a paper today, about mashups. It’s fairly interesting, and you can find it here (you’ll need an ACM account, sadly). It explores how end users feel about mashups. What kind of value do they see in them and would they create them if they had the knowledge? I read something a long […]