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View Maywood Park, OR to St George, UT in a larger map

A plan is falling into place. June 12th – 15th. Training/shakedown rides are planned for most weekends in May. I’ll switch to daily moto commutes once the raining stops. Google Maps shows that St George is 1064 miles with an expected drive time of 15 hours 34 minutes. I know I can be more efficient than that but it is a very long day regardless and the roads south of Salt Lake City are unknown to me.

View Klickitat Run in a larger map

I’m slowly gearing up for a run up to Klickitat. I want to get up there and take a look. It can be a very relaxing place. There is a really nice turn out above the river where the sunsets are really pretty. The turn out is about a mile up a canyon. The sides are not steep drop-offs but steep grassland. The river isn’t visible nor is the upload plateau. It’s quiet with a big shade tree. It’s a nice place to stop, eat an apple and sip some water. Read more…

I’ve been listening to a LOT of music on Pandora lately. Amusingly, most of it I already own. Anyway. Me being me, I wanted to learn more about the technology behind the selection algorithm. So I hit Wikipedia and ended up on Scientific Computing with this article. After reading the article, I can’t say that I learned much. I’m hoping to find out more about the way the algorithm selects tunes. I’ve got ideas on what it is doing, but I’d like to learn more.

Switter by Rammstein played last. Yeah, I have that one. It is really funny if you knew the translation. Who said those ‘wasted years’ in German class wouldn’t pay off. I learned how to use Babelfish better at the very least. LOL It helps when you know the language structure (noun/verb order). Gott Sein by Megaherz is up now. My German isn’t good enough to follow along but I can get the general idea and fill in the gaps by using references. After to listening to several Megaherz tracks, I think they will have to be added to my collection. Interesting. Similar to Rammstein, but not. Good stuff.

I am sure Marilyn Manson is lurking nearby.

The craving is growing. Pieces are lining up. Maybe this summer will be the one to complete the quest: a Saddle Sore 1000 certificate. My conditioning isn’t near where it needs to be, but I still have time and I do have experience on longs days in the saddle having completed multiple 500+ mile days and one 800 mile day. It is all about pacing and knowing when to take breaks (early and often). Scott mubbled something about pushing on the second day to score the Bun Burner.

Saddle Sore 1000 / Bun Burner 1500

It looks like we will do the attempt on the FJR and SuperDuke. That in itself presents a few logistical issues. The FJR range is 300 miles. The KTM fuel light pops on around 150 or 160. Storage. Highway stability at speed. Effort expended in the canyons. Etc. Everything is a trade-off. The basic idea is a hard push at the start to score the cert(s) then an easy cruise back home. Maybe I should mail a few things up to the motel in advance?

View Maywood Park, OR to Stewart, BC in a larger map

BTW: Stewart, BC is just across the border from Hyder, AK. There is no official crossing and Google maps can’t seem to map directly to Hyder these days. It could do it last year.

Now, I need to start burning some miles to get back into shape…

I could have ridden this morning, but I didn’t. The cats kept me up a good portion of the night and I’m rather sore after yesterday evening’s commute. 90 miles of twists and railed corners took a toll on my muscles. Most of the winter was spent doing nothing physical and I degrade so quickly these days. I guess I’m getting old. I don’t bounce back like I used to when I was younger. I don’t retain muscle mass over time without constant use. I used to be able to take a month or two off and get right back into a groove in a few days. Now it takes weeks. I need more sleep to feel well rested and injuries take a lot longer to heal. A simple cut used to take a couple days. Now they can take weeks to heal. My high blood pressure made that worse. I’m got that back under control, mostly by reducing my work load and subsequent stress levels. I should go back to the gym…

In any case, rain is coming and I expect everything to be a miserable mess before the end of the day… or it could be another perfect day. Either way, I drove the car.

Hours at the office a memory, I headed to North Plains for a 90 mile commute home. I traveled to the farthest points on Skyline where the gravel starts then back to Thompson. The corners flowed. Everything clicked. I figured out why the front end was wandering. Groves in the pavement. I learned that drifting out on a corner exit smoothed out my lines. The changes to the settings made a huge difference. The bike had previously unknown stability. I could dive into a corner faster than I ever could on my other bikes and it was a thoughtless process. The bike just flowed into every bend. And I wasn’t trying to push. I wasn’t pushing. It just worked. Read more…

An architecture astronauts that is?

As I said yesterday, I’m spending some time to studying design patterns. I’m ears deep in research on MVC which has led me to MVP and beyond. I’ve got some nasty code tightly bound to a WinForms UI. I want elegance and flexibility. What I have is neither.

So…

It is time to refactor. Read more…

After a relaxing weekend, I had a terrible night last night. All of the pets are in ‘spring-mode.’ The dog wouldn’t lay down. The kitten was racing through the bedroom and the pushiest of our cats decided that I was paying enough attention to her… at 4 am. Needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep last night. Read more…

Queensryche played at the Roseland last night. It was a really good show. They played a handful of older tracks like Screaming in Digital, I Dream in Infrared, and Take Hold of the Flame. They also played large chunks of the new album American Soldier. We had reserved seats in the front row of the balcony. That was a first for me. Great seats. Usually the Roseland is general admission. The sound was pretty good. And the band was in good form.

Umm. Yea. It’s spring. What did you expect?

New Music

Queensryche are playing at the Roseland this weekend. Hopefully the tickets we ordered and received will automagically reappear before 21:00 on Saturday evening. Hopefully…

I’m researching MVC Design patterns at work. I’ve got working code buried in a Excel Ribbon. I need to migrate that code out of the Ribbon in to a new WinForm. It sounds like a simple cut-n-paste. Maybe.
Read more…

UltraGridGroup group1 = band.Groups.Add();

During a code review this morning, I had one of those crazy moments. I was looking through this rather large block of code written by our team lead, Rob. I was doing the review because I wrote the formatting engine for the Excel UI that we currently use. The team lead is working to port all of that functionality over to a WinForms desktop app. Lee, who sits on the other side of Rob from me, was half-listening working on his own stuff.

So… I’m following along as Rob discusses all of his changes and I see the line I wrote above. On pure impulse, I casually belt out, “Band on the run…” Slightly out of key and with zero context… and everyone in the room starts laughing. A lot. Lee initially grimaced because I had scored a direct hit with the “Can’t get that tune out of my head” assault then he started laughing. Rob was trying to keep a straight face while he continued his monologue. It probably didn’t help that I was humming the melody. Every time Rob would try to even things out Lee and I would look at each other and start cracking up again. This lasted a good 10 minutes.

Shiny Toy Guns is play on Pandora at the moment. It was Dokken and Fleetwood Mac a while ago with some W.A.S.P. throw in. Now if I could just find some Paul McCartney and Wings.

The first track played on Pandora this morning.

The creative juices have been primed and ideas are flowing through my fingers. It’s time to pivot some data.

I think today is going to be interesting…

I’ve noticed this (One of ‘those’ days…) is a very popular page. Today I re-read it. I saw a couple more typo’s and places where I wasn’t very clear. But more than anything else it was frustrating and disappointing to revisit that moment.

I know the guy had a life before all of this. He made a bad choice, but his choices had consequences far beyond his limited world. I had multiple conversations with the insurance companies. I learned his name, Mason Andrews. I learned that the driver he hit was terrified to get back in a car and was vowing to never ride again. I know that it took me almost a year to stop thinking about what I saw when I got back on a bike. Maybe that is why I still feel that tightness in my chest when I think about it. It was a brutal moment. Exceptionally fast and infinitely slow.

Spilt blood, bent steel, torn carbon, shattered glass, falling tears, and bare feet.

I still ride, obviously. The SuperDuke is in the same class as the S4R. And I have been seduced by carbon, ti, and steering dampers. But I try not to make those kinds of mistakes. I know what I don’t know. I don’t know the KTM well enough yet to really push it. I do know that you don’t push in rush hour traffic, at least not like that. Sure I break the laws and occassionally lane split when it suits my purposes. I use the power of that v-twin to scoot past the cages that would block my progress. But I also know what happens if I make a mistake…

Live. Ride. Breathe. Feel every moment. And understand that one choice will cause those ripples to move away from you and impact other’s in ways that you never imagined.