I just got back from looking for housing in Ottawa after accepting a job with Ottawa Public Health. I'll be covering a maternity leave for between 9 and 12 months. A good chance to get some experience with a good team.

As freaked out as I am about global warming, today's +17C weather was a nice change from the cold/rainy weather we've been having. And it was a lovely day on the disc golf course. I birdied a few holes and came close to a hole in one on #3, which would have been very choice.

And it sounds like I'm getting a job offer from Ottawa Public Health to cover a maternity leave position as an infectious disease epidemiologist. It's been a long seven months looking for working and straining not to do something soul-sucking, but it's paid off. I'm really looking forward to this job, learning more stuff, and getting paid!

In other news a cyclist was caught in Toronto with a gun.

Well, I have a few interviews lined up for the next two weeks and I've been hitting the books to review a few things pertinent to infectious disease epidemiology.

But all work and no play isn't good! So I've interspersed the work with some hacking of images put by pals in the Toronto Fixed thread of the bikeforums http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?p=7784738

The first was one of my pals Keith and Wes (that's Wes running up the hill).

With the most recent a pic put up by Matt Rennick Living for the City.

Both done with Gimp and Imagemagick with some optimization online at gif image resizer.

It's fun to break up the day with this stuff, even though I pretty much suck at it. But in any case, how long can you really look over CUSUMs and epi curves without going cross-eyed?

Recycling things isn't just fun, it's a moral imperative. I just finished fixing a sewing machine someone had tossed. Admittedly it was placed so people could snag it, but it's not the kind of thing you generally pick up off the street.

Looking it over, the zig-zag lock was seized (and I promptly broke it trying to loosen it off). A few minutes with a drill to drill out the mounting bolt and a dive into the parts bin for a machine bolt and an old quick release skewer cap from the bike parts bin and it's working fine. It's up for adoption or donation to Goodwill.

Now back on getting the recumbent ready for sale. Really long cable paths are a bugger to adjust properly.

For some bizarre reason I've had a few folks try to inject text into the trackbacks. While the scripts defuse the content, I'm left with gobbledygook in the trackback fields, so I'm removing trackbacks for now.

The corporate jackals whooped it up to the tune of $440,000 in celebration of the financial bail out of AIG by the US government

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/1007083aig1.html

I'd say heads should roll, but that would just means whopping lawyer fees and no result. Unfortunately, it's unlikely this pillaging of the American people will end any time soon unless there is a significant about face on corporate transparency and regulation in the US.

Mutt is completely behaving itself and I'm very happy with that. An additional tweak I've made is to pipe Mailtos to a fine script by Martin Krafft http://svn.madduck.net/pub/bin/mail/mailto-mutt. There's a few scripts out there to handle mailtos but Martins' works splendidly with the browser I'm using, Iceweasel. The only things I modified in his script were to route the /path/to/handler to the mailto-mutt script and to respecify the xterminal to aterm, the terminal emulator I use. And don't forget to make the script executable.

I've given some thought to using a text browser to replace Iceweasel, but generally my websurfing is pretty image dependant. I also think that, as a visual media, that's not a bad thing.

About jarheads in their crappy lowrider cars who think it's funny to head fake at you in traffic? Seriously. Where's the humour. I know they're sexually inadequate pea brains, and I pity them. Its just surreal.

This chimp thought I was turning to have words as I pulled into my apartment. Unfortunately, it didn't occur to me to take his picture with my cell camera. Given I think I know this car from the neighbourhood, it would have been good to get his plates and see how he like's tuna juice on the engine block.

Rage fantasy, really. This turnip isn't worth my time or effort.