The bike makes everything better

So for the past couple of days my lower back has been really sore. Strangely enough I cannot figure out why this is, normally I'm obsessive about my body and I know the reason or cause for even the most minor aliment. So it is somewhat surprising that my back is sore enough for me to feel as though I'm an 80 year-old with severe arthritis when I try to get up from a seated position.

Even once I'm up I'm not done looking as though I'm nearing my deathbed. All day at work if I had to get up to leave my office I would take a few steps around my office before leaving. Otherwise I would have had to shuffle down the hall for the first little way. That's not all that bad normally, but the location of my back pain was such that I'm sure an onlooker would have thought that I was seriously clenching and trying not to crap my pants.

So despite all my joys of lower back pain I did notice one thing today, my back really doesn't hurt much at all on the bike. My ride to and from work were probably the most comfortable parts of my day, despite the fact that I'm doing it with a nearly 20 pound backpack resting on my lower back. Now if I could ride my bike everywhere around the building and labs I'd be able to move around pain free and not look weird at all!

When I used to do a lot of bike racing I was always surprised at the number of people who had sore backs when riding. For some reason my back almost never got sore, even after 40 km time trials. Actually I don't think it's anything special with me, maybe just a matter of better fit on the bike, because when you look at how the spine is made we really should be more comfortable on a bike. When riding we are supporting our weight not only at the base of our spine but also at the top, our arms help hold our head/shoulders up. This is far more similar to traditional mammalian posture, which is what our spine was originally evolved to cope with. Which explains why my lower back pain is minimized when I'm on the bike in a position that reduces the pressure on my spine. When you think about it, this is just more proof that there is no "intelligent designer" because nobody who knows anything about physiology would have made a spine like our for bipeds like us.

Birthdays are fun!

So yesterday was my birthday, I'm now officially 31. I can't say I'm really old as all my colleagues are older than me... and possibly a few of the grad students; but I still feel as though I am getting old. But to make the celebration special my wonderful wife was kind enough to buy me the latest iPhone! So its needless to say that I'm really stoked about it, the phone really just is the coolest thing going. It's also led me to realize just how much I've become a huge fan of Apple products in the last couple of years.

See, I've never in fact owned my own computer, the one that I have now is the laptop I got for work. However, if I was to buy one it certainly would be an Apple; but why spend the money if I can get it without a direct cost to myself. But beyond the laptop it seems that Deirdre and I have amassed quite the collection of Apple products, here's the list:

- an iPod shuffle
- an iPod mini
- a G4 iMac
- a 15" MacBook Pro
- an Airport Express wireless router
- a pair of iPhones (one original, one 3G)

The sad part is that even with all these items I would still like to get plenty more. I'm just really impressed with the functionality of Apple products and the style of them.

One of the nice things that I've found with iPhone is just how useful it's already shown itself to be. It would be nice if I could actually download papers that I search for but at least I have found a way to read them once I have downloaded them on another computer. There's a new program that I've managed to get a beta test version of that has proved extremely useful in doing this. It's called Dropbox and it allows you to upload any file into an online storage/sharing program. It syncs up with all computers that it's loaded onto and can be selectively shared with others. The bonus for the iPhone is that I can read any files that have been uploaded to the system on my iPhone, even pdf papers. So this really makes the phone that much more useful for me, which is sweet.

By the way, if you want to try Dropbox and the signup takes too long just leave me a comment and I'll send you an invite, I have about 9 left.

Academic Seasons

So in the past couple of weeks my job has undergone a bit of change, and I can't say that it's one that I'm really happy to be going through. That's right, the undergrads are coming back soon! As a grad student this annual event obviously had an impact on the day to day routine that we had become accustomed to during the summer months. The campus gets crowded once again, at first it seems that everyone is a wide-eye moron with no clue how to get anywhere, but after a few months they are just morons who don't know how to go anywhere without obstructing your path.

As a prof though the impact is more significant. Sure as a grad student I had to get back into the routine of teaching the students in the labs, but that was a minimal commitment and only required a minimum of effort most of the time. Teaching a pair of classes and supervising a lab on the other hand is a lot more work. Which means that in order not to be too swamped by the first few weeks I'm getting the ball rolling on the courses right now... well I'm trying to at least.

The downside to this is that I have run out of time to do work in the lab. I really do enjoy getting into the lab and doing work, particularly when things are going well. And of course things were going really well just before my deadline to get out of the lab and back into my office, things better be working again when I get time to get back in the lab. The one benefit of that is that the results I obtained gave me the confidence to write an abstract for a conference early next year. Of course at this point what I wrote is almost all speculation, but that's the way we always do it in chemistry. It's a sick game but it gets us to work like mad once the abstract is accepted.

One of the things that I was working on last week was a revision to the lab manual I wrote last January. I think I wrote the whole thing in a week or two, it was over 60 pages long. But it had to be done because the previous "lab manual" was just a bunch of sheets, about two per lab, most missing details and really teaching the students nothing. So I rushed to get one together for the spring term, which I did, but it had a few errors that needed to be fixed. Anyway, in doing the corrections I learned something, my students were stupid shits who don't read. I must have had half the class come to my office over the semester asking how to do a specific calibration graph. So I took the time to explain it to each one of them when they came in because the graph being used is a bit of a tricky one (the axis are ratios of two sets of data). Well in doing the revisions I noticed that I had in fact taken the time to clearly explain the way to make and use the graph. I had gone so far as to break it down into 8 fucking simple steps, yet somehow the students still couldn't figure it out. Next semester it's time to revert to a tactic I used when I was a TA in the labs, the first answer to all questions regarding the lab will be "What does the lab manual say?" I swear that answered at least 80% of the questions students had for me when I was a TA.

Normal - so they say

So I don't know about you but I tend to be skeptical of places that have certain declarative adjectives in their names. There is just something about the need to identify a place in such a fashion that makes me feel as though someone is trying to lie to me. But then again maybe I'm just a bit bitter for having grown up in a place called Franklin Centre, which can only be the centre of nowhere if it's the centre of anything. Hell, even Google maps doesn't have the town, pardon me village, in the right place. It gives you an idea how little there is there.

Anyway the reason I have been thinking about descriptive names has to do with my commute to and from work. One of the neighbourhoods that I have to pass through is called "Normal Heights". Now that's a clear sign that something is going wrong in the area. Are they trying to say that all the other "Heights" are abnormal, or are they just desperate to be considered normal too?

Either way I've been able to see through their lame attempt at trying to fit in with everyone else. It really becomes evident when I bike through the area. See, it's only in this neighbourhood that I have noticed a disturbing and slightly worrisome trend. Whenever I'm approaching an intersection where I have the right of way and a car is waiting to pass through my path they all seem to do the same thing. They don't shoot through really fast to try and beat me, which sucks when people try it because they usually underestimate my speed. And they don't sit and wait patiently for me to ride past as they are supposed to. No, in Normal Heights it's "normal" to creep through the intersection while waiting for me to pass. To the point where I'm not sure if they are just trying to line me up better to run me over or just drive really slow and don't see me coming.

It really does piss me off, because that's not the kind of shit that someone would do if I was in a car. When was the last time you slowly drove through a lane and a half while "waiting" for a truck to pass through the intersection?