The Snow that Never Came
There's been a lot of talk over the past few days about the first snowfall of the year; it was projected that 5 to 10cm of snow would fall in Metro Vancouver. To any Canadian outside of the lower mainland, this would be a laughable amount - surely Canada's largest westernmost city would be able to handle a tiny amount of snow.
"Sorry." Of course to any seasoned Vancouverite the first snow of the season means we collectively lose our shit as a city. We forget that driving in the snow is a bit different from the almost Californian conditions that grace us for most of the year.
But that didn't happen this weekend (or at least, not as I write this article on a Sunday afternoon when I should really be working on my operating systems assignment). The snow never fell, and we were instead greeted by freezing rain. Maybe the forecast will prove to be accurate and when I wake up tomorrow morning, the city will be blanketed by a sheet of white. I'm not optimistic, though.
Remember a few weeks ago when I wrote about recording the last TA lecture for my course? I was wrong! It turns out there's always more things to record. I spent a good chunk of last week creating some slides and recording a lecture that introduced students to our course's term project. I think this is the last lecture I record, but all bets are off. At least one good thing that's coming out of this is my newfound experience with video editing software. If I keep this up, I'll be able to become a YouTuber. I've also been missing my lab's scrum. Last term, a majority of my lab would meet on Thursdays to check in and discuss what we've been working on (more or less it became a social hangout for 30min). My inability to participate this term because of a TA scheduling conflict makes me pretty sad.
In terms of coursework, my project partner and I have started on the first assignment for CPSC 539S (Program Verifiers and Program Verification). We've been having some pair programming sessions and boy, have we embarrassed ourselves already. It turns out that two grad students in CS forgot that sets are a data structure that remove any duplicates, and instead wanted to implement duplicate element removals via a nested fold function. Not our finest hour. That said, it's been a lot of fun doing some pair programming, and it's something that I want to keep doing.
I've also gotten a start on CPSC 508's first assignment and I already regret not starting it early. The task is to take a systems research paper and reproduce its results. That might seem easy, but it turns out that a lot of papers are really crappy with respect to reproducibility. It turns out that the paper I'm attempting to reproduce does have a tool that's been released. However, in order to obtain the binaries for this tool, I need to install it on a Windows machine. No other operating systems are supported. I spent an hour getting my Windows partition on my Mac back online and I immediately remembered why I switched to a Unix-based operating system.
That's a brief summary of what happened between last Sunday and this one. Have a great week!