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Categories: all aviation bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater Sun, 31 May 2009I decided last night that I'd head out and finally catch Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which was playing at Balagan theater. I've got a couple of friends in it, and it seemed to be getting good buzz. I decided, since I recently replaced the tach drive oil seal in the CL175, to take it out again. It's a little goofy to ride very far, but Capitol Hill isn't a bad trip, and I wanted to see if I could figure out the appropriate change to make to the carburetors to fix a mid-throttle weakness. The ride up to the hill was fine, and I provisionally decided on the carburetor change I wanted to make (drop the needles a notch, since the mid-throttle feels a bit rich). Unfortunately, as I was riding up Pike, just about to turn to the cross-street where I was intending to park, the engine suddenly died as if the key had been switched off: engine not running, headlight off, no brake light, etc. Bad news. Fortunately, I was literally a couple dozen feet from 11th when I ran out of momentum, so I duck-paddled the bike to the turn and into a parking spot on the side of the street. I didn't have time to work on it just then, so I left it parked and went to the show. After the show, I came back and did some poking at the bike. I checked the fuse (looked fine), unplugged and replugged previously troublesome connectors, looked over anything else that might be the cause of the problem. There really wasn't anything I could see. I finally pulled the fuse out so I could check the size of a replacement (you never know), locked up the bike as best I could, and walked down to the bus. Much later that night (between the walk to the bus, the bus ride, and the walk home from the bus stop, I figured I must have spent about an hour on a 20 minute motorcycle trip), I was able to pull out the multimeter and check the fuse: no connection! This was a bit of a hallelujah moment for me. The bike had previous done this trick, where it would shut off like someone had flipped a switch, but then it would come back as if nothing was wrong. This was incredibly frustrating, because there was then no way to find the problem and fix it. I had to sit back and hope it would manifest again in a situation that wasn't too unsafe. I'm just lucky it died when it did, instead of riding down Aurora, or on the freeway. Visual inspection of the fuse revealed no problems -- it hadn't blown from a short or something. This was very good news, and I realized it explained the whole problem: in one of the end-caps of the fuse, the link had probably vibrated loose over the life of the bike. It was now probably waving around and occasionally re-connecting in a way that would perfectly explain the off-on faults I saw before. I've seen light bulbs do this before, but never a fuse. So, I'm off soon to bus back to the hill, new fuses clutched in my nervous claws. In the absolute worst case, Jesse has offered that he'll be passing through Seattle on his way back from a dirt-biking weekend later today, and he could give me and the bike a lift back to my house. Fantastic timing! Posted at 10:22 permanent link category: /motorcycle Mon, 25 May 2009There's a fair amount of writing I need to do to describe the weekend I spent at Spokane, but first, a picture:
That's the sunset on Saturday night. More to come. Posted at 15:06 permanent link category: /misc Tue, 19 May 2009Every once in a while, Nature throws a curve ball at you:
The weather seems strangely appropriate to my mood tonight, a weird mix of many things. (Yes, that's a vague statement. No, I'm not going to explain it any further.) Posted at 20:34 permanent link category: /misc Tue, 12 May 2009Someone on the F-160 mailing list (a list for 160 Vintage racers) mentioned shoving a track-vendor hotdog into his peg as a substitute for a peg slider, and it inspired me to find this clip: Hopefully clear enough from the visuals and the tone of voice, the only helpful clue I can provide is that TUV is the German equivalent of the DMV, sort of, only every change to a vehicle has to be approved by TUV. Suffice to say that bike customizers and TUV don't usually get along. Posted at 16:51 permanent link category: /motorcycle I'm working on a full report of this weekend, but I'll give you the quickie review. Basically, I didn't have a very good time. There was a lot of self-doubt and wondering why I was bothering. I didn't have any overt problems, no crashes, no big goofs, just a steady stream of "why am I doing this?" This was all capped off by a range of annoying things, from the GoPro camera (which has always been spotty, but was at least kind of working last year) completely crapping out to dropping my shift linkage to coming in dead last, behind a new rider who hadn't even come to practice on Saturday. He was literally riding his first laps around the Pacific Raceways track on Sunday, and it was only his second time out on a track, ever. Humbling and thoroughly demoralizing. Still, I loved hanging out with the racers (although the new guy rubbed me the wrong way somehow), and being at the track, and all of it except the actual riding around the track "competing" for last place. I'm not giving up yet, but it's hard to be too fired up about the whole thing right now. It was also a massively over-committed weekend for me, so I was operating on far too little sleep and a pretty constant feeling of stress. I'll mention it here when I get the race report finished -- it's mostly done, I just have to add pictures. Posted at 11:10 permanent link category: /motorcycle Fri, 08 May 2009I've gone over my lists, prepared my stuff, cleaned and adjusted. I think that I'm about as ready for the race this weekend as I could be. And if you look hard, you can see that I'm (temporarily) sporting two cameras:
For a laugh, I might try turning the one on the handlebars around to aim at my face so you can all see the weird faces I pull as I race. I'll be curious to see how well both cameras work, since I had such generally spotty luck with the GoPro last year. The camera on the handlebars is an Oregon Scientific ATC-2000. The one on the left fork is a GoPro Motorsports Hero (who comes up with these names?). Posted at 16:42 permanent link category: /motorcycle Wed, 06 May 2009Ages ago now (so it seems) someone got hold of my debit card number, and rang up a few inconsequential purchases. My bank (WaMu/Chase) caught it and called me up. I said they weren't mine, and they cancelled the card. At the time, they also said they were placing the order for the new card, and I should expect it in 7-10 business days (up from 3-5 in the WaMu days, as I recall). So, I started making a lot more trips to the bank, and carrying a checkbook with me. Turns out I use a debit card a lot. I knew this already, but it was really driven home after it was shut off this time. As I neared the end of my 7-10 business day purgatory, I happened to think to ask the teller if he had any insight into when the card had been sent. He looked over my account records on his screen, then looked up with an innocent expression, and said, "I don't see an order for a new card here..." Sigh. He placed another order for a new card. Apparently the person I was talking to in the fraud department either didn't do it, or messed it up somehow. Finally, last night, I got my new card in the mail. Something like a child at Christmas, I ripped open the envelope to pull it out. Imagine my horror and surprise when I saw that my new card was "enabled with Blink[tm]!" The little radiating-waves icon told me all I needed to know: my new card contains an RFID chip. Companies that insist on pulling this kind of stunt invariably say that their RFID stuff is completely unhackable. Invariably, within a week of its release (sometimes much sooner), the system is hacked and the hackers gain access to the supposedly encrypted information. Now, this is all fine and good if we're talking about a magnetic stripe or something. You have to pry the card physically away from me to read that. But RFID can be read at a distance. In fact, at quite a distance, as far away as 30 feet. All your basic hacker needs to do is get within 30 feet of your RFID credit card, passport, etc. to read the data from it. That data will almost always be encrypted in some way, but history has taught us that it won't be encrypted very well. So, here I am, sitting with essentially a ticking time bomb in my hands, practically a give-away to any criminal with a laptop and a jacked-up RFID reader. I'm sure Mastercard won't tell anyone what exactly is contained in the data, but it's enough that I can wave it in front of one of their terminals, and complete a transaction. There are ways to prevent this scenario, ranging from professional RFID-proof wallets to very basic homemade wallets and even comparatively high-art steel-cloth wallets. The theory is always the same, though: wrap a layer of metal around the RFID chip in question, and it can't receive the energizing radio waves, and can't respond with the sensitive information inside. Even keeping your card in the same pocket as your keys can have the same effect. Rather than spend much money or time when I already have a perfectly serviceable wallet (and one that I actually quite like, one of these extremely thin wallets), I decided to take a much more... homemade approach (but not as bad as the duct-tape wallet). I made a tinfoil envelope for the card. This has the advantage of being as effective as the RFID blocking wallet, while costing no more than the price of a small piece of tinfoil and some packing tape. It also fits in whichever wallet you may prefer at the time. In truth, I now carry 4 RFID cards, and could probably stand to have a full wallet with RFID blocking capability, but the only one I care about is that damn debit card. Honestly, the chance of my getting scanned by a malicious hacker is relatively remote. But it annoys me to no end that companies like Chase are willing to build in fraud-enabling tools like this. And for the price of a little bit of tinfoil and packing tape, I'd rather be a slightly paranoid safe than sorry. Posted at 14:41 permanent link category: /misc Categories: all aviation gadgets misc motorcycle theater Written by Ian Johnston. Software is Blosxom. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net. |
