The current state of my garage. Can you have too many motorcycles?
It’s alive!
The mighty Seca 750 is running like a top!
Details on my sidecar project page.
All I need now is a sidecar (tomorrow or Tuesday) and a title. (Who knows when that will appear. – Soon I hope.)
The Insanity Begins
I came home this afternoon to find a 1982 Yamaha Seca 750 in my backyard.
And so the Sidecar Project begins.
Dreaming…
So I’m thinking about registering a new domain name. Spelling out anansi-web.com to people is getting a little old.
So I was poking around.
twforeman.com is available
tforeman.com is not
and of course foreman.com is not
Then I started playing around.
www.sawtoothranch.com is taken and points to a ranch in Idaho that is for sale. Beautiful photos of the montains on the site. 360+ acres.
I’d buy it in a heartbeat if I won the lottery!
But I still don’t know what domain to buy.
Paul Krugman’s Column about Karl Rove is fabulous
“John Gibson of Fox News says that Karl Rove should be given a medal. I agree: Mr. Rove should receive a medal from the American Political Science Association for his pioneering discoveries about modern American politics. The medal can, if necessary, be delivered to his prison cell.”
Yes, it requires free registration. Or you could use Firefox and BugMeNot.
And as a side note, I can’t believe that I just created a “Politics” category for my blog. I hate politics. But more than that, I hate what the current administration is doing to America.
Approached by a scammer
So I have my K1100RS motorcycle up for sale. It’s been listed on the Internet BMW Riders Marketplace page for a while with no interest so far.
And then the other day, I got an email:
Hello,
i came across a search dabatase where i found your bike placed for sale.i will like to hear from if you still have it for sale and if so pls could get back to me with the current details about the bike,the final asking price and pls do attach pics ok.
And mind you payment form will be by certified check and pls get back to me as soon as for possible for proceedings.
I will be looking forward to hear from you.
Many Regards.
Allan J Smith.
That’s cool, so I responded.
Continue reading →
Added a few features
I have added a few features on my blog:
- Added the Photoblog plugin in the hopes that I will post more photos here.
- Added a new Photo Blog category
- Added a Google Search Keyword plugin on the lower right – now you can see what search terms people use to find me
- I also turned down the number of entries on the front page from 15 to 8. Seemed a little large to me.
Alien Flower
This is an Alien Flower (I forget the real name.)
Also I have added the PhotoBlog plugin to my Blog in the hopes that I will start posting pictures that I take with my new camera.
A challenge
So yesterday Gus posts on our mailing list about a Yamaha Seca 650 motorcycle that a co-worker is giving away.
It doesn’t run (needs carb work, don’t they all?) and has no title.
So I think nothing of it.
Then when I get home I remember that someone else had posted about a sidecar that they saw for sale for $400.
Hmmm. All of a sudden I get a really stupid idea. Free motorcycle + $400 sidecar + elbow grease + beer = a sidecar rig for under $1000.
So I called Gus and the bike will be delivered to my house this weekend. Wow, what a nice, enabling friend Gus is. 🙂
Now the only hitch (well, okay, maybe not the ONLY hitch, I guess it’s the next hitch) is that someone else on the list wants to look at that sidecar. Hope that they decide they don’t want it.
Like I really need another project.
A Convo about Backups
This is part of an email exchange that my friend Mark and I had about backing up your data:
Mark started it off with:
> But that’s not why I’m writing. I’m writing to ask your learned opinion
> about backing up my data. Up until recently I have been burning periodic
> CD’s of the important stuff on our home computer. And up until recently
> it has all fit nicely on a single CD. But since Xmas since I got that
> iPod and especially in the last month since I got that digital camera, I
> have way more data than will fit on a CD. What to do now?
A continuous question. 🙂
I’m starting to run into the same issue. I just bought a new digital slr
(the canon 300D if you are curious) and am going to starting having gigs of
photos to keep track of and backup.
I’m actually writing a DB/Web program to manage my images right now.
One of the things I’m going to add into the program is that it will track
which DVD you made a backup of the image onto.
> – Continue to use CD’s but set up a more sophisticates system that backs
> up only the changes and compresses?
That’s an option, but a pain.
> – Get an external DVD burner?
A pretty good option, but you will eventually run into the same issue as
you have with CDs. Plus (and this is an issue I bet you have already run
into with CDs) how do you track what is on each disc? With a DVD you now
have about 7 times as much data to catalog per disc.
> – Get an external Fire Wire or USB hard drive?
I like this method the most. It’s portable. The main drawback is that it is
a hard drive and hard drives do fail eventually. But it is (relatively)
cheap, and it’s fast. The other issue is that sooner or later you will
start using it for primary storage and then you won’t have a backup of your
data any more. It’s much easier to just leave it plugged in and put the
files right on it…
> I’m kind of leaning toward that hard drive. It seems I can get 100Gb+ for
> about a dollar or two per Gb. If you have any advice in this matter, I’d
> love to hear it.
I don’t have a really good solution (nobody really does.) There are many,
many issues with data storage, especially long-term data storage. The main
issue that I have with digital vs. film photography is long term storage.
Film lasts a long, long time. Digital media? Who knows how long a DVD will
last? Especially one that is burned and not stamped. And will you still
have hardware to read it in 20 years?
This is a well known issue. NASA and JPL both have more data then they can
handle and some is lost due to file format and media changes. And they
can’t copy it to new media fast enough to keep ahead of it.
At this point, I would lean towards getting an external hard drive AND a
DVD burner. Backup all your data to the hard drive and burn DVDs of the
really important stuff (digital photos, tax records, etc…) That way, when
the external hard drive fails (and it will fail, they all do) you don’t
lose the really important stuff.
My strategy is going to be close to that. I think I’m going to build a
network storage server with RAID for redundancy and I have a 20GB DLT tape
drive for general backups. I’m also planning on burning my digital photos
to DVD at a regular interval, just in case.