(Via everyone and their dog, it seems. I think I saw it first on BoingBoing Gadgets.)

The Cougar Ace suffered a ballast tank pump failure when she was dumping her origin ballast water and filling — or, I suppose, trying to fill — her ballast tanks with local water, as required before entering American waters to prevent the accidental importation of invasive marine species. When the tank emptied but didn’t fill, over she went.

With the propellor out of the water she was adrift and taking on water, and despite being filled with brand-new Mazdas, was about to be written off by her owners until they and the US Coast Guard realized she’d break up on the Alaskan coast.

So 55,000 tons of flooded floating steel had to be righted, and Wired carries the story of the men who saved the Cougar Ace.

[via Metafilter]

Just testing flickr’s blog posting. please excuse.

As I and a crowd exited the bus I gave her the devil’s horns. She laughed and returned same.

I think I’m going to gather up my stuff Thursday and take it home that night, so all I have to do Friday is bring in my laptop and badge and so on and leave empty-handed. I have surprisingly little stuff here.

I rode my bike to work yesterday! I’d been meaning to do so for a while but had always figured it a bit too far, but then I spent four hours riding on a Sunday a while ago and realized it was nothing. Here’s the route I took there and back. In the morning it was only about 18 Celsius out, so once I hit Carling I just followed it the rest of the way, and got to work with half an hour to spare. On the way home the humidex was 32, so I took it a bit slower and followed a bike path through the Greenbelt instead of taking Carling direct.

The ride in was easy, but the air was so thick on the ride home that I felt pretty tired out. I’d really wanted to do it at least once, though, so I’m glad I fit it in before I was done.

Odd thing: I must have encountered at least half a dozen cyclists wearing helmets that hadn’t been produced for ten or fifteen years. Folks, those aren’t even useful for keeping your beer cold now.

I don’t know how often I’ll ride my bike to school next year though. Yesterday I threw jeans and a polo shirt in my bag and showered when I got to work, but it’s less practical when I have to do the same with business casual clothes, with no office, and only for a 2-3h class instead of an 8h day. And with a bus that goes from my door straight to school, I’d rather arrive dry and cool.

Mouseycat might be sick. She had a very loose canine tooth removed the other day and we found she’d lost nearly a kilogram (nearly 2.2 lbs) since the last time she was weighed. There’s a chance that she just lost the weight because it hurt to eat, but it could be something more serious; blood tests ruled out diabetes but there’s still elevated white blood cell and liver enzyme counts so the current hypothesis is cholangiohepatitis. She’s on twice-daily antibiotic pills right now (which she just loves, let me tell you) and we’re back at the vet next Wednesday to find out what’s next.

Candice and I were in Belleville for Father’s Day weekend, and we spent Saturday with Dad at a weekend-long Beatles festival, with Beatles cover bands playing one after another on a single stage. It was surreal and straight out of the Simpsons, with the site map pointing out the “All You Need Is Food” food concession, the “Hello Goodbye” entrance/exits, the “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window” outhouse row, and a Paul McCartney lookalike wandering the crowds progressively drunker all night.

I took my bike in to get the bottom bracket overhauled and bought a helmet and now I’m ready to start riding everywhere. This is what I should’ve been doing instead of the motorcycle, I think. Silly me. I found that the commute to work along bike trails is about 10 miles on mostly level terrain, so I want to try bike commuting at least a couple times this summer. I took a test ride (to U of O and back, which I figured would be a handy benchmark for this fall) which was around 10 miles and found it easy, so I think it’ll be fine.

Related to that, I’ve been hitting the gym 2-3 days a week for the last month or so. I don’t like the workout I’ve been doing much but I just ordered New Rules of Lifting to give something else a try, but I’ve still been making it there regularly, at least. I need to learn to squat and deadlift.

In work-related news, this is not so good, apparently.

New laptop is awesome and so, so light. It also lets me leave my work laptop at work, which means I don’t have to carry a laptop as well as gym clothes and lunch when I go to work, which was getting particularly annoying on the bus, which I have been trying to take as often as possible instead of driving the car an extra 25 km/day.

Speaking of the car, I replaced the water pump recently because it was very noisy and obviously unbalanced (like me!), and pretty much every other noise the car was making went away too! It’s so quiet now. I guess I could have replaced the water pump a while ago.

Last Monday, Candice and I had been together for four years! In a couple of weeks it’ll be our first anniversary. Yay!

That’s about it for now. I’ll try to post more often, especially since I’ve got so many new things going on all at once. For some reason I try to avoid “Here’s what happened today” posts even when it’s sort of interesting. I shouldn’t do that.

(I found that while looking for general traffic-calming stuff after reading about this living room in the road in England.)

Waaaaaaaaaay back in May I told you that the bike I bought came with a horn that looked like a Happy Tree Friends character, and then I never took a picture of the damn horn. Wait no longer!

You can also hear the call of the hippobike.

My favorite part about that horn, other than it being a cute cartoon hippo that squeaks, is that it was included from the factory with a matte-black “urban mountain bike”, and in the bike’s specs it’s listed as a “mystery horn”. I wonder what other horns got distributed with those bikes. The bike shop told me that most of the people who buy that bike decline the horn offer. Obviously those people don’t get it.

☞ The pedestrian menace must be stopped!
☞ MY NAME IS MIRIAM SESE-SEKO AND I AM THE WIFE OF THE LATE CHANCELLOR OF THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA.
☞ This article discusses (sort of) the naval forces of the Byzantine Empire. You know, that other kind of ship. The little one.
☞ Also from Wikipedia: I think someone maybe does not like Danish Blue cheese.

Any local Ottawa people want to recommend places to get local and Canadian news via RSS? The CBC feeds were never that great and they’ve stopped during the labour dispute. CFRA has good headlines and a third-party RSS feed but they don’t provide much detail in their articles. The Citizen is dumb and backwards and only provides their content to paid subscribers. The Sun isn’t really my kind of paper, and offers their headlines in flash so they’re not even scrapable. The Globe and Mail is decent for national news, and has decent RSS feeds for news articles, but they don’t do local news. Dose is spotty and isn’t a News Organization and is drowning in hipness and has no RSS feeds I can see.

Ontario country roads

Quebec country roads