Category: General Ramblings (Page 17 of 19)

I’m very very much against road pricing, the latest (old) idea to come out of one of the governments think tanks;

Each vehicle has a box that receives position signals from satellites (the ‘downlink’) (GPS or the European Gallileo system) and records vehicle movements in some sort of local memory. At some specified interval the box sends a burst of this data (possibly by cellular telephone or by dedicated new network) (the ‘uplink’) to the official road pricing computers that then generate a monthly bill for vehicle usage. The box must be programmed to identify the individual vehicle.

So, as well as knowing everything else about us the government will also know where we are, exactly. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I don’t buy into a lot of the crap that gets pushed around about the police, the government and everyone else in authority. But I am getting sick to the back teeth of being watched. Everywhere. The only place that still appears to be private is the thoughts in my head when I slap on my helmet and ride away; the only thing is that those thoughts keep getting interrupted by the other irritating little voice of… is my insurance up to date as there’s an ANPR camera ahead, when’s my tax due, am I over the speed limit…. dear me the only time I want to worry about these things is when a reminder pops through my door and I spend the 10 mins it takes to sort it out, not the constant concern that I’m doing something wrong!

Why is the new assumption in this country, you’ve done something wrong and if we watch you long enough we’ll know what it is; rather than, get on with it and when you cross the line we’ll come and get you.

Very good write up about Road Pricing here.

I’ve just finished reading the quite amazing book from Charley Boorman – Race to Dakar – First of all I want to make it clear that I really enjoyed Long Way Round, even though I’d watched ‘the real boys’ doing it several years earlier on no budget, with no support crew and certainly no big sponsors, in Mondo Enduro.

I was lucky enough to meet Charley at the NEC Motorcycle Show earlier this year, and he was obviously very warn out and sick to the back teeth of signing books and DVD – let’s be honest after you’ve taken part in the harded rally in the world, standing on the BMW stand signing things and having your photo taken must come a very poor second – I really felt for him standing there, and I’m sure he’d much prefered to be at home with his family, or out on the bike!

The book was a revelation; a stunning portrail of life over two weeks in 2006 as three men and the support crew fought against the sand, the special sections, the organisers and their own mental capacity to just carry on and make the beach at Dakar. When I finished watching The Long Way Round, (the book wasn’t that good) it left me wanting to do my own mamouth trip and was the inspiration for Journey To Russia, but the Dakar book (which is stunningly well written) has left me wanting to go and buy a BMW Dakar bike and find out what all thie enduro nonsense is all about.

Not one to post about scooters very often but this caught my eye

http://www.mp3.piaggio.com/index_eng.html

Essentially it’s a scooter, but, it has three wheels! No news at the moment about how it rides or what it costs but tomorrow is it’s launch day and one of our members over at londonbikers.com is test riding it – so hopefully some more news then.

I’ve resisted posted this for some time because it was a real accident and my old boss felt dreadful about it – he was exceptionally sorry and made sure everything was paid for and repaired.

But it’s still quite funny.

I run a website for bikers in London called londonbikers.com – it’s a pretty cool site that has an amazing forum and collection of users losley defined by a standard internet forum.

It’s been pretty noisy lately, with the very vocal majority, pointing out what they see as problems in the way the site is run – mainly they feel that the site is over moderated. I’ve seen this many times before and Robin Hammon hits the nail on the head in his post here.

Robin points to resent research that suggests users much prefer a moderated forum to a non moderated forum – what he believes is happening is that the user preferes a hosted forum – and that a host and moderator have very different role within an online community.

So I’m going to try to move londonbikers.com down that road – we’ve already identified several members who would like to be hosts, and we’ve losley defined what they’ll do, we’ve also thinned out the moderator ranks, and hopfully this will lead to a much happier forum.

I’m leaving things quite lose at the moment because I think it’s going to take a month or so for both the mods and the hosts to explore what their role, in combination with the site owners, should be.

Then there’s always the commercial angle, and whilst we will never charge members for access to the site (why would we?) we do have to come up with a way to cover costs – we can’t keep writing blank cheques to run the site, and we need to make enough money to employ someone full time to really make the site fly.

We’re a very young company and we’re facing the problems many sites have faced in the past, so I’m trying to learn from other people mistakes and base our way forward on research and tested ideas rather than gut feeling… but why does it feel like I’m pushing a stone up hill.

How do you deal with members who, no matter how open you become, no matter how great the site is, will still only post negative comments and scare away those members who just want a cool club to be a member of – trolls if you like… answers on a post card please!

I was going to write something nice about Ian’s new bike – a Honda Silverwing

I was going to point out that it doesn’t look half bad, that it is rather comfortable, that it does sound quite good, I was even going to go as far as saying I wouldn’t be too embaressed to ride around on one.

Then he posted this and now the gloves have come off.

I can’t stress enough how much I’m looking forward to getting to my new house, and more importantly my new garage.

The one on the far left is mine – my new flat is above it – and there’s another garage out to the right you can’t see – we own the whole building but are renting out the other three garages, knowing how important they are and that the three houses next to us don’t have one.

The important thing about my new garage is the fact that it has electricity, gas, hot and cold water and a large cupboard that runs under the stairs to the flat. It will also house our washing machine and the dryer. The most impressive thing about this list is the gas… I can put in a radiator!

My wife wants me to take it one step further and instal a couch, TV, bed… because then I can stay there!

The point I’m trying to make is that when I have stuff to do on the bike (my 16k service for example) it’s very hard to motivate myself to going outside in the cold, scrambling around in the dark to find my tools, and not being able to boil the kettle because I’m 500 yards from the house!

Really don’t ever let me buy a sportsbike

From Lee Harkers NEC 2006 Photoset on Flickr 

Got back from the 2006 Motorcycle and Scooter Show at the NEC quite late on Friday night and have just started going through my swag bags. I’m quite pleased to say I managed to bag 8 side-stand pucks, 24 sweets, 12 pens, 4 key rings and a free poster of a topless girl on a bike…!

My Flickr set for the show is HERE

I did buy quite a few things too… some Scottoiler protection spray and de-greaser, a BSA key ring for my Grandfather, 2 calandars for the garage, I even manged to get Charlie Boorman to sign a copy of his latest book.

This pic is from Lee Harkers B&W set from the show. Lee is a really good photographer and took some stunning shots of the day.

The show was fantastic this year, much better than last year – even though many of the stands where the same as last year, there seemed to be much more to see. I admit we did pay extra to go on the preview day so it was fairly quiet, we got to sit on a lot more bikes than normal.

Highlights included the Two Wheels Only girls, Becky in particular!

We also spent a lot of time on the Triumph stand – I must admit I’m starting to pay serious thought to the new Triumph Tiger rather than the CBF1000 – more on that soon, must book a test ride.

Lee had a wonderful time…

I also spotted something the new Garmin GPS unit aimed at bikers… I have to say I’m really disapointed with it – I’ll post more about this when I sit down and go through all the literature properly.

So all in all a very good show – well worth going to see – I could have done with another day to really get around it properly – but it was very very entertaining.