Ever since yesterday evening (night, actually), I can’t get the song “everything burns” (Ben Moody with Anastacia) out of my head. The reason? Because everything breaks. E-ve-ry-thing. It’s unbelievable.
Where did this streak of breakage commence, you enquire? Well, it all started on a dark and starry night, a fortnight ago. Upon awakening in the morning, I discovered my bike had been assaulted. Not just mine, but all bikes that were parked outside (in the designated place) had been in a knife fight and had come out on the losing side. Major bummer, as I had just let a bike mechanic install anti-leak-tires on my bike a month earlier. The assailant(s) had deftly avoided the tire’s armour and made an incission on the side. Furthermore, they had seen fit to slash the saddle.
A couple of days later, I still had not found the time to have the bike repaired. So I was using my spare bike, when the propulsion mechanisms of that failed utterly. While riding it. This actually agitised me so much, I went up going home on a new bike that day (note: this is rather decadent, but at our local supermarket there are quite cheap bikes available). It was only 4 days later, when a careless bikester did not heed her turn very well, and managed to crash into me on this new bike (despite me leaving the entire sidewalk to her… some people should learn to look where they are going…). All seemed fine, no injuries were suffered, but about 15 metres from the accident, my brake handle falls from my brand new bike. Turns out that this is a rather flimsy piece to begin with, and the impact it had just born the brunt of was quite a bit more than it could handle. Nevertheless, again a breakage.
A little later, or perhaps earlier (in a parallel process, so to say), I taught a class on voting for our Introduction to Security course. As normal, I planned an Attack of the Week – this time on DRM things, which nicely offset the voting attacks I showed after the DRM class. I found a nice movie, and brought my laptop to show it. Turns out that WinXP did not recognise the file format, so I decided to reboot into Ubuntu and use the ever-powerful mplayer. Well, shutting down worked. Starting up again didn’t. The boot loader just wouldn’t show. Haven’t gotten round to examining that, but supposedly there is a hard disk problem too close the the MBR. So: insert live-cd, reinstall bootloader. Hopefully this will help. Nevertheless, breakage.
Then somewhere along the line, my mp3 player decided to stop playing mp3-files. It could read the file structure, but it could not play any song. “No songs found” was the message, but in browsing many songs were there. That caused one music-free train ride, where I would not have minded some distraction. Problem has been resolved (or, perhaps, circumvented — only time will tell), but this is another breakage.
Now we arrive in the Netherlands, going to meet with Johan over dinner. While just on my way, on my bike (the one in the Netherlands), which was just repaired because the chain had broken, the crank breaks. The crank is the piece of metal that connects the pedal to the bike. There is a “good” one to break and a “bad” one. The good one is the left one, which connects the pedal to the axis. The bad one is the right one, which has the gear attached to it. If that one breaks, you cannot just use any other crank from a random, busted bike. You need a crank with the right gear to replace it. Now you guess which one broke yesterday night.
At least I had some fun kick-scootering home.