Its a little expensive at $30, but educational and something you don't see everyday. 

For any bike guys who care:

Its a 2003 Aprilia SL-1000R

Performance bits:
RSV Swingarm
RSV 2-to-1 header feeding a Tigcraft 80mm titanium exhaust
Renegade air intake and +2 ECU chip
Penske rear sport shock
AF1 Racing top clamp
Evoluzione Billet Aluminum Clutch Slave
Stainless braided brake + hydraulic clutch lines

Comfort and style bits:
Puid smoke windscreen
Carbon fiber front fender and rear hugger
Heli clip on risers
Fender eliminator and flush mount LED front signals
Motovation frame sliders (not in the pics but I put em on last night)

    When I picked him up, he felt like he was under pressure so my first thought was kidney stone.  When I opened the cat carrier he climbed right in....he knew he needed a vet visit too. 

    Dropped him off and they immediately knew he was obstructed.  Catheter time  :P

    Anyway they flushed him out and put him on an IV for a couple days.  Now he is on muscle relaxers and kitty morphine.  You can tell by looking at him:

http://home.comcast.net/~ssteffy/boxer54.jpg

    Right now he's camped out on my legs sleeping.  Vet says he should be good as new in a few days. 

      So last Wednesday I took a floating holiday and took my bike to the racetrack for performance riding school.  The bike technical inspections were at 7am, and the track was about an hour from my house, so I had to get up at about 5:30 in the damn morning.  bleh.

      The school structure is here:  http://2-fast.org/school-structure.html  and its the most fun I've had in years.  I'm pretty much a speed hound, but its usually in things that won't kill me like go karts and such.  I've been riding less than a year, so I'm still not feeling totally at home on a bike yet, but I'm pretty confident in my reaction time and my ability to keep track of everything going on around me, so I've been able to get out of some situations that would have spooked other people.  I even bought some leather pants (leather pants aren't gay if you are buying them for motorcycle racing).

      Here's me trying to look cool.  (Ignore the double chin...its not cool)

http://home.comcast.net/~ssteffy/gonnadie.jpg

      I learned a lot of stuff about how to take corners, how my form was wrong when leaning off the bike, and just how much you can push these bikes before they reach their limits.  I did get up to about 130-135mph on the straightaway, even on my 15 year old bike, but the bigger ones get up to 180 in no time.  The good thing about bikes is that even though the sense of speed is a lot stronger, the bike becomes more stable the faster you go because of the gyroscopic effect of the spinning wheels.

There was a track photographer, but there wasn't a lot of variety in the pictures taken....there wasn't even anything showing me putting a knee down.  :P

here's what he got of me:

http://keepsakephotoonline.exposuremanager.com/g/56

The top row 2nd pic isn't me though, he just mixed up the numbers.

I also took some video from my helmet mounted camera, here's a sped up one lap run from my point of view:

http://home.comcast.net/~ssteffy/2-fast.wmv

Anyway it was a great day, and I can't wait to go back, but I don't think I can afford to do it more than a couple times a year.

dirty garage:



cutting carpet:


Whats that I put under the carpet?


Glue drying overnight:


He approves:


Progress:

and the finished product:

Took a few hours each day, and Boxer hasn't got off it since I finished it.

and 13 hours of standing in line?

This!

So initially I was planning on going down to Best buy around 5pm after work.  "Leaked" internal memos said that BB was getting 200 of the premium level systems, and I figured that would be plenty of line time to ensure a system.  So I get to work around 10am, and check out the xbox discussion public folder.  At 8:45am there are ~85 people in line.  At 10, there are 150. 

 I knew I had to get out of there quick or else I'd be stuck without one until who knows when.  Its a fairly slow week at work, many of the developers are taking the whole week off for the holiday, so I decided to take the day as one of my 2 "floating holidays" per year and get down there.  When I got in line about 11am, the rough count to my line position was about 170.  Close, but I figured I was safe.  The line went from the front down the side, and all the way behind home depot, which if you don't know that parking lot I'd say from the front of the line to my position was about 400 yards.  I had my $5 fold up chair from target, I had a fully charged DS and PSP, and a fairly warm coat, but the temperature was quickly dropping.  The first couple hours passed quickly, chatting with the people close to me in line.  I played a lot of Advance wars on the DS and soon it was 4pm and starting to get dark AND COLD. 

Drama.  Someone was doing line counts and said that there was a lot of line cutting up ahead of us, and said we were now over the 200 mark because of it.  Police were called in, and many people were removed from line.  Another count was taken, and numbered tickets were handed out.  I was 159.  Then the manager came out to try to explain what was up.  Now for some reason they weren't allowed to say how many systems they actually had, so all we had to go on was the internet rumor mill.  He also said that the store "was required by law" to honor their print ad that promised they would have at least 50 premium systems for the store opening the next morning no matter how many people were lined up.  So that effectively made the "safe line" at 150, and remember I am 159.  Manager starts giving people real vouchers...now these vouchers combined with the earlier line number ticket is what guarantees you a system.  They gave everyone up to 150 a system voucher and he said they had to do another inventory count to determine how many more (if any) they had for tonight. (keep in mind there are about 400 people in line at this point)  30 minutes later he comes back and has 15 more premium system vouchers.  People up to 165 are now safe! 

The best buy guys came around giving everyone "Midnight madness launch night" scarves and hats (see top photo) which was nice, but the uncontrollable shivering was growing annoying.  My newest friends next to me in line had a propane camping heater that they sent someone to go fetch, and that thing was a lifesaver.

Rob shows up with food and to hang out for an hour.  We played some mario kart multiplayer and I get tr0wn3d as usual. Thanks for the food!  He takes off to go to a warm house.

Time is going much slower now.  Time for some PSP gametime.  I forgot how fun Wipeout Pure is.  Played it for a good 2 hours racking up gold medals left and right.  One of my old co-workers, Steve Rider was walking by so I yelled at him and we talked for a while.

Manager comes out again, and tells the people past spot 165 that they are having more flown in tomorrow and if they wait in line, and pay tonight, they can come in after 5 tomorrow and pick up their boxes at their leisure (not everyone, but about 200 being flown in) the rest of the people are either gonna have to keep waiting for BB to open in the morning (remember 50 guaranteed) or they are pretty much out of luck.

PARTY BUS!  Party Bus shows up (it also has hydraulics, so its bouncing up and down a little while it plays crappy hip-hop)  They are passing out schwag, I got an xbox live foam football...woop de doo.  Some other people got xbox1 games and a select few got wireless controllers for the 360. 

At this point we notice that the line has pretty much disappeared and everyone is in front of Best Buy in a big blob of people.  Everyone makes their way up there and packs together. At about 11:40 the first person walks out holding his xbox over his head to a round of applause.  This guy has been waiting since 5pm FRIDAY NIGHT.  Thats 79 hours in line.

Once I finally got in the store things went fairly smoothly with a big assembly line of games and accessories.  Basically I only wanted one accessory, the rechargeable battery pack and charge system for the controller.  I got the last one.  At this point I just wanted out of there and I couldn't feel my feet.

On the way home out of curiosity I drove by the redmond target.  There were about 40 people wrapped up in chairs waiting for it to open.  For a second I thought about holding my xbox 360 up to the window and honking as I drove by, but I'm not that cruel. 

So tired.  But overall it wasn't that bad.

So Sunday I climbed Mt Si, which is a local mountain and popular hike spot.  4 miles to the top and about a 3500 foot altitude gain.  Mention it to any serious climber and they will laugh in your face, but it was about the toughest hike I'd want to do without some real training.  I went with a friend, Charlie and we pretty much kicked the mountain's ass. 

Ok, so in anticipation for doglan coming up in 9 days, a while ago I upgraded basically my whole system so I can play the shiny new games in the high resolutions we all love.   It worked fine for probably 3 weeks, then everything seemed to go bad.  The machine started locking up randomly, and these weren't the normal lockups where you reboot and everything is fine again.  These were ultra evil lockups that corrupted the hard drive so that the only way I could get back into windows was to boot to a floppy, run chkdsk and let it fix errors and then boot off the hard drive again.

So it must be the hard drive right?  I went to Fry's and bought a shiny new SATA hard drive and hooked it up and its doing the EXACT same thing.  I ran memtest for about 2 hours and it showed no errors, so basically the only things it can be are video card, motherboard, power supply, or CPU, as there isn't anything else in the system.  I don't see how this kind of problem could be caused by the video card or CPU, so I RMA'd the motherboard back to the manufacturer and they kept it for about 2 weeks. 

I just got it back today and they said they ran benchmarks on it for 72 hours and saw no problems.  So I plugged all my stuff back in, and I couldn't even get windows installed before it started locking up (the first time).  Finally got windows on it, and it almost immediately started doing the same shit. This is so frustrating.  So tomorrow I'm going to take my video card back to Fry's and get a replacement, and also take my CPU to work and (hopefully) pop it into my work machine and run it all day to see if I have any problems with it.  If the CPU is fine, and if the same stuff happens when I get the replacement video card I really am out of options, I'm going to have to just bite the bullet and get a new motherboard and case (which it probably gonna run me another $300).  I guess I can try to sell my shuttle "as is" on ebay, but I will probably only get $100 for it if I'm lucky and it cost me $400.  ^%$#^%#^%*&#&*#

just venting...