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(click picture for full-size panorama)

From May 18th to May 22nd, 2006, I drove my Yamaha FZ-1 from Longmont, CO to San Francisco, CA and back. Total miles: 2650.5 according to the trip-meter on the bike. This was ridden in five days, with an additional day resting in San Francisco. There is a 800×600 slideshow with all of the pics available, click here.

Day one:

Drove from Longmont to Provo, UT. Took I-80 the whole way, didn’t cut through 287 from Ft. Collins. Much of this ride was familiar territory since I’ve gone out I-80 a few times as far as Rock Springs, WY. After Rock Springs, things got more interesting, since I was entering new territory. I had also been on the bike long enough at this point to realize that the ergonomics of the bike would be OK for the long rides, which was encouraging. Rode past the Uintah Mountains to the south, very pretty. Rode down into Utah, saw Park City - very impressive. I’d like to snowboard there someday. Then Salt Lake City. Rush hour traffic. Getting tired, but I wanted to get out of town, so I drove south on I-15 to Orem, couldn’t find a room, continued to Provo. Walked around Provo a bit. Took some pictures. Found out they have really weird alcohol serving laws in Utah.

Day two:

Drove from Provo, UT to Reno, NV. Went south on the I-15 to Nephi, UT, broke west on US 6 to Delta, UT where I picked up US Route 50. This is where things got really interesting. I decided to take route 50 through Nevada on the advice of Charlie and Doug. This is the so-called “Loneliest Road in America”. And if that’s not enough, they have matching signs:

As you’d expect, there were some pretty empty stretches of Route 50. The panorama at the top of the page, for example. There was also a serious swarm of Mormon Crickets. More like a sea of Mormon Crickets. They were everywhere in central Nevada. At one point I was driving in an inch-deep sea of Mormon Crickets that were on the road. I kid you not. I’m not scared to say that I was was afraid to stop. Screw putting your foot down in that. Insane. I’d have gotten a picture if I could have stopped. That wasn’t hapenning. Apparently the Mormon Cricket infestation is the worst in 50 years. I can tell you there’s a swarm of ‘em for sure. That was amazing. The entire place is crawling with them. Freaky. Also saw the Sand Mountain dune. Made it into Reno in 8 hours.

Day three & four:

Rode from Reno, NV to San Francisco, CA. A mercifully short day, since I had a hangover from partying in Reno casinos with my brother Rick and Tom G from Chester. Froze my ass off on Donner Pass, but then got nearly miraculous gas milage going down the Sierras, where you drop 6000 feet in 80 miles. Ride culminated with a very cool ride over the San Francisco Bay Bridge into San Francisco. Very cool sight, espescially after driving the bike that far. Very tired when I finally got to SF. Really needed a day off the bike at this point and some good rest, which I did get. Went to the Bay to Breakers race and to the Oakland/SF interleague baseball game. Barry Bonds did not hit number 715, but hit one outside the foul pole that would’ve done it. Almost got to see it in person. Had some good food and fun running around the Mission with Rick, Gavin and Andrew Lawton.
Day five:

Rode from San Francisco, CA to Battle Mountain, NV. The toughest day. Rained pretty hard from Sacramento all the way up the Sierras to Donner Pass. Cold and wet, bad visibility. Rude drivers. Dangerous conditions. Had to make the call: get off the road and wait, or suck it up and see if it gets better over the pass. I sucked it up. It was better over the pass. I did stop near Truckee and get a cup of coffee and warm up. Also stopped in Reno for a good while. Things went well for a few hours and I hit bad storms near Mill Creek, NV so I stopped under the highway underpass for a while to see if things would get better. Took some pics there. When I got back on the way, I ran into the AMA Superbike truck convoy, which was pretty cool. Big rigs festooned with AMA and manufacturer graphics. Big green Kawasaki truck, AMA Pro Racing truck, Honda motorcycles truck, etc. all pretty cool. Waved at the drivers, who seemed stoked to see a rider out bravin’ the conditions. Decided not to stop for gas at Winnemucca, thinking there’d be another station. Big mistake. Made it to Valmy, NV literally on fumes. Close call. At this point there are huge black t-storms everywhere. I limp into Battle Mountain in the rain and hit the Super-8. Never more glad to see a super 8 in my life.

Day six:

The weather looks good. I promise myself to make it home today. The miles are starting to hurt now. My knees and shoulders have had enough. Today it’s all about being tough and kicking out the miles. I drove from Battle Mountain, NV to Longmont, CO. 11 hours. Too long. Those last 3 hours, I was pretty much too tired to drive, but I was getting close to home and I didn’t want to drive in the dark. I stopped a lot for a tank of gas and a 5 minute stretch. Mostly I kept moving. I made it home just before sunset. Glad to be back. Needed a day to rest and recover.

What an awesome experience that was. I’m really glad I did it. The bike was absolutely flawless and gave me at least 40 mpg except in the very worst headwinds. I need to clean it and take it on in to the shop for some lovin’. Well, back to work for me. There’s plenty of that to do!

Watched the Moto GP race today on Speed Channel. I’ve been paying attention to cycle racing since I bought my FZ-1 in December. Mostly AMA Superbike and Moto GP; I’m not really into the dirt stuff. Both classes of rider are absolutely fearless and insane. So are the machines, which lay so far over in turns now that riders are starting to drag elbows, not just knees.

Jeez, just look at this Ducati. Just give me the keys… and, um, the wheels too I guess.

Watching Moto GP is pretty tense stuff. I’m glad the races are only like 25 minutes. I’m sure the riders are too, it’s gotta be grueling stuff to throw a 1000cc race rocket around like that, especially if you’re small and light enough to actually win. The machines are making incredible power and it’s both fun and harrowing to watch these guys trying to get 250 horsepower down on wasted tires after a few laps. I find myself holding my breath when they dive in a corner stacked 3 deep. Insane.

Today, unfortunately, my favorite rider Valentino Rossi (R-Spec Yamaha R1) DNF’d due to a tire problem. Pretty unfortunate, especially as he had ridden brilliantly from the 13th grid spot to 5th and pressing for 4th. But if you’re tires aren’t right, you just can’t go 210mph on two wheels, or corner on your elbows. So on to Le Mans and get ‘em next time. That guy is incredble. Also being a Honda owner, I didn’t mind too much seeing Honda go 1-2 on the podium.

Prior to the race I rode the FZ-1 around for a couple hours. It was beautiful today on the Front Range. I took the GPS unit, for which I have a handlebar mount, and here’s a map of today’s ride. I love Wyoming. It was great to drive around SE Wyoming today. Soon I’ll have a much cooler way to post these maps, but more on that later….

People seem to think I have a good memory. Now, I assert that this is at least debatable, but I know what they mean. I have a good recollection of people, places, and details of events. I think this is what people mean when they say I have a good memory. If you remind someone of something they said once, or what they wore at some past occasion, they’re always slightly startled, like you actually remember that? So anyway, I thought I’d practice a little by writing some recollections here.

Aunt Willie is one of those people who are larger that life in my memories, probably because we moved away before I was old enough to really know what was going on. For some reason I have been remembering things about her lately.

Aunt Willie was not actually my aunt. Nor anyone else’s as far as I know. Everyone just called her that. She was the very elderly shut-in lady who lived across the street and one house up until we moved to a new neighborhood in 1979. Her house faced a moderaltely busy street for Chesterfield County, VA at least in those days. It was one of these old jobs that has like large asphault shingles for siding and a front porch. I was just over six when we moved away, so all these memories are from before I was seven. In the eight block or so radius that is your universe at around age 4 or 5, Aunt Willie’s house was the mysterious corner that a little kid should be slightly afraid of. Who was that old lady? Where was her family? Why did all the neighbors quietly take care of her? As time went on, she wasn’t so scary after all and we sort of got to know her. She was way gone senile by then, so I think we were pretty much all the same little kid to her. I’m sure she never called us by our real names, it was always Kevin or some other thing.

Invariably, the way we would come into contact with her was by doing some small chores for her. She’d always have some money laid aside for you, like a few coins sitting on the table. And you’d be all scared and go up and snatch those coins up and scram. Going into Aunt Willie’s house was always a fascinating and slighlty scary thing when I was that age. She was just up in there alone in one of those old houses with rooms just crammed full of old stuff, most likely from all her family who she’d just outlived the hell out of. The historian in me wants to go back and go through those rooms, piecing together the family story and the lives of those people. Imagine the things you’d find in those old cobwebby boxes and chests of drawers. In the mind’s eye of my memory, everything inside that house is in black and white, like an old television show.

Rob was old enough then to operate a lawnmower, so he often ended up doing the lawn over there, for which he probably earned like 15 cents from her. Now, this was well before I was old enough to operate a mower, so I thought it must be a really cool thing to do, since Rob was allowed, and I wasn’t. So, I used to tag along and rake stuff up and what not. I remember in great detail for some reason the layout of her lot there and all the trees she had, also a grape arbor and whatnot. I can remeber diggin around in her bushes while Rob mowed the yard, which I guess had to have been during the summer of 1978.

I think my mom, who is a Registered Nurse, was giving her some medical care, or administering her shots or her meds or whatnot. I only remember that really vaguely as those concepts were pretty much beyond me then. But she was definitely doing something over there, because my clearest memory of Aunt Willie is going in her house one time by myself for some reason, she stopped me, put her hand on my arm, and looked me in the eye. She said in a frail old lady’s voice “Son, your momma is an angel come straight down from heaven. Don’t you ever forget that.”

And I haven’t.

Ok this is cool. A robot with an arm draws what it sees by moving a colored LED around in front of a long-exposure camera.
Fotron2000.

I like window managers. I just think that’s a cool piece of software. I’ve been a UNIX & Gnu/Linux user for about six years now. One of the first things that helped me understand what was different about unix-like operating systems was the window manager.

A window manager, as it’s name indicates, is a piece of software that helps your programs’ GUI displays to appear on the screen. On unix-like systems, this can often be a program running on another machine. The window manager provides the familiar titlebar on all of your windows, the resize tabs, the little ‘x’ button that closes the window, and other common windowing functions on a graphical desktop. It is generally used in concert with other programs to create a desktop environment, but many WM’s stand on thier own as a desktop system as well. Anyone who has used Microsoft Windows knows all about these things, we all take them for granted anymore. Well, in UNIX-land, you can use a different window manager if you’d like to switch it out. In a unix-like system, the window manager is just another program thats running. When I discovered this out on my old RedHat 6 machine, I tried a few different window managers out at xwinman.org, and found the differences between them fascinating. There are so many things beyond what Microsoft Windows provides that people can really use in their computing, most notably the Virtual Desktop, which extends your desktop past the visible space on your screen.

After a while of using VTWM, I settled on FVWM2. This is one of my all-time favorite pieces of software. I’ve been using it regularly since 2001 or so. I still use it every day on a variety of computers and Operating Systems. I use it on all my Gnu/Linux machines, and I use it in my X/Darwin server on the macs. I’ve even run it on Windows using Cygwin/X and Hummingbird.

FVWM has some nice features. It is pretty small and light. It doesn’t launch a bunch of persistent processes that hang around your system sucking resources. FVWM2 is extremely configurable. People have made it emulate a full Windows desktop environment (screenshot) as well as OS X (screenshot), SGI IRIX (screenshot), and others. Try that with most Desktop systems, let alone window managers. FVWM2 also integrates with Gnome, KDE, and XFCE, three excellent desktop systems. FWVM2 also has a kick-ass manual (try ‘man fvwm2′ or go here). FVWM2 is configured unix-style via a dotfile, or configuration file in your home directory. I keep that file available online, so any machine with fvwm2 installed and an internet connection, I can have my entire custom environment in seconds. Very convenient.

If you’re one of those folks who have a utilitarian attitude about your machines, and never so much as change the default background, screensaver and color scheme, FVWM is probably not for you. On the other hand, if you’re like me and enjoy tinkering and customizing your desktop environment, FVWM2 will give you more than you could ever use in terms of flexibility and points of customization. Or it can work right out of the box, your choice. A great piece of software, and worth a test run if you want high performance, a small footprint, or heavy customization.