I spent this past weekend in Victoria with a number of skeptics from Vancouver’s Skeptics in the Pub community. About 12 people came in total and we visited the museum, Junior Skeptic editor Daniel Loxton’s studio and met up with a couple more Victoria skeptics.

Sonia and I also met up with the Victoria Secular Humanists at their weekly breakfast, which starts at the horrifyingly early time of 8:00 am on Sundays at a local golf course. They were quite impressed with our recent Pride Parade celebrations in Vancouver, and seem to be the only group of atheist/skeptics in the city that can hold together enough to have regular meetings.

Things that make me angry: Virgin mobile

I set up automatic payments via my Visa on Virgin’s website a few months ago, and the first payment went swimmingly, and last months seemed to be fine. Then I started getting Virgin’s tacky past due text messages telling me I better pay up. I called about a week ago to clear this up and the useless collections agent told me that everything was fine and that I didn’t need to worry about it.

Then in the middle of my trip this past weekend, Virgin’s systems cut Sonia and my outgoing service (we have 2 lines on the same plan). When I called this morning to fix everything, I had to pay since they apparently never charged my Visa (or cancelled the charge they’d previously put on), and didn’t offer any reasoning why things got screwed up.

Then, I got transferred to customer service to negotiate some peace deal so I don’t walk to those offering sweet enticements. After the first connection failed, I called again and got transferred to another nameless collection agent at a foreign call centre. They didn’t know why I ended up talking to them after everything was cleared up financially, but told me to take the battery out of my phone to reinitialize the services (when the first agent only told me to turn it off and on). He then failed to get me connected to a CSR and after calling in a third time on my landline and getting transferred from another useless collection agent, I got put on hold for another 20 minutes before finally getting through to a service rep.

After explaining the cause of my frustration that has probably cost me several years of life expectancy, the agent offered me a credit for the 2 days of no service for both lines. This credit is probably worth about $5.

Way to go Virgin Mobile. Your service has been horrendously shitty since you got bought out completely by Bell and I’m still thinking of switching since you can’t do the simplest of tasks without causing me great frustration and several hours of my life.

Things that make me happy: Canadian Atheist blog

I’m a part of a new group blog that just launched called Canadian Atheist. This blog has a lot of great writers from all across Canada and will adding more as we find the write people (see what I did there). Check it out.

Hopefully I can put up at least 2-3 posts per week, if not more.

Things that make me angry: Laidley management and the Scona Gardens condo board

So I own a condo in Edmonton and my management company recently relayed to me that the board (of whom I have no contact information) has approved a retroactive (to June 1st) fee increase of 15% to cover the additional funds that they think they need for our reserve fund (which covers emergency or replacement expenses). The study that recommends these increases hasn’t been provided to owners (as is required by law) and we haven’t received notice of our next AGM which must occur in the next 3-4 months (as also required by law).

They let us know that the difference would be automatically charged to us on September 1st, but if that’s too soon, they decided to be nice and give us a grace period to October 1st to make up the difference.

Letters will be written.

From my balcony I was able to listen to the accompanying music over Shore FM (104.3 MHz) and could see all the big fireworks over neighbouring condo buildings. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see the smaller ones, but at least there were plenty of big ones to entertain me.

The show lasted about half an hour and was hosted by Team USA. Their music selection was mostly jive and swing music. Overall the show was okay, but I have seen better fireworks shows. Perhaps I’ve just been spoiled by Calgary’s GlobalFest and the 2009 Edmonton Canada Day fireworks show that featured two 16-inch shells.

There’s 3 more shows coming up on the upcoming Saturday, Wednesday and the following Saturday, and I should have a good view for Saturday’s show from a friends BBQ at Jericho Beach.

The Darwin Fish and FSM are from EvolveFish.

We ended up getting the car for just under $20,000 with taxes, undercoating and a dealer VIP program (free oil changes as long as we own the car) after shopping around to almost all of the Nissan and Honda (we were also considering the Fit DX-A) dealers in the lower mainland. Morrey Nissan in Burnaby provided us the lowest price, so we went with them.

We’re quite happy with this car. It’s got power windows, locks, and mirrors, a nice interior, lots of leg room in the front and back, and a surprising amount of cargo space (one of our key reasons for considering the Fit and Versa). It also has electronic stability control (which will be mandatory on all new cars in Canada in another year or two), a block heater and a spare tire (none of which were offered on the Fit).

We’ve taken it out on a few drives already, once to see a drive-in triple feature in Langley and then last weekend to Yoho National Park for a camping trip. The car has enough pep in its 1.8 L engine to keep up with most other vehicles on the Coquiholla highway, and after tracking the fuel economy we got as good as 6.6 L / 100 km on the highway (or 43 mpg). In the city we’re getting between 7 and 9 L / 100 km. The specs from Nissan of course say that we could ideally achieve 5.8 L/100km on the highway and 7.3 in the city.

We’re hoping to get out for a few more hikes and camping trips this summer and also to maybe take a week long trip down the Oregon coast to California at the end of August. At the very least, it’s been very helpful with errands here and there, and perhaps saved the day at the Lawrence Krauss debate by bringing him the donuts that he was craving.

Our one complaint is that rather than be equipped with a real horn that allows one to express true highway rage-frustration, we are given a horn that is reminiscent of a 6-year old girl’s bicycle horn with a very sad and pathetic “meep.”

In that vein, we may end up calling this little car Meeper or maybe Beaker. Of course my original idea was Defiant, but I’m not sure if this car is quite the little battleship as the one of the DS9 namesake.

I can’t even really account with what I did through May and June.

I worked on setting up a terahertz spectroscopy system (which is still jittery and noisy) and trying to get half-decent data about this one sample (with another sample already in line). I filled out an NSERC Industrial Postgraduate Scholarship application, which ended up taking about 2 months to satisfy all the criteria (and it may have been accepted within a mere 48 hours of submission).

Outside of work/school I got the BC Humanists a spot in the 2010 Pride Parade. The membership of the BCHA is rather old, but hopefully members of the campus groups and CFI can fill the group.

I’ve been running around to Skeptics in the Pubs, weekend events and a Lawrence Krauss lecture. Soon PZ Myers will be here and Christopher DiCarlo in August. I’m also trying to organize Armageddon Factor author Marci McDonald to speak here in late October.

With the Freethought Association of Canada we’re working out final details with out soon-to-be-launched national freethinkers website that will (hopefully) serve as a community for all of Canada.

I’ve been meaning to get a freethinkers book-club going since April with Sonia, and it looks like it will actually be starting in August. We’ll be reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s debut book Infidel (which will hopefully prep us for reading Nomad in a later event).

Sonia also got some money for her graduation so together we bought a new 2010 Nissan Versa SL (with an xtronic CVT automatic transmission). I meant to post pictures here, but maybe I’ll get to it once my shiny new Darwin fish and FSM are pasted on the back.

The car’s working out great and we’ve already seen a drive-in triple feature in Langley – Toy Story 3, Prince of Persia and Alice in Wonderland. We also went camping last weekend to Yoho National Park where we met up with some friends from Edmonton. Again, pictures to come (including a beautiful panoramic stitch of the glacier above Lake Opabin).

Also, I finally got around to renting and watching the movie Creation, about Charles Darwin’s fight (with illness, his wife and memory of his dead daughter) to get On the Origin of Species published. It was a fantastic movie, and I highly recommend it. The only slightly disappointing part was how Thomas Huxley was made into a raging anti-theist (quote: “Mr. Darwin, don’t you understand what you have done, you have finally killed God.”)

Other than that, at least the weather’s getting nice, although it seems like I rarely have time to write or just sit on the beach anymore. Hopefully I can find a way to work around that.

At the very least, I have an article half-done about buying our car (we saved over $3000 off sticker price), so hopefully I can crank that out soon and submit it somewhere a bit more prestigious than a campus newspaper.

I think that’s about all for now at least. As any procrastinating blogger will say before another several month hiatus, I promise to post more soon.

I also had my first four-hour lab TAing the Physics 130 life sciences lab. We (meaning the students) explored the simple pendulum. I am not really looking forward to marking 24 unique full lab reports on this topic, but it shouldn’t be so bad.

Today I have a meeting to discuss my NSERC IPS scholarship application and in the afternoon I’m helping/watching the slow process of aligning and improving the low-temperature terahertz experiment in the lab.

Finally, I have a book review of The Armageddon Factor almost ready to submit to the Peak for next week’s edition (my piece this week didn’t make the cut – which is fine since it wasn’t my best work).

All-in-all it should be a good summer.

The BCHA is a registered charity that has existed for over 25 years, but like many humanist associations has seen its membership drop in recent years and its median age has steadily risen. Hopefully, I can reverse these trends and keep the organization alive and healthy.

The BCHA has carved a nice niche out for itself in providing a very community-oriented model with weekly breakfast gatherings and monthly lectures. Unfortunately, room costs are rising and there may be a need to find a new venue in the coming year (which may have the added benefit of dropping the unfortunate “Seniors Centre” name from the current location). While there might be some desire in the BCHA to let itself amalgamate into CFI Vancouver, I think there is a place for this group, its history, and its democratic structure.

So hopefully this next year or so will see the BCHA reverse the declining membership, sponsor a few new event ideas, and increase fundraising levels.

Hell, if it’s really successful, it may be able to launch Cafe Humanism in a few years.

So here’s what’s on the table:

• HP iPaq rx3115 Mobile Media Companion – has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, SD memory card expansion, Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition, verified to work with Windows 7 using Mobile Device Center
• Stylus, power and usb cable for iPaq
• Leather iPaq belt case
• Belkin Wireless PDA keyboard – including installation CD

The only issue I have with the PDA is that it either isn’t holding a charge or I’m not using it frequently enough to keep the battery full. However, if you need a new battery, they’re available on eBay for as low as $10.

I’m open to offers for this package and willing to ship (provided you pay the costs – roughly $15 for in Canada standard delivery) but I’m aiming to sell it around $100 (comparable to eBay sellers).

Email me if you have an offer or want more information.

See pictures:

iPaq rx3115 and accessories

◄ Back

Next ►

Picture 1 of 13

Includes: iPaq, wireless keyboard, power and USB cables and leather belt case.

Note, this page will be updated when I sell this item or put it on eBay.

While I wanted to keep it simple and clean, I realized that I needed to put a sidebar in on the right otherwise text would go on and on and on across the screen, making for a really unreadable chunk of text. So here’s a sidebar with minimal use beyond breaking up the length of text that spans your screen. I also gave up on RSSInclude for the home page and just found a simple customizable RSS widget that let me format the feeds for this blog and Terahertz simply.

Anyway, let me know if you have any feedback for my design or ways to improve this site.

After a few months of uninspiring work in atomic physics, I’ve finally been offered a position in Dr. Steve Dodge’s group working with Honeywell’s paper-processing division to develop a terahertz-based scanner for quality control. Specifically I will somehow find a way (or try to show it’s impossible) to weigh paper with terahertz radiation.

In case you don’t know terahertz radiation is the portion of the spectrum between radio waves (produced by conventional electronics) and infrared light (produced by photonics). It’s very close to the millimetre waves being used for the new full body scanners in airports.

This project will (hopefully) be funded by the NSERC Industrial Postgraduate Scholarship which pairs grad students and industry for mutual success.

In addition to this, I will also be TAing Physics 130, the introductory lab for life science students, at SFU Burnaby this summer.

So perhaps there is hope for my Masters after all.

The first is Writing for the Web by Crawford Kilian. I’ve started reading it, and after only a few chapters it already gives some pretty simple advice for online writing. These include basic things, like understanding that your audience is impatient, so write short, readable sentences.

The other book I got was the The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009.

My goal between these two books is to continually improve my writing skills (please note that I tend to write my blog posts in a single draft, stream-of-consciousness format, see my articles for writing that I’m more proud of) and by the end of this summer I’d like to have my first writings actually published for profit (as opposed to in student newspapers or otherwise).