rolling thunder

This weekend I put the Bonneville on the back of my truck and took it up to my sisters place in northern Virginia. Did a lot of riding with my dad and brother-in-law. About 350 miles in total.

On Sunday, we rode in the Rolling Thunder rally/protest/march. The primary goal is raise awareness of POW/MIA issues. The secondary goal is to get tens of thousands of bikers together.

My dad is a vietnam vet and has been riding every year for a few years, so I went up to ride with him this year. There were a lot of bikes there. I estimated about 10,000-12,000 bikes rode in the parade from the Pentagon, through downtown, and to the Mall. Depending on who you ask, there were between 50,000 and 500,000 bikes downtown in total[1].


The sea of bikes in the Pentagon parking lot.

The ride out of D.C was interesting. If you consider being stuck in traffic on I-95 for an hour interesting.

Most of the rest of the riding that weekend was spent on windy back roads in Caroline county in Virginia. Thats some fun riding.

[1] The event has more than a few political overtones[1], so no surprise the attendance estimates vary greatly.
[2] Not all of which I agree with…

[view at adrianlikins.com ]

motorcycle

I bought a motorcycle. It’s rad.

It’s a 2004 Triumph Bonneville.

A bit more than I originally intended to spend, but whats new.

I like it.

(photos by previous owner)

more motorcycles

Been looking around at different bikes. From a stylistic standpoint, I’m all about the “cafe racer” look. Kind of vintage and minimalist at the same time without being an amorphous blob on wheels or a rolling chromed out two wheel land yacht.

But I’ll probably just go with something like a used 80’s/90’s nighthawk/virago/sv650/etc for now. They are cheap, and pretty easy to come by.

But I covet a Triumph Bonneville. Maybe I’ll get one and some leathers and meet zombiepops down at Brighton and beat the crap out of him while Who songs blare in the background. Or maybe just try to score a goal or two on him next time we play soccer. ;->

On Wednesday, on the way home from work, I decided to buy a bike. So I
did. Nothing fancy (low end Diamonondback Wildwood “comfort” bike).

So, now I’m looking for interesting places to ride. I live up off of
duraleigh. The Crabtree Creek greenway isnt too far away (though
it would be a lot shorter if I could cut though the gated community…).

I’m also looking for a cyclometer/bike computer. Being a near-geek
and all. Any suggestions?

hometown blogging

Saw a post somewhere about someone watching the technorati search results for a search on there home town. So I tried it. An interesting cross section of results. For “statesville”, lots of stuff about NASCAR, and the “JR’s” store there. And apparently a lot more Statesvillians that I would of ever expected to be blogging.

Saturday headed over to Chapel Hill with base10 to see Battles (opening up
for Prefuse 73 at Local 506).

Got there about 10:30 to find a long line out the door and down the sidewalk. Apparently Prefuse 73 is quite popular. The line was moving very slowly due to Local 506’s very strict enforcement of the membership policy. And since the majority of folks there were not typical Local 506 customers, this just slowed matters down.

Just about the time Battles started, they announced they were at capacity counting Etix sales. So we waited around abit to see if anyone left (It was a nice night out, and you could hear the band at least, and see this a little bit though the front door), but eventually left near the end of the set. I really had no idea that the show would be selling tickets, and especially didn’t expect it to sell out.

Sunday went over and played some more soccer. Had a blast. Everyone seems a bit more prepared this time (or at least, everyone had more gear ;->). I was a bit off for the first half and didn’t do much running due to an ankle/shin that was bothering me for some reason. But it seemed to stop hurting for the second half, so was able to move a little bit easier. Got a goal or two and our team won. Just need to recruit some more folks to play.

Went and saw Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy (with badger, maegwynn, and ran into zombiepops and heatherivy there). Not bad. But I couldn’t help but think that it would be awfully confusing and hard to follow if you haven’t read the book. If there was one scene I would of changed, I think it would of been the babelfish scene, since I think the aside about it in the book helps establish the tone, the sense of humour, and the idea that the story can be a bit metaphysical and philosphical. I would of spent just a little bit more time covering some of the babelfish backstory.

os x 10.4 article

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Review

Definitely the best review of “Tiger” I’ve seen. Very detailed, and even mostly spin/marketing/zealotry free.

Though, it does certainly dim my expectations of Tiger. “Spotlight” seems to just be the revenge of eazel/ nautilus/ medusa/ fam/ gnome-metadata/ gnome-vfs . (And I suspect, a lot of the same people are involved). Not a bad thing, but definitely not all that the hype promised. Seems like a decent first step though.

Automator sounds quite potentially useful, but hard to say without using it. Any thing that provides easy hooks for extending functionality is always a plus.

Even the shiny marketing hype made Dashboard seem kind of boring and useless, and with more details, it seems even more so. I can only hope there is a scrolling rss reader widget so I can pretend like it’s 1998 again. “Hey dude! It’s not a homepage, it’s a ‘channel’! And it’s on my desktop! Whoa!”.

CoreData should be useful for ISV’s, so hopefully some interesting apps will come out of it.

[view at adrianlikins.com ]