Depending on who is on your friends list, you may have seen bulletins flying by today. Some people like to use the bulletins to carry on conversations in public that are best left to e-mail.

FAIL!

I just now got back from picking up my new, activated iPhone 3G 16GB BLK. I am now officially a member of the exclusive club of people who paid $299 for a fucking phone and locked themselves into a two year contract at a ridiculous monthly rate (the 450 minute plan). It won't be long before another $99 goes to Apple for the iPhone Developer thing that lets me sell apps on the App Store and, more importantly, debug off the phone. I'm still not quite clear on that stuff. I might not put the money down until I return from my mini vacation in August.

First observation. It feels heavier than I expected.

First joke of the day. My trip will involve going down a narrow corridor of western Virginia with no coverage. The actual Smokey Mountains Park range of Deals Gap also appears to be a dead zone. I am reconsidering the gun idea.

I've been watching a lot of videos about The Tail of The Dragon in Tennessee on SR-129 near Deals Gap. I'm not afraid of the road itself. I figure I can always go slow enough to handle it. No. The fearful presence I speak of is the malevolent presence of the TNPD and BCSO. Their job seems to be to harass bikers and extort money from them.

Normally when I make a trip someplace, I carry a gun. I do this to protect myself against criminals. The problem is, it is generally illegal for me to do that. I won't go into the history of gun control in the USA. But I will say that the laws were originally created to prevent the freed slaves from owning firearms after the civil war. Anyway, with the attention that motorcycle riders get, I'm afraid of getting searched and busted for a felony possession of a firearm. The recent SCOTUS decision (District of Columbia vs Heller) has not changed anything other than forcing DC to at least have some sort of permit system.

Besides, a handgun is useless against rogue cops in a police state.

So when I'm down at the Dragon in August, I will be unarmed. The odds of police harassment vastly exceed the odds of needing a gun for self defense. If you think about it, that's kind of sick. The police are supposed to "protect and serve", not ticket and confiscate.

Even though I don't mean to, I probably sound a bit like a gun nut. The truth is, I don't get to shoot that much recreationally anymore and it is not normal for me to need a gun for self defense. I generally don't carry while riding anyway because in a crash I don't want some hunk of iron to need extraction from my body. I'm fairly realistic about the probability of various possible events within my ability to figure out which is the more likely.

It's possible that I am just letting myself fall victim to propaganda. I am somewhat gullible. Then again, I also have something of a strong anarchist streak. My view of government is that it exists to maintain our infrastructure and nothing else. Something is very wrong when a cop can give you an order and arrest you for not following it. Let's not forget who employs whom.

I suspect most people already have.

Got a letter from the Township explaining that there was an ordinance about the length of grass. I must cut it or face a $1000 / day fine. OK. Since the property can only be seen from a few other places (not the road) a neighbor must have brought it to their attention.

Hi, neighbor! That sound you hear at 05:00 will be MY FUCKING LAWN MOWER.

Have a day.

Original Blog

Back near the end of August 2008, I opened an account on YouTube as a "just in case" backup if LiveVideo were to go off the air. Obviously this did not happen.

LiveVideo has had an impact on YouTube. YouTube has been displaying their videos at the same size as LiveVideo (425x334). This doesn't improve the picture quality of course. They are still using a lower bit rate than LiveVideo. Also, YouTube is still down mixing audio to monaural at a lower bit rate. So YT's audio also sucks.

Edit: LiveVideo uses 445x369.

YT's next salvo seems to be increasing their upload size limit. It is now 10 minutes and 1024MB. That is not a typo. You can upload a 1024MB file. I tested this with a 720p video that I made. The file encoded to 993.3MB. Close enough. The bit rate on the file is just a shade over 16Mbps. It is a proper 16:9 HD file except that I made the frame rate 24fps.

You would expect that such a high quality file would produce a high quality video on YT. I was expecting it. Or, to be more accurate, I was curious if it would or if YT would just knock it down to their usual pathetic bit rate. Well guess what they did? Yep. Pathetic bit rate.

The video itself isn't very interesting. I was just documenting the decay of an old house. I was also playing with certain camera settings. Still, the quality should have been much better.

Sorry, YouTube. The very fact that you still maintain a ten minute playback time limit does not make it worth uploading a super large file when you are just going to ruin it. You fail.

Addendum

I tested out what I found at the URL that Swipe posted and was rather surprised at what I found. I also corrected the upload limit for YT. I tried to embed the high resolution video in this blog, but YT is effectively blocking me from doing that. If anyone can tell me how to fool the flash player into streaming the higher quality stream, please let me know.

In the meantime, you will just have to follow this link to YT to see and hear the difference.

LV, you may need to do some catch up. I hope you keep the original files like YT does. I do like LV much better than YT. But I do dig getting better video and audio quality.

Also, a minor LV annoyance, is that the html I post in my blogs gets parsed. Specifically the object tag is not allowed. Also, the embed tag gets turned into an object tag! I'm sure there are valid security reasons for doing this. I would not trust random html either. Imagine what you can do with iframe and a few other tags. Cross site scripting attacks anyone? Oh well. Just ignore this last paragraph and pretend you never read it.

So like most bikes, the CB600F (599 in North America, 600 Hornet everywhere else) has a web forum dedicated to it. In fact, there are two (that I am aware of). And like with any other bike, there are people who want to know how fast it goes. Everyone has a different number. Recent experience suggests those numbers are made up. Or make believe. Whatever.

So far the highest indicated speed I've seen on my display is 136 MPH. The bike just barely reached that point in the amount of road available. It was working hard to get there. The indicated speed kept fluctuating. It couldn't make up it's mind whether it was going 135 or 136. While the speedometer was making up its mind how fast the bike was going, I was stirring the gears. It didn't really matter where on the tach I was. The wind was a pretty solid wall.

While that was going on, the suspension was pretty much stressed out. The road surface isn't so smooth at that speed. Between the wind buffeting and the road ripple, things were bad enough. That's when the road started to curve. At 70 MPH, the curve is gentle. I'm not even conscious of following my line. At nearly twice that speed, the bike wants to go straight. Damn the road, the bike wants to go straight! Pushing on the inside bar rather hard gets it leaned over. Leaned over kind of like I remember from my crash. I've lost faith in my tires. Until they are replaced, I don't want to be leaned over like that.

I don't want to be leaned over like that at one hundred and whatever miles an hour I was going. Not when I'm just a few feet from a belt sander that most people call an Interstate. So I gave up. I rolled off the throttle. The wind dragged my speed down fairly quickly before I was on the brakes. I was down to the speed limit at the exit ramp.

I know a lot of people say that it is easy to go fast in a straight line. I'd wager most of them haven't done it. Or maybe they have a nice smooth stretch of runway to work with, or a drag strip. I rarely have occasion to break 80. That's indicated. It could be only 72 MPH. Who knows? Motorcycle speedometers can't be trusted. Anyway, 130 indicated, which may be only 117 MPH with a 10% error, feels bloody fast on a bike with no fairing and a suspension setup for commuting.

So how fast does the 600 Hornet go? Your guess is as good as mine. Just don't be too quick to trust numbers bandied about by people.

I can't believe I'm actually considering washing my bike. My usual philosophy is, "if I have the time to wash it, I have the time to ride it." And I sure as heck know which activity is more fun. But since the bike has been down in the mud, I haven't ridden it other than the remainder of the day I set it down. OK, crashed.

I've ordered replacement gear. I had forgotten how much I paid for that stuff. OUCH! Fortunately I found a discount site on the web called New Enough. This is good because it saves me a bunch of money. Also, my mesh jacket has gone into an upgrade that put it in limbo. The company that makes the jacket is advertising the new version. But the stores all are listing the old version. Well almost. They show the old version but have no links to actually let you add one to your shopping cart.

I'm going with a different color on the jacket (there is no choice on the pants unless you choose black). Rather than white, which starts showing off the dirt rather quickly, I am going with grey. I think this is a more practical choice since gear is another thing I don't wash.

I also tried to order a replacement set of crash protectors from R&G since they have proven that they work (unlike the Rizoma mushrooms that go and bend the frame). Don't ask. R&G is a UK outfit. They don't take American Express. I asked about this and got an amusing reply, "Unfortunately we are unable to accept American Express as there are to many digits!" The number of digits is presumably because they have an international payment system in place through the Bank of Scotland. Also the sales guy used the wrong "too". He pointed me to a US distributor that R&G uses that I will look up. He also provided the phone number. With any luck, I'll order those parts today.

Barring any other issues that I may discover when washing the bike, this should set me mostly back to OK. I'm not going to worry about a portion of the clutch lever being ground down or a bit of the kick stand being ground down. The scratches on my wind screen do bug me. I could drop $100 to replace it (again). But that seems kind of vain to me. I'm wondering if I can polish the scratches out. The screen is acrylic. I've never tried to polish acrylic.

On the whole, I would prefer to have not crashed. Sure, the videos that covered the crash have done well in terms of views, hits, and comments compared to what I'm used to. But I honestly think it is enough that I bought a nice camera and good editing software, both of which are serious over kill for vlogs.

This comes courtesy of Thundercat98. The original article is here.

Montgomery motorcyclist stable after crash with SUV

By PAMELA SROKA-HOLZMANN
STAFF WRITER

A 55-year-old Montgomery man is listed in stable condition after the motorcycle he was riding last weekend collided with a sports utility vehicle on Millstone River Road, police said.

The accident occurred at 2:28 p.m. Saturday when Edward W. Gleeson, 55, of the Belle Mead section of Montgomery, was traveling south on Millstone River Road on a Yamaha FJR1300 motorcycle. The motorcycle collided with a Toyota Highlander being driven by Scott T. Totka, 22, of Hillsborough, police said.

Gleeson was listed in stable condition Tuesday evening at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, according to a hospital spokesperson. Totka was not injured in the crash.

Police said Totka was traveling north when he attempted to turn his SUV left into a private driveway and struck the motorcycle. Gleeson suffered internal injuries and was flown via helicopter to Robert Wood.

Millstone River Road between Blackwells Mills Road and Amsterdam Drive was closed for nearly four hours as police investigated the crash.

The incident remains under investigation by township police and the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office Collision Analysis and Reconstruction Team. Police ask anyone with information to call the township's police department at (908) 369-4323.

There is nothing more humbling as a rider than going down on a simple curve on the road. That happened to me. I talk about it some in my video Fudmottin Goes Down.

In one sense I got lucky. The gear I was wearing saved me from serious injury. And yes, I would have had serious injuries without the gear. No one ran over me. The bike was not badly damaged, thanks to the frame sliders. It will probably save me money not to report this accident to the insurance company and just do the repairs myself. But there was one thing that was seriously damaged. My confidence. Yeah, my pride was hurt too. I've gone through curves just like that one at much faster speeds with no problem. Even in the rain.

This crash hurts because it should not have happened. Maybe I should have seen the gravel. Maybe I should have been riding slower (I was already down to about 20 MPH). Whatever the cause, I should have handled it and kept the bike on its two wheels. The crash should not have happened. But it did

It's going to take me some time to build my confidence back up. The money to replace my gear and a few broken parts does not sting as much as my pride.