Motorcycles

The Gumption Trap

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

The other morning I started up the FJ1200 to ride to work. As it sat idling while I suited up, I noticed a spreading puddle of gasoline underneath it.

Damn it. I know what that is. When I rebuilt the carburettors last year, the one wear part I didn’t replace was the inlet needle valves and seats. They looked pretty worn, but I didn’t want to spend the money. And it ran fine all fall.

So I shut it off and drove the hack in to work instead.

I found a guy in New Zealand selling some needles and seats on eBay for a reasonable price, and I bought a set. They arrived a couple of days ago and tonight I decided to put them in.

I’ve taken the carbs off enough times now that it’s not a huge deal and it goes pretty quick. I had the new parts in and the bike back together in about two hours. I also learned a new assembly trick for putting the crabs (sic) back on – if you mount them to the air box first, and then mount them to the cylinder head, it’s a lot easier.

I cranked the bike over a few times to prime the carbs and then let it start. It was idling nicely, then it started to run rough and then I noticed a puddle of gasoline spreading underneath it again.


Whisky-Tango-Foxtrot?

So, since it was almost 9:00 in the evening, and I know all about gumption traps, I shut off the bike, put away my tools and went inside to write this blog entry.

Robert Pirsig coined the term Gumption Trap in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

The book isn’t really about Zen, and it’s not really about Motorcycle Maintenance, but it does talk about some interesting things, and it is about a motorcycle trip to Montana – a trip I’ve made a few times. So I enjoy reading it.

A Gumption Trap is when you are working on something and something goes wrong. It takes the wind out of your sails and then you get frustrated and start to make mistakes. This turns into a downward spiral and things just get worse and worse.

It took me a long time to learn when I should just stop working on something instead of forging on and getting more and more frustrated until something major breaks.

But I did learn it.

But I still have to figure out why the bike is leaking gas.

And I noticed the fork seals are leaking pretty badly. Sigh.

WWW

The Painted Anvil

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Mmm. A nice collection of vintage pinup art. Or, as they say:

The Best in Classic Pin-Up and Comicbook “Girly” art

Link

UPDATED: The link has changed – they are hosted at Fortune City, which is a shame, as it’s full of annoying ad pages. It looks like they were moving to www.paintedanvil.com, but there is no site there now.

I had forgotten about this site until I started seeing this entry showing up as a search result for “painted anvil”. For some reason, this entry is the top result for that search. So I fixed the link.

Misc

WANT: AirJelly

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

This is so cool.

Festo’s AirJelly is powered by some magical jelly fish properties, a lithium-ion battery, an electric motor and a bit of helium. If that’s not floaty enough for you, there’s also a water version, AquaJelly.

Motorcycles

DIY EFI

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

A long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away… no, wait.) Mark and I were discussing changing the carburettors on the 82 BMW R100RS to Fuel Injection.

The major stumbling block at the time was the EFI controller. There just wasn’t really anything available.

HackADay just put up an article about putting EFI on your motorcycle. And there is an open source EFI controller out there called the MegaSquirt!

On the forum page of success stories there is a conversion of an R50 with R100 cylinders that uses the MegaSquirt and a pair of R1150 throttle bodies.

Just what I need, a new project. 🙂

So, sell the K bike, fix up the R bike and convert it to EFI? That could be fun. Not cheap, but fun. I bet Mark would like to help out. 🙂

Computers

Get A Mac, Pt. II

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

To another friend with a Mac:

> Yup, saw that. You’re just jealous because you don’t have one! 🙂

Um. No.

Please give me one *compelling* reason I should go spend thousands of dollars on a piece of hardware so I can run MacOS when I already have a perfectly good Windows PC that does everything I need it to.

What is the one thing that I need to do, but don’t know about, that you can do on your Mac that I can’t do on my PC? What is the Mac’s “killer app” that would justify my buying one?

Video editing? I’ve already demonstrated that’s not true. Sony Vegas was plenty easy for me to figure out and adding a firewire card was plug and play. And I hear Adobe Premier is pretty good too.

Photo editing? Photoshop runs on my PC just fine.

Page layout/DTP? Hell, I’ve run Quark on my PC for years.

CAD? Can you even run SolidWorks or AutoCAD on a Mac? Probably under Parallels, but then you are running Windows, aren’t you?

GarageBand? Well, that’s one that doesn’t run on my PC. But there are others out there – see GarageBand for Windows – but I don’t do music editing. Rosalyn wants to though. But that’s not a compelling reason.

On the other hand there are lots of apps that I use that will *not* run on a Mac.

Sure, I could run Parallels, but then I’m running Windows on the Mac and what’s the real advantage of that? Why not just run Windows on a PC?

And I don’t want to hear “it’s just easier.” Or “hey, it’s a Mac.” Give me concrete examples that are worth thousands of dollars to me.

I’ll accept that you like your Mac. But stop telling everyone they should throw away all their PC hardware and spend thousands of dollars on one.

It’s very annoying.

Computers

Get A Mac. Um, no.

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

This morning at work this article was passed around in email. It’s about a hacking contest and tells how the MacBook Air was hacked in under two minutes with a browser exploit.

We have Macs and Windows PCs (and advocates and zealots) at work so this started a thread about Macs are better/no they are not.

After a bit of back and forth, John Stephenson wrote what I consider to be an excellent screed that can be summed up as “All software sucks, all hardware sucks, the only secure computer is one that’s been melted down to slag.”

You can read John’s full commentary, and my “me too” response below the fold:Continue reading →

Computers

donotreply.com

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

This is a beautiful thing.

Have you ever noticed how many companies send out emails with a return address of something@donotreply.com in hopes that they won’t get any replies?

Well…. Some enterprising soul has registered donotreply.com and setup a mail server.

Wow. Talk about a security hole.

Go read the scary blog of what they are receiving over at www.donotreply.com.

And check out the fine print at the bottom of the page:

Use of the domain donotreply.com is billed at $100 per day or $1 per email minimum – post billed. This domain is not for sale, nor to be used in unauthorized mailings,addresses, or automated systems. Any use of the domain that results in damage to the server may incur additional billing. Please contact chet at poe-news.com for other pricing and the billing mailing address. Unauthorized use of this domain gives me full rights to post any emails involved using the unauthorized address. Don’t like it? Don’t use it.

Ah, I just learned something. There are four reserved domain names that you are supposed to use for testing and examples per RFC 2606:

  • example
  • test
  • invalid
  • localhost

These four domains can never be registered. Interesting.

Politics

American Politics Explained

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

P. J. O’Rourke explains American Politics to the Europeans in his “Letter to Our European Friends” posted at the Cato Institute.

The difference between American parties is actually simple. Democrats are in favor of higher taxes to pay for greater spending, while Republicans are in favor of greater spending, for which the taxpayers will pay. In foreign policy, Republicans intend to pursue the war in Iraq but to do so with a minimal number of troops on the ground. This is not to be confused with the disastrous Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld policy of using a minimal number of troops on the ground to pursue the war in Iraq. Democrats intend to end the war, but they don’t know when. Democrats are making the “high school sex promise”: I’ll pull out in time, honest!
…
Think of America’s politicians as the Seven Dwarves. They’re all short — short on ethics, short on experience, short on common sense, short on something. But we keep thinking that one of these dwarves is going to save our snow white butt.

Go read the rest of it.

Thanks to my friend Sev for sending this one out.