Plans are coming together…

8 02 2010

Spending a week riding in the mountains this past fall was probably the most fun I’ve had while fully clothed. Since the moment I arrived home I have been waiting for Spring to come so that I could do it again, and for the past month I’ve been scouring the Internets for a gathering to attend…

Last week I finally decided on a late-April meet-up in northern Georgia. Richard (Tom’s dad) will join me for the scheduled weekend activities and I’m going to take the following week off to roam on my own. On the last trip I barely got to experience what northern GA has to offer so I am hugely looking forward to that, and being at the southern end of the Appalachian Mountains puts most of the great motorcycle roads of the East Coast within a few hours ride.

Most likely I will ride out of GA to the Tail of the Dragon, then return to eastern Tennessee to repeat the EOM-5 route — my favorite ride of the previous trip — in the vicinity of Big Stone Gap in the Jefferson National Forest, do at least one run through Shady Valley, and then turn south to hit as many fun roads as I can find on the way back home.

Of course, now begins the expensive process of getting my motorcycle ready for another long trip. For the most part the mechanicals and my electronic gizmos pretty well sorted at this point so I just need to make my wiring permanent and tweak some mounting bits. The lock on my cheap top case broke so I’ve ordered something more on the premium side to replace it, with brake light flashers and an alarm built-in. I’ve also got a much nicer jacket on the way that should be better suited to varied weather conditions. The jackets I have now are ok in the wet but are lousy when it is cold. I’ll probably replace the tires again before this trip — by late April the rear will be approaching the miles I put on the last one and I do not want to repeat the last trip’s experience of driving like a mad man on a corded tire to get to the only dealership within 100 miles open on a Saturday before they close.

There went a thousand bucks…

Also need to pick up a Verizon pre-paid as AT&T’s coverage in the mountains sucks. And I still need a new netbook. And I’m giving serious thought to getting a SPOT Satellite GPS tracker, tho I’m not entirely convinced of its usefulness in a solo emergency — if I’ve gone down and am seriously hurt, how will I activate the “Send Help” button?


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Discharged

1 02 2010

I finally got to visit my buddy in the hospital on Sunday, just in time for him to be discharged. His mom loved that I showed up in his room with my riding gear on. And by “loved” I mean that I’m probably off of her Christmas card list.

His injuries turned out to be more extensive than the doctors believed earlier in the week. He broke a thumb, some ribs, and a Thoracic vertebra. The spinal injury is potentially very serious, if it does not heal properly on its own any corrective surgery will have to go through his chest. On the plus side, his spleen and liver are still inside his body and seem to be doing just fine.


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Don’t resize me, bro!

1 02 2010

Lately I’ve been noticing a bunch of web sites that have defeated the text-resizing capabilities of Chrome and Safari. Usually these are the sites of design-obsessed douchebags whose opinions I would have considered to be crap anyways, but the latest site I’ve encountered to do this is the frickin’ Apple Store.

The online store for Apple products have broken a basic feature of their own damned web browser.

For reals.

Amusingly, Apple’s site resizes just fine in IE8.


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Geo-tagged

28 01 2010

One of the things I dig about using my iPhone to take pictures is that they are automatically geo-tagged. It’s nice that it just happens and I don’t have to think about it.

Adding location data to pictures from my regular camera is just a giant pain in the ass. Even when I do have a GPS track available. Most of the photos from my fall vacation should be geo-tagged, since I had a GPS with me the whole time and I saved the tracks from most days, but I uploaded them all to Flickr from the road and it’s even more of a pain to fix the photos I’ve already put up there.

So the other day I was wondering when we’ll finally see GPS chips in normal cameras, and along comes Engadget to tell me that Panasonic has anounced a GPS-enabled version of my current camera.

Awesome!

This could be the first time I upgrade from a camera that hasn’t been lost or broken.


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Anatomy of a motorcycle accident

24 01 2010

One of my closest friends finally got his motorcycle endorsement — originally we were going to take the MSF course together, two years ago — and so we made plans to ride this weekend. He’d spent a few days tooling around his neighborhood on his father’s Harley Road King and our plan was to get out on the backroads for a little tour by the big lake. We went a couple exits down the highway and then headed down a nice country road that was straight for many miles, with a stop sign in the middle and a curve just before the end.

My friend missed the curve. If there is anything worse than crashing, it has to be looking for your pal in the mirror and realizing that he ain’t coming.

Initially I thought he’d committed the classic sin of the curve: feeling that your approach is too fast, panic braking, and forgetting to actually turn. There weren’t any witnesses to the moment he left the pavement but there was a skid mark pointing in a direction that he could have taken.

But when we finally got a chance to talk privately at the hospital his story was completely different. There was another motorcyclist in front of me, we abruptly slowed down, and he went off the road because he wasn’t sure what we were doing and thought he was going to crash into us. My friend didn’t see the sign with the lower speed limit ahead of the curve, didn’t see the many signs along the curve, and basically didn’t see the curve at all until it was too late. He also didn’t notice the unpaved road that he could have swerved down instead of going into the ditch.

His accounting of what happened, and what was missing from his account, was surprising as he was riding far enough behind that if I had actually been making a panic stop he should have had plenty of time to react safely. So the reality is that there were a combination of classic sins. Clearly he was paying too much attention to the riders ahead of him to the detriment of the actual road ahead — he was not riding his own ride — but also he wasn’t paying enough attention in general.

Fortunately, my friend should recover from this incident. Eventually. His gear saved his skin and protected his noggin, and none of his bones broke, but there is internal bleeding from his spleen and possibly his liver and his doctor is basically waiting to see if those organs will take care of themselves or if the spleen needs to be removed.


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Serendipity

9 01 2010

I love the Internet most when it takes me to things that I wasn’t looking for.

Today I was searching for instructions on disassembling the nose of my motorcycle so that I could try fixing my stuck windshield. What I found was a forum post discussing a large gasket inside the nose that sometimes gets loose and binds up the arms holding the windshield. A quick look at the arms on mine showed that was my likely problem, and after attacking the gasket for a few minutes with a screwdriver and box cutters my windshield was raising and lowering properly again.

Coolness.


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Disney

15 12 2009

Last week was possibly the worst in my career that didn’t involve firings or lay-offs, and the end of the pain is not yet in sight, so I took a long weekend and went to Orlando with my brother. We may have been the only adults not accompanying small children to go on the teacups ride… Also got to ride Space Mountain for the first time, covered much more of Animal Kingdom, and have pictures of my brother posing with almost all of the Power Rangers — as a kid he was a huge fan.

It was great fun but I think that trip will be my last time trying to do theme parks for three days in a row. In the end I was completely knackered and sore in places that I can’t recall ever being sore before. We also got nailed by the wild changes in weather that Central Florida has — it was sweater weather when we arrived, just about perfect the following day, and so hot and sunny on the final day that we bailed early.

Lessons from this trip:

  • Taking the “back way” to Orlando (US-27 to I-4) beats the snot out of driving the Turnpike. At least until Sebring, where the traffic patterns become annoying for a while. Up until there we were probably making equal time and encountered few drivers outside of the towns along the way.
  • The Pontiac G8 GT is an awesome road trip car. Granted, a couple hundred miles ain’t that much, but in most cars I’ve driven it is enough to start finding new annoyances.
  • Pure-highway gas mileage in that car isn’t much better than my usual commuting. This shouldn’t be a surprise, but my old ‘86 Trans-Am WS6 with the 305 got 30+ MPG on road trips vs. about 18 MPG on average so I’m disappointed that the G8 only saw a couple of MPG improvement. It takes a big hit going from 70 MPH to 75.
  • I’m really starting to love the Zune HD. It has some warts, and I really hate that it doesn’t have Bluetooth, but I’m liking it more than every other portable MP3 player I have ever owned or used (to me the Empeg Car is the best MP3 player ever made, no portable player has ever come close to being as intuitive to use and I deeply regreat that I had to sell mine years ago to pay bills).
  • Staybridge Suites > Embassy Suites. For several years my preference has been to stay at Embassy for the extra space, microwave, and mini-fridge. Staybridge ups the ante with a full-sized fridge, stove with oven, dishwasher, cabinets full of kitchenwares, and a DVD player / VCR in the living room. The cleaning staff even put our dirty dishes in the dishwasher and ran it while we were out. On the down side, in our two-bedroom suite only one had a desk w/ chair (an Aeron, no less!) and the only accessible power outlet in that room was by the sink. The Internet was also not so great, but unlike at Embassy it was without additional charge.
  • Think twice before taking a picky eater on a trip. My brother puts picky two year olds to shame. Even at a buffet place, where nothing is great but there’s enough variety that anyone ought to be able to make an acceptable meal, the only dish he ate most of was a plate of spaghetti without sauce. The mini-burgers were inedible because they were prepared with pickles. He wouldn’t even try their pizza — yet he ate pizza from a freaking gas station the day before. A fried chicken breast, one of the few foods I couldn’t imagine being prepared in a way not to his liking, he ate just two bites of. And of course, salads and vegetables are completely out of the question. I don’t understand how he has lived this long without developing serious health problems due to malnutrition.
  • Giordano’s Pizza > Uno Chicago Grill.

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