Say Goodbye to Gravity

 

 

  I think my 2008 Ninja 250R was jealous and fussy.  I sold my 2005 Honda Superhawk 996 VTR1000 and now she has no one to talk to, so I decided to ride the bike this morning to get some breakfast at the "Hop of I" (honestly a truly beautiful morning) and get some "Simply Heinz" (aka sugared, non-corn-syrup ketchup) and some coffee filters at WalMart next door.  It's weird about coffee filters that you buy 'em in packs of infinity or so, but eventually, after a few years, infinity runs out, and you have to get more infinities worth of them.  I think one pack of them could easily cover the Earth and Neptune and two packs could shroud the Sun.  Four packs could contain the Oort Cloud and no one has ever seen five packs of them in existence, though you could probably surround parallel universes with them.  You get a lot for a dollar.

  I take the bike out of the garage and face her nose-towards the end of the driveway and put her on fast-idle to warm up with full choke and turn around to go get my spear and magic helmet.  Then.. Ka-DUDGE!  from behind me.  I turn around and the bike had vibrated enough such that the downward angle had nudged the kickstand forward and, well, Ka-Dudge.

  I profane like a Mormon, "ah, frack!" and go over and easily pick up my ultralight, the vintage smell of gasoline pouring through it's innards in ways it shouldn't, being on its side, and through the vent hose now horizontal.  I assess the damage.

  Of course, the turn signal on the left side is toast and snapped-off as it should as a sacrifice to The Wicker Man of entropy.  Entropy, She wants to make motorcycles fall down and be on their side.  It's only Mankind's defiance that keeps them up.  Side plastics were scratched pretty good but not cracked.  I inspect the left mirror and it's now adjusted in an owl-spotter-of-an-angle, but the engineers at Kawasaki did a nice job allowing a ball-joint for the mirror allowing it to move upwards instead of also snapping off.  The bike is still on and thankfully it stalled instead of some expensively comical rear-tire spin so just the electrics are engaged.  I realize it's not in neutral anymore so when it fell it pushed-in the gear shifter to 2nd from neutral, understandably.  It seems that the vibrations of the bike in warm-up mode was enough to pull the bike forward just enough to allow the kickstand to jiggle backward with the added weight of my dorkiness of angling the bike downhill (the kickstand is kicked backwards when it's put in-place).  I go to put the bike in neutral and it won't budge.  I realize the kickstand is markedly shoved inward.  Classic.  Both the blinker, shifter, and mirror are classic fall-down breakages on a bike, usually costing $100 each.  I was spared the mirror-damage.  I attempt to manually wrench the shifter back from its inward bent angle but it's really not budging so I go get a hammer with a crow's foot and pry it back to where it needs to be with a good amount of careful force.  I pick up the exploded parts of the blinker housing and see if it's salvageable.  It's not, as it's cracked severely in several places, two bare wires exposed on the left side.  No left turn-signal for a while.



  I get the bike started-up and it idles a little roughly at first and then it seems fine enough and I ride to IHOP and WalMart.  During breakfast a small crowd was walking around my bike for some reason, the damage, aside from the missing turn-signal is pretty un-noticeable, but they were smoking and I figure my parking spot right near the door was a convenient walk-around place for them.  I get that a lot, people checking out my stuff.  Shrug. I guess it's because I take care of my things (except when I let them fall kaplooey on the cold, cold ground).   I get back on and go to WalMart across the parking lot, get my groceries, put them in my tankbag, and speed off home.






  On the way back I stop short at a changing light, locking the rear tire and sliding a bit past the stop-line and walk it backwards.  No cars around, I probably could have sped through the yellow.  I realize I'm too clumsy today and should not ride a bike anymore today.

  I get home and realize I'm missing the clear lens cover for the blinker I had semi-salvaged and find it under my Saturn Astra XR some 20 feet away in good shape, it having snapped off nicely and cleanly, screw still in-place.  At least I have that as a spare part, and I carefully park the bike, giving it a once-over one more time (so, I guess a twice over).  Seems fine enough.  I realize the logistics of the situation a little and that when the bike was facing downhill, the handlebars were nominally facing left so when it fell over, it angled left and fell topside uphill so the damage was minimal-ish.




 I go online and check to see how much a new blinker will cost while making some humbled Kona coffee and most places are selling them for $97 but eCrater was selling them for $31 on-sale with free shipping!  I love online shopping!  SOLD!  Not worth getting insurance involved on this one.  In the meantime, left will require an extended arm 1930's style.


  So, overall, pride hurt, and I know the kickstand is not sturdy enough to handle a downward-facing bike at full-choke-idle.  Plastic scraped a tad on the side not too noticeable.  Overall it could have been worse for sure, but these things happen.  Guess I could replace the whole damage with coffee filters.

 

Hand of Fate is moving and the finger points to you.
He knocks you to your feet and so what are you gonna do?
Your tongue has frozen now you've got something to say.
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is calling you his way.

You watch the world exploding every single night.
Dancing in the sun a newborn in the light.
Say goodbye to gravity and say goodbye to death.
Hello to eternity and live for every breath.

Your time will come, Thy will be done.
Your time will come, Don't turn, don't run.

The Ferryman wants his money you ain't going to give it back;
He can push his own boat as you set up off the track.
Nothing you can contemplate will ever be the same.
Every second is a new spark, sets the universe aflame.

You watch the world exploding every single night.
Dancing in the sun a newborn in the light.
Brothers and their fathers joining hands and make a chain;
The shadow of the Wicker Man is rising up again!

Your time will come, Thy will be done.
Your time will come, Don't turn, don't run.

Desperate Windows

  I have to watch a lot of commercials, thanks to the money-grubbing folks who post on YouTube (I'd like to point-out that though my content is not really worthy, I don't monetize anything on YouTube or otherwise) and the corporate demons on other online-TV sites.  There's no escaping it.  It's on over-the-air channels as well.  Subsequently, I have to endure quite a bit of it if I want any media these days.  Thankfully, CD music is still void of it, though Bluray discs and movie theaters are shoving it in our faces as well.  I'm at the point where I see the same commercials over and over again.  Some companies are trying too hard.  It's rather sad, really.  Microsoft is batting a fat ZERO with current product releases.  Let's recap, starting with Windows 8...

Worrisome Microsoft uses an emoticon and knew that there'd be problems beforehand and made this screen at-release.

  So Windows 7 is a decent operating system.  It's a bit big, particularly the "professional" or "over-inflated", "unabridged" version that actually makes your PC or desktop weigh more because of all the bits weighing down your SSD or hard-drive (sic).  Windows 7 Professional is fat and unnecessary unless you run a server farm of sorts, then it makes sense, otherwise, Windows 7 Home is quite fine and non-buggy.  Even Internet Explorer 9 it comes with is decent and quick, though you have to tweak it a little in the user interface.  Some people don't like IE9 because of just that fact, but then again, these people also use 85 octane gas and then ironically drive massive SUVs and go to Starbucks for hot corn syrup in a cup, negating the savings on an infinite level.  These haters also prefer to "not think" or set up a computer in any way and prefer iPads so they can mash the picture with their greasy nubs.  Show me the thespian who can navigate a DOS-based game's installation to adjust one's autoexec.bat and config.sys files to get it to work, then adjust the DMU and IRQ settings in their BIOS to avoid their 16-bit Soundblaster soundcard conflicts with a PCI port to play music and have sound effects!  Ah, those were the days of men who knew their stuff!  Still, some had to install the latest and greatest OS, thinking it'll be better in some way, what way they don't know, nor could fathom, but it's new so the dummies who are computer illiterate buy into the newest stuff.  I call these folks, "heat seekers", a nice name for "sucker".  By now, everyone on Earth should know to never buy into the newest technology, like the new Chevy Stingray comming out with cylinder shut-off and direct-injection (thereby clogging valves quicker for the sake of gas savings).



We early gamers earned the right to listen to sound and the prize was rich, 8-bit audio goodness!  When you got it right, and that music started on the game when you loaded it up, such a REWARD!  We EARNED that music by-Jove!

 
Anyway, Windows 7 is easy and it was a good product, but because of the iPad and tablets flooding the dummies market who thrive on low-qual audio and are afraid of keyboards, some very very stupid execs at Microsoft thought to get on the band-waggon and make a tablet-based operating system.  Worse still, instead of calling it Windows CE8, as WinCE has been around for a long time (16 years) made just for hand-helds, they come out with simply, Windows 8.  Even worse still, they shove the whole iPad-like smeary design for tards onto PCs.  This works like crap.  It's a nightmare of a system with retarded giant squares to navigate like some bad PS-One game.  It's not faster in any way, just clumsy and ugly.



Windows Bob was not included in the numbering system as Microsoft was so embarrassed by it.  Imagine an OS ran entirely by Clippy the Paperclip?  Yep.  That's the real Microsoft Windows 4.

 
Most folks are wise to this (ie. never buy an even-numbered Microsoft OS, such as Windows Bob (above) or Windows Vista) [though, grudgingly there are some fans of it, oddly] and do not install it.  Several that did install Windows 8 quickly called the product-support center.  A friend of mine's wife called-in to Microsoft's customer-support asking how to revert back to Win7, to which they obviously hired a team to retort, "Why on Earth would you want to do that?" hoping to get people to stick with Win8, lauding it's abilities and "ease of use" to thwart the strange, new layout phobia, etc.  Ultimately, most low-level formatted their hard-drives and got a copy of Win7.  Indeed, sales of Win7 Home has gone up quite a lot recently, about as much as the sales of pre-installed PCs with Win8 and those who actually bought Win8.  Dell insists your PC come with Win8 as a sort of evil-alliance with Microsoft.  Still, you can format your drive and escape that crap.  I expect an apology from Microsoft with a free option to revert back to 7 in a few months, but they're obviously waiting it out.  I can only imagine the amount of money spent to try to make Win8 and the advertising is horrendous.  Take this vid for example which includes IE10 and Win8 and its Touch feature:

  Ooo!  Is that dubstep?  Kids like that, right?  It's trendy and new, right?  That's that robot music all the movies are doing now in the trailers!  Ooo!  It's so awesome!  I love the dive-bomb subwoofer tone!  That's so cool and new! 

  Ugh.  Okay, firstly Dubstep died last year in the same, sudden way disco died in 1981. Corporations are slow to realize it's a done-deal already, and it's sad. DubStep = modern-day disco. Cheesy and cheap and already spent, and pathetic.  What's with the Don Johnson dude in the commercial above, all by himself like some DJ at an empty club?  No one thinks he's cool.  I bet the actor was only happy he got work, but you know what?  He'll never find work again.  DJs are not musicians.  I admit that XM Radio has a bit of talent in timing one song to the next by matching the previous song's key, scale, and mode with the next and matching mathematically conflicting time signatures to make Holy Diver by DIO match-up with The Whisper by Queensryche (something FM would never play, nor Pandora, because it's too badass) but besides that, it's not cool.  It's sorry and sad, and those guys get fat and think they're heroes and they ain't and eventually the music they spin doesn't match-up with their tastes and they die alone in a U-Haul's truckbed with a pint of Popov Vodka and an emptied prescription of Mirapex. 

  The video is sad and uninspiring, and the Mad Planets video-game arcade controls are annoying at-best.

  Microsoft also released a Touch Tablet that goes something like this:

  Okay, so I see that the band Stomp is working in an office, getting nothing done.  They have a trendy Japanese young dude jumping around like a pansy bitch while various and carefully selected demographics and age genres are represented.  It's so sterile and corporate it hurts, and it's not cool.  No, it's sad, and it comes off as desperate as Dr.Evil trying to do the Macarena dance.

 

  No, Microsoft.  You've over-thought it.  I can just imagine the death meetings some of the guys had to go to, the "oh so smart" higher-ups thinking this was a good idea.  One or two younger fellas might'a said, "Hey, uh.. that whole "Stomp" thing is um.. well.. I.."  They got fired, and it shows.

 

 

Lastly, though I'm a PS3 fan, the XBox 360 was pretty okay a system.  Not great, but fairly popular enough.  There's a new version coming out soon called (no, not the 720, though the 420 might have been a better choice..) XBox One.  It's pretty retarded and doomed from-the-start.  The main feature is that you can watch TV from it..



  This is an incredibly, massively, bad move.  It almost stings the nostrils with it's pungent scent!  It reeks of a corporation wanting to buy-in on the Netflix/Hulu wave.  Dish systems are all but dead, and some folks only keep cable-TV because of the "bundle" they get with internet access, but most people have moved-on to watch TV via Hulu and movies via Netflix.  Even the Redbox kiosks are gathering dust, frequented by no one but the lowest-common-denominators out there.  There's rumor there's even a solitary Blockbuster video rental shop somewhere on this Earth, but I haven't been able to locate it via Google Earth.  Now be advised I give kudos to VHS rental stores still defiant in existence, and I was delighted to find one that even rented-out BetaMax tapes, which is pretty badass, as well as Laserdisc, so there's that novelty, but unless you're somewhere that internet doesn't exist, there's no excuse to not have Hulu Plus and Netflix by now.  Netflix has been around since 1997 (Now) and Hulu has been around since 2007.  That's 15 years and 5 years respectively.  In technology terms, that's about 10 lifetimes.  I hear some people still have old DVD players as well.  Bluray discs were available in 2003, some 10 years ago.  It's amazing some people hold-on to ancient technologies.  Still, vinyl aside (apples to oranges here), the Compact Disc has the highest bitrate quality available (along with Bluray and DVD-A discs which are scarce) so having a CD player makes sense quality-wise.  Oddly, people embrace MP3 players, preferring additional lo-fi compression for convenience over hi-fi quality.  Too bad, but whatever.  In my heart, I know storage size will increase until people will start putting WAV files on their players or other lossless formats over time, which is good.

 
So the XBox One also requires you have constant, online connectivity.  Per my previous argument, there's still an abnormal amount of folks in the US who don't have this.  Some still even use dial-up modems (somehow).  The map here: MAP indicates how many humans have access to broadband internet.  About half the US or so, population-wise.  This limits the XBox sales, as dial-up will be horrible because you have to buy online and download your game to the XBox One.  Yep.  Mandatory.  The PlayStation 4 was considering this move, but Sony wisely avoided it, making it an option, but not required.


So, Strike number THREE with XBox One, already a done-deal.  Microsoft stock will soon plummet, I suspect.  Crap-o-la.  Let's watch it fall together, shall we?  It's obvious Microsoft felt they missed the mark on Apple's simple design and is desperately trying to mimic a lot of it.. badly.  Microsoft, listen to me, just listen.  I'm your friend.  Keep making software for PC users just the way you have been with Win7 and XP.  People who actually use a keyboard and computers who actually do real things are going to still buy it.  Sure, you missed-out on the trendy stuff for the consumer crowd.  That's Apple's thing, for the consumer, but the folks that are creators of things, people who actually do something, folks that make things people consume still use desktop PCs.  Stick with that.  It's what you do best.





 

Iconoclasm

 

  I was watching a little mathematics demonstration on YouTube from "Minute Physics" (yeah, I'm that nerdy) which was arguing the proper order of operations in a formula of instructions: ie. 8 - 2 + 1 = ?  The argument was do you subtract or add first?  For example:

8 - 2 + 1 = ?
8 - 3 = 5   or  6 + 1 = 7

 Well, in school we know that (-2) is a negative two and you add that, so it comes out as such:

8 + (-2) + 1 = ?
6 + 1 = 7

 
It went on for more complicated possibilities, such as 6 / 3 / 3 (which do you divide first, and does it matter?)  Well, it argues in school we're taught left-to right firstly, and multiplication and division before addition and subtraction unless we use parenthesis.  It was a boring argument but it was talking about the morality of mathematics and "mathematical freedom".  It went on for a while if you want to watch it.  Normally I subscribe to "Minute Physics" as often it's interesting, as well as "VSauce" which bring up some interesting concepts.  This one, not so much, however, arguing mathematics with PEMDAS is too robotic.

  Someone was pointing out that Google was giving a different mathematical result as if the search-engine "Google" was all-knowing and a be-all end-all solution for things as an actual mathematical "proof".  This, I found, was troubling on a societal scale.

  Google as a solution to all their problems.  Indeed, the company has become a household word in America by now, and even evolved to become an inverse-gerund (a noun used as a verb, ie. let's Google the answer.)  All Google.com really is is a search engine for other generally editorial websites and doesn't really prove anything, though one could argue, "What's the standard then?"  Well, we could Google a result from only Encyclopedia Britannica (or Galactica) and the answer would likely be correct, but Google itself is merely a blind card-catalog in a massive library of periodicals (magazines) and a few books, all written by people.  One cannot find the truth by Googling a website, reading a human-created article, and call it a "proof".  Still, such things will get you on your way, and ultimately, truth is just a collection of opinions and/or scientific proofs, some of which are written (either correctly or incorrectly) on web pages, books, and other articles.  Typos do indeed exist in these transcriptions to websites and, dare I say, text books as well.  I've seen it.  It seems a lot of folks idolize these website as they take them for fact, because it's easier.

  Still, my concern is that America has put a lot of faith and trust into websites such as Google, Wikipedia, and other semi-fact-editorial sites.  Some websites actually mimic their bigger brothers, like WikiFacts, using a similar layout as Wikipedia but having some dubious entries not as policed by editorial societal members.  I find Wikipedia is aggressively maintained for most entries, some more than others.  I've made a few adjustments based on first-hand knowledge on a few things and I do indeed have an account to do so and some credibility to have it accepted and kept.  Say, for instance, you went to Wikipedia and you changed the entry for Jesus Christ to be Jesus Christ on a Popsicle stick (which Jesus may or may not find amusing, though I'm apt to think if the entry was kindly translated for Him, He'd have a chuckle) the entry would be adjusted within a minute or two by any number of religious organizations.  I'm sure there's a division in the Vatican that polices just that on Wikipedia, and, thanks to FaceBook selling anyone who pays, would find your personal information and all about you and keep an eye on you for a few days.  Oh, and by the way, FaceBook will sell all personal information (IP address, physical location, browsing history, your entire hard-drive contents, etc.) on one individual for $0.38.  Yep, 38 cents.  That's how much you're worth, and yes, FB has the right in the user-agreement to do so, and scan your hard-drive, and copy anything they want from it.  Nice.

  So Americans have a bit of an idol-worship on Google.  People accept its results unquestioningly.  Some will take a few samplings from Google, such as take 10 website articles and filter them, but this is how the "Global Warming has nothing to do with Solar Cycle" scam happened, and folks still think tropospheric perturbations affect global climate (it's stratospheric, kids, like volcanoes, nukes, solar flares, and rocket launches with yummy metric-tons of propellant, cars only create smog in valleys temporarily and do not affect global-climate, only immediately local climate).  People also accept Wikipedia more-so than not now-a-days, and the argument, "Oh, if it's on the Internet, it's gotta be true." joke is starting to wane.  Indeed, we've idolized certain websites as Truth, and I say, "Nay nay!"

  It's not a healthy choice, but it's good to get a smattering of various opinions to form your own personal truth, sure.  Scientifically, you can get truths a lot easier by manuals and such, though it's hard to get a Truth that's 100% accurate.  In school we listened to praises of Columbus the Explorer and how he discovered America who was actually an Italian opportunist pirate who discovered Cuba, never got near the landmass of the United States, and apparently ate and raped children.  Some hero.  Columbus, it seemed, was a real jerk.  So because of this, Truth itself is almost always evolving, coming more into focus.

  Most people aren't that clever I've noticed.  Most people stop learning around age 16 or so and become brain-dead and have no sense of wonder, happy to bury and waste their lives on palm-sized "phones" smashing birds at pig architecture or smearing their muddy paws over the screen cutting-up virtual fruit while Life ticks away behind them until they wondered where 10 years went.  Hint: it's rude and pathetic.  I've owned them, and I understand the lure, but Life is happening around you, why bury yourself in digital oblivion?  You're not eight years old.

 
 Most people idolize certain websites as Truth and accept it as such in the same way the Israelites started to worship false gods after Moses led them from Egypt.  We Americans had AltaVista, Yahoo, RocketMail, and the like at first, and before that, BBSs and Forums (which are still useful and quite editorial) but I'm worried the dumb America (the 90% of us who can't find, say, Egypt on a map or solve a differential equation or understand why Michael Bay movies suck because of silly-physics he wants you to belive in) will just accept these false gods as Truth without questioning, without doubting.  It's turning out like the epic album The Warning by Queensryche where computers pose as gods and the People accept it as such (until the computer deems humans as a virus and must eliminate the problem).

  I really want people to think and consider and not accept things as Truth until they analyze it themselves, but it might be too late.  People go to sleep with no sense of wonder these days, they browse the solution to a question and go to sleep satisfied.  Back in the '70s if you wanted to know where Tom Petty was born, you wouldn't know.  You'd buy a few rock-oriented magazines, ask a few friends at work, but no one would know, and you'd wonder for weeks, and you'd go to sleep not knowing.  You'd go to the library but it might omit his birth place and you wouldn't know for years.  One day, you'd meet a girl on the street who's a super Tom Petty fan, and she'd know, "Yeah, he's from Florida!" and you'd marry that girl.  Today, people are numb cows who click it, look it up on Wikipedia and go to sleep without a care in the world.  Not good.  People are numb cows now, and I'm not impressed.  I wish I could smash Google and Wikipedia and destroy iTunes so that you'd have to actually buy a vinyl album and revel in it's album-art and sit and listen to the whole gosh darn album (no fast-forwarding on vinyl lest you scratch it up, hopping the needle) and you appreciate every track and you read the liner-notes and you sit and listen for an hour or so to the album and cars don't have radios and you need a dime to make a phonecall at a phonebooth as there'll be no cell-phones and you actually have to drive your car with a sense of danger and you buy maps at a triple-A store or get a Rand McNally and plot your way across country. 

  I want you to try that.  Leave your cellphone at home and turn off your OnStar and shut your radio off, then go for a 1 hour drive.  Don't worry, you won't die.

  We were self-reliant then, now, too much trust is put in websites.  I say we smash them all and start over, and take ourselves back to 1975 and start again, this time with more caution on inventing the Internet.  It's too easy, and people are too soft.  I wish I could smash them all like a modern-day super-iconoclast!

I'm out.

Saturday Morning Ride

  
  Today is one of those "perfect" motorcycle riding mornings in Colorado, when the wind is almost nil, it's about 59 degrees outside, the sun is shining but it's partly cloudy, and it's mid-to-late-spring and traffic is almost non-existent since the alcoholic/druggie Coloradians seeking oblivion are nursing their hangovers and/or aren't awake yet at 8:30am (though I woke at 5:30, which in military terms is rather late in the day, normally we have to get up at 4am for a day-shift). 



Colorado native says, "I don't shive a git!.. Fuuuushn' A!  420 babay!"



Nice Chinese-made steel pergola

  For a change, I have little to do today, except contemplate a pergola and reading the horror-stories from Lowe's website the Chinese pig-steel they use and that it rusts after 2 months (no thanks) I'm considering getting a master carpenter to do the deed if under $1k.  I consider "Rosie" but her tank is a tad on empty, though the morning "nowhere" drive would be nice with the targa-top down, I consider my options.  Since I recently sold my Honda Superhawk VTR996 (a fine bike, but it's time for me to let her go to have adventures with someone else) I eye my trusty Kawasaki Ninja 250R.  Yep, she'll have to do.  My hatchback Saturn Astra XR (made for 1 year only in the US) looks sad but defiant, knowing she'll get heavy use come winter with her grabby siped winter-only tires.  I check Google Maps and verify a favorite route of mine and consider a detour.

  Normally, a fun and little-known southern route follows Old Pueblo Road from Santa Fe Blvd. in Fountain.  It's a farmer's route with lots of nice trees and a river called "Fountain Creek" it's picturesque and pleasant, so I fire up "BJ" (blue "Jay" Ninja 250R based on the 250R-J type model 2008) which is assembled in Bangkok, Thailand (so you know it's a fun time) though the parts are manufactured in Kawasaki, Japan.  She's only got a scant 3k miles on her, I haven't ridden her much in favor of my old Superhawk though I gave a thorough oil-changing and a lot of modifications on suspension and handling and lighter "things" and some cosmetic goodies.  She sits very low to the ground with a seat-height of about 26 inches.  Yeah, the seat is 2 feet and 2 inches off the ground which makes for super fun happy times and builds a lot of confidence.  As usual, I glued a tiny "talisman" action figure on the brake-fluid reservoir, a little blue ninja man.  Yeah, a little ninja on a little ninja.  My quarter liter beater!





  She fires up just fine and I let her idle for a minute or so while I gear-up, the low growl of the 248cc engine a bit louder now that I've performed the "snorkel removal" procedure giving me 2 extra horsepower (a 10% gain!)  I'm a fan of ATG-ATT (all the gear, all the time) motto.  I use a carbon-fiber HJC helmet from 2006 that's still in very good condition (though I suspect an upgrade is due as it's only SNELL M2000 and I think we're up to SNELL M2010 standards by now, which is better than DOT standards, and there's argument about drying glue and the such, though the foam lining doesn't shift when pressured, which is the main concern, it's probably still fine enough).  Still I put it on and my heavier leathers by First Racing (all blue, of course) I bought back in 2002 when I had my first Ninja 250 EX.  Yeah, I should update that gear I guess.  Very rugged stuff.  I have new gloves though that have knuckle protection and some finger vents and some gel padding by Olympia I bought last season that I wore only a few times instead of my ancient 2002 blue Olympia gauntlets more rough for wear at this point and should be retired.

 

 

  I go west on Powers/Mesa Ridge Pkwy to  Fountain Mesa Road which is a residential thoroughfare and over to Ohio Ave. to South Main St. in Old Fountain which turns into my Happy Favorite Bike Road, "Old Pueblo Road" that snakes south.  It's one of those happy roads that wind around a lot with pretty trees and the like, the smell of farm is in the air as you meander at about 50mph (10 over the speed limit).  No traffic (or barely any).  Quite nice.



 
  There's a sassy railroad hairpin turn that suggests 10mph and they ain't kidding.  It's a decreasing radius from 50 mph and it doubles-back troublingly over some tracks while in a turn with some sand for good measure.  Motorcyclists understand this is a recipe for disaster so pussyfooting one's way over it like a Harley motorcyclist does on every turn is the way to go here without eating steel railroad tracks for breakfast.  I still always come onto it a bit hot and have to scrub-off a good amount of speed with my braided-brake lines, the 250 easily compliant.  You don't want to hit those tracks at a lean!  Success!  No fall-y fall-y.



 
  Now at the end, the road curves back onto I-25 as it runs parallel with it for about 15 miles or so at Pike's Peak International Raceway (where AMA used to be held, sadly no more).  According to my Google Map, I can go over to Hanover Road veering east (left) and then onto Meridian Road going south (right) which will lead me to the east half of Pueblo some 10 more miles south and it meanders nicely (supposedly).



Dirt road?  Crap.

  I follow Hanover for about 5 miles until I get to Meridian Road South (rather nondescript).  The scenery here is barren and alien-looking.  Anyone who's driven to Roswell, NM knows the terrain I'm talking about.  It seems not-of-this-earth barren and foliage is odd cactus things that look like baby Joshua-trees (not the album, the last good one by U2).  Meridian Road I come to a halt at and look sadly.  It's a dirt road, and it expands for miles over the horizon.  I'm not in the mood to negotiate 10 miles of sand and rocks, so I sigh and turn her around and go back.



All roads end at Burger King.

Half and hour later I make it back to Rt. 85/87 where all roads lead to Burger King and I order a bacon-double-Whopper with Cheese (no bun) and onion rings for my Atkin's delight.  My hair is sticking up from my helmet (aka "helmet hair") like Beaker from The Muppets but I munch away in delight, then speed on back home, taking a slight detour to look at the new housing developments going-on under my Mesa (I live on the top of a 100 foot cliff overlooking Pueblo in the distance and a dairy farm).



Russian spies at Burger King?  Fembots = WIN!

  Yeah, it's been a good day for riding, and a good day overall, and it's only 10:30am!  Win for the Win!  Glad you could join me!



Spamalot 401

 

  So some of you may have noticed I just completed Post #400 on Blogspot here, which is pretty awesome, but also that you cannot comment anonymously anymore (booo). Reason being, I was getting a lot of Spam from a character I called "Master Yoda" who spoke in broken English, usually referring to loans originating out of the UK. 

    It was fun at first, as I'd reply back to the Spambot humorously, and even go to the websites (all protections on full-blast on my PC just-in-case like a reporter reviewing the Carter Hotel in New York City.)  It was a lot of fun and I'd critique the comments it'd post.  Until recently, there'd only be one or two a week of these Spambot posts, but now it's reaching several dozen a day, and it's getting a little ridiculous.  Granted, it increases my view counts and comments, but I take a bit of pride in keeping my website (www.mikecronis.com) and posts free of evil Spam.  I allowed a smattering for humor's sake but the Spam has become an infestation and I was being over-run like pouring gallons of honey in and around a California home near an ant colony daily.  It really was getting unruly.
 

  To solve for this, you cannot post anonymously as I have set up a basic Level 1 requirement for posters to simply have an account of some kind, like AOL or AIM or Google +, etc. which makes the poster of a comment more likely to be human than 'bot.  I have several other levels of protection I can invoke, but this is the least invasive for my viewers, and most people by now should have a Google + account as FaceBook and its data-mining and personal-information-sharing behemoth is coming to a grinding halt anyway as it's the most evil corporation selling people's souls for anyone willing to pay the twelve cents it costs to glean 500 million people's addresses, home or IP, work schedules, purchasing habits, face pictures (yeah, there's facial recognition on those pictures of yourself you post, you narcissistic kiddies), product placement, etc.  It's actually become the worst data-mining monstrosity in the history of the Internet at this point.  It was pretty okay about two years ago, but they want to make a buck as the stock is floundering.  I suspect Tom of MySpace is delighted, hoping people will migrate back and be his friend again (Tom was the initial first "friend" everyone would get on MySpace.com)  Luckily, there's plenty of other social-media sites that are less intel-stripping, though arguably not everyone's completely migrated yet, and there's some argument as to where to vacate to.  I don't recommend Friendster, Tumblr, or FourSquare, of if you're into Chinese girls, QZone is pretty popular, though Google+ recently is the #2 site, just over half of FaceBook's status in English-speaking countries, followed by YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn respectively.  Interesting Google+ is actually more popular than YouTube in hits.  Hm.

  Regardless, I need an iota of protection.  On this site you can comment by logging in with your Google+ account, or an OpenID account, which is sort of an "everything" passport to all sites (to include FaceBook, etc.).  I can't allow Anonymous replies anymore because I can't spend my days bantering against a hoard of orc-like spam-bots every waking hour.  I have a life and I'm not spending it against a subroutine that eats away at my posts, so I counter with a verification subroutine and, well, we break even.

  So, sorry for the inconvenience.  I urge everyone to evolve past FaceBook (personal information Rape Book for Tween Suckers) and get on-board to the current decade.  It's not 2004 anymore.

  As for Master Yoda the SpamBot from the UK, don't worry.  Some old gramma's gonna click you someday and you can feast on her meager fixed-income checking account and feed while you guarantee your room with a view in hell.