Greg and Kat's blog

I have seen several of these on Facebook. “You know you go to UBC when…” “You know you’re from BC when…” “You know you’re Indian when…”

I can’t find an SFU one. So, I’m taking suggestions.

You know you go to SFU (Burnaby) when…

• you know how to get between any two points on campus on a rainy day without getting wet.
• you know that “a rainy day” is synonymous with “a day”.
• the people at Renaissance know your drink order before you say it.
• Parminder at Renaissance knows you by name.
• you longer wonder where floors 1-6 are.
• you can actually find the first floor in the AQ.
• you have even been stuck on the hill because of 1 inch of snow.
• you notice when people you don’t even know are studying in the wrong place, because they usually study over there [points].
• you have an opinion about the CFS… a STRONG opinion.
• heading for the bus stop, you look at your watch: if it’s 20 after, you kill ten minutes to wait out the bus rush.
• you have found yourself unable to remember significant parts of a Pub Night (or GIC Social).
• you have used a cafeteria tray to slide down the slopes near the gym after it snowed.
• “Purple Library Guy” doesn’t make you think of a lame superhero.
• … you know Purple Library Guy’s story.
• you can talk about “the Clan” without thinking about white hoods and torches.
• you are surprised when you meet your TA and they speak English.
• you ever decided not to take a course so you wouldn’t have to come to campus on Tuesdays.
• you know every takeout place that delivers to campus.
• you know several people that ride up the hill but would never do it yourself–that’s crazy.
• you have had an argument on the various merits of study locations on campus.
• you’d go to your prof’s office hours, if you could only find their office.
• you can walk from the Skytrain to the 145 stop with your eyes closed.
• it would never occur to you to ask “which one” when somebody refers to a “pub”.
• it’s going to take you seven years to finish your undergrad, but you’re okay with that.
• you have “gone swimming” in the pond in the AQ. Once. Never again.
• you have spent five minutes looking for your car in the parking lot before realizing you’re on the wrong level.

Okay, I’m out. Please add more in comments. More for inspiration.

As many of you know, Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing editor, and sci-fi author, among other things) was at SFU today to give a talk. As it happened, it was under the guise of the Leonardo lecture series which is run by the Faculty of Applied Science.

As a Boing Boing fan, I poked around a little and found out Barry Shell was organizing it. I asked him about it, and he invited me to come to a small session with grad students earlier in the day. When I went to that, I managed to get myself invited to lunch afterwards. So, I had lunch with Cary Doctorow a few other people.

Long story short, Cory’s cool. His interests are in the technology, society, copyright, privacy, freedom spectrum. A lot of people in that world can be a little intense: prone to conspiracy theories and rants. Cory was very thoughtful and knows an insane amount about this stuff. He has also been directly involved in an amazing amount of technology policy (and just won the EFF Pioneer Award).

Basically, I have a platonic crush on Cory Doctorow.

Plus, it can’t hurt to have a little face time with my dean (who was at the lunch). Good day overall.

Brief background: The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) sponsors an annual worldwide programming contest. The contest format is 5+ problems, generally all tricky algorithmic problems, solve ’em, GO! Teams with more problems correctly completed in the given time win; ties are broken by penalty points (incorrect submissions and time taken to complete problems).

Brad (our coach) and the UBC coach often organize a spring warmup/practice/fun contest for our students. For the last two years, Ted Kirkpatrick and I have entered as a team.

Competing against students can go one of two general ways:

1. Oh ha ha, you’re better at DDR than me.
2. This contest seems to involve logic/reasoning/intelligence: exactly the stuff I’m supposed to be better at than my students so I can teach them. Failure is not an option.

ACM-like contests are distinctly in the second category.

This presents an interesting challenge. Primarily, the students who are into the ACM contest are really into it and are quite good. Ted and I spend a lot more time writing lecture notes than programs.

Last year, we finished below the really competitive teams, and above the rest of the students. That’s the best we could have hoped for, really.

This year’s contest was today. Once again, two SFU teams bested us, completing 4/6 problems. We completed 3/6.

I cost us 20 minutes debugging a stupid mistake in fraction arithmetic. If not for that, we definitely would have finished a fourth problem (but not changed our ranking because of penalty points).

I’m more annoyed at another problem that neither Ted or I saw how to do. All you had to do was tilt your head the right way and say “Oh, it’s graph theory. I’ll just look up the formula and type it in.” Me and my undergrad in math and masters in graph-theoretic network algorithms didn’t notice that.

I hope Art doesn’t find out. Anyway, we should have had 4/6 and if I had really been on top of my game, it might have been 5/6. [shakes fist]

It has been a long semester. I’m teaching two courses and trying to figure out how to be undergrad chair. Really, it made Kat being away less of an issue: I wouldn’t have had much time to do anything anyway. I’m guessing I averaged around 60 hours per week this semester.

I just finished marking the 470 projects. They were bimodal, as the class has been all semester. Apparently, my 120 exams are marked and I’ll get them tomorrow morning. With some luck, all the final grades will be done tomorrow. Realistically, Wednesday morning.

The CS Xmas party is tomorrow afternoon. Hopefully it will go well: as the chair of the Social committee, I had a hand in it. It pretty much followed Greg’s event organizing pattern: phone a restaurant and tell them about 100 people are coming, ask grad students to organize entertainment, done.

Update 12/12: I just approved my first final grades (one of the duties of the undergrad chair). That was exciting.

As most of you know, SFU Burnaby was closed today (sorry, Paul). So, I had an unexpected day off. Or, more correctly, an unexpected day to work at home.

So, what did I do with my day?

I saw that they had closed the campus before I went to bed, so I could sleep in. My mother phoned at 8:00 to… uh… tell me it was snowing? I grumbled something about the University being closed. “Oh, were you asleep?” “Yabayngh.” I phoned back later and confirmed that it was indeed snowing. I took a few more pictures.

Then I heard the landlady shoveling the sidewalk. I went out to do it for her, thus a five minute conversation ensued about what I was trying to do. It almost ended with me saying “give me the damn shovel and go back in the stupid house where it’s warm!” She’s afraid of going outside. Possibly because it was icy, or possibly in general. As usual, I only caught about every third word.

While I was at it, I brushed off the car. The locks were a little stiff, but I managed to get in. Since then, the temperature has gone down, and they’re totally frozen shut. I had to walk over to the Safeway to get a few supplies, instead of getting proper groceries.

Did some laundry. That was a long time coming—the supply of socks was running a bit low.

But mostly, I worked on my CMPT 120 final exam, which I’m hoping to have done and sent to duplicating by Wednesday. By the way, I have one more reason to not cheat on assignments: the instructor isn’t exactly in a generous mood when making up your exam. I might not get the drunken “favourite instructor” honour at the next LAN party.

A full day, I’d say.

I haven’t really written anything about my recently aquired admin duties. Mostly, that’s because everything falls into one of three categories: hopelessly boring, hopelessly boring to everybody but me, confidential.

At this point, we’re mostly chasing the deadline for calendar changes, roughly the end of November for changes to leave the department and be sent up the chain. What with teaching two courses, there isn’t much time in my day to deal with much else.

Now that most of our changes have been dealt with, I’m now dealing with the peripheral problems. These are changes Engineering is making that affect us in some way, changes Interactive Arts is making that we don’t like, etc.

Since a picture is worth 1000 words, here’s an illustration of how far I am from caring about what Engineering and IAT are doing with their curriculum:

I was talking to one of our grad students today. He mentioned an old email sig he had seen, and I convinced him to send it to me:

When you realize you know everything, you can get your Bachelor’s.
When you realize you know nothing, you can get your Master’s.
When you realize your supervisor knows nothing, you can get your Ph.D.

Have truer words ever been spoken? Since I think we have readers nearing the end of each of those phases, I thought it would be appreciated all-around.

The CSSS had a games night last night. Not having much else to do, I went up to hang out for a while. Besides seconding one of the rooms in the lab so we could play Gran Tourismo on the projector, the games part was relatively uneventful.

But, there is an active group of first-year students. Here’s a quiz for everybody in the audience who has been in residence in first year (as many of them are): first year students + any excuse of a party = ???

That’s right! “Sloppy drunk.”

All of them disppeared and went back to res, drank too hard and too fast, and somehow managed to make it back to the ASB. Keep in mind that most of them are in my CMPT 120 class.

There’s something about watching your students yak into garbage cans that can really make your evening. Watching them draw on the passed-out one (and perhaps having some influence on the process) was just icing on the cake.

Just before I left, one of them came-to. He had purged most of the alcohol from his stomach and was in reasonably good shape. He looked at me, worried that I might hold something against him, and asked if I knew his name. I answered “no,” just to expedite the conversation. I thought about “no, [firstname],” but decided he was sober enough to catch that.

There are two interesting assumptions in this kid’s worry: (1) that I have some kind of individual control over his marks, and (2) that I would think a first-year student hurling the better part of a mickey of cheap booze is a horrible thing. Both assumptions are false and amuse me for different reasons.

So, what have we missed?

We got back to Vancouver. Kat only had a week to spend in the city, so we were pretty busy. We had to see her family, see friends, and we both had a solid chunk of work to get done.

In the middle of it, my parents were in town. They had just taken an Alaska cruise, and decided to spend a few days in Vancouver after it. On labour day weekend. While Kat was back. And I was trying to get back up to speed to start teaching and admin stuff. And Oli and Tina got back to Vancouver. Wheee!!!

Long story short, we were busy, so no blogging. I dropped Kat off at the airport this morning to head back to NC. I’ll let her tell her own travel story.

Now, I’m back to work and busy. I got pulled into about four unscheduled meetings today and barely had time to breathe in a day that started with a half-hour scheduled. I’m hoping that was a backlog of stuff from the semester break. It might be, right?