We had decided that electric motorcycles would be the future but thought it would be odd being propelled through the forest on a quietly humming steed.

That was going on ten years ago now, I haven’t had my TT600R for going on eight years now and I don’t even live in Coffs Harbour anymore. I happened across a youtube video of an Electric motorcross bike in use (ignore the hooliganism) and looking carefully at the video I saw a website address across the bike Quantya.com. Apparently our dream of the future is a reality and you can buy electric motorcross (and road registerable) motorbikes across the world – just not in Australia.

It seems like such an excellent idea to me and I can’t wait to see what electric vehicles the world has to offer in the near future.

I’ll finish up with a promotional video for the Quantya.

They had listed on the job card “$500.00 in ‘honda parts’”… I quizzed them on this and they said that the parts list was a mile long and they just summed it up in one line so it wasn’t pages and pages of invoice. I asked to see the parts list and they refused me. They claimed it was a lucky co-incidence that it came to exactly $500 in parts which seems rather unlikely to me but the bike is running again which is a HUGE improvement from before.

I also seem to have fixed the MX5 electrical problems. I fixed it by returning the $220 Federal battery to the shop I bought it from and putting back in the old dodgy cheapo battery that is of much lower capacity. Car runs fine now and hasn’t had any issues with electricity after driving all over town.

Battery shop said they needed to send the Federal away for testing because the problem could be caused by my car.

After a night on the charger I checked out my $200 Federal battery and found it was only 11.53 volts. Straight after a full charge in my experience lead acid batteries hover around 13 volts.

I called up about my motorbike yesterday afternoon and was told that it would now be put off another day because they were waiting upon a gasket, (for the third day in a row) and it would deffinately be finished (for the third day in a row) by the followingafternoon.

I’m sitting in my cubicle cube by myself today. Everyone else has called in sick apparently. After a whole rash of work prior to 10am it’s been relatively quiet today and I’m just biding my time until lunch.

Nothing makes the day go slower than a slow day in the office but I can live in hope that there will be a heap more work later this afternoon to make the time fly by.

Last night I saw an iphone in the flesh for the first time and it was better than I imagined. I was particularly impressed with the graphical interface for displaying sms messages whereby messages from the same contact are displayed in speech bubbles down the screen like a chat program so you can read it like a conversation. It was a simple thing but it was an interface feature that made the device feel welcoming and of a high quality.

I’m sure the iPhone is still big news for most of the world but they’re still not officially for sale in Australia and whilst I know of people who have them I hadn’t had the opportunity to see one firsthand.

If I do end up going to europe I may consider buying one over there, but it would depend on how long I planned to spend there.

This was a big week. I hope to make something of myself at this new company.

The truth of the matter is I’ve been so busy over the last month or so that I haven’t had the time nor the inclination to write much unfortunately. There has been quite a few big changes in my life and I’ve undertaken activities that take up alot of my free time outside of work, and I’ve not at the break time at work to fill you in on what has been happening.

I’ve recently changed jobs. I now work in the city, but I have to get up very early in order to make the train (5:30am or so) but when I get home from work I’ve been actively trying to catch up with friends, building my MX5 (which with the significant help of others was completed in around two weeks), playing world of warcraft and trying to catch up on a million other things around my new house that are asking for my attention.

All in all I’m loving life and I’ve taken on a wide range of activities that is seeing me regularly busy. I’ve even started riding my mountain bike again so hopefully I’ll be getting fit again soon!

I’ve been unsuccessful in getting my VTR1000 repaired. The shop that has my motorbike has been extremely slow and after several months they still keep promising the repairs will be finished by ‘the end of the week’.

Owning a motorbike over these last 10 years has been my crutch of avoiding having to queue for public transport and paying for parking. It’s been a real shock to my system to have to add so much time to my travel times and to pay over $50 for two days parking at the cheapest rate in the CBD. At the moment I feel like I’m working to pay for my parking. Even the train ticket is double my weekly motorcycle fuel bill and I have to allow an extra hour for travel times.

I’m hoping that I’ll be getting back the motorcycle soon and I’ll be able to travel cheaply, efficiently and according to my own schedule again soon. Another avenue I am considering is riding my bicycle to work, but that will depend on the suitability of bicycle storage facilities at work as well as making the sacrifice of an hour per day each way for travelling. If my work hours directly matched the train timetable it would obviously be the easiest solution for getting to work, but unfortunately getting to work on the train means either arriving 40 minutes early or 5 minutes late every day.

From my new desk I have a view out over the city including the clock tower on the town hall. Every fifteen minutes the clock chimes and for some reason or the other it makes me smile.

This new workplace has a fairly fast buzz about it, and the workload seems to come in fairly thick and fast, but for the most part it’s a positive workplace and the people here make it a very enjoyable place to be despite the workload.

I hope to take some pictures of my MX5 soon and I’ll place the up here as I’ve had several requests. It’s not the prettiest example around but I’m very proud of what came together nonetheless.

Something I’ve noticed from my newest workplace is that every workplace were there is a significant number of people, you start to run into similar people in each workplace. I hope this isn’t offensive to anyone but in a way it almost seems like there is a workplace template where colleagues are stamped out of a workplace machine but due to the manufacturing process there are key differences from workplace to workplace but the individuals possibly came off the same production line. I can only guess why this effect doesn’t occur in smaller workplaces is because there isn’t a large enough sample size for similarities to be seen.

For some unknown reason, every time I work on my car or a computer recently I manage to give myself tiny cuts that are no deeper than a paper-cut but they bleed everywhere. Very unpleasant.

Speaking of cuts – on the weekend I started getting back into mountain biking again after at least 6 months of inactivity. After I got back from China I haven’t ridden enough to maintain my level of fitness and as result the ride was quite tiring for me. One one particular climb I was coming around a tight corner on wet clay, my legs were burning and I just didn’t think I’d have the energy to complete the climb, so I attempted to click my left foot out of my pedal. Unfortunately all I managed to do was throw myself off balance – I became stationary and fell sideways into the lantana that was growing thickly along the side of the path. I joked to the next rider that I was doing my part for the environment by beating down weeds using my body. I wasn’t significantly hurt but bruised my wrist slightly and gave myself tiny itchy scratches up my arms and legs. It’s not the first time I’ve fallen from my mountain bike due to my lack of co-ordination with clipless pedals and it probably won’t be the last.

I’m currently using Crank Bros Acid pedals and I find them much more comfortable to ride with than my previous Shimano pedals because they have much more float for my knees with the added benefit that they’re also much lighter.

Despite having an eeepc I’ve recently taken to carrying my much much larger Macbook Pro with me everywhere I go. It doesn’t really make alot of sense to carry the much larger laptop just to do some writing so I might wise up soon and start carrying the smaller cheaper one around with me to do my writings. It does seem a pity to have such a nice laptop and not take it everywhere with me though. I have to say this Apple laptop is possibly the nicest (not the most powerful) machine that I’ve ever been fortunate to use. I find the interface somehow relaxing and when I’m trying to be productive I find myself far less distracted than if I was using another operating system.

Obviously there is the Macbook Air which is also both small, portable and lightweight but unfortunately it’s not even remotely in my pricerange and I can’t justify buying any more computers. I’ll just have to find a way to take the MBP everywhere I go. With the excellent 6+ hour battery life it’s not hard to justify using the MBP as my daily laptop.

Something caught my eye on the way home tonight. A woman on the back of a very small motorcycle with exposed pale white, cellulite pitted legs that were considerably greater in size than my own chest (and that’s saying something). I would have thought that if I placed my own 110kg on a CBR250RR the suspension would be sorely pressed, I can only imagine with the two of them it must have been running along at the bottom of its travel! They seemed to be getting along ok in traffic and I think it’s great they were commuting on a motorbike.

At the end of last year the big end bearing let go in my VR6 forcing my hand to sell it and then the VTR had a flat rear tyre on the highway.

And on last friday  the 22nd of Feb 2008 my timing chain snapped a few streets from home smacking my valves into the pistons. Early estimates from the local bike shop was “between $1000 and $4000″ depending on how extensive the damage is.

I feel like the owner of a horse who has broken it’s leg and I have to make the difficult decision of whether to put down my beloved (but old and worn) steed of 8 years and buy another motorcycle or to repair it in the knowledge that something  else could likely go wrong over the following months. The uncomfortable fact is it’s probably time to let go.

To be honest the timing chain was the last thing I expected to break. Suspecting the chain I had it replaced around 30,000km ago and I would have thought it would be good for another 50,000km or so. I was only doing about 1500rpm putting down the local streets to my house, and given it redlines at 9500rpm that’s taking it pretty easy.

I was getting better economy last year but in my new job my commute is less highway and more gridlock.

At 7:30am I tried using my telephone and was disappointed to find it still working so I made breakfast and got ready for work. As I was stepping out the door at 8am a Telstra van pulled into my driveway and he called me on my home phone to say he was commencing work and could he come inside to test the connection inside.

He asked me about this eye eye net thing and is it true it works without having a telephone number. Does this VOIP thing I’ve heard of have a telephone number too? He tested my 2nd telephone port and found the adsl was there. He said he had connected it to that port on the street because he didn’t think I’d want to lose my telephone service and he wasn’t sure how I could have ADSL without a telephone number.

He said it hadn’t been working because there was several missing links between the exchange and my house – if that’s the case I’m not sure what happened when the last technician connected my service. I assumed they’d just have to make the change at the exchange because I already had a working telephone.

I then left for work on my motorcycle and he gave me a call 30 minutes later to say it should be all working when I get home.

It’s been about a month since I went offline. I’m really looking forward to having broadband again!

I was impressed by the large number of people in China who despite the cheap local petrol (which was probably still expensive to someone on an average wage) had chosen an electric bicycle in order to encompass their entire transportation needs.

It has to be said though that whilst it had pedals for assistance and shop owners had powerboards for people to plug their bikes into whilst they shopped – the machines didn’t seem to keep up with traffic and were used mostly as bicycles that didn’t require pedalling and were used in the bicycle lanes. When I saw my first electric bicycles and scooters I had visions of people adding batteries with higher capacities and output coupled with high efficiency brushless motors so they could tear around the streets on their eco-friendly racing machines, but in reality none of this appeared to be happening and the owners stuck to the bicycle lane.

In 2001 I was in Jakarta and I remember speaking to the son of a wedding photographer who was a) thrilled to be talking to someone who was more than happy to have a natural conversation in english and b) absolutely stunned that I owned a 1000cc superbike.

His dream motorcycle was a NSR250 which was apparently quite an expensive and large capacity motorcycle. He went on that his family shared a 50cc scooter between them and it was unlikely he would be able to afford his dream NSR250. It really struck home the difference between myself at the time a student, I felt like I was scraping by in my home country eating noodles, whereas in Indonesia I was having a conversation with another student who for all intents of purpose I may have owned a spaceship – it was so far out of his financial reach.

That said, I got the strong impression that if you could afford a 1000cc motorcycle in Indonesia (even 2nd hand like mine was) socially you’d be mad not to own a car instead.