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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Why I’d rather be punched in the testicles than call customer service.
Ten thing you need to stop Tweeting about. Ten is barely a start…
My new motorcycle tire came on Black Friday so I hustled over to the dealer first thing Saturday. An hour and $100 later I had fresh oil and a severely over-inflated front tire — I don’t know by how much because my gauge only goes to 75psi. Next time I’ll bring the gauge with me so I can scream about their incompetence to their faces…
The next day I rode. And a couple of times to work. And again on Sunday.
Way out in cow country I actually found a road with a couple of turns sharp enough to get my lean on. Of course, there were potholes.
On some farmland straights I decided to make some top speed runs. With my windshield not yet fixed it gets uncomfortable around 100mph, and at a GPS-calculated top speed of 138mph the wind is just plain crazy. Even with my shield in the lowest position it provides more cover than any sport bike; I don’t understand how those people tolerate the wind at speed.
