Ok, this is just a thought I had this morning, while laying on the pavement being told not to move (I'm fine, I wasn't telling myself not to move)... When you see a red light ahead of you as you travel along a public road, what do _you_ do? I mean I generally slow down and prepare to stop, while simultaneously hoping that it changes to green before I get to it. Unfortunately, that is _not_ what the gentleman whose bumper I found myself bouncing off of this morning did. He instead proceeded to maintain speed and travel into the intersection, wherein my bike and I collided violently with him.

Honda 599: probably totalled

Hip: Bruised and raspberried

Brandon: Sore and roughed up

Brand new Jacket: Broken in, not to bad I don't think

Car: Pretty well smashed in driver's door

I guess it's not the worst timing really -- I just bought a new primary motorcycle... so if the 599 is totalled, it just means that I don't have to sell it, but really... seriously... red lights... they mean something.

I probably would have been able to stop if it hadn't also been raining gently shortly before I was out riding -- just enough to wet down the slippery stuff on the pavement, but not enough to wash it away. Who knows though, red lights... yeah...

I bought a bike! Sadly, it's in the shop now, so I don't have pics of it.

A few weeks ago, Liz moved to a new apartment. As a result, she lives on a pretty big hill. She has ridden pillion on my motorcycle a lot over the months that we've been seeing each other, but going down hill, and stopping suddenly have always made her pretty uncomfortable on my little 599. With her new location, the big hill leaving her place made it noticeably harder to get her to go for rides with me.

Now, I bought a bike, with the vision of one day sharing the ride with a pretty girl, and going on weekend motorcycle trips together and that sort of thing, so this was just the kick in the pants that I needed to actually start looking for a bigger sport touring bike to replace my 599. After poking around on Craig's List and elsewhere on the internets for a while, I stumbled on an beautiful looking 1995 VFR with only 7k more miles than my 2006 599 and Corbin Beattle Bags. After emailing with the owner, we agreed on a time for a test drive and potential purchase and I went about getting a big pile of cash out of my bank accounts.

Yesterday, I stashed small piles of cash all over myself and my bike and armed up (in case of trouble) and headed to the middle of nowhere to check out the VFR. The bike is as pretty as the pictures in the Craig's List ad and runs like new. Well... ran like new... we negotiated a purchase price, and I left a deposit while I went home to drop off my bike and acquire other transportation back to pick it up.

I returned to pick up the bike and we finished the paper work and chatted about riding. The seller was emotional about letting the bike go, it'd been his only bike ever and satisfied a dream he'd had years before. When I was ready to go, it was a tiny bit hesitant to start. I should have stopped and had some think about it, but it did eventually start up fine and settle to a nice idle, so I headed off. At the last stop light before the entrance ramp to the free way, as I shifted down to first, the bike stalled out and refused to even try to turn over.

After some fun with getting the bike over to the side of the road, I inspected everything I could and determined that the battery was completely dead. Charging system fault. The seller had installed a brand new battery 3 days earlier. I called the seller and he said he'd be able to grab jumper cables and try to jump it to get me home, and then I called the nearest motorcycle shop to see if they were open and able to look at it and find out about a local tow that would safely handle bikes.

About 20 minutes later, the seller showed up, with not only cables, but a trailer. We talked about it briefly and decided to just trailer it over to the shop and let the pros take care of it. He was extremely protective of (now) my new bike as we loaded up on the trailer and beyond apologetic about the problems. The charging system must have failed somehow due to being not ridden enough over recent years. The shop didn't have any parts for the 1995 VFR in stock, so I had to leave it there... and then the seller gave me a ride over 20 miles home to Seattle.

I still haven't heard from the shop about the exact problem and the damage, but TBH it's no big deal; I was planning to have the charging system checked immediately upon getting the bike home, because older VFRs frequently report problems with it. I'm just amazed at how far above and beyond the seller went to take care of me. Best Craig's List buying experience ever. Best used anything buying experience ever. I can't wait to get the bike back and enjoy the new ride. Not really looking forward to selling the 599, both because I have a lot of cleaning up to do on it first, and because I'll miss it; it was my first bike, and it gave me a lot of good miles in our 3 years together.

Since I got a MacBook Pro for work, I've been annoyed that I only have 1 power adapter for it. I have a couple of MacBook ones, but I don't want to use them with the MBP. I have a Kensington 120W Universal Air/Car/Home power adapter, but unfortunately, they don't make a magsafe smarttip for it. The Googles told me taht I could make my own, so I followed this guide to make a magsafe cable for it. It works! Probably wastes some juice as I have it run at the 18.5V max magsafe voltage all the time, but it works and means I don't have to another Macbook Pro adapter.

So I've long had my little Backups Blow backup script/system for backing up general files and directories on *nix over ftp|s3|ssh|nfs. My world has changed somewhat since I created Backups Blow, and I now have a MacBook, a MacBook Pro and an external hard drive that I want to back them up to. I have my home directories and other files I want backed up stored on ZFS, but needed a script to handle regularly backing up snapshots.

Also, since I created Backups Blow, my scripting language of choice has changed from Perl to Python. All of this has led to the creation of ZFS Backups Blow, which for now is just a single little Python script which I have stuck in the Backups Blow git repository.

Why is this little script of mine worth sharing? Thanks to the magic of ZFS snapshots, with this short script alone, you get a flexible backup solution. What it doesn't handle so far is removing snapshots from your backup medium, but for my personal purposes, that isn't a huge concern (the backup medium is considerably larger than the media being backed up). What it does handle so far is: Rotating backups on the source medium, keeping the current and one previous snapshot (this allows for incremental send|recv, and recovery from "oops" mistakes); uniquely named, by timestamp, backups on the backup medium; recursively backing up from any depth of your ZFS hierarchy (ok, it doesn't actually handle doing it in a non-recursive manner at all); minimal, not very smart detection when to do a full send and when to do an incremental; and a decent amount of "am I behaving sanely" checking. The known bugs in the script at this point are failure handling. Behavior on a failed sanity check is less than ideal.

To use this script, read the script, then set the variables at the top and stick it in your crontab, or (on OS X) use a launch agent.

Thanksgiving in Chicago was fun, the food was fantastic. Which reminds me, you should check out Foodista. It's a pretty cool wiki recipe/cooking site.

Also, after discovering Survival Straps and a related Instructable, I've started work on my own design. Eventually, I'll either blog or post on Instructables how to recreate my creation.

U.S. Child Labor Laws are Child Abuse
by Wendy McElroy

When I was sixteen, I ran away from home and lived on the streets for as short a period of time as I could manage. I did not turn to prostitution or to drugs; I was lucky. Not in avoiding paid sex and substances -- these were deliberate choices. I was lucky to be sixteen and, so, able to legally support myself. If I had been two months younger, child labor laws would have forced me to beg or do far worse in order to survive.

Excellent article. This is why both child labor and minimum wage laws _hurt_ the very people they are supposed to help.

Ok, I have been a major major slacker on posting. Sorry!

Halloween was fun! My girlfriend, her roommate and I got all dressed up and went out.

I'm still climbing a lot, which is great.

Holiday preparations at work, combined with things mentioned above have had me exceedingly busy.

If you're bored, TED is your friend.

The original Zeitgeist movie was a brilliant series of questions and facts. It was mind opening and encouraged reflection on self, reflection on society and reflection on the universe. The addendum, on the other hand, tries to offer answers to the questions posed in the original. It drives relentlessly on a socialistic agenda, no longer sticking to the facts, but turning instead to pie-in-the-sky ideals without basis.

I would like to take a moment to point out one huge hypocrisy that came up in the last 1/2 hour of the addendum. They spend a lot of time and effort emphasizing that we are all one and that we are all connected. They say that therefor unconditional love is the only correct answer. They then proceed to attempt to use this as a reason to discard capitalism as corrupt. Their reasoning is that capitalism is selfish and therefor evil. They say that we should all be motivated by the well being of mankind, not by economic gains.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that if the 'true path' for humankind is to be motivated by the good of our fellow humans, then a free market capitalism allows for that. An economy is simply a way for people to express their needs and preferences. There is no inherent corruption here, simply that expression. The 'corrupt capitalists' will always be corrupt, regardless of the underlying system. The nice thing about free market capitalism is that it allows both for them to express their needs and preferences and for the rest of us to do so. If our preferences are massively different from theirs, things will change, because their profit motives _require_ us to demand what they are selling.

If, as the addendum suggests, we pull our funds, accounts and labor away from certain companies, the free market will drive a reduction in the power of those that we despise. In the planned, "resource driven" world proposed therein, there would be no way to express those preferences. So, by definition, it could never reflect the ever changing needs, wants and desires of all of us, as one, or as many.

Many of the action items proposed by the addendum are fine and consistent with the _questions_ and _facts_, but several are so clearly driving a socialistic agenda as to undermine open minded beauty from which it was spawned. I'm truly sorry to see that this movie did not continue the open ended, personal development based legacy of the original.