Tales of Ordinary Madness

Well — at long last — the bike is up and running. I took it for it’s inaguaral ride on Thursday and it purrs.

Wow — how time manages to slip past. I can’t believe it’s been almost two months since my last blog. A lot has happened in those two months…

First, on October 28, 2005 Jess created a most awesome Halloween costume for me. Pictures are below of Jess and I pre-party and JustBill and I at JustBill and Jaimee’s Halloween party that night:

Second, on October 30, 2005 I earned my class M endorsement from the state of Pennsylvania, which means I am now licensed to operate a motorcycle. I signed up for and completed the Motorcycle Safety Foundation course. The course was fun and challenging; I was surprised at the amount of coordination and thought that is required to operate a motorcycle. I went into it thinking it would be a cake walk, I left with a healthy respect for the art of motorcycle operating. I’m hoping that over the winter I can acquire a nice “starter” motorcycle and start riding in the spring.

Thirdly, I ran for and was elected to the board of directors for the Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group. I will be serving as the Director-at-Large for the upcoming year. We’ve already had our first board meeting and I’m excited to see how things progress. We have also started a ErieLUG revival committee. I’m hoping JustBill will join the committee and help us kick-start ErieLUG again.

Over the last few days, I have been in touch with a woman that I worked with during the Internet boom days. It was nice to hear from someone who I thought had disappeared into oblivion (isn’t the Internet great!).

Her and her husband own a full service motorcycle and repair shop in Bloomsburg, PA (just Northeast of Harrisburg) called American Cycle Fabrication. They came to this country from South Africa and told me some great stories and taught me some great South African slang.

They even had a write up about them and their motorcycles in the South African Playboy – from what I recall Paul was an expert craftsman and specialized in vintage motorcycles (probably not the proper term – but when we were still in Harrisburg I saw some of his handy work and I couldn’t call him anything else).

Well that’s pretty cool you say – well guess what – it doesn’t stop there – Barbara just informed me that they had one of their motors run in Speed Week in Bonneville. 18 of the 40 records where set at Bonneville by motorcycles and of those 18, 3 were set by the bike sporting their engine. I’ve included a picture of the bike below.