RiderX

This past weekend I attended (and my company provided sponsorship for) the CPOSC. For the price it was a great conference. I was both surprised and underwhelmed that it was held on a Sunday. The central PA technical community has a decent percentage of hobbyists. I gather this was the reason for it being held on a Sunday.

While all of the talks were good, my two favorite talks were Using Drupal by Christian Pearce, and Network Introspection with Open Source Tools by Brad Lhotsky.

Christian prepared a tremendous amount of material on Drupal. His informal and accommodating presentation style resulted in a generous level of audience participation and dialog. This made for a very interesting and informative class. A few of the attendees were folks either using or trying to use other systems like Joomla. As such the discussion was pretty informative.

Brads talk was not at all what I thought it was going to be. I figured we’d hear a bit about nmap and other OSS tools. Not so. I don’t think nmap was even mentioned. He talked about a large collection of tools he uses to keep very tight controll of his network. He does this by writing a lot of code to tie tools together, storing a lot of event data in a PostgreSQL database, and doing a healthy amount of reporting on that data. A good talk covering an unexpected breadth of material.

I picked up a nail in the rear tire of the R11 today somwhere between Phoenixville
and Horsham.   I probably put another 70 miles on with the bike feeling wonky.  Tonight
I got a chance to go out to the garage and inspect the rear and found the nail. An attempt
to plug the tire from the inside failed. This is my first attempt to patch
from the inside.  The failure is not surprising. I’ve never had a plug or patch take well.

I’m contemplating trying again on Thursday, perhaps with a gooey patch rather than
a plug from the inside.  Perhaps I’ll just order new tires; the front is shot.

Subsequently, low rear tire pressure really affects the handling of the bike.  Cornering today was really, really tough.
 

This weekend was mostly a maintenance weekend.  Sunday was spent at the CPOSC, which was quite good.  I was getting anxious that the BMW and Husky were ready for an oil change.  I’d initially planned on going up to Port Clinton on Saturday Morning to fetch an oil filter for the BMW.  It occured to me that there are a variety of options available at local auto parts stores.  I wound up with a WIX filter which was an equivilant of one listed here. Subsequently, the IBMWR is a rockin site. I was lucky enough to find the filters at Rogers Auto Parts. I prefer to buy at local/ indepent businesses.  But I was somewhat frustrated because I just went to Pep Boys for a case of 20W50.  I’d been to Rogers loking for it before, but they tried to set me up with 15W40.  I mentioned that they didn’t have 20W50 when I was last in and the guy insisted that they _always_ carry 20W50.   If you’ve got a BMW of any kind consider getting on one of their lists.  I’m on the tech list, though I’m not a regular poster.

At the end of the day, the R1100RS has fresh oil and filter as well as another run at syncing of the throttle bodies.  This is the second run at syncing recently.  I attempted a week or so back for the first time.  I used a MotionPro SyncPro, which I’d ordered a few weeks back. The first sync went well.  The R11 ran far better after.  Idle smoother, launching from a stop improved greatly, and fuel economy increased to about 40MPG.  I’m not satisfied with that, I should get 50 based on past experience.  This round of syncing went well, and the bike runs even better.  I’ve not put on enough miles yet to determine if the economy is back where it should be.

As for the SyncPro…  It’s not bad.  The most frustrating thing about it is that it requires that it be stored at temperatures above freezing.  My garage is not heated so this means the SyncPro will wind up living in the house.  My nature is to be tidy and keep tools in the garage.  So I’ve got to find a good place in the house for it.  Since I live in a Bi-level home, I don’t have a proper basement.  I’ll probably hang it in a closet.  But WTF.  Coulnt’d they mix some propylene glycol in it to keep it from freezing?  There are two other things that frustrate me about it also.  The first is that it didn’t come with enough rubber tubing.  It should have come with at least 50% more.  It’d be nice to have the hoses a little longer.

I also changed the oil in the Husky.  The spec calls for 10W60.  I found some references on ThumperTalk (sorry, I’m too lazy to dig up exact references), and Supermoto Junkie suggesting that it’s okay to vary the oil a bit.  So I wound up using Agip 20W50 4T that I’d bought for the Laverda 750S a few years back.  I split a case with a buddy and then wound up letting the Laverda sit the last few years.   I’m going to increase the oil change frequency on it now, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be okay.  Rather than changing the oil filter I just cleaned it.  Carb cleaner, blasted it with compressed air…