Bike Service, Dinner and Work

Mum and dad picked me up on the way home and we went and got the bike and then dropped it off for a service. New gear and brake cables, true the back wheel, new handle bar tape, loosen the pedals and get the gears working again. The gears have been on friction feed for a couple of years now so it will be nice (strange even) to have indexing working again.

Mum and Dad won a $60 voucher for dinner at the Oatley West Chinese restaurant. So we went there for dinner tonight. Ken was going to come too but he is sick so couldn't join us. Very nice as always, and only cost $10 in the end.

Went to Melbourne yesterday (Virgin Blue, sigh) for a trade show, PacPrint. Normally these shows can be a bit boring but this one was pretty good. Lots of big iron, quite impressive some of it. Funnily enough when we fessed up to working for Canon R&D several of the companies, our competitors, got all excited and started opening up their machines and telling us all about how they worked and what the exciting new bits were. I guess it was a nice change having someone who actually understood the technical side. Everything they showed was public knowledge of course, but still very interesting to see the real thing. We had a nice lunch too, Linguini Pescatore with a nice Chardonnay.

Practice Pack

I had my first practice pack today. First off I had to put the front low rider panniers on. It has been so long since I last did it that I couldn't remember exactly how they went on. So I had to go and look at some old photo's to check that I was doing it right :)

Once that was all done the pack itself was pretty easy. A couple of weeks ago I got the list of stuff I carry off of my web site and collected everything up. So today was just a matter of stuffing everything in the correct place. It is the first time with the Acer. Bulk wise it is not too much of a problem, although it is a second charger. What was a bit of a shock was the bike, soooooo heavy. I think it is going to take a while to get used to a loaded touring bike again. Good thing I am going to the Netherlands first.

Google sites crashes all the time

I've been trying to move my old site across but Google Sites keeps hanging. You create a page, edit it, save and then if you try and change it you get "Loading editor..." and the browser sits on 100% but never returns. Most frustrating :( I normally use IE, I tried the latest Opera but it has the same problem, unable to edit.

Getting started

Geocities is dead :( I'm currently moving my old site across from Geocities. The new site is hosted by Google, http://sites.google.com/site/jasonandre/Home. Since Google is hosting the web site I thought I might as well use Google for a Blog as well.

Jason