Sunday, April 13, 2008

Hot weather

So this weekend I was almost killed by a 10 year-old, but instead I got away unscathed and may have broken his shin.

The weather down here this weekend was just roasting hot, easily about 30 C each day. so what better time to get out for a couple of bike rides. My ride Saturday was uneventful, a good 60 km loop down towards San Clemente and back, the hills at the end of the ride were killer, but as always it was great. Sunday was a different story, I needed a bit of a lighter ride so I took off North along the PCH towards Long Beach.

Going North was a good idea, it was a headwind on the way out and tailwind on the way back. Well, it was a good idea until I reached Huntingdon Beach. See I hadn't quite realized that everyone who was stuck inland would be heading out to the beach to cool off. The result of which was a confluence of ignorance and distraction as drivers tried to get to parking spots near the beach and people tried to cross the highway.

The funniest part was seeing the idiots trying to get to the parking by the beach. At several intersection they would try get across the intersection, despite the obvious backlog of cars already sitting in the middle of the intersection. Of course being on a bike I really didn't mind, I could glide through the gaps that the morons left between their SUVs.

Now, the part with the kid nearly killing me. On my way North through Huntington Beach I was riding near the parked cars as I normally do, looking out for doors opening. Unfortunately kids move even faster than opening doors. In the middle of a block three of them came darting out from between a pair of SUVs. Of course their timing was impeccable, leading to two bodies trying to occupy the same space at the same time. Fortunately for me my handlebars managed to miss the kid, so I didn't pull an Armstrong and go flying into traffic. The point that made contact with the kid was my right foot, knocking me sideways but I stayed on my bike. I'm not sure what happened to the kid, he and his friends ran off when I started swearing at them (the initial reaction to that kind of experience). I'm not sure what happened to the kid, I may have broken his leg for all I know...well I guess not since he ran off. But getting hit by 180 pounds of bike and body moving at about 35 km/h can't feel good. And I feel a bit bad for the kid, but at least I wasn't a car, because we know how that would have ended for him and at least this way he learned his lesson, hopefully.

Sunday, April 06, 2008

This just doesn't help.

So one of the blogs that I've been reading is by an “angry” professor and there is an interesting subtitle to the blog: The world needs ditch-diggers, too. It's a statement that I'm beginning to understand applies even to those do make it into institutions of higher learning.

The reason this has come to have more meaning for me is because I've just managed to struggle my way through grading the last midterm I gave my students. See, I learned something very exciting while grading the "creative" calculations they came up with, the price of gas will certainly go down if any of them every work at a gas station. You see, they cannot deal with the simplest calculations, things that they should have been taught in high school; I checked with my 16 year old brother-in-law, he knows how to do these calculations. The key one they fucked up (16% of them made this error) was in finding the number of moles in a solution of a given volume and concentration. This is why I want them to work at gas stations, because concentration is expressed in moles/liter, just like gas is priced $3.60/gallon. So according to my students if I wanted to buy six gallons of gas I just take the price and divide it by the volume; 6 gallons would cost $0.60, sweet!

Is it any wonder I get this awful tension headache whenever I grade? Incidentally it disappeared over spring break when I decided it wasn't worth my time to grade the exams then. Only about five or six more weeks of classes, I haven't looked forward to the end of classes since I was about 12.

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

A day off

So I’m on my spring break this week. And just like pretty much every spring break I’ve ever had I’m working. Spring break always seemed like a cool idea, but I never had time or money to really get out and do anything. Most years I had research to do, even in my last year of undergrad. The year prior to that was the 1998 ice storm in Montreal, my school decided that the loss of a week of classes at the beginning of the semester would be compensated by having no break that year. And some people wonder why I never really have any pride in the institutions I’ve studied at.

Though now that I’m a faculty member I decided that I needed a bit of a break, so I took Monday off, giving me a nice three day weekend. And for a change it actually was a weekend, I didn’t work on lectures, grants or grading like I normally do. I just sat back and relaxed and even manage to get in a couple of bike rides, after more than a month of not riding (I’m still not sure how that happened).

I recently picked up an iPod shuffle, with the new pricing on them I couldn’t help myself. After all I had been hoarding Deirdre’s iPod mini for ages now. I knew the thing was small but I was shocked at just how light the thing is, I think my earbuds actually weight more than the shuffle. So on the ride I took Monday I decided that I would take it along with me; I was riding down the PCH and anything to silence the car noise is appreciated. Thankfully the ride is a safe one with a large bike path/shoulder so I wasn’t at risk not having my hearing while riding (something I find I need in heavy city traffic riding). The beauty of the shuffle is that I could just clip the unit to my sleeve and run the earbuds under the jersey to my collar. I did learn however that my heart sounds like a cricket. Well, it does when the shuffle is turned on (playing or not) and the cord passes over the heartrate monitor I wear riding. The radio frequency transmission sends chirps through the earbuds, but only if the wire is right on top of the transmitter, so that was easy to avoid.

Harder to avoid are the habits of a northern cyclist. Riding in Edmonton I could be out for four or five hours in June and barely get a tan. I learned very quickly that that wouldn’t be the case here. Riding only for about two and a half hours got me some nice lobster-like skin coloration. You have to love southern California, when I can get a bikers tan in March.