This is a modified version of my last blog which was a private message to a friend. It may also be applicable to other people, but it really is in response to a question that came up elsewhere, and this seems to be my best venue for letting her know my thoughts on the topic.

For other friends you may need to modify 'millions' to many. I'm going to do my best to remove personally identifiable characteristics, as I think that others can apply it to themselves. If you don't have some of the experiences listed, that's OK. Don't treat them as applying to you.

First of all I, along with millions of other people, know you first for your work in playboy and on a few adult pictures sites. From that I know that a significant part of your experience with guys since then has been the result of how your characteristics have been marketed. It's primarily been lust, and as a result there isn't a lot of opportunity for you to build a relationship with a guy where you don't start asking yourself 'is he just after the ... and ... on an my body?' I won't suggest that there are not a lot of guys who are. That would be a lie.

From having you as a friend here and on elsewhere, I have gotten the feeling that while you appreciate the attention, it leaves you wondering if anyone does love you. You have even asked the question explicitly.

The answer is yes, there are many people who love you.

Let's start with a few people close to home. I strongly suspect that your mom didn't approve of some of the direction you chose when leaving college. Would it be fair to say that she would have wanted you to go into a different profession? I suspect it is. That said, from the comments you've made over the years, I know very well that she loves you very deeply. Remember that always. Disappointment does not take from love. True disappointment is always the result of loving someone very much. It is simply a state of recognizing that something different from expected or desired happened, and that plans must change.

You also have a small collection of friends near at hand. People you grew up with, or who you encountered in school, and a few since then. All of them know you as someone who they have had a great time talking with, playing games with, going to movies with, and more. If you wanted to talk with someone about something you wouldn't want to talk with your mom about, these people are very likely to be there. Perhaps not at every instant of your life, but there none the less.

You also have those who depend upon you at home. [Pet's name], et all. These are a different variety in that they both love and depend on you. While you may not think of their love as important when considering the love of relationships, it is. They know you as the type of person you are, occasionally forgetful, but deeply concerned about their well being.

There are people I know have been involved in your life at some point, but I don't know anything about them. Your dad for example. From the fact that I don't recall you ever mentioning him, I gather that either through circumstance or decision, he is not a part of your life today. I think that is a very bad situation. A Father being around, loving, and involved in their daughters lives is an important benchmark for a woman to know how to recognize men and women who are going to be good for them, vs. those who will be trying to take any advantage of them that they can. One of the truely unfortunate aspects is the possibility that your dad did something that you've elected to exclude him from your life for. There are a lot of women in the adult industry who can point at an abusive or worse father as a major influence on getting where they are. I honestly don't know enough about your dad, or the circumstances surounding why he is not a significant part of your life today, to make any comment on his love for you.

Going further afield, I pretty much have to go to the career you have gotten into. Glamor modeling or if you prefer adult modeling, is going to be very tough to find love within. But it can be found. The major problem is that the vast majority of the people you are going to encounter are looking at you as part of their next paycheck. Not in the sense of getting 'you' in some way, but in the sense of being able to 'sell' something of you in some way. From the perspective of paying the bills, that's not all bad. But of course a significant part of you is looking for some real feeling of love between you and someone else.

Perhaps the closest you will feel to having love with someone involved in work is with other models. Most of them are also wondering if there is something beyond the flash and cash of their career. Some will be good people to befriend, though that's not always going to be the case.

The next variety of people would be those you interact with on a day to day basis that have nothing to do with your work. Shop keepers, people you meet while out for a walk with Wasabi, and the like. I'm pretty sure that many of them know about your modeling career, But whether they do or not, you will very likely find many of them like you for 'you' not for the thought of you as a model. Many of the guys lust after you, but I think you know that's going to happen anyway. The important thing is that these are people who interact with you. I strongly suspect that if you [modified attributes], that all of those guys would still lust after you. Not because of the image they hold of you as the sex goddes, but because it's somewhat of a normal state for guys to lust after beautiful women. [And you would continue to be beautiful.]

There are really three varieties of people left. Fans who are interested enough in you to befriend you here and elsewhere. Fans who are not. And the largest group, people who have no idea who you are.

I would have to say that the largest group, people who don't know you at all, is the least likely to have feelings towards you one way or another. I suspect however that if you get involved with people in this area that you will find the most honest love for you. The down  side is that in this era, it's trivial to find out information about someone, especially someone like you who has gotten into the public eye in a big way.

That leaves Fans. The fans that don't 'follow' you, are also not as likely to know enough of you to go beyond the pictures and what others have written as words from your mouth in the writeup with the pictures. I wouldn't discount these people entirely, I'm sure that there are some fans who would be more than happy to have you as their only love for the rest of their lives, but it is a shallow situation, so I wouldn't suggest it's a likely place to think about.

Pretty much that leaves fans who follow you. You have [thousands of] friends on MySpace, over [a thousand] following you on [other social sites]. You also have the new comercial web site where you can find out the subscription numbers for yourself. These are all people who devote enough of their attention to you to go through the process of 'signing up.' In many cases it's trivial. MySpace being the easiest of course. It's easy to think of these people as only interested in your public personality, or only after more pictures of your body. That really is most of them. But you will find a few people who are paying attention to what you write. Be it poetry, life, or questions about who you have become, and musings on whether anyone will ever be someone you will be in love with who loves you back the same way.

The reality is that you have to recognize that while lust is not love, love doesn't eliminate lust either. Would you want to be around someone who has no lust for you? A man or woman who may lust for other women, but only has 'love' for you? Lust is a part of having a sucessful and happy relationship. It may not seem all that important, and it may be very difficult to see beyond to the love that someone has for you, but without it, there could be nothing to draw that person to you. Would you be comfortable or happy being 'in love' with a guy or gal who you did not have lust for?

Yes, love goes beyond lust. Lust should have a deminishing involvement in your love over time, but it needs to be there. The down side for you is that I strongly suspect that you could walk into almost any bar in the US, and walk out with as many as 4 or 5 guys in tow, who have nothing but 'getting some' in mind. You already know through your [public] appearances that thousands of guys will come to visit you at the drop of a hat. So you are going to have trouble finding guys with more than lust for you to work with. They are out there though.

You've already heard all the 'good' ways of meeting guys. So beyond being involved in things you love to do, charities that are of interest to you, and the like, I'm only going to make one further comment.

There is one industry where well over 90% of the people involved are happily married, often to each other. That is the Wedding industry. It is the one place I can say where looking for love will bring you a good chance of success. Be it wedding planners, photography, cake making/bakery, florists, or any of the hundreds of parts of the industry that are involved. Every day you are reminded at work that the business at hand is helping people who love each other come closer together.

If you are serious about wanting to get out of the 'lust for Lina' business, and on with the 'I love you!' business, talk to your agent and possibly photographers you know and see if any have suggestions on modeling in the wedding business. Oh, a few will probably suggest sex toys, or lingere, but you may find an entry into weding dress modeling, or so, and who knows where that may lead.

You are a friend I value Lena. Someone I would love to sit and chat with, talk about dogs with, and perhaps share coffee with. I don't expect to ever meet up with you. I have no immediate plans on traveling to [your home] area, and can't recommend you comming to Minneapolis just for me. If you have some reason to visit, or my life changes in ways that have me traveling, I would love to have that coffee and talk with you. But up front I'll admit that most of what I feel for you is probably based on lust, and while I believe that there is more, (you know a lot of people who would write this much on lust alone?) I don't know how much there is. Worse I'm a bit old for you, or you young for me. I've been places you heard about in High School, and I wasn't young then.

For some reason the rss feed for my blog links to someone named Michael in Poland. I'm not sure why, as I can't see any place to configure that. I've dropped a note to the fine folks at MySpace to have a look and see what they can find. We'll see what happens.

I discovered this while building a 'Planet Me' which will aggregate things that I write in various locations. It will be updating every couple of hours, so there may be some delay between my posting something and it being on the page, but it shouldn't be too bad. If you would like to follow it, you can browse to http://www.rustyconnections.com/planet. Let me know if you like the setup, or if it could use some improvement.

Have a great week, I'm pretty sure I will.

I understand some people think I'm a bit long winded. Well, I don't think I will argue. I'm one of them.

In any case, as I was waiting for the bus on Thursday, a bit of a story idea came up, so I figured I would spend some time on the idea and came up with http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/blog/2008/10/short-story-time/

Comments welcome. If the subject (which is brought up at the beginning of that blog) is something you would rather not read about, that's fine.

If you would rather read it as plain text, let me know, and I'll post a link to the plain text version of the story.

OK not really a surprise, but I've been on the friendship building cruise again. I suspect that in the next couple of days I'll end up going over 2000 friends. I don't expect anything super fantastic to happen then, or for that matter anything really different. There may be another change in what shows up in my view of my profile, but I'm not too worried about that.

And that's not really what this blog entry is about.

Nope, this one is about 'reality' or the lack there of in entirely too many people's lives.

I've seen a few different profiles lately. Hardly a surprise there is there. As an observation, Most guy's profiles are fairly basic. Oh, they've been customized of course, colors, backgrounds, the usual stuff, but it's still the basic MySpace layout.

Actually that's the case with most women's profiles as well. However once we get past the something over 'half' that makes 'most' women's profiles basic, you start to see all sorts of diffferent things. A small percentage have the columns flipped. I.e. the user's profile picture is on the right rather than the left. A bit more than that have some sort of a content management flash ui. So instead of seeing the different blocks with their associated information embeded in them, that information is presented by the flash interface as the viewer moves the mouse over different things, or clicks on them. Oddly enough, this group presents a worse problem for me than the really small percentage of people who only want to add people they already know. The problem is that not every flash viewer makes the interactive elements interactive. So the 'Add me as a friend' button doesn't 'click' and you can't send an invite to them.

Oh, well, a loss, but that's OK.

The next group of people that I find having some incongruity in their profile are the 'bi' women who don't want male friends. The reality of the situation is that they have established a myspace profile as a lesbian, but don't want people to think of them as lesbians. That's OK too. I happen to prefer women myself, and have no problem with women who have an interest in women, even if they may never have an interest in me. In all honesty, the only subset of this group that concerns me are the women who bury a note in their profile saying that invitations from guys will be flagged as spam. Personally I have finer grained conditions for flagging an invitation as spam, but if a woman wants to tag any guy who happens to think she's attractive, and might be worthy of being considered a friend as a spammer, I guess that's her prerogative.

The 'odd' profiles are the 'Official' or 'Real' profiles of people. How many profiles are there of Pam Anderson? How many are 'really her!'? I'm reasonably confident that there are 'several' Pamela Anderson profiles. (Probably a few Pamela Andersen's as well.) It wouldn't surprise me all that much if there was a Pam Anderson (or en) behind the majority of them. The ones that people get concerned about are those of the Celebrityh Pamela Anderson. There very well may be a few 'Official' profiles of her. And don't question her about it either, she's liable to get upset and flag your question as spam and try to get you kicked off MySpace for even doubting that this is her profile.

OK, Whatever. First of all, most of the fraudulent profiles are related to people who've found pictures of the celeb, and who've decided that making those pictures available to others is a good way to get attention, and build friends. OK. I don't happen to think it's a very worthwhile method, but then if you need a way to get a vector for some computer infection gets around, I suspect that it will work.

In any case, what makes the page 'Official?' Is there some judge or appraiser who has stamped their certification on the page and made it 'official'? Nope. It's almost universally 'official' because the user claims it is their official page. They edit their profile, and add the words 'Official MySpace Profile of...' or words to that effect. So if there is no governing body vetting you from adding it to your profile, what's to prevent the fraud from putting it on their page? Nothing. In other words claiming that your profile page is the one and only official MySpace page for you is probably the silliest thing you can do on MySpace. Well, OK, that or hold the camera in front of your face when taking a picture of yourself in the bathroom mirror, but that's a different matter.

I've been asked how many of the people I have as friends on MySpace have I actually met. I have not even met all of the people on my 'top' list. (Though I would love to sit and chat with every single one of them.) If I meet 1% of my MySpace friends in real life, I would be very surprised. Oh, I have plenty of friends who I don't have as friends on MySpace, but some part of that is the fact that I have lots of online friends who wouldn't think of setting up a MySpace page for whatever reason. So it balances out at some level.

There are also people who ask how many of my friends profiles are really of them? Again, it doesn't really matter. Are there celebrities who've had fake profiles set up? Sure. I would suspect that less than 1% of my friends profiles are 'fakes'. Now that doesn't mean that there are not a significant number that don't have the reported person actually behind the profile. As an example, the Playmate and Pet profiles that have a common 'Add Me' theme in their 'contacting ...' block, I suspect are 'managed' profiles. The odds of actually getting a message from the Playmate or Pet, using that profile are pretty low in my opinion. Likewise profiles with hundreds of thousands of friends are likely to be managed at some level. It may be that the user has farmed out approving comments and friend adds to someone else, but is handling all the messages themselves. But if you get what sounds like a canned response, you begin to wonder.

As an observation on a couple of those points. If you find that I've added a profile that's using your pictures to present themselves as you, feel free to take up the matter of misappropriated pictures with the MySpace people. I have no control over those people, and I'm just as likely to include you in the people that I drop if you ask me to drop them as a friend. Here's why. As with the 'Offical' or 'Real' tag on a profile, I have nothing immediately available to verify that the person requesting that I drop someone is any more likely to be the 'real' or 'official' person than that the profile is for the Real person. Additionally I am being a bit indiscriminate in the adding of people, so I'll probably be indiscriminate in purging them as well. It's not something personal. For the vast majority of my friends, it can't be personal, as I don't know the person in the first place.

Well, that's going to do it for now. I think it's time I got some sleep.

Got another late start today. Ended up being up till 4 this morning, on one thing or another, and had to make a ride into downtown to pick up my cell phone (which I had left at work.) I had been thinking of doing that last night as well, but I'll admit that driving into downtown Mpls at night right now doesn't appeal to me all that much. There was not a lot of traffic this afternoon, but I heard more than enough chatter on the radio last night to suggest that it was a trip I didn't need to make.

So, I hit the road about 3:30, or effectively 4:00 pm I'll see about doing something even earlier soon, but it won't be today. (obviously.)

I was curious what the roads were like to the south, which for me means either 52 heading towards Rochester, or 169 towards Mankato. Since I have taken highway 52 to a variety of locations for many years, I decided 169 would be interesting. I got past Chaska, and realized I was going to need to fill up. Should have done that before I got started today, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to go a ways first. I ended up filling up in Jordon, MN, and while I was there I picked up a sandwich at Burger King in the Holiday there. I realized I was not going to make the turn at first, so I took a right (you need to take a left to get to the gas station from southbound 169, and turned around to cross the highway. I noticed that there was a state park off that way some place, and stashed the info for later consideration.

After filling up, and picking up some food, I got back on the highway, and continued south. Saint Peter sounded like a reasonable destination. I could have probably gotten to Mankato, but without scheduling a full day to take a good look around, I didn't think it was a good idea. Before I got there though I saw a sign for a rest stop in the Le Sueur vicinity. Stopped there and ait my sandwich, and used the facilities. While I didn't order fries with my sanwich, apparently the people at BK were concerned enough about the fact that I had waited a fair amount of time that they threw them in for me. I ate about half the fries. Being diabetic, I decided I really didn't need all that much in the way of starches right then.

One of the reasons I stopped there was that as I was riding, I was being hit pretty hard by cross winds. It's a bit disconcerting to be taking a broad right hand sweeping turn and the bike is leaning to the left to compensate for the wind. It really doesn't feel right. Also the buffeting felt a bit like someone beating up on me.

As I was leaving the rest stop, I decided to go ahead down to St Peter, and once I got into town I could turn around.

In case you are thinking 'I've heard of that city, what from?' it was hit by a tornado in 1998 which destroyed nearly half the town, and ended up killing one child. It is also the final resting place of William B. Dodd who built 'Dodd Road' from Mendota Minnesota, (just south of St. Paul) and St. Peter. The road is unusuall in the sense that it was privately funded at a time when most roads were being built with public funds. (I will have to remember to try that road one of these days, though it does not follow the same route that it originally did.)

It was well after 5 by the time I got to St. Peter, so after riding around a rather small part of the city, I got back on the highway and went home. I have to do something about this permit thing I suppose.

Remembering the State park I had seen the sign for as I was approaching Jordan, I decided that I was making good enough time to take a bit of a detour to have a look see. The state park was not quite as close to the highway as I was expecting, but still within reason. I stopped at the entry house, and did a quick review of the situation. They have two types of passes for the park, (well actually close to 10, but only two of which caught my eye as being potentially useful to me.) The first was a day pass for $5. the second was a motorcycle anual pass of $20. Not really being prepared for either, I picked up a map of the state parks in MN, and read a bit of the history behind this state park.

The Minnesota State Park Lawrence Division is sited on the original plat, and surrounding area of the community of Lawrence MN. Lawrence was lain out as a city on the Minnesota River. The founder built a home at what would have become the center of town, and it turns out that ultimately no one moved in. It is now part of the Minnesota River State Park.

I finished my Diet Mt. Dew, and pulled the liner out of my biking jacket, then got back on the road, and ultimately got back home.

A couple of riding notes as well. As I say, I felt pretty beat up before I got to the point where I turned around. The weather is to the point where I will need to look at getting a different jacket soon. The one I"me ridng with now is designed for hot weather, and suits that variety of riding just fine. I have a few minor complaints about it, things like the sleeve gathers not being very impressive, but over all it's not too bad. I've worn a textile jacket in the past, though I blew the sleeve zipper out on that, and I think it's really only good for a costume at this point. (which it very well may become.) I haven't quite decided what jacket I will be buying, but I'll have to make that decision this next week or so, before the weather starts cooling off much more.

Part of the buffeting is also due to the fact that this bike doesn't really have a wind screen. At one level it does. there is a small windscreen in front of the instrument panel, however this is not designed to protect the rider who is sitting upright on the bike. I note that riding leaned over the tank gave me a much smoother riding experience, however I'll also admit that I wouldn't want to do this for very long rides. That's mostly because holding my head in a position that makes visibility of the road possible at that point is very likely to end up giving me a pain in the neck.

Well, I suspect that I will feel pretty beat up tomorrrow, though I may sleep well tonight. We'll see.

Next blog over on my home blog at http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/blog

Have a great day...

Last blog entry was June 24th here, but that's far from my most recent blog entry. We'll get to more on that in a little bit.

As a couple of friends have noted, I tend to be fairly prolific when it comes to writing. Either I write a lot of short entries, or I occasionally write some long blog entries. Have to admit that I don't recall all that many short entries, but there are quite a few longer entries here.

In any case, I've been working on a number of projects, and it turns out that the level of categorizations, and 'tags' available are rather limited here. It's nice to have the Smilies but if I want to tag a blog entry so that people looking for CVG2008, or CONvergence can easily aggregate my blog into their system, it's rather difficult. Specifically the tag function doesn't exist, though I could format tags into the body of the blog entry and hope that the indexers can figure out what they mean.

As a result, and because I may decide to stray into topics that even MySpace may not be comfortable with, I've decided to set up my own blog. I have done this in the past, and used SimplePHPBlog, and other very basic software, but the king of the hill for blogging is WordPress, and getting it running gave me the tools to do some other things, or at least reminded me of what I need to do in the future.

In any case, there will be a lot more about that, identi.ca and other things over at my new blog. I'll still write here from time to time, but since I own a domain (or 4 or more) and have it pointed at my own server, I suppose having traffic there would be nice.

For more information, and to follow the blog, go to http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/blog. There is an rss feed there, and you can even attach that to your myspace page. Or you can open a google reader page and read from my blog there. That's also handy for dynamically adding other blogs, and rss feeds when I refer to them.

I'm still learning about the setup, layout, and how to do different things, such as back linking, and using my blog to comment on someone else's blog, but I'm hoping it works out well for anyone who's been reading this blog here.

Thanks for the responses everyone. Hope to see you at the new location as well.

I see it's time to discuss friend requests again.

I have not had a request that I've been able to just out of hand declare is a spam request for over a month now. I think that is at least in part because of the captcha that I now request that people enter. I hope that there have been other efforts made to filter out those accounts, such as watching for profile updates that put a transparent image over the entire page that links to a third party site, but there may be other issues that not even I am aware of involved.

So why the new blog entry? I've run into a somewhat different type of an invite that concerns me. Requests from 'private' profiles that don't have a greeting message.

Don't get me wrong on thinking I don't want you to maintain your privacy. I'm perfectly happy with that. There are several reasons for doing so, as well as a few different methods of making sure that it happens. Again, perfectly happy with that.

As an example, my profile is private to people under 18. If I could set the age to 21, I probably would. The really reason for doing this is to discourage seemingly random 'friend requests' from 'minors.' I'll grant that this is only as effective as the 'age' field in a user's profile, but one has to start somewhere. I don't need the headaches of having to deal with people suggesting that I'm attempting to corrupt our youth, and I'm old enough that there are some people who would think that I was attempting to do that even with my profile set up the way it is.

I'm also not opposed to people sending invitations without an accompanying greeting note. I do that all the time as well. We often assume that the person we are sending an invitation to has no more time to check on who we are than we do to check on them.

One thing to remember though is that when you send an invite from a private profile, there is no way for the person receiving the invite to know who you are, except by the information around your profile picture. I.e. they don't get to see who your friends are, who each of you may have as mutual friends, or any of the related information.

For some accounts, this is not an issue at all. I seriously doubt if Bobby Billiard, Tilia Tequila, or any of the other accounts with over a million friends spend a lot of time 'vetting' their friend requests. I could be wrong, but I suspect that they have people who help with account management who have other techniques to check if a friend request is legitimate. I'm a bit of a fan of at least looking at a prospective friend's profile and seeing what sort of comments they are leaving on their friends web pages.

As a worst case I would love to know who we each may have as mutual friends, but even this is not available until after I accept a friend request.

The simplest solution of course, if you want to keep your profile private, is to leave a quick note in the invitation saying 'I saw your comment on ... picture" or "... seems to think very highly of you." just to give the recipient some idea of why they are getting an invitation from you. Or 'I saw you at ... and you said to say Hi! here.'

But that doesn't happen all that often. So we'll see if the accepting of the friend leads to issues. Fortunately once a friend is added, they go into the 'New Friends' list for a month, and you get to see mutual friends of each of you. It can be fun to find out who you already know.

Be well.

As you can tell by looking at my home page, I got a few happy birthday greetings this year. And if you dig through my comment history, you'll see it's a few more than I got last year. I'm kind of happy about that. I know I don't get out there every day and wish all of my friends a happy birthday, and a few of you could probably note that I've missed yours. Sorry if I have.

Did I have the happiest possible birthday? Well for a lot of people, if you saw what I did for my birthday, where I spent it, and so on, you would probably say that I did not have a particularily happy birthday. That's OK. In my book it was a good day. Things that needed to get done, some got done. There will always be more that needs to be done, but when that ceases to be the case, I'll probably cease to be as well.

My immediate family (parents, siblings, children) have either moved away from here, or have passed on. About the closest family I have in the area is a niece going to college in the TC area, and I think she went home for the summer. Everyone else is at least a cousin in family depth. At that point, the people I work with are esentially closer to family than almost everyone else, and I spent about half the day in their company.

Did I get anything 'good' for my birthday? Well, the Lexus didn't show up, and I ended up driving into work in my own car. I got to watch the Discovery space shuttle land, granted it was on TV, but I honestly can count the number of times I've seen even that much of the event on both hands. I think I've seen more launches. The best thing I think I got though was the greetings from my friends on MySpace. I gave myself a PS3, but I don't think it compares. Especially as I won't be able to watch or game on it till the cables and stuff come in. On the other hand, the greetings will be there and welcome for some time to come. Thank you.

I was up till about 1:30 or so, then awake at about 5. I was actually 'up' at 6, so I don't know whether I should consider that hour part of my rest, or part of my day. I certainly wouldn't call it sleep. But that's hardly unusual. I understand that some people wake up and Boom they begin their day, and everything goes grand. Not really the case for me. I do spend some time contemplating what I will be doing, but most of the decisions are not made till a bit later.

I should have ridden in to work Friday night, Saturday morning looked like a great morning to ride. And I'm thinking I may be kicking myself again for that, as today looks like another great morning. The prediction I saw before work yesterday was that from about now (7:00 am) to about 10, there would be scattered thunderstorms. Now 'partly sunny' or 'partly cloudy' for the next 24 hours... Oh well.

What was my greatest wish for my birthday? It doesn't happen all at once, but I wish all of my friends the very best. I know that some of you are going through troubles that you thought you had either evaded or that was going to be different this time. Regardless, I really do wish you the very best, along with all my other friends here and elsewhere.

For me there is little difference day to day when I turned 44. Not really expecting all that much when I turn 45, or 50 either. For some people a Birthday is another great opportunity to have a party. I'm not really 'big' on parties, though I'm involved in planning what I consider to be one of the best parties, with some of the very best people to party with. I'm not opposed to drinking, but Anhiser-Bush hasn't been getting wealthy off of sales to me either. (Or Miller, or Daniels, etc.) I am pretty solidly against Smoking, but I do have friends who do smoke, and I'm not interested in trying to force changes upon them. In any case, since I'm not very interested in drinking, the 'parties' that relly upon alcohol, don't hold out much attraction to me. I'm older, and in 2 years I need to get my drivers licence renewed again. If that sounds dull to you, that's OK.

By now you should know that I write on a fairly wide variety of topics. You are welcome to disagree, or not as you wish. I'm not saying that I'm going to be right in my writing. Mostly they are my 'observations' and can very well be wrong. Feel free to speak up. Einstein pointed out that 'Common Sense' is what we learn before we are 3. Something that I may be missing entirely is easily not 'common sense' for me. So let me know when I am dead wrong.

Thank you, and since it's Father's Day, and can not be my birthday any more, in the words of the Mad Hatter, "Happy Unbirthday to you!"

It's been a couple of weeks sinc I last blogged here. Time to write a little bit before I go off to work.

Things are getting busy with preparations for the convention coming up in July. Oh, some people are more interested in the September Republican National Convention, and I wish them well, but I have other things on my mind.

I'm working on a small project that I hope will have two outcomes. The first is a usable projector screen for the convention, then after the convention I hope to make it work at home. Finding a projector screen these days isn't a big problem, so long as you don't mind spending a couple hundred bucks for the screen. Oddly enough, I do mind that kind of an expense, so... I picked up some 2'x4' 1/4" hardboard. At one time I was able to pick this stuff up with a whiteboard surface, but I can't find that at the moment. So I also picked up a can of white paint and a paint roller. The paint went on yesterday (before the weather turned wet) Whiteboard paint is about twice as expensive as what I'm prepared for at the moment, and I don't really need the glossy surface, so flat white is what I went with. For support I am going to go with a couple of pieces of 1"x4"x4' pieces of melamine. OK, it will probably be 3/4" thick, but that should be enough. I'll carve in a 1/4" or 3/8" kerf in an arch that the boards that are painted white will fit into, leaving about a foot of board extending on both ends. Then a dowel at both corners in the back, and a bungy coard (for now) between the dowel and the screen back surface to hold everything together through tension. (If I can't find good bungies I can either pick up the cord itself, or I can use a strap and ratchet system. We'll see.)

Not a lot of riding these days. Rain and other things getting in the way.

Besides painting yesterday I emptied about 200 gallons of trash. When I moved (and along the way before then) I filled up 35-55 gallon storage containiers with stuff that has been sitting in my garage now for over 3 years. I need some of that space back to work on my bike and do other things in my garage. So I spent a couple of hours parsing the contents. One container had cookware in it. I don't know that I will use it again anytime soon, but it's stuff that I think is worth holding onto. A couple of containers had uniforms and stuff from when I was in the service. I was able to combine those. I don't think any of the containers were completely full when I started, but I did empty two 55 gallon storage containers, 3 40 gallon containers and a 35 gallon container. 4 35 gallon trash bags made it to the dumpster, and I have a few things that I'm going to have to decide if they go back into storage, or if I have the opportunity to sell them. (I may donate some of the sweatshirts and sweaters to charity, but I need to wash them first. (3 years in storage did not do much good for them.)

Now I have to go through the stuff from my folks and transfer them from cardboard boxes into the storage containers and re-pack the garage. Once that's done I think I will have space to work on the bike and stuff.

Bikd mirrors are getting to be a bit of an issue for me. I ordered up one set that I thought were the right set, only to find I had ordered two of the same side for a different year. then I ordered up the next pair which should have been right, but the mountings look nothing like what my bike needs. So back to the store I go.

Work tonight though, so time to get cleaned up and going. Have a good one, and ride safe.

As I noted a while back, the helmet I was originally riding with is a little bit small. It's a size Medium which is the size that the chart they seller had suggested, however I think I was basing my starting size upon a value that may not be a standard hat size. In any case with the face module locked down and the helmet strapped snuggly in place, the chin module was pressing against my chin. Even with all the vents open, simply breathing in my helmet would cause it to fog up. Not a great experience, and it makes it difficult to ride with it. So off I went and bought another helmet.

This time I picked up a bright yellow modular helmet, and added a smoke face shield to the order. Oddly enough even with the face shield down, it works better for me to wear protective glasses (sun glasses, safety glasses, the like) as there is enough air moving past my face at highway speed that it bothers my eyes when I am wearing contacts. (Glasses would do also I'm sure.)

Of course the first thing I did with the new helmet is replace the face shield with the smoke one. I'm going to have to pull out a flat blade screw driver again though and check out the assembly as I am getting a lot of wind noise on my right side. Some also on the left, but I have also noticed that if I don't have the face shield snapped down to the chin module, there is a significant amount of movement on the right side that I'm not sure should be there. Also the chin module does not seem to want to stay up if the face shield is snapped to it.

I'm also going to have to start watching for wind reports I think. A 25 mph cross wind with 35 mph gusts is really noticeable when riding. And going 'faster' doesn't necessarily help. (A heavier bike might though, but I'm seriously not ready for that.) It got to the point yesterday where when I got within a couple of miles of home, I got off of the freeway, just to get out of the wind. Frontage roads there had good wind breaks in the sound barriers and difference in level for the road. Additionally it got me out of highway mode which is probably good.

The Ice Breaker question at the convention committee meeting yesterday was 'What is one thing you will be doing the weekend after the convention?' Lot's of responses of 'sleep' but even though I'm far from the only person who rides a motorcycle, I was the first person who said 'hopefully riding on a highway some place.'

Ordered up a Tiny Tracker 4 for my bike. I have been rooting around in my junk boxes, and have not located the tiny tracker 3 that I built for riding on a bicycle. If I find it I may use that instead, but there are some advantages with the 4 for riding. Telemetry, and it will talk to my etrex and other aprs users in the area will show up.

Even more for the bike, I ordered a pair of turn signals, a pair of after-market mirrors and a few other things to go on the bike. After seeing what happened with the right front turn signal, I can see why the earlier owner may have wanted to use the handlebar mirrors on the end of the handlebars, but I'm not as comfortable with them to tell the truth. Part of it is just getting things tightened down I'm sure. The mirrors want to turn away from where I position them at this time. But a bigger portion of the problem is that to look in the mirrors, I have to turn my head away from the road by a large angle. I'm really not happy about that.

Later folks. Pups need some attention.