Canadian Heat Wave [ep. 2]

Scene 1

"Not much happens when you have a baby," Nick said. "Everything takes so long and then nothing happens."
"But what are the 'things' in everything that takes so long so that nothing can happen?" Pemulis asked. "It sort of sounds contradictory."
"Oh, you know, nothing really".

Scene 2 [nothing happens]

Pemulis has been dreaming about a relaxing lakeside getaway for some time now. With Baby Helga's arrival, stress relief has been hard to come by. But he has foresight and he knew, thanks to the Canadian Farmer's Almanac, that 2016 would bring the Great May Canadian Heat Wave [TM]. And so he reads up on the Italian* parental leave laws and regulations and fills out all the paper work and gets himself one month of unpaid but somewhat state-subsidized leave from work for the month of May. Pemulis, Joelle, and Baby Helga arrive to little fanfare in the Great White North and soon afterwards are cottage-bound. Following three hundred and seventeen stops on the way up, they arrive at the quiet lakefront vacation home only to discover the cries of another baby. The next day's entirety is filled up by driving approx. 10,000 km to pick up Baby Helga's Aunt who I don't think has had a special name Christened to her on this blog. We'll call her Mrs. Ed.

Finally, with Mrs. Ed loaded up in the car, groceries purchased, and the Tesla Model 3 (not really) fueled up, they head back to the cottage for the relaxing to finally begin. Baby Helga wakes the cottage dwellers up at 4:15 AM. Pemulis is so exhausted from driving the equivalent distance of a round-trip on the Orient Express and getting back so late the night before and being awoken from his peaceful slumber some 3-4 hours later that little relaxing can be had on this day. He makes a plan to go to sleep earlier tonight and has confidence that Baby Helga will wake up at a more sensible hour the following day.

Obviously neither of those things happen. Additional guests arrive at the cottage even later than their previous night's arrival and the next morning Helga welcomes the world of the conscious at approximately 3:45 AM. Now that may seem so early that you might say "well it's the middle of the night so why don't you just go back to sleep?" to which Pemulis would reply [maniacally] "ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha" (x14).

Fast-forward to a week later and Pemulis is in the Air Canada Platinum Members Departure Lounge sipping a Vodka Martini while Joelle gets a pedicure in imported Maldives saltwater done by aesthitician-to-the-stars Marcy Runkle. Meanwhile Baby Helga is being attended to by professional Swedish infant-care specialists trained by King Carl XVI Gustaf's longtime care staff who have passed on ancient and mysterious child-rearing techniques for nineteen generations and who have been at the wheel for raising such successful former babies as Albert Einstein, Guenter Grass, and (obviously) King Carl himself. When boarding time comes the family is escorted on to the plane's first class upper-deck area through the VIP entrance and the flight staff personally put together a live performance of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew (at the insistence of King Carl's staff who suggest that the parents could also use a little care themselves) with a special guest appearance by Blue Jays 3B man Josh Donaldson as Petruchio. The Pemulis Family arrives in Foggia (see footnote, supra) and win the 100 Million Dollar lottery. Pemulis finally relaxes.

* if you're up on your GWMD/Pemulis Kremlinology (aka Pemulology and Grenoblogology) then you'll remember that despite the blog's name being Grenoble -- which is in France btw -- and despite the principal locale of said blog for the last nearly three years being Munich -- which is in Germany btw -- then you'll remember from "Eastward the Course of Empire Makes Its Way (Eventually)" that Pemulis actually lives in the town of Foggia -- which is in Italy.

Scene 3 [something happens]

Baby Helga sleeps in until 6:45 AM on the final day of the Canadian Heat Wave which happens to mysteriously coincide with the final day of the Canadian Summer Vacation part 2 (last summer counted as part 1) and all rejoice appropriately.

Canadian Heat Wave [episode 1]

Time: 6 pm. Date: May 29th, 2016. Place: SW ON. Temperature? 55 degrees Celsius (estimate). Feeling: warm. State of mind: restless. Sleep status: negative. Black flies? ++. Live tweeting Memorial Cup Final for a few minutes:

It's a Husky two-hander! #memorialcup #goknights

Draws the penalty on Graves and we get a first look at this Huskies powerplay #Meyers #hockey #memorialcup

Oh wow! What an absolute barrage! #powerplay #anothercircus

He tried to shoot. The buzzer goes. And the Huskies take it to the Knights in that 2nd period #buzzer #triedtoshoot #twitterisstupid

What a championship game it is. And this game is tied with a period to go, Jeff. #jeff #hockey #howdyoulikethat #highlevelplay #qualityofplayinthistournamentisalwaysgood #wordsegmentationtask #notlettinglondongetouttothatquickleadthattheyliketo #mydraftyearandimaprettygoodgoaltender

[end of live tweet session]

And Helga is back after being misted. Dave was not lying. "That splash-pad is fantastic!" raved Linda. "<mumble mumble mumble>" exclaimed Helga. Dad sees a commercial for a really stupid looking movie and rolls his eyes.

The Canadian Heat Wave continues...

Naming issues, conflicting interests, and their connections to constitutional law

Hope springs eternal in the human breast. Every year will somehow offer more time to do things. One of the main reasons people who will never benefit from policies that benefit only the rich vote for said policies and vote against policies that would benefit those exactly matching their income class / social situation / [etc] is that they believe they will eventually be those rich people and once they get there they don't want to be paying taxes that benefit people like themselves, currently. [Or, similarly, everyone is convinced that at least their children will be doing better than them when in fact lately in general your kids will end up doing worse than you.] I just finish a blog post and think "that was easy; I'll definitely write 5 more next month and be right back on track!". Of course the purpose isn't simply to fill the blogger.com data centres with random words, but content is king, as they say (I think). Hannah will stop crying for no reason all day long any day now; it won't rain every weekend; I'll have way more time to go cycling next week; etc.

At work we are solving the world's problems. Every day the decisions we make are touching fundamental problems/solutions and the paths that we take will have long-term ramifications far beyond anything that we can currently envision or plan for. That's why, this past week, I spent most of my time arguing for the following parameter order for our implementation of the clip function:

clip(x, min_value, max_value)

where x is some tensor (collection of elements with some shape -- like a vector or a matrix, for example), and min_value and max_value are minimum and maximum numbers that the elements in x can have. The output of the function will be the same tensor x, but all of the values will be "clipped" to fall within those min and max values, if need be. Just in case you didn't get it (and because it's so important for the story at hand), here is an example... Let's say x is a vector with x = [1, 2, 3, 4] with min_value = 2 and max_value = 3.5. Then clip(x, 2, 3.5) would result in [2, 2, 3, 3.5].

Anyways, so that's the obvious parameter order. Everyone else does it that way. If you change it you're not doing anything other than confusing people. But, some believe that the data should always be last. So, instead, the signature of the function would be:

clip(min_value, max_value, x)

The argument for the above is that having the data last allows you to do some interesting function chaining where you're setting up a network of functions, etc. So there's this competing question of which is more important? Allowing this (and being consistent about it across our implementation where we would always put the data last), or being consistent with everybody else so if they come over to our tools then they won't be confused. So obviously this is just the same as determining the choice to make when we have conflicting constitutional rights! Like there is a right to free speech but there is also a right to not be subjected to hate speech and you need to balance those interests, etc. And when I wrote the title of this particular blog post I guess I thought I would spend more time on the constitutional law and conflict of rights issue and all that but now I don't feel up for it. Sorry. But these are the important issues that kept me busy at work all week (inter alia, of course).

And here are some completely different random observations that will surely enrich your life:

1. I was sitting back with a (home-brewed) Segafredo¹ espresso² watching La Doyenne ("The Old Lady"), aka Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the last of the Spring classics, and during the break an ad for the shampoo "Alpecin" came on. This in itself is not at all out of the ordinary as Team Giant-Alpecin is a major German UCI cycling team and so during cycling events such as the Tour de France and La Doyenne you will often see ads put on by sponsors of the major teams. Anyways, as far as I can tell they are (or at least should be) known for really dumb ads. But this one took the cake (/"the biscuit" if you're British). The ad starts with a new (I presume -- the 'new' part I mean) slogan that fills the entire screen and has the announcer read out the words:

"Doping für die Haare"

And you don't need to be Jonathan Franzen or Goethe or have a 500+ day streak on German duolingo to quickly figure out that the above reads "Doping for the hair". Even though I don't need to buy shampoo because I didn't do enough doping for my hair (or something), because of this inept / tone-deaf commercial aired during La Doyenne, even if some miracle happens or I make some kind of Faustian deal (weird how we're sort of back to Goethe again, right?) that will give me my hair back in return for my soul then I will never buy this shampoo even if it's the only shampoo in the store because come on.. I guess it's meant to be a joke but even by German standards it's pretty weak. And we're meant to be joking about / glorifying cloaked in humour doping during a cycling event in 2016? Puh-lease.

[FN1] Two of Sandi's cycling heroes³ are the Canadian Ryder Hesjedal and the Swiss Fabian Cancellara. As fate would have it, this year they are both riding on the same team: Trek Segafredo. It is sort of a new team (the teams are always changing around a bit and changing names as sponsors come and go, etc.) because last year they were just called "Trek Factory Racing". But now Segafredo has joined as a major sponsor and so they're, as mentioned, "Trek Segafredo". Since both those guys are on the team, and Sandi didn't have a really cool really professional cycling jersey before, and we both like coffee [see FN2 reference supra, and definition, infra], she got a brand new Trek Segafredo jersey for her birthday and so today she can wear it to cheer on the Trek guys in La Doyenne.

[FN2] Why is there this crazy connection between cycling and espresso? I think both of those things are pretty cool so it works out well for me, but where does it come from? Perhaps a topic for an essay for students to be assigned for some kind of English course? In the meantime I did a very quick Bing search and the Grimpeur Bros. have some common sense suggestions (https://www.grimpeurbros.com/pages/coffee-cycling-the-inextricable-link) on the "inextricable link between cycling and coffee" (but nothing too concrete). These include obvious things like "cycling‘s strong ties to Italy, France, Belgium, and Spain probably have something to do with it" and "on weekends, a post-race coffee or mid-ride espresso break, gives us the opportunity to take a break, share some gossip, nosh on some baked goods, and most importantly, share a laugh and enjoy our friendships — all over coffee." Fair enough. Wait, do any of you care about this at all? I think it's pretty interesting, anyways...

[FN3] Yes, in Europe people have cycling heroes. Kind of like in North America people have hockey and baseball heroes.

2. Ben Harper has a new record and it's really good. Sandi is a pretty lucky girl. In addition to being blessed (in the atheistic equivalent anyways) with a healthy (so far) baby girl, and receiving the aforementioned Trek Segafredo professional cycling jersey, she also received a copy of the new Ben Harper record "Call it what it is" for her birthday and we have been listening to it, like, 40 times a day. It's important to learn all the songs because we want to be able to sing along when we see him in Munich on October 1st.⁴

[FN4] Sandi and I might have a somewhat deservedly-obtained reputation of not exactly being the best at planning ahead or being prepared for things, etc. Fine. But, in this situation, despite the fact that October 1st is currently more than five months away, we already have experienced babysitters lined up for the night! K&J will be arriving in Munich several days prior and by then will have more than a year of baby girl taking care of experience. Not bad, right?

3. I think I gave Belgium a bad rap. Brussels is not a fun place to visit. And so I kind of hated it. But watching Liège-Bastogne-Liège, it looks like it's not necessarily such a bad place. And they got by for a couple of years without even having a government. So that's not so bad either...

Until next time...

Addendum:
Remember the Krailinger Duathlon race report from last year? Well the 2016 version is coming up next weekend and if it's raining like last year we won't do it.. But if it's nice, we will! If it's nice then, look forward to another upcoming fun-filled race report where Sandi and I might do a relay and hand-off Hannah in the transition zone. Stay tuned...

Pemulis and Hans

He's been literally counting the minutes tick by for the entire six days that have passed since she told him. Almost every single one of them. Around 8,640 minutes minus a handful where he was able to sleep for the briefest of moments. In fact, most of the time he's even been counting the seconds. He had created a whole swath of games in his head with the numbers. Sometimes he would count up, and other times he would be counting down. Something like "it's been 945 seconds since <some time> and 4 + 5 = 9 and 5 + 4 = 9 and 9 - 4 = 5 and 9 - 5 = 4 and 945 seconds is exactly 15 minutes and 45 seconds which is crazy because the 45 seconds do the same thing as before but now we have the 15 minutes and with 15 you can get 5 - 1 = 4 and then you have a 4 which goes to 4 + 5 = 9, and cetera...". This had actually been happening off and on in his head for as long as he could remember but it had really ramped up and came more to the surface, let's say, over these previous six days. During the wait, he had gone through an entire week of work. She told him on a Sunday, now it was Saturday afternoon, and between those two moments he had somehow attended meetings, written e-mails, conversed with colleagues, and all manner of work stuff had gone down so to say, but all of it was, well, I guess, repressed? It happened completely and utterly capital F-R Freud subconsciously like a dream or even further back than a dream. He knows it happened but he basically just floated through all that stuff that seems to have somehow happened. Each day after work he headed straight home and straight to the couch where he immediately turned on the TV. News, weather, weather, watching the clock, counting seconds, counting minutes, weather, moving pictures that didn't actually help to speed up the clock (or at least the feeling of the clock speeding up) but he felt that if he didn't go straight to the TV that things would feel even slower somehow (even though he didn't try it [not going to the TV, that is]). He took dinner in front of the TV, leaned forward over a short white cheap coffee table. Drank six beers. Seriously. Six every night, and on two of the nights whiskey for dessert. It still couldn't bring him towards sleep, though. Things simply got real hazy and even slower, if you could believe it, and he knew that the beer and the whiskey weren't going to get him to sleep and he even knew that it would make things worse because not only would he not be able to sleep, but he would be drowsy enough that he wouldn't be able to do anything else like read or even watch TV because his eyes would burn so much, but just like with the TV (earlier in the evening) he couldn't NOT do these things because the fear that not doing them would make things even worse was stronger than the rational realization that doing them was making things worse.

Friday night should have been a milestone both because he had somehow made it through the entire work week and he was now only 24 hours away from it. But things felt worse than ever. Since time had somehow exponentially been slowing down, psychologically he was at the furthest point from Saturday night that he'd been since the previous Sunday! That's some wonky space-time physics-voodoo. But still he soldiers on and watches the news and the weather and drinks his six beers and tries to keep watching more TV but his eyes are burning and so, just like every other night in the last week, he turns off the TV and he goes back to counting the seconds and the minutes and after what is truly an infinitely long period each time -- and he knows that a lot of this "literally this" and "literally that" and "infinite this" and "infinite that" is sensationalistic and trust-bleeding in the sense that clearly it wasn't literally every second that he counted and an infinite amount of time by definition will never be reached and all that and so he's sorry that it has to be portrayed this way but THERE'S LITERALLY NO OTHER WAY it was just so so long and the time was going by so so slowly -- he counts the hours too. Finally Saturday morning arrives and the dog wakes him up (yes he actually managed a few minutes sleep somehow) by licking him on the face -- oh what a good boy, he would never do this to me -- and he pats the dog on the head and sits up from his lying position on the couch and turns on the TV and starts watching the news and the weather. It takes just forever, of course, but finally after eons of watching TV and pacing the house and watching more TV, evening arrives. Pemulis feels, in precisely equal amounts, both dread and relief.

His daughter Helga arrives home after being out all afternoon and announces that her new boyfriend Hans is no longer coming over for dinner because she broke up with him and she decides she's never going to have another boyfriend ever again. So Pemulis takes her out for a fancy dinner and buys her a beautiful gold Rolex and a sports car and they play scrabble and he goes to bed and has the most luxuriant sleep of his life and doesn't wake up for 15 hours.

Frühling in Europa

It's springtime here in southern Germany (and technically all across the northern hemisphere but we're talking more feel here rather than hard dates) and the sun is shining again. More specifically than just springtime, it's also Easter-time -- meaning that holiday season is in full force. I asked Hannah if she wanted to go to Majorca, Tenerife, Lanzarote, or somewhere else for a trip and she vomited on my new jeans and then cried for an hour. I tried running that scenario through the Dunstan Baby Language but Priscilla's findings couldn't seem to translate that particular attempt at communication and so in the end we probably won't go anywhere.

It's funny how perspectives change over time. Like when you're a student and you think you don't have any time, but then you start working and you realize that you had a ton of time before and only now you *really* don't have any time. But then you have a kid and you realized that before you had all the time in the world. Or you drink a Molson Canadian and you think 'wow beer is good!' and then later on you try a Steamwhistle and you think 'hey this beer is really good!' and then finally one day you drink a real Munich beer and you realize 'wow all that other beer wasn't all that good'. Or how about you're happy that your running has come a long way and you think that it's great that you finished 10k in under 50 minutes but then a year or two later you're disappointed if you don't go under 45 minutes and then finally now if you haven't broken 40 yet then something is seriously wrong. I think you get the picture so now we can move on to the observation at hand which was that I really thought last year that I'd dropped the ball on blog post frequency but now here we are in 2016 and things are more dismal than ever. But you didn't give up, did you? Here we are now and you're reading a brand new blog post as we speak! These are exciting times. And to make things even more exciting -- especially for the demographic of GWMD readers who are into beautiful visualizations and graphs of all kinds -- please enjoy a graphical representation of GWMD post frequency over the last four years.

So the black curve shows absolute number of posts per year which -- despite an outlier in 2013 -- has been dropping every year since GWMD's inception. The blue line shows the regression line of the data which confirms the obvious drop, and the grey shaded area shows the confidence interval in the linear regression (basically if you were to predict the number of posts in 2017 it would probably lie somewhere between -5 and 30.. haha -5). Of course this isn't really a fair comparison since 2016 has only had 3 months happen so far so take all this with a grain of you-know-what.

Perhaps more interesting, then, and more fair, is a visualization of posts per month! Woo-hoo!

You'll notice some missing months recently -- noticeably zero posts in September and zero posts in November. I wonder why that might be!

Here are some things that have happened recently:

1. Due to springtime weather (see supra), Hannah visited her first [?] beer garden:

2. We ate a giant steak: 

3. My new bike arrived:

4. Hannah learned how to turn her toys into a pillow:

So does all this mean that we might be seeing a higher post frequency in the near future? Some kind of drive from the upper management at GWMD to set a commitment for a solid measurable statistically significant increase in number of posts per month and/or year that will in turn keep our customers happy and returning for more? Could this be the start of something new? Stay tuned to find out!*

* the answer is probably not. Sorry..

中国：从图片前四天 (China: pictures from the first four days)

Hello readers of GWMD
It's me
I've been wondering after all these days if you would like to see
Some pictures
Of Suzhou
They say that Suzhou is beautiful
But I ain't seen much beauty

Hello
Can you hear me?
I am far away in China dreaming of what this blog used to be
When I was younger and kind of free
I've forgotten how it felt before I had no time to write
There's such a difference between the quality
Of the posts from way back when...

Hello from the other side (of the world)
My body still think it's Munich time
It tells me "I'm sorry"
Despite everything that you've done
But when you try to sleep you'll have to
Wait till the morning

Hello it's your wake up call!
At least I can say that I've tried
To get used to being
In the China Time Zone
But it don't matter, it clearly
Will work out the day that I leave...

My office for the week

My home for the week

Giant buildings across the lake

Retired (?) boat at the sailing club

Suzhou waking up across the lake

Suzhou sunrise

Contrasts

Further contrasts: old and modern China

Morning lakeside jog

More buildings

Terrible attempt at selfie

"Suzhou Dushu Lake Higher Education Town" (苏州独墅湖高等教育区)

Swans... I think

Coming up with captions is getting a little tiring...

Something something lake buildings

We all need a little green and a little love

Jesus in China

Something we can all believe in

I did indeed see many other runners around the Suzhou Road Running Base!

Good! Because I could use some computer radiation reduction in my life

Crossing underneath the street at Suzhou Times Square

This particular Chinese food was actually delicious

And here I am eating it!

My own picture (see full moon!) of Suzhou Times Square area

And the ever-important Toronto Buffet Restaurant (did not attend due to sketchiness factor)

NOTE: this post represents an important milestone -- it is GWMD's 150th! We hope you enjoyed it.

中国: Day One

Twelve hours on an air-plane in the window seat imprisoned there by a sleeping old man in the aisle seat who wouldn't wake up resulted in a few things. I couldn't go to the restroom for a very, very long time and thus irreparable internal damage has likely occurred. I read one Harlen Coben novel front-to-back and the better part of a John Grisham and have to admit that the bladder thing definitely will have a stronger long-lasting impact on me. And I ended up Suzhou, China.

Suzhou is a great microcosm of modern China. It's a 'small' city of 11 million people situated about one hour from Shanghai. But it's being built for about 30 million who it seems are scheduled to arrive any day now. There are literally hundreds of very, very tall skyscrapers built and in the process of being built: office buildings and condominiums, stretching all the way into the clouds, with no residents. We arrived into Suzhou at night and nearly all of these apartment buildings were pitch dark. The city has multi-lane highways designed for the influx of eventual Suzhouians getting to work, but for now they are as empty as the 407. The MS building where I'm working is only eight stories tall and we're sitting on the eighth. But don't worry, because the government is building three (3) new 20-story MS buildings next door for expansion.

On the way from the airport we passed many Audis, Mercedes, BMWs, and other expensive cars. There were gleaming glass (empty for the most part) skyscrapers on either side of the newly-paved highway. And then all of a sudden for a short stretch we passed through the old China. The road turned to dirt and there were tiny wooden carts and huts selling food. People were bicycling in the rain and others were on antiquated scooters with all of their possessions tied to the back. There were people everywhere in the road going about their business (in the pouring rain) and after our driver nearly killed some (well, most) of them through his extremely aggressive and frightening driving, we got through that yet-to-be-upgraded part of the road and were back to modern China.

Alert: China is no longer cheap. Our ride from the airport to the hotel with the angel of death cost 350 CNY. That's about 50 EUR, and apparently 25 more EUR than it was exactly one year ago. Our dinner last night was about what you'd pay for a similar thing in Munich (but of a much more frightening character [the food here, I mean]). I've seen Maseratis (yes, plural) and Porsches.

And things are Westerner than ever. The next massive building over from the Four Points Sheraton (which, according to the poster in the elevator, has locations all over the world including London Ontario, Cambridge, and Kitchener-Waterloo!) is a Starbucks. The buffet breakfast this morning had an omelette station, and I filled up on pancakes. At the shopping area in the 'downtown' ("Times Square") where we had lunch there was H&M, Gap, Hugo Boss, Adidas, etc etc etc. Apparently this is how Times Square would look if it hadn't been pouring rain and rendering visibility more than 50 m ahead of you impossible:

Notice the three under-construction buildings. They don't built something and wait for it to fill up and then build something else. They build 30 buildings, then they build another 50, and then a further 100. And then, eventually, I guess people will show up.

If it stops raining tomorrow then perhaps I can put up some of my own pictures!