.the gpb kids.

Better Rossi vs Stoner Video

Posted by Mike - August 5, 2008 at 04:08:59 pm

Stoner vs Rossi

Found this better version of the Rossi vs Stoner battle from Laguna Seca by the people at MotoGP.com. However, they disabled embedding. Why would you do that? Who runs that stupid motogp website? What a bunch of jerks. Their website is subscription based, and their content on youtube is embed disabled. Here I am trying to promote their content and they don’t even let me.

Unfortunately I liked the video enough to work around the disabled embedding… *sigh*

update: okay i guess i can’t embed it like that… back to MotoGP.com being jerks.

Yes, that must be it.

Posted by Mike - August 5, 2008 at 08:08:57 am

“It’s because they’re crazy,” she muttered under her breathe as she impatiently darted from lane to lane under the grass-is-always-greener freeway mentality. On the radio NPR was previewing a segment on increasing motorcycle rider fatalities despite lower overall traffic accidents. Yes, I’m sure they all must be crazy and it has nothing to do with car drivers. Well, at least we motorcycle riders check our blind spots. I’ll think I’ll skip her the next time she comes up as my casual carpool driver.

MotoGP at Laguna Seca 2008

Posted by Mike - July 21, 2008 at 11:07:55 am

I traveled down to Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca again this year with Dylan, Dan and Laura to watch the MotoGP race. We camped from Thursday through Sunday again. The weather changes so much from year to year. Last year it was sunny and warm/hot the whole time. The year before was a scorcher with temps in the 100s. This year it was cold and foggy in the morning and then would clear up a bit after noon. But I still wore my sweatshirt for most of the time.

Rossi won and Stoner came in second after a lot of battling. What’s amazing is that Rossi and Stoner were so far ahead of everyone else that Stoner was able to fall off his bike and still get second. Crazy I tell you.

Here’s a video of them going back and forth throughout the race.

We sat outside of turn 9 for the main race and qualifying. It wasn’t too exciting for the race, there weren’t any passes on that turn and turn 10, but we saw two riders slide out during qualifying.

Grizzly Peak

Posted by Mike - February 15, 2008 at 09:02:14 am

Yesterday I worked from home and went on a little ride during my lunch break. My short ride of choice? Grizzly peak. It’s a nice twisty road in the Berkeley Hills and you can take Skyline to Redwood for a longer ride if you want. I pulled over and took a few pictures while I was up there.

Jules and I are planning on getting some protective gear for her this spring so she can hop on the back and go on some of these nice rides. As fun as the rides are, they can get kinda lonely by yourself.

Ninja ZX-6R vs Ninja 250R

Posted by Mike - February 12, 2008 at 06:02:12 pm

My friend recently took the MSF course in anticipation of getting his motorcycle license. I was talking to him about it today and he mentioned he wanted to get a Ninja 250R. Images of boxy motorcycles danced through my mind and I scoffed at the idea. But then I actually looked up the bike and I have to say, this year’s model is pretty good looking.

Above are the Ninja ZX-6R, my bike of choice if I ever get a new one, and his desired Ninja 250R. They made the 250 more sporty looking which I approve of and for a $3,500 MSRP I’d say it’s a pretty good deal. (But still not nearly as sexy as the 6R.)

Weekend Fun

Posted by Mike - February 11, 2008 at 07:02:37 am

The weather was beautiful over the weekend. I’ve been spending a lot of my free time programming side projects but yesterday was so nice I had to take advantage. So I went on my first bike ride in a few weeks. My plan was to do the usual route: up Park to Snake and then take Skyline to Grizzly Peak and come down Centennial by the Lawrence Hall of Science and the Botanical garden. Then I usually either go around the UC Berkeley campus to see what’s new or go down Claremont straight home.

Yesterday, however, Skyline toward Grizzly was closed so I had to go the other way toward the Chabot science center, then come down from the hills and take 13 to Berkeley before going up to Grizzly. I didn’t mind though cause it was so nice out.

The new front tire I put on a few weeks ago feels really nice. My turns are much smoother now and the bike feels more in control. But I think I’m leaking oil. I noticed it dripping out the bottom whenever I came to a stop light.

I devoted most of the rest of the weekend to trying to get Imagemagick to work on OS X. After having no luck from the binary install I checked out this guy’s post on how to Install ImageMagick from Source on OS X Tiger and got it sorted out. I think problem I had was not having the OS X Developer Tools installed. I still got an error when installing the jpeg library but it seems to work anyway.

I also got SVN sorted out last night. Now everything is on Google Code. It wasn’t until after I put everything there that I found out Mediatemple provides SVN hosting as well. Poop.

On Using Protection

Posted by Mike - December 28, 2007 at 10:12:00 pm

Jules and I went shopping today and among some other less important things, we picked up some armor! I want to do some more riding on the weekends when it’s sunny and I’ve been using some crappy leg guards. I decided it was time to throw down some money and pick up more protection. I got the leg guards and shorts pictured above from Cycle Gear today and I’m going to buy my brother’s track pants (also pictured above) from him over the weekend.

Maybe the next thing I’ll get will be a mini DV camera to take some video of the rides I go on.

Motorcycle + Gravel + Mike = X_x

Posted by Mike - July 29, 2007 at 10:07:13 pm

Actually I think the streaks look kinda cool.

Good thing my dad gave my brother and I handy-dandy toolkits with zip-ties.

Online Shopping

Posted by Mike - May 29, 2007 at 10:05:39 pm

I just spent an hour looking for a good online retailer to buy a throat microphone from. After a little research I decided that the Iasus Sniper Pro would be a good all around choice for me. I mainly want the microphones for use while motorcycling but I thought they would be handy for doing other things like paintball or snowboarding or something.

I rejected maybe a half dozen websites based on bad return policies or just for having a terrible website before I finally settled on one. I get to the first step of the checkout process and actually click on the privacy policy. Like most people I don’t usually read the privacy policy, but since this wasn’t a website I had ever been to be before I thought it’d be a good idea. And lo and behold, the privacy policy page is blank. Not the best sign for me. Thus I am still mic-less. Not really sure what to do now. All of the “authorized retailers” have terrible websites. Argh.

It was bound to happen someday

Posted by Mike - May 12, 2007 at 09:05:37 pm

I finally dropped my motocycle. I always knew it was going to happen one day. I just thought it was going to be from someone swerving in front of me or from hitting a patch of gravel or something. But here’s how it went down.

Jules was preparing some fried rice when she opened the fridge to discover… no eggs! You can’t make fried rice without eggs. So I am sent on an errand to the store. I shoot over on the bike, stuff some eggs in the backpack and pull out of the parking lot. Except… I left the disc brake lock on. Doh. I stop abruptly and fall over. Wonderful. Fortunately it was more like I layed the bike on its side rather that it falling hard. So the only real damage was to my ego.

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