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Well, there was a Pirates not-a-meet today. It was a bit short, but given the length of the film and the conditions (HOT!), there wasn't really much we could do about that. Random, Barry, Spook, Ladylark and myself were in attendance: nice to verify that the people behind the nicks are, well, people and not some peculiar neural simulation at Miskatonic University.
Spook and I biked there, and we biked back, along the seafront where the air was nice and cool. Upon getting there, I discovered that (get this) my metal keychain had become fused into the nylon-derived fabric of my cycling belt-pack. ISTR making a throwaway comment about the heat of the sun. I've just examined my bike lights (which were in the bag, what with it being a relentlessly bright, sunny day and all) to discover significant meltiness about the power terminals of the headlight and a pair of mildly discoloured AA NiCads.
Who's a clever little electronic engineer then, and knows all about short-circuits? *headdesk*
New bike light for me, then. since the disassembled components thereof can no longer be mantled due to meltiness...
[Note: entry backdated to the time it was made, minor glitch on GHE]
It's kinda weird on campus at the moment, even more so when it's this hot. The temperature is actually that high that the tarmac of the paths and roads is heating up, and reflecting onto my legs. Mid-afternoon, when the air has cooled a little and the heat is rising off the tarmac, with the sharp, strong smell of rain in the air, you could almost think you were in America. The dense accents of all the International Summer School students, many of whom are American or learned English from Americans, doesn't help this illusion.
One thing the weather is good for, admittedly, is cycling. High radiated heat levels and cool, still air means that cycling at any reasonable speed is a rather pleasant experience, though you have to discount the odd suicidal pedestrian or homicidal SUV driver. I've finally gotten my bike repaired again, and it's helping me get places on time, which is nice. Funny story there: one of my cranks got fairly seriously deformed around the socket, to the point that it fell off in traffic a couple of weeks back. Halfords were willing to exchange it, but pointed out that this kind of damage commonly resulted from a damaged or worn bottom-bracket. The bottom-bracket on that bike is rather old and, when compared to current equipment, somewhat antiquated. Nevertheless, it was something of a surprise to open the casing and, expecting to extract two bearing-races and an axle, be deluged with ball-bearings and sharp bits of metal instead... More spent on the vehicle, but with luck this'll be the last thing to go wrong or missing for a while.
The intense sunlight is, of course, causing one of those yearly oddities: I am rapidly becoming the amazing two-tone man. Parts of my surface are deeply tanned (or running very hot, giving the appearance of sunburn), and other areas are as close to ghost-white as I normally come, nothing in between. Ah, summer. Enjoy it while it lasts, folks.
Well, I lost the Ebay auction (sniped with about forty seconds remaining), so I had to go and buy a new saddle instead. What with fittings and fixtures, and the new helmet I bought at the same time, that pulls the total refit cost up to £260. While I could have bought a new bike for quite a bit less, it wouldn't have the same high-end frame and worn-in components.
I also expanded my toolkit by a set of spanners. This happened this morning, when I discovered the bracket nuts on the saddle needed tightening. I discovered this by falling off the bicycle at speed when the saddle decided that horizontality was boring...
I'd rather that didn't happen again, if you don't mind *looks meaningfully at bicycling deities*
Argh
I suppose I should have known how today was going to turn out from the way it started... I got into the lab, and the boss immediately buttonholed me to ask about the demo I was going to present. Er, what demo? Turns out a client was coming in to view the lab today, but the lab admin had neglected to inform me and the rest of the researchers. So there I was, clad in t-shirt and shorts, unshaven, frantically preparing from scratch a demo I hadn't known I needed, and consequently hadn't started.
By some sheer miracle, I got the demo to hold together more or less exactly for the length of time it took to show it off. Literally as the clients turned their backs, one of the distributed nodes crashed hard. Still, it looked pretty and showed off some interesting technology, which was the main thing.
Bit of time in the pub, eating tea and discussing the hydroponic arrangements necessary to grow spider-plants, and then it was time to go fencing. On the way over, I checked on my bike in passing, and discovered that some little fuck had stolen the saddle.
*sigh* This depresses me somewhat. It's always been a core tenet of my philosophy, and that of those around me, that if you can't afford it, you can't have it. I... I don't understand.
Ultimately, it's no more than annoying, since my teaching job brings in enough cash to replace the saddle tomorrow. From now on, I will be changing my parking location. Convenient though the current racks are for my schedule, there exist others on campus that are much more visible and have CCTV cameras trained on them. And I'll probably be taking my saddle to the lab with me.
Like I said, argh.