Vaccination Timeline = Ever Given??
By the time I finish writing this newsletter, a large container ship (the size of 4 football fields. I don’t remember the last time I’ve been to an American football field, but my American friends assure me that it is quite large) will have been blocking the Suez Canal for 5 days. With its blockage comes a complete halt in any traffic down the canal, effectively blocking trade for a small (but not completely insignificant) portion of the world economy.
The situation has been endlessly memed, including a few from our very own lab:
Maybe I’m crazy, but the futility of the situation really does remind me a bit of the vaccination plan that is rolling out across the province of BC; all we can do, really, is watch and wait. Unfortunately, cases are creeping up across the province in a clearly palpable third wave that seems to include a spike in cases for the various variants that have arrived in our province in the last few months.
I’m really hoping for a situation where we can curb the explosive growth of these cases, but only time will tell. Perhaps this last (knock on wood) stage of this year-long clusterfuck pandemic will go as quickly as the pandemic began.
After a period of relative calm (albeit a calm filled with an incessant barrage of papers), CPSC 508 is starting to pick up. I spent the last week pair-programming with my project partner. I think I can safely say that I’ve done more pair-programming in these past few months than I have done for the entirety of undergrad. I think I enjoy it - it’s always interesting to get a new perspective on your own code. I also find it fascinating to watch how other people approach program design. I’ve seen patterns from jumping right into code/implementation, all the way to sketching/talking out an algorithm or a general solution before even opening a text editor. I can say with confidence that I’ve definitely learned a lot. I hope pair-programming is something I do more of, even after the pandemic is over.
The month of March is effectively over, and I expect with the start of April that a period of chaos shall begin. There’s going to be work that I need to do in order to wrap up TA duties for CPSC 310, and I think I’ll definitely write about TA’ing what appears to be my last course, in the future.
Until next time!