CenterLeft.net

I appreciate all of the passion and intensity that you brought to our relationship.  But it’s over now and it’s time for us to break up. I won’t say that we didn’t have our ups and downs along the way.  But you have to admit that our time together has run it’s course.

I’m sorry, it’s not you, it’s me.  Good bye.

Reminder: Next time you modify the engine of your motorcycle, finish testing it before setting off on a 400 mile road-trip.

Popped down to Portland for the weekend on the bike.  The weather was great and the ride down went along nice and smooth.  The ride home wasn’t nearly so nice though.

I’ve been playing with a new air intake for the bike which has added a nice bump to the power.  Unfortunately, there is almost never a stock setting for your carbs when you’re dealing with a custom air intake and exhaust.  It takes a fair amount of trial and error to get everything tweaked in just right.  Too little gas and your pistons overheat, too much and the bike burns dirty and fouls the spark plugs.

Luckily, I guess, for me it was just a problem of too much gas.  So 300 miles into the weekend everything completely choked up with soot and started to loose power and stop firing.  This made getting home a real joy, but I shouldn’t have done any permanent damage to the cylinders or pistons.

If you drive by this weekend, you’ll probably see me sitting on a bucket in my driveway again: busy busy busy stripping down and rebuilding the carbs one more time.  My next bike is going to be fuel injected, I promise.

I’m still fighting hackers here on the site.  It looks like I’ve gotten everything cleared up finally, but I guess I can only wait and see.  The last time I thought I was in the clear I was attacked again the very next day.

Fun weekend otherwise.  Beth’s Mum came up to visit and to check out the big fish auction put on by the Seattle Aquarium Society.  I took in a few things to sell, and mostly just hung out to watch what came up and bid on a few items now and then.  Barb took home a few great items and seemed to enjoy herself.

Exciting news for me too: I won one of the items from the raffle.  I’m playing around with setting up a new big tank eventually and now I get to spend a gift certificate on fish stuff at the Fish Tank People’s online store.  I don’t do any salt water tanks, but I’ve got my eye on a couple of the pumps that they sell.  So, that should work out just fine.

Most days seem to just go okay.  But then there are days like today.

That keeps life interesting right?  When every, blessed, simple little thing goes wrong?

You would think when the motherboard of a computer blows up it would be a pretty strait forward thing to replace. And it probably would be, except when that motherboard is the heart of a $1+ Million microscope.

And that’s just the start of how interesting things can get.  I’ve got 4 versions of software, 3 versions of hardware, old school network connections, new school hard drives and drivers and $500,000 worth of cameras and detectors to get working again.

But then again, the last time I did this everything went smoothly.  Right up until the end when the backup of the finished product hosed everything and took me all night to start over on.  So maybe a little fun upfront isn’t so bad.

Well… my wonderful heated hand grips didn’t last long.  Something went wrong in the control box and they burned themselves out.  The company that sold them to me has agreed to give me a refund, but I have to send everything back. Luckily it doesn’t look like the fault caused any permanent damage to my battery.

So, I’m totally without my bike for the next few weeks probably.  When I installed these grips I had to destroy one of the old grips to get everything off.  The bike is looking really sad with just the bare bar ends.  Hopefully I’ll get a new pair in the mail soon and I can get everything back together again.

Until then: keep your leather up and the rubber down.

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.

Everything was going smoothly; I was having a lovely time reading a book and having a nice cup of coffee. But it soon took a turn for the worse as I went up for a refill. While I was waiting at the coffee bar for a fresh cup, I turned around… What I was confronted with was quite likely the ugliest women on earth.

The vision was so horrifying that I can not accurately recreate it for you. I assume that in a desperate bid for self preservation my mind has blocked the image from my memory. Like mothers forgetting the excruciating pain of childbirth, I still retain my ability to see and will someday return to said coffee shop. But probably not until my raw cornea feel less violated.