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tugrikJust a quick re-cap of a weekend gone well. Since it's a mishmash of subjects I'll put it behind a cut-tag. It doesn't even dwell on printer-stuff, for a change!
Thursday we finally got around to seeing Kung-Fu panda. I really liked the film. A good part of the appreciation comes from a few of my friends being so deeply into martial arts. The flick is both respectful and pokes fun at the whole kung-fu thing in just the right amounts. It's definitely lightweight, summer-movie fare, but very enjoyably so.
On Saturday morning Revar and I were noodling about, trying to figure what to do with the rest of our day while the last of the AC printjobs were spooling in the other room. That's when we saw![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
astolpho's "OMG - lightning in Monterey!" post. Whot? A summer thunderstorm... in California? No Way. Seriously, no way. *checks radar* DudeGetInTheCarNow! We got down into Morgan Hill just as the last of the very-fast-moving storm cell was exiting the area. It was a dry-lightning special. The cell had so much energy moving so quickly that it couldn't form up into a proper thunderstorm, but it had a ton of electrical potential to dump. The end result was this mangry-looking cloud booking across the sky, pegging the ground with anywhere from two to eight bolts per strike about twice a minute. We drove right into the heart of it, enjoying every little bit we could get of the storm before it disappeared over Henry Coe State Park, headed for the San Joquain beyond. We managed to get atop the dam on Anderson Lake as it retreated, catching only the back-end of the cloud on camera:
Garth got more shots on his camera that he'll probably post later. While we didn't have enough time to set up for lighting-catch photography, he did get numerous pictures of the little white smoke-colums all over Coyote Valley from lightning-strike-induced grassfires.
~~~~
Luphinus and I went out for a little motorcycle ride on Sunday. Our Saturday one had been called off due to the stupid-high temperatures (106 on the back side of Hamilton!) but we both still wanted to get out and about. He was excellent at playing motivator and taildragged me out of the house for a 'quick run to Alice's'. After some grumbling and shuffling about I got on the bike and headed out with him. Within a few minutes of being on the road I was very glad he'd convinced me to come out; it was a beautiful day.
The 'little run' to Alice's ended up being more like 4.5 hrs of noodling about all over the coastal mountains. We went up the nine only to find Alice's jam-packed with knuckledraggers and tourists, though surprisingly the road-squid seemed to stay home today. Not wanting to wait in line for an hour to get a table, we headed down to the coast via Tunitas Creek Road. The asphalt didn't take this past winter very well, so it was a proper 'suspension test' of a ride. The Valk handled it far better than I thought it would. As Luph put it, his bike had 'more loose bits than he thought' get pointed out to him by the chumbly road. From there it was a quick jaunt down Stage road to a lunch spot in Pescatero, goofing around on Bean Hollow and then back up into the hills. Eventually we got around to Soquel and then over the old-ways to get back into Los Gatos. The ride ended with a little galumfing over the local hills near the Hicks loop and then we were back at home.
Since I knew there was a chance that the ride might stretch out longer than planned, I'd given my car keys to Garth and asked him to give Dusty and Dollraves a lift to the airport if I wasn't back in time. Sure enough, we went over-time... and my bluetooth gadgetry utterly failed me. Even though I'd received three calls, not a single one had rung the Zumo/Q2 headset pair. Garth got them to the airport anyways, so the hedging of bets worked out in the end, thank goodness. I'm going to have to find a different headset solution if I want to be able to rely on helmet-mounted call notification. I don't necessarily want to talk while riding, but I *do* want to know if a call came in so I can stop and call them back.
View Larger Map
The fun part of the ride was getting to show Luph some roads he'd not been on before. The coastal range is full of a ton of odd little roads and nifty places to see. I'm not yet back into the habit of stopping for pictures while on the bike, but I did get one or two. Out on Stage Road, for instance, one of the locals built himself a little machine gun man:
There's a few that Luph caught on his iphone that hopefully he'll post. As for the Dragon-bike, this was the first real ride on the new suspension. I kept it sedate most of the time. *looks innocent about certain sections of Skyline* This works out well because it's more a cruiser-bike than a performance or adventure-class one. Still, it stuck to the corners like glue far more than I thought it would. Even though the pace was due-to-bike-design slower than on my GS Beemer bikes, I had no confidence issues anywhere on these little wiggly roads we went down. The ergos are coming together quite nicely. I need to tweak the highway peg locations a little and probably should still get the footrest lowering kit. Better grips would be nice but a thicker padded seat is a must. By the end of the day I was getting a wicked case of flat-butt.
I don't think I could ride across the country quite yet (which is a bummer -- I wanted to do just that at the end of the summer to see family in Missouri), but things like a trip to Death Valley or Ojai (for a custom seat) are definitely within the realm of possibility now. This makes me a lot happier about the new bike. Yay, green-dragon!
Oh... and Luph? Your bike is a really cool shade of blue, even if you can't stand the color. :) Thanks for goin' on a ride!
~~~~
One last thing we got done this weekend was to consolidate down some of our tools. As I mentioned earlier in the week, I've decided to give up on learning aluminum TIG welding for now. It's a lot less fun than MIG and takes a lot more physical practice than I have time for amidst the other projects. It's also scary as hell to have a 200A air-cooled-only torch in your hand buzzing and vaporizing metal like a mad-science experiment gone wrong. There's something about high-frequency AC TIG that wigs me right out. I spent a few hours trying to get myself used to the sensation and just never was comfortable, thereby strengthening my resolve to sell off the unit.
We've decided the best course of action is to sell both the Dynasty 200DX TIG and the Miller Passport MIG. Both are extremely desirable units that are hard to find used in good condition, so they'll fetch a nice price. We'll use the proceeds from the sale to buy a MIller Passport Plus MIG with an aluminum spoolgun and a Spectrum 375-Ex plasma cutter. This will let us do both steel and aluminum MIG process, which is more than enough for our hobby-fabrication levels of welding, as well as replace our aging and woefully underpowered Harbor Freight plasma cutter. Thanks to the amount a good Dynasty should sell for, I'll get about a grand back in change, too. W00t!
Okay, I lied. ONE thing about printer-stuff. I adore Jaygryph's little critter-doodle style of drawings. He sent me this one earlier tonight, as he's been terribly amused at all my geeking over the z3100:
Thanks, Jay. Crazy burd. :)
Thursday we finally got around to seeing Kung-Fu panda. I really liked the film. A good part of the appreciation comes from a few of my friends being so deeply into martial arts. The flick is both respectful and pokes fun at the whole kung-fu thing in just the right amounts. It's definitely lightweight, summer-movie fare, but very enjoyably so.
On Saturday morning Revar and I were noodling about, trying to figure what to do with the rest of our day while the last of the AC printjobs were spooling in the other room. That's when we saw
astolpho's "OMG - lightning in Monterey!" post. Whot? A summer thunderstorm... in California? No Way. Seriously, no way. *checks radar* DudeGetInTheCarNow! We got down into Morgan Hill just as the last of the very-fast-moving storm cell was exiting the area. It was a dry-lightning special. The cell had so much energy moving so quickly that it couldn't form up into a proper thunderstorm, but it had a ton of electrical potential to dump. The end result was this mangry-looking cloud booking across the sky, pegging the ground with anywhere from two to eight bolts per strike about twice a minute. We drove right into the heart of it, enjoying every little bit we could get of the storm before it disappeared over Henry Coe State Park, headed for the San Joquain beyond. We managed to get atop the dam on Anderson Lake as it retreated, catching only the back-end of the cloud on camera:
Garth got more shots on his camera that he'll probably post later. While we didn't have enough time to set up for lighting-catch photography, he did get numerous pictures of the little white smoke-colums all over Coyote Valley from lightning-strike-induced grassfires.
Luphinus and I went out for a little motorcycle ride on Sunday. Our Saturday one had been called off due to the stupid-high temperatures (106 on the back side of Hamilton!) but we both still wanted to get out and about. He was excellent at playing motivator and taildragged me out of the house for a 'quick run to Alice's'. After some grumbling and shuffling about I got on the bike and headed out with him. Within a few minutes of being on the road I was very glad he'd convinced me to come out; it was a beautiful day.
The 'little run' to Alice's ended up being more like 4.5 hrs of noodling about all over the coastal mountains. We went up the nine only to find Alice's jam-packed with knuckledraggers and tourists, though surprisingly the road-squid seemed to stay home today. Not wanting to wait in line for an hour to get a table, we headed down to the coast via Tunitas Creek Road. The asphalt didn't take this past winter very well, so it was a proper 'suspension test' of a ride. The Valk handled it far better than I thought it would. As Luph put it, his bike had 'more loose bits than he thought' get pointed out to him by the chumbly road. From there it was a quick jaunt down Stage road to a lunch spot in Pescatero, goofing around on Bean Hollow and then back up into the hills. Eventually we got around to Soquel and then over the old-ways to get back into Los Gatos. The ride ended with a little galumfing over the local hills near the Hicks loop and then we were back at home.
Since I knew there was a chance that the ride might stretch out longer than planned, I'd given my car keys to Garth and asked him to give Dusty and Dollraves a lift to the airport if I wasn't back in time. Sure enough, we went over-time... and my bluetooth gadgetry utterly failed me. Even though I'd received three calls, not a single one had rung the Zumo/Q2 headset pair. Garth got them to the airport anyways, so the hedging of bets worked out in the end, thank goodness. I'm going to have to find a different headset solution if I want to be able to rely on helmet-mounted call notification. I don't necessarily want to talk while riding, but I *do* want to know if a call came in so I can stop and call them back.
View Larger Map
The fun part of the ride was getting to show Luph some roads he'd not been on before. The coastal range is full of a ton of odd little roads and nifty places to see. I'm not yet back into the habit of stopping for pictures while on the bike, but I did get one or two. Out on Stage Road, for instance, one of the locals built himself a little machine gun man:
There's a few that Luph caught on his iphone that hopefully he'll post. As for the Dragon-bike, this was the first real ride on the new suspension. I kept it sedate most of the time. *looks innocent about certain sections of Skyline* This works out well because it's more a cruiser-bike than a performance or adventure-class one. Still, it stuck to the corners like glue far more than I thought it would. Even though the pace was due-to-bike-design slower than on my GS Beemer bikes, I had no confidence issues anywhere on these little wiggly roads we went down. The ergos are coming together quite nicely. I need to tweak the highway peg locations a little and probably should still get the footrest lowering kit. Better grips would be nice but a thicker padded seat is a must. By the end of the day I was getting a wicked case of flat-butt.
I don't think I could ride across the country quite yet (which is a bummer -- I wanted to do just that at the end of the summer to see family in Missouri), but things like a trip to Death Valley or Ojai (for a custom seat) are definitely within the realm of possibility now. This makes me a lot happier about the new bike. Yay, green-dragon!
Oh... and Luph? Your bike is a really cool shade of blue, even if you can't stand the color. :) Thanks for goin' on a ride!
One last thing we got done this weekend was to consolidate down some of our tools. As I mentioned earlier in the week, I've decided to give up on learning aluminum TIG welding for now. It's a lot less fun than MIG and takes a lot more physical practice than I have time for amidst the other projects. It's also scary as hell to have a 200A air-cooled-only torch in your hand buzzing and vaporizing metal like a mad-science experiment gone wrong. There's something about high-frequency AC TIG that wigs me right out. I spent a few hours trying to get myself used to the sensation and just never was comfortable, thereby strengthening my resolve to sell off the unit.
We've decided the best course of action is to sell both the Dynasty 200DX TIG and the Miller Passport MIG. Both are extremely desirable units that are hard to find used in good condition, so they'll fetch a nice price. We'll use the proceeds from the sale to buy a MIller Passport Plus MIG with an aluminum spoolgun and a Spectrum 375-Ex plasma cutter. This will let us do both steel and aluminum MIG process, which is more than enough for our hobby-fabrication levels of welding, as well as replace our aging and woefully underpowered Harbor Freight plasma cutter. Thanks to the amount a good Dynasty should sell for, I'll get about a grand back in change, too. W00t!
Okay, I lied. ONE thing about printer-stuff. I adore Jaygryph's little critter-doodle style of drawings. He sent me this one earlier tonight, as he's been terribly amused at all my geeking over the z3100:
Thanks, Jay. Crazy burd. :)
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