I can handle:

• A four hour bike ride, that’s easy.
• Five or six kilometres of fist-sized gravel on a sports bike.
• The seals on my front master cylinder deciding to refuse to  live up to their name.

What I can’t handle is the terrible state of back-country Queensland roads and ending up with incredibly sore wrists by the time I was half way home.

In other news, Kawasaki wins again on the parts front – went down to TeamMoto’s big warehouse store at Springwood and ordered a rebuild kit for the master cylinder ($93) and a replacement seal for the top ($25ish).

The three-brake-line system that the bike runs as standard needed replacing because the lines were bulging even under light braking situations.  I found a local manufacturer called HEL Performance and I have ordered some from for the reasonable sum of $160 delivered.

I’d highly recommend them because they allow you to choose from a variety of colours for both  the lines and the fittings and have a massive back-catalogue of supported bikes with their associated configurations of lines. I have chosen to go with a more race-like dual-line setup which runs a line for each caliper directly to the master cylinder. This configuration allows for more direct feedback and improved performance along with reduced parts count and ease of bleeding.

Good idea: Not wearing shoes as it’s better for your feet.
Bad idea: Not wearing shoes as I twist my feet when I walk and developed two nice fat blisters last night.

New boots for my trip to the snow Got them for $69.95 – I can’t remember the last time I got shoes so cheap, I love having size fifteen feet

Found them at DFO up the back hidden in a pile of “seconds” in the corner – nothing wrong with them, just they were old stock!

After a second or so of blank stare, she said “yeah, that’s right, have a good night!”

I’m a fucking JEDI!

I’ve been fearful of the wet because I don’t like the feeling of the bike being unstable under me. It reminds me too much of the feeling of the bike going down while heralding a expensive, annoying and boring couple of weeks.

Tonight it didn’t slip or shudder, sailing along as smooth as silk. I kept my speed to under about fifty and I was doing not much above walking speed for some of the corners, but it was smooth and that’s what matters.

Good times, now all I need to do is work on trusting the bike.

And convincing a mechanic I trust to service the engine and suspension.

Stranger still, as I went looking for the above link, the site broke. WTF? (or maybe it was just my proxy. sigh.)

Fuck.

I’m going to start applying for slightly-less-smelling-like-garlic shitkicker jobs, prodding more people at random and hoping for the best. This hasn’t worked so far, but others are saying to keep doing it, so on with the poking.

In other news, I’m looking for a business to start. There’s a couple of ideas, but most of them involve knowledge I don’t have, working with other people or saving up (or spending some of my recent insurance payout which should go on a car) to buy equipment.

Uh, google reader is interesting. I’m going to try it out for a while, never really got the hang of feed reader programs because I couldn’t find a good online one. I live on at least two different PC’s, so a a local program doesn’t work unless it syncs somehow – yeah, right.

I’ll probably keep quiet about my plans for businesses so you sneaky bastards on the internet don’t steal them, but once things are going I’ll try to document as much of my (hopefully) success story as I can

That’s enough for me now, bye

I went down to Springwood Suzuki and was reccommended the Oxford brand, and I agreed – purchasing one of these. Well, borysSNORC did anyway

It’s got loads of pockets, big magnets to hold it on, can zip into a backback and has a zip-off bum bag on the right there. Pretty good quality, that’s for sure.

A couple of days ago I adjusted the throttle free-play, something that’d been plaguing me since I got the bike. It had about 1/8th of a turn of play :S

I also plastic-welded the fairings back together, which made me happy in my pants to see the bike not rattling and ripping itself apart…

Today’s work included a replacement of the oil filter and the oil in the bike. I hope to do it every six to ten thousand K’s with the oil I’m using and the bike that I have. I chose to use Motul 5100 semi-synth as it’s under sixty bucks for four litres and has good reviews on a few sites. The oil filter was easy to get – a Ryco Z411 from SuperCheap Auto for a massive twelve dollars.

The job wasn’t hard to do – I’m getting good at taking the lower fairings off Once I worked out how to take the oil cooler off without having to replace the seals on the hoses, I dropped the oil and got the filter off. I was worried if the filter would fit, as I’d read only found a vague reference to a non-standard one on a forum posting. Uh, it did, huzzah. If you want a cheap and good ZZR600 oil filter, get a Z411. I’m thinking I might try to find a highflow one later, and will take a look at things when I can. Until then, the filter designed for a much larger motor should be fine

The rest of the job was pretty easy, topping up the oil and making sure I didn’t get it all over the place. 3.6lt of oil later, and the job was done

So, my bike’s in the shop and I have a morning off from work. A friend offers me a ride of his spare bike, and the opportunity to be led through the twisties heading up to the Maiala Rainforest Teahouse at Mount Nebo/Glorious. Who could say no? Not me!

I’ll admit it, I was shitting myself. On someone else’s much lighter and more responsive bike, tooling through the hills and trying to not look like a complete grandma – which I failed at, but am cool with that)

It was a great couple of hours of riding with a break for coffee and a toasted bacon and egg sammich. I got to see how my practice held up against some real roads instead of the lots-of-straights-and-suburbia I’d been riding around. Not to mention I finally met snail/rasp/David, which only took about a year or two.

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There have been a few that I like the look of, and many complete shitters. It’s to be expected with a low-turnover item and my low budget – under three thousand dollars was my goal. Another problem is the fact that I’m 6’9″ tall, leaving me out of the running for many smaller bikes because they look like little pushbikes under me.

After a while of looking, I found this on eBay: Kawasaki ZZR-600. 70ish thousand K’s, seventeen years old and after sending him an email I found that a roadworthy was to be supplied upon sale. There was a reserve of unknown value on it, but I asked and was told it was two thousand – bonus!

Previously the bike had been passed in at ~1900 dollars, leaving me wondering a little about its condition. I met up with the owner and took the bike for a quick ride around the back streets and gave it a good looking over. From what I could tell with my limited bike experience – read none – there wasn’t any leaks, it didn’t wobble, and it rode alright so I decided to bid.

With my usual eBay tactics in hand, I bid with twenty three seconds to go (praying the internet or my wireless didn’t drop out) and secured it with a final bid of 2075.00

It’s in for a roadworthy tomorrow, so hopefully if I’m feeling well enough to go get it and the insurance company will play nice I’ll be the proud owner of a 1991 Kawasaki ZZR-600 tomorrow

Here’s the photos from the eBay auction in case it disappears:

As shown above, I look like a clown and have an R class Queensland license – allowing for an unrestricted engine sized motorbike

Neuroticism (91)

91

Extraversion (21)

21

Openness to Experience (40)

40

Agreeableness (26)

26

Conscientiousness (7)

7

Porn? OK

Movies? OK

Information on useful things in life? Heaven forbid!

Oh, and while I’m admitting my sins, last year I looked up how to tie a tie on youtube, something that was never taught to me.

I figured that I’d been playing around too much so uninstalling everything to do with media playing then reinstalling it might be the go, and I was right

If you’re having problems and nothing really works, try this…  either su to root or use sudo in front of this command to run it as root:

 apt-get remove totem libdvdcss2 libdvdread3

Or just go into Synaptic and remove Totem, libdvdcss and libdvdread. Then go into Quickstart again and install the DVD software. You should be good to go

If you do have any problems, leave a comment and I’ll see what I can work out that I’ve left out – I removed a few things but I think those three packages are the main problem causing ones.

Opportunistic, patriotic to a fault, and not so fond of people who aren’t just like you, you are like a Nazi General. Back in Germany in the 1940′s, you would have been at the top of the asshole list. Not for Nazism, necessarily, but for your own sick, twisted values. Then, out of superior intelligence (relative to other Nazis, that is), you would’ve climbed to the top.

Conclusion: you would have been a Nazi, and most likely would have served them well.