Me: I know you don’t like to ride [on the back of my motorcycle] with me anymore, but you know I love riding two-up and I hope you don’t mind if I take the odd passenger occasionally.

Butterfly: No. … As long as they’re not naked.

Me: Oh you can rest assured that would never happen. I demand that all my passengers wear a helmet.

*drum fill*

I can’t sleep. Again.

Normally when I can’t sleep, I pull Lorelei out of the garage and take her for a lap around Palm Beach County. Only this time, I wandered a bit farther south: I ended up on Ft. Lauderdale Beach, a place where I used to frequent all the time–of course, I lived down there at the time, and didn’t have to drive a motorcycle 50 miles to get there.

Somehow, though, I always end up there when I’m feeling blue and need a bit of “me” time. Tonight definitely qualified as one of those nights.

I ended up at a hole-in-the-wall dive bar just off Sunrise and A-1-A called The Famous Parrot. It didn’t look particularly famous, but I was thirsty, and so I had a Jack & Coke and, less blue, I was on my way.

I figured that as long as I’m not sleeping, and I’m in the neighborhood, I ought to stop by the office and check on a 40gb file file transfer from Denver (where my company’s parent company is) that I kicked off over the weekend(!). To my great surprise, it still hasn’t completed yet–some 72 hours after I started it–but at least it hasn’t stopped.

Knock wood. It still has 56 minutes to go…

I reckon I could’ve just as easily checked on it from home. But I was already here, and figured I’d stop on by for a couple of Pita chips and a Coke before I headed for home.

I posted this on Facebook, but it just wasn’t the same.

One day, a little less than a year ago, I took some video with my phone while I was commuting to work on a beautiful Florida autumn morning. I edited the clips together, set them to music, and here are the results:

So, for those of you who were ever curious as to what it’s like to be in the saddle of a 1,200cc high-performance touring motorcycle while it zips along Florida’s Turnpike on a beautiful Autumn morning, here ya go.

This has been an amazing morning. And I don’t mean ‘amazing’ in the good way. I mean ‘amazing in that I’m amazed that so much could go awry in a single morning–and it’s only just lunchtime.

• I thought it’d be a nice morning to ride Lorelei to work, so I stopped at the gas station a mile or so from my house to fuel up and fill my tires. I left the key in the ignition when I filled the tires (a sweaty, dirty job in itself), and killed the three-year-old battery.
  • A nice gentleman tried to give me a jump, but my puny little pathetic jumper cables were not up to the task.
  • I walked the mile or so home and got my truck and portable jump-starter, and Lorelei started right up. I pulled her into a large parking lot, where I’ll go collect her later this evening.
  • I ended up getting to the office around 11:00am. Wow, that’s late.
• Once at the office, I was informed that because of an inspection happening on Thursday, all the low-voltage wiring (e.g. network, alarm, and the like) has to be completely off the ceiling grid–y’know, the grid that all the ceiling tiles hang from.
  • Our offices are over ten years old, and still have shit in the ceiling from the old BlueBehemoth days (read: a metric assload of Token-Ring) . Even if it’s not connected to anything, it still has to be tie-wrapped off the ceiling grid, or cut out.
  • It is incredibly hot, sweaty, physical work, going up and down and up and down on the ladder.
• My second-line manager’s ThinkPad X300 is giving me screaming purple fits. I’m trying to double the size of the hard drive, but it simply will not cooperate.
  • The X300 is equipped with a 64gb solid-state hard drive. It’s really slick, as it has no moving parts. But, at 64gb, it’s pretty puny by today’s standards.
  • The 64gb drive has a micro-SATA interface, which means it’s different from all the equipment I would normally use to copy one hard drive to another. The replacement drive conveniently came with a standard SATA-to-micro SATA interface. However, it’s not recognized by my external SATA USB drive reader under Windows XP.
  • I used GHOST to make a copy of the machine’s data, and transferred it to the new drive–this time, directly plugged into my bench machine’s planar (motherboard, for those of you who are not BlueBehemoth initiates). When I inserted the new drive into the X300, it would not boot.
  • booted the X300 with the Windows XP cd, thinking I’d use the Recovery Console to write a new MBR (master boot record) and boot sector to the disk. Windows XP would not recognize the new disk in the X300.
  • I plugged the new disk into the bench machine’s planar again and booted it with the Windows XP cd. It recognized it this time, and using the recovery console, was able to write a new MBR and boot sector to the disk. But once again, on reinserting it back into the X300, it refused to boot.
    • I’m beginning to suspect that this drive isn’t compatible with this machine, and is only compatible with the X301. A call to Lenovo ought to tell me for sure.
    • If it is indeed incompatible, I’ll have to return the drive to PC Connections, from whence it came.

Whew. What a morning.