• the delay between lights changing from green to red is very short
• lots of hills
• lots of eccentric homeless people (ex. a woman who dresses up her cat in flowers and stuff)
• temperature changes drastically throughout the day
• lots of places that offer super cheap happy hour drinks
• it’s hard to get a cab
• cabs are cheap
• there is a cab company whose cars look like police cars
• there are hardly any brown people
• some ads in the subway are only in Spanish (surprising because I’m used to French, and I’d also expect half English)
• hardly anyone wears heels except for tourists

I’m a terrible actor, so watch for the storyline and everyone else in the video haha.

Please ignore the typo

It’s a simple idea: map your friends’ most recent locations based on the latitude and longitude of their check-in. It wasn’t difficult to implement at all, once we figured out how to use the Facebook Graph API, so we had a lot of extra time, but we purposefully overestimated the time needed because we didn’t want to end up not having anything to demo (which happened to a number of other teams).

We didn’t win, but it was a cool experience — minus the sleep deprivation — and it was also interesting to see what other people came up with.

My team's name

Sleeping

Watching demos

I thought it would be interesting to see what the demographics of the users look like, so I did some data analysis. Nothing really surprised me, except for the fact that there are significantly less people looking for short-term relationships than I expected.

The vast majority of users are single, straight undergrads from the St. George campus. They are pretty evenly distributed among their years of study, and about 80% of them are between the ages of 18 and 23.

(Great news that most people don’t smoke regularly!)

Most common hobbies:

• listening to music
• reading
• watching movies
• playing video games
• hanging out with friends
• photography
• cooking and eating

The courses that stood out the most as lamest were math and statistics courses.

The courses that stood out the most as people’s favourites were philosophy and psychology courses.

I also made some word clouds using Wordle, with common words removed. I did this kind of quickly so these are not completely accurate because I didn’t take phrases into account nor that people abbreviate certain things. For example, the word “Smith” shows up a lot in the first cloud but the word “Sidney” does not, because some people refer to the building as “Sid Smith.” Also, if words have apostrophes or special characters, the letters get split up, which explains why you might see things like “ing.”

Where people like to hang out

What people would like to do on a first date

What characteristics people look for in a partner

What people are passionate about

I could have analyzed the data in a more interesting way and asked questions like, “Are the things that girls are interested in doing on a first date different from what guys are interested in doing?” But I will leave that for another time.

Visited a cottage in the winter

Tried snowboarding, which was very difficult (and I had to buy a pair of $200 snow pants for it too)

Spent almost an entire year using a broken keyboard

Attended and helped to organize the Canadian Undergraduate Software Engineering Conference in Montreal

Ate Big Fat Burrito burritos and Booster Juice on consecutive days a number of times

Did Google Summer of Code!

Took an English course at school and did decently well

Ran into the closest thing that I’ve come to a concert, which was Ke$ha rehearsing for the Much Music Video Awards

Traveled by plane by myself

Lived in San Francisco + away from home + avec le boyfriend for two months

We ate dinner on a cardboard box for a few weeks because he didn't have a table

Visited an aquarium for the first time

Visited the Computer History Museum in Mountainview, California

Went to Yahoo HQ for my first girl geek dinner

Visited the Twitter office and on the same day watched Kanye West eating lunch there a few feet away

Drove around the Valley to the Oracle, Facebook, Apple, Google, and Yahoo! campuses (not inside though)

Went to Mexico for the first time and swam in an infinity pool

Started Love at U of T!

Worked at Gap Adventures and went on an awesome company retreat to Niagara Falls during that time

Joined Reddit and became obsessed with rage comics

New Year's Resolution

Presented at DemoCamp

Got food poisoning three times and spent probably a total of one week in bed as a result

Participated in a group Halloween costume (I’m Blooper, the squid, who is probably the most hated item)

Ate ramen for the first time and fell in love… but later discovered that it was not vegetarian

Hosted a speed dating event

Met a lot of awesome people!

Me doing the demo

There are more pics here

The shear magnitude of our corner of creation is inconceivably small compared to the known universe, which overshadows our solar system 1.25 quadrillion (successor to trillion) to 1 in diameter alone. Humility in this great expanse should be instinctive.

I found this on Smashing Magazine and I really like it because it reminds me to be humble. It reflects exactly how I feel whenever I look at the sky at night or watch movies about space — small. All of the little problems on Earth become incredibly insignificant.

After much experience debugging builds and installing things, I’ve come up with this list of commonly overlooked problems that I store in my head:

1. Something is misspelled (this is the most difficult to spot)
2. Something is case-sensitive
3. You didn’t do a full/clean build
4. The file permissions are incorrect
5. You need to “sudo” that command
6. The environment variables are incorrect or not set

If all else fails, just tell yourself that when you finally figure out what was wrong, you’ll have learned a good lesson, as painful as it was.