Biker Truisms

The only good view of a thunderstorm is in your rear view mirror.

Four wheels move the body; two wheels move the soul.

You start riding with a full pot of luck and an empty pot of experience. The object is to fill the pot of experience before you empty the pot of luck.

If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.

Midnight bugs taste just as bad as noon time bugs.

Saddlebags can never hold everything you want, but they CAN hold everything you need.

Don't ride so late into the night that you sleep through the sunrise.

Sometimes it takes a whole tank full of gas before you can think straight.

Never hesitate to ride past the last street light at the edge of town.

Respect the person who has seen the dark side of motorcycling and lived, and still rides.

Young riders pick a destination and go. Old riders pick a direction and go.

A good mechanic will let you watch without charging you for it.

Whatever it is, it's better in the wind.

Two-lane blacktop isn't a highway - it's an attitude.

Keep your bike in good repair. Motorcycle boots are not all that comfortable for walking.

People are like Motorcycles: each is customized a bit differently.

Sometimes, the best communication happens when you're on separate bikes.

When you're riding lead, don't spit.

Catching a yellow jacket in your shirt @ 70 mph can double your vocabulary.

Everyone crashes. Some get back on. Some don't. Some can't.

If you can't get it going with bungee cords and duct tape, God's telling you to stop for the night.

Only a Biker knows why a dog sticks his head out of a car window

Starting on Friday, after work. The temperature was in the middle 50's and I rode the bike to work, so the ride home was very pleasant.

Nothing too exciting happened Friday night; we went to Wal-Mart in Jefferson City to pick up a few things. I did meet a couple of old friends that I have not seen in a while, so it was nice to catch-up with them.

Saturday started off with work on my '88 Toyota Pickup. I noticed earlier in the week that it needed new brakes, so I worked on that Saturday morning. The only real problem was that the parts store gave me the wrong brake shoes, but once I had the first set off and realized the problem, it was a short bike-ride back to the store to get the correct shoes.

Then, I worked on putting my TM-D700 back in the truck. I had some problem with the wiring for power for the radio and had pulled the radio out several months ago. I finally got the wiring straightened out and am happy to have a real radio in the truck again.

We went out to dinner on Saturday night to a new Bar-B-Q place in Sevierville, Woody's I think it's called. It's much like Buddy's, but they have more options. I gave it an average rating. I think I'll give it a little while for the cooks to get in their groove and give it another try.

Sunday started off as a lazy day. I fixed a big breakfast (Eggs, Sausage, Biscuits & Gravy) - a weekend favorite for me. Then I began to do some cleaning in the office. I did some re-arranging and eliminated a few bundles of wire messes that I had in here with the computers, radios and such.

We went out for lunch, nothing elaborate, just KFC.

After lunch, I worked on adding insulation to some pipes that I had trouble with during the last couple of cold snaps. When I finished that, I went over to a neighbor's where my father-in-law and some guys were working on a trailer that they will use to haul jeeps on. It's a rather large trailer (it will haul three jeeps) and they were in the process of replacing the axles with axles from a tractor-trailer trailer. Their approach was to flip the trailer over to make the welding of the new axles in place easier. This afternoon's project was to flip the trailer right-side-up and mount the tires on it.

After that, I settled down to get ready for my weekly APRS net. The net went well, with a fair amount of discussion that lasted about 40 minutes.

After that, I found the movie "Enter the Dragon" on television, so I decided to kick back and watch that while enjoying a pipe full of "1Q" tobacco.

Yes, this is, for me, a great weekend. Nothing significant happened, but I got some things accomplished that I have wanted to for a while now and I had plenty of time to enjoy it.

This time, we planned on taking the "Behind-the-Scenes Tour". Unfortunately, even in the off-season, these tours sell out quickly, so we were not able to get tickets. Instead, we took their "Rooftop" tour. We just barely made it in time to get tickets for this tour; we took the 2:00 tour, the last one of the day would be at 3:00.

We used the time before hand to explore the Italian Garden's. We had never walked down around the pools and this time we were greeted by a couple of geese.

From there, we decided to have some lunch. We ate at the Stables Cafe and had a wonderful lunch. I choose the Harvest Turkey Sandwich with melted Brie, bacon, arugula. Lori had a chicken wrap of some sort.

After lunch, we took a self-passed tour of the house. This was much nicer in January than in late November. There was just not nearly as many people there, so we were free to take as much or as little time as we wanted in the various rooms.

Once we finished out tour, it was nearly time for our Rooftop tour. We had a great tour guide, John, who lead a group of about 15 of us on the tour. He was very entertaining and knowledgeable about the various areas in and out of the house.

Of course, the best part of this tour is being on the roof and seeing the views. The view from the back balcony was not bad either; I can imagine sitting there watching the setting sun while puffing on a cigar!

I guess this was not a camera day for me. I only took about 30 pictures and very few of them turned out to be reasonably good pics. Oh well, the one good thing about this is I know we'll be back - and probably soon!

Well, I've been thinking about what I wanted to do with the Martial Arts section of my blog. I'm not knowledgeable enough to write a weekly (or even monthly) column on something related to the arts, so I decided to just begin using it as a way to keep track of these little things that I hear from an instructor, read in a magazine or whatever hits me.

This week, we discussed a self-defense technique that was designed to knock the wind out of an attacker. Many people asked if this was the appropriate move (as opposed to snapping the guys neck for example). My instructor explained that this was a very valid option especially given the scenario that he had outlined.

Then he went into his explanation of why:

If you can't breath, you can't fight.
If you can't walk, you can't fight.
If you can't see, you can't fight.

This response takes away the opponent's ability to breath, even if it is only temporary. During that time, it will be difficult if not impossible for the opponent to fight and it gives you ample time to do whatever else needs to be done (i.e., leave the area).

So today, I got in early to make sure I had as many options as possible.

I was able to get the classes that I wanted; a web-based English Composition II class and a Thursday night Philosophy class at the Sevier County campus.

Two classes should be much easier than the four I took last time; hopefully this semester I'll have time to occasionally breathe.

Hopefully this semester I'll do a better job of writing about what's going on at school in the blog. No promises.

First, what would you do when someone that you are involved in a confrontation with indicates that he has a gun. The answer that we came up with was simple. Assume he's telling the truth and act quickly so that he can't pull the gun; knock him out, then search him for the gun. Why? If the guy pulls the gun, then you're in some potential trouble (see below), if you kill the guy because he said he had a gun but actually did not, you may not feel so good about it in the morning (or on the day of the trial).

The next escalation would be when a guy pulls a gun. In this scenario, it's clear that this guy is out to kill you. You must react fist. Running away is not an option because it's very difficult to outrun a bullet. If you are close enough to do so, taking the opponent out is the best course of action. If you are not close enough, you have to buy some time and close the gap.

Another situation is when a person pulls a knife. In this situation, the best option is to run away. The knife can only hurt you if you are close. If you can get out of harms way, you're safe and ultimately that's what the end goal should be.

So I figured that I had something pretty low in the OS that was preventing the Virus Scans/Spyware removal from being able to remove the stuff. To get past this, I first tried booting into the Trinity Rescue Disk (http://trinityhome.org) and running a virus scan from there. It found nothing.

Interestingly, I did not find any Spyware removal software for a bootable Linux distribution, so I went looking. What I found was the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (http://www.ubcd4win.com/index.htm). This let me build a bootable CD that was running Windows XP. It did require that I have a copy of my MS Windows XP install disk, but I had that so it was no problem. The really good news is that it came with Spyware/Virus removal tools pre-installed, so it was easy to use this disk to boot into windows, update the Spyware definitions and scan the drive.

In the end, even these steps did not remove this Trojan and I ended up re-installing XP on his computer to eliminate it, but I thought these tools were pretty handy to have in the tool bag.

Last night was my first night back in karate class in a couple of months. The class was a good one for me to get back in the groove of things. We worked on charts, the very basic elements of our art.

One part of chart two is leg stretches. When we got to this point, someone asked "Why do we stretch?" and "Why is it better to stretch after you have warmed-up?".

Have you ever picked up a rubber band and watched it snap as you stretched it around something? The same kind of thing can happen to our muscles. If we take them cold and pull them to their limit, they will break. Muscles with a greater range of motion are less likely to experience tears when used actively.

Take two identical rubber bands. Let one of them sit. Subject the second one to daily "exercise" in the form of stretching it every day. You want to stretch it so that it gets a good stretch, but not to the point of breaking. Try this for a couple of months. At the end of that period, compare the two rubber bands. Are they the same length? What happens if you put both of them on your fingers and stretch them at the same time? Which one breaks first? My guess is that the act of stretching the second rubber band has resulted in it being longer and having a greater range of motion.

This results of stretching the second rubber band is the same thing that you want to accomplish by stretching your muscles.

Stretching stimulates blood flow to the muscles helping muscles heal after a hard workout.