Those who can’t…

Why on earth would a teaching program use this as their banner slogan?

You know you’re a grad student…

You know you’re a grad student if you actually get excited about finding someone’s dissertation online and reading the whole thing.

An inconvenient truth…

My internets are broken again, I think Al Gore needs to stop worrying about global warming and invent me some new ones.

You should call us butter…

So it’s been a good week for transportation intramurals… victories in soccer, flag football, and volleyball. I think it’s because of the matching jerseys.

Edit: You know what I hate? Commercials with “cute” kids. I’m just saying.

Watch your sushi

HEB isn’t exactly the first place you think of to buy sushi, but Hancock Center actually makes theirs fresh and it tastes all right. I saw some similarly-packaged sushi at the Burnet HEB yesterday and bought some, thinking I’d found something just as good at a more convenient location.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

It was nasty. As in, I was hungry and couldn’t even finish it. The salmon was mushy, there was this sickly sweet taste to the whole thing, even the rice tasted wrong. I checked the back and saw a list of ingredients including high fructose corn syrup and a host of other preservatives… um, what? Japanese food has subtle flavors, you can’t just add in random chemicals and pretend like it’s the same thing. (You shouldn’t do it with other foods either, but in some cuisines, such as Italian, it’s less noticeable) I don’t even know why they added corn syrup in the first place, it’s not like sushi is supposed to be extra sweet or anything. Bah. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to join the slow food movement even though I disagree with a lot of what they stand for.

On cycling, Part I

I’ll get on a small soapbox today. The topic? Vehicular cycling… repeat after me, kids: vehicular cycling. I’ve cycled a fair amount these last four years (until my bike got stolen last month, grumble grumble) and spent a lot of time thinking about transportation in grad school, so I have a lot of opinions on bicycle issues. I’ve also noticed that a lot of people — both cyclists and drivers — don’t really know what to do around each other… hence this post.

To start, it’s a shame that vehicular cycling even needs its own term, since it really just boils down to following the law. At its essence, vehicular cycling means that bicycles should be treated like any other vehicle. In particular,

• Cyclists should follow the rules of the road
• Cyclists should stay to the right, except when moving at the same speed as traffic, or if the rules of the road (or safety) require otherwise
• Drivers should treat cyclists as they would any other slow-moving vehicle (think cement trucks or city buses)

That’s really all there is to it. See, it’s not so complicated. The trouble is that almost nobody (cyclist or driver) does this.

I’m convinced that a big reason for this is simple ignorance. There is no licensing process for riding a bike… no drivers’ ed, no drivers’ test, no safety inspections, etc. Most people start cycling as a little kid, as a toy or a way to get around your neighborhood. Then they hang their bike up in their garage once they learn to drive, and then once they’re in college they pull it out and start riding again, never having learned how to ride properly and still treating it like a toy.

So, they start doing things like blatantly running stop signs in front of cars, which pisses drivers off and doesn’t really make them feel like giving cyclists the rights they deserve… which they may not even be aware of, since dealing with cyclists isn’t always covered in drivers’ ed classes.

The cure for this is pretty obvious, at least from my view: if we cyclists want drivers to respect our legal rights, we need to ride more responsibly. This alone isn’t enough; education is needed to fight the ignorance that grips both drivers and cyclists alike. Education on things like “if I’m riding a bike and making a left turn, I’m going to be in the left lane, because that’s what the law demands all vehicles to do, slow-moving or not, so don’t honk at me.” Or “If there’s a row of parked cars, I’m not going to ride six inches away from them and get doored.”

That said, I also think that any driver who complains about cyclists needs to get on a bike for a few weeks to understand things from the other side. If it’s 100 degrees outside and I’m riding uphill, you’ll forgive me if I don’t want to come to a complete stop at a stop sign and lose momentum. (I mean, most of the time I don’t even come to a complete stop when I’m driving.) If it’s raining, you’ll forgive me for running a red light if there’s nobody around. I try not to judge the things that truck drivers drivers do, because I have no idea what it’s like to drive a semitrailer, but I imagine it’s way different than driving a compact car. Likewise, I ask drivers to temper their judgment against cyclists unless they’ve spent some time commuting in the saddle themselves.

That’s all for this time. Happy riding (or driving)!

…for everything else, there’s conservation.

Replacing eight incandescent bulbs with fluorescents: $20
Using ceiling fans instead of the air conditioner: a mild adjustment
Living in an apartment between 80 and 90 degrees: a bit uncomfortable

A $15 electricity bill for the month of June: priceless

The finest ‘Winter Wind’ you’ll ever hear

Ignore the goofy facial expressions. After a nice performance of Chopin 10/2, Ingolf Wunder pulls out the fury for the Winter Wind etude, starting around 1:20. You won’t find a better performance of the WW anywhere, so you better crank the volume.

The most intelligent conversation in the history of instant messenger

[16:57] BusyBoy2001: 30-10
[16:57] Pundit966: wow
[16:57] Pundit966: wow
[16:57] BusyBoy2001: wow
[16:57] Pundit966: um yeah

It’s getting hot in here

Someone, please remind me why I moved to Texas. And I think my air conditioner is busted, too.