R e n d r a g

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 🙂