‘da Blog

I haven’t ridden my Kawasaki KLX 250S in a few months. I’d blown out its rear tire a few months back, let it sit, got it fixed, and then let it sit. So I rode it in today instead of my BMW F650GS…figured I’d give the 650 the day off since I’d be riding it to Death Vally tomorrow (Saturday). So I’m riding down Rancho Road and I’m ahead of traffic. I get to a light, stop, notice an odd burning smell (which I dismiss as coming from a cage next to me), and then go. I’ve got about a mile until the next light and I get it up to about 50MPH. Somewhere in there I notice that the bike is tracking funny (I recognize this sensation). I get to the the next light which is a left turn on Cheyenne Rd. While waiting for the light I check the wheel and tires. I look at the rear and I know what’s happened: The rear tire’s gone flat.

The left turn light turns green so I pull out and slowly make the turn. I pull over and take another look at the tire: It’s starting to come off the wheel (the bead’s broken so the tire’s bead isn’t resting on the shoulder of the wheel). There’s a gas station across the street so I signal, check traffic, and with as much throttle as I dared, limped out to the median, made a U-turn and got over to the opposite break-down lane. The tire feels really bad so I decide to shut it down and walk the bike in. As I get off the bike, a pick-up rushes behind me. If I’d gotten off the bike two seconds sooner he would’ve flattened me. I push the bike to the gas station.

Once at the gas station I get some change for the air machine and try to air up the tire. No joy. I decide the tire’s been holed and make the call to my insurance to call in some roadside assistance. I TXT work to say I will be late. I wait about an hour (I got a Diet Pepsi and a polish dog for breakfast at the mini mart) and the tow truck (a flatbed) arrives. I’m told they can’t take me home and that they have to take me to the nearest Kawasaki dealer. This is OK since my house is very close to the dealer and maybe I can get it fixed while-I-wait.

Turns out that the Kawi dealer doesn’t have the tire guy working today and suggests that I go next door to an independent off-road motorcycle place. I walk over and find out that they can take me right away. I push the bike over to their garage and arrange the repair. I’m waiting in the store while the wrench is working on the bike. After about 20 minutes in he comes with the tube and something else in his hand. “Here’s the problem,” he says and hands me the valve stem. Then he moves his finger off the hole in the tube where the valve stem goes and out comes the air. Somehow, I managed to tear the valve stem off of the tube. He suggests a rim lock and I say, “Go for it.”

A few minutes later I’m putting along—all’s right with the world but just in case, I’m heading home to get the BMW to ride that into work. I’m suddenly not so confident in the KLX.

So here’s what probably happened: At some point in the morning I accelerated hard enough that the wheel turned faster than the tire. This can happen if the bead isn’t firmly seated on the wheel which allows the wheel to slip (and turn) against the tire. So if the wheel turns but the tire doesn’t the tube in the tire has to do what the tire is doing. The problem is that the tube has a valve stem sticking out through a hole in the wheel. If the wheel turns enough, it’ll pull the valve stem off the tube. Out comes the air.

Not sure where to go from here with the KLX…eventually I was going to get new wheels and tire to SuMo (SuperMoto) the bike, i.e. take a dual-sport bike (which looks like an off-road bike) and give it street wheels and tire resulting in a super manouverable bike with ridiculous cornering capability but I don’t have the money for that right now. I’ll just have to stare at it for a while, mayne take it out one weekend, and see what blows up.

I added a bunch of college friends in Facebook today. I seem to add people in groups and go weeks between adding new friends. On Twitter I started following some new people today…I gotta get some family members and more friends using Twitter (if they aren’t already—have to start looking for them!).

I think there’s a plug-in module for WordPress that integrates Twitter posts into the blog. I’ll try to add that by the weekend. I tried to add the Twitter app to my Facebook page but encountered a login issue so was denied…I want to add that so my Facebook status line and Twitter are one and the same.

What a tangled web we weave on this Interweb thingy we’ve conceived. Thanks, Wil’.

So I got home form work at around 20:20 (yes, I keep time in 24 hour format. Get over it). Washed the dishes and then went upstairs to update some one-page websites.

The first ones I updated were the splash pages to a few sites I have  under the alsplace.com domain including: alsplace.com, atalanta.alsplace.com, galatea.alsplace.com, and galatea.alsplace.com/~aalegado. If you visit these pages you’ll see they are all, basically, the same page:

A screen-shot of the alsplace.com splash page.

The only difference is the hostname reported at the top (this is hard-coded…I didn’t want to reveal the actual hostname of some of the hosts because, well, they’re kinda fugly) and which of two different MySQL databases that the fortune cookie script accesses.

The list of fortunes are identical in both MySQL dbs…I just haven’t learned how I can get the GoDaddy-based MySQL server to answer remote queries, i.e. so I can use the GoDaddy MySQL db for all my sites on all the different hosts I have (there are a few…). I read some support docs on the GoDaddy site and they refer to a “Direct Database Acess” setting that you’re supposed to set when you create a database. Well, guess what? I can’t find the setting. I created a test db to see if I missed it the first time. I didn’t. It’s not there. I might not have the right account. Anyway, I’ll probably ask tech support to see if I can do it. I’d rather use one MySQL server although I’m split as to which one I should use: The one GoDaddy offers for use with my hosting account or the one I have on my self-hosted Linux box.

The other  pages are…

A screen-shot of the aksenovatwins.com splash page.

A screen-shot of the icouldbehappy.com splash page.

A screen-shot of the ithinkthereforeimac.com splash page.

A screen-shot of the pinkyblueskies.com splash page.

For each of these domain names I’ve only created the splash page…no real time to build complete sites.

Speaking of complete sites, alsplace.com used to have some extensive pages mostly-oriented around digital photos presented by custom-scripted gallery pages. I got tired of hand-crafting the pages and eventually installed Gallery2 on a self-hosted, Linux webserver. This worked for a few months and I started to worry about uptime and back-ups so I just opended and account and uploaded my libraries to SmugMug.com which does a much better job of presenting photo galleries (and gives me multiple, off-site back-ups of all my digital photos to boot!). I may add a page here or there to alsplace.com but I think for now I’ll just maintain this blog.

As for the domain names:

The Aksenova twins want me to go balls out and create some interesting features in their site…they seem to think I know what I’m doing. Scary. Still, they’ve got some ideas for some photo galleries that should turn out pretty nice once I can spend some time working on them!

The Altered Images homage pages are just what they are and will probably stay that way. I just wanted to make some Internet Shrines to some classic 80’s songs, Pinky Blue and (my favorite Altered Images song) I Could Be Happy. I’m still working on another one-pager: You Make Me Feel So Good by Book of Love.

The IThinkThereForeIMac page is a fortune cookie-generator. ’nuff said.

Heya. This is my first blog-post so I’ll make it short and sweet.

…

…I’ve got nothing. I’ll try again later.