Bikerscum - Patrick St. Jean

I managed to break the feed line for my APRS station's antenna, it disconnected from the connector while I was loading the Jeep up for the drive up to Illinois in December. I've been a little bit of a slacker and haven't gotten around to fixing it. Well, on the way home from work today I stopped off at Tanner Electronics and picked up the parts I needed to get a new connector on the feed line. After a quick spin around the block to make sure the transmitter was still working I buttoned everything up and am able to send position reports again.

Link: http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/controller?act=ModelDetailAct&fcategoryid=148&modelid=8940

My new Canon 17-40mm F/4L lens arrived today, a day earlier than I'd expected. It's replacing the 28mm f/2.8 prime because I was feeling pretty limited in my wide angle choices. I'm going to run a roll or so through it to start getting a feel for how it performs before heading out to do some landscape shooting this weekend.

Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0434409/

I got together with some friends to go see V for Vendetta tonight. First off, I haven't read the graphic novels that it's based on, and I understand that there is a little bit of a controversy with regards to the author asking for his name to be removed from hte credits because of some disputes with the studio. But in spite of that it was a very good movie with an extremely powerful message. It kept my attention from start to finish and I'm going to try to find a copy of the graphic novels so that I can get the whole story.

I dropped the rocker boxes off at Hands Off Polishing in Garland today. They don't have a website but if you're looking for someone to do some chroming or polishing, give them a shout at 972-487-8220. They quoted me a two week turnaround and a reasonable price for the work. That two week timeframe is going to cut it close with the rest of the work, but I think the results will be worth it. Now I need to pick up some chrome bolts to put those rocker box covers back on with.

The heads have been dropped off at Evolution Bike Works for the valve job. Paul suggested that I check out a different chromer so I'll be giving them a call tomorrow to see if I can get the rocker box covers chromed. Powder coating the middle one to match the paint is not going to happen, so I'm just going to chrome all three.

Link: http://www.petmate.com/Catalog.plx?ID=1823

The new feeder for the girls came in today. It's a Petmate Electronic Portion Control Le Bistro. The unit is pretty solidly built, with a cover over the clock and programming controls. Programming it isn't difficult provided you follow the directions. I've got it set to dispense the same amount of food twice a day and will be trying to see if I can get it to dispense different amounts instead of all the same amount.

The girls are getting used to it, but there's food in it so I don't think they'll take too long.

I just got back from dropping the cylinders off at my local UPS Store to be shipped up to Nallin's. So this whole project's really starting to take off. Now I've got to deal with getting the heads worked on and chroming/powder coating the rocker box covers.

It's been raining all weekend here but that wasn't going to stop me from getting started on the conversion so I put on the rain gear and headed over to a friend's house since he's got the tools and a lot more know-how than I do.

Crude was graceful enough to let me do all of the work, which is what I wanted because I need to learn how to do this stuff. Disassembly wasn't all that bad, just tedious, and went without too many major hitches. A couple bolts didn't want to come out so Crude had to cold chisel them, including the nut holding the front pulley on.

Speaking of the front pulley, we took it off to get at the neutral switch, which had failed a few months ago. It was definitely a good thing that we took a look at it because the pulley's splines were almost totally stripped out. There was less than a millimeter left, which means that I would have been left stranded on the road some time soon.

So now I've got the heads and cylinders in the garage. The cylinders will be shipped out tomorrow, the heads will be dropped off at Evolution Bike Works on Tuesday for a valve job, and I've got a list of parts to order from the dealership. Reassembly starts when all of the parts are back, which should be about three weeks from now.

We got MSN Messenger working with the webcams tonight and the results were actually pretty good. The video, at least on my side, was a few frames short of full motion, and the audio quality was top notch. I don't think I'm going to need to buy the video conferencing package that Logitech sells. It was good to see and hear Reese and I think he enjoyed it too.

I'm looking forward to being able to do this a little more frequently now that we know it's working.

I had a little money left over from my bonuses so I picked up a few movies, including Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Enough has already been said about the movie to do another review, but the DVD has a pretty cute menuing system, modeled after the Guide. For kicks you should try out the Improbability Drive option. The extras are pretty good, a few deleted scenes, a few really deleted scenes, and a really amusing hangman game.

After paying off some bills I had enough bonus money left over to pay for the 1200 conversion for my Sportster. After doing a bunch of research I settled on the kit offered by Nallin Racing Head Service. Basically I've got to pull the motor apart and send the cylinders out to them. Once they get them they'll bore and hone them, match a set of pistons to them, and ship everything back along with rings and gaskets. I wish I could go for something a little more wild, but this conversion will give me some added power and won't decrease reliability like the bigher power conversions have the potential to do.

The following link just came across the Sportster List. Pretty good technique to pick up a dropped bike. I've used a variation on this method a few times and it works really well.

Picking Up A Fallen Bike

For various reasons I haven't read Dan Brown's other works but a friend loaned me a copy of Digital Fortress after the Superbowl party and I finally got around to reading it. It's a pretty good read, with short chapters that move quickly and good, believable character and plot development throughout.

The story starts with the discovery of an unbreakable code and the NSA's hunt to find it before all of their code cracking abilities are rendered useless. From there it goes on a whirlwind trip through the NSA's headquarters, Japan, and Spain. The book kept me engaged throughout and left me guessing until the end.

Link: http://www.village-idiot.org/archives/2005/01/28/b2evo-captcha-explained/

I've been getting slammed by more and more comment spam over the last few days and have finally had enough. I'm implementing the captcha solution from village-idiot.org. I know it's not perfect and that there is software out there to defeat them but it'll stop me from having to delete literally hundreds of porn spam comments from my posts while still leaving them open for people to post .

The directions are pretty good but I did make a couple changes to authimage.php and comment_post.php to clean up a few warnings generated when the spammers try to hit the page directly.

Basically, you need to change two blocks of code in authimage.php, both up near the top of the file. First, wrap the if/elseif block that checks to see if you're requesting a text or image with a test to see if $_GET['type'] is set. Then in checkAICode you'll need to change the if/then block at the beginning to make sure that $_SESSION['AI-code'] is set. Here's what the two blocks look like after being changed:

if (isset($_GET['type'])) {
  if ($_GET['type'] == "text") {
    createAICode("text");
    exit;
  }elseif ($_GET['type'] == "image") {
    createAICode("image");
    exit;
  }
}

and

if(!isset($_SESSION['AI-code'])) {
  $return = 0;
} else {
  if ($code == $_SESSION['AI-code']) {
    $return = 1;
  } else {
    $return = 0;
  }
}

And then in comment_post.php you'll need to wrap the captcha checking routine with this code:

if (isset($_POST['code'])){
...
} else {
  errors_add( T_('Error: Please don\'t try to bypass the access code.') );
}

Furies of Calderon is Jim Butcher's first book in a new fantasy series. It's a good, quick read with great character building and a believable universe. The book and series are certainly a departure from the Dresden Files books, but he's doing a really good job with this genre as well.

It's set in a world where the people have bonded with spirits of the elements, called furies, that help them throughout their lives. All except Tavi, a young boy who is thrust into the center of a budding civil war and an invasion by one of the non-human races.

I picked up a pair of Logitech QuickCam Communicate STX webcams today to set up on the computer here in Peoria and on my Windows box at home so that Reese and I will be able to do some video chats instead of just phone calls. The installation went well and the image quality, especially in poor lighting seems to be pretty good. They claim that the cameras work with MS Messenger so we should be OK. If not, Logitech's got a pay service that does video conferencing, and while I'd rather not pay if I don't have to, the rate's reasonable and getting the video chat going is more important than spending a little money.

I got to finish off H.M.S. Surprise on the flight out to Peoria today. It's a little shorter than the previous volumes, but still a fantastic read. I'm still learning 19th century naval terms and was a little stumped on a few, but it didn't detract from the book at all.

The book opens with Jack Aubrey's prize money being taken away by political games which also expose Dr. Maturin's spying. It then moves on to India and the main acion of the book. There's not as much combat in this one as there were in the previous versions, but it does a good job of showing Capt. Aubrey growing in to his command and sets the stage for where the series is going to go.

I got an e-mail announcing that Delphi was having a quickie sale on a few accessories for the Roady2 XM receiver. And a sale it was! I got the Personal Audio System (a Walkman-like adapter) for $20! And then for kicks added in the home kit so that I can listen at my desk. $40 for both with free shipping. Sweet!

The site was getting hammered so badly yesterday that it was all but inaccessible. Note to marketing folks, check with your IT guys before starting an e-mail campaign. I've run large e-commerce websites (NokiaUSA.com) and you don't do this kind of stuff in a vacuum. Because of that I was worried that it'd be all sold out before I could get my order in, but no worries. It was happy this morning and the order went through.