And so, with those words did the conversation start…..
Let me rewind a tad. On Saturday morning I rode to Cars and Coffee, there is nothing new there, I often take ‘the bike’, there is special motorcycle parking and my bike is fairly unusual.
At the end of the event I walked back to where I had parked and there was a young guy standing next to a black GSXR 1000 talking animatedly with another motorcyclist. As I approached, sensing his chance the other biker left the conversation and the GSXR owner said, loudly ‘and that is why you should always run’, thus engaging me in conversation…..
The young guy – he was 23 it transpired – had just been on the receiving end of ‘huge’ ticket and a ‘hour long’ lecture on his riding.
He is now, it appears, in a position where he is going to have to sell his bike as his insurance is going to cost him more than he can afford.
Rather than learn ‘do not ride like a dumb-ass’ he has learned that you should always run.
He even showed the ‘cool’ flip-up licence plate that he had fitted – well, when I say ‘fitted’ I mean ‘bashed with a hammer until it was barely recognizeable and then bashed onto the bike with cable ties and ductape.
*sigh
As I write this, I am sitting on the sofa watching the F1 race from Monaco, there are about 18 laps to go and unless a car breaks or crashes or some technical problem intervenes then the result is set.
The top ten has been set for something like the last fifty laps.
Initially there was a great deal of ‘fun’ when Alonso, who started in the pit lane, picked off car after car and pulled the same move on several cars, before a safety car session allowed him to jump up the order and create a Ferrari-McLaren-Ferrari sandwich. Given that Alonso is one of the absolute best drivers in the world and he is was in arguably the most expensive cars on the grid he really struggled to get by cars that are several seconds per lap slower. Typically he would catch a car that was five seconds or more up the road in a single lap than spend two laps trying to find his way around it.
The safety car sessions gave Alonso probably as much as thirty seconds back at one time.
Continue reading “Monaco F1” »
I read with interest an article in which Stephen Hawking expressed concern that any visit from an Alien race may not have peaceful intentions, likening any visitation with the impact that humans have inflicted on each other when colonizing other countries.
Though I hate to disagree, I feel that he may be incorrect in his assumption that any alien race would want to conquer the planet, they may want to ‘show us the way’, which to us, the comparatively primitive race may feel a lot like the North American Indians felt when we educated them regarding Christianity.
However I hope that any advanced race has already gone through a logical next step in terms of evolution and would be a lot more understanding of us than we were when we forced our religion and our culture onto what we considered the ‘savages’.
The logical step that I am talking about is not physical, but mental.
If we are to reach for the stars, as the alien race that Hawking is considering, then we, humanity, needs to work together.
The current ‘mess’ that we are in proves that we are not very good at that. The rich are rich and the poor, well, the poor do not matter.
If we are going to reach for the stars, or just really get much further along as a society, then we need to work as a single population towards those common goals.
This means that we need to look beyond political and religious divisions and do the ‘right thing’, rather than the thing that inconvenience us personally the least.
The state that I live in is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, during the housing boom and the associated spending frenzy the state committed to improving roads, building new buildings and vast amounts of pet projects. This spending is mostly spent now and the state is in a huge budget crisis.
The solution to the crisis is simple, we, as a state, need to balance the expenditure with the income available, plus we need to ensure that we have adequate reserves.
This is incredibly obvious.
Continue reading “The next evolutionary step” »
Recently I have been wondering about the legacy that we are creating for our children.
The recent oil spill in the Gulf reminded me that the gasoline that I put in my car each week comes from ‘somewhere’, it comes from a hole in the ground that taps into a huge oil ‘pool’. This is a finite resource and that concerns me. Mostly because we tend to not consider that it is finite, precious, limited.
My car manages to travel for about 24 miles on a single (US) gallon of gas. That gallon currently costs me $3.24, I know this because I filled my car up, but generally I take little notice of the costs, it is just built into my budget. That gasoline came from a hole in the ground somewhere.
It used a tiny, tiny percentage of the total amount of oil that is available to the world, but everyone else is filling their vehicles too, at some point that insignificant fill-up is going to have a real impact on the amount left.
The energy that was stored is gone, kind of, it is transferred into heat, electrical power, forward motion and, on part of my commute at least, sound waves in the shape of the B52′s.
Did I waste that energy ?
Did I use it in an efficient way ?
Dell Math
Well, maybe not that bad, but there is something woefully wrong with Dell math.
let me explain….
Over the weekend the [V] keycap fell off the brand new Gateway laptop that we purchased last weekend. The support from them was somewhere North of ‘appalling’ and close to ‘Rude and Obstructive’, so rather than send off a brand new laptop to get it ‘fixed’ we took it back to the store and asked for a refund. While all the time promising never to buy another Gateway computer. Ever. Again.
During our search for a replacement we looked at HP (I get a corporate discount) and Dell (again I get a small discount) but in order to qualify we needed to order online.
After exhausting the possibilities at Office Depot, Staples, Fry’s and Worst Buy, we ended up shopping from the sofa.
I budgeted $600.
Dell have a factory refurbished/made to cancelled order site and we, well I, decided that my wife absolutely needs a PINK laptop. Oh and also dual core, 4GB etc……
So after a lot of searching in the outlet store I found the perfect machine, it comes with enough options to set the price to $719 in the regular store – or $660 with my discount.
Or $529 plus tax with free shipping for a ‘made to order, but cancelled’ machine…
So I thought about it for a few moments and hit ‘Buy Now’ for $529 + $46.25 tax. That is $575.25.
The checkout gave me a total of $575.25 and I entered my credit card and all was well.
The order acknowledgement said $575.25 too.
So imagine my surprise when I see a charge of $591.25 against my bank account.
The $16 is a California charge for the recycle fee.
But it does not mention this. At. All.
Not until you spot the ‘bad math’ and you start to hunt deeper and deeper into the e-mails and you figure it out.
I have suggested that they refund this as I am not happy.
The suggested I cancel the order.
I sighed, deeply.
I just got an e-mail to say that it shipped, so I guess that I am paying $591.25…..
The word ‘geek’ used to be an insult, perhaps it is becoming so again ?
A few days ago I was asked to look at a pair of computers that belong to my wifes’ friend. The two machines are HP’s, an elderly, but still really nicely functional laptop and a fairly new desktop.
Both machines had been used by ‘children’ and as such, they had teenagitis, multiple copies of ‘extorsionware’, out-of-date anti-virus and every ‘free game’ known to man.
In other words, they are a pair of machines that are owned by people that are less than computer savvy.
The laptop was pretty easy to deal with, booting an OEM copy of XP and using the installation codes on the label affixed to the underside had it up and running quickly, hp.com relinquished the drivers for the wi-fi and 18,197 updates later I installed Microsoft’s Security Essentials and all was good. Continue reading “Worst Buys Greek Squid……” »
This evening as I made my way home through the ‘rush hour’ traffic, an hour which i feel I need to point out lasts for ‘several hours’ and is completely impossible to rush through, I spotted an extreme Hokey Kokey motorcyclist.
As he pulled up to the (red) traffic lights in front of me he had both feet off the pegs and he sort of dragged his heels for a good twenty yards before finally wobbling almost to a halt a few yards short of the line. He then accelerated, sort of, by slipping the clutch in what sounded like 5th or 6th gear and almost stalled the bike.
When he finally stopped, still short of the line, he wobbled a little to the left and mashed the back brake (right foot) pedal and stuck his left leg down.
Then he put his right leg down.
And lifted his left leg and mashed the gear lever up and down for a while and found neutral.
So he put his left leg down.
and his right leg up (brake)
and took his hands off the bars.
The engine died with a jolt, it seems that he had a false neutral.
Both hands on bars (both hands in ?)
Clutch and brake pulled
Right leg down
Left leg up, shake and find neutral.
Start motor – both hands in.
Left leg down
Right leg up (brake)
Both arms off (out) and he started the usual bum scratching routine.
The light changed to green. Continue reading “Doin’ the Hokey Kokey” »
My current laptop is a fairly old and beaten PowerBook G4 and recently it has been showing signs of age more than ever. I also have an Acer Aspire One Netbook, that runs ChromiumOS, but this is too small to use for anything beyond uber casual surfing.
Desktop computing is handled by an AMD powered, Quad core machine with lots of memory and plenty of disk space that dual boots Vista (ugh) and Linux.
Having migrated my e-mail, contacts and calender to google services I have little need for a ‘local’ e-mail, just a really good browser and access to my domain’s. Or alternatively a really good e-mail program that copes with imap or exchange services.
Chrome browser support would be great, then I get the plethora of pluggins and bookmarks sync, which is something I never knew I wanted, but now cannot imagine life without.
Battery life is not a huge thing to me, but a decent display is. My Powerbook does 1280×854, more screen real estate would be good, or a decent ‘pinch-to-zoom’ would be cool I guess.
Continue reading “Do I want an iPad ?” »
Or how I learned to love to watch people driving in circles.
NASCAR was not exactly popular among my peers growing up in the UK. Apart from the odd mention on TV I had not really heard of the sport until I became a regular reader of Motoring News. Even then, the mentions were vague and related to a sport that I had no reference points for.
Let me explain.
In the UK there is a huge ‘club’ racing scene, with many formula based classes that allow anyone that is interested to race wheel-to-wheel at a price that matches their budget.
There is a simple ‘open vs closed wheel’ split, and then ‘tin tops vs open’ split too. The open-wheelers ranged from ‘Formula Ford’ up to ‘Formual One’, with a reasonably simple progression that would allow almost anyone with talent to progress through the ranks and arrive in F1 after a few years. Many famous names made the progression. I remember seeing Nigel Mansell race in the lower series at my local track for example. Continue reading “F1 vs NASCAR” »
I had planned on watching the race live last night from 11PM to 1AM, but after a fairly long day and too much pizza I went to bed before it started and was therefore able to watch it this morning on the DVR while avoiding the internet (and hence results), luckily I was awake enough to watch the whole thing and it really was a fun race.
Perhaps though it is time to change the definition of ‘winner’ though ?
Over the weekend Lewis Hamilton manage to score more ‘Hero Points’ than any driver that I can remember since the late, great James Hunt and therefore should be considered the winner this weekend.
The viewers were also winners this time around after the snooze-fest last time around. This race had pretty much everything, it started out wet/damp, then there was the almost expected first lap crash that shuffled the field. A brief session behind the safety car followed and then the race proper began. During which time the track dried out and the field got shuffled a little and there was more overtaking for position than anyone could have predicted.
Continue reading “F1 race opinions – Australia” »
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