the flying squirrel

Larry Lessig is something of a hero of mine. He’s a Harvard law professor who started out campaigning against modern intellectual property extremism that is locking up our culture and making creativity and innovation more and more difficult and more and more expensive. He created the Creative Commons to give artists a way to contribute [...]

Wow. 2011, eh? Back to school (sort of): I sat in on the two UW computer science compiler courses over the winter and spring terms. This has become rather useful at work, as I’m now on OpenText’s compiler team. I also helped recruit my CS444 instructor to help us out. Speaking of work: it was [...]

You know, I kinda feel bad for not posting as much personal stuff. Most of what I end up posting is Ubuntu or Kwartzlab-related. I know there are at least one or two of you who might like to hear a little bit about me. How do you feel about bullets? Maybe in reverse-chronological order. [...]

It’s a provincial election time. I hate it when people say “Oh, there’s an election, but I just can’t bring myself to care.” But this time, I can kinda relate. Thing is, I do care. There’s a lot of provincial stuff I care about. It’s just that from what I can tell, my local race [...]

Listened to the latest This Developer’s Life yesterday. “Education“. I enjoyed especially the Seth Juarez interview. Along with a bunch of useful advice and insight on how to think about school, Seth recommends every programmer should learn 3 languages: a strongly-typed compiled language, a dynamic language and a functional language. I’ve got the first two [...]

I love living in Waterloo Region. I love living in the City of Waterloo. One of the things I love is that I can start walking from my house in Lakeshore–a 40-year-old suburb–and find myself in cow pastures in about 20 minutes. I worry that if our current growth patterns and planning continue, we will [...]

I used to volunteer at the Royal Medieval Faire, usually working gates: taking money and welcoming people to the Faire. One year the Faire tried giving people wristbands instead of hand stamps to let them back in. For no discernible reason, the wristbands were pink. One little boy worked his way up to us in [...]

I have the start of four other posts about the current Canadian parliamentary election in my drafts folder. I’ve been having a hard time collating my thoughts into something novel or interesting. This election scares me and makes me profoundly sad for my country. That’s made it hard for me to get my thoughts together. [...]

Ten years ago today, I posted my first blog post. Okay, technically, that was on my old, hand-coded blog, and I’m lame even after almost 4 years, I haven’t imported my old blog into this one, but woo! 10 years! Equally technically, I was posting something like blog posts on my old homepage, starting around [...]

When I started at my current employer (about 18 months ago), I got it in my head I should take advantage of their training budget and proximity to uWaterloo (like the kids are calling it now) and take a course. For one reason or another (sanity, mostly; also scheduling), I wasn’t able to take the [...]