sedmonds.org

Yamaha held R-Days on Saturday, Aug 23 this year. The event was very similar to last year. New this year, they had a couple of pre-production V-Max. That bike is a freakin beast of a machine. The staff were all friendly and helpful. Just holding the event makes it that much more likely that I'd seriously consider another Yamaha if I was looking for another bike. Unfortunately, the YZF600R I've got does all of the bikely things I could possibly ask of it.

Apparently last night there was a pretty good storm here. I went out to get a movie at about 7, and came home and put it in to watch. About half way through, I went to get some water and noticed leaves and branches in the street. Figuring that this would trigger my basement to leak, I took the carpet cleaner downstairs to suck up the water. After building a small dyke out of towels to direct water to the floor drain, I went outside. Something didn't look right.

Ok, I'm an addict. Most addicts pick things like liquor, or cigarettes, or crack. A few pick crazy european sex, or jumping out of airplanes. Me, my drug of choice is Ultra Kick-Ass Helicopter Sorry, the link is now dead (July 23, 2008). It's even more addictive than tetris, pong, and breakout combined!

I bought a new 2006 Yamaha YZF600R last fall, from Kelly Cycle Centre in Hamilton. My previous bike, which I'm currently selling, is a 2002 Kawasaki Ninja 500. I got an invitation to Yamaha R-Days out at Shannonville Motorsport on August 11, 2007.

Ok, it turns out that the repair job on the glove box and dash board hasn't withstood the test of time very well. I'm not sure if it was just detailing materials that had made it look good, or if it just needs more dye or what. There was also some minor damage to the dash trim around the climate controls. The body shop submitted the supplemental to State Farm, who approved the repair. The part is in, it's just a matter of making an appointment.

Some ancient societies had it right - cut off the hand(s) of thieves.

The good folks over at Audiosource took care of the stereo and alarm today. The stereo gear cost a little more than what State Farm would cover, and ended up with less per-channel wattage for the main speakers and more wattage for the sub.

What I had before was a Memphis Audio - MCA150 powering JL Audio - XR 653-CS in the front and another powering JL Audio XR 650-CXi rears, and a Memphis Audio MCD250 powering a JL Audio 10W3V2-D4 sub. All of this was fed by a Pioneer - DEH-7600MP head unit.

Got my car back from the collision center at Heffner Lexus Toyota. It's amazing what they can repair on the dash and door panel. I was sure that a repair job would be unsatisfactory, but it looks great. The cut in the seat isn't perfect, but I only notice it because I know it's there. And the gouge where the crooks tried to pry the window out from above the weatherstripping can't even be seen. I'm pretty happy with the results.

What the hell is it with some people.

I woke up this morning, and looked out the kitchen window. Something didn't look right on my car, so I was staring at it for a couple minutes trying to figure out what. Eventually I realized that the passenger seat was leaned forward. A small bit more looking and I realized the passenger window was smashed out.

I finally got around to figuring out what was on a stack of currently unused hard drives. Mostly they were empty, but one of them actually had stuff on it. Stuff I'd put on my web site the last time I had had a web server running. The one thing of note was a road trip I took right after exams were done in April 2004. I started off in Saskatoon and by the time I got back I'd made stops in Spokane WA, Rexburg ID, Jackson Hole WY, Denver CO, Minneapolis MN, Kalamazoo MN, Toronto ON, Atlanta GA, and Charlotte NC. A touch over 11,000 miles I drove on that trip. Only the first week or so was there interesting scenery - the interstates looks about the same everywhere I was east of the foothills.

I didn't know any HTML at the time, and by the time each day was over uploading and writing/verifying web pages over connections at hotels along the way to a dsl connection at home wasn't high on my list of things to do. I don't have a fat upload pipe for this site now either, so some of the pages will load sloooooowly. You have been warned.

Here it is.

This is probably my favorite of the pictures I took on the trip:

I rode around for a while today, just taking it easy. It got a little chilly, so I stopped at Tim's for a cup of coffee. It's not home-roast, but it's warm. I needed to get a stubby phillips screwdriver, so on to Princess Auto. Unfortunately, there wasn't much in the way of individual screwdrivers, and none of the sets was about to fit under the seat on my bike. I started off toward home, took a left hander a little too quick, and lowsided. Fortunately there was no traffic around so I didn't get run over too, and I didn't slide into or over anything. A couple people were near enough to see it before I got the bike back upright, and they stopped to make sure I was ok.