the guy checking into the hotel with the $5 haircut (or is it a self-haircut?) and pasty white skin wearing wire frame glasses, a company logo’d lanyard with his company id badge around the neck of his company logo’d polo shirt tucked into his k-mart cargo pants with the zip-off legs pulled high up on his waist showing white socks over tan trail running sneakers and carrying a wad of keys on his REI carabineer clipped to his belt loop and a swiss army knife on his belt over his hip.

I'm leaving the house now to go be sequestered in the downtown Bellevue Hilton for a weeklong experiential learning experience of self enlightenment and discovery.... oh joy.

I spent the day today in my old building where I worked for many years, camped out in my old boss’s office (he was on vacation) completing annual performance reviews with my old team. I must admit it felt very familiar and comfortable to be there amongst so many folks I’ve spent so much time with. It almost felt like I never left, maybe someday I’ll be able to come back and be part of the Windows Live system again. Maybe. And I never, ever thought I’d say this two months ago, but I miss the Red West cafe. Coincidentally, they were having a morale event in the afternoon at the volleyball and basketball courts. I wandered over for an ice cream and see even more people who I’ve worked with in the past.

Sure was nice to see them all.

Pandora.  I turned off my XM radio earlier this year since there’s so much free music available over the air, but getting uninterrupted streaming radio from the iPhone on my own programmed channels is great. I just plug it into the aux input in the truck and it works!  The quality is 100 times better than free over the air music and the bookmarking and tagging features are terrific as well. of coarse I don’t do that while driving ;-)  I’m hoping this will work over bluetooth so I can listen to it on the bike in my helmet. THAT would be cool!

I’ve had my iPhone about two weeks and it continues to astound me how many things this device does so well. Web browsing, GPS with directions, voice mail, and of course the iPod functionality. The touch interface for the iPod seems to be missing some features I liked on my Nano, like play all albums from a single artist in track order (it only plays in alphabetical order) but I’m getting used to it.  I also love the SmugShot app from SmugMug. What a terrific turnkey app to load quick snaps directly to my SmugMug site.

Oh, and the games are cool too – of course. What good would a phone like this be without wicked games to play.

My friend Eric Cheng from Wetpixel.com was in town this past weekend diving with sixgill sharks and exploring puget sound with fellow underwater photography enthusiasts. I met Eric at a meet and greet Sunday evening to say hi since I haven’t seen him since we did the Digital Shootout together in Palau early in 2006.  Much has changed for both of us since then, it was really good to catch up. Being amongst all those divers almost has me considering getting back in the water again. Almost.

Eric Cheng, Julie Heyn and me. Julie and Martin Heyn hosted the meet and greet at their beautiful home in Seattle.

Getting ready to leave before Sunday night’s thunderstorms arrived.
Thanks for an awesome image Eric!

well last weekend’s oppressive 95+ degrees weather is just a memory as this week it’s in the 60’s and I’m wearing a hoody, wool socks and trail shoes. got to love it!  summers in the northwest are shorter then the Olympics.

We had a wedding to attend at the base of Mt Rainier Saturday, so I took Friday off to go exploring a little as it's been years since we were last at the mountain.  We see the mountain all the time from home, but forget just how majestic it is up close. Friday and Saturday were spectacular days, clear and hotter than hell, mid to upper 90's both days, and we didn't get up to the mountain either of those days of course, Sunday we went up before heading home and clouds had started to come in to vale the peaks.  Still phenomenal to see, I just wish I had gotten a few pics on the other days while it was sweltering out and the skies were clear.  Did I mention how hot is was? Ugh. Air conditioning at home for the pets and we're stuck in a human oven at Alexander's Inn, built in 1912 with no a/c and one measly window in our room with a WalMart fan.  Sleep tight victims.

So I haven’t had time to ride with Mike in quite a while with both our schedules not aligning very often. I finally decided to just say screw it and take a vacation day while the weather is nice. We rolled out of the garage before 7 this morning fired up the bikes to warm them up and as I started pulling my helmet on I noticed Mike’s face looked frustratingly puzzled and he switched his bike off.  When I pulled my helmet off I could see smoke coming up from under his fairing.

So the bikes went back into the garage and we started looking for sources, up went the gas tank, off one side panel then another.  Our diagnostics included starting the bike until it smoked then looking for a source. Did that 4 or 5 times until we found what we think is the problem. (He’s still in the garage working on it) . There’s fresh oil on the front exhaust header that smokes as soon as the pipe gets hot. We need to figure out where the oil came from before we declare problem solved.  It could be worse, our worse fears were a smoked electrical component, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Well, I wanted to spend the day with my son, I just didn’t expect to do it in the garage.

UPDATE:  Turns out this was a very minor issue, with a rather lengthy effort to resolve.  After getting all the panels off and some good lights to see where the smoke was coming from it turns out one of the header retaining springs for some reason had a glob of fresh oil/grease/something on it that smoked like mad when the header got hot. We removed the spring, cleaned it off with chain cleaner, 409 and any other solvent I could find in the garage. Cleaned off the header, then ran it for a while without the spring to make sure there wasn’t anything dripping on where the spring attaches. No drips, no smoke, problem solved! Yea!   We finally got to leave shortly after 10am – 3 hours later then planned. While Mike was working on the bike I checked the weather radar and it was raining in Ellensburg and up through the Chelan corridor already so my 3 pass blast plan got canned as I didn’t feel like a wet ride today. Instead we went for a shorter ride up north to Granite Falls, had some lunch and came home. We only rode 120 miles, less then half of what I was expecting to do, but at least we got out for a ride. There’s way too much construction on all the fun roads this year. Also, due to the late start we hit a lot more traffic too which is never fun. I can say the passing capabilities of the ST3 are pretty darn good. .

I’m going to do that 3 pass blast before summer is over, damn it! One way or the other, even if I need to play hooky from work again.