Pimped my ride

OK, not really. Tonight I installed the GPS on the new bike, and the installation is pretty tight if I do say so myself.

The view from the cockpit. I can see all the gauges, get to all the controls, and even retained the use of the (mostly useless) tank storage compartment.






From a different angle. If you have a Concours 14, and want to install a Garmin Zumo, talk to the GadgetGuy.

You meet the nicest people on a motorcycle

Honda used to have an old ad campaign, "You meet the nicest people on a Honda." I'm stepping outside the manufacturer bounds here and need to tell you folks about Genna the GadgetGuy. He makes some really slick kits to mount various GPS devices on your motorcycle. I had the Base Plate II for the KLR and it fit perfectly. Well, I managed to rescue the Zumo off of the broken bike, but it will not simply bolt onto the Concours. So I called Genna and left a voicemail, hoping he'd return it. Sure enough he called back, and I explained my situation. We talked about what he could put together, and by Friday I should have a pile of parts to make a clean looking installation.

YES I WILL POST PICTURES, I PROMISE.

Anyhow... I looked up where Genna is and saw that he's in Maryland, so I told him I might stop by and thank him in person. Once he realized I was doing a big x-country trip, he became that much more determined to get me back on the road with a functioning GPS.

If you ever need to mount a GPS on your bike, hit up the GadgetGuy.

Knocked a few more things off the to-do list today:
Insurance for new bike - check.
New jacket ordered, will be here Friday - check.

Then I took a stroll for the rest of the day in downtown Northwest Portland.

Cartography and stuff

If you look over to the right of the page, there's a new section called "Stuff to click on." Jesse put together a pretty slick tracking page to track all the OK signals I send from the SPOT locater beacon. Props to mutke too for some of the code he built it on.

Yes I know it says I'm still in Coos Bay. Tomorrow morning I'll go outside and send an OK signal from Portland so the map will update. I'm curious to see what route the map will think I took.

Called up the local Cycle Gear here in Portland and zipped over there before they closed. Got a shiny new helmet and some more appropriate boots.

Tomorrow I'll work on the jacket, some insurance for the new ride, and GPS gadgetry.

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.