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xtatic1's birthday cake. We have so many geeky friends that this probably won't be lost on anyone, but I thought it was clever. Besides, the cake would have set off the smoke alarm if we had lit the requisite base-10 number of candles.


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During my recent trip to St. Louis for the Society for Industrial Archeology conference, I couldn't help noticing that the place has a distinct theme. Given the ubiquitous monolith hovering over the downtown, I suppose that theme really isn't too hard to discern, but after a while I began to notice arches everywhere. I mulled on the significance of ( Read more... )

I inadvertantly caused a round of speculation among my online motorcycling friends last month when I posted something along the lines of "you'll never believe what I'm doing for a living these days." The job I took isn't exactly on my career arc, and I really didn't want to subject myself to the kind of ribbing I knew it would cause. But a number ( Read more... )

Last night xtatic1, elizilla and I went up to Bloomfield Hills to see The World's Fastest Indian. It's in limited release, and really deserves wider distribution. I think this is the best motorcycling-themed movie I've ever seen. This genre is often tragically cheesy, no doubt scaring off funding for scripts that might have a bit more realistic relation to the ( Read more... )

( My E85 experiment, behind the cut. )

Every year I do a Veterans' Day sport ride with my Columbus riding buddies. But now that I’ve moved to Michigan it’s a little harder to get up early enough to make it down to Cowtown for the weekend rides. Still, this is a traditional ride, and you know you can’t mess with riding traditions.

( Long trip report with pics here. )

Over the years I've heard stories about the famous Sportbike Rally held at Parry Sound, Ontario. I'm really not much into the group motorcycle event thing (with the exception of SabMag events, of course), but this sounded like fun. Besides, when the emphasis is so often on the cruising side of the spectrum at these events, one that focuses more on ( Read more... )

I'm still keeping my fingers crossed, because stuff did go wrong this late on the last house--but it looks like we finally found our new home. Recap: we were outbid on the first house, and we decided to withdraw our offer on the second one after a particularly educational and enlightening inspection. The inspector is definitely on our Christmas ( Read more... )

Since I'm to become a resident of the Michigan city bearing this odd name beginning early next month and, well, since it's something that I just have to know, being who and what I am, I set out to find out.

According to elizilla, it's a Greek word meaning "can't afford Ann Arbor." We did shop for a lot of houses in the area and, while we determined that ( Read more... )