I must have offended the God of Tire Pumps at some point.
That's the only explanation I can think of for my persistent complete inability to use them. This evening on the way home, for example, I noticed that my back tire was getting a tad squishy, so I stopped by the University of Victoria Bike Kitchen.  I followed the directions precisely:

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What, you mean that simplistic prescriptions concerning nebulous and ill-defined "gravy" and "red tape" are no way to run a major urban area? Well, I never! If only there had been someone (or even several thousand well-educated people) around to warn the Torontonian electorate over and over and over again that voting for this man was a stupendously ( Read more... )

Lately, I have been thinking entirely too much about stable timeloops, and have had some thoughts which are probably stupid, but which I will write down here nonetheless. For the sake of this argument, let us define a stable timeloop as occuring whenever a time-travelling entity, by travelling to the past, affects the course of events in such a way ( Read more... )

Last night, I dreamt that travel insurance companies had started to demand that beneficiaries recieve permission from their God or Gods before embarking upon a journey. Naturally, there were alot of polytheists up in arms about this change, as they claimed that it was discriminatory to expect them to get permission from all umpteen million of their ( Read more... )

I suppose alot has already been written on the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I really have nothing to say about them, in all honesty. Nothing about their historical context or political significance that hasn't already been hashed-out a million times before. I suppose I could write the standard, personal account of "where I was ( Read more... )

So as those of you not on my facebook may not be aware, my paper on the ringing modes of quantum-corrected black holes has now been peer-reviewed, and accepted for publication pending minor revisions. I wish I could say that I was more involved in the actual writing of the paper, but to be perfectly honest, although I did do most of the research ( Read more... )

So I finally managed to clear up a mistake with my new laptop batteries (I ordered one, they thought I ordered three, so I should get reimbursed by about $200 soon enough ( Read more... )

Today I met, as they say, the new guy. By the new guy, I am referring to Dr. Kovtun's new grad student(now that Rowena has moved-on/unaccountably disappeared), Michael. He dresses in a green sweater and has the thickest, roundest glasses I have ever seen. Apparently he is also from Winnipeg, but he went to U of M, so I don't know him. I am, ( Read more... )

I suspect that most people on the Internet would come across sounding less stupid if they took a few minutes to consider what comments are actually saying, rather than immediately responding to what they, at first glance, think is being said. Case in point, this story, which is a horrific report of a disabled student at a Missouri highschool being ( Read more... )

Leah has returned (temporarily) to Seattle, and with Mom and Maureen also gone, that means that for the first time in nearly a month, I am completely alone at home. Naturally, I spent several hours cleaning up, and then some quality time with my computer. Unfortunately, however, I happened to come across this particular entry on cracked.com just as ( Read more... )