Accidentally in Code

Reflections

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    Effectiveness, not Efficiency

    Someone once described me as “scarily efficient”. I have to say, I took it as a huge compliment. However after reading The 4-Hour Work Week (Tim Ferriss – Amazon) and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R Covey – Amazon) I’ve been focusing more on Effectiveness. There’s an important distinction. You can be…

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  • Expat Reflections

    Expat Reflections

    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…

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    Efficiency

    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,…

    →: Efficiency

  • Internet Addiction

    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…

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  • Passive Aggressive

    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…

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  • Happiness is… being a Connector

    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…

    →: Happiness is… being a Connector
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    International Students

    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…

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    Time

    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.…

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    Manic Monday

    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…

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