• Category Archives Life in the USA
  • Cool and quite……..

    My sister hassled me today about the lack of blogs…….

    Been relaxing in some ways, the kids have been a church camp, so its just been Freddy and I. Cant believe that a week has passed since we were away with Sean and Pam.

    I got sick of the screaming computer fan (its running flat out most of the time trying to keep the thing cool) about a month ago, but I was not happy with the price of CPU coolers in Temecula, so we have just been putting up with it.
    Had to go to San Marcos to try and get some paper work sorted for Freddys driving license (blog coming), well, Frys is down that way, so I took the opportunity to get one from there.
    I installed it on Sunday afternoon (Matt B noticed the web site and cameras were down…..Garry must have been out riding my his bike).
    Wow, what a difference. You can hardly hear the computer at all now, and its running much better. The CPU was between 70° and 80°C before, now it does not budge above 40°C. So I hope that solves a lot of my problems.

    We are going to get the kids this evening. They are going to be at Long Beach around 9pm. It will be a bit of a drive for us, but Im sure they will keen to get back in their own beds.
    We are not sure how the camp went, so I am looking forward to hearing all about it on the drive home. Assuming they do not fall asleep in the car!

    Thats been about it. We washed the bike. We made up a budget (Guess which was more fun). We watched some movies (unlimited internet, gota love it).

    I am still keen to see if I can get a web page up about our trip rather than do the usual blog entry and have the photos on Picasa. I want to start doing what I had done for the old Goldwing and that is a web page per trip…… First I need to make a new menu item for the new bike. Im running Dreamweaver on XP on a VMware computer on my Linux computer (Yeah, yeah, thats enough out of you Gary). Translation for my sister, Im running two computers, one real, one fake, the web stuff is on the fake one. Anyway, for some reason Dreamweaver has not picked up my site template and I am having unfun getting it sorted.

    Thats about it for now. Will give the short version of the kids time at camp when we get it and will keep trying to get the trip report up.


  • Packing for the trip.

    The kids are on their way to camp. The weather is a beautiful 33°C and we are just getting the bike packed ready to leave tomorrow night.

    Plan is to leave work at 4:30pm as usual, leave the apartment at 5pm and get to our hotel around dusk (8:30pm). Leave when we are awake and mozy up to Pams parents forest retreat before lunch.

    Not sure if we are going to break the ride up on the way back, or do it in one hit.

    Arizona trip. July 4th 2008

    (Right click on it, and select ‘View Image’ to see it full size).
    Here is the link to the Google maps page this picture was taken from.
    You will be able to pan it around and zoom in.
    Point “E” is where we are going to spend the night on the way up, and point “G” is where the forest is that we are going to be staying in the log cabin at. Sean and Pam live at point “F”, so its about an hour past their home. Our actual route may vary, we will post the GPS data when we get back.

    Were going to make it a 4 day weekend, so you all have yourself a super Independence day holiday (or not), and we will blog at you when we get back.


  • Trip in profile

    I just had to share this with my fellow geeks (Sue, you may skip over this one)…..

    trip in profile

    This is the profile from the ‘night’ ride (AWR to BA). The exciting thing is the huge hill that is Mt Palomar. Check it out, we go from 420 feet at the bottom to 5323 at the top, and we do it in exactly 1/2 hour and 35kms (22 miles). Thats pretty neat!

    It all adds up to a whole bunch of curves!


  • Its alive!

    Turned out to be something super simple.
    The positive battery bolt was tight when I checked it, but 2ned time around when I REALLY checked it, it was tight because the bolt was hitting the back of the battery terminal.
    It was still allowing the bike battery lead to move a little against the terminal, that was enough to cause it to ‘crack’ when I hit the starter and stop the bike from starting.

    I removed the bolt and replaced it with a shorter one, and away we went.

    So, while the fix was simple, the lesson learned was not.