As it gets colder and more humid now even here in California, I am again looking into improving wind protection and noise level on the F800GS. The V-Strom with the Madstad brackets and a Givi shield is pretty good, only having some slight buffeting which I can probably solve with finding the right angle for the shield. But the F800GS is still kind of suboptimal.

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For Andrea's V-Strom we were looking into options of lowering the bike a little bit so she can flatfoot easier to get more confidence when stopping or in slow speed maneuvering. Option number one was a lower seat to not play around with the overall bike layout. So we went out for a little trip down to Hollister, CA. There, a well known company called Corbin makes excellent motorcycle seats that can be optionally made lower than the stock seats - at least that's the theory.

Today I played around with memcached as a response cache for this application. The goal was to boost the number of requests per second this application can handle when there is not so much content change but a huge load of read requests - e.g. from being "slashdotted", meaning, linked from a high profile site and getting a huge number of requests in a short time.

Again I've some more work into URL rewriting for the blog entries. The latest change affects the entries only, not the blog pages. Now the title is taken, normalized to be URL safe, and then used as part of the URL.

If you see any issues, let me know!

Out of interest I always wanted to rent a Harley Road King or Electra Glide for a weekend and take it for a short trip. I'm cured ... wanna know why? Read on ...

Link

Upper management in too many companies doesn't get that employees work more and better when they are happy in their environment. Mixed environment gives more people the opportunity to choose what they like. But those grey haired block heads don't understand this.

My most hated things at work:

Today Andrea did her first trip on public roads. To avoid normal Bay Area traffic we started at 6 in the morning with some neighborhood streets going to Central Expressway. We chose Central Express Way in favor of a "normal" highway for the first higher speed street as there is way less traffic and max legal speed is 50mph (around 80km/h).

From there we took Lawrence to Saratoga Ave and through Saratoga on Highway 9 to Skyline Blvd. Short break at the vista point, then north on Skyline Blvd to Page Mill Road. Page Mill Road down to Highway 280 and home again.

Overall it was about 48 miles (77km) and it took us about 2:45h. We were very careful and slow especially on the curvy Highway 9 and Page Mill Road. It was definitely a lot of fun driving.

When I was lubing the chain of our F800GS I saw something metallic on the rear tire and was immediately wondering what I picked up here. When we had it out it was a nearly 2.5cm nail - it was missing the head, this was probably broken when I picked it up and then ground down between tire and tar. We were lucky though that the tube didn't get a puncture.

So this time everything went well and hopefully we won't get something like this again in the near future.

So, for whatever reason, page titles stopped working. I'm not sure when and why this happened, as this should have been populated automatically and I'm sure it worked at one time. I'm also sure I haven't touched it. But so what, it works again and maybe I'm even able to see "content by title" again on Google Analytics. Would be cool.

To the left you see a photo of one of our (better: Andrea's) sunflowers from the front yard. That beast is about two meters high now (6'8") and has dozens of blossoms - most of them still closed. It looks absolutely amazing. Click on the little image to see a bigger one.

The photo was taken in the evening, when it was getting dark. The flash brought the blossom really well into focus while getting the background nearly completely black. The picture is left right as it came from the camera. No manipulation.