pre-game psyche up

I have been feeling like something is missing from my pre-game routine before ultimate games. Perhaps I should take a page from Hollweg's book.

Google References

Okay, I'm going to say right here that this goes out to the academics in the room. The rest of you are probably wasting your time. (But then again, why else would you be here, right?)

I just discovered this cool feature in Google Scholar. It's easy to do, just follow these steps:
1) Cut a hole in a box.
1) Go to Google Scholar
2) Click on the "Scholar Preferences" link on the right:


Yeah, yeah, the arrows. I know.
3) Scroll to the bottom and click select "Show links to import citations into ..." and choose your poison. (Mine happens to be BibTeX.)

Okay, let's try this out. Let's search for something of interest.

Looks like we stumbled upon a gem here. Maybe we'll want to reference this at some point. So by clicking on "Import into BibTeX", we get the reference in BibTeX format:

@article{naveh1982kpd,
title={{Kinetics of peroxidase deactivation in blanching of corn-on-the-cob}},
author={Naveh, D. and Mizrahi, S. and Kopelman, I.J.},
journal={Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry},
volume={30},
number={5},
pages={967--970},
year={1982},
publisher={American Chemical Society}
}

Now you usually have to make small edits, but in general, the form is there! Cool, eh?

A request to the smokers of the world

Dear smokers,

As somebody that shares your side-walks, bus stops, park benches, beaches, lakes, rivers, and scenic outlooks, I have a minor request. And I know this doesn't pertain to all of you, but it seems to pertain to a lot of you, possibly most of you.

You know that bit of the cigarette that you put in your mouth and don't smoke? The cigarette butt? Please don't throw it on the ground/street/gutter when you're done with it. Instead, please throw it in the trash, where it belongs.

Now that might seem like a lot of work for something so trivially small, I know. But have you ever stopped and looked at how many cigarette butts are littered near a bus stop? Or a flower bed next to a fountain in the park? Or even a garden outside a hospital? It's more than you'd care to count.

Apparently, 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are littered each year. Here's a few ways to wrap your head around that number. If you placed those cigarette butts end-to-end at the equator, they would form a line that circled the globe three times. If you put them in a pile, the pile would take up a city block and be 8 stories high. The littering rate equals 142 per second. That's equivalent to over 2 per day per person on the planet. Or, another way to look at it: every time somebody on the planet takes a dump, somebody litters a cigarette butt. (Give or take.) That's a shit-load of litter. And the reason for it? As far as I can tell it's a combination of apathy and sheer laziness on the part of smokers. Junkies are probably more careful about disposing of their needles.

I knew a smoker that worked in remote parts of the world, where he was about a 2 hour flight from any road. He would store cigarette butts in a bag in his pocket for weeks until a plane came to deliver food and pick up garbage. So please don't tell me that carefully extinguishing the butt on the side of your shoe/a tree/the garbage can and then tossing the butt in the trash is too much work. If it were, this friend of mine would have burnt his pants off years ago.

A lot of smokers complain that their rights to smoke are being violated by a repressive anti-smoking society. That's fine and fair, and in a lot of instances it probably is going too far. But remember that it's not your bus stop/park/whatever; you're sharing it with hundreds, maybe thousands of people. My mom used to tell me that with privilege comes responsibility. If your kid ate 5 Popsicles a day and couldn't eat a Popsicle without leaving the Popsicle stick lying in the yard, how long would it be before you made an ultimatum about it?

Please lead by example.

What's black and blue and goes splat in the woods?

I have to say that my feet are hurting a little more today than they do on an average Monday. But then again, yesterday I did a little more footwork than I would on an average Sunday. But, as I've mentioned once before, I'm trying to get back in shape, and I've decided to compete in the 8-hour version of the E2C adventure race. And so in preparation, my team mate and I decided to do mini-E2C this weekend. Now I spend my share of time in the woods. Well, more than average, anyway, but this weekend was especially gruelling.

I should have known it was coming. But I didn't. I was in blissfully disillusioned, thinking that we'd be prancing around forests with relative ease. That expectation was rudely shattered 15 minutes into the 5 hour race when I found myself fording a knee-deep, forty-foot wide, ice-cold, rushing stream. That's when I put the pieces together and realized the implications of having a former national orienteering champion as a team mate for the race.

At 9:15, instead of frying up eggs and sipping coffee, I was drenched from the waist down in 5-degree weather.

We crossed the stream, made our way to a the edge of a lake, and cut into the woods looking for our first checkpoint. A mere 20 minutes into the race were there. Things were looking good.

All we had to do next was bush-whack in a straight line for about one mile to intersect a road. My team-mate, who I must say has the uncanny ability to slip through the densest forest like a freaking deer on speed, was flying. I barely looked at my compass or map as I tried to keep up. When we finally emerged from the brush on a road, I had no idea where we were. That confusion was not helped by the map. The logging roads in the real world trailed away from intersections at fastly different compass bearings than the ones on the map. Some took sudden 90-degree turns that weren't on the map. All this made it very difficult to figure out where we were, and we walked aimlessly on these roads for about an hour before determining our position. By then we were about 5 km from where our planned route would have us so we made a new plan, and quickly (i.e. in the 90 minutes) found two more check-points. With two hours to go, we had found less than 1/3 of the checkpoints. We went back into the woods and started bush-whacking, but because we were looking for a trail that didn't exist, we spent the next 90 minutes covering about 4 km in the thick woods. By the time we came to a trail, we had 30 minutes to cover 5 km (on roads now) to get to the finish line before running out of time. There was one more check-point right near the end of the course, so our final score was 4/10, unlike the 7 or 8 we had hoped for.

But I learnt some lessons. (1) Even though the course was built for GPS users, we had decided not to bring any because that would be cheating. Next time, I should either take a GPS or not do a race like that. (2) Even if it's a bad map, you have to trust it. (3) If you sign up to run through the woods with a deer, you're going to get your ass kicked by the forest.

Morning conversation

ME: I can't believe how much hair seems to fall out in the shower.

ALLIE: I wouldn't worry about it. Each day, 100 new hair follicles form.

ME: Yeah, I don't think that's gonna cut it.

ALLIE: Well, maybe your hair is falling out faster than it's coming back.

ME: You know, I really shouldn't worry about what happens to my hair. I mean, it is my hair that's leaving me, after all.

Well, it has been kind of quiet here lately. But I think it's been a good kind of quiet. Like when you're sitting around the campfire on a beach, and all you can hear is crackling wood and and waves gently rolling onto the shore.

So here we are you and I, sitting on the beach just to the side of a palm tree whose fronds rustle as the trade winds stream past. We've been here a while, and I decide to get up and stretch my legs. The moon is bright tonight, and the clouds in the sky are sparse. Orion stands proudly in the night sky as I stroll along the black sand beach, right at the threshold of the water's edge.

A set of waves is tumbling in. The whitewash shimmers on the blackened ocean. The ocean meets my feet and rushes past -- it's slightly cooler than expected. It reaches up the beach, then recedes. For a moment, the sand gets pulled from underneath my feet as I sink an inch or two.

I've wandered far enough from the fire that I can't hear it anymore, but a quick glance over my shoulder reveals its flickering orange glow on the lone palm tree. I look up at the waves, then past them, into the restless and endless ocean.

I take a couple of steps up the beach, out of the reach of the waves, and sit down facing the ocean. There's something floating in about two feet of water. It's reflecting the moon beams. I can't make out what it is, though, maybe it's driftwood? I don't care much. Taking a deep breath, I instead enjoy the sweet smell of the nearby rain forest intermingled with the salty sea breeze.

Okay. Time to get up.

Lethargically.

Strolling back to the campfire, I stare at it's glow. Nobody breaks the silence as I sit back down. Looking at each other, we share smiles, but there's nothing to be said. A piece of firewood pops, drawing our attention back to the embers. Nothing is said and we return to watching the dance of the fire.

Yeah, it's been that kind of quiet around here.

the twisted shriek of irony

So on Monday, I think the good folks over at the Globe and Mail were tweaking with their website. I was having some problems which I described to them:

I run Firefox on Linux (insert technobabble here). On your site (and only on your site) I get a segmentation fault when I try to scroll down the page: (insert more technobabble)
As such, I cannot read the content of the globe's website. Today is the first day I've encountered this problem, so it must be a relatively new change.

To be honest, I wasn't really expecting a reply, they caught me in an old-man mood and I wrote a letter to complain. But I got a reply! What did they have to say? I'm glad you asked...

We do not support Firefox on Linux, for your reference system requirements for theglobeandmail.com can be located at the following link:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/v5/content/help/technical-answers.html#general

Right...to learn more about reading the website, I am directed to the website that I cannot read. Sheer brilliance!

gzzzt - Oww. gzzzt - Oww. gzzzt - Oww.

I think this may partially explain why it is that I am losing my hair.

Things I did this weekend

In no particular order

Went to an alumni dinner for a university whose campus I've never seen.

Washed my memory stick (it still works).

Administered first aid (sorta) on a woman who'd been lightly bumped by a car. She'll live. Yay!

Worked on improving my SAR team's call-out service. Now with GoogleMaps!!!

Won an item in a silent auction (by outbidding Allie by $1).

Learnt how to tie a full Windsor knot from my friend, the internet. Again.

Rented a movie because of a Fifth Estate episode

Banged my head against a wall for 6 hours before learning it was the compiler, not my code, that had the problem. Only to find a different problem in the code after.