November 14th, 2008
I only heard about the Eagles of Death Metal concert last week, even though tickets went on sale in September. When I found out, I was pretty excited, since they are a great band and I’ve heard they put on a live show worth checking out. I went to buy tickets, but of course they were long sold out.
Yesterday, out of the blue, my friend Spencer emails saying he has extra tickets. Lucky me!
Eagles of Death Metal play fuzzy-guitar straight up rock and roll, complete with falsetto vocals and ample doses of cowbell. They sounded great live, despite a few technical difficulties with microphones and things. Lead singer Jesse “The Devil” Hughes looked like he was having fun, which made it easy for the crowd to have a good time.
Bottom line: loud dirty rock + beer = a good Thursday night.
October 29th, 2008
For the past year, I’ve been hearing waaaay too much about the upcoming U.S. presidential election. I’m tired of it. I’ve heard enough about Obama and McCain and that stupid Palin woman. Sure, this whole thing will probably have some serious impact on the economy and the world, but as a Canadian who’s not very interested in politics, the amount of political shit being force-fed to me is annoying. TV, radio, the newspaper, magazines, the Internet… you can’t escape hearing the latest news about some campaign or scandal.
We just had an election in Canada, and it came and went in about a month. That was annoying enough, but at least bearable, since it was somewhat relevant to my day-to-day life and relatively short lived.
I can’t wait until Tuesday (November 4th) when the whole thing is finally over with.
September 10th, 2008
Large Hadron Collider
I’ve been hearing a lot about the
Large Hadron Collider lately, not entirely knowing what it is or what it’s supposed to do. I did a little research last night and learned quite a bit about this giant crazy science project.
The LHC is a particle accelerator that shoots beams of protons at each other at nearly the speed of light so they collide and explode into little subatomic particles like quarks and gluons. It doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you’re a physicist, but the thing’s incredible, nonetheless.
Basically, it’s a giant 27km long circular tunnel buried 100 metres underground, occupying parts of both France and Switzerland. There’s a bunch of pipes, huge superconducting magnets, giant sensors to detect the presence of dark matter and other crazy shit, and it’s all cooled by 96 tonnes of liquid helium to reach a temperature of -271 degrees Celsius, which is just two degrees above absolute zero.
The 27km long circular tunnel was created in the early 80′s, and the LHC construction began in 1996. To date, the project has cost about $6 billion! It’s a joint effort, with thousands of physicists, engineers and technicians from over 80 countries taking part in the construction, operation and analysis of the LHC.
Scientists hope the LHC will answer a lot of questions relating to matter, antimatter, gravity, extra dimensions and all kinds of stuff that sounds like it came out of a Star Trek episode. This has been a long time coming, and now that I know a bit more about it, I’m pretty excited. The LHC is the biggest scientific achievement of our time, just like the moon landing of my parents’ generation.
Here’s a few more quick facts about the LHC:
- at full power, the LHC will use about $100,000 worth of electricity per day
- the LHC will generate enough data to fill a CD every second
- protons will make 11,000 laps around the 27km tunnel every second
- each proton will cross the France/Switzerland border 44,000 times per second
August 1st, 2008
It’s time for me to jump on the Cuil-bashing bandwagon. I first heard about the search engine after reading the Toronto Star Tuesday morning. When I got to work, several non-technical people were asking me about it, so it obviously got some serious hype in a short time.
At first, I was like, WTF is this? How do you pronounce it? “Quill”? “kwee-uhl”? Is it French? Maybe “soo-ill”? I never would have guessed “cool”. I’m no branding expert, but right off the bat, the name just doesn’t seem like something that will catch on easily.
Functionally, the site hasn’t had very positive reviews. They claim to index more pages than Google – over 120 billion. However, looking up very simple words often brought no results, and as of two days ago, searching for “Cuil” returned no results related to the site itself, either. If they can’t find themselves in their own search engine, who’s going to trust them for anything?
A search for "Cuil" returns nothing related to itself
In a timely fashion, the guys at Google’s blog had a post last Friday mentioning they’ve indexed 1 trillion unique URLs on the web. Take that Cuil, with your measly 120 billion…
It makes me mad to see some ex-Google employees drum up 33 million dollars over a bunch of hype. I hope the investors lose their money. They deserve it.
July 31st, 2008
We got up early, knowing this was our last day on the road. We were riding at 8am, and got to Cornwall by 9:30. Spencer’s spoke supply was getting low, and he misplaced his spoke wrench the day before, so we stopped in at Bicycle World in Cornwall to pick up what we needed. Bicycle World was the best bike store I’ve ever been to. The people were super nice, and they even let us in a few minutes before their usual opening time, since they knew we were on a big trip.
Bicycle World in Cornwall
We stopped for lunch at a McDonald’s not far from the Quebec border. Shortly after lunch, we hit the border and took a few pictures. We met a nice French cyclist who rode with us for a bit and gave us some tips on the construction we’d encounter. We took Route Verte #5, which was a very nice bike path that went on forever. It followed alongside the Soulanges Canal, which used to be Quebec’s main shipping route before the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959.
At the Quebec border
Around this time, I started feeling a weird pain in my right ankle/achilles area. It got worse as the day went on, but luckily I was able to continue riding.
Riding alongside the St. Lawrence in Quebec
When we reached the end of Route Verte, we were mostly on streets, going through some very nice little towns. Pat got his first flat tire around this time. Shortly after that, Spencer broke another spoke. We stopped for dinner in some little town at a roadside pub. At about 7pm, we realized we still had about 30km to go before we’d be in Montreal. We knew this was the homestretch, so we started riding hard. Along the way, we encountered a spandex rider on a fast-looking bike, so we started chasing him. We were on his tail for over 30 minutes, and Spencer caught him at one point, but then fell back to join us. We were ripping it up, averaging over 30km/h with our fully loaded bikes, gaining speed up hills, racing through the busy streets. It was a lot of fun, and I’d like to think we kinda scared the guy away, although he very well may have just been going home…
We continued along at a pretty quick pace, making it to our hotel in Montreal at 8:30 – at the same time Pat and Spencer’s girlfriends rolled up in their cab.
It was quite the adventure, with a lot of ups and downs, but it was tons of fun. Riding our bikes was a full time job for those four days, and I know I really pushed myself to my limits, both physically and mentally. It was a great feeling to make it to our destination, knowing we could just relax and enjoy Montreal for a few days. And to top it all off, we had a free bus ride home.
Distance covered: 160km
Total time on the road: 12.5 hours (8am to 8:30pm)
Total trip distance: 633km
Total time on the road: 48.5 hours
