4fraziers.com

Archive for January, 2010

Click here to read my Examiner.com article on five great internet sites that will help you plan a fantastic motorcycle vacation.

That may be a dangerous and immoral philosophy in human relationships, but when it comes to modes of transport I have to say it makes sense.

I didn’t get my beloved Triumph out of the shop yesterday.  They aren’t quite finished with her.

But sitting in the driveway like the guitar in a Kenny Rogers song, “…waiting for me like a secret friend…”, is my trusty old Dodge Magnum.  I’ve been driving Robin’s Avalanche since my motorcycle crash.  She’s working from home these days and can’t drive anyway due to the ginormous cast on her leg, and the Magnum was overdue for an oil change.

So today, knowing my shoulder will soon be in a sling for the next twelve weeks, I changed the oil in the V8 Hemi and topped off all the other fluids.  Then I popped one of those fifty dollar K&N air filters in for good measure.

It turns out that air filter is the perfect compliment to the suitcase resonator delete I did on the old rocket sled a couple of years ago.  After ingesting six quarts of Mobil One 15,000 mile synthetic extended performance oil I fired her up and let her sit running in the driveway for fifteen minutes.

5.7 Liter HEMI V8

Once that gallon and a half of petroleum was good and warm I took it for a test drive.

Boston Acoustics stereo system blasting out Meatloaf’s “Bat Out of Hell”, I pushed her all the way up to 150 and she just roared down the highway in exquisite pleasure.  It was about half as fun as riding the Rocket III…which means it was a LOT of fun.  Which also gives you an idea of how much fun it is to ride a motorcycle.

Hopefully my Mopar friend will be enough to get me through the next twelve weeks as I recover from rotator cuff surgery.  If not, I’ll just have to check into a Triumph withdrawal clinic.

I published an article for Examiner yesterday explaining how Google Latitude can be used to ease your loved ones’ minds when you are out and about on your mean machine.

I publish my location live 24×7 nowadays using Google Latitude. When Robin can’t reach me by phone she can always browse to my “No Worries” page on our 4Fraziers site and see exactly where I am. If my little icon dosen’t move on that map in say, five minutes, and it’s not at my office, a Shell station on my usual route, or one of my favorite restaurant locations, she knows to get worried and to send help to whatever spot on the map my icon is stuck at.

Otherwise she has total peace of mind, and a nifty way to determine how soon I’ll be home (why spoil a perfect marriage by a surprise arrival, right?).

I said all of that to say this: Go read my article at Examiner,com. Everytime someone lands on one of my articles there (or on any of my articles at Associated Content), I earn a little cash.

You get to read my stuff for free…I know I’m no Peter Egan, but hey, you have to deal out a few bucks for Cycle World to read one of his articles.

Imagine speaking to a person in another country who only speaks Spanish while you only speak English. Imagine that you each have a translator listening and translating your speech to each other as you are speaking, real time, without waiting for you to finish a sentence or paragraph.

Translation you can understand immediately, no awkward pauses or gaffs.

Now imagine that the translators were not people, but invisible robots or implants. The technology of science fiction transformed into reality.

Douglas Adams had something like that in his hit Sci-Fi comedy novels: “The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. It was called a “Babble Fish” and when you put it in your ear it would instantly translate anything anyone said to you into your own language.

Google has achieved this in the form of electronic communication, and thank heaven it doesn’t involve inserting a fish into your ear. You type in your language, the recipient receives your message as you are typing it in his language.

The translator is a ‘robot’ in the Google Wave product, a multi-faceted collaboration tool that achieves communication heights that have never been reached in a single utility before. The translation feature is only one tiny example of what Google Wave can do. Think of the many tools available today for communication: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogs, email, voicemail, online photo galleries, chat rooms, instant messaging, SharePoint, and the list goes on.

Google Wave has integrated features from all of these communication vessels and provides a simple, intuitive means of collaboration for personal, business, perhaps even top-secret clandestine communication. Developers are busy across the globe writing new APIs, robots, extensions, and other integrations for this amazing new collaboration tool.

I believe that Google Wave is the future of electronic collaboration, and email will soon be a seldom used tool, retiring after a great 40 year run.

Those who adopt Google Wave quickly will have a temporary advantage…once businesses see the benefits and receive assurances that Wave can be a secure form of communication it will spread like wildfire.

Google Wave will be the demise of those massively expensive Microsoft Exchange implementations and upgrades. High-priced corporate instant messaging solutions like SameTime will be a thing of the past, and the crazy proprietary junkware known as SharePoint will be ridiculously expensive and too complicated to bother with by comparison.

Aside from what Google Wave can already do, the possibilities for new capabilities are endless. Extensions and new APIs are being invented by the hour.

CIOs of major corporations take note: if you ignore this application, you are missing the boat. This is the greatest leap in collaboration since the invention of the telephone.

Yes, I am channelling Nastradamus.

I just ran across this jewel of an article by Neale Bayly and had to post a linked excerpt:

“With the America barely making enough power to pull your granny off the mailman, and the Rocket III capable of ripping your arms out of their sockets and leaving your missus in the next county, the new Triumph Thunderbird is the perfect balance and addition to this cruiser line up.”

I’ve never seen the range of Triumph’s cruisers described so eloquently before.  And that part about the Rocket III ripping your arms off?  He’s not exaggerating…much.

Bravo, Neale Bayly!

Just a teaser for another article I’m writing…on a very cool collaborative GPS system. Wait for my write up or feel free to check it out yourself at http://www.waze.com.

Although they love the freedom and sense of flying that they feel when they’re riding, there’s a corner in every male motorcyclist’s brain that says, “Riding a motorcycle makes you more attractive.”

Don’t misunderstand: I’m not on the market, Robin’s the only girl for me. That part of my brain says she’s thinking: “There goes one hot pappa and he’s all mine…” as she watches me ride off to work every morning. She probably thinks about how sexy my butt looks, too.

While most women may outwardly snort at a middle aged man buying a motorcycle and make comments about mid-life crisis and pitiful attempts to recapture boyhood, my wife gave me the story straight. She told me that when she sees me cruising up on my mammoth muscle bike I instantly appear twice as hot to her.

That means on a hotness scale of one to ten my motorcycle transforms me into a solid two.

If I hide her glasses and get a couple of tequila shots down her neck I bet could cross the “three” line.

Okay, I made all that up; I’m a solid two without the motorcycle.

What were Robin’s actual words after she followed me home from EuroSport Cycle on my bike? Well, the conversation went like this:

ME: [Entering living room, helmet under arm and still wearing the black leather gloves and jacket even though I'd had plenty of time to take them off (but I look so cool in them!)] “So how’d I look boynin’ up thuh slab on mah new machine?”

ROBIN:[Picking up the remote and scrolling to the 'American Idol' recording from last night] “You looked real cute riding your new motorcycle, Honey. What’s a ‘slab’ and why are you talking like that?”

ME: [Long pause, waiting a bit for the sting to subside] “Okay, I wasn’t exactly going for ‘cute’ when I insisted on buying the largest bike on the market. I did tell you that’s a 2300cc engine between those two wheels, right?”

ROBIN: “Oh, honey, you know what I mean by ‘cute’. But you change lanes kinda funny on it. Are you sure you’re supposed to do it that quickly?”

ME: “I was just putting her through the paces…getting a feel for it…wait, I’m not done talking about your impression. Don’t you have any other words to describe the situation besides ‘cute’?

ROBIN: “Oh sure, Sweetie, your bike is gorgeous and you looked really happy on it. And you were cute on top of all that”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I had just invested $15,000 in high anticipation that I would be described as ‘tough’, ‘manly’, ‘brave’, ‘heroic’, ‘impressive’, ‘burly’, ‘daring’, ‘mysterious’, ‘bad-ass’…all kinds of words that I would use if I were a woman and saw me riding that big bruiser down the road.

A fifteen grand British hot rod motorcycle just had to bump me way up one the wife’s hotness scale.

I’d envisioned all the things that came to mind every time you see one of those Triumph commercials or a biker movie with a motorcycle cruising along, the rider wearing those dark sunglasses, a half-helmet if any at all, long hair and beard flowing in the wind, legs splayed on pegs jutting out from crash bars like he’s about to kick the door off any car that dares get too close; the image of living wild and running free.

Why couldn’t she see the transformation into that sort of guy that happened when I was rollin’ on two wheels? Should I buy a phone booth to change into my riding gear in? Just as surely as Nicholas Cage became “Ghost Rider” when he mounted his bike, I became “Handsome Bad-Ass Biker Dude” when I mounted mine. This I believed every time I got within that sacred owner-only proximity zone around my bike.

We hadn’t discussed it; I just assumed she would see the obvious transformation. After all, she had recently gotten her new eyeglasses.

She had to be messing with my mind.  Then again, perhaps something was still missing.

I knew I had to take the final step to ensure she would never again see me as ‘cute’. I had to truly commit to becoming ‘Biker Dude’ whether I was near my bike or not. On the road, or sitting on the couch, I had to walk the walk and live the life. I was dead serious and 100% all-in.

As I left her to watch ‘American Idol’ I made a silent vow to grow out my hair and beard and get a tattoo.

A temporary tattoo, of course.

It is not unusual these days for some of us to have to step in and fulfil duties that our better halves would rather manage. When the wife is out of commission due to surgery or injury, for instance.

Previously Robin banned me from washing clothes, because she doesn’t think it proper to simply toss in arm-loads of colored, white, cashmere, three-hundred dollar suits, and a cup of powdered soap before twisting the thing to “on” and walking away. What’s the point of having an “Automatic” clothes washing machine if you have to do all that sorting and reading of fabric care labels first?

That incident, and several others, have succeeded in relieving me of any interior household chores that involve appliances other than the vacuum cleaner.

However, your humble author, finally resigned himself to lashing on an apron and prancing about the abode with a feather duster today.

But enough about my recreational activities. This article is about the need to clean house during my sweet wife’s convalescence due to an extensive ankle surgery. Since she cannot move about the place very well with a full cast from knee to toes, and doctor’s orders are to stay prone with it elevated, the duties of banishing dust bunnies, discarding wrapping paper, cleaning dishes, and vacuuming the floors have fallen to me. It cannot be done as well as Robin could do it were she on her feet, but I try, bless my heart.

I thought perhaps we might have enough dishes to last for the twelve weeks of her recovery, but alas, it was a matter of three days and I was forced to either buy paper plates, borrow cutlery and platters from the neighbors, or do the dishes.

With my motorcycle in the shop being overhauled, I couldn’t just ride off for a bit and ponder the situation. I was stuck in a house that would soon be suitable for gardening if one more layer of dirt accumulated on the floor. Robin had been puttering about for days, making a pitiful attempt to dust with a telescoping swiffer dust tool as she rode her scooter from the bedroom to the kitchen and back.

Resigned to fate, I began to clean, as only a 44 year old “biker” can do. I piled as many dishes as would fit into the dish washer. Most of the others I gave a cursory scrubbing and rinse by hand and piled on the counter to air-dry.

One of the pans was still partially filled with a dull reddish brown concrete that used to be spaghetti sauce. I put it in the garbage disposal side of the sink and turned the hot water on. Applying scientific reasoning to the situation, I figured if water could carve out the Grand Canyon, water could wash away that petrified Italian gravy. I only needed to let it run long enough.

In case you don’t know (as I didn’t), the proper configuration for a garbage disposal drain that includes an inlet from a dish washer is to attach the dish washer drain hose to the upper inlet of the garbage disposal.

I don’t know why this is the proper configuration, but it is. Check the manual for your own garbage disposal if you don’t believe me. The reason why I say I don’t know why this is proper is because it is a recipe for disaster if a grumpy old Triumph rider decides to put a pan full of crusty food in that side of the sink and leave the water running while the disposal is off.

True to the legacy of carving vast canyons and valleys into the earth, the rushing hot water softened and broke up the hearty red sauce and spicy Italian sausage. Clumps of the stuff floated free and battered their way down into the silent garbage disposal.

As those red chunks of sauce piled up inside the disposal, they quickly clogged the drain. The water rushing in from the faucet continued to run, oblivious to the marvellous disaster it was about to create. The level climbed until it reached that little inlet that the hose connected to the drain on the dishwasher; then it began to rush down that hose into the waiting vast steel enclosure that is our dishwasher.

In retrospect, I think a five dollar anti-back-flow valve installed on the drain hose would be a capital idea.

Our dish washing machine isn’t top of the line, like a Viking, but it is a fairly good quality KitchenAid model with a stainless steel interior and an excellent seal around the door. You could fill our dishwasher up with water and it would take 20 or 30 gallons before it created enough pressure for water to start seeping out around that door seal.

I filled her up with about forty gallons.

During the time that the doomsday event was percolating in our kitchen drainage complex, I was happily sitting at my computer writing one of my weekly columns. I had told Robin I was dusting and vacuuming the office; which meant I blew the dust off my keyboard and turned on the vacuum cleaner every few minutes when I stopped to think of something clever or funny to include in the column.

After a while I finally rememberd I had left the water running, and rushed back to the kitchen to turn it off, thinking how horrible it would be that I would have an extra dollar or two on this month’s water bill.

I was shocked to see a puddle of water on the floor, seeping at an increasing rate out from the bottom of the cabinetry encasing the sink and dishwasher. I began to curse the plumbers who had installed the original drainage pipes in our house (having momentarily forgotten that I myself had replaced it all a year ago). Assuming the cause was a leak around one of the p-trap joints below the garbage disposal, I threw dirty towels (there were plenty, since I had been letting the laundry pile up for several days in hopes that the linen fairy would take care of it for me) on the expanding puddle and turned off the faucet.

I flung open the door beneath the sink, expecting to see all those bottles of detergent, Ajax, Windex, and other chemical products (which we keep well within reach of any baby visiting Fort Frazier…note to self: baby proof the kitchen) soaked in the water that should have been steadily drip-drip-dripping from the pipes.

There was none. The exterior of the pipes were, of course, dry as a bone. And why not? I thought, since I had installed them myself and done a quality job.

But even though the faucet was now off the puddle continued to grow beyond the capacity of my pile of dirty laundry.

About that time my visiting daughter, Kelli, walked into the kitchen, bravely approaching despite the continuous profanity coming from the vicinity of my mouth and the anguished pounding of my fist upon the counter.

“Dad, it’s coming from the dishwasher.” She said, pointing to the steady trickles of water flowing from the bottom corners of the dishwasher door.

“Aha! So it is”, said I.

And then I performed the culminating act of stupidity for the day.

I opened the dishwasher door.

So here’s the tips:
#1. Install an anti-backflow valve on the diswasher drain hose
#2. Do not leave running water unattended
#3. Hire a maid service

You guessed it: Triumph Motorcycles, LTD. managed to stay on top of the heap while other bike manufacturers took a beating in the world wide economy of 2009 (relatively speaking).

While Triumph could still end up in the woods like everyone else, the independent British company rescued from obscurity by John Bloor reportedly has managed to post higher comparative sales percentages than the vast majority of their competitors and opened 39 new stores in the past year. As usual, the famed Bonneville and its various incarnations deserves a lot of the credit.

Also deserving of credit for the world’s eldest motorcycle marque’s incredible resurrection is the innovation and flat-out overkill of dreams pushed into reality like the Rocket III. Yours Truly happened upon this monstrosity by happen-stance after being directed away from various Harley Davidson and Victory dealer sites. A friend notified us of the current line-up from Triumph and after one look at the Rocket III the legacy American icon and it’s recently birthed domestic competitor from Polaris was forgotten.

The Motor Company, with it’s stores that seem to push branded T-Shirts, coffee mugs, and pet apparel as much as it’s bikes, has nothing as outlandish or gigantically “American” as the Rocket III from Great Britain…or the newly minted 2010 Thunderbird – a name, by the way, which Ford had to lease from Triumph in order to apply it to their famous fifties automobile.

Bloor’s little company has begun anew the great rivalry between American V-Twins, British parrallel twins and her in-line triple cruisers.

While the sport bikes Triumph produces have long been admirable and held their share of respect among the potential buyers from Italian and Japanese maker markets, the Motor Company’s dominance of the cruiser world is suddenly teetering, with Victory chopping away at the die-hard V-Twin aspect and Triumph offering, as Monte Python writers would put it, “something completely different”. The whirring of chains on internal spinning timing gears, the thunder of a superb acoustically tuned 1600 parallel twin, or the jaw-dropping speed and intimidating presence of the asymmetrical Rocket III…any of them will instantly turn heads from a rumbling V-Twin that has become a boring, common, and sometimes annoying lazy thump.

It’s no wonder Triumph Motorcycles have done well.

They’ve blown our minds with their seemingly juxtaposed outer restraint and blisteringly unorthodox internals of the 2010 Thunderbird. They’ve taken the Rocket III to a new level with the Roadster by adding more horsepower (Why? The same reason they built a 2300cc triple to start with…because they refuse to accept boundaries) and the funnelling of those three ports into two symmetrical throaty pipes as if to say, “it’s always had the fury, now here’s the sound”.

There’s a point at which you’ve outdone yourself, and once you’ve achieved the mountain top, you must stay put or else descend.

Has Triumph reached that lofty height? Or can they conceivably ascend to higher planes yet? Or will they simply maintain their current status by having so far outstripped all others in imagination, quality, and price?

I can’t think of any way they can do better…

But I’m breathless in anticipation of being pleasantly surprised by their next move.