January 27, 2009 By Jesse Doerr @ 5:37 pm
This is a test. You passed.
By Jesse Doerr @ 12:32 am
I was out surfing the inter webs today and was amused to find that two of my friends, in unrelated countries and on unrelated trips, had posted very similar accounts of the joys of local transportation. From Laura, who is currently on vacation in Mexico comes this anecdote:
Bus drivers are people who failed out of taxi school, I believe. The buses themselves only hold together by prayers. We careened through narrow roads between sheer cliffs and on the edge of sheer cliffs, coming within inches of disaster several times, and nearly killing at least three or four people who were waiting to be picked up. It was the same sort of thrill you get from a roller coaster.
And then from the other side of the world, Heather really sounds like she wants to learn to drive in Thailand:
The ride up and down from the mountain top was INSANE. The road was originally built by buddhists trying to make merit, a way long time ago. I don’t think the angles, curves, slopes – anything – has been reevaluated since the road was originally built for foot and cart traffic. Now it’s a bit wider and paved, but still has crazy steep inclines and over 180-degree curves, many of which are blind. Also add into that mix Thai drivers’ penchants for lane markings being suggestions, speed limits ignored, and you end up with the group of us wondering if the four-hour walk up the mountain might not have been a better idea.
I can picture just exactly the scenes that each is describing. I would imagine, anyone that has traveled much at all probably can. But, you know, from looking back into the archives I see that I’ve had a few choice things to say about drivers in Iowa myself. So, perhaps Iowa isn’t to blame for secretly being a 3rd world country, maybe there is a more universal truth here about people and driving.
Maybe.
January 25, 2009 By Jesse Doerr @ 2:08 pm
It’s always a fun game for me when I first get on a plane to imagine who the person is going to be that will sit next to me. Every time someone walks down the isle towards me I find myself running an internal mantra of “ooh yes, please be you, please be you.” But more often I find myself saying “oh no, not you, please don’t be you.”
When I was coming home from Europe though, I found that my criteria had changed a little. Usually this is my list:
- Cute
- Not Fat
- Quiet
- Interesting
Where, if I can’t have the first then I want the second, and if I can’t have the second then the third and so on. But, when I’m flying in Europe, I find that everything can be trumped by one thing: is the person wearing deodorant. Because if not, boy that isn’t a smell I’m used to over here and it can get real old after 4 or 5 or 11 hours.
January 21, 2009 By Jesse Doerr @ 1:56 am
And the crowd goes wild!
We made it out karting again this visit. It was a heck of a time, but I’m hurting today from it. We were going at it pretty hard, and getting thrown around in the seat takes a toll on you after a while.
I was doing pretty good this time, with a fastest lap time of 42.4 seconds. That was in the top 5 drivers for the day, but nowhere close to the 38.8 second top time for the month.
It’s a really great track here in Eindhoven. If you ever make it here and are into karting it’s worth a visit. The track covers two floors of a building and is quite quick. I understand that these gas engines can get to about 30 – 35 mph. You can checkout a video here from their website to get a feel for it.
January 18, 2009 By Jesse Doerr @ 8:05 pm
We’ll it’s Monday at 2 am here and I’m awake again.
It was an all night flight to get here and I forgot my sleeping pills. That will teach me. I should know better by now. If I want to be at all functional Monday night, after the first day of class, I need to force myself into the new sleep schedule as soon as possible.
I only got an hour or two of sleep on the flight from Seattle to Amsterdam, but I thought I was doing pretty well on the train. I was tired, but not exhausted yet. I took a quick shower at the hotel and went out for lunch. I must have gotten the espresso to beer ratio wrong though because I was unconscious in my hotel room by 2 pm on Sunday.
So now it’s early in the morning and it’ll be another 4 hours before breakfast. Boy am I hungry.
January 14, 2009 By Jesse Doerr @ 1:39 pm
Yesterday was just one of those days. Monday definitely ended on a high note. But Tuesday didn’t work out so well.
I started the day by running over my blue tooth headset with the car. Later, I got a tag etched for our dog, Sophie, but when I got home I realized that I had accidentally put down our old home number instead of Beth’s cell. Finally, I found that my new hand grips are defective and won’t heat up anymore.
On a high note though, I have a beautiful new aquarium in my living room. One of the members of the Seattle Aquarium Society was put into the heart breaking position of having to give up all of her tanks because of needing to move to a rental property.
I was fortunate to be able to adopt her 55 gallon Tanganyikan Lake cichlid show tank. I spent Monday evening moving everything over to my place, and I am very happy to report that all of the fish survived the trip and appear quite happy in their new home.
Just for my own notes, the tank has: 5 Neolamprologus brichardi, 4 Tropheus duboisi (1 male, 3 female), and a breeding pare of Julidochromis transcriptus (with 2 or 3 small fry).
January 12, 2009 By Jesse Doerr @ 6:59 pm
I’ve finally put everything together on the bike and taken some pictures of it. Check out the full gallery here.
Pictured are the amazing new heated hand grips that I’ve just finished installing. They are really wonderful to ride with. As long as I can stay dry, with these grips going there isn’t much in the way of weather that can stop me from riding my bike anymore.
I really have to thank Kirk for putting together that rack on the back too. I just finished the paint on it, and I think it really looks sharp. If you look closely you can see how he bent the top of the sissy bar and back of the rack to match the curves of the bike. It’s a subtle thing, but really makes the whole thing fit together in my mind.
Here are a few more pictures of everything:
By Jesse Doerr @ 1:30 pm
I always get into trouble when I try to get clever, and boy were things going smooth for me this weekend.
I’ve been doing some back end tweaking to the website this weekend. As a result there were a few artifacts in some older posts that needed to be cleaned out. I did a quick search of the internet and found a script that should fix everything for me. Blissfully, I disregarded all the warnings that told me the script was not intended for my version of the website and would probably break everything for me.
Well, I did a quick test and everything seemed fine… it turns out I was wrong. The script worked great on all of the older posts, cleaning out everything that I had hoped it would. Except, it made a complete hash of all of the new posts that I had added this weekend.
I’ve gone back to my last database backup to restore everything to a working version again. But, of course, that backup was from a couple days ago. So, everything is back up and working again, sans: me talking about what fun I had this weekend.
Oh well. Such is life.
Even if it’s not written here anymore, I still had a really nice weekend. I spent quite a bit of time playing with the motorcycle and it’s in great shape now. I changed my own oil for the first time, tightened the chain without the back wheel falling off, installed some amazing new heated hand grips, and started painting the luggage rack that Kirk built for me in the fall.
I can’t wait for spring. It’ll be great when things warm up a bit again to get out and take a camping trip on the bike. I finally have everything I need for it to be a comfortable trip and be able to cary everything I need.
January 9, 2009 By Jesse Doerr @ 3:59 pm
From time to time I like to ride motorcycles. Rather, from time to time I like to ride my own motorcycle. I suppose that I would like to ride other motorcycles too, but I only have one so that limits my experience to some extent.
Surprisingly, since motorcycles only have two wheels they take twice as much maintenance to ensure that they are safe. Until now, I have avoided doing my own maintenance because I assumed that if I tried the wheels would probably fall off on the next ride and I would die. But you know what? It’s really not that bad. Just make sure a couple bolts are tightened and the wheels are probably going to stay on okay.
The first blizzard of the season has finally thawed, so I thought it was probably time to get out and winterize my bike this weekend. I’ve been poor about getting around to it in the past and have as a consequence not been able to ride the bike for the last couple springs while I wait for the shop to finish fixing it.
This year I was good about getting the battery charger hooked up in time. So all of the electrical was in good shape on Sunday. Unfortunately I hadn’t put any fuel stabilizer in the tank, so the carbs were plugged with the rotten fuel. Draining the old gas and replacing it with fresh, I was eventually able to get the bike started. With some care, and by revving the engine, the carbs were eventually blown clear and everything seems to be working smoothly again.
As soon as I finished getting the fuel ready for storage the snow started falling again. I mean, come on, this is Seattle! So looks like I’ll be waiting another couple weeks for things to warm up a bit more so I can replace the oil and the anti-freeze.
Next time I buy a house though, I’m getting a garage. It sure would be nice to have a warm dry place to do all of this work while the rain and snow is falling outside.
RSS