I’ve joined the two-wheel commuter society, in the form of a Tomos Moped. It’s a 49cc motorbike with pedals, and falls into a dusty corner of the Highway Traffic Act (regulations for Ontario roads). It has pedals, requires a license plate, but doesn’t require a motorbike license. I get somewhere close to 100 miles per gallon, or 2.5 litres per 100km. It costs all of $4.50 to fill up, and that’s using premium. I’m riding it to work; it doesn’t take much longer than by car. Most of the time I can’t get up to the full speed of 65km/h because of traffic. The one downside is that driving in the rain is really, really miserable.

The moped had it’s first accident yesterday. Thankfully I wasn’t on it 🙂 It’s so light that it blew over while parked at work. The security guard took pity on me, and now rather than parking accross the road in no-man’s land, I get to park it by the bike racks, right beside the front door.

This article talks about “snarges”, the result of a bird/airplane collision. The Smithsonian lab checks the resulting DNA to figure out what exactly hit the airplane. My favourite part is the last paragraph: the lab result came back as “rabbit”. Quote “How do you explain to the FAA that we had a rabbit strike at 1,800 feet?” Seems that hawks drop their quarry when they get scared.

Next week I’m taking a badly needed week of vacation, one that I had to cancel in August because of the work schedule. We’re not doing much of anything, except relax at home. I may take Noah and his cousing Mitchell camping, depending on the weather and fallout of Hurricane Rita.

I’m working on setting up a Linux cluster using HP’s MC/ServiceGuard, and there’s very scare documentation out there. I’ll be posting some hints and tips in the next few weeks, hopefully to save someone else the aggravation of going through what we are.

And that’s it for today’s update.