Kayjay just pointed me at OCAU.MC - It's the OCAU people with Motorcycles, and goddamn, there's PEOPLE IN CANBERRA!! Think I'd better start hanging around and see if I can't find someone in Canberry to ride with..

Now THAT is what I call a ride!

Distance: 3150Km
Trip Time: 48:15:30
Max Speed: 134Km/h (Passing a f@#@ car driver on the way back from mt.gambier)
Average Speed: 65.3Km
Total Fuel: 181L
Average Consumption (L/100K: Min, Max, Avg): 6.63, 8.52, 7.21

Yes, ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC trip!@#

Had to give the throttle pivots a good soaking with CRC at Melbourne on the way home, as the left pair were sticking open slightly, and had to adjust the pilot jets at mt.gamber, as one bank was waaay too rich, one bank too lean - now it's running like a charm!

You know the funniest thing? even with Allllll that camping gear on the back of the bike, I *STILL* had a 5 sec 0-100 :-p

Photos coming soonish!

Woohoo, got all the campsites for my holidays booked! Leaving Monday morning, heading to Batemans Bay, then following the coast road down through Bega, Genoa, then then turning off at Orbost and heading into Cape Conran to camp for the night..

Day 2 get back onto the highway and head through Bairnsdale, Sale, Yarram, Welshpool, Foster, and camp for the night at Waratah Bay..

Day 3 head out to Wonthaggi via the coast road, up to Koo-wee-rup, and back down to Hastings for the afternoon/night..

Day 4 Head off again, catch the Queenscliff ferry from Sorrento to Queenscliff, then head through Barwon Heads, Torquay, Lorne, Apollo Bay, Port Campbell, Warnambool, and camp for the night at Port Fairy.

Day 5 head off through Portland to Mt Gambier and have a stickybeak around, then head back off after lunch through Hamilton to Halls Gap to spend a couple of days camping in the Grampians!

Day 7 head off through Maryborough, Castlemaine, and end up at mum's place in Kyneton!

Well the old '250 finally packed it in, so I went looking for a new bike. Spotted this old XJ750 in the trading post, was waaaay cheap, so went to have a look at it with an open mind.

Well, I got out there, found it was mechanically perfect, it was just the tacho/speedo were both dead. Picked it up the next day, and got it home. Man it rode nice, though I thought it changed through the gears a bit quick..

Tacho turned out to just be unplugged, and after a fair bit of phoning around, a new speedo is being posted down from a Sydney wrecker.

Once I got the tacho working and took it for another ride, I twigged that a 4cyl at say 4000rpm will have double the pitch of a 2cyl at 4000rpm.. - so where I thought i was getting it up to around 8000rpm or so, I hadn't it past 4k rpm! Once I realised that, I gave it a good squirt, and the adrenaline is finally starting to wear off, four hours later!!!.

Been doing some searching through teh net, and it appears that the XJ isn't the meaty tourer I thought it was.. - it's bloody high-spec sports, which will give the ZZR600's etc a run for their money.. here's some specs:

Maximum Power: 60kw @ 9000rpm (yes, that's 50% more power than my old 1600 VW!@#!@)
Weight: 241Kg (yes, that's 1/5th that of my old VW!)
Maximum Speed: 204K/h
0-100kph time: 3.2 sec (Yes, that's 3.2 seconds to get to 100km/h!@#!@#!)
Fuel Capacity: 18L
Average Fuel Consumption: 5L/100km (twice as good as my current V6)

So yeah, it would appear that I'm never going to have to worry about not having the power to maintain 110 on the freeway.. - It's got plenty of grunt there!

Oh, you want the picture? Well here we go :)

Holy Guaccamole Batman, I turned 25 today!! Yes Yes, rendrag is an old (but still hunky and all that) man!

Good Lordy, I just realised I've been with ISA for 5 years today! That's right, it's 5 years since Mr T phoned up and had the phone answered by Chips from Rafferty's Woodyard! ;)

<DG> Rafferty's Woodyard, Chips Speaking!
<ST> Umm, hi, I'm looking for Damien Gardner?
<DG> That'd be me..
<ST> *chuckle* I kinda thought so.. Damien, my Name is Steven Thomas, I'm one of the managing directors of Internet Solutions, and I'd like to offer you a job...

Gee, don't you think I felt embarrased? Not that that stopped me from my funny phone answerings ;)

Holy smokes batman, you should have seen the fires on the weekend! Took out a whole crapload of houses around Canberry (think the total was 508 in the end??)..

The power in Deakin West went out about 2pm, came back up about 5pm, but the entire suburb dropped out again when I tried bringing our server room back online *grin*, so we gave up and sat around for a few hours to see if it would come back up. No such luck, so after cruising over to Randal's place for some hearty aussie tucker (chicken and pea pies with hot chips), we headed back to mission control and started pulling hard disks out of servers.

Now I'm curious as to where the APS were during all the goings on.. Going on the number of times they've called in the bomb squad because I've parked my car too close to the building, we were surprised not to get hassled when we backed Spoon's LandCruiser in through the front doors of the building and started loading files and equipment into the back!

Power came back on sometime Monday morning, and we set things back up again.. Wow those fires are taking off down south though :(

Packed all the camping gear on the back of the bike and rode up to Palm Beach on Wednesday. Spent a few days camping at the basin with Vin and Sherree, then cruised back down into Sydney to have dinner with the Suspects crew. Was a good ride, and the bike held up nicely :)

Heh, yay for people grabbing one piece of a conversation and running with it...

We were evacuated out of the building this morning due to a bomb scare upstairs (The Embassy of Afghanistan moved in about 9 months ago..). After much phoning around within the AFP and getting 'you dont need to know' answers, I finally thought to phone Barry Corrigan (Team Leader, Protective Services), who I know looks after our building, and finally got a straight answer from a fellow called Tom.

Apparently the Body Corporate got broken into AGAIN (they're the only office in the building without an alarm system, and I swear their door jams are made of balsa wood!), and the lockbox they keep the spare keys for the offices in the building in was torn off the wall. Apparently the Bomb Squad was on standby (as is standard procedure when an embassy's building is broken into), but were never actually called in. They found the lockbox in the end, but they don't know if any keys were taken, so they'll be changing all their locks (now you know why I insist on us having completely separate bilock system, alarm, video surveillance, etc).

But yeah, I think it's pretty funny that someone at the body corporate heard 'bomb squad on standby' and ran with it, evacuating the building.. :)

Isn't it nice when you finally manage to meet some of your resolutions?

Three weeks ago I made two resolutions - one to stop doing something that annoys me, one to get properly into shape by christmas.. Ok, so I'm not in too bad shape - I ride my pushbike the 20km each way into work and back occasionally, and love spending a day out in stromlo forest mountain biking - but that doesn't mean I'm actually in shape..

Three weeks later, and I'm now able to do 50 pushups and 30 situps in one go, and my heart rate isn't rising while doing the pushups! I know that's not much, but stop laughing (*grin*) - That's a pretty good acheivement in three weeks I think, for someone to whom exercise was walking the 2km to the shops and back to get an icecream after dinner :-)

I've also managed to burn about 90% of the fat in my arms!