Kevin Correia

This past weekend I had my first snowboard trip of the season at Cypress Mountain. I had already purchased a 5 day-pass to Whistler, but one of the EIT’s at Hydro mentioned you could probably save some money with the Gold Medal Card. I decided to crunch the numbers to see if the Cypress Gold Medal Card was really worth it.

The Situation
The Gold Medal Card is a loyalty program that allows skiers or riders to save 20% off lift tickets, and 40% off lift tickets purchased after late March. …

When I began my rotation in Burrard Thermal in July 2010, I noticed that the sun’s glare would strike my monitor on days I stayed past 5 pm. Now we are in October, and my “glare time” is getting earlier and earlier, around 3:15 pm as of last week. So a question arose:
At what point in the year does the number of sunlight hours change the most?

A good starting point is looking at how sunlight hours vary throughout the year – via a sinusoid curve. During the vernal …

I have always been a Geography geek. I often joke that I would rather read a map instead a book. I was always the one reading the road maps during my family’s summer camping trips. I was always fixated on looking at maps from the Age of Discovery… and when I was a kid I went through a phase of watching the Weather Network religiously. It probably had to do with showing data on the cool maps, or waiting for the weatherman to announce a snow day …

I recently had a trip to Seattle and noticed that the price difference of gasoline first hand – 20 cents. We decided to fill up the car before entering the country and noticed that all of the customers at the gas station were Canadian. Here’s my analysis without trying to resort to the easy explanation of “price gouging”.
The oil industry is a commodity-based industry, so I think it would be a good idea to have some definition refreshers:

A commodity is a good that is in demand but …

I got my first credit card the summer before I went to university. The TD Emerald Visa. My reasoning behind choosing this annual fee credit card was that it had a lower interest rate on balances, which is something nice to have. In hindsight, it was a dumb choice. I have never been one to carry a balance on a credit card, and I find it hard to see myself ever doing that. In the end, I wasted the $25 on a credit card that I …

Everyone knows that gasoline is a commodity:

Gasoline is traded as a commodity on the New York Merchant Exchange
Gasoline is derived from crude oil, another commodity
Gasoline is chemically similar across stations (aside from additives)
Even though gasoline is a commodity, it has the loyalty of a branded product. How did this happen? Oil companies have created loyalty programs to convince you to pull into their gas station instead of their competitors. Worse of all, some people may even drive an extra distance just to fill up their gasoline tank at their …

In May and June 2009, my life was in a carefree limbo. I had just completed my undergraduate in April, and I was slated to begin my fulltime job in July 2009. I decided I would use my short lived freedom to sit in lectures I was never able to attend during my Engineering undergrad. One of them was World Politics, instructed by Bill Moul (PSCI 281).
On the first day Prof. Moul introduced the class to the HDI Index (Human Development Index), and how it can be used …