Flat Tire

Last week while riding to a meeting I must have ran over a screw and it deflated my rear tire (which is barely a couple months old) fairly quickly.
I knew something was up when my back end was sliding/rolling side to side when I hit any bump and when I put my feet down the bike was definitely several inches lower.
After fenangling a ride home so I could use the car to get to my meeting late Irene and I used a friend's trailer to bring it to the shop. (Thanks MW!)
Luckily, the shop was able to get it's hands on a tire which is really quite hard these days because scooters are gaining in popularity so fast the tire manufacturers can't keep up. And so 150 bucks later I am back on the road.


As a not-so-funny aside, I thought for a bit that the screw was one of my own drywall screws but it is definitely a flooring screw - phew.

Best.Pool.Ever

I am typically not a big fan of pools in Canada. They take insane amounts of energy and chemicals to run properly and then you empty all that water at the end of 5 months of maintenance. The rest of the year your yard is full of a big cesspool of rotting leaves and mosquito larvae. Good Times.

But if you live in a place where you can have a pool open the whole year round it makes more sense. Either way, this pool at the Joule hotel in Dallas, Texas pretty much sets the standard for cool pools. It projects over the main street and allows for a great view of downtown. I can only imagine the structural requirements for something like that.....

Pretty Awesome.

Bluesfest 2009!

So we have to make up our minds on which days to hit up Bluesfest.

Here are the days and artists I really want to check out:

Thurs July 9th: Brothers Chaffey, The Stills, Iron & Wine
Friday July 10th: Okkervil River, DeVotchKa
Saturday July 11th: United Steel Workers, Hey Rosetta!, Jill Barber, Loreena McKennit

Wed. July 15th: Arkells, The National, Skydiggers
Thurs July 16th: Politique, M83, Coeur de pirate
Friday July 17th: Library Voices, Cake, Clem Snide

Right now the 9th, the 15th and the 16th are at the top of my list. The 15th is also when KISS plays which is apparently driving up the price of that day to 55$. That seems a bit steep to me. I really wish I could have volunteered and got the free full 11 day pass. Oh well, you can't do everything and I probably would have burned out.

Heart of a Pirate

So the back story to this video is some guy wanted to do a time lapse video of his 9-month old child playing in the dining room for 4 hours. He does it and adds a song by the independent Montreal artist Béatrice Martin who goes by the moniker 'Coeur de Pirate'. He doesn't expect anything really but the video ended up going viral with almost a million views and ended up being featured on american national TV on CNN.
Anyway, here is the super cute video with the perfect musical background:

And thanks to this unexpected bit Coeur de Pirate is doing quite well these days. She is all over the place now and even made her own music video.

And I really hope I can see her perform at Bluesfest along with Politique and M83!

Chrome to be 30% Faster

Google is claiming that it's updated web browser will be 30% faster. I was a slow convert but after my Firefox started to get too bogged down with so many awesome applications I slowly started to use Chrome for any quick thing. Now I use Chrome far more than Firefox just because of the sheer speed. And now with this latest update coming it could be more of a tipping point for me.
C'mon Firefox you can match this......