Hmmmm….now I’m thinking to myself, “Hey, self…why can’t you do that yet?!”

My self answered back (that happens occasionally, don’t ask…), “Bruce, you’re not that young or crazy anymore…or are you?”

Buell Video

Getting the bike up to 55 (oops, a little speeding there, it’s only 45) was exhilarating! And then I ran into a new obstacle for me - wet roads. Lisa had mentioned that it rained hard in Uptown while she was getting her pedicure, but it hadn’t barely sprinkled at the house. So of course my luck would be that right as I reach the edge of traffic by all the stores, the road turns wet from the earlier rain. I turned carefully into the Home Depot parking lot and made my way to the gas station on the other side.

Pumped her up with 3 1/2 gallons of 91 octane premium and off I went again…somewhat slowly but not too bad. Then back on the road where it’s dry and off I went!

With my first gas filling experience with the bike under my belt, and a successful venture into new traffic territory, I came home pretty stoked! LOL

The bike had 186 miles on it when I filled her up with 3.5 gallons, so that makes it about…oh, 53 miles per gallon. About right since I’ve been doing all slower stop and go riding around the neighborhoods. We’ll see if I can push that up to 65 miles per gallon once I start traveling to work consistently.

With today’s venture out, I’m thinking I might ride into the office tomorrow!

Here’s a slideshow from recent pics, including new ones today…

I’ve been harboring a desire for a bike for several years and have finally pulled the trigger. A couple of my friends took their riding course 4 summers ago and bought their bikes, and that really amp’d up my desire - but I still couldn’t bring myself to either spend the money or take the risk of riding.

Now with gas prices getting ridiculously out of control, it actually makes some financial sense (at least, that’s how I’m justifying it to myself in my own mind - haha!). When another friend and two other acquaintances this summer went through the riding class and bought bikes, I couldn’t resist any longer. I scheduled my own class through the state for a whopping $25, but since I waited until June to do that I can’t get in until October.

I figured that gave me plenty of time to pick up the essentials (helmet, gloves, jacket, etc.), get my license moved over (I was still licensed in Florida and hadn’t moved it to Ohio yet), and take the written portion of the riding test to get my 1-year permit for the course. Then I thought I’d look for a bike over the fall/winter in the hopes of picking up a good deal, given that the off-season is historically the best time to buy a bike.

The final straw and the best part of all this was that Lisa was behind me with getting bike - with the stipulation that I raise my life insurance policy!

So off we went to pick up the essentials. I had also already picked out my bike - the Buell Blast. In fact, I even had a Buell catalog from 2004 when I was looking at the Buells. They’re pretty unique looking bikes, have a great maintenance history, and have a great story behind them.

We figured that even though I was planning on waiting until fall to purchase, that shouldn’t stop us from visiting the only two locations in greater Columbus that carry Buells. For those that don’t know, Buell is now 98% owned by Harley-Davidson - in fact, the engine in some of the Buells is essentially a modified Harley Sportster 1203cc. Columbus also happens to be the home of the oldest Harley-Davidson dealer in the nation - A.D. Farrow.

They now have two locations in Columbus: the original location in downtown Columbus and a new location just north of where we live. We headed to the new location and found that it was a very upscale looking place, with somewhat of an attitude to go along with it. In fact, we were there for 30 minutes with not one sales person willing to help provide us with any information about the Buells. We left pretty disheartened by that experience.

Then last week over the holiday we decided to take a drive downtown and see if we could find the original location downtown. We walked in to a very friendly atmosphere, completely the opposite of our experience from the location up north. I mentioned that I was looking for information on the Buell Blast, explaining that I really liked everything I researched about the Buell line and it seemed that the Blast was a great little starter bike. The sales person kind of laughed a little and asked how tall I was. “5′11″ and 190,” I said. She then explained that the Blast is a pretty small bike and probably would simply be too small for me. She mentioned that I would probably like a Sportster much better.

This I was prepared for, as I’d already been forewarned by my friendly neighborhood motorcycle accessory store (Iron Pony) that when trying to buy a Buell, they almost always try to sell you a Sportster instead. But I was pretty adamant about the Blast. She then mentioned that if I was set on the Buell, they had a just gotten in a Buell Lightning XB12Ss and I might be more interested in that.

Then she asked if I’d ever seen one - a Blast, that is. Well, actually no.

So off she took us to another building where they actually keep all their stock bikes. She didn’t have a Blast on hand, but they did happen to have one in for repair from a customer. One look at it in person and it was immediately apparent that this was a very, very small bike. She then showed me the Buell Lightning that they just got in. Only 102 miles on it with the full factory warranty still intact. It looked like what I expected the Blast to be like - big, powerful, and unique. Sitting on it Lisa smiled and thought I looked good on it, that it looked like my bike. She even thought the Blast was far too small. We started it up and….rumble, grrrrrrr….what a beautiful sound! Sounded like a throaty Harley crossed with a Ninja and they begat the Buell.

I left my name on a call list (basically if someone else came in and wanted to buy it, they’d have to call me first to allow me the opportunity to buy it first) and we left to give it some thought.

Not two days later I called and made an offer over the phone and…that afternoon this beautiful bike was sitting in our garage!

I immediately went out and changed my license to Ohio, took the Ohio motorcycle test, obtained my temporary permit, and started riding around the neighborhood! In addition our high school is right here in the neighborhood and has their driver’s training course / cones all setup so I’ve made my way up there a few times to practice as well. I’ve had my permit since Saturday and have put 32 miles on the bike just around the neighborhood. I’m getting more and more comfortable with it, enough so that I’ll probably try venturing up to the road just a bit probably by the weekend - with Lisa directly behind me in her SUV (hey, I may be a risk taker to some extent - rappelling, motorcycling, etc - but I still practice as safely as possible).

So far - the Buell Lightning is proving to be an awesome bike! And unlike most first bikes that people trade-in after a year or so, I’m pretty convinced that this will be more then enough bike for me for a few years.

How old are you?
How old are you?
How old are YOU?
How old are YOU???????

You married a HOT woman!!
You married a HOT woman!!
You married a HOT woman!!
You married a HOT WOMAN (WOW)!!!!!!

You are so lucky!!
You are so lucky!!
You are so lucky, to have ME!!

I LOVE YOU!! Happy Birthday My LOVE!!

BSG Season 4 (presumably the final season) begins tonight on Sci-Fi @ 10pm!! I am so excited - I’m such a geek!!

If you need to catch up on seasons 1-3, this 8-minute recap will tell you all you need to know in a fun, time compressed video and dialog. Even if you’ve seen the first 3 seasons it’s well worth watching.

“Introducing Gmail Custom Time. Be on time. Every time.”

That’s what the header says. Set a time delivery for your email anytime in the past, all the way back to April 1, 2004 when GMail was launched. And for an instant, a colleague of mine fell for it.

Until I read to him the “How does it work” statement: “Gmail utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality.” Ummmm….does anyone else see the references to both Back to the Future and The Matrix films there?

Good one Google! That one really had me laughing!

Last week I broke down and gave myself a couple of gifts and last night they arrived - a new monitor and video card. It’s been several years since I’ve played computer games to any real extent but recently I finally got around to playing Half-Life 2. Yes, I hear you laughing now, given that the game is a few years old - but I loved the original Half-Life and wanted to play something with my son. I bought the Orange Box edition for myself and found that my imbedded Intel video chipset with software rendering was just good enough to make it through Half-Life 2 and Episode One, but choked on Episode Two.

Then my very good friend Ralph got me into World of Warcraft. A decade ago when the first real MMORPG came out (the classic Ultima Online) he and I would play for hours and hours on end. We played through the BETA into Version 1 and onward. A year later I realized how much time I had spent on that game and away from other things in life and stopped playing most games all together.

A decade older and wiser now I can handle my enthusiasm and dedication to such a gaming world a bit more maturely - or at least my wife believes so, so it must be true thankfully! LOL

So late last week I headed off to Tiger Direct and purchased both an EVGA NVidia GeForce 9600 GT video card to get through Half-Life Episode Two, and a Viewsonic VX2240w 22″ LCD monitor to get past my monitor envy. The doting geek husband that I am, I had already bought my wife a Viewsonic VX2235wm almost a year ago exactly when I last rebuilt her Windows PC. At the time her monitor went on the fritz so we went out and bought her a new wide-screen LCD monitor and I’ve been envious ever since. She also already runs an older GeForce card in her system. Heck, her box could run games and mine couldn’t! haha

The only difference between our two model of monitors is that hers (VX2235wm) has built-in speakers (which she doesn’t use nor have we every even tried out, given her nice 3-way speaker system already) and that mine (VX2240w) has a better video response (2ms versus her 5ms) for gaming.

Hooking up the VX2240w to my new GeForce 9600GT ended up to be a beautiful pairing of hardware! While neither are top of the line in today’s world, they are perfectly matched to my needs and met my budget considerations. So far I’m delighted at my new setup!

The only complaint I have is more aesthetic then anything. I don’t quite like is the silver plastic on the bottom of the monitor. I think it would be much nicer in black, like how the VX2235wm is. Leaving the entire casing in black allows my eyes to focus more on the screen, while the silver is somewhat distracting - particularly with an all black system setup. A very small gripe in context of everything though. The picture is clear and crisp while the colors are very vibrant.

Oh, and just so it’s said - I did not leave Lisa out in my hardware purchase. I also tripled her RAM in the process! With her all day iTunes listening habit and 10-tab Firefox browsing, she’s been running low on memory. I just couldn’t leave her out while dropping several C-notes on myself.

No more monitor envy!

If you find yourself interested in checking out the latest build of Firefox 3 on Windows, but are concerned about messing with your current Firefox 2 installation, then this is what you’re looking for. Yes, this has been written about and documented in several other places on the web. But I just got around to checking out Firefox 3 myself and so decided to put the steps together that I followed in order to run both Firefox 2 and Firefox3 Beta 4 simultaneously.

The way I did things will NOT mess up your current Firefox 2 profile, and it will allow you to tell the difference between both versions in your various task lists. This is nice if you’re into comparing memory and CPU usage between the two instances.

On with the steps!

1. Download the latest build from either the FTP site or from the web site - the web site provides a link to all of the languages, while the FTP site contains nightly builds in English.
2. Run the installer and select Custom setup to ensure it’s installing to a DIFFERENT directory then your current Firefox installation
3. At the end of the install, de-select Run Firefox now
4. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to your newly installed Firefox 3 directory
5. Locate the Firefox.exe and rename it to something else. I renamed it to Firefox3-BETA.exe. The reason for this is so you can tell the difference in your Task Manager (for instance) between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.
6. Go to Start => Run and type: firefox.exe -profilemanager -no-remote
7. Click the Create Profile button and name your new profile. I named mine Firefox3-BETA.
8. Click Exit
9. Create a shortcut to your Firefox3-BETA.exe (or whatever you renamed it to) on your desktop, Quick Start, dock bar, or wherever you’d like.
10. Now we need to add some command line parameters to the shortcut in order to use our new Firefox3-BETA profile.
11. Edit the properties on the shortcut and add the following to the END OF THE TARGET line:
    -P Firefox3-BETA -no-remote
12. The entire target line should be something like this:
    “C:\Program Files\Firefox3\firefox3-BETA.exe” -P Firefox3-BETA -no-remote
13. Now using this shortcut you can run both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 simultaneously AND easily tell the difference between them in your various task lists. Enjoy!

CAVEAT 1:
Because I renamed the Firefox 3 executable, updates to Firefox 3 *may* be broken. Simply rename the executable back to firefox.exe and edit your Firefox 3 shortcut and it will all be fine - however, you won’t be able to distinguish between Firefox 2 and 3 in your task list by name alone.

CAVEAT 2:
I noticed that of the add-ons I use not a single one was FF3 compatible - yet. My short list of add-ons:

Noia 2.0 (eXtreme) theme
Adblock Plus
Adblock Filterset
Better Gmail 2
Download Statusbar
Flashblock
Foxmarks
FoxyTunes