SPOT not all it's cracked up to be

I went and picked up one of these SPOT Satellite Personal Tracker devices on Saturday, and activated it. The product literature said you could have friends and family track your progress with the SPOTcasting functionality. What they neglect to tell you is that in order for anyone to see your updates, they need to log into the web service with your account credentials. My intent was to post a URL on this blog, so anyone could click it and see where I am or where I last checked in. It doesn't look like that's quite going to work so easily.

The service rep I spoke to was aware of this shortcoming, as I am not the only one to be dissatisfied with the current service offering. Apparently it's the number one complaint from customers, and "is being worked on" but there is no ETA for a fix.

Time to get creative.

DNS tomfoolery

I've switched from using a blogspot.com URL to my own custom one with the idea that someday I may move off of blogger and host this stuff on my own machine. If you have bookmarked http://bbidnick.blogspot.com you may want to update that bookmark to be http://blog.bidnick.com to avoid the redirect screen.

Bike readiness

Headed over to Aftershocks this afternoon to get the shock reservoir moved to a less obtrusive position. Now BOTH passenger footpegs are accessible. The only thing left to do now is some carb modifications to richen the mixture up a bit, make the slide move faster, and replace the air/fuel screw with a thumbscrew, so I can adjust it as needed for elevation changes without tools. The bike is nearly ready for its big ride. The rider might not be as prepared.

And so it begins

For those of you that haven't heard, I'm going for a motorcycle ride. A long one. About 8,000 miles long. After 5 years at the company I work for, one gets to take a 4-week long paid sabbatical. And if your manager is cool, you can tack on as much as 2 weeks of your own vacation time to it. I had big plans to go to Australia last year, but I got a little sick and so those plans went out the window.

The one thing I learned in 2007 is that you never know what will happen tomorrow. Or even today. So I've decided to get out and see the USA while I have the opportunity.

I'll be using this blog to post about things I've seen on the road, share pictures, and let everyone who is following along know that I'm still ok.