While many people advocate going to school and getting an education, the reality is that education costs are more expensive than most people realize. Canada thankfully provides reasonably priced educations compared to the rest of the world, but it is far from free. Given that I grew up in Chilliwack, and that I had to move out to Vancouver to attend UBC, I spent approximately $11,000 per 8-month period, which included housing on the UBC campus along with a university food program (which tasted fairly similar to prison food, I imagine). Of those costs, approximately $3,000 went towards tuition, ...

Most people probably don’t know it about me, but I used to be involved in weather forecasting a long time ago. My first exposure to it was a co-op job I had in the summer of 1997 up in Whitehorse, YT. I was working for Environment Canada’s weather centre, helping to develop JAVA programs for visualizing some of their data. JAVA was a new technology at the time, so it was essentially one big prototype. It worked decently enough, but I doubt it survived much past the end of my co-op term. Years later I would be employed by the Department of Ocean Sciences at UBC as a part time software developer. ...