Greg and Kat's blog

Well, the semester is winding down for me. All of my marks are in and approved. [Angelina: your mark is in.] Relatively few students are complaining about their marks. There are a few with inflated senses of their accomplishments, but it’s pretty quiet.

I have a few more sets of grades to approve, and a few last meetings, but it’s all pretty much over.

I had a discipline hearing today. I was on the board; it wasn’t a CMPT case. It was a serious case that they have been trying to schedule the hearing since May. The end result was the harshest I have seen: upheld department’s Fs, retroactive removal of degree, student must surrender parchment, 9 semester suspension, permanent notation on transcript. This was considered somewhat lenient.

Kat should be hitting YVR tomorrow at about 21:00, so that’s good.

After that, it’s all food and drink until the new year.

Edit: On the subject of complaining about marks… What goes on in a student’s mind to get 74.6%, and then ask if 75% is the cutoff for the next letter grade, and shouldn’t that be rounded up? Do students really think some spreadsheet has a roundoff error just for them? If I had wanted the cutoff at 74.5%, that’s where I would have put it. There are 180 students, so some of them are going to be close to boundaries no matter what I do.

People wonder why I have occasional Scroogey tendencies around this time of year.

I’m just sitting here watching TV as I work. I think this quote from a commercial I just saw sums it up pretty well:

Now in stores: Christmas with Boney M!

Really? The world needs this? The newly remastered version of this no less?

I can’t be the only one that thinks we might have lost our way here.

And not to rag on anybody’s religion, but I don’t want to hear any story that ends with “Now where’d that body get off to? Gaw-lee, that fella in the cave says it dun-gone to heaven.” There’s less nutty stuff later on, but are you really going to take the word of some guy hanging out alone in a cave where they chuck dead bodies?

Do you remember Estelle Getty’s character in Golden Girls? The premise was that she had a stroke and lost the ability to filter what she said, thus always said what was on her mind, no matter how abrasive.

I think I had that stroke.

I have sent no less than seven potentially inflammatory emails in the last 24 hours. Tones have ranged from “has the potential to cause problems in the future” to “please increase your stress level right now”.

And it feels good.

Several things seem to have recently come to a point where they need to be dealt with. The options are pretty much “ignore”, “placate”, or “try to fix”. I am basically just opting for the third… and doing it directly.

I think this all started when I went on a co-op site visit with Harriet in the summer. One of the students we visited was a little awkward and kept playing with his pen and the desk chair beside him during the meeting. About 5 minutes after it started bugging me, Harriet said “Put the pen down and stop playing with the chair. It makes people think you’re not listening.” My internal reaction was “OMG, you can say that out loud?”

For example, I was talking to Amanda earlier today (who is, of course, in favour of this behaviour). We were, as always, discussing the functioning of the School. My argument in favour of giving myself a potentially horrible future task was “people’s lives get ruined all the time; why not mine?”

This cannot be healthy behaviour.

Pay attention to this sentence, because it’s not one you have probably heard before: This week, I bought three new laptops for $800.

This morning, the One Laptop Per Child project opened up their give one, get one program, and I was there. For US$400, I bought two OLPC XO laptops. One goes to me, one to some kid in a developing country.

So, I suppose that’s a halfway decent thing to do. But, I mostly wanted to get my hands on one of these things that we have all heard so much about.

Second, I ordered an ASUS Eee. For $400, it’s a more-or-less fully functional Linux laptop and about the size of a small hardcover book. I’m hoping this one has a little more real utility.

The specs sound a little thin for a modern laptop: 900MHz, 512 MB RAM, 4GB storage (flash, not hard drive), 800×480 display. But, that would have been a pretty snappy laptop 4 or 5 years ago. How much has my workflow really changed in the last 4 years? [A laptop isn’t a primary PC for me. It’s a thing to use when not in my office or at home.]

I know low-end mainstream laptops are bumping down in the $500–600 range, but there’s that part about weighing less than a kilogram and fitting in my man-purse. How could this not be ideal for travelling?

I’m also hoping it can ride on a iRobot Create and run Player for a sweet little autonomous robotics platform. If they come out with the $200 model, that would give us a full setup for <$500 that high school kids could play with.

BTW, thanks all for the interest in my CMPT 120 assignment. I went with controlling the ghosts in a pacman-like game. That should keep ’em busy.

So, I’m sitting in my office, putting icing on cupcakes for our Halloween potluck. (It’s way easier to transport un-iced cupcakes.) It’s my office hours, but nobody ever comes anyway.

Which brings me to the reason for this post…

There is a list of things that a student expects when they arrive at an instructor’s office hours. The instructor turning around and saying (cheerily) “Cupcake?” while shoving one in their direction? Let’s say that’s probably pretty far down the list.

It was all I could do to keep it together until he finished his question and left. So somewhere, there’s a CMPT 120 student who is very confused, but has a cupcake.

I haven’t blogged for a while. Being really busy has caused me to have little time to blog, and little to talk about if I did.

The new semester started. I’m teaching CMPT 120 (intro programming, etc) and CMPT 470 (web-fu). I’m also supervising CMPT 165 (web-fu-lite) distance ed. And, I’m supervising Angelina in a directed studies course. And I’m undergrad director. Yeah, it’s going to be a big bag of crazy all semester.

Angelina’s project is quite cool: She Builds Robots. The finished product will be a series of video tutorials (with some other stuff in the mix) on building and programming autonomous robots. I’ve signed on because of the outreachy part of the whole thing. The fact that I don’t know crap about robots bothers me a little, but Angelina seems to be doing okay on that front, so I think we’re good.

On the admin side, it’s still pretty much all restructuring all the time. The smart money is on Computing Science and Engineering forming a new faculty together. I’m campaigning for the “Faculty of Engineering and Computing Science” because it has a pronounceable acronym: FECS. I still have a side bet that we will end up in the Faculty of Science (with the other end of that bet being the status quo).

Honestly, I pretty much stopped caring what happens when I couldn’t think of anything that would be better or worse depending on the outcome. I might like my dean more… or less. Anything other than the status quo would be more coherent for recruiting, so that would be good.

Teaching-wise, all is well. I could do 470 in my sleep at this point and 120 is chugging along too. My 120 students seem to have some reading comprehension problems (e.g. being unable to determine what room their labs are in, after I email with the room numbers), but that’s annoyingly normal for first year.

A while ago, I came across this rent-or-buy calculator. After playing around with it for a while, I learned two things: (1) I didn’t really understand what it was trying to display, and (2) the buying/renting distinction was more subtle than I thought. So, let me work through this…

Option 1: Buy

Let’s buy a $400,000 home. Let’s say we get together a $50,000 down payment and mortgage $350,000.

At the moment, the banks’ best lending rates are 6.25% on variable rate mortgages. Let’s assume (foolishly) that that will not increase over a 20 year mortgage. A mortgage calculator says that the monthly payment will be $2,542.

So, after 20 years, we own our home. Apparently, home prices don’t really increase that much, on average in the long-term. (I suspect the problem here is that after 20 years, your house is 20 years older, thus less desirable to potential buyers. It’s not relevant to compare new-home prices.) Let’s say the home appreciates at 2% after inflation. At the end of the mortgage, a compound interest calculator says that our home will be worth $594,379.

Option 2: Rent

Let’s use the mortgage payment of $2,542 per month. We rent a place for $1,500 (which should be comparable to what we could buy for $400k at the moment), and invest the other $1042. Start the investment account off with the $50,000 down-payment.

Like in my last money-related post, I’ll use 6% after inflation as the rate of return and an investment calculator gives us $649,364 after 20 years. A net worth of $55k more than if we had bought.

Notes

• Option 1 ignores property taxes, fees, and maintenance. Strata fees in particular are going to really add up if you’re buying a condo.
• In option 1, you might do really well if housing prices go up dramatically. Or you might get screwed. Basically, the problem is that you have a horribly diversified portfolio. You have one thing, your house, and are very susceptible to market fluctuations.
• Option 1 doesn’t take into account any improvements made that would increase the value of the house. It doesn’t count the cost of those improvements either.
• A home is about the least-liquid asset you can have. It may be worth $600k, but you have to sell it (and thus start renting) to get at that capital.
• After the 20 years, you’re definitely still paying rent in option 2.
• Option 2 assumes the discipline to invest without the threat of the bank breaking your kneecaps.
• There are probably some tax implications of buying that I don’t know about.
• There are any number of possibly-invalid assumptions there, but I’ve tried to hit a reasonable balance (except that thing about interest rates never going up: that’s nuts). The calculations are particularly sensitive to changes in the interest/return rates.

So…

I don’t know, really. I just needed to work an example through. I guess the message is that buying a home isn’t the be-all and end-all of investing.

We can rent, invest, and relax.

So, I rode up to SFU this afternoon. This is something I try to do once a week, but realistically get around to less than that. I tried riding to work for a while, but I’m not really very useful for an hour or so after the ride, so that didn’t really work.

I had ridden up two weeks ago after a long hiatus. If anybody had been there to hear me after I got past the SFU sign, they would have heard something like this:

pant… pant… gasp… “gonna die”
pant… pant… gasp… “gonna die”

This week went better. I said “gonna die” way less often than every three breaths.

Anyway, as I was grinding up the hill, I started to wonder how many calories I was burning. Even ignoring the forward motion, I was gaining a lot of height. Gaining height means gaining gravitational potential energy. Energy is conserved, and there was no other energy source around, so I had to be putting out the energy in return.

According to Google Earth, the Security booth at SFU is about 200 m above Curtis and Duthie. I weigh about 80 kg (which is part of the problem). So, my gain of gravitational potential energy was

E = mgh = 80 kg × 9.8 m/s² × 200 m
= 156800 kg m²/s² = 156800 J = 37451 cal.

So, that doesn’t sound right. I don’t think I need to eat 65 Big Macs to recover from the ride.

I seem to remember that there’s some confusion between calories and kilocalories when people talk about food. So maybe it’s 37 “calories”? If all I earned from the ride was half a nigiri, then I’m not exercising any more.

So, what the hell am I doing wrong there? I know I’m ignoring the forward motion but, as anybody that rides up the hill will tell you, forward isn’t the hard part.

So, after work last night, there was a birthday dinner for Kat’s uncle Sev. As always for birthdays, I hopped in the car and drove down to Ama’s house in Surrey

When I got there, I rang the doorbell. There’s usually a certain level of commotion in the house that can be heard from the front door that was strangely absent. I knocked again.

A couple of facts quickly started to come together: (1) I had arrived on-time for dinner at 6:30. (2) Dinner wasn’t at the place had arrived to. (3) I had no damn clue where dinner actually was.

No answer on Pam’s cell phone, so I sent Kat a text, which I believe was “Where the fuck is dinner? Not Ama’s?” Kat was good enough to leave the movie she was in and text back “Sun Sui Wah in Richmond!”

Then, some more facts joined the earlier three: (4) Kat had told me dinner was at Sun Sui Wah; I had totally forgotten and gone to Ama’s out of habit. (5) I knew how to get to Sun Sui Wah from the direction of our place, but was a little fuzzy on how to even get from Surrey to Richmond efficiently, let alone find the restaurant from a totally different direction. (6) Not owning a teleporter, I was going to be seriously late.

Luckily, Pam phoned at just that moment to ask if I was getting there soon. “No.” Her father gave me instructions for the drive. Luckily, my good auditory learning kicked in, and I got them about as fast as he could talk. I’m pretty sure he gave me the cross-street in Richmond incorrectly though. I had to phone Paul and have him check for me.

So, I got there about 45 minutes late, but only missed one course (either squab or quail, the family was undecided). Since it was a full 10-course banquet, that was pretty good. I took a bunch of pictures and all was well.

I’m sure there will be much mocking the next time I see the fam. Sigh.