me no savi [travel madness]

Today, I left home in the wee hours, after watering my tomatoes!, quite excited to join the Safe, Anytime-Valid Inference (SAVI) workshop in Eindhoven, which was taking place after two years of postponement. I alas did not check the state of the train traffic beforehand and when I reached the train station I found that part of the line to De Gaulle airport was closed, due to some control cables being stolen last night. Things quickly deteriorated as the train management in Gare du Nord was pretty inefficient, meaning that the trains would stop for five minutes at each station, and that there was no rail alternative to reach Roissy. The taxi stand was a complete mess, with no queue whatsoever, and the Parisian taxis kept true to their reputation, by refusing to take people to the airport, asking for outrageous prices (60 euros per passenger), and stopping anywhere. I almost managed to get one but he refused to take me on top of the Swede family I had directed to this stand from the RER train, and this was simply my last opportunity. Über taxis were invisible and I soon realised I could not catch my flight. Later flights were outrageously expensive and there was not train seat whatsoever till the day after, so I gave up and returned home from this trip to nowhere…

en gare de Tours [jatp]

clothespin and bike woes

The past week at Warwick was a pleasant (pre)start of semester (with hardly any student around), pleasant except from a biking perspective, as I was essentially three days without a bike, from having to recover it at a friend’s at the end of my first morning run, where it had been kindly stored over the summer break, to facing once again a flat tyre, to running after a safe and dry storage location as my Department is about to move to a new and smaller building. Where bikes are not allowed indoor, apparently. (Sometimes, it feels like the University of Carwick!) And the new bike hub at Coventry train station had no free fob. Nothing major as I am living once again in the maths houses, quite a quick walk to the Department, but mildly annoying and disrupting my routine. As it happened, the flat tyre was the result of my riding over the spring of a clothes peg (or clothespin, as in the above sculpture in Phillie), lying the wrong way on the ground, which acted as a perfect caltrop! (My friend and bike wizzard Nick fixed the tyre and changed the tube as soon as I reached the  Department with the wheel, but annoying it was.)