State of the Feathers Report for February 2010

I always empty out my pants pockets when I get home. I keep the quarters and throw the rest of the coin into a large coffee can. Over the last 10-15 years I've filled up 2 large coffee cans and an even larger cookie jar. For a long time I have been cursing about how much space the coin takes up and how useless it is to me. Last week I hauled 2 of the cans to the grocery store, where they have a coin counting machine, and cashed it in. The small coin is mostly useless now days but if you collect enough of it it adds up! I made quite a haul and I still have the big cookie jar to cash in!

The stint of fair weather we had in early January didn't hold out; Denver has had a couple of snow storms since the club took its impromptu ride to Limon in January. Not enough snow to shut down the city but enough to keep us "fair weather" riders off the street. The club had a Mystery Dinner run last Friday; we all showed up in cars because of the weather. We still had a good showing in spite of the snow. We went to Tafolino's Mexican Restaurant in Lakewood.

One of the club members celebrated their 76th birthday with a Karaoke party last week. I took the video camera and filmed the Karaoke; I also took the Canon and took still pictures. I burned everything onto CD-ROM but I'm not going to post the video on-line unless he asks me to. The marinated meat balls were great! I actually do know what the secret ingredient was but I'm not telling.

Be careful what you ask for because you just might get it. I've been assigned a couple of high visibility projects at work. Now I have to walk my talk. I am not sure I have the skills needed to get them done. I should have kept my mouth shut.

The Berlin years

I was browsing books a few days ago and came across a book titled "Christopher and His Kind" by Christopher Isherwood. The book is an autobiography of Isherwood's time in Berlin just before the outbreak of World War II.

The book was released in 1976 and is considered by many critics to be an important work for two reasons. Most important to me is Christopher's candor about his gay life style and gay Berlin in the 1930's. Isherwood went on to be an early leader of the gay movement in the United States. The book is also considered important for its evolution of the autobiography as novel.

I first learned of Isherwood last spring when I watched a DVD titled "Chris & Don: A Love Story". The film is a fascinating documentary about Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy and their 33 year relationship together. (The young Don Bachardy is very easy on the eyes too.)

If you can read this then you are as bored as I am

Last weekend I did a comparison test of the Hoyt Tech MSR-200 HD motorsports video camera, the Twenty20 Contour HD helmet video camera and the GoPro HD wearable video camera. The Hoyt Tech MSR-200 is clearly an inferior camera both in quality of video and design - it's not worth the money. Both GoPro and Twenty20 have made tremendous improvements in their products; I was disappointed with the first release of their product line. Hopefully Hoyt Tech will make some improvements to their camera. I am not going to post the video.

I plan to use the Contour HD and the GoPro HD together. I want to get the GoPro out infront of the wind screen to record a more panoramic view. On top of the headlight is the perfect place for it but it picks up too much vibration there; I may have thought of a way to fix that. I'm going to try filling a Hot Water bottle with a thick liquid (maybe dish soap) attach that to the top of the headlight and attach the camera to the water bottle - I think that might dampen out the vibration. It will look like crap but if it works I don't care what it looks like.

I took down some of my videos that no one watched; I might take down 2 or 3 more. It really doesn't matter if they clock up view counts or not, still if I'm the only one that looks at them they don't need to be on You Tube.

The polyps they took out during my colonoscopy were benign (non-cancerous). The procedure is simple and painless but the clean out the night before isn't much fun. I'm not looking forward to the next one in 5 years.

A pair of Mountain Chickadee's flew past the apartment last Saturday singing "Fee-bee, fee-bee" back and forth to each other. They were too fast for me to run get the big camera out and snap pictures, and too active for me to go out searching for them ... maybe next time.

The back pain has cleared up and I've resumed doing some light exercises and walking again. If I can't go out for a walk then I try to take the stairs instead of the elevator at work at least twice during the day.

I really wish the lady upstairs wouldn't run the vacuum while I'm trying to blog.