Greg and Kat's blog

After a luxurious 40 hours in Vancouver, I’m heading off again tomorrow. This time to SIGCSE ’08: the ACM‘s (Association for Computing Machinery’s) Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education conference. In short: the big CS education conference.

Tactical error: I booked my tickets without looking at the conference schedule closely. There’s nothing on Wednesday that I can really go to. Wednesday is all special-interest things that cost extra. So, I have an extra day to hang around Portland. Fine I guess, but there’s probably stuff I should be doing in Vancouver.

Other than that, there’s not a single session where there isn’t something I’m interested in. Hopefully, it will be a good couple of days.

I’m passing through Toronto as I write this (but posting it after I got back to Vancouver, as I’m too cheap to pay for wireless). There was a crazy snowstorm yesterday in Toronto. Things are cleared now, and my flights weren’t affected.

There are still a lot of people around the airport, standing in lines for customer service, or whatever other airline person will talk to them. I guess a lot of connections must have been cancelled: maybe to airports that took the storm later, or were hit harder.

The people in these lines are the subject of my travel tip:

If you find yourself in an airport needing to fix your flight, don’t wait in a line. Phone the airline. There will invariably be hundreds or thousands of other people in the same situation as you. There’s no hope of the staff in the building dealing with it quickly. Phone their toll-free number (it’s probably on your itinerary or boarding pass) and jump to the front of the line.

The operator should be able to rebook you, and give you a confirmation number. From there, you’re home-free and just need to check back in.

To be fair, there were also a lot of people bumming around for standby, probably after their original flight was cancelled. I have no good tip for those people.

Daylight savings time day: +1:00.

East coast to west coast: -3:00.

Traveling on DST day: -2:00. One less hour of jetlag. Score.

My six-word story: I’m here and Mario Galaxy rocks.

I’m pretty much hanging around in Chapel Hill, trying to get some work done while Kat’s in the lab. (She’s doing full days, trying to get the science done so she can come home as soon as possible.)

I decided to set the reasonable goal for the week of getting my email under control. I’m down from probably 270 messages in my inbox to 180. If I can get it down under 100 and handle all of the “my mark is wrong” ones from my distance ed class, I’ll be pleased.

But then, Ryan (a lab tech in Kat’s lab) lent us Super Mario Galaxy. That’s costing me. I just got the second power star. If nothing else, it’s a solidly long game.

or “How to take a redeye from the west to east coast.”

I usually fly redeye (aka overnight) flights when coming east. I have had some disbelieving reactions to this like “Did you save a lot of money?” Sometimes, but that’s not really why.

The setup: Flying from Vancouver to Toronto or Ottawa takes about 4.5 hours. Counting in the 3 hour time change, that just about equals “overnight”. The last flights leave at 11:00 or so.

The prelude: I can get in a full day of work (or whatever) before leaving. The airport run happens after rush hour, and at a time that people are generally more willing to give me the ride.

Airport arrival: First thing at the airport: take a sleeping pill (Sleep-Eze or whatever). Check in and go through security. It only takes a few minutes, since there are few flights at that time. Eat somewhere in there and buy a bottle of water past security. About 10 minutes before boarding time, brush teeth.

The flight: The sleeping pill should be starting to kick by boarding. Put on sunglasses (since I can never be bothered with a mask). Ignore everything and get as much sleep as possible.

The connection: I am generally making a connection to North Carolina. That involves going through US customs at the Toronto airport at about 6:00. No lines, and the agents are still half asleep. For some reason, I sleep better on the second flight: I have slept through the takeoff and usually wake up when somebody tells me to put my chair up.

All-told, I usually get a little more than a half night’s sleep. That leaves me a little screwed up the next day. But, consider the alternative: if I hadn’t taken the redeye, I would have spent the whole day on a plane. This way, I can lounge around, take a nap and be good. As an added bonus, I can go to sleep whenever I want the next night, and jetlag is suddenly a non-issue.

The math doesn’t work out for east to west, though.

Now that I’m in Chapel Hill for 10 days, I have to figure out what I want to do: this will probably be my last long visit. My plans seems to be focusing around food. Here are the places I need to visit:

Allen and Son BBQ: The best local BBQ place. Actually went for dinner tonight. As you can tell, I’m off the vegetarian wagon in NC.

Goodberry’s Frozen Custard: We stumbled across frozen custard when on a quest to buy some damn thing or another last year. It doesn’t seem possible to get it in Vancouver, so I’m going to have to get it now.

Toledo’s Taqueria: This is a little hole-in-the-wall cafeteria-style Mexican place. Day labourers wait outside in the mornings, so I’m guessing it’s pretty authentic. Plus, nobody speaks English. Kat insists on exercising her high school Spanish. I’m happy to get out “plato especial”.

Some less authentic Mexican place: I’m not against a little tex in my mex either.

Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen: It’s just not possible to get biscuits this good in Vancouver. Something about the amount of protein in Canadian flour.

Bon’s: We haven’t been there before, but I need some southern food.

S & T Soda Shoppe: A real, restored olde-timey soda shoppe nearby.

I’m heading to North Carolina tomorrow night for about 10 days.

I’ve said if before and I’ll say it again: the jetset lifestyle only sounds like fun until you do it. Once you actually find yourself in an airport more often than once every couple of months, you start to realize that the whole process is a lot like some colourful analogy involving something that’s really bad.

This might affect my thrice-weekly blogging. Or it might mean I have a lot more to talk about. Only time will tell.

My last stop before I go tomorrow is the SFU Surrey Open House. All should consider coming.

P.S. Must… have… one!

As some of you know, I’m starting a one year sabbatical in September. There’s a lot to say about that, but for today, I’m going to limit myself to one of the plans.

I’d like to get to a point that I can teach CMPT 383 (Comparative Programming Languages). One of the things I’d like to do for that is expand my own breadth of experience with programming languages. I have worked with a bunch, but there are a lot more out there, and most programmers don’t give them enough thought. My goal for the year is to learn one language per month.

Of course, I wouldn’t have time to do a huge project in each. I’d like to get to the point that I could write some small (but functional) programs and know “the way” of the language. Here are some of the languages that come immediately to mind:

• Haskell: I have used Miranda (which is similar), and took a functional programming course at SFU that used Haskell, but that was all a long time ago. I’d like to go through for a refresher.
• Prolog: Again, I used Prolog back in the 383-like course I took in my undergrad, but it has been a long time.
• OCaml: People who like OCaml really like it. That’s the kind of thinking that brought me to Python a few years ago, so it might be worth a look.
• Lua: A lightweight scripting language that also seems to have some rabid fans.
• Lisp: I find it a little odd that I’ve gotten this far in life and never written any Lisp. Time to right that wrong.
• C#: The only language on the list that’s widely considered “practical”. I know it’s kind of just MS Java, but there might be something good in there. Plus, the Mono implementation seems to be working now, so I wouldn’t have to use Windows to do it.
• Matlab or Octave: I like the array-based thing, and want to try some real stuff with it.
• Erlang: You could say that Erlang is Just Another Functional Language, but it was developed by Ericsson for real practical stuff. That distinguishes it as interesting.
• D: People like it, and it comes after C, right? That’s some good marketing.
• Some esoteric programming language. These are mostly conceived as jokes, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to learn from them.

That’s ten without even thinking too hard. There’s a really great list of programming languages by category in Wikipedia.

I think the way to go about this is to create something like an informal Programming Language Study Group. That way, there would be other people hounding me to keep going (and vice versa). We could have a few little exercises for each language, maybe.

Who’s with me?

There are a lot of days where nothing seems to get done. There are days when the whole world lines up against you. Then there are days like today when everything just happens.

For background: I have recently learned what our admission cutoffs are for fall applications. You’d think I would know what they are, since it’s the undergrad director’s job to set them, but that’s another story. The cutoffs were a little nutty (maybe more on that in a later post), and I had a bit of a controlled temper tantrum about it.

Highlights from the day:

• Started with my first Faculty Enrolment Management meeting. (For those that don’t know, “Enrollment Management” is recruiting, admission, and retention of students.) Found out that our new admit targets are actually pretty reasonable for the fall: definitely not enough to justify panicking and setting low cutoffs.

  Somehow in there, my Associate Dean decided to continue my tantrum up the chain in a productive way. I thought I was just ensuring that the same thing didn’t happen again next year, but we might get a change for this year.

• Had a long discussion with Paula from Engineering about Enrolment Management stuff. ENSC is our closest ally in a lot of this, since our student pool is pretty similar.

• Had lunch with Margo and Art at the Indian place on campus.

• Got some data from Nathan on performance of students admitted last fall. Remembered how to do a linear regression and found out that the numbers exactly match my instincts on student retention. That means I have data to support where I want to set the cutoffs. Sent the information to everybody that would listen. Getting this information together and presented less than 48 hours after the start of my spaz is astonishing by University standards: huzzah Nathan!

• Got information for our new Software Systems program to the web guy. The program doesn’t have final approval yet, but it’s critical that we start promoting.

• School meeting. Got our proposal for concentrations in the major passed in time for the 2008/09 calendar. Sent the proposal up to the next level.

• Inconsequential meeting with people from the downtown campus about offerings there. We’re okay; they’re okay.

• Helped Daniela with her math homework.

• Errands: Costco, and Home Depot. Now I have a doorbell again.

• One last look at the job description for Amanda’s position.

Not a bad 12 hour day.

As part of the Computing Science recruitment activities, we often send people to area career/education fairs. The idea is that people (usually high school students) come and explore their options.

I had never been to one of these, and decided I should go and see what they’re all about. Yesterday was the Vancouver Education and Career Fair, downtown at the convention centre. I decided to go, along with Margo, to see what I could see.

An “education” fair is probably a little more focused. An “education and career” fair is pretty all-over the map. There were booths there from a bunch of Universities (SFU, UBC, bunch of Ontario schools, some US schools), but I kind of understand Universities by now. What I found more interesting were the straight-from-high-school jobs: Kara Foods, esthetician training, police, certified accountants, and countless other crazy things. All of the SFU people got their skin analyzed at a nearby spa-training booth as the day started to wind down.

The practical implementation of being a “recruiter” for a day involves standing on concrete for 8 hours, and starting to think that the ratty carpet in the aisles would be really comfortable to lie down on.

I think that the whole thing was worthwhile. People had questions that ranged from “what kind of courses will I take in CS” to general career advising. It’s worth it to have a variety of people from SFU there who can answer a wide variety of questions. Students go away with good information about SFU, and thinking that we’re very helpful.

I took a few pictures at the fair, mostly as a memory-augmenter. It’s interesting to see what they actually look like if you’ve never seen one.