yotogi.net

here is a well stated blog post on why we ride...

On Monday, I had to go home to help my Melissa get a baby owl back into a tree in the backyard. When I got home that night, we took the box down and it was empty. Although unable to confirm it, we suspected that since the baby wasn’t back on the ground and the box was intact he made it home safely. Parent owls had been eyeing us as we put the box in the tree, although they didn’t attack.

When I get back from walking the dog this morning, the baby is hanging out on our porch. We figure it is learning to fly and is just tired out. For some reference as to how chill this baby is, this picture was taken from about 5 feet away with my 50mm fixed lens (no zoom).

Parent owls were hanging out in a tree keeping an eye on the little one. I think that this is the mother owl as it is smaller than the other one that keeps an eye out. In fact daddy is to the top and right of this picture which I didn’t know until I was looking for the mom again and saw they were both up there. They like to talk a big game, but they haven’t attacked and have gotten as close as 10 feet without spooking. This was taken with my zoom lens, so I was not anywhere as close as the other picture.

Game Theory
Transferable Utility
Chronicles of Spellborn Combat System (Spelldeck) (couldn't even get it to patch at work, shameful)
Steampunk
R/C Tank Combat (random)
Weather Underground (nasty storms today)
OpenGL Programming Guide for Mac OSX

What is Cocoa?
Launch Services Reference
Hex vs. Square Map
Tessellation
10-Minute Introduction to Objective-C
The Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language

there is a difference between someone worth getting angry over and something worth getting angry over. not all of the prior's actions are the latter.

a couple of weeks back, the science channel, as one of the many channels of the discovery network, ran space week. in many ways this is like the long running shark week that we have watched for years, but for the geekier set. while it might be my predisposition to the inner geek, i would still argue that space week is much better (cooler?) and in many ways better.

in HD, the "When We Left Earth" series is fantastic. some of the footage that they found and used is mesmerizing. and the entire 6-hour series is inspired and inspiring all at the same time. i am becoming quite a fan of this format, which has seen heavy use recently in the series "Planet Earth" and "Earth: The Biography". It lends itself well to being the correct amount of time for a series without having to include too much cruft which would be necessary for at 12-26 episode broadcast series.

one of the things that so many of the astronauts noted is the spiritual understanding they gained looking down on our little planet from the freedom of space. how unimportant everything that we stressed about seemed, how we continually seem to sell ourselves short with very unimportant things. a speck, on a speck, on something that aspires to be a speck.

i can see how people pre-disposed to find importance in the human species and our place in the universe have found religion soothing. when you consider how many elements had to line up to form a world in just the right spot for water to be liquid (the habitable zone), to have so much that water delivered by comets, to have a magnetosphere that protects our atmosphere from being boiled off by solar radiation, to have species like the dinosaurs removed from the food chain so that mammals could develop, to survive all the the cataclysms the earth has experienced, the odds seem insurmountable. there must be a god, the odds are just too remote.

that is, until you consider the shear size of the universe. and not just the space we take up, but also the age, we start to get a better grasp on some of the statistics. there are an estimated 100 billion starts in our galaxy. our current best estimate for the number of galaxies is 125 billion. so, start to do the math. that is a lot of places for intelligent life to form, much less the time that we have to develop that life over. we have been on our little rock 250,000 years as a species, but what we would view as society has only been around maybe 10,000 years. considering the age of the earth is 4.5 billion years with recent discoveries indicating water and cooler temperatures present for maybe 4 billion years we begin to hit a statistical probability that life will form, and not just here, but elsewhere in the universe.

now, i am not talking up the likelihood of little green men, just a bigger understanding of our significance, if you could even attach that word to it. so the next time you get stressed out by getting cut off in traffic, just remember that there is very little in this world that is worth getting angry about. and most of the things that are worth any amount of stress are things that you probably don't take the time to think about nearly often enough.

so a few weeks ago i attended a Motorcycle Safety Foundation course to begin my training on operating a motor vehicle that is missing a couple of wheels. i successfully completed the course (more on that later) and was issues a license to operate a motorcycle a week ago monday. every day since, i have had or made a reason to ride putting on over 200 miles in less than 2 weeks.

in order to ride, one must have one. in my case this is a buell blast, a bike manufactured by Harley-Davidson and the bike used in their Rider's Edge motorcycle instruction program. The Blast is not a fast motorcycle. It is a 500cc single cylinder "thumper" that has an aftermarket "exhaust" which sounds like little more than a can on the end of a straight pipe. i wear ear plugs when i ride.

today i dropped the bike performing a quick stop in a parking lot. my fault, i had not completed rechecking oncoming traffic before starting my turn. i should have had the bike straight before i got on the brakes and as a result the bike went down. even at ~330 pounds, it still was surprisingly hard to get back upright, but i managed, and only a couple of cosmetic scratches on some of the plastic parts that i was planning on painting over the next couple of weeks anyway.

i was happy to have dropped the bike. it happens to everyone. i learned what i did wrong. it was a good experience. no real damage done, lessons learned all around. as most people who i have talked to (or read online) say, "it is not a matter of if you will drop your bike, it is a matter of when." today was my when.

so the MSF class is 6 hours of classroom and 10 hours on bike instruction. the course material is interesting, the instructors were great. it is not enough instruction for new riders. i had read before going into the class that there were some concerns over the last couple of years that the quality of the instruction has become tailored to the lowest common denominator. i am inclined to agree. i needed more time on a bike in an instructional setting. instead i am having to learn more in parking lots and on surface streets. i am careful, but today's experience might have been avoided with a little more instruction.

by the way, i love it.

turns out my dad has a camping trip that will keep him busy father's day weekend. so we will celebrate the next weekend. i get to go to class and learn more about motorcycling. i am very excited.

melissa and i are off to atlanta for a wedding and familial visitation. yea atlanta in june...

i managed to get as much sleep as i wanted on sunday night. i was dozing off on the couch around 9:00 and really didn't make it out of the bed until around 8:30 on monday. the dark rings under my eyes indicated a good amount of rest. i felt much better.

memorial day had melissa and i out to see iron man which was very enjoyable. afterwards we ran a few errands before i headed over to ryan's house to check out his new motorcycle (BMW F650GS). he is a very generous friend as he allowed me to ride around in his condo complex. i was worried about how hard it would be to get in gear and how comfortable I would feel on it. but i have to say that i am completely hooked.

it was a lot easier to perform the basics on the bike than i thought prior to riding. but i must be clear here and say that it is by no means easy. keeping straight the gear, clutch, breaking, signals, other cars around you, balance in the turn, all of it is very different than even riding a bicycle. it compels you to stay focused and stay safe. i cannot wait until my class, although that too may have to wait a bit longer. i had planned to spend father's day with my father (makes sense) which is when i am scheduled for class. i should know what is going on today and we shall go from there.

so i was supposed to start my motorcycle training class today, but that got messed up due to a computer scheduling glitch. then i was supposed to start next week, but that got messed up due to some function taking over the parking lot where they do the class. now i am all signed up for the 12th of June, but that seems so far away. i guess i am impatient to start my class so i can find out that i love riding (which seems inevitable based on talking to people) and find a bike of my own and start riding.

oh well, i guess it just leaves me more time to do more research.