yaleman.org

I just had one of the best rides in the wet since my first night on the bike. I basically said to myself “shut the fuck up and ride” and did so. I loosened my typical vice-tight grip on the bars, tightened up my knees like one should on the bike and just rode it smooth. Remembering to think less about the fact that I had a bit of water on my visor and just watching the road was a good thing too.

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.

They’re obviously not deleting posts on Gizmodo.

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

You heard it here. It shits me. It seems that with my weird and wonderful assortment of experience and skills that I don’t actually fit into any box they have, so I can’t get a job and I’m stuck in pizzaVille.

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’ve been considering storage solutions for on my bike – ventura racks and bags and so forth. As a small, portable solution I’ve been looking at a magnetic tank bag as they’re removable and relatively cheap (not to mention easy to get, since they’re not model-specific) and allow me to use my gps and or see my phone while riding.

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.

So, I’m going down the route of trying to make motorcycling the cheapest I can. I’m planning on doing as much repair and maintenance as I can, so that includes things like adjustments of controls, and oil & filter replacements

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