my life, my thoughts, my world.

It was a beautiful day for a ride yesterday – so ride I did. Pine Mountain being so close, made a perfect candidate for a quick ride, and another run with my camera. This time I mounted the mic under my rear seat. I realized at the end of the ride that I had not properly secured the rear seat, and am amazed that it did not fly off at any point. My intention was to mix some Metallica in with the engine noise on the audio track but if linux has a shortcoming, it is A/V processing. Anyway, here is the video. It’s 138MB, and 30 minutes long. Don’t try to full screen it, ubersmall frame size and low video bitrate beg you to just leave it small. If you want the full size – send me a blank DVD.

This weekend should be pretty decent. I’ll be going with some friends to watch X3 tonight. After several months back, I finally decided to wash my truck – I forgot how good it looked clean. When I get back from vacation I’ll have to actually hand wash it, and put a coat of wax on. The inside really needed to be cleaned out as well, seeing as there was a freaking live wolf spider in there last night (it was only live for a second – then I smashed it).

Put a few more miles on my motorcycle today, one of the people I work with wanted a ride, so S2 and S3 went to lunch. I kept the rubber side down, and decided when I got back I’d probably better clean, lube, and adjust my chain again. My best guess says I will need to replace my chain and sprockets at the end of the summer, just to be safe. I may go for a ride tomorrow just because I can.

Sometime I’ll get around to taking some more photos – I just don’t know of what yet.

So after being awake for some 27 hours, I find out my trip to Ft. Campbell for PRK has been cancelled. The reason? Our Dr. PCS’d to Hawaii. That, is nothing short of amazing. Anyway, I had essentially cancelled my mega-ride this summer, on the premise that I probably wouldn’t be able to see well enough to safely ride cross country. Now that no one will be zapping my eyeballs with lasers, the ride is on. I’m going to go ahead and order my GPS along w/ mapping software to get real routes, along with a taller windscreen for added comfort.

Maybe while I’m home the motorcycle riding engineers I like to call my family can cook up some plans for removeable hard luggage for my Suzuki. It doesn’t have to look great – just fit, and be watertight.

Alright, a number of things have gone on in the last week – so I’ll do an all encompassing post on such matters. The correct front tire for my motorcycle came in, so I had the Michelin Pilot Powers mounted and thus far I love them. Steering is much quicker, and the bike is much more stable leaned over in a turn. Mid-week I got a call from the EENT folks over at Martin Army Community Hospital – somehow I came up on the list for refractive eye surgery. Nifty. I’ll be going to up to Ft. Campbell to let the Army shoot me in the eye with a laser next week. That last bit might screw my summer riding plans, as I’ll have to appropriately heal before attempting any major trips – especially any major trips on two wheels.

In less important news, I just watched a chick-flick with my friend Danielle. We saw “Stick It”, there was the typical level of cheese, along with the usual bad-kid-working-through-problems-to-make-a-major-impact plot – oh yeah, and spandex. It wasn’t horrible, I don’t remember wanting to kill myself during it – so that’s a plus I guess. If gymnastics is your thing, you’ll probably like it – I think, maybe.

That’s all for now.

Someone shoot me, now. We ran sprints with no real warm-up this morning for PT. My quads are killing me. Time for a hot shower, and some Tiger Balm. *groan*

My video camera from helmetcamera.com arrived today. I’ve got it in the mount now, and all wired up – later I will go see how it works on the bike. The lense is fairly wide angle, so I think it will work fine mounted under the nose of the motorcycle. I’ll run the mic back towards the exhaust and see how that sounds.

The Michelin Pilot Powers are here too, but the mailroom screwed me again. I’ll have to wait until Monday now. That’s not a huge deal, I’ll go put another few hundred miles on the Dunlops before I get rid of them.

Edit to add:
Yesterday I mounted the helmet cam under the nose of the SV and went for a block around Kelley Hill to see how it works out. Stability seems alright to me, though I think I’m going to come up with a way to tie the cam and mount to the bike, in case the adhesive for the velcro stuff lets loose. One major issue is the sound, but I can mess with mounting points for the microphone. I had it clipped to the underside of the bike, but there’s a lot of wind noise causing some serious audio clipping. Tomorrow if the weather looks nice, I will go out and take pictures of the mounted camera, and make another test run with the microphone in my undertail storage to see if just blocking the direct wind is enough. If not, I’ll get a block of foam or something to stick the mic in and try that. Video Here

More photos on my Flickr

It’s modding time my friends. As said earlier, my tires are on the way – and I’ve got a shop to put them on at a non-crack-smoking price. I took out the trust budget magic, and I with some sacrifices I can actually afford to knock this SV project out as far as tires, brakes, and suspension goes. Pending word from SVRaceShop on availability of fork cores for 2nd gen SVs, I’ll be ordering my forks soonish. I’m going to go ahead and buy a front stand to lift from the bottom of my triple clamps, so I can change the forks myself. Next up will be the brake hoses and pads, and that’ll probably be it until after the SV Rally @ Deal’s Gap.

Yesterday’s weather begged me to put another few hundred miles on the SV, so I figured I’d take a trip down to Providence Canyon. The route is quite similar to a previous ride I’ve posted, you just stay on US27 South a bit longer and take a right on GA39C, which is more fun to ride down than GA39 a few miles north. Just past the park itself there are a series of nice sweepers that I couldn’t resist riding down several times.

Google Earth led me to believe there were some seriously twisty backroads branching off GA39C winding through the area. There are, but a Dual Sport bike would be required, as none of them are paved. Really all that does for me is make me want a DS bike even more. At any rate, it was a good ride, with a break to walk the rim of Providence Canyon, as well as the canyon floor – and of course take some photographs.

Placed my tire order today, through Southwest Moto Tires. Free shipping won me over, now I just have to check around town and see who will mount/balance them for the best price. Michelin won out this time around, a front and rear Pilot Power are on their way here. Plenty of people have reported getting roughly the same life out of both tires, so I decided to go with the sportier of the two as I fully intend to hit more and more twisty roads in the coming months. As for wet grip, I’ve managed to stay out of the rain for this long, and I ride extra cautiously in the wet anyway so I think I’ll be fine.

For a number of reasons, the largest being a complete lack of use, I sold my custom 1911 holsters today. I don’t really feel badly about it as I’ve never used them, and I can use the funds to buy new tires or something for my motorcycle – which I do use a lot.