“[A] wise and frugal government … shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”
Thomas Jefferson
The 10″ windshield on my Tsakayu fairing is perfectly sized until I put on a helmet. Even with lowers on the forks and engine guards the buffeting feels like someone is playing the bongos on my head at interstate speeds.
After doing a lot of reading on the aerodynamics involved I grabbed a set of Freedom Wings and a new windshield from Clear View. I really like the look of the dark smoke 10″ windshield I have so I got the same height, dark smoke, but with the feature I went specifically to Clear View for, the recurved lip at the top. By all accounts this pushes air like a 2-3″ taller windshield and figured it a good place to start before going to the a full 15″ touring screen.
Sadly the shield is just sitting here in the box, I can’t even get it put on this weekend. But unwrapping the thing the workmanship is awesome. I can’t wait to try it out. Too bad that probably won’t be until sometime in March…
I’ve been shooting and carrying my Kimber with factory sights for 8 years now and it was time for a change. A change I’ve been telling myself I was going to get to for those same 8 years. Recently this was further spurred on by my desire to spend money with Trijicon. So I started shopping for a set of Trijicon KB01’s and surprisingly found many places out of stock including Trijicon.
Turning to eBay I found Todd offering the ones I wanted for a really great price and had the sights in hand in only 2 days.
Today I carefully drove those old irons are off and the Trijicon’s reside in their place. No small feat let me tell you, Kimber really fits those things tight! A few mags down range verified the new sights are properly aligned and certainly improve sight acquisition.
There may be some conservative votes happy to see Dan Coats come out of hiding in Virginia to take on Evan Bayh but I am not one of them. Its been many years so many have forgotten Dan Coats voted for the crime bill in 1994 otherwise known as the Assault Weapons Ban.
Dan Coats will not get my vote in the primaries, that will go to John Hostettler. I’m dubious Coats has enough name recognition to carry the primary this many years later. After all, he never really came back to Indiana after retiring from the Senate, choosing to live in Virginia.
Mr. Coats, respectfully, stay in Virginia.
About the only time I’m not found wearing boots is at work in the cooler months and at Church. So that my well over 10 year old Danner’s finally surrendered was no surprise. I’d been looking at different boots this past year anyway so what an opportunity to pick something different.
I started looking specifically at biker boots, from the high tech AlpineStar touring boots to the low tech River Road Trooper boots and realized something pretty quickly. The space age looking tour boots would look funny with dress pants and provide little traction on the trail. And the other end of the spectrum lacked the technology features I insist on, like gore-tex.
After almost of week of browsing and researching I bought another pair of Danner’s….
I’m not a big fan of ground hogs today…. Still, 3/21 is the official start of spring and as long as that’s on schedule I’ll survive… besides - I’m not done with my long list of winter bike projects.
Are apparently the new pit bull of NYC’s east end. I’ve seen a Beagle considerably more vicious than any dog I’ve ever seen. But she was probably just covering her embarrassment of having been bred to a Pug….
So the weatherman this morning says maybe a little accumulation of snow. After lunch the weatherman is saying we might get and inch by Tuesday morning.
After two hours on the road (the plow drivers must be listening to the same forecast) getting home in the snow I’m pulling into my driveway. There’s easily 2 inches of snow on the ground, and its drifting, and at that moment the weatherman on the radio says “less than 1 inch accumulation overnight”.
Saturday may not have been a terribly pretty day but it had one thing going for it, 50 degrees. As I have a laundry list of maintenance items to do before ridign season it seemed a good day to work on the head bearing. If the adjustment works I’m not taking the entire front end down - if it doesn’t then that’s exactly what’s going to happen including new progressive springs.
Due to technical difficulties it was 5pm before the procedure was completed. Without the Honda special socket I torqed it down with a monkey wrench and worked it around and tightened it down again until I felt confident it was smooth. Then backed it down little at a time until the tension was in the 5-7 pound range. After putting it all back together I headed out for 25-30 miles and could produce no deceleration wobble nor any wobble in the leans.
I’d still like to put in the progressive fork springs and may yet do that but for the moment should spring arrive early at least that particular task isn’t going to keep us off the road.
Next step, valve clearance check….
I’m sure you all saw this coming. At least the President got it over with quickly….
By that time, we did. And here’s my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts, but the mood around the country.
The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office.
People are angry, and they’re frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.
(President Obama to George Stephanopoulos)
That’s right folks, Scott Brown won due to lingering anger at George W Bush.
So I’m sitting at my desk this afternoon moving data around on a SAN when I get this robo-call asking if I’d like to lower my interest rate on my credit card. “If you’d like to lower your interest rate on your credit card account press 1 to talk to a representative”. Well who doesn’t want a better interest rate on their credit card, eh? So I press 1.
Now this guy comes on and thanks me for my time and asks if I was aware that my credit record review made me eligible for a better interest rate. I told him, a native English speaking person I might add, that no, I was not aware of the review but there’s nothing wrong with getting a better rate.
And… by the way - I ask sheepishly - just which credit card account is this regarding as I have a few from different banks….
**CLICK**
Yup, pretty much what I expected. I don’t know what their angle was but I’m betting it was something like “just need to pay $29.95 fee so we can run your credit report from the reporting agencies” or some such scam. And I was sure it was a scam since my credit card company has lowered my interest rate dramatically without so much as a sticky note in my bill going LOOK HERE and pointing out the 7 point drop.
I hope they call back though, I have some more questions and I’ll try to play along a little longer next time.
It seems Trijicon puts scripture references on their products which has some people claiming it proves we’re crusaders in the Middle East. And then there is that whole “separation” myth, too.
I’d love to have a Trijicon site so marked and as is being issued for the M4 but my goodness they’re expensive - almost as much as the M4 itself in the civilian market. I have been looking to upgrade the sights on my Kimber and trying to decide which sights to go with… I guess this answers that question…
As for me and my arsenal, I’ll use Trijicon.
Dang, there I go again… clinging to my guns and religion.
Just writing about Pelosi I recall that John Hostettler, 8th district Indiana - and now doing is part to take down Evan Bayh - essentially ran on a campaign of “a vote for Brad Ellsworth is a vote for Nancy Pelosi for speaker of the house”. The powers that be had been pretty successful in keeping Pelosi on a leash and the media kept her out of the limelight so Hostettler’s angle fell very flat with most voters.
Fast forward a year and a half and I have to wonder if the Republican running against Brad Ellsworth ran on the same anti-Pelosi theme if that wouldn’t in itself carry the Republican to victory.
While we’re all celebrating Jack Cafferty’s Pelosi’s a horrible woman we mustn’t loose sight of the fact that Cafferty remains an unapologetic Obama fan boy.
The Administration’s first year has been a horrible one by any political measure you choose to use. And if you’re paying attention to the White House’s “stands” on issues over the past few months you’ve seen mealy mouth policy comments that make John Kerry’s campaign platform look like bedrock.
Pelosi is a ripe target, she’s been a party loose canon, a total embarrassment since 2006. Add to that Reid is on the skids, too, and is likely not running for re-election. He’s spent his political capital with his constituents and he knows it.
What does all this boil down to? Two ripe scapegoats and I suspect Obama fanboy Jack Cafferty is just getting the ball rolling in a larger political plan that he may well be oblivious to. Over the coming months running up to the fall election I expect to see a number of high ranking democrats, specifically these two clowns, to be thrown under the bus by the Obama administration as they try desperately to save their own political hides.
I’m not at all sold on the need for a sarcasm punctuation mark and for a few very good reasons.
First, not all sarcasm is created equal - for example there is the generic sarcasm and then there is my preferred 
. Would there be a variety of punctuations to identify the type of sarcasm?
Second, a sarcasm punctuation mark takes away so much from its purpose if you have to put big signs around it that says this is sarcasm!.
Third, what would then happen to sarchasm? After all, what fun is sarcasm if everybody gets it?
As the saying goes, if you have to explain it - they wouldn’t understand anyway. And sometimes its just better left that way…
I don’t know why I’m bothering with such a mundane topic. But it was quite obvious Leno didn’t want to move but NBC had a deal with Conan so the forced it. Now their shinanigans are backfiring on them as they try to have retain their talent and ratings too. I have never felt Conan was an adult oriented show and have been surprised that his potty humored Late Nite survived so long. Leno on the other hand is one of the few “celebs” I could comfortably sit down and have a beer with - preferably in his bike garage… 
So… send Conan back to Late Nite or let him go give the Tonight Show back to Leno who has proven a worthy successor to Carson who was a hard act to follow for anyone.
Wow, I wonder why no one saw this coming - that the whole H1N1 flu scare was drug firms cashing in. But how would anyone know since the WHO’s involvement and holdings in these drug companies has been effectively buried by the media. Let the Left bemoan the Right’s involvement with Wall Street and go look at the Left’s involvement in these drug companies. Remember that part of the hubbub around “Hillary Care” was her involvement with them… think anything has changed?
The Daily Mail’s David Rose has a nice article today, The mini ice age starts here. Why must any current event, especially historically proven cyclic events, be assumed the new status quo? Well, besides that there’s money to be made in the next-big-emergency…
It’s really to bad, too, as I was looking forward to global warming giving me a longer riding season… now I can’t even get that moving to Florida.
Americans make seemingly unhealthy choices - smoking, eating too much fast food, roller blading without pads, riding a motorcycle without a helmet, keeping a gun in the house are just a few whereby someone is bound to say “you shouldn’t be allowed to do that because it is making my insurance go up!”. I have been thoroughly amazed at the otherwise intelligent people who espouse such rubbish.
The sadly ironic thing is that under the proposed health care overhaul it is your class that dictates your coverage and not your healthy lifestyle.
Why am I completely unsurprised?
The problem is you get what you subsidize so if we’re going to have a country full of fat poor people then they’ll have to make a healthy diet compulsory.
So Eric Holder is going to go after ponzi schemes now… if he wants to go after the one that’s stolen the most money from citizens he’d go after Social Security. Oh wait, they’re the ones running that one.. so he’ll focus on the small fish to make it look like he’s doing something….
Spazy was our first pet after the Missus and I married and got our house. A close friend found her under the hood of his truck where she’d crawled one cold night to stay warm and for some reason he thought we ought to have her. That was late winter in 1992 and she was full grown by then but only just.
She’s old and has been deaf for some years and this evening after work I found her laying peacefully under her box. She’d been acting peculiar the last day or two so I wasn’t too surprised.
She’d had a good run having been a fixture around here for 18 odd years and I’m certain it was pure orneriness that kept her going….
I have an embarrassing admission to make: Windows 7 (Enterprise) isn’t terrible. Having gone from Windows XP to 7 on my laptop and thus avoiding Vista I missed most of the horror of Microsoft’s ME2.
Of course this doesn’t mean I’ll be booting to Windows 7 any more often than I have in the past (which is maybe 1 in 10 boots) but it will suffice for those cases where I have no choice but to use Windows.
The rest of the time my laptop continues to run Mandriva as the default OS.
Roberta X has a great rundown on the Gun Bills In The Indiana General Assembly.
I’m pleased to see mostly pro-freedom for a change. A law to allow you to keep your firearm locked in your car at work even if your employer forbids it. Another to prevent the state from restricting our rights in a Katrina type emergency. And a recent hot topic in Indiana, restricting access to the Indiana carry permit database which was recently published in part by a Bloomington newspaper.
A woman was up visiting friends in our town and happened to see the ad in the paper for Scout while there. It was spur of the moment but since they were already right here they called at almost 10PM.
Naturally my being eager to find the fellow a home I agreed to the late visit and they came over. When they came in he went right to them like they were old friends… Scout hasn’t met many people he didn’t like… So we discussed the why’s and wherefore’s of his existence and she decided he’d be perfect for her to keep her company while her hubby worked nights.
As they weren’t planning to get a dog tonight I fixed them up with a leash, 10#’s of kibble and a care package of rawhides and cookies.
Just like the first attempt at adopting him out the girls don’t even seem to notice his absence. But we sure do! Scout was a very sweet fellow but it is really nice to be back to only two dogs…
The local police are wondering what exactly happened to common sense as 3 are rescued from their GPS routes.
Pointman is a Hoosier who works in the IT industry, is an amateur photographer an avid motorcycle rider, shooter and firearms collector.
Please feel free to email Pointman at pointman -at- pointmanspage -dot- com.
The masthead graphic "Road to Oakalla" was taken during a motorcycle ride to the Oakalla covered bridge on 23 May, 2007 with a Canon A85 digital camera (F5.6, 1/125 sec exposure). Additional images from the visit are in the Oakalla bridge gallery.
