I bought a pair of shoes, Mizuno Wave Inspire 8′s, in a size 15. Quite comfy actually. I went for a jog, and when I had them done up too tight I got the terrible foot pain issues I’ve had in the past.

The next part of the shopping journey was to get my glasses prescription. Unfortunately they wouldn’t give it to me without re-testing my eyes, so I got them re-tested. It seems they’re still OK, woot.

I’ve been eyeing off a smallish frypan so I can have bacon and eggs for breakfasts. Shiny and PTFE-free. Baccarat Ceramix frypans look fairly cool, and I got the 20cm one for only $10 more than the 30cm one!

I got myself a cookbook which looks pretty freakin’ cool. 35% off was even better, so it was only $35 or so for a hefty book full of italian food The recipes are well laid out and have many photographs.

There’s a simple trick, run this from the console as an admin (sudo if you please):

dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

When it asks what kind of keyboard you have, hit “m” to select Macbook then hit enter. Keep hitting enter (or letter keys to select options, multiple taps on the same letter will scroll) and you’ll get your way through.

Keys should work after that

1. Go to My Documents – My Games – Oblivion and delete the file named Oblivion
2. Disable the display that the game is not running off (In windows, not the monitors power button)
3. Run Oblivion and it shouldn’t crash (for this specific problem)
4. Exit Oblivion and turn on the second display.

When you load Oblivion again, it should start fine whether you have one or multiple displays active. It seems to be an issue with the way it detects multiple screens – I’ve seen mention that they try to use both screens in a weird multi-monitor see-everything mode.

So yeah, there has been lots of flooding in Queensland, people lost their stuff and in some cases their lives, but as usual I’m sitting here experiencing it digitally. 9/11 was the televised disaster of the first world, and this time it’s via the internet. Facebook became a great outage-proof communication method for people and the authorities alike, with the Queensland Police, Energex and Brisbane City Council being shining examples of how to get information quickly to the most amount of people.

Facebook and Twitter were alive with posts of pictures, “I’m OK”‘s and all sorts of posts of thanks to deities and rescue workers alike. I was included in that – the real ones, not the anthromorphic ones – I’m amazed at the skill and endless energy that these people show in saving the unlucky and fucking stupid alike.

Now, I’ve been saving for a house deposit for a long time, and now there’s a going to be a glut of riverside properties ready for the renovating. Who doesn’t love a parking fairy?

Fuck explaining why I haven’t posted for a long time, just post it yale.

OK. So I went to the Powderfinger Sunsets Tour concert on 05/09/10 at the Brisbane Riverstage. It was amazing. It was emotional, I cried, I got soaked with rain, and I had a lot of fun seeing a band that I’d always enjoyed and I never thought I’d have a chance to see again – seeing as they are doing their farewell tour.

Another thing happened that night, my faithful wallet of the last couple of years got utterly soaked. I hate looking for wallets, they’re horribly personal things that are hard to find replacements for because you get used to the bumps and curves of the one you have.

Since it was a black leather wallet it was pretty much destroyed by getting soaked, so I ended up going hobo-chic style for a few weeks. This was done by grabbing only the bare minimum of cards and my usual amount of notes and sticking it in a bulldog clip. Problem solved! It was minimalist and easy to use.

I finally found a new wallet after giving up and trying an Oakley store of all places. Hugo Boss had a nice one, but for $300 they can stick it up their ass.

Link to the new one here.

Yes, I gave up on this post half way through. Fuck off.

Description: user’s outlook wasn’t synchronising because user refused to follow instructions in error message and sync errors repeated every 20 seconds

Impact: no new mail and deleted items getting loaded up with sync errors

Cause: user didn’t read error messages and follow instructions

Sigh.

Update: Not five minutes after I posted the first one…

user’s mailbox is way over its limit – advised to clear it up and will stop getting messages saying it’s full. user claims to have received email saying his account would be closed – but had deleted it and cleared it (and only it) from the deleted items. over 50MB of other stuff in deleted items however. advised if gets message like this to NOT delete it before calling us.

Why?

I have it on loan for a day or so while the 2000 model ZZR-250 RMB is buying is in for a roadworthy.  The bike is an excellent height for me – nearly too high in fact for me to comfortably stand on it in traffic. Considering I’m 6’9″ tall, that is quite an effort!

The riding position is very comfortable, with my arms bent at about 90 degrees and my back nearly straight. Under acceleration I have the urge to lean forward lest I be thrown from the bike because of the way the suspension shifts.

The handling takes a bit of getting used to, going from my normal heavy old ZZR-600 to what is effectively a trail bike which weighs half as much. It is very manoeuvrable due to the light weight, trailbike suspension and very wide handlebars.

I have not had a chance to really test the handling due to the fact I only have it for a short time – not to mention throwing a loaner bike around in peak hour highway traffic while it is raining probably should be avoided. The general feeling that I get of the bike is that it is well settled and useful on the road, tight tracks or on fire trails where sticky mud and traction are not an issue.

The engine is very different to what I have ridden with before. The smooth carby-fed inline four cylinder ZZR-600, the thumping SV-650′s V-Twin and the ZZR-250′s wheezy but rev-happy two cylinder inline engine all have different characteristics, but they are still sports bikes at the core. The XTX’s engine, with its single piston and small useful rev range is a totally different beast. It definitely lives up to the “thumper” moniker such engines receive, roaring during acceleration and sounding like a burbling Harley-Davidson when you back off.

Without a tachometer on the bike it is hard to tell what you are doing at any point in time, but the feeling through the seat is that if you fail to choose the right gear you are heading for rattly-stallsville on the low end and it runs out of puff on the top end. There is a relatively tight range in the middle that it is quite happy to cruise in and pull away from under normal riding conditions.

The controls are easy to find and use as one would expect, all the switches and buttons are in the normal places and easy to feel for when you are first on the bike. The gearbox is reassuringly smooth and accurate, never leaving one to question whether it went into the gear I wanted. The levers aren’t adjustable, which makes me think that riders with smaller hands could be left over-reaching ont hsi bike. Clutch actuation is smooth and light which is nice.

The brakes I am still deciding about. The front sports a big single 320mm disc with four Brembo aluminium pistons doing the grabbing, and the rear has a not-too-shabby 245mm rear single disc. There is no question that if I was to grab the brakes that the bike would stop quickly, but under road use it seems to require more than the usual two-finger grab to pull the bike up. I’m not sure if this is another case of the motard-road bike comparison but it makes me feel a little nervous grabbing so hard on the lever to pull myself up.

Obviously after an hour or so on the bike in traffic it’s never going to be the most exhaustive of reviews, but it certainly is an interesting bike. Easy to ride and a good height, with a complete minimum of features leaves the bike in the normal motard position. Good for those that haven’t got a ute and want to ride their bike to the trail or for a fun bike which covers a lot of simple bases.

For me though, I’m going to be happy to be back on the dedicated sports bikes

Supermotard – the Yamaha way

The XTX’s 660cc liquid-cooled, 4-stroke single is built to last, but it’s also built to perform. It boasts a specially designed SOHC 4-valve cylinder head with high intake efficiency and a 10:1 compression ratio.

Inside the lightweight cylinder head, rocker arms with roller bearings are fitted (the first Yamaha motorcycle so fitted), reducing friction-related power loss (50% less than without bearings).

Inside that formidable cylinder lives a lightweight aluminium forged piston, with an anodised head surface treated to reduce oil consumption and increase heat resistance.

The aluminium XTX cylinder is ceramic composite plated to improve heat radiation and reduce oil consumption, while a cylinder skirt cutaway reduces pumping loss.

Throw in a light crankshaft for low reciprocating mass, and a return-less fuel injection system with 44m bigbore throttle bodies and you’re looking at a smooth, crisp delivery, instant grunt and an exhilarating mid-range when you need it.

A lot of lightweight dirt bikes might feel nervous on the road, but remember, this is your road bike that just happens to be your supermotard…

While the steering might be pleasantly quick, the strong, diamond frame and steel swing arm boasts plenty of torsional and lateral rigidity.

The lightweight 17-inch Excel front wheel carries a 320mm floating front disc gripped by four Brembo aluminium piston calipers, while a plush Kayaba shock with five step preload adjuster and beefy 43mm Paioli fork with generous 200mm travel cope easily with rough secondary roads.

ANZ has a new logo. What the hell? Do they want to give me a hug? Is it something to do with anime? Or is it just some weird stylised crap that makes no sense.

I think it is the last one, personally. ANZ, please fire your graphic designers, they are making too much money and spending it on crack again.

This is more a reminder of the fact that I have read it for myself than gushing about his writing style, so that is all I will say about it today. Have fun!

It was designed by the team that brought the OpenMoko to the world, the first true open source mobile phone. I will be interested to see what happens with the developer’s side of things – hopefully they will allow open access to the software of the device so that it can be hacked and used for other things as well. Maybe this is the cheap ebook reader I have been looking for?

Buy yourself a WikiReader by clicking here and support an incredible project

A truly honest view from an enlightened person on a drug that many think is the root of all evil. Please do not take this as me encouraging its use (as I am not a big fan), but I am fascinated by how he looks at the use of mind-altering drugs.

I think this pretty much explains my views on some drugs:

…there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words…

The idea of R which he introduces late in the piece is an interesting one – and especially for those that do not have experience or knowledge of drugs. The time between taking a dose and experiencing the effects is an important thing which many people fail to understand and which can cause no end of trouble. How many times have you heard of someone taking a dose of a drug and then when they thought it was not working, taking another dose or something else before the first dose hits? How many times was this potentially (or actually) catastrophic?

If this was the first piece of education provided to people at a young age with respect to recreational or mind-altering drugs I would be quite happy. It does not promote drugs, nor does it have the normal religious or societal warnings imposed on it. The next thing I would hope for would be an honest discussion on the physiological affects, but how would we get honest discussion on drugs going in society anyway?

I like that forty years ago one of the most intelligent and inspiring people of the time was hoping for the legality “of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.”

Mr. X

By Carl Sagan

This account was written in 1969 for publication in Marihuana Reconsidered (1971). Sagan was in his mid-thirties at that time. He continued to use cannabis for the rest of his life.

It all began about ten years ago. I had reached a considerably more relaxed period in my life – a time when I had come to feel that there was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social consciousness and amiability, a time when I was open to new experiences. I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually persuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to entertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation rather than by chemistry. After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, however, it happened. I was lying on my back in a friend’s living room idly examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling cast by a potted plant (not cannabis!). I suddenly realized that I was examining an intricately detailed miniature Volkswagen, distinctly outlined by the shadows. I was very skeptical at this perception, and tried to find inconsistencies between Volkswagens and what I viewed on the ceiling. But it was all there, down to hubcaps, license plate, chrome, and even the small handle used for opening the trunk. When I closed my eyes, I was stunned to find that there was a movie going on the inside of my eyelids. Flash… a simple country scene with red farmhouse, a blue sky, white clouds, yellow path meandering over green hills to the horizon. . . Flash . . . same scene, orange house, brown sky, red clouds, yellow path, violet fields… Flash… Flash… Flash. The flashes came about once a heartbeat. Each flash brought the same simple scene into view, but each time with a different set of colors… exquisitely deep hues, and astonishingly harmonious in their juxtaposition. Since then I have smoked occasionally and enjoyed it thoroughly. It amplifies torpid sensibilities and produces what to me are even more interesting effects, as I will explain shortly.

I can remember another early visual experience with cannabis, in which I viewed a candle flame and discovered in the heart of the flame, standing with magnificent indifference, the black-hatted and -cloaked Spanish gentleman who appears on the label of the Sandeman sherry bottle. Looking at fires when high, by the way, especially through one of those prism kaleidoscopes which image their surroundings, is an extraordinarily moving and beautiful experience.

I want to explain that at no time did I think these things ‘really’ were out there. I knew there was no Volkswagen on the ceiling and there was no Sandeman salamander man in the flame. I don’t feel any contradiction in these experiences. There’s a part of me making, creating the perceptions which in everyday life would be bizarre; there’s another part of me which is a kind of observer. About half of the pleasure comes from the observer-part appreciating the work of the creator-part. I smile, or sometimes even laugh out loud at the pictures on the insides of my eyelids. In this sense, I suppose cannabis is psychotomimetic, but I find none of the panic or terror that accompanies some psychoses. Possibly this is because I know it’s my own trip, and that I can come down rapidly any time I want to.

While my early perceptions were all visual, and curiously lacking in images of human beings, both of these items have changed over the intervening years. I find that today a single joint is enough to get me high. I test whether I’m high by closing my eyes and looking for the flashes. They come long before there are any alterations in my visual or other perceptions. I would guess this is a signal-to-noise problem, the visual noise level being very low with my eyes closed. Another interesting information-theoretical aspects is the prevalence – at least in my flashed images – of cartoons: just the outlines of figures, caricatures, not photographs. I think this is simply a matter of information compression; it would be impossible to grasp the total content of an image with the information content of an ordinary photograph, say 10⁸ bits, in the fraction of a second which a flash occupies. And the flash experience is designed, if I may use that word, for instant appreciation. The artist and viewer are one. This is not to say that the images are not marvelously detailed and complex. I recently had an image in which two people were talking, and the words they were saying would form and disappear in yellow above their heads, at about a sentence per heartbeat. In this way it was possible to follow the conversation. At the same time an occasional word would appear in red letters among the yellows above their heads, perfectly in context with the conversation; but if one remembered these red words, they would enunciate a quite different set of statements, penetratingly critical of the conversation. The entire image set which I’ve outlined here, with I would say at least 100 yellow words and something like 10 red words, occurred in something under a minute.

The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before. The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I’m down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. There also have been some art-related insights – I don’t know whether they are true or false, but they were fun to formulate. For example, I have spent some time high looking at the work of the Belgian surrealist Yves Tanguey. Some years later, I emerged from a long swim in the Caribbean and sank exhausted onto a beach formed from the erosion of a nearby coral reef. In idly examining the arcuate pastel-colored coral fragments which made up the beach, I saw before me a vast Tanguey painting. Perhaps Tanguey visited such a beach in his childhood.

A very similar improvement in my appreciation of music has occurred with cannabis. For the first time I have been able to hear the separate parts of a three-part harmony and the richness of the counterpoint. I have since discovered that professional musicians can quite easily keep many separate parts going simultaneously in their heads, but this was the first time for me. Again, the learning experience when high has at least to some extent carried over when I’m down. The enjoyment of food is amplified; tastes and aromas emerge that for some reason we ordinarily seem to be too busy to notice. I am able to give my full attention to the sensation. A potato will have a texture, a body, and taste like that of other potatoes, but much more so. Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex – on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with the profusion of image passing before my eyes. The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes with cannabis smoking.

I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I’ve had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word ‘crazy’ to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: ‘did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.’ When high on cannabis I discovered that there’s somebody inside in those people we call mad.

When I’m high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won’t attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day. Some of the hardest work I’ve ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or in writing. The problem is that ten even more interesting ideas or images have to be lost in the effort of recording one. It is easy to understand why someone might think it’s a waste of effort going to all that trouble to set the thought down, a kind of intrusion of the Protestant Ethic. But since I live almost all my life down I’ve made the effort – successfully, I think. Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an effort to remember, I never do.

I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. Because of problems of space, I can’t go into the details of these essays, but from all external signs, such as public reactions and expert commentary, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books.

But let me try to at least give the flavor of such an insight and its accompaniments. One night, high on cannabis, I was delving into my childhood, a little self-analysis, and making what seemed to me to be very good progress. I then paused and thought how extraordinary it was that Sigmund Freud, with no assistance from drugs, had been able to achieve his own remarkable self-analysis. But then it hit me like a thunderclap that this was wrong, that Freud had spent the decade before his self-analysis as an experimenter with and a proselytizer for cocaine; and it seemed to me very apparent that the genuine psychological insights that Freud brought to the world were at least in part derived from his drug experience. I have no idea whether this is in fact true, or whether the historians of Freud would agree with this interpretation, or even if such an idea has been published in the past, but it is an interesting hypothesis and one which passes first scrutiny in the world of the downs.

I can remember the night that I suddenly realized what it was like to be crazy, or nights when my feelings and perceptions were of a religious nature. I had a very accurate sense that these feelings and perceptions, written down casually, would not stand the usual critical scrutiny that is my stock in trade as a scientist. If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I’m high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say ‘Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!’ I try to show that my mind is working clearly; I recall the name of a high school acquaintance I have not thought of in thirty years; I describe the color, typography, and format of a book in another room and these memories do pass critical scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it’s as if two people are reading each other’s minds.

Cannabis enables nonmusicians to know a little about what it is like to be a musician, and nonartists to grasp the joys of art. But I am neither an artist nor a musician. What about my own scientific work? While I find a curious disinclination to think of my professional concerns when high – the attractive intellectual adventures always seem to be in every other area – I have made a conscious effort to think of a few particularly difficult current problems in my field when high. It works, at least to a degree. I find I can bring to bear, for example, a range of relevant experimental facts which appear to be mutually inconsistent. So far, so good. At least the recall works. Then in trying to conceive of a way of reconciling the disparate facts, I was able to come up with a very bizarre possibility, one that I’m sure I would never have thought of down. I’ve written a paper which mentions this idea in passing. I think it’s very unlikely to be true, but it has consequences which are experimentally testable, which is the hallmark of an acceptable theory.

I have mentioned that in the cannabis experience there is a part of your mind that remains a dispassionate observer, who is able to take you down in a hurry if need be. I have on a few occasions been forced to drive in heavy traffic when high. I’ve negotiated it with no difficult at all, though I did have some thoughts about the marvelous cherry-red color of traffic lights. I find that after the drive I’m not high at all. There are no flashes on the insides of my eyelids. If you’re high and your child is calling, you can respond about as capably as you usually do. I don’t advocate driving when high on cannabis, but I can tell you from personal experience that it certainly can be done. My high is always reflective, peaceable, intellectually exciting, and sociable, unlike most alcohol highs, and there is never a hangover. Through the years I find that slightly smaller amounts of cannabis suffice to produce the same degree of high, and in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theater.

There is a very nice self-titering aspect to cannabis. Each puff is a very small dose; the time lag between inhaling a puff and sensing its effect is small; and there is no desire for more after the high is there. I think the ratio, R, of the time to sense the dose taken to the time required to take an excessive dose is an important quantity. R is very large for LSD (which I’ve never taken) and reasonably short for cannabis. Small values of R should be one measure of the safety of psychedelic drugs. When cannabis is legalized, I hope to see this ratio as one of he parameters printed on the pack. I hope that time isn’t too distant; the illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.

Copypasted from: http://marijuana-uses.com/essays/002.html via BoingBoing

net use X: \\SERVER\Share

Where:

• X: is the drive letter you wish to map the share to,
• \\SERVER\Share is the UNC path to the share.

Assuming you have permissions to map drives and to access that share, it will map the drive and tell you that it mapped successfully.

If you want quick access and do not want to map a network drive, you can access a UNC Path directly from the Command Prompt using pushd.

For example:

pushd \\SERVER\Share

This will connect to the path automatically for you and make it your current working directory.

When you are finished on the network share enter the popd command. This will return you to the directory you were in before and delete the temporary network drive.

The popd and pushd commands can be used with local directories. If change to a directory with pushd it stores the previous location you were in so that when you issue the popd command you are returned to it. This is similar to bash-stacking in linux where if you open a shell within an existing shell, quitting that will take you back to where you were when you opened it.

“Saratoga Springs school district prohibits kids from biking to school, but a mom and her son defied the law. A state trooper was there to greet them.”

I’m completely and utterly gobsmacked at the nanny-state behaviour that’s happening more and more in today’s society. If a kid wants to ride or walk to school along a designated bike path with their parent supervising them no less, when does is it become the school’s choice to ban them from doing so?

I have to ask how the “State Troopers and an unhappy group of administrators” became involved, other than the fact that they had been pre warned or something else had happened to spark it.

One section of the school policy states: “The Board of Education forbids the riding of bicycles by students to and from Maple Avenue Middle School.” Another section also prohibits riding to elementary schools.

Why would they do this? What is the justification? There is mention that it has something to do with the bicycles being on the property – possibly sparked by parents making it the fault of the school for bikes being stolen in the past.

There’s a reader comment (that seems to have been written by someone with the spelling ability of a bucket of sand) which complains that if a child got injured, the town and school district would be sued.
The concept that a parent would sue the school or the town for a child’s injury caused by a motorist is nothing less than disgusting.

They go on to say that the mother is setting a bad example by teaching their child to break the rules. While I agree that while it’s bad for them to break the rules, being taught to question political decisions and perform peaceful protests isn’t such a bad idea. This is especially true in the face of a generation of children that will likely be buried by their parents because of their terrible nutrition and weight problems, poisoned by the culture that they want so badly.

I hope I’m not one of them – I am trying to cut back on the garbage and get a bit healthier these days. If at all possible my kids will walk or ride to school with me, reinforcing the message that it’s good fun to be outside and getting some road sense.

What do (or will) your children do?

Saratogian via Mother Nature Network

Of course, the people that it was destined to reach are a government-run outsourced nightmare of bureaucracy and stupidity so I thought it would be them at first. Alas, they had not received the paperwork so it was most likely to be a fault on our end.

The complete lack of information on who to call and talk to in this place is just mind boggling. I had to ask two different people before I could find the wrong person that just happened to know who the paperwork had gone.

They had to call me back because there was much walking and discussing to happen. I’m sure there’s Tolkien-esque paragraphs I could write about the rage that boiled inside me.  I won’t, I hate Tolkien.

I will say that I was physically twitching and feeling decidedly unwell with rage. And lo, it was solved! I got a call from RR, the wonderfully sweet young lady that is the Executive Assistant to someone incredibly important far up the chain. As the fires of anger raged within my gut, my heart and mind were instantly calmed. I can’t explain it, I couldn’t yell at such a Nice Young Lady. Her sweet voice was the music to the beast within.

As it stands, I got paid enough to pay rent and have splash cash, and I should have the rest by the end of the week. Sigh.

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.

It explores the idea of a red-state vs. blue-state American civil war brought about by manipulating the media and the people through some interesting psychological ploys.

As stated by the author himself, it wasn’t entirely his idea – having been approached by the Chair Entertainment Group, an American video game producer – and offered the chance to develop the game’s storyline as well as a novel to set the series into action. This is not to say that it’s not an incredibly well thought-out story, with rich character development and the just the right amount of workout for your imagination.

There’s so many twists and turns through this story that at times I was left with an intense feeling of being right in the story, lost as to what’s going on and wondering what will happen next. The plot rarely pauses and by the time you get to the end it showed no sign of slowing down until the very last word.

Well worth a read in my opinion, get your copy here at amazon.com

The 18-year-old youth was 17 and on a learner’s permit when he stole a Holden Rodeo ute at a party at Cheltenham in Melbourne’s southeast, the Moorabbin Kingston Leader reports.

Wait, was he eighteen or seventeen? Gah, you guys suck.

Repeat after me: The address bar’s history is NOT your bookmark folder!
Thanks,

yale.