Month: June 2003

And, looking out my entirely-glass south wall just to the right of where I make the software magic happen (that would be my bedroom office), it would appear that I’m also buried in rain.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present the Polini 910 Carena: a motorbike small enough to put on your mantelpiece, but real enough to ride!

From the article at Motorcycle.com:

Basically, pocket bikes, also known as minimotos, are not mini-bikes in the traditional sense. They are miniature GP racing motorcycles, accurate in proportion to GP bikes and include many of the same component materials such as disc brakes, alloy and billet aluminum cast perimeter frame and swingarm. They are so small they many be perfect as a decoration piece. However, pocket bikes are manufactured to be ridden.

Our test bike, the 910 Carena, represented the middle ground of the Polini pocket bike line-up. The air-cooled, single-cylinder, two-stroke motor only produces a little over six horsepower, but there is a lot of potential in this pocket bike. Bear with us as we try to explain to you what its like to ride this Italian micro-bike less than a foot off the ground at speeds up to 40 miles-per-hour.

They called it a two-stroke motor?! It’s a two-stroke engine, people. There’s a difference.

All I can say is that you’d better be the toughest (or hottest) biker of the gang if you want to ride one of these in Quebec.

[Thanks to John “lemonodor” Wiseman for pointing out this link!]

According to this story, 1.2% of the gun dealers in the United States sell weapons that account for 57% of all firearms used in crimes.

Recommended Reading

Just in case you didn’t know (and hence didn’t get the joke title), here’s an explanation of what the Pareto Principle is.

We’re only a couple of days into National Accordion Awareness Month, and nobody can accuse me of not pulling my weight. Here are my contributions…

“If I’ve told them once, I’ve told them a thousand times, it’s AccordionGuy first, then Rush Limbaugh.”

Thanks to a recommendation from Scott “Hello, My Name Is Scott” Ginsberg — he’s the guy who wears a name tag, which gets accordion-like results and doesn’t weigh thirty freaking pounds — I’m going to be interviewed on the Keith Larson Show on WBT News/Talk Radio (1110 on your AM dial in Charlotte, NC) this Friday at 11:35 a.m. Eastern. They haevn’t given me any particular “script” to stick to; as far as I can tell, it’ll be me nattering for twenty-five minutes in my radio-friendly schmoove voice, after which Rush Limbaugh takes over. I hear he’s going to eat a tree on his Friday show.

A big thank you to Scott for the recommendation! You’re the man!

ChickTV

Next week, I’ll be taping a segment for an episode of an upcoming W Network / WTN show called Living Romance. This particular episode concerns itself with serenading and will feature a mariachi band, a violinist who plays for his girlfriend in the morning to wake her up and at night to lull her to sleep (oh yeah, that’ll be happening once the honeymoon’s over), and me. As with the radio show, this will be largely unscripted, although I think there’s going to be a busking segment where I attempt to woo women on the street. Which sounds like an average weekend for me.

Ooh! I get a movie credit!

On Monday, June 16th, the Canadian Film Centre will premiere five new short films, including one called Squeezebox, on which I served as technical consultant, extra, accordion foley artist and soundtrack musician. That, and I also gave two of the young teen stars help with their music and math homework. The preview screening will take place at the Uptown Theatre on Monday, June 16th at 7:00 p.m., followed by an after party at The Phoenix at 8:30.

I’ll be there, and if you live in Accordion City and want to come along, drop me a line and let me know!

…which I’m afraid might be too much of a good thing. I wake up and start coding, and before I go to bed, the last thing I do is check files into version control. Then I sleep, only to dream about coding. In one particular dream, I was standing in front of the Kickass Karaoke crowd, and they were asking me “why isn’t it done yet?” and on the screens, there was SQL instead of song lyrics.

Thankfully, I still managed to squeeze out enough personal time for the weekly dinner with my family and a couple of hours to make an impromptu visit to meet the utterly charming Min Jung Kim when she passed through town. No one expects the Min Jung Inquisition! (Min Jung, you can try on my accordion any time, and thanks, Rannie for the invite!)

The rest of my life, however is TLAs (three-letter acronyms): PHP, ASP, SQL, P2P. (Okay, “2” isn’t a letter.)

All I have to do is survive the next couple of weeks and things will get back to what passes for normal round my way.

I’m going to try to post something later on tonight, but there are no guarantees. In the meantime, how about another one of those silly Internet quiz results that I save for these occasions?

Yeah, as if we hadn’t guessed that already.