I was reminded again yesterday that my right motorcycle boot has thrown in the towel on its waterproofness. I’ve had them for a couple-three years now, so it’s probably time to look anyway.
Sadly, good boots aren’t cheap, so it’s going to be a battle of wills to see how long I can hold out before actually springing for a new pair. It comes down to (more or less) “when do my wet feet bug me enough to drop three bills to fix it?”
Once that day comes, though, then I get the additional battle of choosing where I place my mark on the scale between “walking comfort” and “protection” since the two are really kind of mutually exclusive ideas in a motorcycle boot: for walking you want flexibility; for protection you want not flexibility.
I could replace it with (essentially) the same boot I’ve got now which is one I’d really feel OK about crashing in, or I could go to something more walkable but with more flex and less armor.
Can’t have everything, sadly, but I figure either way I’m still doing better than most of the people I see riding around here…
Tags: motorcycle
Apparently I left my first “fat bike on a hot parking lot” footprint yesterday.
I’ve been parking on the blacktop spaces right next to the front door recently since they’ve been open and the concrete pad for motorcycle parking is all the way at the back of the lot.
When I pulled in this morning, I put my kickstand down, got off the bike, looked down and said, “How odd – an inch-deep hole in the asphalt of the exact same shape as my kickstand foot.” I thought about that for a second, put my gloves back on and went back to park on the concrete instead.
Well, I hate to admit it, but iTunes is earning its keep so far. Once I actually figured out how to subscribe to a podcast that’s not in the iTunes store (which is blocked at work, it seems, since iTunes gripes when I open it up…)(bizarrely hidden under the “advanced” menu) and then once I figured out how to tell it to download stuff (hint: the “play”-shaped icon next to your podcast name isn’t the “play podcast” button – it’s the “expand the contents” button) it seems to cook right along.
iTunes is downloading as we speak. I finally got sick of the behavior of all the podcast downloaders that I’d tried.
- Juice would start downloading 4 or 5 files and then stall out randomly and not resume.
- Winamp doesn’t do anything without brute force methods.
- Doppler won’t queue more than 2 files at a go and locks up the UI for 15 seconds here and there whenever it has to think hard.
My use case is this: I find something I want to hear and then I want to pull down 10 or 15 files to get the whole thing. Shouldn’t be hard, but apparently I’d be wrong.
I am worried that iTunes is going to take over my whole computer and make my life miserable with Quicktime (utter resource hogging piece of cruft that it is). I don’t need a media manager, I don’t need another playback tool, I really don’t need the iTunes Store, all I want is to bulk-download a batch of podcast MP3 files.
Because nobody else is in the office today (mostly – we’re technically closed for business this week), I decided to see what natural light was like. Typically, everybody keeps the windowshades on my side of the building closed (mostly because our A/C system isn’t really up to the challenge) so it’s pretty dark and dreary if I don’t feel like turning on the overhead lights.
I must say, though – with the nice indirect light from the West-facing windows, it’s quite pleasant in here.
Arkansas - dead ahead!
Ok, so I finally got my photos from the Memorial Day trip up to Flickr. There’s not a lot of them, sadly – it was either too much fun riding to stop or stopping in the middle of a rainstorm wouldn’t have been fun enough. Either way, I’ll try and do better next time.
All the photos from this trip are in my Motorcycle Trips set, beginning right here.
World Domination, that’s what they’re after. And money. Can’t have one without the other, you know.
The way they plan to get both is through owning your soul (or, at least, all of your personal data, your eyeballs and your friends and that’s really just as good as a soul to them).
Bad juju lies in that direction, people. The Beacon and terms-0f-service issues show you where they want to go, they just have to find the right way to sneak it up on it.
Also, their plan as a whole is questionable. There’s the little problem (as mentioned also in the story comments) that my circle of friends is nearly useless for most of the things that I need to know about in a “now” kind of way. Sorry, Facebook, but you lose to Google’s big ol’ index of publicly-available knowledge for everything except “what was the name of that restaurant you were talking about last week?”. If I need the syntax for some command in the Windows API, posting it up on my “wall” and hoping one of my programmer friends happens to check and respond to it is a whopping big “fail” of a plan.
We won another softball game last night, but it was kind of a hollow victory. The opposing team showed up remarkably short-handed, fielding only 6 players, 4 of whom were women. Even though we backed off to holding our players to nothing more than singles in the last inning, we still got an 18-? mercy-rule decision after the 4th inning.
In related news, this game and all of our remaining three games are at Lee Martinez Park, Fort Collins’ own “Mosquito Preserve and Cultural Center”. That’ll be “fun”. This is also a park with no shade for the dugouts, so it’s going to make for a character-building experience.
In a close 5-4 decision, it appears that the Supreme Court finally did something right.
Newsflash, folks: America is a land of equal opportunity, not a land of equal results.
It will be interesting to see how (as noted in the last paragraph of the article) Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor answers the questions that will inevitably arise out of this ruling during her hearings. She’s got a history of having some… interesting opinions on how things should work for minority groups.
Tags: government, politics, race
The article doesn’t mention whether that advice consists of “just put it on your credit card and deal with it later”.
This is actually a double-indictment of CSU’s policies: their current shining example of $400M construction deficit and the fact that they let all those credit card companies loose on the plaza every year to try and convince freshmen to trade their financial future for a t-shirt.
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