yaleman.org

I thought the idea of a motard would be great, and reading the description on Yamaha’s website makes it sound awesome! (See the end for a copy of the page)

I have it on loan for a day or so while the 2000 model ZZR-250 RMB is buying is in for a roadworthy.  The bike is an excellent height for me - nearly too high in fact for me to comfortably stand on it in traffic. Considering I’m 6'9" tall, that is quite an effort!

The riding position is very comfortable, with my arms bent at about 90 degrees and my back nearly straight. Under acceleration I have the urge to lean forward lest I be thrown from the bike because of the way the suspension shifts.

The handling takes a bit of getting used to, going from my normal heavy old ZZR-600 to what is effectively a trail bike which weighs half as much. It is very manoeuvrable due to the light weight, trailbike suspension and very wide handlebars.

I have not had a chance to really test the handling due to the fact I only have it for a short time - not to mention throwing a loaner bike around in peak hour highway traffic while it is raining probably should be avoided. The general feeling that I get of the bike is that it is well settled and useful on the road, tight tracks or on fire trails where sticky mud and traction are not an issue.

The engine is very different to what I have ridden with before. The smooth carby-fed inline four cylinder ZZR-600, the thumping SV-650’s V-Twin and the ZZR-250’s wheezy but rev-happy two cylinder inline engine all have different characteristics, but they are still sports bikes at the core. The XTX’s engine, with its single piston and small useful rev range is a totally different beast. It definitely lives up to the “thumper” moniker such engines receive, roaring during acceleration and sounding like a burbling Harley-Davidson when you back off.

Without a tachometer on the bike it is hard to tell what you are doing at any point in time, but the feeling through the seat is that if you fail to choose the right gear you are heading for rattly-stallsville on the low end and it runs out of puff on the top end. There is a relatively tight range in the middle that it is quite happy to cruise in and pull away from under normal riding conditions.

The controls are easy to find and use as one would expect, all the switches and buttons are in the normal places and easy to feel for when you are first on the bike. The gearbox is reassuringly smooth and accurate, never leaving one to question whether it went into the gear I wanted. The levers aren’t adjustable, which makes me think that riders with smaller hands could be left over-reaching ont hsi bike. Clutch actuation is smooth and light which is nice.

The brakes I am still deciding about. The front sports a big single 320mm disc with four Brembo aluminium pistons doing the grabbing, and the rear has a not-too-shabby 245mm rear single disc. There is no question that if I was to grab the brakes that the bike would stop quickly, but under road use it seems to require more than the usual two-finger grab to pull the bike up. I’m not sure if this is another case of the motard-road bike comparison but it makes me feel a little nervous grabbing so hard on the lever to pull myself up.

Obviously after an hour or so on the bike in traffic it’s never going to be the most exhaustive of reviews, but it certainly is an interesting bike. Easy to ride and a good height, with a complete minimum of features leaves the bike in the normal motard position. Good for those that haven’t got a ute and want to ride their bike to the trail or for a fun bike which covers a lot of simple bases.

For me though, I’m going to be happy to be back on the dedicated sports bikes 😉

ANZ has a new logo. What the hell? Do they want to give me a hug? Is it something to do with anime? Or is it just some weird stylised crap that makes no sense.

I think it is the last one, personally. ANZ, please fire your graphic designers, they are making too much money and spending it on crack again.

I have read it before, and listened to it now in audio book form  - Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code is entertaining and if any of it is true (even just the facts that tie the story together) then it’s educational as well! I quite like the flow of the story, and the way that it introduces people to the idea of symbolism and questioning some of the central themes of religion.

We are getting closer to what I have dreamed and written of before - a universal information access device that allows people to learn from wherever and whenever they are. The WikiReader is a portable, low power device which has a full copy of Wikipedia that you can carry with you and access from anywhere.

It was designed by the team that brought the OpenMoko to the world, the first true open source mobile phone. I will be interested to see what happens with the developer’s side of things - hopefully they will allow open access to the software of the device so that it can be hacked and used for other things as well. Maybe this is the cheap ebook reader I have been looking for?

A truly honest view from an enlightened person on a drug that many think is the root of all evil. Please do not take this as me encouraging its use (as I am not a big fan), but I am fascinated by how he looks at the use of mind-altering drugs.

I think this pretty much explains my views on some drugs:

…there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words…

The idea of R which he introduces late in the piece is an interesting one - and especially for those that do not have experience or knowledge of drugs. The time between taking a dose and experiencing the effects is an important thing which many people fail to understand and which can cause no end of trouble. How many times have you heard of someone taking a dose of a drug and then when they thought it was not working, taking another dose or something else before the first dose hits? How many times was this potentially (or actually) catastrophic?

If this was the first piece of education provided to people at a young age with respect to recreational or mind-altering drugs I would be quite happy. It does not promote drugs, nor does it have the normal religious or societal warnings imposed on it. The next thing I would hope for would be an honest discussion on the physiological affects, but how would we get honest discussion on drugs going in society anyway?

I like that forty years ago one of the most intelligent and inspiring people of the time was hoping for the legality “of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.”

The most common way to connect a drive to a network path in Windows is this command:

net use X: \\SERVER\Share

Where:

• X: is the drive letter you wish to map the share to,
• \SERVER\Share is the UNC path to the share.

Assuming you have permissions to map drives and to access that share, it will map the drive and tell you that it mapped successfully.

If you want quick access and do not want to map a network drive, you can access a UNC Path directly from the Command Prompt using pushd.

“Saratoga Springs school district prohibits kids from biking to school, but a mom and her son defied the law. A state trooper was there to greet them.”

I’m completely and utterly gobsmacked at the nanny-state behaviour that’s happening more and more in today’s society. If a kid wants to ride or walk to school along a designated bike path with their parent supervising them no less, when does is it become the school’s choice to ban them from doing so?

Well, I should have known better than to have trusted all those in the chain that my contract paperwork had to go through in order to go from a temporary employee to the comfort of a permanent role. Of course once I had made the assumption that all would go well, it did not. Instead of attaching my paperwork along with some others, it lay forgotten in the digital wasteland that is an Executive Assistant’s computer and did not reach the appropriate people to get me paid.

I attended a wonderful wedding recently in the Bunya Mountains between two friends of mine, and it was lovely. The ride to and from there was less than fun, however.

I can handle:

• A four hour bike ride, that’s easy.
• Five or six kilometres of fist-sized gravel on a sports bike.
• The seals on my front master cylinder deciding to refuse to  live up to their name.

What I can’t handle is the terrible state of back-country Queensland roads and ending up with incredibly sore wrists by the time I was half way home. 🙁

I’ve just finished listening to an audiobook version of Orson Scott Card’s novel “Empire”. It’s quite an impressive novel, bringing together action, science fiction, politics and some modern philosophy.

It explores the idea of a red-state vs. blue-state American civil war brought about by manipulating the media and the people through some interesting psychological ploys.

As stated by the author himself, it wasn’t entirely his idea - having been approached by the Chair Entertainment Group, an American video game producer - and offered the chance to develop the game’s storyline as well as a novel to set the series into action. This is not to say that it’s not an incredibly well thought-out story, with rich character development and the just the right amount of workout for your imagination.