Scrumptious Word Morsels

I guess there’s been a lack of updates lately, but only because I’ve been pretty busy. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t been doing other things online, though! If you follow me on Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, or one of the other social networking sites I belong to, you’ll notice that I’m still posting several status updates per day and replying to other people’s updates. (All my status updates get transferred to the sidebar of this site automagically, by the way.) I’m most active on Facebook, so add me as a friend if you haven’t already, but only if you actually know me in real life too—that’s my Facebook rule.

The last shipment of motorcycle parts should be here Monday, and then I’m going to fix little Vanessa up and change the way she looks for the better (plastic surgery for motorcycles, if you will). It involves swapping out the mirrors and headlight assembly and removing the fairings, but it’s a little hard to describe without pictures. Those will be coming soon, of course, and I realize I never posted any post-accident pictures of the bike, so I’ll roll those into the next update too.

Until next time, hit me up on Twitter, and then we can share 140-character updates with each other!

No, I’m not talking about that. Get your minds out of the gutter. Jeez!

I’m talking about the motorcycle, obviously. My dad and I were doing some routine maintenance last weekend (thanks again, Dad), and it dawned on me that my new mode of transportation is still without a proper name. The name needs to be feminine, of course, because all fast, sleek, dangerous things with motors have female names.

Off the top of my head, I was thinking Ruby, Autumn, and Vanessa. I don’t know why the top three names I came up with are stereotypical stripper names, but they are.

Got a better idea? Comments are open.

Tucson got pounded with what was arguably the best storm of the entire summer last night. We’re talking horizontal rain, winds that almost knocked my bike over, and flooding all over the place. Oh, and power outages. Lots and lots of power outages.

Power was out at my apartment last night from about 8:00 p.m. until sometime in the middle of the night. I stood on my balcony, which looks out southbound over the city, and literally watched rows of lights go out until all of Tucson was black. The only lights I could see were air traffic control towers and beacons at Davis-Monthan and the Tucson “International” Airport.

So, I woke up this morning, and the power was back on at my apartment. Cool. Fire up the UPSes, reboot the router, reboot the servers, reboot the Vonage adapter, and we’re back in business. I get in my car and start driving to work, only to get about one mile before hitting a wall of cars. We’re bumper-to-bumper and barely moving down a road that you can normally go 50-55 mph on.

Since we’re mostly stopped, I start posting tweets in an attempt to warn others who might be thinking about heading down the same road. I speculated about what the problem might be, and as it turns out, the traffic signals at River/Swan were completely. Only, instead of a cop directing traffic, the county had put up four stop signs around the intersection. Fantastic.

After watching several near-collisions, I came to the conclusion that people don’t know how to react to a 4-way stop at a major intersection. When I got past the blockage and a little closer to work, I realized traffic lights were out everywhere. “Hmm… I wonder if power is out at the office.” Sure enough, power was out at the office.

A few people had gotten to work ahead of me, and they were waiting around to see what would happen with the power situation. As you can imagine, it’s difficult for programmers to get work done when all the desktops, servers, and network connections are completely wiped out. So we did what any good employees would do given the circumstances: we played foosball for an hour.

That brings me to the present. I’m currently sitting in a Starbucks that happens to have power, recounting my morning in blog form for you, my loyal readers. It’s been about two hours since I left the office, though I’m supposed to get a call when we’re back online. I’m not particularly looking forward to that call, as it means a lot of babysitting servers and fscking* work for me.

* Just in case you were wondering, that’s not actually vulgar, though it might appear that way on the surface. Follow the link to find out what the fsck I’m talking about.

Since I’ve talked about it enough during the past three or four weeks, most of my loyal readers know that I recently purchased a motorcycle. That was almost two weeks ago. Well, this weekend, I finally started learning how to ride it. And it is fun. It’s more fun than I could have imagined, and it’s more fun than I’ve had in my car in a long time.

I’m gonna be honest and let you guys in on a little secret: I never learned how to drive a manual transmission car. Now, before you start throwing things at me, let me explain. When I started driving in about 2000, nobody I knew had a stick-shift car, so I learned on an auto. That was all well and good for about eight years, until I wanted to drive something with a clutch and a manual gearbox. In case you didn’t know, 99% of motorcycles have manual transmissions.

I had no idea how sensitive the friction zone of the clutch would be, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. I’m becoming more intuitive about feeling when it starts to grab and then slipping it some more and applying the appropriate amount of throttle to get going. And let me tell you, this thing gets going. With the Protege, I hit the gas and the car is like, “Yes, sir. I’ll make a note that you’d like to accelerate. How about we take another second to enjoy the scenery, though?” With the bike, it’s like, “I hear ya, buddy. Hold on to the grips, just in case this turns out to be a bad idea.”

With my geek buddy Jim from TFUG (Tucson Free Unix Group, i.e., Linux), we logged about 5-6 hours in a parking lot between yesterday and today. After I felt comfortable this afternoon, we hit the road on our respective bikes and I got my first taste of navigating through traffic. Thankfully, Sunday afternoon traffic is pretty light, and it made for a nice, easy ride. After twisting around the Foothills a bit (literally, roads at the base of the mountain), we went to La Encantada and came back when it turned out to be packed.

Oh yeah, at some point along the way, I made it up into fifth gear, and it was a blast. I’m really enjoying the whole “motorcycle” thing, and I’m happy I got a bike when I did. If I’m feeling up to it, I might try riding to work tomorrow. It’s a straight 4 miles through 3 traffic lights and a left turn, and traffic is pretty sparse when I get into the office before 8:30 or so.

Vroom!

I cleaned the living room today and finally got rid of the last of the boxes and various piles of crap (not literally, don’t worry) left over from the move… which was two months ago. But now the room is completely empty except for a few random instruments stashed away in the corner.

I have no TV and no couches and no money to buy either, so I’m thinking I’ll just move the motorcycle into the living room and use that as functional furniture. It would see more action in there than it would on the street, but that’s another story for another day. A story for tomorrow, in fact. With pictures.