I run three monitors in my home office. For awhile I used to do this via two video cards, but I had a lot of stability problems in Windows Vista and the release candidate for Windows 7. I disconnected the tertiary monitor, yanked the PCI video card, and started researching solutions. I thought I would have to upgrade to a dual PCI-X slot motherboard and run two video cards in an SLI/Crossfire configuration. That meant buying a new motherboard and a second GeForce 7600, and that would have been a pain in the ass for the former and a little difficult for the latter. The GeForce 7xxx series is now two or three generations old, and I didn’t want to gamble on a used card.

ATI’s new 57xx series features “Eyefinity,” which basically allows one card to aggregate several physical monitors into one meta-monitor. This is, conceptually, a little different from a multi-monitor display that breaks the desktop into several sections. Think of Eyefinity as making one big, oddly-shaped monitor out of whatever monitors you have on hand.

The trick to Eyefinity, however, is that you need at least one of those monitors to have a DisplayPort interface. I’d never even heard of this interface until I started researching the 57xx series. Apparently it’s on laptops and Apple has their own “mini” version of it. The problem was that my three existing Dell 22″ monitors had regular VGA and DVI.

I purchased a 22″ monitor from Dell with a DisplayPort link for about $240 shipped. I was surprised to see a shipping notification that evening, and the monitor showed up three days later. Problem solved, right?

Er, no.
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“Congratulations,” my Motorcycle Safety Foundation course instructor told me after finishing my class. “You are now qualified to ride slowly around a parking lot. Stay off of the highway.”

After feeling confident enough to putter around my neighborhood and surrounding suface streets, I took to the highway. I live a good 15 – 25 miles from the majority of my friends and my place of employment. The highway is vital for me to get anywhere on two wheels, and before long I was zipping along with the rest of the world.

I often prefer riding on the highway to surface streets. Yes, the stakes are higher: crashing at 65+MPH is going to result in a more spectacular get-off than, say, 40MPH. However, traffic flows (usually) in the same direction on the highway, and I don’t have to worry about people making left hand turns in front of me like you do a surface street intersection.

Still, you have to deal with lane incursions, rapid deceleration due to accidents or emergency vehicles entering the highway, and worst of all, on-ramps and off-ramps.

Here are a few tips to staying safe when approaching an on-ramp.
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I’ve run Windows XP for a very, very long time. To be honest, it was a great operating system, aside from having to reboot after installing driver or most patches. I passed on Vista for the first two years of its life until a Black Friday newegg.com retail special hooked me at $79 for an OEM copy of Vista Home Premium.

I liked Vista, for the most part. It seemed stable enough, and I had to reboot less. I think coming into the OS two years after retail launch colored my experience in a much more positive light than those who started with Vista on day one. I particularly liked the new implementation of the taskbar. I liked being able to hover over an open item and seeing a thumbnail of whatever was open.

Vista wasn’t all sunshine and roses, though. I had tons of compatibility problems when trying to run three monitors. The operating system seldom remembered window preferences. When I finally yanked my secondary video card out, the window for StreamRipper was forever lost where monitor three used to be. It was like phantom limb syndrome, but for computer desktops. I hated the implementation of User Access Control, and disabled it as soon as I could figure out how.

About the same time I was struggling with my triple monitor display the release candidate beta for Windows 7 went public. I played around with it, but the stability was lacking for a multi-monitor, multi-display card setup. I chalked it up to immature video drivers and went back to Vista. In the meantime, I suffered an unrecoverable operating system corruption, and my recovery disk made in Acronis TruImage failed to restore my system. I reinstalled Vista and waited for Windows 7.
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Personally, I like sugar-fortified, processed, ever-smooth peanut butter like Jif. However, other folks like natural peanut butter, supposedly because it tastes better and is better for you. What’s the fun in that? The downside to natural peanut butter is that it separates over time. You need to stir it up, especially after you open the jar for the first time.

People use butter knives, spoons, spatulas, and all manner of improvised contraptions to do this, but none of these are optimal. Such crude solutions are messy; they get peanut butter all over the jar, the counter, and yourself.

Enter the Witmer Company peanut butter mixer. It is a novel and clean solution to stirring natural peanut butter.
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Rosie, taken on October 17, 2009.

I adopted Rosie four years ago today. My ex-girlfriend and I started looking for a second dog when we realized that Porter (a year old back then) needed even more playtime than we could provide. Just like with Porter (and eventually, Pearl), I put Rosie through a personality test. It was important to me to find a dog that fit my desire for a companion, and also a dog that fit fairly close to Porter’s dominance level. I wanted a pup that was inquisitive, but not too independent. Snuggly, but not too needy. Playful, but not aggressive. Rosie fit the bill down to the last line, and sealed the deal when she leapt fearlessly off of a planter box towards my outstretched arms.

To my surprise, it was much easier to raise a second dog with Porter providing a good example. He was top dog for about Rosie was about six months or so, when she finally outgrew him and realized she could get to things he couldn’t:

I’d like to encourage anyone looking for a companion dog to consult their regional rescue agencies first. We got Rosie from SHARE, and I don’t think they are active any more. However, Homeward Trails and the Washington Animal Rescue League are both great folks to deal with if you live in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US.

Whew, that title is a mouthful.

It’s been almost two years since I last mentioned an airpot on Gibberish in my insulated coffee mug shoot-out. I had a Thermos-branded glass-lined airpot back then, too. It was $15 before tax at Target. In the years that followed the write-up, the plunger started to wear on the old Thermos. I expected to find another easily — but not so fast.

Target has apparently stopped stocking the airpot in stores and instead offers one that is about $60. I searched Amazon.com and a few other coffee sites (including where my conical burr grinder was purchased), and $60 turned out to be about the bottom of the price range for “real” airpots. There were some that looked like my old Thermos airpot for about $35, but I’d be dammed to pay and extra $20 for something that gave up the ghost on me.

Leave it to the guy who’s made a career on the Web and e-commerce to look at Target.com dead last. Sure enough, there’s the 2-quart glass-lined airpot for sale. It’s still $15, and the lid was updated a little bit. I bought three: one for home, one for the office, and one for the attic — just in case I couldn’t find them again.

How does it stand up to the original? Pretty damn well so far.
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Tires are pretty important on an automobile. They help you do everything from speed up and slow down, maintain traction, and helps to keep your car at its optimal fuel efficiency. The nice thing about a car tires is that, generally, there are four of them. Motorcycles are immediately handicapped by only having two tires. To top it off, motorcycle tires are much more narrow than a car’s tire. This results in a smaller contact patch with the road, which affects braking and handling.

Worse yet, if you have a blow out or catastrophic flat on a motorcycle you are pretty much hosed, especially if it’s your front tire.

It is critical to make sure your motorcycle tires are inflated properly, and boy was I surprised to learn how rapidly and frequently my tires lost pressure.
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I don’t think we’ve talked about this here before, but apparently Oklahoma State University is conducting a motorcycle crash statistics analysis (similar to the Hurt study of the 80s). Here is a Los Angeles Times article about the study.

The original desire was to study between 900 and 1200 crashes; however due to budgetary constraints they will only study 300 incidents. As you can imagine, this is calling the validity and scope of the study into question.

The Motorcycle Safety Foundation was going to pony up over $2 million USD for the study, but only if the study included 900 or more crashes.

The report will be done in about a year, but I have a feeling that with the small sample size the results are doomed to criticism no matter what the results. For example, they may be used to repeal motorcycle helmet laws or make them more widespread. However, either side will have ammunition to question the study due to the size.

I wonder if it’s worse than not having a study at all, as we may spend more time bickering about the results than changing our riding and gear habits.

The LA Times article has some interesting additional information, like how motorcycles are greatly over-represented in crash statistics. They hypothesize a few plausible and popular theories, such as more horsepower being put out by modern motorcycles, the aging rider populace, etc. Having spent a few months on an FJR forum populated by riders ages 50+, I can definitely attest that there are a lot of crashes by riders who took a long hiatus, jumped onto a 1300cc sport-tourer, and crashed their shit up in a turn. It’s especially prevalent among riders who used to ride cruisers and made the jump to a very powerful, very different type of motorcycle.

One thing the study may not consider is something I’ve mulled over many times on my commute into work. In Europe, motorcycles and scooters are commuter vehicles as much as, if not more so than, recreational vehicles. In the United States, two-wheeled transport is for fun. Very few of us commute to work consistently on motorcycles, and even fewer just have bikes as their only transport. I consider myself a bit of an extreme rider since I bike into work about nine to ten months out of the year. Unless you live in a warmer state, it isn’t really feasible to ride year-round. Even then, I still have a car for backup and for when I have company.

At any rate, I believe the “commuter” vs “recreational” aspect of riding in America has something to do with crash stats and rider preparedness. When viewed from the lens of “I’m going to idle down main street for bike night,” wearing things like CE-approved armor and high visibility colors may seem like overkill. However, let’s say you live in a rainy town in the United Kingdom and the motorbike is your only form of transportation. Insulated, armored, hi-viz textile jacket and pants are only part of your protective gear repertoire.

I am making over-generalizations, of course, as I am sure there are squids over in the UK and elsewhere. I saw a picture of a family of four on a single scooter in India the other day. I just believe your priorities change when you encircle your life around motorcycling instead of making motorcycling part of your life. I sum up this view by distinguishing a “motorcyclist” — someone who lives and breathes on two wheels — from someone who “rides a motorcycle” on the weekends or when the weather is perfect. I think the vast, vast majority of American riders are people who ride motorcycles. They don’t care about better gear, better skills, and picking a bike that matches their skill and expectations. If you only ride thirty days a year, it seems like a lot of time and money to spend.

The OSU-run study results will be out in “about a year.” I am going to be interested to see what information comes out of it. I hope the study discusses who crashed their bikes as much as how they crashed. I hope to see information on how long they were riding motorcycles prior to the incident, how often they rode their motorcycles, and if they had any formal licensing and training.

Guess we’ll see sometime in the fall of 2010.

I can’t believe it’s been five years since I adopted Porter from Homeward Trails.

He has been a wonderful companion all of this time. As I added another dog (and then another), he gracefully and gradually slid lower and lower the pack’s totem pole. As the most omega of omega dogs, he is super pleasant and accommodating to everyone. Even though it makes me sad from time to time when Pearl gives him the occasional dick-bite, he is the most gentle dog I have ever been around.

Sometimes the topic of “which dog would you save first in a fire” comes up, and I immediately answer “Porter,” every time. He’s my number one hombre, and besides, he couldn’t really save himself. Rosie and Pearl would build a fire engine out of their water dish, some paracord, and a pack of zip ties.

I am so glad I adopted him, and highly encourage anyone who is thinking about a dog to please please please adopt one and not buy a dog from a breeder. There are so many wonderful companions out there. Porter and his littermates were discarded hunting dog puppies, and if no one adopted them they would have been put down.

I buy a lot of shirts from Shirt.Woot, Woot.com’s t-shirt a day Web site. A lot of t-shirts. I thought I would give 6 Dollar Shirts a shot, especially since you can get ten for $50. 6 Dollar Shirts has a lot of cool concepts, and I was glad to see that the site allows you to mix and match sizes to get to the magic ten. It also allows you to mix mens and womens shirts, another bonus.

When the shirts arrived I tossed them into the wash. I put on a bright yellow T with “MOTORCYCLES ARE DANGEROUS” on it, complete with an older-school motorcyclist hauling ass.

Everything seemed good, until I stretched. I felt a slight breeze on my belly. Which is odd, because my tummy is furry, and because I was now flashing my Rock Island Armory 1911 Officer’s model handgun. Good thing I was at home. I decided not to raise my arms above my head for the rest of the day.

So, it got me to thinking. Why are the shirts from Woot! so much better?
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