Over the last couple of months I’ve been looking at cellphones with particular attention being paid to the smartphone variety due to the possible direction my job might take. Smartphones are few and far between, most of them are either lacking features or they are just plain ugly, and then the ones that are decent are actually just PDA’s with cellphone capabilities.

So when reading my feeds this morning I was quite surprised to come across this on my Gizmodo feed. The Mio A701 GPS Smartphone boasts some pretty impressive features while looking pretty slick at the same time if you ask me; not something you’d be ashamed to be seen with. It’s a smartphone with PDA capabilities so it’s not going to be small having a 2.7″ screen, but nor will it be huge.

The only thing it’s really lacking is WiFi, although this is available via an SDIO WiFi expansion card if you don’t mind something sticking out of it.

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I left work on Friday with the intention of going to bed early enough so that I could get up early Saturday morning so I could go shopping for mirrors. These intentions, though good as they were, were rather unrealistic for me. I seem to have this incredible ability of always finding something to do right before I want to go to bed. Friday it was anime and then a game. The anime (Fantastic Children) was one that I was currently watching and wanted to finish, it turned out to be pretty dramatic but good nonetheless. It was rapidly approaching 2am when I was tipped off about a game that I had just obtained, it seems that you get to slice and dice people with 2 shiny blades, blow up people with some fancy blood guns, toss the bad guys around with a harpoon all the while controlling a vampire chick — blood, maimage, vampires, dismemberment… not a bad combo at all. So after installing BloodRayne 2 I decided to take a look for myself; a few hours later with it getting lighter outside I decided to pack it in and goto bed with some vague idea that I would only sleep for 4 hours, giving myself plenty of time when I woke up. And there go my intentions of shopping for mirrors; I woke up at around 2 in the afternoon and shops close early on weekends.

Ever since I started working my weekends seem to have gotten shorter, I guess this is partly due to my long Friday’s. I don’t often get home before 6 during the week and Friday’s aren’t much better, maybe 5:30; even though I live 10 minutes from work. So the week seems so long and when the weekends arrive they seem so short. I have 15 days of leave this year, 15 long weekends in a row seems like a good idea right now.

So yesterday I went to the repair shop to collect one of the mirrors off my bike (to make sure the replacements have the right fixture) when I was surprised by this standing out front. Another pic from the other side.

Well things are looking up, there wasn’t any damage to the front wheel or the frame thankfully and the forks have been straightened. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the replacement parts (radiator, alternator cover, fork seals, etc.). The fairing will be ready on Tuesday so as soon as the parts are here, the fairing gets sprayed and the bike gets put back together. So hopefully it should be up and running in a couple of weeks provided there aren’t any mechanical problems.

Other than that, my contacts are getting a little bit easier to put in. When I got them on Tuesday, I took the right one out and tried to put it back in… I must have wasted somewhere in the region of two hours trying — unsuccsefully. I eventually gave up, pulled the left one out and put my glasses back on. Yesterday morning, I managed to put the left one in twice within 10 minutes, the right on the other hand, took me almost an hour (I just can’t seem to keep/hold my eyelids open). This morning was a lot better, taking be about 10 minutes per eye, hopefully this will get quicker and easier — my eyes get quite sore from all the poking and prodding.

I just got my contacts and my right eye is causing me quite a bit of grief. The left eye has always been pretty bad so the fact that I can’t really focus my left eye is normal, and that hasn’t changed now that I’m wearing contacts, in fact the left eye has improved slightly. My right eye on the other hand is the dominant one, and not being able to focus properly with that one is really really annoying, it’s like i’m wearing the wrong lens or something (I sure hope I’m not). The prescription did change a bit, so I’m hoping that it’s just a phase where my eye has to adjust to the new correction.

Well contacts are gonna be quite a mission to put in and remove for the first couple of days, my eyes are extremely sensitive and my blink reflex is very strong, so that’s not helping a bit. Otherwise not wearing glasses feels pretty odd, I keep wanting to adjust them out of habit and realise that I’m not actually wearing them.

I suddenly feel very tired, mmm… 3 hours of work left, I wonder what my boss would say if he checked the timestamps of my blog entries.

Two and a half weeks later, I’m almost back to normal in terms of mobility. The only wound that was really any bother to me was the knee, not being able to walk properly for almost 2 weeks. My calf muscle was constantly rock solid stiff from all the strain it was taking to compensate for a knee joint that couldn’t bend without causing quite a lot of pain. Now I only have a slight limp and I can pretty much bend my leg to 90degrees without any pain, beyond that it’s still extremely stiff and causes some pain in the joint, at least the skin on my kneecap is healing nicely and not dragging on my pants anymore. Mostly it was the stitches and the dressings that were catching on my pants. Half my stitches were taken out last Tuesday, which for some odd reason made that evening and the whole of Wednesday an absolute nightmare, the pain was pretty excrutiating and the painkillers (myprodol) were doing nothing to help. I think the pain was mostly due to the fact that the wound had got infected, so I was on anti-biotics for a while there.

Otherwise I’m still taking anti-inflammatories, as my knee and hip are still slightly swolen. My hip is still quite bruised, even though the skin has healed now, the pain is still there when I apply pressure, same with my elbow.

My knee and its healing progress.

Personal injury isn’t the only damage that has been done, my wallet is going to be bleeding quite a lot in the coming weeks as the bills stack up.

I’m sure there are going to be more costs that I’ve overlooked. Fortunately my medical aid was kind enough to pick up R660.60 of the ambulance fees, and my insurance will pick up another R2000 of medical fees, as well as the towing fees. I only have a hospital plan, and I was treated as a casualty patient and not checked in, so the rest of the medical fees aren’t covered, I wish I had known this at the time, I would have got myself checked in and stayed over night. Other than that, the rest comes out of my own pocket. My helmet has to be replaced, and I’ve decided to get an upgrade at the same time so that will probably end up costing me an additional R2k-R3k as I had a pretty cheap helmet to start.

As for the person I hit… well she didn’t have insurance, so she will be trying to claim off my insurance as third party, and if I’m found at fault (I had to cross a solid barrier line to pass her), thats gonna suck, I’ll probably end up paying her excess, as well as have an increased insurance premium. If she’s found at fault, chances are she will get nothing, but then there’s always the potential lawsuit.

And those are the immediate costs, I still have all my other bills to pay, as well as upgrade my gear which I was going to do with the money that I now have to spend on all the bills above… at least I get paid this week :).

Well for those who haven’t noticed yet Google has entered the realm of Instant Messaging — yes… another one to add to the growing pile of IM clients: MSN, ICQ, AIM, YahooIM, QQ, and the millions of Jabber clients to name the most popular. Everyone knew this was coming, it’s just another step in their nefarious plan entitled “Quest for Global Domination” or some such.

I won’t say this is a bad thing, I’m actually hoping it will replace the likes of MSN (one of the worst IM’s imo) in terms of popularity. Google Talk is based on the Jabber protocl, one of the two IM’s I don’t mind using; I quite like being able to leave offline messages if I have to, and not being told that it the message *probably* won’t reach the the recipient, not to mention being frustrated with messages to the effect of “this message cannot be sent” when you start typing faster than 3wpm.

Anyhow, without further adieu: Google Talk

And a nice little easter egg: Wumpus

So far I’ve been unsuccessful in my attempts to get Trillian’s Jabber plugin to connect.

The bike, after hitting a car, sliding on the ground on the left side and then getting wedged underneath a 4×4 took quite a bit of damage (as can be seen in the pictures below). To be more precise, the original repair quote was for R39k, after the insurance assessor came out and negotiated with the repair shop, the revised repair quote is now for R29k. This includes a reduction in labour charges, some cheaper aftermarket parts (mirrors & indicators) and a fibreglass fairing rather than original OEM plastics.

The damage to the bike includes: bent forks, broken radiator, broken left mirror, 3 of 4 indicators broken, rashed alternator cover, every bit of plastic on the bike either is broken, badly rashed or has a chunk taken out of it, front brake lever is gone, left clipon got scraped (I hope it’s not bent), tank has a dent, front fairing stay is mangled, front wheel may be damaged, bent triple tree, damaged swingarm, bent shift lever, and possible damage to the frame. So ye, a fair amount of repairs to be done along with a completely new sprayjob.

My bike (97 Honda CBR 600 F3) on the day I got it.

Below are pictures taken after the crash, bearing in mind that the bike landed on the left. The bike was fairly close to the wall and I was too sore at the time to move the bike to get any decent pictures of the left side. I have no idea how my headlight and windshield survived, the windshield is usually one of the first things to go.

As for my gear, it really doesn’t look that bad. I was wearing all the gear that I have: a leather jacket, leather gloves, boots and helmet, as well as jeans. I would never consider riding with anything less. My helmet has a bunch of scraping on the shell, doens’t look like it took any major impact, I’m not taking a chance it could be compromised on the inside so it’s being replaced with an upgrade. My gloves didn’t take any damage, slight scraping on the knuckles where my left hand hit the ground; these will be upgraded too with race grade gloves so I can have some nice carbon fibre knuckles and kevlar protection. The jacket took quite a bit of rash on the back and shoulders and left arm, I’m pretty glad I was wearing it otherwise I would probably still be nursing some serious wounds on my back and arms. The jacket will need to be repaired, some of the stitches got ripped off, also I’m going to invest in a full racing leather 2-piece suit in short order. My boots came out with some minor scrapes that will quickly be lost amongst the other scratches that I will pick up on my first track day. Lastly I was rather surprised at the state my jeans were in, you would hardly notice that they’ve even been through a crash, sliding on the ground, theres a bit of scuffing and scrapes but no holes or anything, rather surprising considering the damage done to me.

Which brings me on to the last section of this post, personal injury. I came out relatively unscathed and extremely lucky. Had I slid with the bike, I probably would have broken my leg in a couple of places as it got wedged underneath the 4×4. Had there been oncoming traffic… well who knows what may have happened. Instead I came out with two bruised and swolen fingers on my left hand which must have hit the ground really hard, I initially thought they were broken because they sure looked that way considering how much swelling there was, those fears were quickly abated when I realised I could move them with relative ease and little pain. My left hip got some pretty mean rash from the seam of my jeans as well as bruising from the impact. My left elbow is still quite sore from the bruising I received. To the worst of the wounds, I split my knee open, the road must have gripped my jeans which in turn gripped my skin and then pulled it right off my kneecap.

Well thats it for the damage, all thats left now is to detail the recovery :).

August 06, it was a Saturday, not exactly the greatest weather, the wind was quite strong which was actually the deciding factor in my choice to go riding or not because I wanted to take the opportunity to teach myself to ride in strong crosswinds while still cornering at my usual speeds. Anyone familiar with riding a motorcycle would know that this is not easy; a sharp gust of wind and you can easily find yourself suddenly travelling in another lane possibly even an oncoming lane or getting dangerously close to the pavement, add to this sharp highspeed corners and one can easily see where the danger and difficulty comes in.

So there I was, heading up Kloof Nek on my way out to Camps Bay, when a red car began pulling out from a parking bay on the left side of the road pretty close in front of me. At first the car appeared to stop half way out of the bay as if the driver had seen me, sadly I had no such luck, the car was just pulling out very slowly. So I was presented with a very slow moving obstacle in my lane; at this point that the adrenaline kicked in and realisation dawned on me, I was going to rearend this car if I didn’t act immediately. My options were fairly simple: do nothing and hit the car (target fixation & panic), brake hard and slow down enough, or go around either left or right. I weighed up the options, the first was highly unappealing, the second worried me quite a lot as I had recently noticed something odd about my front suspension/braking (another reason I was out riding, to diagnose the issue) , so I selected the third option of going around the car. Left or right, which will it be? Passing a car on the left is fraught with danger, there is less space to pass, and cars turning out of sidestreets often pull into the road a bit. There was no oncoming traffic, so the obvious choice was to pass on the right. So I did, or at least I tried, pulling alongside the car I suddenly realised the car was turning right cutting off my line of escape. It’s a rather sickening feeling when you know that you have no more options, no more time to react, and that you’re going to collide.

Everything is a bit hazy here, after hitting the cars wheel arch all I remember is crunching, cracking, grinding, sliding and then lying on the road staring up at the sky with people holding me down asking if I was conscious. Thinking back over the incident the car must have knocked the bike out from underneath me, because I continued to go straight, and the bike went to my right sliding along the ground until it got wedged underneath the front of a parked 4×4 on the right side of the road. I ended up roughly 15m from the original point of impact in the oncoming lane, behind this same 4×4.

There we have it, a full account of the accident — as I remember it at least. Distances and durations and speeds I’m not sure of, coming back later to measure, the stretch of road in which it all happened is about 60m, and travelling at 60kph (~16m/s) doesn’t leave much time. In hindsight if I had immediately started braking I probably would have made it, unfortunately I don’t have the natural instinctive reflexes that more experienced riders have developed; I’m still fairly new to riding (roughly 6 months and 8500km).

I guess my lazy streak is shining through as bright as ever. I set this blog up about two weeks ago and have only got around to adding any real content now. Although, in my own defense, during that time I did manage to find a semi-decent theme which I’ve altered to suit my needs in addition to slapping together a lightweight header.

For those who may be reading this who don’t already know me (eh?), I’m a 21 year old Software Developer/Java Programmer/Peon currently involved in application development for Cellphones and PDA’s with smartphone capabilities. It sounds more interesting than it is in reality, but such are the things we put up with in order to see through the month to receive that shiny paycheque. It should get more interesting in the coming months as live applications start to shape themselves into something tangible; also I might get a free PDA to test all of this stuff :) Who knows though? One thing I do know is that I’ll be teaching myself C++ in order to assist one of my collegue’s with his project; that at least should be interesting seeing as the project is going to be one of technical nature.

Work aside — I have lived in Cape Town for all 21 years of my current existance and that doesn’t look like it will be changing any time soon seeing as I’m tied down by contractual obligations pretty well. I’m a fairly ardent biker, or was until two weeks ago when my bike got wedged underneath a 4×4 causing some major damage to the front of it, either way, as soon as it’s fixed I’ll be back on it tearing through the twisties; which is why I’ve added the nice little weather report to the page, more for myself than anyone else considering I constantly check weather reports from multiple sources to ensure that my takkies aren’t going to be sliding.

So that’s it for now, next I think I’ll have to summarise the altercation I had with a cars wheel arch which caused my bike to become wedged underneath said 4×4.