I lived in the UK before making the barely-considered decision to move to Canada.  I still have savings denominated in pounds sterling (all dutifully declared on my Canadian tax return).  Accordingly, I keep a close watch on the GBP-CAD exchange rate so I have some sense of my net worth.

When I arrived in Canada in July 2008, one pound sterling bought $2, down from $2.30 two years before that.  Today, the pound has devalued further and is worth around...

I spend much of my time traveling for business. These trips often last a week, and we try to visit as many potential customers as possible, and in the most efficient order. This involves matching our hosts' calendars with our own, booking the most cost effective travel options, and coping with last-minute cancellations and changes. It isn’t easy!

This has become so much easier with the advent of shareable calendars and mapping services, like Google Maps. ...

Sometimes the obvious escapes me, and it’s only due to some chance observation that I realize the same fundamental principles are everywhere.

A short time ago, I created a simple hydraulic network in MapleSim, and after experimenting with some of the parameters, found it gave the same behaviour as an electric circuit I’d modeled earlier.

Around the time that Windows 98 was at its most popular, I used to dabble in programming Windows user interfaces with Visual C++ and the help of several thick MFC (Microsoft Foundation Class) manuals.  I wanted to create packaged (and admittedly simple) engineering applications. But for a chemical engineer with little background in Windows programming, combining math functionality with a user interface was time-consuming and cumbersome. (MFC can be arcane unless you’ve invested considerable time in learning the API.)

Later, I migrated to VB6.  Designing an interface was an order of magnitude easier, but I still had to roll many of my own math routines, or link to external libraries. While I may be interested in the mathematical mechanics of adaptive step sizing in Runge-Kutta algorithms at the intellectual level, it was secondary to my then goal.

If you were to stroll into the Application Engineering office at Maplesoft, you might be led to believe that we subsist on nothing but donuts, pizza, chocolate and coffee.  It’s even worse at this time of year when we have many more opportunities to over-consume. I try to have a balanced diet, but there are too many temptations scattered around the office (including candy at the office entrance – our receptionist, Walli, expects me at 3pm each day without fail). It doesn’t help that a virtually limitless supply of donuts are only a three minute drive away.