10:30 am, Kitchener. A poofy-haired lime-green-Doof-shirted university student staggers through the door into Recycle Cycles, a volunteer-run bike-repair shop on the second floor of the Working Centre off Queen Street. The following exchange ensues:

Me: I'm going on a very long bike trip this summer, so I'd like to learn something about bike repair.
Staff: Okay - what do you want to learn, exactly?
Me: Well...I was thinking I would just take a bike apart and put it back together again.

One brief and lighthearted public shaming later (that only takes about 15 minutes, right?) I was kneeling beside an old run-down road bike with a handful of wrenches as Dave (who, it turns out, used to be a PhD candidate in CS (with research interests in AI and pattern recognition) before he quit to try his hand at the whole startup game) patiently explained the basics. In the course of four hours I removed the pedal arms, detached the pedals, dismantled the pedal axle assembly (ball bearings and all), replaced the cones, slotted the whole mess back together again, took apart the rear axle, replaced the back gears, reassembled the back tire into place again, tested and tuned the derailleur for proper shifting, and crimped end caps onto the gear cables. Things I still need to go over:

• Cable replacement. While these do loosen over time, fraying is the main concern here.
• Inner tube replacement. This is not technically difficult, but it still helps to have a few dry runs - improperly installed tubes can pinch and explode, thus ensuring hilarity for everyone except you.
• Front fork repairs. A friend was biking along the sidewalk in Bronte when his front tire lodged in a crack, causing the entire bike to pitch forward into the ground with such force that the front fork shattered. (Side note: the impact cleft his helmet in twain.)

My bike repair goal for the term is simple: build a bike from scratch.

In short: this was an amazing experience. I've ranted many times before about the need for a more direct, social, and experiential model of education. Memorization is obsolete; we must transition to comprehension, application, synthesis. By itself, bike repair makes a passable exercise in spatial and mechanical reasoning. As part of a larger module, it could elicit any number of questions. Why are the parts designed this way? How could we make them more efficient? What advantages does cycling have over driving? What disadvantages? Why is cycling more prevalent in certain cities or countries? How do you make a bike-share program economically feasible and robust against petty theft? These in turn spark discussions on everything from industrial design to physics to politics to ecology to economics - all from a simple yet practical exercise.

Unfortunately, these sorts of practical exercises are usually confined to trade schools or mechanical engineering workshops, where they are delivered in a primarily utilitarian fashion. I think there is significant room for informal apprenticeship in modern education; it certainly plays well with the emergence of communities based around interest rather than geography. Any thoughts?

Even more poetry - I'm hoping to put together something worthy of final submission within the next couple of weeks, so comments are appreciated. (Also, this will give me third-party confirmation that my hacked-together reCAPTCHA comment form WordPress theme magic actually works!)

Winter

Snow and sleet sweep silent streets sucked dry
whose sole crime is crossing space and time to appear - here,
in frozen climes,
at this slumbering somber time of year
when frost strikes fear into hearts that yearn
for summer sun, a sun scarce found amidst the hail and mist
that still song and dance this time of year,
this slumbering somber time of year.

A thousand faces peer through ice-glazed glass:
eyes gloomy, full shivers dispelled
in huddles by heaters that glean heat from wire or gas
and lend it to frigid floors;
what need for the warmth of friends drawn near?
Chimes of clocks tick seconds away in the empty space
of solitary wait, each second another step away
from water's weighty solid form
that presses on eaves that creak and sway
this slumbering somber time of year.

Cold wind clenches its wintry hold,
clasping shut spirits with closed fist,
its howl a clamorous dirge both ancient and bold
that clings, its clarion call crisp
as crunch of crystal under frost-numb feet
in boots that clamber through thick of white.
Treacherous, this trudging over bank and pile;
each face filled with fright at the absence of birds' trill.
Rare the smile that pierces long whiles spent in
company of fire, a last defense against the months
that separate more favoured climes from this time of year:
this slumbering somber time of year.

Student returns to campus, only to be rudely reminded that he hasn't covered his elective requirements yet. Student flails frantically through course calendar, trudging through the execrable QUEST interface in an effort to unearth courses which are both interesting and available. Student settles on two more electives: Creative Writing and General Relativity.

The first assignment for Creative Writing is simple - write a poem of at least 140 words over at least 14 lines. This poses a unique problem: poetry is something I wrote off at multiple points throughout secondary school as boring, pretentious, or some convex combination thereof. In an effort to dust off whatever minuscule poetic skill I might have developed from the English education foisted upon me by our curriculum-setting overlords, I've decided to put my faith in the value of practice:

The Lineup

Man, arrayed in wintry garb,
Heavyset, prominent jaw;
Pores pensively over news-sheet.

Scarf-shrouded matron,
Age-worn mask of propriety;
Shares pleasantries and tea.

Lonely bespectacled soul,
Clutches cherished BlackBerry;
Awaits interaction.

For this moment alone
Their journeys converge

(I'm rather fond of arrayed. Your guess why.)

To further pad what will hopefully be my last term here at Waterloo with awesomeness, I've taken up a role in the annual theatrical production known as FASS. The theme of this year's production is video games; hilarity is promised!

Last words: I know you're wondering about the post title. This image explains all.

So this is it - the final make-or-break stretch of my most demanding term at the University of Waterloo. Over the next 28 days, I will either successfully complete Real-Time and Graphics concurrently or consign myself to a pseudorandom location within the Bermuda Triangle of exhaustion, insanity, and despair trying. In typical fashion, I've done some preliminary number crunching: assuming roughly 8 hours of productive time per day - including weekends! - I have 224 hours in which to complete four Theory of Computation assignments, an essay about Church's approach to the Entscheidungsproblem, a raytracer, two more Real-Time train control milestones, one last midterm...and both my Real-Time and Graphics projects. I believe that this feat is tractable, albeit barely so - but time will be the judge of how well my wetware handles NP-complete scheduling problems!

The clock is ticking.

Work Term Reports - why?
The utter pointlessness is
Rather annoying.

(Decided I'd, er, borrow a motif from vasavage.) Spring is here in Waterloo - the sound of construction in the air, the cranes in full bloom! At least the ensuing fracas has contributed the above sign, redolent of the kind of neon-coloured cartoon-character Engrish prevalent in Japan, to our collective student consciousness. I've snapped a couple of pics of my room, as well as a few around campus; they're up in my nascent Waterloo album. As for me, I'm scrambling to get this work term report done so I can get on with life - for high-course-workload values of life, that is.

After an epic journey down the 401 involving 5-6 coffee cups worth of caffeine, 2 hospitals, 12 hours (7 or so of which were spent either in said hospitals or in an ambulance headed thereto), and 3 carpopedal spasms (these resulting from panic attacks, which in turn were most likely induced by the aforementioned dose of caffeine), I finally made it back up to Waterloo in one piece. I'm most definitely avoiding caffeinated beverages from now on...

On a more positive note, I'll be living here for the next four months. (That said, my decision to take the infamous Real-Time and Graphics project courses concurrently may very well minimize the time I get to spend in my new digs!) I've got a decent room setup which will only get better with a few key investments in hardware - pics to follow.

I'll post some kind of winter term retrospective in the near future; for now, however, I'm off to tackle some nagging errands.

The birds are singing, the sun is bright, the days are getting ever-longer - and I have to write another work term report. Ugh. Fortunately, a quick Google search brought up this. It's not the cleanest bit of LaTeX code, but it gets the job done! (Yes, I know I could use Word. I'll consider it next time I want to spend 90% of my time format-tweaking to obtain a layout that I can't easily reuse and share.)\

Also: the same search unearthed this (unfortunately nascent) effort to create a public repository of work report templates! Hooray for open source.

The Waterloo Regional Police Service has recently joined the ranks in using Twitter to broadcast updates, incident reports, and other information - 37 followers and counting. Now if only the rest of our public services could follow suit...

I'm at home for the weekend, basking in the almost imperceptibly warmer Oakville-Toronto weather before booking it up to Waterloo. Pleasant drive down here, if uneventful - absolutely magnificent sunset, French-edition CBC Radio discussions on the caisse populaire and our troubled economic times, slices of Bowie, and some much-needed mid-term reflections.

Also: it's Pi Day! Unfortunately, the Math Department decided to give the requisite pie out yesterday, so it looks like I'll miss out on that.

Okay, so I haven't posted in a week - five days of parkour/conditioning/rock-climbing does that to you. So sue me. (Then watch as I nimbly elude your litigious minions.)

It's mid-March. There's nothing special about mid-March per se; it's just close enough to the Spring 2009 term to finally kick off the housing search. If anyone cares, I'm looking for something: close to Uptown Waterloo, at most $350/month, non-smoking, decent kitchen, with broadband and at least passably sociable roommates. I'd prefer laundry and relatively secure bike storage, but I'll take what I can get. Now to set up a properly-weighted LP and crunch the available housing data...

I've tried a number of approaches in the student housing market. Cluster-bombing Craigslist, Kijiji, and Facebook Marketplace allowed me to sublet out my previous digs with relative ease. On the other side, I've always had decent success sifting through Off-Campus Housing. I tried finditoffcampus; the interface is zippy, the idea is good, but there's still a couple of missing pieces. The selection is somewhat limited (only 220 listings!) You can search for housing near the universities/colleges, but you can't search by proximity to, say, Uptown or Waterloo Park. The Advanced Search form fails to fill in sensible defaults - try filling in just the upper limit for rent, and you get this. These are mostly minor annoyances, though, and it could easily cure me of my board-sifting ways with just a touch more work.