Day 17 - In Winnipeg until the Solstice

The solstice is Aboriginal Day. The day with the most sunshine of them all. After that the days will get shorter. I think I'll definitely notice. I know I'm late writing this entry, but I've been keeping most of the information about my trip on a Google Map. You can see it here
there isn't much pictures, but at least you can see where I've been. A bike trip across Canada isn't as far as you might think. No wonder Dugald Christie chose it as his preferred mode of continental travel. I'll have to stop and pay my respects when I get close to Sault Ste. Marie.

Day 5 - Calgary

Well I made it into Calgary last night and stayed the night at my cousin's house. I rode 208km last night. Going at this pace I just might make it to the Moses Mayes concert on the 12th. :-)

The ride through the rockies was great and Kicking Horse Pass wasn't too bad. The weird thing that I noticed was that there's this lake west of Calgary and its higher than Rogers Pass.

Tannis is coming down from Grand Prairie today and today I'm going to do laundry and head over to MEC to get a new headlight, since I'm planning to do some night riding. It's cooler and I don't get that funky cyclists tan.

Day 2 - Sicamous to Rogers Pass

The ride from Sicamous was great. I didn't really know what to expect from Rogers Pass the last time I've been this way is about 5 years ago.

It wasn't so bad. Now that I've checked out a the Kicking Horse Pass elevation profile. I'm going to try and push on to Banff by tomorrow. I'll have to do some night riding, but If I make it all the better.

Tonight I'll get a good night sleep and be off.

Bioregional ideas and Secwepemc Values

For the past 150 years in Secwepemc Territory an invasive group of people have tried to undermine and convert our economy into one of exploitation and deprive us as a people from our land. The Candian and Provioncal government have made concerted attempts to undermine our traditional economy and way of life. This would be known as tribal and some would say it was backwards and not civilised.

Not only is this myth incorrect it's actually harmful to overall society. One only has to look at the state of the world's ecosystems and note they are all in decline. The most promising solution is what's being touted as the bioreginal solutions. This solution puts emphasis on local communities that depend on the local environment for food and other resources. This is exactly what the Native Nations all over Turtle Island. So this solution isn't something new, this is something that the Secwepemc have been practicing for their whole existence on this planet.

That people are starting to go back to this model that has been under external pressures to abandon the very lifestyle that will prove to be much more robust and civilised. That our traditional economy has survived this brutal onslaught is testament to us as a people and the power of our communities. Our communities and economy is far from what it used to be, but with determination and focus we can regain our once proud place amongst the nations and people of this Earth and show people how to live.

Note: Here's a map of the Secwepemc "bioregion"

Flashlight no longer a heater

I fixed my landlords two lights the other day. The lights were a gift for her sons some Christmas long ago. What her sons soon found out was that the batteries lasted all of an hour even with four batteries.

The reason it was drained so fast was that it was a Halogen light, which was pumping out more energy in heat than light. So I had this idea, I couldn't see why and LED wouldn't work instead. I had some left over from the SpokePOV kit that I put together last year.

I one into the lights and voila! We have a more efficient light source. Granted the light is blue.

Tragic Deaths

I've noticed that the Physicists and Mathematicians that I'm most interested left this earth in an untimely manner. They all committed suicide or what amounted to suicide.

Paul Ehrenfest shot himself and his son on Sept 25, 1933. He was known as a wonderful teacher the best in his field according to Albert Einstein. He encouraged international physics community by encouraging people to come to Leiden, and encouraging his students to study abroad.

Yutaka Taniyama was a Mathematician he killed himself at the age of 31. His suicide note says a lot about his mind. He was also depressed at the time of his death. He was criticized for his revolutionary idea about automorphic properties of L-functions of elliptic curves over any number field. A refined version was later used to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. The conjecture is now called the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture.

Évariste Galois was a budding Mathematician and contributed greatly to group theory. His idea of the permutation group was used to illuminate the relation between roots of polynomials of degree 4 and less. It also proved why there are no general solutions greater than 4. He died in a dual during the turbulent times that was France in the 1800s.

Later.

PIMS and Cycling to Victoria

I didn't write about this when it hapend, but I thought I should write about it now. Back in February I cycled to Victoria from Vancouver. Well not the whole way, since you can't cycle across the George Straight and you're not legally allowed to cycle the George Massey Tunnel.

The ride was fun. It takes very little time to get from Downtown to the Airport. I missed the bus to catch the 7:30 ferry sailing, so I had to wait for the 9:30 ferry. Little do I know but this was a blessing in disguise.

On my way to the ferry there was another cyclist who hoped on board to the ferry. When I cycled over to the ferry to board there were three cyclists getting on board, and one of them was a mathematician going to the Eighth Coast Combinatorics Conference. What a coincidence. Even though the company made the ride that much more enjoyable, it didn't make it any more drier. I guess I'm spoiled living in Kamloops.

Last week of School

Even though I'm not remotly Christian. I'm digging this four day weekend we're having. I'm able to catch up on homework. I'd like to finish everything before Wednesday. That way I can start and finish my final lab report before the weekend.

I've been riding my fixed bike that I built up more and more. A couple times I lost control of the pedals, which must have looked silly. I just enjoy having that much more control of the bike, also it makes it a lot easier to clean. On Tuesday I'm going down to the Bicycle Cafe to get a 16t or maybe 18t single cog for the freewheel side.

Cycling East

At the end of the school semester I'm taking off on my bike on a 6500 km Journey. Were your intrepid explorer will scale mountains ride across prairie fields, and hopefully have fun doing it... and not die. There was a lawyer died last year in Ontario.

I almost got hit crossing the street the other day. I saw this car come and he was pretty far from the intersection, and i started to cross, since the walking guy came on. By the time I got to the middle of the road he was still bombing around the corner.

I ordered a rear wheel with a flip flop hub on it and a crank set. I got it from IRO Cycle since I've heard good things from them on the internet. I can't wait till it comes in, next week maybe.

Vim Blogger Plugin

I found this great plug-in for Vim to post to Pleasant Cemetery. I found it at Vim Plugin It's quite useful. I haven't installed a plug-in for Vim before, but it was pretty easy. I had to make the ~/.vim directory as it suggested in the post. Untar it and create file-type.vim file with a .blogger file-type.

A Secwepemc Course -- Part II

I spent the last few days at home working on A Secwepemc Course. It's about half transcribed. I only ended up sending it out to a couple people. I'll probably just end up doing it all myself. I think I can easily do one lesson a day.


I've been learning a few things every day. Secwepemctsin is a rich and wondeful language, that I wish was promoted more in and around Kamloops, by schools, the government, and every other thing in the world.


I've been using vim to edit the LaTeX file and it's proving to be quite useful. If I was using any other program it would take forever I really like the VISUAL BLOCK environment so useful.

A good Day

I rode my bike to school today. I left at 9:00 and got there at 9:25. The bike ride was beautiful, it's nice going up West St. Paul in the morning. If it weren't for all the cars I see below on the Bridge, it would be a beautiful view. Who am I kidding it's still beautiful.



I'm going to have to start leaving earlier to school so I can start swimming. They still haven't posted the information for the 2007 Kids-To-Camp Mini-Triatholon, but I'm sure it's at the end of April. That gives me plenty of time to work on my stroke.

A Secwepemc Course -- Part I

I've been transcribing "A Shuswap Course" into the computer so that I'll have a PDF of it. I'll then be sending it out to all those who wants some. If you want a copy... for free.



If you know me you may know that I'm use Open Source software. The development model that sprung up can be used in preserving languages. The way people work in the open source is by breaking up a large task and distributing it. So that's what I want to do with this project if you want a copy. you can e-mail me.



I also wanted to mention about the name of this blog here. I always found Pleasant Cemetery to be an interesting title. It's the name of the cemetery by my house. The more I thought about it the more I liked it. It follows my philosophy of enjoying death. Death is a natural thing. People see birth as natural, but somehow deaht is usually seen as not. I've always liked the saying. Today is a good day to die. I'm trying to live that more and more. The more I think that way the happier I feel.



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|tsukw|

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LaTeX Presentation

I gave a presentation on the typesetting system LaTeX to my class. I went way over time. I went right to the 1024 and class is supposed to end at 1020. I went over some special characters, some commands and some environements that people might use.

The biggest questions came from how commands were implemented. How to format. One thing I didn't get across was the concept of the packages. I think, everyone will be alright. They got the basic idea of using commands and the idea of the \section and creating equations.

I could have cut it down a bit more so now I know for later. Well it's one of the few presentations that I've given. Especially one that is meant to be interactive. I guess, you could say that it was the first time that I taught a lecture. It was fun and I think I could do it again.