So all my toys are arriving, which resulted in this blog entry… because, you know, showing off your toys is the right thing to do. So I got my cellphone at long last, I had been waiting for this thing for quite a few months now, I think I first saw it back around April; it’s a Samsung D600. Quite a nice phone really, it’s got all the features you’d want from a cellphone plus more (mp3 player, 2mp camera, video player, picsel viewer, etc.), though I would have liked a smartphone I wasn’t prepared to shell out double the price. As it is I got it on a R99/month contract and got to keep my original cell number, so I consider it a fairly good deal since it will work out at about R3.3k over the 2 years once you add all the mandatory costs.

Aside from that, my frame sliders arrived today; these things really don’t look like they can protect my bike from a drop, they weigh practically nothing and are just plastic, but they’ve been tried and tested by many racers so I guess I’ll just have to trust that they are quality. Hopefully I won’t ever have to test them, but I’ll definately feel a lot better with them on. Which means that I now have to get these things fitted, so off to paarden island I will be going to give these things to the people that are fixing my bike, hopefully they care enough to drill flush, smooth holes for these things.

My bike is not fixed yet. Yep, it’s taking forever, but that doesn’t really matter *because* that brake disc I mentioned a few weeks back, well they’re still waiting for it :( it has to come from Japan. I could ride the bike without the disc, but yah, riding with one disc and half the stopping power doesn’t do much to instill confidence. So I will probably end up waiting till the disc arrives, and my bike should be fixed long before that happens. The spraypainting should be done by tomorrow, the stickers will apparently also be done by tomorrow, so then all thats left is to fit the fairing, drill holes for the sliders, and put everything back together (mirrors, indicated, etc.).

Hmmm… weekend was pretty much ordinary and boring. Went to a house party on Saturday, watched other people get drunk, saw Ross for the first time in quite a while, went home, went to bed at about 5. Lucia gave me a chocolate for anime, I ate that. Haven’t had my bike for 2 months, this is kinda sucking, should be back soon.

I woke up this morning feeling like a truck had ridden over me, this is not unusual, but it was particularly bad today and I really have no idea why this has been happening. It’s not like I don’t sleep, in fact I get about 7 hours sleep a night, thats a whole lot more than the 4-6hrs I always used to have during school and college, I’d often get away with 2-3hrs and not feel this tired. Going to go get my gym contract tonight, hopefully once I start gyming that will make me feel better. Got my gym program too, so I’m going to have to spend some time on google figuring out what half these things are. 5-days a week is going to be pretty tough to start considering I’ve done pretty much zero exercise my whole life; the only sports that appeal to me are motorsports, which incidently is the reason I’m starting this gym thing, I need to strengthen my legs/back so that I can ride better. Hanging off the side of a bike is quite taxing.

The milk was sour this morning, so I didn’t get my usual daily dose of cereal, so I’m pretty hungry right now. Back to work it is!

Back in March I signed up for a 20twenty bank account and have been quite happy with it. Considering I’m online 24/7 using a bank which is marketed as an internet/online bank was quite appealing at the time (though all banks have inet banking these days) since it would be fairly convenient to do all my banking: eft’s mostly. But at the time the main reason was to get the actual plastic, as a 20twenty card, is by default, a mastercard even if you don’t have a line of credit. So this would enable me to buy/pay for stuff online with ease — which is pretty much how I’ve been using it since.

One thing I’ve noticed with online banking and credit card facility, is that I’m far more willing to part with my \*cough\* hard earned \*cough\* cash since it just doesn’t feel real. Managing my finances online feels almost like a game to me, meanwhile I know that in reality the money is being drained out of my bank when I buy stuff online.

I have a Paypal account as well as an Ebay account, among other things, and it takes quite a bit of restraint to not go out and buy a whole lot of junk — for my bike of course. Needless to say, I just spent another R340 using this shiny piece of plastic which I now have a line of credit for. For that R340 all I’ll be getting are 2 chunks of thermoplastic (read: frame sliders) and 2 stainless steel bolts delivered to my door. Certainly quite a bit cheaper than the R400 I was quoted for sliders locally, not to mention that I’d still have to hunt down the correct bolts and take my bike to get measurements done etc. etc., so all in all it seems to be a fairly good deal.

I’ll probably only get them the week after next with some luck, at which point I’ll have to figure out how to mount them. I’m expecting to receive the sliders at much the same point in time as I get my bike back, but I kinda want to fit these myself, unfortunately I don’t have the tools to a) take my fairing off and b) to cut a hole in my plastics. To cut the hole I’ll need a hole saw about 5cm in diameter, hopefully I can pick up a drill attachment at the local hardware store, and then just finish off with a file. Don’t feel like buying a rotary tool or a dremel to do the job, and I don’t particularly trust other people to cut a hole flush. So the remaining problem is trying to figure out how to remove my fairing…

Well I went to get my jacket yesterday; cost me R50 to get the stitching that had burst to be redone, so that’s all good. Which means I now have all my gear back, so I’m ready to ride and try out my shiny new helmet. But… I won’t be getting my bike back for quite a while yet, which is rather depressing at this stage. 1 more week and it will be 2 months since I had my accident, so yes, getting back on my bike will be quite exciting and the waiting is really starting to work on my nerves now.

It’s my fairing bracket that’s holding everything back now, they can’t seem to source a replacement locally and it will take ~3 months to import one from Japan, so they decided to fix the one I had. It got pretty mangled in the accident, so fixing it just right is taking them a long time. From what I’ve been told it sounds like everytime they think they’ve got it right, they put the fairing back on and it’s not sitting right. This thing holds my front upper plastics, my light fixtures, my gauges, everthing at the front of the bike basically — it must all be in place otherwise it’s going to end up looking pretty dodgy. So now my bike has been given top priority, so as soon as they’ve fixed that bracket, they’ll spray it. With a lot of luck (if they don’t take too long spraying) I’ll get it back at the end of next week, otherwise the following week.

And… I booked my license. These people all lied to me, I was quite explicit when enquiring about motorcycle driver’s licenses, but nooooooo, apparently they don’t take bookings until next year etc etc etc. I hate speaking to cluetards that don’t know what’s happening in their own departments. So after everything I managed to get a booking for the end of November, they tried to give me one for the end of March (yes… thats the next available date for a car drivers license).
For any who actually read this and might be interested, it seems the traffic departments that do motorcycle driver’s licenses are: Cape Town Central, Bellville and Parow, out of the departments in Cape Town. It’s only the licenses for cars that are fully booked till the end of the year and into March, so whoever the various mullets at their respective traffic departments were that told me that I couldn’t get a license for a bike this year were smoking some serious crack. Now I just mustn’t fail :/

Like the title suggests, I finally got a helmet. I’m not ecstatic about the fit, it definately could be a bit tighter, but it’s still the best fit of the helmets I tried on. The problem with this country is there’s so little choice, so it was just a matter of finding what fit me best and buying it. When it comes to motorcycle helmets 3 of the top brands are: Arai, Shoei and Suomy. From the helmets I’ve been looking at; the Shoei didn’t fit, ZA doesn’t import Suomy and then there’s the Arai which I just bought; an XS refitted with the thickest lining they had (I hope).

Either way, it’s a very nice, comfortable, light-weight helmet, and I sure paid enough for it. At least I got a nice cash discount and a free anti-fog visor with it. Hopefully it won’t be as loud as my previous helmet, but I’ll only be able to test when I get my bike (I’m really hoping for this week).

Next on the shopping list is new reenforced gloves. I should be picking up a pair of Wolf gloves when I fetch my bike, if they fit me right, though that won’t be half the problem helmets are. I’m a fairly standard size medium when it comes to gloves it’s just a matter of finding ones that are nice and comfortable. Of the ones I’ve tried on there are quite a few that are really hard, the most comfortable ones I’ve tried on come with a R1900 pricetag… of course.

Come 5 o’clock I get a phone call telling me that my helmet is in. So I wrap up for the day, stuffing the big fat wad of cash that I’ve been carrying around for the last few days into my pocket, I say cheers to the rest of the people at the office and walk out the door. So I get to the stealership and try on the helmet and as luck would have it, it doesn’t fit… I can’t say I’m surprised, I was pretty much expecting this, the helmet is so close to fitting me 100% it’s just ridiculous. For those who don’t know how to fit a helmet: it must be extremely tight, squeezing your cheeks with a lot of pressure around your head so as not to cause excessive strain on your neck, nor must it have any movement — it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’re going to get a headache for the first few times you use it as the pads and lining break in and loosen up. Well the extra-small fits me pretty snugly, unfortunately I can move it some, the problem with that once the helmet takes the shape of my face and loosens up, this movement is going to cause major problems like the helmet lifting up at speed (very very annoying).

So now they’re sending the helmet back, changing the inner shell and refitting the lining with the thickest they have — I think/hope. If everything is in stock, I may be able to get the helmet tomorrow.

I also got a number of some guy who can fabricate frame sliders for me, so I guess I can give him a call in the morning, hopefully it won’t cost me too much.

Otherwise my mirrors and indicators are in stock, so I just have to give the repair place a call, and get them to pick them up, so hopefully all that’s left is the sprayjob.

So my menu has decided to go AWOL too and dissapear down the page (in IE based stuff), just like what happened to Ross’. How annoying, unfortunately I don’t know my arse from my mouth when it comes to CSS, so I’ll just have to wait for Ross to wake up/come online/finish whatever he’s doing/… so that he, being the 1337 CSS guru that he is, can tell me what to change so I can fix this thing.

I always had a feeling that this theme was badly coded and constructed when I was fiddling around with it to get it how I liked — but then again I’m just a PHP novice and PHP has stuff like variable variable’s (yes I can see how that might be useful…).

I’m still waiting for my phonecall to tell me that I can come try on my helmet and spend my “hard-earned” cash; I have this wad of cash sitting here next to me. Not that it really matters, can’t do much with a helmet and no bike. And, speaking about bikes, I’ve told them to go ahead with the sprayjob as I will be getting a discount on the sprayjob, although not from the decals. The guys get audited quite strictly so they can’t just go and change the quote, oh well. They will submit the decals as a discount, so I should probably save a bit on my excess (*yay*, probably only about R50 but hey, every cent counts these days). I hope they get the design correct, with nice flowing, smooth and clean lines, with sharp edges and points; I think I will have to go through and speak to the guy that’s spraying it because it’s going to take a little bit of creativity on his part.

update:
So anyways; Ross just reduced the size of the sidebar by 5pixels, which is a hackage way of fixing it \*cough***. So because there seems to be something fundamentally wrong with that approach I started calculating the widths of all the components, and everything matches up exactly, so I reduced my sidebar width by 1 pixel and it works again. 1 pixel made all the difference, I have no idea where the extra pixel is coming from, so I’m guessing it’s just IE’s affinity for queerness and random behavior.

Well after much procrastination I finally put together a design which, in my opinion, looks fairly decent (at least I’m hoping it will translate). As it turns out, I procrastinated just the right amount of time as they only got the plastics yesterday.
Spray Design
The design is only red to make it easier to see when printed out; the bike will be sprayed black with the design in a silver colour. I’m considering getting the windshield sprayed black as well, and then printing out a complex design to stick on there, or maybe I will just do that myself at a later date.

My plastics right now are very much white, and very much in 1 piece; they appear to be well made, or at least they look good. Hopefully pieces won’t start breaking off when I go above the speed limit. All the separate pieces have been joined, so where my fairing used to be 9 pieces at the front, it is now 2, a full upper, and a full lower, I’m guessing the tail section is still the same since it didn’t get damaged too much. I have no idea how I’m going to remove these if I ever decide I need to — and I will need to remove them when I fit my frame sliders… egh, I really don’t want to have to buy more stands.

I think they’re still waiting for parts too, which is a bit unfortunate; I’ll find that out later.

And… my lovely helmet didn’t fit properly, the small had too much movement, and the extra small was tight enough (maybe a bit too tight), but my nose touched the chin bar… nothnx. So now I’ve ordered an even *more* expensive helmet, this time an Arai Astro/R Tattoo Red. If this one fits me properly I’ll be forking out quite a hefty sum of money, and I still have to purchase a second visor (not cheap either). Ah well, the more protection the better I guess, as I’ll probably start going to the track soon.

Next of course is the 2 pc racing suit, going to have to save for another few months before I can afford that. Seeing as I’m spending the money I had saved for the suit on all my bills *yay*.

update:
Helmet arrives on Friday, dark visors in stock yay. It’s the correct helmet, so if it fits I’ll have a nice new helmet.
Sprayjob is gonna cost a lot extra, trying to see if they can offset the cost of the sprayjob against the reduction in price seeing as I don’t need the decals; hopefully they’ll do this and I can just pick up the difference. Otherwise the sprayjob is gonna take another week and a half, so ya, not getting my bike this week, and seriously doubtful that I will get it next week. At least I save on petrol this way… I definately need to cut costs wherever I can right now, and petrol is about the only expense that I can save on right now because I already spend hardly any money (meds, etc.).

Things are looking good for my bike, the plastics are all ready to be sprayed now, so it’s just a matter of getting a design to them now and off we go. My mirrors should be arriving at the end of the week, and then I can just pick up the indicators at the same time. The rest of the parts should be here by next week. So after spraying everything and putting it back together I’ll be back out there just in time for the good riding weather.

Apart from that I still have to replace my helmet, I’ve decided to get a decent helmet this time around, so a much more expensive helmet was in order. I’ve decided to get a Shoei XR-1000 along with a second visor (chromed/smoked/iridium I haven’t decided yet), so that’s going to set me back quite a bit of money: ~R4700 before discount & insurance payout. But I guess it’s worth it in the end, the helmet is really comfortable and weighs nothing compared to my old helmet; either way, it’s a very good helmet and well worth the extra money I think. It’s just a matter of deciding which one I want to get seeing as there are quite a lot to choose from, preferably something to match my bike after it’s custom sprayjob — not much point in paying that much money and not having it all match nicely. All in all this accident has been a really costly experience, and I was only intending to upgrade my helmet sometime next year.

Now to the bad news and the rant part of this blog… I got a rather nice letter in my post last night. It went on about how I was speeding, completely unable to control my bike, and a bunch of other things which I can’t remember right now… I was pretty astounded with all the false accusations — perhaps someone forgot that they said “I didn’t even see him”, so how would they know all of these things? Maybe there were witnesses? How accurately can you judge speed? 60kph is going to look pretty fast when you’re standing on the pavement, and if there were witnesses they would be able to tell that I was very much in control of my bike. So the letter basically boiled down to this: “you have 10 days to pay up, or we sue you”, which is all fine and good, except the letter was written on 30 August and I only received it last night, so that gives me a whole 2 days to respond… *great* so these people will be hearing from my lawyer.

They want to claim from my third party insurance now as I pay for fully comprehensive insurance, and she (the driver of the car) has none. In some countries you get the royal shafting (in more ways than one) if you have an accident and no insurance since it’s illegal; but not here. It’s up to the lawyers now to decide who was at fault and let them sort it out between themselves, if she’s found at fault this might backfire and she may have to cough up the excess for my claim, if I’m found at fault, I guess I’ll be paying the excess for her claim on *my* insurance, *and* my premium will go up. In my opinion, if you’re on the road you should have insurance.

Onto other things, my other domain finally went live, more than a month later so grave.za.net now works as well — mostly. I really don’t feel like going to the effort of getting it registered as separate from the .org one so that I can use my subdomains. I will eventually, but for now, the subdomains don’t work for .net and everything else just forwards to .org.

Link.

Pretty insightful entry regarding Google Talk and the mess that is instant messaging; it only serves to confirm what I’ve been thinking all along.

Update:
Link 2.

More GTalk related blogging.