I just got off the phone with a guy at Telus who told me that I’ve only had a phone with them for two days while I know the real time to be closer to five years.

I admit I am in a bit of an odd position because I changed the name on my account a month ago. Strangely enough, the Telus man readily admitted that I’d been a client since August 8th but refused to believe that I had a cell phone during that time. I tried to ask why I have any reason to pay my invoice for August if he thinks I haven’t been using any services, but he didn’t seem to get my point.

After spending much time trying to convince him there was a mistake on his end, my old phone record “just popped up” on his screen. Lucky for him. Maybe my threat of not paying really did work.

At about this time, my call was dropped, and when I called back I got a much friendlier woman. I explained my situation from scratch and she told me, without fuss, just exactly what the situation was. Quite simply, the fee I was calling to ask about hadn’t been invoiced yet, but my September invoice would be generated tomorrow and I could just call back then. In the meantime, she’d put a note on my account so that whoever I spoke to would know exactly what to do.

That was a much better response, but I can’t help but still be steamed over the first guy who couldn’t wrap it around his head that I had a Telus phone for a month let alone the first years prior. I was calling about the change of handset fee they charge, but he didn’t believe it had ever changed. He thought I was a completely new customer.

The conclusion I have come to is that Telus doesn’t value their existing customers any more than new ones that walk off the street. They advertise, for example, that they will give you a new phone every three years. This is completely false, or at best intentionally misleading. What actually happens is that after three years, you can go to the store and if you sign up for a new 3 year contract you can get the phone that comes free with a 3 year contract, and you still have to pay a $25 fee to switch handsets. If you want a better phone, you have to pay for that too.

This is exactly the same as if you were a brand new customer—sign a contract and get a free phone—PLUS an extra fee for doing it. How does this, in any way, sound like Telus giving you a phone as a thanks for staying with them for 3 years? What incentive at all I do have for staying with a company if I can just as easily switch to another and be treated the same?

It has been a wild two weeks for me. I’ve flown to faraway places, seen friends get married, walked for miles on unfamiliar streets, spent all my money, and had a terrible time and a wonderful time doing it.

Yes, there are pictures to prove it and stories I could tell, but as it stands my bags are all packed for yet another trip early in the morning. This one is considerably more permanent.

I’d like to say, of course, that all these adventures from the past few weeks will be immortalised in blog post form for everybody to enjoy—especially since I was recently accosted by a tipsy friend of mine for infrequent updates—but I think the internet has plenty of “I’ll write about it later” posts followed by obvious silence as it is.

So until next time, when I’ll be reporting from strange new lands in a province far away, goodnight!

I recently took the subway in an unfamiliar city. When coming up from underground, though I could identify the intersection and knew roughly where in the city I was, I couldn’t spot anything to give me a sense of direction. No recognizable buildings in the distance, no mountains, no waterways. I had to walk west about ten blocks, but without knowing the names of any streets in between I didn’t want to risk a guess.

So, I did what any lost tourist eventually has to do, which is ask a local for help. My first local turned out to be British and new only how to get to her hotel, which didn’t help me. The second person was much more help and immediately pointed out east and west for me.

So off I go, trotting westward down the boulevard. This is about 6 pm. Almost immediately I have to put my sunglasses on as I think, “Man, this is annoying, having to walk straight into the sun like this.”

Then I realised immediately what a dunce I was. Hopefully they don’t get wind of this at the Astronomy department and kick me out.

This week Canadian Idol contestant Mitch MacDonald sang a condensed version of Joel Plaskett’s “I Love This Town” on the show. I typically only catch the show in passing and promptly forget it, but this song stuck in my head. Being Joel Plaskett, I assumed it was a love song to Halifax, or some small Nova Scotia town.

Nobody cares how much money you have
If you’ve got enough to get in a cab
There’ll be drinks on the house if your house burns down
There’s a reason that I love this town

I saw your band in the early days
We all understand why you moved away
We’ll hold a grudge anyway

This is one of those frequent times, however, when the song takes on a much different meaning when listened to more carefully. A verse skipped in the Canadian Idol version was

I played a show in Kelowna last year
Said “Pick it up Joel, we’re dying in here”
Picture one hand clapping then picture half that sound
There’s a reason that I hate that town

So not only does the speaker love some still unnamed town, he loves it especially in comparison with Kelowna and their unreceptive audiences. The plot, as they say, thickens. But wait—immediately following the above passage we have the following:

If you saw my band in the early days
Then you understand why we moved away
But you’ll hold a grudge anyway

This mirrors the last three lines of the first passage quoted, but from the opposite point of view. It must be that somewhere between the two, without any change in singer, inflection, key, style, or melody, the narrator has changed. At the beginning of the song, somebody loves a town and holds a grudge against a band for moving away. (The song also suggests the grudge is good natured—as if the town is happy for the band’s success after leaving home, having known they couldn’t survive without leaving.) In the middle, the narration has switched to one of the members of the band, recalling how badly a particular show went, and implying that it was part of (or indicative of) of the reason they left. If you saw the show, you’d understand.

But then again, the bad show in Kelowna might be unrelated to the moving away—it might not even be the same town. It could certainly be argued that “last year” sounds much more recent than “the early days”. Nonetheless I can’t help but think that what happened in Kelowna must be related in some way to the band’s move.

Anyway, then the song finishes off with this:

Davey and me face down in our soup
Some French restaurant outside Riviere-du-Loup
Last night on a tour we burned the place to the ground
There’s a reason that I love this town

Now I just don’t know what to think. We have another more recent time frame, and another town. Is burning the place down metaphoric or literal? At the very least it’s a tad more dramatic than half a hand clapping. And we’re back to loving “this town”, not “that town”, not “Riviere-du-Loup”.

The town is still unnamed or ambiguous. The narrator changes without fanfare—or at least there are two different bands. The motives of anybody are unclear. What is this song about? To really like a song like this, I think you should be able to answer that question.

The Mole ends tomorrow night, and though I suspect most of the internet has already put the pieces together and figured out who the mole is, I’ve avoided the online speculation in favour of figuring it out for myself and gotten nowhere.

If Nicole is the mole, I’ll be very disappointed. She’s the obvious answer, having thrown every mission from the start just for the fun of it. There will be nothing satisfying in the mole’s sabotage if it was so blatant all along.

If Mark is the mole, he’s the best one there’s ever been. Whereas Nicole screws up everything, Mark is often the one that saves the day. He tries hard, he understands the clues, he solves the riddles. He seems to get genuinely upset when things go wrongly and gleeful when they go in his way. You’d think the mole would be more in control of their emotions, and let missions fall apart when they start to collapse more often than jumping in and saving the day. Then again, he does have a habit of refusing to do the missions at all for no good reason…

In the middle is Craig. He hasn’t been terrible, and he hasn’t been great either. Mark’s right when he says that everybody still congratulates Craig on doing missions even when he fails terribly. Nobody seemed to blame him for anything. Strangely, though, Paul said he was targeting Craig two weeks ago ended up failing the quiz. That either means Craig isn’t the mole, or that Paul just didn’t have the right eye for detail that week.

Nicole can’t be the mole because she is so obviously the mole. Mark can’t be the mole because he’s so obviously not the mole. And if Craig’s the mole, it’ll just be disappointing because he’s not a very exciting character. I hope, actually, that he wins the money. We’ll find out tomorrow.

• you become a fan of Physics on facebook;
• you read The Trouble with Physics in the lunchroom while co-workers read the latest Wal-Mart flyer;
• you spend most of the day singing the chorus from Large Hadron Rap (LHCb sees where the antimatter’s gone…);
• you spend an inordinate amount of time playing Super Mario Galaxy thinking that those are nothing like actual galaxies—they’re more like planetary systems, at best;
• and during the final, climactic scene in WALL-E, when everybody is gathered in the main room of the ship, all you can do think, “That’s not how gravity works!”

All of which I’ve done.

And I’m not talking about that pesky butterfly that keeps making hurricanes. There’s an actual Weather Modification Office in Beijing, tasked with ending droughts, firefighting, and now making sure that the weather is nice for the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games.

This came up in a special I just saw on CBC called, cleverly enough, “Beijing 2008″, about how China is preparing for the games. I love the Olympics, right down to the theme song (as has been well documented—it actual gives me goosebumps), so it was a good show for me.

Now, really all the Weather Modification Office can do is make it rain sooner rather than later, so if it looks like it’s going to rain on the opening ceremonies, they can seed the clouds and hopefully make it rain the day before instead. Something along those lines. It’s hard to say whether it actually works or not (it definitely won’t stop a big storm) but the Chinese government seems to be banking on it. They’ve guaranteed clear skies for the event.

If you’ve been reading anything about the games, you might have also heard that they’re cutting down on polluting cars. At first all I heard was that they’re just reducing numbers, but they’ve also got special cameras that, much like speed cameras can detect how fast you’re going so the police can pull you over, can detect how much pollution a car is giving out. And just like speeding, they pull you over and can even ban the car from the road. All in the hopes that marathon runners (among others) will have clear(er) air to breathe this summer.

So yes, China controls the weather.

What good is it having two showers if you can only use one at a time?

Recently somebody implied that I was being a big couch potato because I wrote a few posts about television. Well for the record, yes, a little bit, but only when I’m home.

My last two weeks have been spent mostly either at work or the local rowing club. It’s interesting going to different clubs (this is my third) and comparing them. The one in Vancouver was a well established affair, a social club with a relatively big and fancy club house with employees and everything to boot. Then of course at McGill it was a university club where the focus was on training, coaches putting you through your paces at every turn and not giving any slack.

It’s hard to tell what exactly exists at my current club. The program I’m in is pretty much dominated by kids from the local high school teams. Though I’m told there are senior rowers around, there is certainly nothing regular or organized. I certainly miss the intensity of the university crew. We have had a couple days where we did erging or running and I was thoroughly worn out by the end, but the days we can get on the water—the area is notorious for thick endless fog—are decidedly less intense.

The thing I miss most is having a set crew. You knew as your alarm went off at 5 am that there would be seven other guys down at the water counting on you to be there, not to mention the cox and coach. If one guy didn’t show up, everybody suffered. Train together, win together.

From my favourite radio show, CBC Radio One’s Go: If Teenage Jesus had a Vlog.

Also check out episodes two and three. “Is that Jesus? He’s off the hook!”

Mythbusters is an awesome show, as we’re already well aware. The problem though, is that it airs later than I should be staying up to watch it but it still manages to suck me in every time.

Of course I want to know if cockroaches will really survive a nuclear holocaust. Of course I need to stay up an extra hour to see two fully loaded transport trucks collide head-on. I really do need to know if vodka makes a decent mouthwash.

The problem is made that much worse by the fact that the show is very repetitive. After every commercial break we’re told what the myth is, how they’re going to bust it, what they’ve done so far, and what they’re going to do next. On top of that, they tell us again before every break. That’s great if I’m just flipping through channels and I’ve missed the first forty minutes, but when I’m there from the start and all I want to see is the answer, it gets kind of annoying.

They could probably do the show quite well in half an hour, without cutting out anything but the redundant narrations and the “coming up next” bits. Sure, I know these myths might be expensive and time consuming, but I need to work in the morning. I think lots of scientists are familiar with that mild disappointment when months of work are distilled into a single number or sentence in the conclusion of a short paper, with all those dead ends and hours of refining technique swept under the rug. You’ll get used to it.

I still love the Discovery Channel, though. Boom de ah da, boom de yada.