Random Musings and Nicknacks

A favourite topic of mine on this site has been discussing my observations on bike commuting, relative levels, and the change in rates over the season. This year I have seen a lot of bikes, and my impression was a lot of bikes right through the month of November.

For the first time, I actually have numbers to back this up! There is a guy I talk to on the seabus regularly, who is very active in bike advocacy and lobbying through the city, who has access to the numbers the city has been generating.

According to him, in the month of November the city counted 570 bikes an hour on Ontario street (the busiest bike route). This represents a 30% drop from the summer, which in my opinion is pretty good — a lot smaller drop than I would have expected!

That works out to 10 bikes a minute during rush hour. No wonder I’ve been seeing ‘bike jams’

I found this amusing story in the news today…

Subject: Risks of unilingual vacation-reply messages
The council of Swansea, Wales, decided to have a certain road posted “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only”. Official road signs in Wales today must be in Welsh as well as English, so the English text was emailed to the council’s translation office.

And in due course a sign was erected with text in Welsh — whose meaning was: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.”

See <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wale /7702913.stm>.

This also reminded me, though that its not always a good idea to just bypass the person and go straight to the computer for an answer…
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I am a news and political junkie. I always have been, and likely always will. The more sources of news (especially international, technological, or sociological) I can get the better. That is why I have become addicted to podcasts. My favourite part of my day is plugging into my podcasts while I get onto my bike to head to or from work, and to learn.

That is why I am now lost.
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I just read this fascinating article on Newsweek: Special Election Project

Apparently they have had reporters inside both US campaigns, with special permission to watch the internals as long as they didn’t report anything until after the election. Some of the observations are fascinating.

Highly recommended reading, and they are promising a more complete article in the future.

One of my co-workers was growing a nice batch of cherry tomatoes in his yard over the summer. Regularly during lunchtime conversations we would get updates about how they were progressing, and his plans for them once they had ripened.

We hadn’t heard about them lately, so we finally asked how they were — it turns out he didn’t get to eat any!

Apparently, when he went out to harvest the ripe tomatoes, there were none on the plants. There were still a number of green tomatoes, and aside from that empty, untouched, undamaged plants.

He went back into his house, and found his labrador sitting there looking guilty, but also very satisfied.

Apparently the dog had discovered that he liked ripe tomatoes, and was later caught in the act — he would wander through the plants, bypassing all the green ones until he found a nice, ripe juicy tomato. He would carefully wrap his lips around it, and suck it right off the vine without touching anything else. Over the summer he had cleared the entire garden this way.

The perfect crime — almost.