Mike’s Typo

TED report. So, I got lots of emails from readers 001-003 hard at work trying to find the Robin Williams improv at TED. Zilch, nada, nothing. But. Loyal reader 004 (previously incognito), one black&chrome {at} hot-mail {youknowwhat} com, sent me this consolation video. Robin Williams has to be the life of the party where ever he shows. The end is the best, so watch it all the way through. Too good to wait for next week - in my opinion. Thanks to 004.

BTW. We’re hoping to be able to name reader 007 - that’s right, 007 - by the end of next month. Stay tuned.

Ok. What’s an eBlast without a sales pitch. Forecast in SC tomorrow - sunny. Coffees on, sodas are cold, financing deals are outrageous (like our motorclothes staff) so head down/up/over and see what’s new at Santa Cruz and Green Valley.

Robin Williams to the rescue. Seems the TED conference had a technical glitch with a planned BBC recording of one of its panels. Robin Williams was in the audience and started an adlib routine in his seat. The audience reacted with roarious applause and the next thing you know he’s in full routine on the stage. A free t-shirt to the first person who finds a link to video of this on the web! Check out the story here.

That’s the weather in Milwaukee as I write this post to the blob. Yep, you guessed it, I checked in with the web voyeurs watching the H-D Museum build. Doesn’t look like much is happening. My guess is they moved inside. Walls, electrical, flooring. So, where’s the indoor cams. Come on H-D, get with it. Anticipate the desires of your constituents! It’s still fun to hop over and check out what the new Milwaukee skyline looks like. I’m getting pretty excited about the party in Milwaukee in August. Celebrating the big 10.5. Springsteen is the headliner. And, the who’s who of rock ‘n roll B players are on the list. The ride to, the week of celebrating, the concerts, the 15 mile long parade of bikes - it’s all going to be a blast. Think about it.

So, for you folks who’ve been checking out the voyeur cam regularly, doesn’t it bug you that the horizon is running down on the right. I’m sure hoping that’s the way the river flows. But, really, I just want to crawl up on that tower (even though I’ve got a bad thing for heights) and twist that camera level. One good reason it can’t be done is the Time Lapse button. Check that out. It’s like watching re-runs of I Love Lucy (sort of).

TED. That’s the sold-out, lovefest of free thinkers of the world that happens later this week in Monterey, CA. I’m a bit pissy because I didn’t get one of the coveted 1,100 invites. Course, had I gotten the invite, I’d be walking around with my coffee can asking for donations to send me to TED - it’s $6,000, plus room, food, greens fees, etc. So, I’ll be sulking and watching the speakers online. You might remember an earlier post about one of the recipients of the TED prize - James Nachtwey. If you haven’t seen his video presentation, I still recommend it.

The rumors for this year? Well, one of the highly anticipated speakers is Al Gore. He presented his global warming talk a few years ago - before it became a movie. Peace prize in hand, he’s got a new presentation, and no one is saying what it’s about.

The whole event is sorta a who’s who of the entertainment, technology and design industries. As one PR piece mentions, it’s a gathering to cross-pollinate ideas and gain inspiration from presentations on the latest developments in sciences and the arts. Hey, on that cross-pollination thing. Maybe they can spend a few nanoseconds talking about the bee problem or what to do with that quagmire of plastic floating off Hawaii, or….

Signing off: pissy cause I got passed over.

Today from the Tech Tipster - cam chain tensioners. (make sure you’ve had your coffee.)

As your miles start to add up on your Harley it becomes prudent to have a few things inspected that maybe aren’t on the service checklists. That’s where our experience with more that 200 bikes a month (month after month) comes in handy. Everything wears, right? And, depending upon how you ride, different things wear at different rates. Riding around town; riding long; riding hard - each of these wears parts differently. Our job is to look ahead and inspect things that might cause a problem down the road. Riding is suppose to be fun; breakdowns typically take the fun out of it.

So, one of the items in your engine that is susceptible to differing amounts of wear based upon what type of riding you do is the cam chain tensioner. When this little item breaks it can do major damage to your engine and equally significant damage to your wallet. So, we’ve added this inspection to the 20k service. And, our techs inspect the cam chain tensioner every 10k after that. Plugging this into our services has really cut down on the number of failures we’ve seen.

So, why isn’t it on Harley’s list? We asked that question. The answer is simple. Harley’s list is built from experience around the country. Our riding out this way may differ from that in the deep South. Consequently, we see little things like this that need to be addressed locally.

Can you hear it going bad? Not before it’s too late really. That’s another reason we plugged this preventative inspection in.

Tip #1a. If you own a 2006 and earlier Big Twin (with the exception of Dynas), you can upgrade to an automatic primary chain adjuster. This will let your chain ride in comfort and your mind in peace. Longer wear and peace of mind can’t be all bad for $99.95. That’s a Service Special by-the-way.

Next time: Cush Drive: What can it do for you?

A wet, soggy & windy weekend gave me time to catch up on some magazine articles I set aside. Lots of time. From my perusing came a couple of “dream” trips. One in Washington and one in Oregon. Strangely enough, both come really close to Portland. I wonder if that’s why so many people are starting to talk about Portland. But, the rides are what I started to talk about.

Northern Californians are just plain spoiled. We have some of the best riding in the country certainly - and arguably the world. That being said, it’s still nice to see what else is out there. There is amazing beauty in the west and lots of it to see. Both of these articles highlight the beauty of Washington and Oregon well. One of the things that I liked about both articles is the reference to so few cars. Not something we are used to in the Bay Area.

So, without any snide quips, I present you with the following two articles. These are pdfs from scans. So, you should be able to read them online or print them. I checked to make sure that the maps were as readable as the original. Hope these two articles get you inspired to plan a trip.

• Salmon Run, Northwest In September - A beautiful loop around some of the best of Washington
• In The Ride of the Beholder - A July/August ride through western Oregon concentrating on the the Oregon coast

By the way, my sources tell me that right now might be one of the best times in years to ride through Death Valley. Spring flowers were huge this year in the valley and they are on the waning days of that cycle.

In the dog-eat-dog-world (yuck) of today’s blobbing, you know you’ve arrived when you beat Fake Steve Jobs (FSJ) to a story. We reported here yesterday (or maybe it was the day before) that there was a grass roots effort to pump some life back into Hillary’s campaign. Today, FSJ came out with the same story. It’s fun to be first!

Whew. Arms a bit sore from reaching around to pat myself on the back. I gotta confess. It’s our great staff of Internet scavengers that grind away everyday to feed me with stories worthy. Sorry FSJ, you get what you pay for when it comes to staff talent. Way to go team!

And so goes Bad Alvin (AKA USA-193).  Leave it to the folks at Wired to bring us the good stuff.  Link over and check out Bad Alvin getting blown to little football sizes pieces.  As we earlier reported.  This was a 5,000 lbs. rogue spy satellite the size of a school bus with a 1,000 lbs. of some nasty jet fuel on board.  So, the boom is rather spectacular in a sick, war-games kinda way.  It would be a real eye-opener to tally up how hard you and I had to work to pay for that satellite that failed and then how much harder we had to work to put together the program to blow it to infinity-and-beyond.  I’m getting light-headed just thinking about it.  Enjoy the gov’s home movie - you paid for it.

The good news is we’ve got four subscribers now!  The bad news is I’m number 4.  Number 003 still has a cool site.  But, that’s another story.  So, confession time.  I subscribed to the RSS feed.  Not that I want to read my writing, although I’ve been accused of wanting to hear myself talk, but I did want to make sure that the feed was working.  You know it would be kinda sad if all this good stuff was getting beamed out there - to nowhere.  So, I signed up.  (But, I used an alias.)

Rainy day.  So, I’m cruising through my RSS reader and damn if I don’t come across one of the Typo Blob posts.  Wholly spam, Batman.  Someone has picked up one of our stories, and ….  Then it occurred to me that I’d subscribed.  Call it a senior moment - but, it felt so good!

All this said, you can subscribe if your an RSS’r.  Or, we’ll keep batching these pearls into the Typo and beaming that directly to your emailbox.  Thanks, 001-003 for reading.

That rogue spy satellite that we talked about Tuesday (Bad Alvin, AKA USA-193). Well, he’s been put down.

Seems that a “kill vehicle” (I think that’s military for missile) hit the satellite on or about 10:30p EST Wednesday. Officials are cautiously optimistic that the kill vehicle hit the “dying satellite” which at the time was traveling at more than 17,000 miles per hour, 130 mile above the Pacific Ocean. 17,000 miles per hour. That doesn’t sound like a last gasp to me. I’m thinking Bad Alvin got the word from one of his dark-side informants and put the warp speed on. Sounds to me like he was on the move.

The article in the NY Times this morning was fascinating. Seems we needed three Navy ships and all sorts of ground personnel to pull this off. Wow. Where’d that money come from? You guessed it, we’ll just print more.

I love this part though from a different article. Seems the Russian are tweaked. They think we’re up to no good - testing our capabilities again. Hmmm. Maybe that’s the story after all. Wouldn’t this fuel and the satellite have burned up on re-entry? They’re counting on all this space debris (largest piece being the size of a football) to head south and burn up upon re-entry. Makes you wonder. Maybe we should ask Hillary on her next campaign stop. She give it to us straight!