This is a photo of the Earth, taken by Voyager 1 at a distance of over 6 billion kilometers. the Earth is the little bright spot in the upper right; probably about 4–8 pixels: A bit of eloquence once written about that photo: Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

December 21, 2010 is the winter solstice this year, the shortest day of the year, and the first day of winter. the moon will be full. In the early morning, the full moon will be passing directly through the northern half of the darkest part of the Earth’s shadow (the umbra), i.e., a full lunar eclipse will be visible to almost all of North America! The eclipse starts at 12:30 AM Eastern Standard Time (Tuesday morning).

the moon using the new 8mm eyepiece (56x magnification).

Jupiter in the backyard. These 2 shots were taken with the new 8mm eyepiece (56x magnification). This pic was taken with the ISO set to auto and no exposure compensation. managed to pick up some of Jupiter’s bands. adjusted the ISO to 400, and got the moons, but too bright to see the bands.

Mesa Verde, Colorado. The bright star is Altair. this was a 2 second exposure.

Just held the digital camera to the eyepiece and shot some pictures. To get the moon to come out at all, I set a custom white balance, turned exposure compensation down as far as it would go (to -2). the exposure time was only 1⁄6 s. this is jupiter. the 4 smaller blurry dots are the 4 ‘gallilean’ moons (the 4 largest moons that galilleo could see with his telescope in the 16th century).

A friend asked me to go test drive some BMW cars while he was getting the oil changed in his 528. I ended up driving the only car they had on the lot with a manual transmission, a 328 with no options whatsoever. I knew right away this car was not for me. granted, it was the base model, with the less-powerful engine, but I also didn’t like the seating position or the shifter.

The headlight is working again. After taking off the front bumper and removing the driver’s side headlight, I had to completely disassemble the headlight itself to change out the ballast. The ballast itself was accessible via a panel on the bottom of the headlight, but the part which plugged in to the bulb wouldn’t fit between the reflector and the body of the headlight. I needed to remove the lens off the front, which was mainly secured by silicone sealant.

After leaving the Phoenix International Auto Show, the RX-8 wouldn’t start! We went and had lunch, then bought jumper cables. When we went to hook up the jumper cables, we realized the negative battery cable was loose! I didn’t do a good job re-tightening it after trying to fix the headlight. I returned the jumper cables. I’d like to buy a trickle charger someday.

The driver’s side headlight stopped working. Oddly, for a brief time it worked sometimes but not others. Without stopping to think, I ordered new headlight bulbs. Once they arrived, I removed the driver’s side wheelwell and reached in to change the bulb. [caption id=“attachment_19298” align=“alignnone” width=“224” caption=“reaching in through the wheelwell”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19299” align=“alignnone” width=“224” caption=“I disconnected the battery before starting this.”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19300” align=“alignnone” width=“224” caption=“Behind the warning panel: The plug with the NASA-looking cable is connected to the now-infamous ballast”][/caption]

The SCCA club brought a set of scales to the last autocross. The car had a full tank of gas and also had the spare tire and jack in the trunk. left front right 926 1880 954 Total: 3324 722 1445 723 left rear right

We went camping in the woods near sedona (yes, in the mustang).

The big sand dunes west of Yuma in eastern California

A friend asked me to go test drive some BMW cars while he was getting the oil changed in his 528. I ended up driving the only car they had on the lot with a manual transmission, a 328 with no options whatsoever. I knew right away this car was not for me. granted, it was the base model, with the less-powerful engine, but I also didn’t like the seating position or the shifter.

Before the release of iOS 13, Joy and I used a shared Apple Reminders list called “Grocery” to keep our grocery list in. I’ve found the Reminders app to be completely broken for me now in iOS 13. I can’t get my phone, ipad, and icloud.com to agree on which lists I have. Apple has explicitly stated sharing a list is broken in iOS 13: Sharing a Reminders list using the Add People function does not work currently in iOS 13.

I have long been a fan of the Vesper martini, using the recipe published in the Vesper app by Q Branch: 3 oz Tanqueray Ten 1 oz Belvedere or Stolichnaya .5 oz Lillet Blanc Belvedere was my vodka of choice. At my father-in-law’s house, I found myself elected to make martinis. Now, my wife’s dad favors vodka martinis, which I’ve never had success with. His vodka is Chopin, a Polish potato-based vodka.

Complications work much better with WatchOS 2 (I’m on 2.2). No more rebooting the watch to get the sunset time. But Apps are still slow. WatchOS 2 brought color to the complications on the Utility face. Most complications look nice with color, but the Sunrise, Stopwatch, and Timer are a hideous orange, which forces me to set the second hand to match. So instead of using my favorite yellow second hand:

Yes. Oh yes. This is the best thing ever. I downloaded Crystal and probably buy peace soon too. I can’t say enough about the web on my iPhone with these things turned on.

After five weeks with apple watch, here are some thoughts on the various faces. Note: when I refer to a half complication, below, I’m talking about the one which will only show the date, the day of the week and the date, or nothing. Chronograph The chronograph face allows four-and-a-half complications and is one of my favorite faces, thanks to discretely small hour-indicator numbers, beautiful hands and layout, and one-tap access to start the chronograph (which is mission-critical on my wrist!

I’m looking forward to the day when apple allows all iOS apps to show information in their icons, like the apple calendar and clock apps do. Just a number badge is so boring in our modern world!

I’ve had trouble with one of my macs not syncing to iCloud. Specifically, if I update a document on my second mac, it goes to iCloud just fine (I can see the updates on iCloud.com, my iPhone, and my iPad) but I don’t get the update on my first mac. The best workaround I’ve found is to make sure both macs are awake and online when a document is modified. it seems if a mac is offline and misses the new data push from iCloud, the mac never requests new data from iCloud.

I’ve now turned off background app refresh for all apps. I didn’t realize, at first, that background app refresh could be disabled. It can, though, on a per-app or global basis. so I turned it off completely.

I noticed my phone having shorter battery life and staying warm when I wasn’t using it. In Settings > Privacy > Location Services I disallowed the Facebook app from being able to use my location. Problem seems to be solved. My iphone now stays at room temperature when I’m not using it. How did I decide to turn off location services for Facebook? iOS 7 added a feature allowing apps to occasionally update in the background.

With the 7.1 update, I’m much more comfortable with iOS 7. I no longer miss iOS 6. The updated lock screen and phone apps are the best touches. I especially like the new effects when waking up or turning off the screen: a subtle, super-fast zoom in on wake and zoom out on sleep. Making the transition animations shorter is also nice, everything feels snappier because of it. The new calendar app looks nice but is still clunky from a usability perspective.

FAA is finally going to allow electronics during takeoff and landing. I’ve been cheating with my iPhone, iPad, and laptop for as long as I’ve had said devices, so I’m glad to hear I’ll soon be able to stop looking over my shoulder for nagging airline attendants while doing so!

Welcome to the new DMZ.

I’ve been quite thrilled with the new 15” macbook pro I got at work, with one hitch … it often goes to sleep randomly when running on battery. Even while I’m typing. I finally figured out why. My new money clip wallet has an inordinately strong magnet in it.

A GTD FAQ OmniFocus on the iPad

I never cared about having a “to-do list”. My style of “task management” used to be to keep in my head the most important things I needed to do and not worry about the rest. A nice, simple system. Unfortunately, I’d often find myself driving to work, realizing I’d left something at home I meant to take with me. Ever have that feeling where you sit down at the computer, ready to look something up you were excited to research, only to realize you forgot what it was?

I set up mail.app on Mountain Lion with all my accounts, including the Apple ID I used with MobileMe. The result was nearly every operation in mail.app resulted in a minute or two of the spinning beach ball. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I noticed errors in the Console.app referring to my MobileMe’s apple id, so I deleted that account completely from Mail.app and now it all works great!

MacVim now supports OS X’s full screen mode! Awesome.

Did you get the iPhoto app for iPhone and iPad yet? I did, and was disappointed at first. Until I read this iPhoto review. Now I love to use iPhoto to winnow my multiple shots of the same scene down to one and only one photo. I favorite the winner, then delete all of them from camera roll. iPhoto saves its own copy of any photo you favorite or edit.

Apple maintains a table mapping your Apple ID to your iOS devices (probably by serial number but possibly by SIM card). When you sell an iOS device, you should first turn off iMessage before restoring the software. If you forget, though, or your iOS device is stolen, an alternative way to disable iMessages on the device is to go to apple’s support page, log in with your Apple id, and you’ll see all the devices apple has associated with that Apple ID.

In an attempt to plan more laptop-less trips, I wanted to get a few critical spreadsheets onto the iPad: the budget spreadsheet, and the car fuel-and-maintenance-tracking spreadsheets. I exported them out of gnumeric in the Microsoft Excel 97/2000/XP format and imported them into Numbers ‘09 on my MacBook. Numbers threw open a sheet saying it didn’t have the fonts referenced in the spreadsheet and allowed me to pick new fonts. I spent a bit of time cleaning up formatting.

A coworker’s mac just suffered a hard drive failure, causing me to urgently want to plug in all my Time Machine backup drives again. I recently plugged a new external drive into my mac mini, to store movies on to be streamed through the apple tv. the mac mini only has two usb ports, and the other port was in use for the keyboard and mouse. so I unplugged the keyboard and mouse and plugged in the time machine drive.

Flickstacker is the best flickr iOS app I’ve found yet, especially for uploading.

I got a call out of the blue today from a head hunter trying to fill a job opening. I’ll take this as a good sign.

Modern internet routers contain so much buffering of packets they defeat TCP’s congestion algorithms. The end result is high latency on your broadband connection. If your home router runs linux, you can mitigate this latency using QOS (i.e., traffic shaping). My home broadband connection is rated at 12Mbps down, 1Mbps up. Using the CBQ script from the Linux QOS howto (linked above), I set the upload speed parameter to 3⁄4 of my available bandwidth, and the download speed parameter to 13⁄16.

I think my cablemodem is wearing out again. this one is about 1.25 years old. youtube and netflix streaming performance has deteriorated rapidly over the last month, and is now unusable. here’s the current speed test:

long story short, replacing just the screen wasn’t sufficient. the home key was still activating spuriously. I went back to the apple store and they finally gave me a new phone. I had only 22 days left on the warranty!

I got another appointment at a genius bar. after telling the long story, and heading him off at the pass when he started to tell me to reset it to factory defaults and not restore, he replaced the screen. I think the phantom home key presses are gone, but it might have happened during a phone call once, last night. we’ll see.

I dropped my iPhone on a sidewalk in December, shattering the screen. Apple sold me a new one for $200. After I restored my backup to the new phone, within a couple weeks the iPhone started pressing the home button by itself. That is, it would jump out of whatever app I was in, then jump back and forth between the first page of the home screen and the search page.

My experience with the iPad was surprising. Some of the things I expected to not care about turned out to be impressive, and some features I was excited about wound up as letdowns. Enough generalities, let me get down to details. First, I was prepared for heft after reading many comments castigating the mass of the iPad. I found the iPad to be just right! For its size, I think its weight speaks of solidity and perhaps even quality.

oh, I almost forgot something fairly important… my mercurial I installed in my home directory still works, and X11 apps I installed via fink (like gnucash and gnumeric) still work in Snow Leopard without having to recompile them. I suspect as long as the binaries you have were compiled with an x86 target at all, it will probably still run without recompiling, just in 32-bit mode.

I updated my macbook to Snow Leopard tonight. I went to run my little C-type sizeof program, and found out that I hadn’t recompiled it since I was running on a PPC. rosetta doesn’t install by default in Snow Leopard. so I went to re-compile it only to find out gcc had gone missing. all I had to do was install the new XCode on the Snow Leopard DVD, and then download the iphone SDK 3.

I needed to write some code to find out my local machine’s IP address. I wanted to tell another machine my IP address so that other machine could open a socket connection back to my machine. A little googling turned up some sample code which works on both Linux and Mac OS X. Also I fiddled around with that code and condensed it down a bit.

A new version of Debian stable has been released! My firewall machine, entropy, is currently running the “old” Debian stable (etch). Sometime soon I’ll update to the new stable release, Debian 5.0 Lenny. Just for reference, here is how I will update: edit /etc/apt/sources.list, change all occurrences of etch to lenny, then run these commands as root: aptitude update aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude aptitude full-upgrade when it is done, then I’ll have to reboot to start using the new kernel.

I’ve been looking for some programs to restore functionality I lost when I left kde 3.5. glipper is an ok clipboard history application. although each entry only gets 99 characters. liferea is almost as good an RSS Reader as akregator-kde3 (and MUCH better than akregator-kde4). evolution is a mixed bag. it’s great for contacts, calendars, and imap, but LDAP won’t work, so no corporate address book, which is going to be a problem.

the first one I tried, liferea, has most of the good points from the kde 3.5 akregator: feeds with unread articles stand out with bold text, and the number of unread articles is tucked up next to the title. if there are no unread articles, there is no number. simple yet effective and readable at a glance.

I can’t believe I’m typing this. I’m logged in with gnome as my desktop. I’m going to use it on all my computers for the next few days or a week and see how it goes. KDE4 bothers me this much. KDE4 keeps getting better, but I believe it will take at least another year to reach the polish of KDE 3.5. and I’m finding that in ubuntu, gnome is actually MORE polished than my beloved KDE 3.

Let me start off by saying that CVS and Subversion are both outdated systems that no one in their right mind should use for a new project. (If you are starting a new project, I would recommend managing your source code with Mercurial). Unfortunately, I have in the past been forced to use CVS, and I am now forced to use Subversion. I had hoped that Subversion would truly be an upgrade over CVS, since Subversion promises merge tracking.

I’ve gotten in the habit of playing music on my big stereo via iTunes running on my Mac. A handy remote control for this is the Apple-created iPhone app called “Remote”. it looks like an ipod on your phone, but it’s controlling an iTunes running on a Mac over the network. It works well enough, but not perfectly. Lag time between waking up the iPhone and being able to control iTunes is in the neigborhood of 5 seconds, which is an eternity when you’re used to instant digital gratification.

I would like to switch away from using quicksilver to using spotlight for all my searching; it will be simpler to use one interface instead of two. QuickSilver does quite a few things that spotlight will not do (and vice versa). but most of the things I want to do are covered by spotlight, with one notable and nearly fatal exception: searching for saved Terminal.app session files. I ssh to other machines often, and I set up a saved terminal session for each machine.

I unfortunately have some songs I bought from the itunes music store using the FairPlay DRM. I know, I know, that was a mistake. well now I’m stuck with about 55 songs I can’t play in linux, and I have to worry about making sure I don’t run out of the 5 auths for my macs (which is a much more serious and likely scenario) some songs can be ‘upgraded’ for 30 cents to a non-drm version (and a higher sampling rate too).

I’ve been trying to display stuff in full screen mode from my mac on my television which accepts VGA input. After plugging in the cable, going through setting up the display in system preferences, I was easily able to make the TV be a second screen sitting next to my macbook’s built in lcd. So then I moved a preview.app window over to the television (drug it over using the mouse).

I’m running Mac OS X version 10.5 (leopard), and I’ve install xcode 3.1. I need gnumeric and gnucash, which I use to track my finances. The current stable rsync version of fink contains gnumeric 1.8.1-3 and gnucash 2.2.5-52, both of which are close enough to the versions I have in Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Intrepid Ibex to be useable. gnumeric and its dependencies compiled and installed fine. the gnucash2 package, however, failed building some dependent library.

I bought a new cablemodem. Each morning this week, the cablemodem was down until lunch time. last night it went down too. today it never came back on. From what I hear, they actually wear out slowly and sporadically… they will just start getting flakey, rather than die all at once. The old cablemodem was still flashing orange lights when I unplugged it and put the new one in. it took a couple minutes for the new one to get all

I was doing stuff on my computer tonight at home, then I realized I had updated my calendar at work but hadn’t pushed the changes to the server (I did a git commit, but not a git push, I was in a hurry to leave to pick up aiden from school). no prob, I thought, I’ll just log in to the vpn, get on my computer at work (fission), and push the changes.

now I’m thinking about re-building my server too, after the successes with my workstation and laptop. for this one, I would get a new, big hard drive, and do the install on it, then copy all the files over. first step will be to shop for hard drives; they are cheap now, but I hope they still make the kind I need for my server, which is a turn of the century model.

I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for years…. my computer desk has a shelf on it to put the monitor on. which means a person sitting at the desk is looking up at the monitor, rather than slightly down. which meant I couldn’t sit at the desk for more than 10 minutes. Tonight I spent an hour and half, moving the monitor, re-routing a dozen cables, and taking the shelf off.

I decided to go ahead and do a fresh install of kubuntu gutsy gibbon on my work laptop too. the main motivation was to utilize the disk space better. I wanted to eliminate some little or not-at-all used partitions, and I was almost out of space in my /work partition. this install went almost as smooth as on Jupiter, but the laptop has a lot more software on it and a lot more requirements.

upon reading that the newest ubuntu release, gutsy gibbon, had support in the installer for encrypted partitions, I decided it was time to do an install from scratch on my workstation, Jupiter. Jupiter was running fiesty fawn, and the whole disk was encrypted, but I practically had to roll my own initial ramdisk to get it set up, and I doubted that would make it through a dist-upgrade to gutsy without some serious intervention.

so debian etch is totally rocking. It was a fun experience just reading the installation manual. The manual was impressive, I’ve not seen a work which conveyed so much information in so little words. Let me explain what I mean by that; I, as an expert Linux user, found the directions extremely helpful, easy to follow, with just the right amount of hints along the way. However, a Linux newb would be hopelessly lost.

got debian etch booted on entropy. the only problem I had was I tried at first to use lilo. several years ago, grub wouldn’t work on this machine, and I had to use lilo. Rembering that, I tried to install lilo from the get-go. but the complication of installing lilo into the second hard drive on the system so it would later boot as the first drive were a bit much.

My 90Mhz pentium named entropy has been my firewall machine (running iptables and a dns server) for quite a while now, without any trouble. unfortunately, it’s really been bothering me. why? because it was running Gentoo Linux, and had become un-upgradeable. it was at the point where nothing could be upgraded without first upgrading gcc, but the gcc build apparently requires 2gb of memory and/or swap space. Entropy has 128MB of ram, and a 4GB disk, not enough space to make a 2GB swap file without re-partitioning and doing a re-install.

Installed an Audio Link in my car. this adds an ipod dock connector in my glove compartment. It keeps the ipod charged, and also pipes the music through the cd change connector on the back of my head unit. The car thinks the ipod is a cd changer! (which has cd with thousands of songs on them) the steering wheel controls will change tracks, and the head unit itself can select between the first 5 playlists on the ipod, as well as fast forward and rewind within a song.

you, too, can upgrade to edgy

edgy eft was released today! (Ubuntu Linux version 6.10) my thinkpad is downloading about 996mb spread amongst 1500 new software packages right now as part of the dist-upgrade! for the curious, a photo of an eft

well, it’s been 3 weeks, and the new ups I exchanged has worked perfectly so far (no sudden computer shutdowns). I’m ready to tenatively declare success. my first one must have been bad.

the optical drive on my ibook is dead. I was going to burn a cd today. the drive opened normally, but when I closed the door it didn’t want to latch. once I finally got it to latch, it wouldn’t see the blank cd I had put in. then it wouldn’t eject. got out a pin, stuck it in the manual eject hole, and the display went dark. hmm. eventually got the disc out, and booted up again.

the Tripplite OMNI1000LCD UPS which I had raven (my server) plugged in to was still shutting off on me. at this point, I had one computer, 1 ethernet switch, 1 ethernet hub, and a kvm switch plugged into the battery. it should be able to handle that. then I moved the little stuff off battery, leaving only the computer. Even then, I’ve had it power off. Today I exchanged the UPS for another one (same model) hoping that perhaps the one I got was bad.

I like KDE, and one of the reasons I prefer it over something like GNOME is the IOSlaves framework (fish is one of my favorites). basically, any part of kde can interact with any type of data or protocol as long as someone has written an IOSlave to handle it. a very powerful paradigm, which gives you lots of functionality in suprising places, much of which is unduplicated on any platform (yes, including Windows and Mac OS X).

in the last few years, I’ve not had a power outage last more than a second. but that second wreaks havoc with the kvm switch, and also Raven (AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.33GHz, server) tends not to boot after a power outage because of the kvm being weird. so a 1 second (or less) power loss usually results in nearly an hour of unplugging and replugging kvm cables to get the kvm going again.

my poor ibook g3, after 5 hours of surgery last night and this morning, is a changed computer. the ibook had long suffered from a bad gpu connection on the logic board, resulting in a mostly unreadable display. now, thanks to some web insight, a nice slab of copper (thank you, Chelby), and a cabinet door bumper, the ibook display is perfect again. I took advantage of the disassembly requirement to replace the hard drive, with a slightly fast and larger capacity drive.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve switch Linux distributions, from gentoo to ubuntu. I was having too many hassles with gentoo. anyway, I was searching the gentoo forums to try to solve a problem on one of the left-over gentoo machines at work, and stumbled across this thread (don’t bother reading past the first page). sounds like others are leaving too.

turns out nine inch nails is tied with depeche mode as my favorite band. here’s my top 10 highest rated bands. the number is how many songs by that artist made it into my top 82 songs: nine inch nails: 8 depeche mode: 8 madonna: 5 van halen: 4 tori amos: 3 beastie boys: 3 alice in chains: 3 aerosmith: 3 the white stripes: 2 prince: 2

my wife’s ibook suffered a fatal hard drive failure. last time we backed it up to the imac was in december. :( among the data lost was her calendar (ical) and addressbook. I had a copy of her calendar (so I can know when she’s busy :) but not the addressbook. fortunately, we were syncing her contacts and calendars to her ipod, and that had last been done only 2 weeks ago.

it seems like I won’t be a Gentoo Linux user for much longer. My server (Gentoo Linux) has suffered a lot of problems lately. I think that Gentoo now has too many packages and too few developers. pretty much any update I’ve done in the last 6 months on any of the 6 or so computers I maintain has caused non-trivial problems. I’ve now changed my server, my work machine, and my desktop machine over to ubuntu.

I’ve had an ipod for a while now and knew about the ‘my highest rated’ smart playlist, but it was just a few days ago that I actually looked at it. sometimes while listening to the ipod at work, if a good song came up I’d rate it somewhere between 1 and 5 stars. I’m pretty conservative with the 5-star rating; to get five stars, you have to be a song that I expect I’ll never get tired of.

Gentoo is my favorite Linux distribution. However, I recently tried out ubuntu which bills itself as Linux for Human Beings''. Ubuntu definitely has that OS X feeling ofit just works”. if you want to try out Linux, or you are a hard-core linux geek tired of fiddling with settings, ubuntu is definitely nice. since it’s debian based, you only have to install once, and upgrades are typically painless. out of all the obscure programs I use, I’ve only run in to 2 which weren’t available in ubuntu.

I’ve spent way too much time playing with gnu arch (tla) and git lately. if you are simply tracking source code, I’d recommend using git. if you are making changes to a project someone else maintains, and you periodically want to submit patches to the upstream maintainer, and so are constantly needing to re-sync and re-apply your unaccepted patches, git is again my recommendation. if however you have gone off the deep end like me, and you are maintaining multiple branches of a project, you routinely merge some patches in some of the branches, but some patches must not end up in the other branches, then gnu arch (tla) is the only way to manage that.

oops, turns out stat has been rolled into GNU coreutils, and the version there compiles and runs fine in OS X. oh well, it kept me entertained at the airport.

I got the linux ‘stat’ system call wrapper working in OS X. Here it is

today is the anniversary of my birth. The best part will be going to see the Zoo lights wife my wife and son. The stable linux kernel 2.6.0 was released late last night, just in time. I installed it on most of my computers today. [caption id=“attachment_19002” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“ocotillo running Linux kernel 2.6.0, and KDE desktop”][/caption] I even have moderator access on slashdot today! Can’t get any better than this.

now aol.com won’t accept email from me anymore either. oh well, just added aol.com to the paranoid domains list

I’ve just started using mediacom’s cable modem service. Sprint Broadband has been quite slow for the past few months, and are taking on no new customers. I could see the writing on the wall. So far, so good. mediacom is definitely faster. The DNS change seems to have propagated much quicker than expected. Only around 4 hours for me to see the change, and for email to start arriving at desertsol.

roadrunner (rr.com) just started a global policy that all email originating from a residential'' IP address is rejected, the assumption being that it's an open relay or virus infested. My IP of course isresidential” so all emails chelby sent to her friend in San Diego (san.rr.com) were bounced. Now my exim setup has a special rule for ``paranoid domains”. Mail to be delivered to any of the domains in that list are relayed through my ISP’s SMTP server rather than being delivered directly.

All partitions (except /boot) are now reiserfs on my ibook. I’ve seen a huge increase in performance for ‘qpkg’, and ‘emerge’. qpkg is faster than epm now! Also, someone just created a patch for the ppc linux kernel so the touchpad can emulate a scrollwheel like in OS X.

synergy is a great app! When you have multiple computers and they each have their own monitor. It’s even cross-platform, so I use it at work. My main machine is for development and runs gentoo linux. I also have a windows 2000 machine for outlook and project central. Synergy allows my to cut and past between the two machines, and use my linux machine’s keyboard and mouse to control both machines.

I’ve been slowly migrating all my file systems to ReiserFS, away from ext3. I haven’t bothered to do any benchmarking of my own, I’m trusting everyone else’s benchmarks. the scary one is my ibook; there are rumors of ReiserFS instability on ppc. So far I just switched the /data partition. I keep pictures, mp3s, and my ccache there, all data which is expendable or also resides somewhere else. I’m doing some emerging on the machine lately, as well as development for work, so ccache is getting lots of access.

just switched all my systems to use metalog rather than syslog-ng for system logs. Once you take the time to read the metalog docs, it’s much more straightforward than the other loggers I’ve used. plus it buffers all the output for ‘high performance’. the only real benefit I hope to achieve from that is that perhaps my laptop hard drive will stay turned off longer. when you need to debug something, you can turn off the buffering with ‘killall -USR1 metalog’ and back on with ‘killall -USR2 metalog’

Somebody in the army had a great idea for using some of their advertising budget. They created a combat simulation video game called America’s Army! Apparently it’s so good that all West Point cadets are issued a laptop with the game installed. and of course you can play over the net. and it’s free since it’s an advertisement! They just created a linux port of the game, and an OS X version is on the way.

so having used zsh for a while, I’m definitely glad I changed. my only irritant is that when I hit ‘escape’ then the ‘/’ key to search in my history, I have to pause for 0.4 seconds between the two so zsh uses the search history meaning for that key combo rather than the generic completion meaning. There is a shell variable that allows you to adjust the interval: KEYTIMEOUT. have to try that with 0.

so I just dropped tcsh in favor of zsh. I’d been thinking of doing it for a long time, mainly because I knew that zsh’s command line vi mode is much better than tcsh’s. the ‘.’ for repeating your last command works, the cut buffer works (so the classic ‘xp’ for transposing characters works), and you can even use ‘marks’ in your history. But I haven’t even looked into all the completions that zsh is famous for, and I’ve already found lots of nice features tcsh didn’t have.

we’re flying home in the morning for my wife’s baby shower number 1 (or baby shower east if you prefer). We decided not to bring our laptops since it’s only a few days and taking it on the plane is a big hassle. I spent several days psyching myself up to this idea. Now I’m excited about reading on the plane rather than playing with my laptop. But today Chelby realized she needs to bring her laptop so she can show pictures to everyone at the shower!

I’ve solved all my backspace problems! it turns out that all my earlier attempts to fix the backspace key eventually became the problem. modern terminals all handle backspace correctly. Once I removed all ‘stty erase’ commands from all my rc files, the backspace began to work correctly in all environments, windows, linux, OS X, console, ssh, etc. I worked very hard to give myself so much trouble!

I have an excuse this time for not updating in so long: my wife got tired of me using her laptop and got me one! So I’ve been quite consumed installing Linux on it and setting up Mac OS X.

I’m trying out a new version of KDE. I try to dabble with different environments, just to see what they’re like. I still haven’t found anything to lure me away from blackbox, but this new kde has come the closest yet. First off, this is by far the fastest KDE I’ve seen! It feels an order of magnitude faster than KDE 3.0.3 was. Usually, KDE has been slow as a dog for me, but calling it ‘snappy’ now enters the realm of possibility.

For some reason, the backspace key has been a persistent issue for me. At first, the line ‘stty erase ^h’ in my .tcshrc file gave me a good backspace, instead of the ‘^h’s showing up when I hit the backspace key. Then when Redhat 7.1 came out, my backspace wouldn’t work in vim anymore, when I ran it in an xterm. It turned out that in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/XTerm they put this line: *VT100*backarrowKey: false when I changed it to true, my backspace key worked again.

I really dig cryptography. It’s quite a concept that I can scramble some data in such a way that if I got electrocuted tomorrow, no one would be able to read the data for at least a few decades (and that’s assuming a fundamental mathematical breakthrough). The main two algorithms I use to explicitly encrypt data are RC4 (in the form of my own ciphersabers) and rijndael (AES) in the form of a kernel loop back device.

At my new job, I have to learn VAX assembly language, in order to port an app to C++, linux, and even (shudder) windoze. I have done a bit of assembly programming before, but never on a VAX. the VAX has instructions for handling linked lists!! can you say ‘Complex Instruction Set’?? But the reason I’m posting this is to record the feeling I’ve been getting this week as I learn the new language.

gentoo also has another client with it, called ‘kluje’. Despite the name, I like it better than logjam.

this entry is in logjam. After I followed the link from the livejournal page for gtk+ clients and saw the client was called logjam, I checked to see if gentoo had an ebuild for it with ‘emerge -s logjam’. for some reason there were two, so I picked the newer one and installed it with ‘emerge net-misc/logjam’. I’m amazed every day at gentoo linux

I can’t believe my account still works! time to go download a client.

there is finally an rpm up for gnumeric-0.65 on www.rpmfind.net. Getting it to install took several trips back to rpmfind to fill in newer or missing rpms. Beware! the liconv and libgal7 ximian rpms installed all their stuff in /opt/gnome instead of /usr like a sane rpm should. I made /opt be a symlink to /usr, and then symlinked the libraries in /usr/gnome back to /usr/lib. My main spreadsheet program used to be the one from star office, but it was annoying to put up with star office’s HUGE memory footprint just to get a spreadsheet.

A new version of jpilot for syncing your palm pilot in linux is out.

got the new mozilla working today (0.9.1) in linux. This release is a tremendous step forward! Renders html as fast as opera, but the result looks better. I had trouble getting the java plugin to work at first, it turned out I had an rpm installed of an earlier milestone. Once I removed the old version, the new version worked fine. Here’s my resulting install process: Download the newest binary (here).

here’s a url: the perl script I’m using to post this with

You get to decide how you feel. This is a technique I learned once, for use when I am faced with a choice of (thinking unpleasant thoughts or having a bad mood or feeling down) or of feeling good. It works for me. This came from Mindful Loving. Whenever you have a thought or emotion that disturbs your peace: identify and call out the thought: think to yourself “oh, this is one of THOSE disturbing thoughts!

wrecked the bike today. Taking the ramp from 202W to 101N, I wasn’t paying attention. I saw slow traffic in front of me, then realized it was stopped, not slow, grabbed the front brake while still turning, and highsided. good thing I was wearing full gear. I still scraped my knee. my right hand is swollen, bruised, and sore. my left shoulder is very sore, along with both knees. Bike is totalled.

Got the bike out again, put gas in it, and took a little shakedown ride. Got to watch lightning all over the valley, in front of me all the way from the south to the north as I headed west from home. Fortunately all the rain was well to the west of me. Went and got cash, fish tacos, and a vanilla coke. I could tell I hadn’t ridden in a while!

Today marked the last fill-up on gas for the summer. I rode this tank out, and the ninja has been sitting in my garage with the low-fuel light flashing ever since. I’ve moved it into the driveway and back into the garage about twice just to keep the battery going. maybe I should look into a trickle charger for next summer.

Headed home today, back through Globe to AJ. The ninja odometer claims a total of 967.8 miles from Friday through today. total ride, including all destinations we rode to+to:1104+S+Central+Ave,+Safford,+AZ+85546+to:Alpine,+Arizona+to:Mule+Creek,+New+Mexico+to:1104+s+central+ave,+safford,+az+to:937+W+15th+Ave,+Apache+Junction,+AZ+85220&hl=en&geocode=%3BFRbn9AEdKvB1-Q%3BFT-v9AEdalJ3-SGn9Grj4b5htA%3BFRbn9AEdKvB1-SEEPB6btEKcFw%3B%3BFWDTCAIdgqJ8-SEB1h2mz-NLyg%3BFUoMDAId4FeI-Q%3B%3B%3BFYSZ9AEdthV6-SEV4jg-aKCDRw%3B%3B%3B%3B%3B&mra=ls&sll=33.56787,-110.030465&sspn=2.480639,4.597778&ie=UTF8&z=8) Google says 987 miles. My odometer is up to 7491 miles total.

Brian, Dan, and I set out much earlier (left at 8:30 instead of 10), rode to Clifton, AZ, and from there attacked the “Tail of the Beast”; US191 from Morenci to Alpine. This road used to be designated US666 and was affectionately known as “The Devil’s Road”. [caption id=“attachment_19265” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“96 Miles of curves”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19266” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“The road curves through the Apache National Forest.”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19267” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“We reach 8100 feet; it was cold!

Got going about 10am, got gas, rode to Springerville via highway 180 in New Mexico. Some high elevation on the way, up to 7000 feet, so we saw lots of pine trees. Just before Springerville we hit incredibly strong winds. Parked at Los Dos Molinos in Springerville, I was worried the bike would fall over. It was even worse trying to get gas after lunch. From Springerville, we rode on to Quemado, NM, then cut over on NM32 to Apache Creek, through Reserve, NM, and then rejoined 180 and went back to Safford the way we had come from there.

Headed out towards globe. There was a small airport on the reservation just past globe, with some interesting old airplanes. After that brief stop, on to Olney House in Safford. Brian arrived a few minutes before me. The proprietor graciously offered parking in the back yard.

Just rode to work and back.

I had a service appointment for the ninja at 9 so I only had time to ride up to the first overlook on highway 88. Went much faster this time. On the way back down, I was taking one of the “15 mph” right-handers, and scraped my right foot! This indicates to me that I’m getting the bike leaned over. I dropped it off at the dealer with 6461 miles on the odometer.

Rode up to tortilla flats and back on highway 88, need practice on the curves. This was a great practice ride, starting to get the idea. After tortilla flats, I rode back down and then straight on to work. Got in three other shorter rides today, rode about 200 miles total today!

Took a long ride in preparation for a road trip next weekend. Rode about 55miles, all highway riding.

Paid off. Time to sell it! Today the Odometer is showing 6170 miles. I won’t be riding it for about a week. usually I put about 120–180 miles a week on it.

I put the liners in, and it made a huge difference. I still need to get new gloves, my hands pretty much started going numb, and I have a bit of air coming in around my neck, but it’s so much better than before. Some statistics: The bike has 3115 miles now. I’ve gotten an average of 53.3 mpg (it’s so low because my typical highway cruising speed is an indicated 80-85 mph).

I’ve been thinking I need to get more practice on curvy roads. Also, I need to do some longer rides, since my typical rides are all between 30 and 40 miles long. Today when I left for work, I decided to head down highway 88 toward Canyon Lake first, to work on both those goals. It seemed colder out today. I had fun riding up through the curves, got to a nice pull-out.

The two BMW motorcycle dealers in town had demo days. Both days I got to ride a BMW f800st. The second time I wanted to try out a R1200R, but it was already taken. That’s OK though, because I loved the f800st! I’m going to have to get one as soon as possible. This bike is similar in size and style to my ninja, but is better in every way! much more powerful, more comfortable, more stable on the highway, easier to turn, better brakes (with ABS), plus it has fancy features like heated grips, ambient temperature guage, a trip computer, and even a MPG guage (not to mention a fuel guage!

Went on a little ride with Brian and Kristy. The trip was 327 miles for me, since I had to ride out to Brian and Kristy’s house and back also. I have 1870 miles on the bike now. During the main part of the trip, I averaged 64.4 mpg! This is by far the longest I’ve ridden in one day. By the end, I needed to stop every 30 or 40 miles to rest.

Rode to work today, then on to pool. I’m going to stop adding “routine” rides on here, or it’s going to get really boring. tonight, it started raining when I was at pool league. it rained for several hours! finally around midnight it seemed to be slowing down, so I finally headed home. once I got out of tempe and more into mesa, the rain was gone, and as I went further east the highway was dry!

went to the post office, and then to the grocery store to get some water.

first service done at 1063 miles! oil change, valve timing, adjust & lube chain

fed the cats on the way to work and went to the bank. The trip in was 32.1 miles, bike is at 1033 miles now. trip home (including a gas stop) was 29.2 miles. bike is at 1062 miles now. This fill-up was 3.091 gallons, $11.80, and 55.969 average mpg. I got gas early since I probably won’t ride again until friday. The low fuel light came on just as I exited the highway at the gas station.

I got up WAY late today, so I was able to take 60, 101, 202 to work today since rush hour was over. the trip in was 28.1 miles, and the main odometer shows 967 miles now. After work I went and fed the cats, then took thomas to 101 and then got on 202. I was getting on the highway around 6:30, but I decided not to risk getting stuck on 101.

I rode to Fry’s to get some groceries (2.2 miles round trip). That was fun because I parked on the sidewalk, out of the way. Then later I realized I needed another part for the pool pump—I found yet another worn out gasket, and had to run to the pool store before they closed. The pool store run was 17.1 miles. Around sunset time I decided to ride up 88 highway again.

Rode to the pool store, to feed the cats, then on to downtown phoenix. got the low fuel light on the way back, so I got gas in AJ on the way home. I rode home a little slower with the low fuel light in my eye, even though I knew I had enough gas to get there. 48.7 miles there, 38.1 miles home. Bike is up to 888 miles now.

took 60 to work again, I was at the 101 interchange right at 9:00, so 101 traffic was fine, just a little bit slow. up to 768 miles, and the trip in was 28.0 miles after work I fed the cats, then took McDowell to Alma School, then got on 202 from there. interesting driving through the fringe of the reservation. up to 802 miles now, and the trip home was 33.

Rode in a bit later today, so I took 60 and 101. 28.0 miles, bike is up to 707 miles now. I thought sure I was going to get rained on tonight! There was a huge thunderstorm over the Superstition Mountains. Lots of lightening bolts. But I made it home dry, and it started raining about 30 minutes after I got home. I stopped off at the bank. The trip home was 32.

The helmet was dried out this morning. Rode in to work, and stopped off at Berge Mazda to buy some RX-8 parts. it was 17.3 miles to Berge Mazda. From there I went to work with a brief stop to feed some cats. 14.2 miles. the bike is up to 646 miles now. The ride home was 32.9 miles (took 202). traffic was great. I got gas on the way home, mileage was around 51mpg.

Rode in to work, on the new 202. 31.3 miles. traffic was good, right up until a mile before my exit, where it turned into full-blown stop and go. I have difficulty transitioning from high-speed control to low speed control; it’s kind of a shock to slow way down and then try to maneuver at low speeds. the bike is up to 580 miles now. I’m feeling really good on the bike in general; I think I’ve gotten some toning in whatever new muscles I’m using to ride the bike, plus I’m more and more relaxed on it.

rode to downtown phoenix, then to work. low fuel light came on, on the way to Phoenix, got gas around the corner from work. I had to drive around a while trying to find a gas station, ended up at a Valero. It was 37.5 miles to Phoenix, then it was 16.3 miles to the gas station and to the office. the bike is up to 509 miles now. this tank of gas was 54.

got some straps and a backpack so I have some makeshift luggage. the cortech luggage I really want is on backorder, but I needed something for now, so I followed a suggestion I found online.

Installed the mirror extenders tonight. At first I was having trouble, but then I realized the trick was to first attach the extender to the bike, then attach the mirror to the extender. I tried it the other way around first, but that didn’t work out. [caption id=“attachment_19185” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Stock mirror”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19186” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Mirror Extender”][/caption]

Drove the bike to work and back again today. I’ve been riding it so much I’ve actually gotten some sore muscles. I found myself on the way home today making a conscious effort to relax more. I typically have my arms relaxed, but my shoulders and neck tend to tense up. The trip in was 28.1 miles, and the trip home was 27.9 miles. the bike is up to a total of 455 miles now.

rode in to work again. went after rush hour, so traffic was good. 28.0 miles, 295 miles total The street cleaners were out and cleaning the parking lot at work today; I had to drive through the wet parking lot. the black parts of the bike were full of spots On the way home I decided to go ahead and get gas. I pulled into the gas station, and held too much speed; when I turned left to pull in front of a pump, I had to turn the front wheel too far and when I stopped it fell right over on its side.

lots of rain today, took a picture in the garage.

the ninja has landed at work. It wasn’t bad riding in. I just took it carefully. the HOV lane was nice. traffic was slow and thick on 101 which was annoying. The ride in was 28.0 miles, and the bike is up to 239 miles now. Ride home was hot, but not as bad as I expected. 27.9 miles, total of 267 miles. this was a good day to ride to work; it was only around 100 degrees when I left work to go home.

I did some night riding today! put on my clear face shield, and was rolling out of the garage at 8:02 pm. [caption id=“attachment_19137” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“The sky just before I started”][/caption] first I rode up Ironwood to McKellips, then decided to do some highway driving, to go get a smoothie. After the break, I continued west to greenfield. Just as I was exiting onto Greenfield, my low fuel light flashed; it’s too bright at night.

Now it’s happily back in the much-roomier garage. the rest of the stuff in the garage will be going soon.

Today I mainly focused on practicing slow speed, parking lot-type maneuvers. That went pretty well. I only ended up going 9.8 miles. bike is up to 175 miles now. Then later I stashed the bike in my house since a crew was coming to empty out the garage.

Today I rode around a neighborhood, practicing turning from a stop sign and things like that. just trying to get more traffic/road experience. Then at the end I jumped on US60 and cruised with the traffic for about 5 miles. Rode 16.7 miles today, and the bike is up to 165 miles now.

I was out on the bike by 5:45 am. I rode up to the overlook over canyon lake this morning. on the way up, I was taking those turns at about 25–30 and that of course was utterly easy, even at my 2 degree lean angles. On the way back down I increased a bit to 30–35mph, and one time I even leaned it over too far. I was taking a right hand turn and I think I was making the turn about half the radius it should have been, so that was fun.

rode 19.3 miles today (bike is at 121). down 88 to needle vista and back again.

Short ride today, only 18.6 miles (bike is up to 101). I rode down 88 all the way to needle vista, got up to 70mph. Then rode back and went down broadway to the vet’s office on apache trail and back. Installed the license plate today too, and put the official registration under the seat.

got back on highway 88 and was relaxed this time. got up to 60mph. rode as far as Lost Dutchman state park, took some pictures, and then rode back and rode around in AJ a bit. 23 miles today! the odometer has 83 miles on it now. too bad the camera decided to focus on the parking lot instead of on me

oops. got gas at 43 miles, set my helmet on the bike seat while fueling. so of course I managed to knock the helmet off, onto the ground. as soon as it fell off, I remembered reading that if you set the helmet on the ground while refueling you can’t knock it off. I finished fueling (it took 1.755 gallons) and got back on the road. Today I rode up 88 highway as far as hackamore road.

up to 41.9; got in 7 miles in only about 20 minutes. went out onto Southern, Apache trail, and got to lean the bike for real on phelps (in front of fry’s)

the odometer is up to 34.9 miles now. This morning I went for a 8.4 mile ride. I started venturing out onto other side streets, onto san marcos a lot more, and even onto 16th avenue. got into 5th gear and hit 45 mph!!

19.4 miles now, got to go riding again this morning (5.8 miles). getting hot out also, received the license plate in the mail brian came over and took it for a 7.1 mile ride

finally got back on the bike. I was a bit nervous at first because it had been so long. but by the end of this session I had gained some confidence in turning and stopping. rode for about 20 minutes (5 miles). now up to 13.6 miles

Got to ride for 2.3 miles, then the crews descended to re-pave the street. total of 8.6 miles now.

Well I haven’t gotten to ride the bike any more, it’s been raining. Since the tires aren’t even broken in no way am I going to ride on wet streets. I sat in the garage tonight playing with the controls and took the seat off to stash the necessary paperwork.

this morning I was able to get in about 6 miles of practice, riding around the neighborhood. I was practicing keeping my head up, looking where I wanted to go, and proper turns (slow down, look, lean, roll on throttle through the turn). I expect to get in some more miles tonight.

Yesterday I went by the Kawasaki dealership to try to learn how long the wait would be on the Ninja 250R and how much it would cost. They wrote that all up for me, and said it would be 3 weeks or so. The offer from the dealer was MSRP, plus the typical boatload of fees. I wished I could sit on one. The dealer said the 650 was similar, since the 250 was based on the 650 [which actually isn’t true, but they are at least of similar size], so I sat on that.

The SCCA club brought a set of scales to the last autocross. The car had a full tank of gas and also had the spare tire and jack in the trunk. left front right 926 1880 954 Total: 3324 722 1445 723 left rear right

We went camping in the woods near sedona (yes, in the mustang).

The big sand dunes west of Yuma in eastern California

Ordered March 8, 1999, built May 3, 1999, delivered May 17, 1999! Nine weeks is a long time to wait!! But really I’ve been waiting to get a car like this ever since I turned 16. I’ve always drooled over Mustang GTs! Sometimes waiting has its rewards. [caption id=“attachment_19012” align=“alignnone” width=“364” caption=“This year the mustang has 260 horsepower and 302 foot pounds of torque”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19016” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“A Lightning came in on the same truck as my Stang”][/caption]

wrecked the bike today. Taking the ramp from 202W to 101N, I wasn’t paying attention. I saw slow traffic in front of me, then realized it was stopped, not slow, grabbed the front brake while still turning, and highsided. good thing I was wearing full gear. I still scraped my knee. my right hand is swollen, bruised, and sore. my left shoulder is very sore, along with both knees. Bike is totalled.

Got the bike out again, put gas in it, and took a little shakedown ride. Got to watch lightning all over the valley, in front of me all the way from the south to the north as I headed west from home. Fortunately all the rain was well to the west of me. Went and got cash, fish tacos, and a vanilla coke. I could tell I hadn’t ridden in a while!

Today marked the last fill-up on gas for the summer. I rode this tank out, and the ninja has been sitting in my garage with the low-fuel light flashing ever since. I’ve moved it into the driveway and back into the garage about twice just to keep the battery going. maybe I should look into a trickle charger for next summer.

Headed home today, back through Globe to AJ. The ninja odometer claims a total of 967.8 miles from Friday through today. total ride, including all destinations we rode to+to:1104+S+Central+Ave,+Safford,+AZ+85546+to:Alpine,+Arizona+to:Mule+Creek,+New+Mexico+to:1104+s+central+ave,+safford,+az+to:937+W+15th+Ave,+Apache+Junction,+AZ+85220&hl=en&geocode=%3BFRbn9AEdKvB1-Q%3BFT-v9AEdalJ3-SGn9Grj4b5htA%3BFRbn9AEdKvB1-SEEPB6btEKcFw%3B%3BFWDTCAIdgqJ8-SEB1h2mz-NLyg%3BFUoMDAId4FeI-Q%3B%3B%3BFYSZ9AEdthV6-SEV4jg-aKCDRw%3B%3B%3B%3B%3B&mra=ls&sll=33.56787,-110.030465&sspn=2.480639,4.597778&ie=UTF8&z=8) Google says 987 miles. My odometer is up to 7491 miles total.

Brian, Dan, and I set out much earlier (left at 8:30 instead of 10), rode to Clifton, AZ, and from there attacked the “Tail of the Beast”; US191 from Morenci to Alpine. This road used to be designated US666 and was affectionately known as “The Devil’s Road”. [caption id=“attachment_19265” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“96 Miles of curves”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19266” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“The road curves through the Apache National Forest.”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19267” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“We reach 8100 feet; it was cold!

Got going about 10am, got gas, rode to Springerville via highway 180 in New Mexico. Some high elevation on the way, up to 7000 feet, so we saw lots of pine trees. Just before Springerville we hit incredibly strong winds. Parked at Los Dos Molinos in Springerville, I was worried the bike would fall over. It was even worse trying to get gas after lunch. From Springerville, we rode on to Quemado, NM, then cut over on NM32 to Apache Creek, through Reserve, NM, and then rejoined 180 and went back to Safford the way we had come from there.

Headed out towards globe. There was a small airport on the reservation just past globe, with some interesting old airplanes. After that brief stop, on to Olney House in Safford. Brian arrived a few minutes before me. The proprietor graciously offered parking in the back yard.

Just rode to work and back.

I had a service appointment for the ninja at 9 so I only had time to ride up to the first overlook on highway 88. Went much faster this time. On the way back down, I was taking one of the “15 mph” right-handers, and scraped my right foot! This indicates to me that I’m getting the bike leaned over. I dropped it off at the dealer with 6461 miles on the odometer.

Rode up to tortilla flats and back on highway 88, need practice on the curves. This was a great practice ride, starting to get the idea. After tortilla flats, I rode back down and then straight on to work. Got in three other shorter rides today, rode about 200 miles total today!

Took a long ride in preparation for a road trip next weekend. Rode about 55miles, all highway riding.

Paid off. Time to sell it! Today the Odometer is showing 6170 miles. I won’t be riding it for about a week. usually I put about 120–180 miles a week on it.

I put the liners in, and it made a huge difference. I still need to get new gloves, my hands pretty much started going numb, and I have a bit of air coming in around my neck, but it’s so much better than before. Some statistics: The bike has 3115 miles now. I’ve gotten an average of 53.3 mpg (it’s so low because my typical highway cruising speed is an indicated 80-85 mph).

I’ve been thinking I need to get more practice on curvy roads. Also, I need to do some longer rides, since my typical rides are all between 30 and 40 miles long. Today when I left for work, I decided to head down highway 88 toward Canyon Lake first, to work on both those goals. It seemed colder out today. I had fun riding up through the curves, got to a nice pull-out.

Went on a little ride with Brian and Kristy. The trip was 327 miles for me, since I had to ride out to Brian and Kristy’s house and back also. I have 1870 miles on the bike now. During the main part of the trip, I averaged 64.4 mpg! This is by far the longest I’ve ridden in one day. By the end, I needed to stop every 30 or 40 miles to rest.

Rode to work today, then on to pool. I’m going to stop adding “routine” rides on here, or it’s going to get really boring. tonight, it started raining when I was at pool league. it rained for several hours! finally around midnight it seemed to be slowing down, so I finally headed home. once I got out of tempe and more into mesa, the rain was gone, and as I went further east the highway was dry!

went to the post office, and then to the grocery store to get some water.

first service done at 1063 miles! oil change, valve timing, adjust & lube chain

fed the cats on the way to work and went to the bank. The trip in was 32.1 miles, bike is at 1033 miles now. trip home (including a gas stop) was 29.2 miles. bike is at 1062 miles now. This fill-up was 3.091 gallons, $11.80, and 55.969 average mpg. I got gas early since I probably won’t ride again until friday. The low fuel light came on just as I exited the highway at the gas station.

I got up WAY late today, so I was able to take 60, 101, 202 to work today since rush hour was over. the trip in was 28.1 miles, and the main odometer shows 967 miles now. After work I went and fed the cats, then took thomas to 101 and then got on 202. I was getting on the highway around 6:30, but I decided not to risk getting stuck on 101.

I rode to Fry’s to get some groceries (2.2 miles round trip). That was fun because I parked on the sidewalk, out of the way. Then later I realized I needed another part for the pool pump—I found yet another worn out gasket, and had to run to the pool store before they closed. The pool store run was 17.1 miles. Around sunset time I decided to ride up 88 highway again.

Rode to the pool store, to feed the cats, then on to downtown phoenix. got the low fuel light on the way back, so I got gas in AJ on the way home. I rode home a little slower with the low fuel light in my eye, even though I knew I had enough gas to get there. 48.7 miles there, 38.1 miles home. Bike is up to 888 miles now.

took 60 to work again, I was at the 101 interchange right at 9:00, so 101 traffic was fine, just a little bit slow. up to 768 miles, and the trip in was 28.0 miles after work I fed the cats, then took McDowell to Alma School, then got on 202 from there. interesting driving through the fringe of the reservation. up to 802 miles now, and the trip home was 33.

Rode in a bit later today, so I took 60 and 101. 28.0 miles, bike is up to 707 miles now. I thought sure I was going to get rained on tonight! There was a huge thunderstorm over the Superstition Mountains. Lots of lightening bolts. But I made it home dry, and it started raining about 30 minutes after I got home. I stopped off at the bank. The trip home was 32.

The helmet was dried out this morning. Rode in to work, and stopped off at Berge Mazda to buy some RX-8 parts. it was 17.3 miles to Berge Mazda. From there I went to work with a brief stop to feed some cats. 14.2 miles. the bike is up to 646 miles now. The ride home was 32.9 miles (took 202). traffic was great. I got gas on the way home, mileage was around 51mpg.

Rode in to work, on the new 202. 31.3 miles. traffic was good, right up until a mile before my exit, where it turned into full-blown stop and go. I have difficulty transitioning from high-speed control to low speed control; it’s kind of a shock to slow way down and then try to maneuver at low speeds. the bike is up to 580 miles now. I’m feeling really good on the bike in general; I think I’ve gotten some toning in whatever new muscles I’m using to ride the bike, plus I’m more and more relaxed on it.

rode to downtown phoenix, then to work. low fuel light came on, on the way to Phoenix, got gas around the corner from work. I had to drive around a while trying to find a gas station, ended up at a Valero. It was 37.5 miles to Phoenix, then it was 16.3 miles to the gas station and to the office. the bike is up to 509 miles now. this tank of gas was 54.

got some straps and a backpack so I have some makeshift luggage. the cortech luggage I really want is on backorder, but I needed something for now, so I followed a suggestion I found online.

Installed the mirror extenders tonight. At first I was having trouble, but then I realized the trick was to first attach the extender to the bike, then attach the mirror to the extender. I tried it the other way around first, but that didn’t work out. [caption id=“attachment_19185” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Stock mirror”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19186” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Mirror Extender”][/caption]

Drove the bike to work and back again today. I’ve been riding it so much I’ve actually gotten some sore muscles. I found myself on the way home today making a conscious effort to relax more. I typically have my arms relaxed, but my shoulders and neck tend to tense up. The trip in was 28.1 miles, and the trip home was 27.9 miles. the bike is up to a total of 455 miles now.

rode in to work again. went after rush hour, so traffic was good. 28.0 miles, 295 miles total The street cleaners were out and cleaning the parking lot at work today; I had to drive through the wet parking lot. the black parts of the bike were full of spots On the way home I decided to go ahead and get gas. I pulled into the gas station, and held too much speed; when I turned left to pull in front of a pump, I had to turn the front wheel too far and when I stopped it fell right over on its side.

lots of rain today, took a picture in the garage.

the ninja has landed at work. It wasn’t bad riding in. I just took it carefully. the HOV lane was nice. traffic was slow and thick on 101 which was annoying. The ride in was 28.0 miles, and the bike is up to 239 miles now. Ride home was hot, but not as bad as I expected. 27.9 miles, total of 267 miles. this was a good day to ride to work; it was only around 100 degrees when I left work to go home.

I did some night riding today! put on my clear face shield, and was rolling out of the garage at 8:02 pm. [caption id=“attachment_19137” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“The sky just before I started”][/caption] first I rode up Ironwood to McKellips, then decided to do some highway driving, to go get a smoothie. After the break, I continued west to greenfield. Just as I was exiting onto Greenfield, my low fuel light flashed; it’s too bright at night.

Now it’s happily back in the much-roomier garage. the rest of the stuff in the garage will be going soon.

Today I mainly focused on practicing slow speed, parking lot-type maneuvers. That went pretty well. I only ended up going 9.8 miles. bike is up to 175 miles now. Then later I stashed the bike in my house since a crew was coming to empty out the garage.

Today I rode around a neighborhood, practicing turning from a stop sign and things like that. just trying to get more traffic/road experience. Then at the end I jumped on US60 and cruised with the traffic for about 5 miles. Rode 16.7 miles today, and the bike is up to 165 miles now.

I was out on the bike by 5:45 am. I rode up to the overlook over canyon lake this morning. on the way up, I was taking those turns at about 25–30 and that of course was utterly easy, even at my 2 degree lean angles. On the way back down I increased a bit to 30–35mph, and one time I even leaned it over too far. I was taking a right hand turn and I think I was making the turn about half the radius it should have been, so that was fun.

rode 19.3 miles today (bike is at 121). down 88 to needle vista and back again.

Short ride today, only 18.6 miles (bike is up to 101). I rode down 88 all the way to needle vista, got up to 70mph. Then rode back and went down broadway to the vet’s office on apache trail and back. Installed the license plate today too, and put the official registration under the seat.

got back on highway 88 and was relaxed this time. got up to 60mph. rode as far as Lost Dutchman state park, took some pictures, and then rode back and rode around in AJ a bit. 23 miles today! the odometer has 83 miles on it now. too bad the camera decided to focus on the parking lot instead of on me

oops. got gas at 43 miles, set my helmet on the bike seat while fueling. so of course I managed to knock the helmet off, onto the ground. as soon as it fell off, I remembered reading that if you set the helmet on the ground while refueling you can’t knock it off. I finished fueling (it took 1.755 gallons) and got back on the road. Today I rode up 88 highway as far as hackamore road.

up to 41.9; got in 7 miles in only about 20 minutes. went out onto Southern, Apache trail, and got to lean the bike for real on phelps (in front of fry’s)

the odometer is up to 34.9 miles now. This morning I went for a 8.4 mile ride. I started venturing out onto other side streets, onto san marcos a lot more, and even onto 16th avenue. got into 5th gear and hit 45 mph!!

19.4 miles now, got to go riding again this morning (5.8 miles). getting hot out also, received the license plate in the mail brian came over and took it for a 7.1 mile ride

finally got back on the bike. I was a bit nervous at first because it had been so long. but by the end of this session I had gained some confidence in turning and stopping. rode for about 20 minutes (5 miles). now up to 13.6 miles

Got to ride for 2.3 miles, then the crews descended to re-pave the street. total of 8.6 miles now.

Well I haven’t gotten to ride the bike any more, it’s been raining. Since the tires aren’t even broken in no way am I going to ride on wet streets. I sat in the garage tonight playing with the controls and took the seat off to stash the necessary paperwork.

this morning I was able to get in about 6 miles of practice, riding around the neighborhood. I was practicing keeping my head up, looking where I wanted to go, and proper turns (slow down, look, lean, roll on throttle through the turn). I expect to get in some more miles tonight.

Yesterday I went by the Kawasaki dealership to try to learn how long the wait would be on the Ninja 250R and how much it would cost. They wrote that all up for me, and said it would be 3 weeks or so. The offer from the dealer was MSRP, plus the typical boatload of fees. I wished I could sit on one. The dealer said the 650 was similar, since the 250 was based on the 650 [which actually isn’t true, but they are at least of similar size], so I sat on that.

I’ve been enjoying the Bullet Journal system for utilizing a paper notebook. The idea of using one whole “spread” of two pages for a specific topic is particularly appealing. I also like the index idea. All the items I want to record in a notebook are of the notes variety. The other main entities of the bullet system (events and tasks) are well-covered by my digital tools (namely, iCloud calender and Omnifocus).

Jeremy sent me a Lamy 2000 fountain pen for Christmas! I’ve been wanting one of these for a few months. Currently, this has displaced my Vanishing Point as favorite pen. The vanishing point is smoother, but on good paper, it’s too smooth, and feels like writing on ice. The Lamy 2000, on the other hand, feels perfect on good paper. Still smooth, it also has some pleasant feedback. After writing with the Lamy, the Vanishing Point feels wild and out of control.

Purchased via Citroenpers. This pen had a rough ride from the Netherlands to me. It took nearly a month! The plastic case the pen was shipped in was cracked in several places, but the pen itself was unscarred. There was some condensation inside the barrel, so I took the nib off and it dried out over night. Then I was finally able to ink up and write with it. Nice writing experience.

good fountain pen for $20.

I put Waterman cartridges in this pen. Once the current cartridge is empty, I’ll be cleaning the pen thoroughly and packing it away, probably never to write with it again. (I’m now spoiled by my Pilot Vanishing Point.) The wood is bocote from Central America. You can mostly read the labelling in the large pictures. The nib reads “IRRIDIUM POINT GERMANY” on the front, and “6” on the back.

Considering I think I got it for about $8, this is a good fountain pen.

Shots without the flash, and a longer exposure. the color shows through much better.

[caption id=“attachment_19046” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“The shipping box”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19047” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“The real box”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19048” align=“alignleft” width=“300” caption=“The Namiki Vanishing Point fountain pen!”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19050” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Ships with the twist converter attached.”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19051” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“A nice shot of the nib.”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19052” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Instructions are under the false bottom.”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19053” align=“alignnone” width=“225” caption=“Sometimes it is a good idea to read first.”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19054” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Under the directions: a cartridge of blue (or perhaps blue black) ink, and a metal cap to put on top of the cartridge (so the push button will still work with the cartridge, which is shorter than the twist converter)“][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19055” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Close up of the label.

The headlight is working again. After taking off the front bumper and removing the driver’s side headlight, I had to completely disassemble the headlight itself to change out the ballast. The ballast itself was accessible via a panel on the bottom of the headlight, but the part which plugged in to the bulb wouldn’t fit between the reflector and the body of the headlight. I needed to remove the lens off the front, which was mainly secured by silicone sealant.

No more power steering again. must be a loose connection of some sort. Sounds like soldering is required.

The power steering started working again today!

Power steering quit today. The steering warning light on the dash came on.

Going down the onramp onto US60, I was getting on it … hit redline in first gear, shifted to second, continued at full throttle. Power dipped, the check engine light started flashing! I let off the throttle, and the check engine light stopped flashing. Seems to be running fine now; probably a misfire. It’s time to replace the spark plugs anyway …

After leaving the Phoenix International Auto Show, the RX-8 wouldn’t start! We went and had lunch, then bought jumper cables. When we went to hook up the jumper cables, we realized the negative battery cable was loose! I didn’t do a good job re-tightening it after trying to fix the headlight. I returned the jumper cables. I’d like to buy a trickle charger someday.

The driver’s side headlight stopped working. Oddly, for a brief time it worked sometimes but not others. Without stopping to think, I ordered new headlight bulbs. Once they arrived, I removed the driver’s side wheelwell and reached in to change the bulb. [caption id=“attachment_19298” align=“alignnone” width=“224” caption=“reaching in through the wheelwell”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19299” align=“alignnone” width=“224” caption=“I disconnected the battery before starting this.”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19300” align=“alignnone” width=“224” caption=“Behind the warning panel: The plug with the NASA-looking cable is connected to the now-infamous ballast”][/caption]

Bought a wheel on ebay to replace the wheel I hit with a curb. I also ordered some new Dunlop Direzza Sport Z1 tires yesterday. The current wheel looks bad but is still functional, so I intend to keep it, with the tire on it, as a spare. hopefully I can get a large wheel bag to put it in and keep it in the utility room, out of the heat, so it won’t get dry-rotted.

Last Thursday I was getting on the highway, accelerating gently up the onramp, w hen I heard a loud “Pop!”. Then the car had no power and the tach started slowly sliding lower and lower. The battery light flashed once. Then the check engine light came on and stayed on. By this time I had coasted to the shoulder. Turns out I had lost at least one apex seal in rotor #2.

bought an extra set of wheels with factory bridgestone potenza RE040s. can’t decide if I just got some tires for cheap for the street, want to put race tires on the extra wheels, or if I should re-sell them and just get some nice tires to use for both street and autocross. I ended up selling the wheels and tires individually on ebay for a tidy profit, and using the proceeds to buy some Dunlop Direzza Sport Z1 tires.

Replaced the gas cap. the seal wears out after a while and starts causing the check engine light to come on. It was only $16 online from the sponsors of rx8club.com

Got some Michelin Pilot tires installed for autocross

Installed an Audio Link in my car. this adds an ipod dock connector in my glove compartment. It keeps the ipod charged, and also pipes the music through the cd change connector on the back of my head unit. The car thinks the ipod is a cd changer! (which has cd with thousands of songs on them) the steering wheel controls will change tracks, and the head unit itself can select between the first 5 playlists on the ipod, as well as fast forward and rewind within a song.

had a persistent leak of some sort. Turns out it was the transmission input seal (took two trips to the dealer to diagnose it though). seal replaced under warranty.

My car passed the dreaded engine recall check; just got a PCM flash and the leading spark plugs replaced. since I had just replaced them recently, I complained, and they gave me two brand-new leading spark plugs for free!

Replaced all four spark plugs myself. got a 12” ratchet extension for this job, as well a 5⁄8” spark plug socket and some anti-seize. Simplest way to do it is take off the driver’s side front wheel. Best known price for the RX-8 spark plugs Thread about changing the spark plugs

I put 32,111 miles on the tires which shipped with the car from the factory. They were Bridgestone Potenza A030s, the size was P225/45ZR18. These tires seemed to be too small for the wheels. The new tires are Kumho Ecsta SPTs, in size 245/40ZR18. These seem to fit much nicer, and look much better, plus I get an extra 20mm or so of tread width! The old tires had a treadwear rating of 140, the new ones have a treadwear rating of 320!

I just changed my oil myself. this was my 8’s third oil change. the first two were performed by dealerships (1st by the dealership I bought it from, second by a highly recommended dealership). I didn’t jack the car up at all. the crush washer I removed from the oil drain plug had been painted black! it must have been the factory crush washer. so two different dealerships must not have bothered to replace it.

Right after a wash and wax

Pictures of the engine.

Washed the car, had to take a few more pics and drive up to the lake overlook.

Drove up to canyon lake, took a few pictures.

The stock tire seems to be too narrow for the stock wheel. The stock tires are Bridgestone Potenza A030 at P225/45ZR18. Once they are worn out, I plan to go to P245/40R18.

Met up with Rotary Car Club of Arizona at the Pavillions Car Show

Got to the gas station within a few miles of the low fuel light coming on. The gas guage was not quite to the empty mark. 13.519 gallons were required to fill up. That means when the low fuel light comes on, there is about 2.4 gallons left in the tank.

First autocross [caption id=“attachment_29” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“At the line”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_33” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Lean to the left”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_38” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Looking ahead”][/caption]

Re-wired the foglights so they can be turned on as long as the accessory is on and wired in the Valentine 1

Got the car on the SCCA corner scales. The gas guage was two ticks above the 1⁄2 mark. My best estimate, taking into account the amount of reserve fuel still in the tank after hitting the empty mark (2.5 gallons) is that I had about 10.3 gallons of gas in the tank. (it’s a 15.9 gallon tank). I took everything out of the car, including the floormats, but left in the factory-supplied air compressor (the corner of the car where the air compressor sits was still the lightest!

Picked up the car, blew off work and went driving for the day.

today is the anniversary of my birth. The best part will be going to see the Zoo lights wife my wife and son. The stable linux kernel 2.6.0 was released late last night, just in time. I installed it on most of my computers today. [caption id=“attachment_19002” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“ocotillo running Linux kernel 2.6.0, and KDE desktop”][/caption] I even have moderator access on slashdot today! Can’t get any better than this.