May has been a lot of work. On the Berlinguette side, we've been running the optimizer on real scenarios, but we keep running into issues with getting clean data. It looks like there's a lot of things we could optimize in our process, but we really need to stop making changes so we can hand it off to the corporate partners.

On the school side, I've started CPSC 304, Intro to Relational Databases. It's a lot more complicated than I thought. I looked some database stuff up before for personal interest, so the first week or two were fine. After that, it started to get more into that CS-style math we saw in our algorithms course, so it's a lot more of a brain burner now. Fortunately, I've got a good group to work with on the course project, which I'll have to talk about next month.

On the personal side, the biggest thing is that I got my first vaccine dose! They have a great system here for administering the mRNA doses here. It was very smooth and easy to get through, thanks to all the volunteers and staff. They've really thought through their logistics. (It also didn't hurt that the doctor doing my shot liked my Sawbones "Pro-Vax" pin!)

The shot did give me some muscle pain for a few days, but it was never worse than a bad bruise. The best side effect was finally feeling safe. My weird muscle tension has mostly gone now, which I'm not suprised by. It also helps that BC has a solid re-opening plan that looks well thought-out, and that new cases are dropping quickly. I'm feeling optimistic about being back with people in September.

Side story: at the clinic, after waiting to get cleared at the door, they had many set of chairs set up for the people (or family groups) up next. You'd wait there to get into the gymnasium where they'd get your data and you'd get your shot. As I was waiting in my chair, I watched how their system worked.

There were 2 volunteers, one running entry into this waiting space, and another running the exit and moving people onwards. After I was sent to my seat, I noticed that the entry staff would direct people so they filled up my column, then the next and so on. I then checked out how people were being moved onwards, and realized that there was a contiguous set of people ahead of me, and that the exit volunteer would always call on the person at the head. And that's when I realized that this was a circular buffer, and that's when I realized I think about CS too much.

That's it for this update. See you next time!

(Photo by Marisol Benitez on Unsplash)