Is BMW going to introduce a crotch rocket? If so, will it be strictly for racing or will it be available to the public, and how soon? Find out here.

Oooo, I gots goosebumps.

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Saturday I met up with Whitty and his family to go to a Mariners baseball game. I didn’t know it at the time, but there was also a motocross race happening at the football stadium, which is right next door. We’re walking down the street to where the stadiums are (me, Whit, his wife, and their two boys, aged 7 and 5), when I noticed a whole bunch of people with THEIR kids walking through the crosswalk. The way they were dressed told me that these folks were NOT going to a baseball game. Oh sure, they had ball caps on, but most of the ones I saw that day (on non-Mariners fans anyway) were some version of camouflage, and they were wearing motocross jerseys with some guy’s number and name, or better yet, that stupid NO FEAR logo, or sometimes the jersey was basically an ad for some packed-with-sugar energy drink. At any rate, there was a mix of thousands of ball fans and thousands of motocross fans all walking to the same area.

Up at the intersection in front of us, I saw a family walk past, with their children doing that little hop/jump/skip sort of thing that children do when they’re excited, and I said as adoringly as I could, “Awwwww, would you look at all those cute little rednecks….how sweeeeet!” And just as we got to the intersection, Whitty’s 7 yr old asked, “What’s a redneck?”

Needless to say, a whole bunch of camo hats turned 180 degrees to look at us. There might even have been a full set of teeth between them.

So I guess the moral of the story is: Oh sure, I might know when to and when not to whisper, but the kids don’t, so it’s my job too to make sure that I don’t accidently put ideas or questions into their sweet little heads that may illicit innocent remarks at the wrong time.

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Please bear with me, as I’m maybe going to change designs again. I was bored and I saw this one theme that I thought might be neat.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Mudbutt showed me this awesome developer’s tool that takes a LOT of the guesswork out of trying to figure out what goes where, and what I should be changing around when I want a certain result and anyway, I’m going to change the look around, but since I am in much more control now, I’m going to take some time and do it right.

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WARNING: After reviewing this post, it has been found that if you aren’t into bicycles, you may not understand, or find interesting, the contents of said following post. Read at your own risk.

One day I’m sitting there, minding my own business, when a bike rep comes to the shop to show us the new bike line he started to carry. In the course of him showing us catalogs and price sheets, he took us out to his car where he showed us a particular frame that was a cyclocross frame…and it was all black…and the price was right.

So I bought it right there on the spot.

Oh sure, I measured it…made sure the top tube was alright, and the seat tube length was kosher and all that. And a few weeks later, I built it up. Looks killer too! Black everywhere, it’s totally murdered out, as those crazy kids like to say.

And then I noticed that the cranks rubbed against the chainstays. Hmmm, I decided to upgrade cranks instead of just getting a new BB spindle. (I know I’m losing more and more readers cuz this is getting techy, but since there are only two readers anyway, I know that at least DP is still reading)

So Dave, here’s what I did. I got new cranks and installed them, only to find that they rub too! WTF! Is this bike designed only for mtn cranks and not able to take an external bearing BB? I ran into this same problem with a customer’s Ibis a while back, and his bike had to have a square-taper BB or an ISIS BB. Oh great… I then took some spacers and after messing around with the bottom bracket cup spacing, I ended up with a 2.5mm spacer on the drive-side (yep, only one reader left at this point) and the little safety-tab thingy on the non-drive side doesn’t quite want to go into place.

Well, now what? I’m also finding at this point that the new frame isn’t as stiff as my old frame was, and that’s bumming me out. I decided to look around at our various distributors and after about a week of measurement-taking, I ordered another frame, this time a full-on road frame. It was on super closeout sale and so I pulled the trigger and waited anxiously for it arrive. And when it did?

I see why they’re on closeout. It’s so ugly, nobody would ever buy one! I mean Jesus, I’m going to have to buy some Capt America or Spiderman underoos just to ride this thing. Holy crap, I didn’t sign on for this. But hey, it’s so damn loud I shouldn’t get hit by a car because I wasn’t seen at least.

Gotta look on the bright side, knowhatimeen? And this thing is BRIGHT!!!

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A few days ago, Andrew got the most brilliant idea.  We go to the german bar often enough.  Hell, last night they called last call and when I looked at my watch, the bartender said, “NOT YOU!!  THEM!”

Anyway, Andrew got a wonderful idea.  Why don’t we try to sample a .3 liter glass of each of the beers that the german bar has on tap?  After doing the math, it came to about 5 liters.

That’s a lot of beer

As it turns out, our math was wrong.  The actual number of taps makes it out to be more like 6 liters.

That’s a lot of beer.

Extensive research has shown that we both can hold our own after 3 liters and one shot, so if we take long enough and eat and make sure we ingest enough water, we should be able to endure without incurring a police presence.

So today we thought we’d try it.  I think Andrew’s exact words were, “It’s not like there’s going to be a GOOD day to do it.”  We sent a text msg to the bartender which outlined our intent, to which he replied, “Game on!”, and we set about to get our supplies together, mostly items to document this occasion.  I brought 2 cameras, my computer and power supply, and Andrew brought his computer.  I managed to forget the cable that attaches my camera to the computer, so I can’t show you any of the photos we’ve taken up to now, but I’ll post them later.  We are taking photos every time we get a new beer (bier) and they’re turning out to be pretty hilarious, and after 8 samplings, I must say that this was a great idea.

The only problem (so far) has been that an ex-real German and his family sat at the table behind us and when he saw us geeking out on our computers (I was using Photoshop and Andrew was making a business card), he leaned over and asked us what we were doing.  That turned into him leaning over and telling us all about why this german bar wasn’t TRULY authentic, and how they really do it in Germany…ad nauseum.

No thanks.  Go away.

Luckily he was gone within an hour and we’ve been left to our beers and computers since then for the most part.  At one point, Andrew said, “I wish we could order beers electronically!”  Which reminded me…one time I actually ordered a beer by texting the bartender.  He came over with my beer and laughed, “I LOVE the fact that you ordered with a text, that’s AWESOME!”

At any rate, we’re at 9 beers with 6 to go to meet our 5liter goal, with 3 extra credit beers remaining.  I think we might make it.

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The other day, my webmaster was here, checking up on stuff and making necessary changes.  On the front end, all is good, as I’ve been able to make the header change around each time the viewer hits my site, or hits the refresh button.  On the back end though, changes needed to be made.  I was getting so much spam sent to me disguised as comments, that I’d have to moderate 60+ “comments” a day.  Buy viagra, buy cialis, surf our site for porn, do all that and more.

No thanks.  I just want my friends to leave me messages.

So webmaster is here and a friend calls, and that’s when the REAL porn was revealed.

“Hey, what are you doing?”

Uhhhh, my webmaster is here and he’s making sure my back end is free of spam.

EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW, I gotta go take a shower!

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beer loves company
together we have much fun
please keep your voice down

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When it comes to PHP and HTML and all the other nuts n bolts of the internet, I can stare at code for days and it just doesn’t make any sense at all.  And then one day for no reason at all, I’ll figure something out, or I’ll look at it different, and I’ll make sense of it.  Such is the case tonight.  I’ve been wanting for months to get back the feature that enables my header image to randomly switch between a number of images that I’ve prepared for just that purpose.  Well, for some silly reason, I got it to work tonight.  Please indulge me by hitting the Refresh button a couple of times and seeing the header change, will you please?

Thank you.

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I don’t know if I want to devote a page here to Egypt and write all my individual thoughts on all the different crazy things I saw, but at least for now there is a place you can go to see a lot of what I did while I was there.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chewykolchuk/sets/

I still haven’t tagged and added descriptions to everything, but there are quite a few pics up there, so go have a look.

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Yep.  I’m feeling much better than I did in the previous whining post, but that’s what I do.  When I’m injured or sick….I whine.  I’m good at it too!  So I posted about how my immune system went on strike right?  Well I’m shitting you when I say that that very night I went home and basically developed a double dose of pink eye.  WTF!  So I went to the doctor the next morning and she told me that my immune system went on strike and I should just ride it out.  So I did.  Watched a bunch of really crappy stuff on TV and stayed in bed the entire weekend.  Oh boy, did I get a sore back and develop some serious cabin fever, BUT!!!  I’m better now.  And I have a new bike frame that I’m excited about.  And I rode in to work for the first time in a billion years, so things are starting to slowly get back to normal.  Well…most things.  I love and will forever miss my best friend, but I’m extremely happy and honored to have been a friend of his, and that will have to be good enough until it’s my turn.

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