Here we go again… So I got my bike back yesterday and I’m shocked by the quality of service I’ve received. I don’t know what they were doing the last two months, but clearly it wasn’t much of anything, it came back in virtually the same condition that I gave it to them. The paintwork has been fixed to an extent, but hell there are some \*deep\* scratches there, which on a clean paint job is pretty shocking. The level of incompetence is absolutely staggering and I will never take anything back to them be it a car or a bike.

At almost 8 months since my accident my patience is wearing thin and I’m quite tempted to take this to court and claim for the full amount and let someone else deal with this bike. When the bike went back to them — it took over a week to get them to fetch it — they were given a list (about 10 items) of stuff to fix, from what I can tell they’ve only worked on about 4 items from that list, and haven’t even done that to my satisfaction. Not to mention that this list has actually increased on return of the bike with more problems being noticed.

The main reason the bike went back was to sort out the leaking forks as there was oil spilling out everywhere; I’ve got some pretty large oil stains on the garage floor now. So apparently they rebuilt my forks and replaced the seals. I’m not sure what they did, but they didn’t do a very good job. My forks are still leaking, not as much, but there’s still plenty of oil. Perhaps the seals take a few km to set properly, but I highly doubt that. Wven if they did, they shouldn’t be leaking this much oil. If I wipe down the forks, compress them and then touch them, my fingers come away drenched in oil. This is not right; it should be absolutely dry.

There is a very thin line between riding safely and having a catastrophic mechanical failure, and leaking forks just makes that line thinner. Keeping my tyres in contact with the road surface is absolutely essential if I want to continue riding and it is my suspension that does this. I had planned on racing this bike, but if I get even a single drop of oil on the track, the other racers will be sure to gut me.

So, to recap some of the main functional problems that weren’t rectified:

• My temperature gauge readout is still very wrong.
• The trip meter is still broken.
• The forks are still leaking.

Some minor bodywork problems that weren’t rectified:

• The cracks in the fairing were never repaired.
• Some of the plastics don’t align 100%.
• The left barend wasn’t straightened and painted.
• The triple tree yoke wasn’t resprayed. This one really bothers me; it’s a very minor job to fix. It looks absolutely terrible now, even after the accident there were only 2 scratches (I have photos), but now it’s just missing paint everywhere and has been stripped down to the metal. So it’s a faded shade of black with bits of silver showing through everywhere. All this was done by them, so the fact that they couldn’t even fix up damage that they did themselves really astounds me.
• The front fender is still the wrong one; they did absolutely nothing to replace this.

To add some new problems to the list:

• The front brakes are absolutely shocking; I can pull the lever all the way to the clipon without much effort at all. When I gave it to them my brakes were extremely hard (I had just had them bled properly).
• There are now some new scratches on the fairing and tank, some of which are pretty deep.
• My right fork protector is gone… what the hell is going on here? It took me all of 5 seconds to notice that it was missing, how they missed it when putting my forks back together is completely beyond me. I’m not mechanically inclined and yet it was glaringly obvious to me. When the forks are back on the bike the left fork protector is only about 10cm away, and considering that the forks were my biggest gripe you would think they would make sure everything was there.
• I found paint \*inside\* the tank — this is \*bad\*. Having any foreign substances inside your tank is bad, it eventually finds its way into you fuel system, possibly clogging the fuel filter, damaging the fuel pump, getting burnt up and leaving residue in the carbs, etc. There are so many problems that can occur with this one and they all lead to massively reduced performance. When they sprayed my tank they quite obviously did not cover the cap properly and managed to get some spray inside the tank. When I opened it up yesterday there was a loose flake just hanging off the lip that could very easily have dislodged and landed in the fuel. This really makes me wonder how much is already floating around in the tank. The tank also had a small dent from my accident, I’m now wondering if they broke the seal inside the tank so it’s now going to start rusting.
• There’s water vapour inside the indicators… Ok the indicators are cheap aftermarket ones so they aren’t airtight, but this probably means that my bike was standing in the rain at some points in time.

Problems that I haven’t been able to check/confirm yet:

• My front wheel was buckled, they apparently fixed that but there’s no way for me to check without riding the bike.
• Brake discs. For all I know they dropped them and warped them again when they removed them to fix my wheel.
• I found what I’m pretty sure is brake fluid underneath my front fender where the right calliper connects to the left. If the metal tube that connects the two callipers is leaking brake fluid, this could become a very dangerous problem if it is indeed brake fluid. This tube is supposed to go over my fender but with the incorrect fender it goes underneath so I’m not particularly impressed, it also has slight kinks in places.

Lastly stuff that got fixed:

• The petcock is now aligned properly, so hopefully this will make removing my tail fairing easier.
• The burst stickers have been repaired.
• The paintwork was fixed in some places.
• The forks got rebuilt… apparently. See above.
• The front wheel got straightened. See above.
• The tabs that hold my tail piece on properly have been fixed. But I’d be willing to bet that they used fibreglass to fix them so they will probably snap off the first time i remove the tail.

So all in all, this whole process has been extremely time consuming and all I have to show for it are escalating costs.

Edit: To be fair I added a list (a rather short one) of stuff that has been fixed.

I just set up my gallery (finally) using Gallery2 \*cough\*. Ye I know, it’s not the best piece of software, and it takes up a lot of space (far more than it needs to), but it does what I want it to do.

I also set it up to integrate into wordpress so I can embed thumbnails instead of linking to stuff the whole time. So here’s a test:

 

My gallery can be found at: http://gallery.grave.za.org

Ok, for those of you not living in Cape Town right now, let me tell you: IT IS HOT. 40C max is pretty unnatural for Cape Town I’d say, it’s not often we get these sort of temperatures. The end of February / beginning of March usually has a couple scorchers, but I can’t remember the last time we had a max temperature this high.

Fortunately my office is south facing so it never gets any direct sunlight. This of course keeps the temperatures down in summer, which is quite a blessing on days like today, but it’s an absolute curse in winter. Our office is going to turn into a fridge this winter, with more blackouts ahead the use of heaters is going to be quite limited, so I might have to get accustomed to wearing a jacket indoors (something I’ve never bothered with) :/.

There’s quite an annoyingly hot breeze blowing over me right now, and through the office in general, so it’s starting to get pretty hot in here. Only 3 hours till I can go home and be boiled alive in my room :(. Having 2 PC’s in there running 24/7 doesn’t do much for my rooms ambient temperature; though it’s quite nice in winter. I guess it’s lucky that I’ll be going to a house tonight that has airconditioning in the ceiling. Let’s hope that Eskom doesn’t decide to do anything funny again.

I wonder if the other reactor is actually up and running where it should be. I suppose it is because there doesn’t appear to be any recent news nor is there a “load-shedding” schedule. But who knows these days with our electricity supply being as unpredictable as it is.

Steak.

Electricity was out this morning for 2 and half hours. What is there to do at an office with no electricity? The books I’m supposed to read when the electricity is off can put me to sleep faster than that stuff they give you before a big op. That stuff is pretty cool, they tell you to count backwards from 10; I can only ever remember getting to 10. Well I tried to sleep without the aid of these incredibly boring technical books (C++ stuff yay, and COM design/objects/interfaces/whatever), unfortunately these office chairs aren’t very conducive to a comfortable sleeping environment.

So is everyone else having fun with constant, completely unpredictable (the schedules mean nothing), ill-timed blackouts?

I was in the gym on Tuesday night, 10-15 minutes into my workout when everything went pitch black. Ok so I was at the very back of the gym, I mean, I could not get any further away from the door nor is there another point in the gym that I could be with more intervening equipment between myself and the exit. I contemplated continuing with my routine in the dark, but discarded that idea as a pretty bad one. I could easily do my workout with my eyes closed, the problem here would be moving between exercises. I’d be quite likely to trip over a dumbbell someone left on the ground and break my neck, certainly not the way I’d like to end off my day. Not to mention that finding the correct weight would be a mission (noone ever puts them back where they’re supposed to be).

After waiting for a bit, hoping that some backup lights would come on, I realised I was wasting my time. For those who don’t already know, I’m night blind, and I can see almost nothing at night. I’ll avoid driving at night and find an alternative (in case some of those who know me wonder why I ask for lifts instead of driving myself) if I can. I know the gym layout pretty well, but you get disoriented pretty quickly when you can’t see anything, and people move the equipment around all the time. Needless to say I hurt myself on the way out; smacked my knee on what I think was the weight arm of the seated calf machine. Yes, it was my left knee, the one that got pretty banged up in my accident at the beginning of August and has been really sensitive to pain ever since.

Oh ya I voted. Shame at you if you didn’t. I know there’s plenty of you who don’t believe in voting because you don’t believe in democracy; to me, that just seems like a poor excuse that allows one to continue moaning about the current state of affairs while presenting what is supposedly ideal.

So I get a call from FNB asking me to bring in 3 months bank statements — why they couldn’t ask me when I opened up my cheque account along with a credit card account on Monday, I don’t know. It certainly would have saved me some time and trouble. Anyways; I first email through digital copies of my bank statements, but they asked me to bring through hardcopies because of the power failures. Fantastic.
So not more than 20 minutes later, I’m standing outside the bank staring at a queue that starts at the closed doors and heads around the corner. Fantastic again. Instead of wasting my time standing in a queue I decide to go and pay my Edgars bill, a bill I was unable to pay online because of all the damn power failures, and if I hadn’t done it today I would have received some delightful late payment charges and accrue some annoying black marks against my credit record. Yes ladies and gents… pay your bills… on time… especially if you want financing in the near future (car for me, yay).

Wynberg main road is quite an effort, even for a pedestrian; getting stuck behind the black mamas that waddle around taking nigh on forever to get to where they’re going and always walking in the middle of the pavement, effectively blocking you from walking around without stepping onto an extremely busy road. Then you get the drunk, homeless people who walk in a zigzag-like fashion. So when you try to walk around them on the one side, they stumble across your path, and then to the other. It’s like some sick game they play with people such as myself. Yet again the road is the answer. Unfortunately you have to be wary, not of the cars, but of this person you’re trying to get around, you never know when they will turn their head and launch a disgusting saliva missile in your general direction. Let’s not mention the constant stream of expletives that are emited from these, directed at noone in particular. Ah, Wynberg, hygiene and culture abound. How I love it.
After paying my Edgars account I headed back to the bank with the false hope that the situation would have improved some. I knew it was useless before I even began to consider the idea. So on returning the bank, there was no longer a line heading around the corner. Instead this line had grown and was now inside the bank, and beginning to snake out the door. I gave up and went back to the office; I guess I’ll sort it out another day.

Yeh, queues seem to be the bane of my existence. I hate queues (doesn’t everyone?), and all these power failures certainly aren’t helping. At this rate I won’t get my bank account sorted out in time. I’ve already had to force all my accounts to go through on my 20Twenty account that is going to expire in just over a week, lets hope all the credit card transactions clear by then. The last thing I need are some serious black marks against my credit record.

Unless you’re stuck in a crevice in the middle of nowhere you should know about the crisis that Cape Town and in fact the entire Western Cape is facing in the coming months; a crisis that is quite likely to stretch into years, as there certainly doesn’t appear to be any immediate “quick fix� solution to the problem at hand.

Early this morning Cape Town was plunged into darkness as Koeberg disconnected from the national grid and stopped generating electricity as its sole working reactor switched off for the second time in as many weeks. Go read the news if you don’t already know the details. Now we wait, and in the mean time we can expect our power to go out as “scheduled load-shedding� blackouts occur. The scheduled part is obviously a farce, my electricity has never gone off or come back online according to that schedule, and I’m sure there are many others with the same gripes; and the load-shedding part is just an annoying euphemism. So here I am saving everything every couple of minutes trying to minimise any damage incurred as a result of an unexpected blackout that is sure to happen at some point.

This last week has made me painfully aware of how reliant our society is on electricity and its constant supply. I used to complain about my unstable net connection, now I can’t even use that unstable net connection half the time with our electricity supply being what it is. Everything just comes to a sudden, jarring halt when the electricity is cut off; businesses shut down as their PCs switch off, traffic becomes gridlocked as the robots stop working and just gets worse when people begin to head for home unable to do anything at the office, food gets thrown out half cooked or spoiled as fridges warm up, and in general we get cruelly thrown back into the dark ages.

So if you haven’t already, my advice would be to stock up on wood and gas for the coming winter months, as it seems things are only going to get worse as demand increases. And demand is certainly increasing, as there are reports of gas shortages. A UPS is now like gold if you work in the IT industry, my boss bought 3 the other day and plans on buying a complete battery operated energy source, and possibly a diesel generator to keep this thing charged; but considering that our office is in a residential area I really don’t think that idea will fly. The noise will be sure to attract complaints and I’m pretty sure the sound will grate on my nerves too, like the damn power supply fan of the server sitting behind me… I’m going to smash this thing into millions of tiny bits soon.

In this case I think people are placing too much blame on Eskom and not enough blame where it is due. The government has let them retain their monopoly as seems to be a very unfortunate yet common trend in this country. Faults occur and problems rear their ugly heads, this is unavoidable fact of life and is quite understandable but in this case where there is almost no backup to be had, the result is that the outlook on the whole situation has become somewhat dismal.

The council has known for many years that the electricity demand would reach critical mass and start to exceed supply sometime around now, and with Koeberg offline this is exactly what has occurred and much like our water supply they’ve done nothing to solve the problem. In the case of our water supply they’ve known for a lot longer, the Cape is in drought and has been for over a decade (it was 17 years if I recall correctly) and yet nothing has been done, apart from imposing heavy restrictions and praying for rain. I really don’t mind the restrictions; in fact I abhor the wastage of water as I find it completely unnecessary, unfortunately the fact of the matter is that imposing water restrictions on the domestic market is only going to help slightly, as it’s industries that use a very large portion of our limited water supply. It’s like slapping a band-aid on a gaping wound, the little help that it’s going to provide isn’t going to last very long.

February: a short month to some, but just as long as any other to me. In days, yes it is shorter; by 2 or 3 days depending on how you count, but realistically if you work (I try to at least) it’s hardly any shorter than the others. Lets look at January, the 1st is a public holiday; but that doesn’t matter since most people are on holiday at that time and for a few days after, thus cutting down on the effective working days for the month. So how many people take leave in February? Obviously I don’t care enough to take a poll, but if I were to go with a logical conclusion, I would say it’s not that many and certainly not as many as in December/January and yes… April.

April is getting closer and if you live in South Africa you should know that there are 4 public holidays pretty close together there one of which falls on the 1st of May, but that doesn’t really matter. The 14th and 17th are Good Friday and Family Day respectively which falls around Easter weekend, and then not even a full two weeks later the 27th is Freedom Day. That’s a Thursday for those of you who haven’t checked the calendar yet. So it doesn’t exactly take a genius to figure out what’s going to happen, but if you really need me to spell it out for you: May 1, the following Monday, is Workers day. So how many people are going to take the Friday off and join it up into a nice 5-day weekend? I’m certainly considering it.

So in my opinion at least April is probably the shortest month of the year apart from the standard holiday months of December and January; and February is only deceptively short due to the amount of calendar days. Of course by now you should have figured out that I only attribute workdays to a longer month. My days off (weekends and public holidays) seem to go by very quickly.

I’m not sure where this post came from, as it’s nowhere near what I had originally intended to write about. Maybe I’m looking forward to the public holiday tomorrow just a bit too much.

Whats this? 3 posts in one day?

Well I figured I have to make up for all the times I didn’t blog even when there was something to blog about. Looking at the archives section it seems the number of posts per month have been declining since I started this blog, and then December — nothing. So to turn that around I’ll have to start posting more. Aaaaaaand that’s what this completely inane entry is for.

But just to add a little bit of content to this one, I’ll say that I’m older and stuff.

For those of you who use your cellphone to browse the intarweb and have Java capabilities you might want to take a look at Opera Mini. It’s pretty decent application for only 100KB. Living in South Africa with cellphone charges being what they are, the fact that it uses server-side middleware to render and significantly compress websites and the images could result in fairly decent savings if you use your cellphone to browse a lot. If your phone has a decent sized screen you can shrink the fonts quite a lot; Opera Mini will render and antialias them so you can still actually read the site.

I don’t have much use for browsing from a cellphone (permanent ADSL at work, and “permanent” Uninet at home), but for those who might: you could save some money.

According to Virgin Actives web site I’ve been to gym 62 times since 19 October when I started. I suppose when you go 5 times a week it adds up pretty quickly.

My gym situation has never really featured in this blog, and this trend probably won’t change much. I haven’t really bothered to document my progress apart from my own memory. I’ve put on almost 13kg since I started gyming, and yet I did take a break over my holidays where my weight remained static (more sleep, less time to eat), so thats a pretty rapid weight increase. Up from the 72kg when i started i’m now sitting between 84 and 85. Yet most people are trying to lose this amount of weight :/.

Due to my meal replacement shakes that I’ve been drinking to assist in the weight gain I’ve put on a lot of fat along with the muscle. This doesn’t really bother me as I will start losing it very soon when I do a lot of cardiovascular exercises along with my weight training. The main problem this presents though is the issue of clothes, I’ve quite literally grown out of everything I own and with my body changing as rapidly as it is I’m rather hesitant to buy more. Chances are that I’ll grow out of some of the new clothes that I buy. Considering that I’m aiming for 90kg of lean muscle this is quite a high possibility. Oh well… I guess I knew what I was getting into when I adopted this lifestyle, but it has certainly been a lot more costly than I had originally anticipated.

As a result I haven’t bought my race leathers yet; they’re going to set me back almost R7000 so growing out of them in a few months is *not* an option.

As for gym, I’ve pretty much doubled and in some cases tripled (or more) every weight and exercise that I’ve been doing. Being as thin as I was when I started I didn’t have much muscle mass and not much strength. I’m still not exactly strong (it’s only been 3 and a bit months) but the difference it’s made from my personal perspective is really quite amazing. Genetics unfortunately dictate your body type, so I’m still tall and relatively thin; I have no idea what will happen in a few months time, but I suspect that I’m predominantly an ectomorph.

Right now I’ve taken a week long break from gym to get some much needed rest and prepare for the intense cardio workouts I’m going to escalate to.

So as most people are already aware, I’ve turned the focus of my attention to the 4 wheeled variety of motorvehicles. I’ve been looking at purchasing a car for quite a few months now but that desire was mostly born out of boredom and idle thoughts. Finally now that my bike is almost paid off (will be paid off in the next 2 days) I’m looking far more seriously at getting a car.

A lot of people seem to have the notion that I’m buying a car because of my bike accident. Not so, in fact I almost bought a second bike because of the accident. Unfortunately my finances didn’t permit due to all the extra expenses incurred as a result of said accident. I had always wanted a second bike and still do, mainly for the reason of turning one of them into a track bike.

So to set everything straight, it takes me about 15 minutes to get to work in a car (in traffic); on a bike I’d save maybe 3 minutes if I split lanes. Theres 9 robots in the 6km I travel to work each day and considering it takes me about 5 minutes longer to gear up and get my bike out and going there really is no benefit to riding to work — not to mention that I’d have to change when I got to work. In other words it’s quite a hassle for me to ride my bike to work. I hadn’t anticipated working so close to home when I was job hunting; but in the end I prefer it this way.

With all that said I guess the main reason for buying a car is because I’m tired of driving the piece of junk that I have been for the last 3 and a half years now. So I have my new bike insurance sorted, a quote for car insurance, and potential car financing in the pipeline enabling me to work out what I can afford after all my other expenses. After running through so many potential cars (Polo, Stilo, 206, Megane, RunX, Astra, Civic, to name a few) I finally narrowed it down to either a Ford Fiesta or a Ford Focus. This is mainly because of value for money, though the Fords aren’t the best cars, when you compare the price for what you get against other manufacturers the price difference is quite a lot.

As to which car I do eventually end up with, I’ll have to see what the next few months bring in terms of finances and deals. Just need to save up for a nice deposit now.

Sometimes I wonder if I enjoy security that debt brings; I mean you always know what to spend your money on. The hard part of deciding has already been made. Though security isn’t really the right word, maybe excrutiating pain coupled with endless angsiety is a good substitute?