50,000 miles.

I finally passed 50,000 miles of riding experience on motorcycles. I had 3,000 on my Volusia, followed by 12,000 on my Kingpin and just rolled over 36,000 on my GSA. I actually passed it a little while ago but kept forgetting about posting it, so if you do the math on the numbers, you’ll notice it’s actually 51,000+ miles, or 82,000 kilometers.

To put it into perspective:

• That’s enough miles to ride around the circumference of the Earth twice along the equator.
• You could ride from San Jose to Toronto Ont and back 9.5 times.
• Go from San Jose to Calgary Alberta and back 16.5 times.
• Ride around the entire USA followings it’s outer edges 6 times.
• Ride from San Jose to Fairbanks AK and back 8.2 times.
• If I was on the moon, I could have ridden around it 7.5 times!

It’s not a staggering number of miles, but I think it’s enough to officially move me out of the motorcycle newbie group.

It also gives me a lot of perspective on the riders who have ridden 200,000 miles or more. Miles on a motorcycle are much harder then miles on a car. If it’s hot out, your cooking inside all your gear. If it’s raining, your miserable and chances are, cold and wet. If it’s cold outside, your battling the cold as well. You get sore legs and back aches on a motorcycle, cramps and wrist aches. You feel every inch of road you ride over. It’s not a passive experience like a car is. I have a lot of respect for high mileage riders. It ain’t easy.

Golden Axe: Beast Rider

The game that I rolled onto after Iron Man has just been placed on store shelves. I did environment work on this one, mostly dealing with objects within the game. Modeling, texturing, uvmapping, grime maps and pretty much anything else they needed in order to get it finished and onto store shelves.

Golden Axe: Beast Rider hit store shelves on October 14th. It’s available for both the XBox 360 and the PS3.

There is also a great trailer that was released today that IGN is hosting.

CLICK HERE FOR THE TRAILER.

Get the PS3 version here, and the XBox360 version here!

It’s been getting pretty bad reviews so far. I think a lot of the reviewers are being harsher then they need to be. I don’t think it’s a brilliant game, and the exclusion of multi player still has me scratching my head, but I don’t think it’s as bad as most reviewers are making it out to be.

A lot of reviewers seem to say they don’t see much of the original in the game. I disagree. There is Tyris, the barbarian makes an appearance, Death Adder, a chicken like thing to ride like in the original, the turtle titan, dwarfs to kick around for potions and loads of hacking and slashing, even the cheesy dragon spell is in there. It’s basic hack and slash like the original. The glaring omission of two player is hard to forgive though and that seems to be where people really get stuck on it. If you could play with your buddy in the same version, fighting for the same potions from the same little dwarf being kicked around, I think it would have been more faithful to the arcade version we all love. Sega and SL deserve a smack for no multiplayer, thats obvious. Are they being punished for not including it? I think so.

I would give it a 6 to 7 out of 10. It’s not brilliant, but it’s not that bad either. I’d say it’s a decent enough rental. I wonder if multiplayer had been included in the game how the reviews would have played out? It seems to me, far to many people decided long ago, when it was announced that it would be a single player game (I also did a WTF? at that time) that they hated it and have railed against the game ever since. It’s interesting that the average player, not reviewers, are giving it about the same rating I have. The forum on IGN also has reviews from people who bought the game and think IGN’s “review” on it is full of baloney.

I think GameDaily gave it a fair review. It goes into what works in the game, and what doesn’t. To many of the reviews I have read for it read like they were written by a 12 year old throwing a tantrum.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

I recently watched this movie and figured I would comment on it since a good friend of mine posted a short review on his site.

I’m going to start right out and say, I don’t think this should have been on the big screen. It clearly wasn’t up to par with other large budget CG movies, that’s not to say it didn’t have some cool moments though. There were parts of it I thought looked great, but it wasn’t able to keep that level of quality through the entire story.

The rendered look was very matte at times, without much specularity. The lighting wasn’t that interesting and the animation was flat and seemed very stiff. Then there was the facial animation… Sure the lips matched the words, but their faces seemed very plastic and hard. If you’re going to bring a CG movie to the theater, you better be able to give people what they expect on the big screen. If you can’t do that because of the team size or budget then they should expect to be called on it. Simply because it’s Star Wars, doesn’t mean it should be in the theaters.

This movie looks like it was made for the small screen with a small screen episodic budget. If you look at the movie through that lens, it then becomes much more enjoyable. I think they have really achieved something and have raised the bar for CG television. If they can maintain that level of quality through the tv series, I’ll be pretty happy! I’ll certainly tivo it and watch it when it starts airing. This movie would have been great as a straight to BluRay disc or a big TV event on The Cartoon Network instead of trying to pass it off as theater worthy.

I like the visual look they have created for the characters. Some of it looks more successful then others, such as how Obewan looks compared to Anakin, or how the Padawan looks like something designed by Disney’s Little Mermaid team. All in all though, most of the characters look pretty cool! It was interesting to see some of the well known characters, such as Yoda or Jabba sporting the new visual style.

The fight scenes were about what I expect from the Star Wars universe. Lots of droids marching in straight lines shootings straight ahead while Jedi’s in front flail wildly with their light sabers like they are playing badminton. There are some heavy artillery mechs that were pretty funky to spice things up and added interest to the battles. I thought the most interesting battle, the duel between Dooku and Anakin lacked real menace.

The story was actually interesting and I enjoyed it, although some of the dialog was pretty terrible. The droids are painfully lame and fail miserably trying to inject a comic element into the movie. They are so stupid that I got flashbacks to the idiotic soldiers in Return of the Jedi. They stutter, flail and utter one liners that make you think WTF? The Padawan that is assigned to Anakin is insufferable. Her dialog and attitude in the movie make you think she is the master and Anakin is the Padawan. She does whatever she wants and Anakin tags along. I think they were trying to show her as strong willed and rebellious, like Anakin was. Instead, she comes across as lippy, unreasonable and whiny. There was also the character Zero The Hutt who does some of the worst voice acting I have heard in some time. What was with his accent? Was he supposed to be gay?

I really liked the audio, lots of great familiar saber sounds and gun turrets. All the usual noises that you know as uniquely Star Wars. The music was nicely done as well.

All in all, I think it was a good start to a series! There are some ugly bumps in there, but what series starts out perfect? (Well, Futurama comes to mind… heh heh)

I’d give it a 6.5 out of 10. It’s not exactly a great movie, but its not really a bad one either.

Happy Hollow Gorilla Fundraiser.

Last weekend Catherine and I went to a private fund raising event at San Jose’s Happy Hollow Park and Zoo. 100% of the money raised goes to the Advance Rangers protecting Virunga National Park’s gorillas and hippos that live in it.

You can read about it HERE on their web site. I strongly encourage donations.

We left the event with our bank accounts bruised but feeling like our money will be well used.

They had a lot of items spread across many tables for a silent auction. They also had seven very cool items up for grabs with a real auction as well. We placed some bids for several items in the silent auction and waited for 8 pm to roll around for the main auction.

The first item up for auction was really cool! It was a chance to create a painting with the monkeys in the zoo! I thought it would go for a really high auction price, after all, who wouldn’t love to create monkey art? Catherine decided to try for it as a birthday present for me! She bid against two others, and just before we reached the limit of what we were willing to pay for, the other people stopped bidding! We won! So sometime in the next few weeks, I’m going to the monkey enclosure to paint with the monkeys! WOOT! I’ll post of a couple of pics after I do it.

We ended up winning several of the items we bid on in the silent auction. Catherine got a San Jose Grand Prix Staff shirt for Tomas, and I picked up two cool pieces of art.

The first one is an oil on wood painting of two Capybaras by Joe Weatherly. I really like his work and consider myself very lucky to own one. I’ve also had a real soft spot for Capybara’s, they look like something that should have been around in the ice age. I really love this painting.

I’m not sure who did the other piece. It’s an x-ray of a Mandrill skull in profile. There were three of them for auction. One large piece and two smaller ones. Vanessa Rogier, who put together the fundraiser has really great taste in art. She bid on all the same things I did, I thought it would be kind of jerk like of me to take all of them so I didn’t keep bidding on the two smaller ones. They were mighty cool though.

I think next year, I’m going to save up a bit for the event so that I can give them a larger amount then what we did this year.

Saddle Sore 1000

I just finished my first Iron Butt ride yesterday. I’ve done several long days riding before, the longest being approx 850 miles, but this would be my first 1000+ mile ride. I had no doubt that I could do it and originally wanted to do the 1500 miles in 36 hours, but my girlfriend talked me into the 1000 first. Since I knew she was nervous about it, I figured it would be wise to do the 1000 first if I wanted to do any others after that.

I read up what would be needed to qualify for a successful Iron Butt ride on Sunday and printed up the forms needed for the SaddleSore 1000. Since I’m on my days off right now, I figured Tuesday would be a good day to attempt it. I thought since it’s a work day, the highways wouldn’t be as crowded.

I decided this would be my route (removed my home address for obvious reasons, but its close to where I have the start and end) :

My Saddle Sore 1000 Route.

I did an oil change on Monday and got the bike ready for an early leave on Tuesday morning. I left my garage at 4:30 am to beat the Bay Area rush hour traffic.

By 6:00 am I was in Fairfield, just after 9:00 am I was riding past Redding. It was supposed to get pretty hot, but so far it was the perfect riding conditions. The terrain turned from plains heading to Redding into Mountains.

I decided to verify my turn near Ashland in Oregon before I turned East towards Lakeview, Nevada. The plan was to turn just before Ashland onto highway 66 but I ended up riding up into Ashland to find a Chevron. I’ve found they are reliable for giving you a gas receipt that always has the stations address, date and time. It wasn’t always possible but I tried to make Chevron my first choice.

I filled up again in Ashland and hit Highway 66. It was a pretty cool stretch of road. It had lots of curves and tight corners, in a way it reminded me a lot of the stretch of road the heads out to Stinson Beach across from the Golden Gate. It had that same kind of sketchy patch job from land slides. It was full of deep dips and very uneven spots, it was almost like a roller coaster. I saw several sport bikes that passed me going the other way so I assume it’s a popular local road. It wasn’t as fast as I was hoping though. Since it was so curvy it ate up a lot of time going across it. Eventually I reached Bly where I had a pit stop. Near Bly, the land turned from hilly with the heavy smell of dry forest into drier desert type terrain.

I met an old guy around 75 or so. He pulled up to the junk store beside the town store in an 80’s red corvette. He called it his “pickup”, because “I use it to pick up girls!” He has an old Honda bike that a friend gave him and we talked bikes for a while. He was a real character and worth talking to for 20 minutes.

Around 20 miles from Lakeview I caught up to a huge motorhome pulling a jeep behind it. They were really booking (well, for a motorhome) through a curvy section and crossed well over the double yellow line on almost EVERY corner. I got pretty pissed watching it but when we hit a straight section, I blew past them.

Lakeview was a nice enough little town and I putted along into it behind a husband and wife team on Harley’s towing a wee trailer. While filling up and taking a break, the motorhome arrived. I was going to say something to the driver, but when he hopped out he was a little old man, real old, probably over 75. I figured I could probably yell at him for over an hour and he wouldn’t give a crap. I let my anger go and hopped back onto the bike. It was already 3 pm and I was falling way behind on my schedule. I was enjoying the spectacular scenery off the major highway, but these small secondary roads were really eating up my time. No sweat though, I still felt great at the 538 mile mark and didn’t mind if I got back home late at night.

From Lakeview I headed South, back into California for another 40 miles or so along Highway 395. Along the way I passed Goose Lake, it’s so freaking huge it’s amazing. The scenery through there was top notch but I started getting lazy with the photos since I wanted to try and make up some time. Somewhere near Goose Lake I hit a 10 mile stretch home to the Super Grasshopper. I was riding around 65mph through that stretch and they would hit me like paintballs. I’ve hit plenty of grasshoppers before, but was like these suckers had armor on. They were actually uncomfortable to hit. I ended up hunkering down as low behind my windshield as I could and tucking my legs as close to the bike as possible. Even then, it still sucked.

I turned East onto Highway 447 back into Nevada. This turned into a pretty hardcore road. Slowly civilization vanished, the road became thinner and the landscape turned into hardcore Nevada nothing. My GPS said I had approx 120 miles of road to ride through. The first 60 miles I saw no other person going any direction. I ended up having to ride very slow for a large part of it, bouncing between 20 miles an hour to 55. Large sections of the road were complete crap with the poorest patch jobs I have ever seen. Grooves that grabbed the tires, loose gravel all over the road and corners with big pot holes. Riding through the high passes I had to go real slow since you could only see small sections of road before it would do a turn and vanish. The lack of signs for the corners meant you had no info on what kind of corner it was. You would go around a bend and not know if you were coming up to a gentle curve or a hairpin. Throw in the gravel all over the road and it made things real interesting. The section of the Nevada border to Gerlach had only a tiny number of people living in it. I saw maybe 3 lonely houses, but plenty of dirt tracks that headed into the hills. It made me wish I had a light dual sport bike and find out where they go.

Eventually I pulled into Gerlach, home of Burning Man and the Playa. (The last photo is the Playa taken at the Shell station) I’ve been to Burning Man twice and thought the Playa looked far nicer without the hippys on it. It had taken a real toll on my schedule to get there, I had hoped to be there far sooner then the 6 pm that I pulled in at. The speed limits were pretty low once I got off the major highways. Once I reached Gerlach they jumped back up to 70 mph, it felt great to finally be moving at a good clip again.

I pulled into a gas station at 7 pm (Loves Gas, about 20-30 miles East of Reno) and then hit 80 to take me back home. I managed to get about half way through the mountains before it got dark. The moon was only a sliver so it got REAL dark. I hooked up behind another vehicle hoping they would be a good animal bumper if there were any on the road and used the extra light they spread to see the road better. There was a LOT of road construction from Reno almost all the way home. That made large parts of it 55mph or slower, and since they do the construction at night, you were guaranteed a CHP car at each location to discourage speeding up. Ugh… From there it was to Sacramento, then Stockton (smelled like dog shit riding through it…) then Livermore and finally home.

The first gas station I stopped at gave me a receipt with no time on it. Luckily, I only put a couple bucks of gas in just in case. I found a Chevron, that I was sure would be closed, but was actually open close to my house and got the receipt I needed. I pulled into my garage at 12:30 that night. According to my Zumo 550 GPS, I had ridden 1068.9 miles in approx 20 hours of almost non stop riding.

I was an odd feeling pulling into the garage. I almost felt like I had gone on some motorcycle vacation. I had passed through so many different types of terrain and been far from home.

Physically, I was pretty much ok. My throttle hand was kind of sore along with my butt and back, but all in all, I was in pretty good shape. I’m sure I could do the 1500 mile run, although with that ride, I think I’ll stick to just major highways.

Now all thats left is to put my info packet of receipts (I stopped and got gas just for the receipts to verify my route a lot more then I have included in my ride report) and send them off!

WOOT!

Ducati SanDisk Thumb Drive

This just makes me laugh.

Ducati has a 4 gig thumb drive for sale for a whopping $124.99!!

Lets see what more reasonable prices would be from two of the biggest hardware stores on the net.

NewEgg.com = From as low as $13 but you can get a decent one for under $30.
TigerDirect.com = Almost the same as NewEgg.com

You could also buy one with twice the storage capacity at 8 gigs (SanDisk as well) for $48, or a 16 gig one (PNY) for $76, or one with 8 times the storage at a whopping 32 gigs (Patriot Memory) for the same price as the Ducati one at $124.99

Sure, the Ducati one looks awesome. You’ll be paying at least $90 more for that cool look though. Then the inevitable will happen and you’ll lose it 4 weeks later.

If you still want one, click here.

Time for a new Hoshi picture.

It’s been a while since I posted one.

Freshly shorn and vegging from the heat.

Got a new bike!

It’s blue! I parked it beside my GS. I think they really compliment each other.

Red Sky

So we have been having some pretty big fires around us lately.

It’s that time of year where the grass has gone completely yellow and become tinder, ready to start up any moment!

A couple weeks back, there was a big fire a little west of us in Bonny Dune. I could see the huge smoke cloud coming from it when I rode home along highway 280 one Friday night. It looked like a giant dark storm hanging over the hills, spreading out over San Jose. It turned the sky completely pink and red, unlike anything I had seen before. The clouds were so thick that you could actually stare at the sun with no ill effect, in fact, I looked at the sun for a few minutes thinking it was an early moon before I realized what I was looking at.

I took a couple of pictures but they don’t really do justice to how it looked out there. I did no color correction to them at all. The sky was far more saturated then the pictures show…

When we got up the next morning, there was a fine layer of ash over everything.

Motorcycle Safety Site

I’ve been all over the net finding and reading articles on motorcycle safety. I’ve been riding for sometime now and from the moment I decided that I wanted to become a rider, I scoured the net looking for as much safety information as I could absorb.

Imagine my surprise when I realized I had missed this site, The Motorcycle Safety Site. It even has the self explanatory title.

I came across it when I read this article, Beating The Odds, on lowering your chance of becoming a statistic. I think it’s a great article with some good common sense regarding riding a motorcycle and what you can do to defy or lower the chances of being in an accident.

The site has a very large number of articles that go over many different aspects of riding, from leaning on corners to overnight parking.

Definitely worth checking out.