A few weeks ago, we sold the trusted Honda Shadow VLX that we’d been riding for the last six years (by we, I refer to my dad, my sister, and I). This is the same bike that I had taken down to Urbana with me during the final year of college, and by the time we sold it, it had over 16,000 miles on it. Needless to say, we had many great memories together.

Ever since we sold the bike, we’ve been looking at a replacement. At first, we were leaning towards a Harley, but after test driving one, it just didn’t seem like a good fit. So after a lot of looking around, we ended up looking at Hondas again since they are so reliable and we had great experiences with our old one. Last weekend, we found a great bike and ended up buying it on the spot!

Here are a few pictures:

The bike had a lot of custom work done to it which includes Cobra exhaust pipes, chrome engine guard, chrome radiator plate with a flaming skull, skull rearview mirrors, skull footpegs, skull grips. As you can tell, theres a lot of the biker “skull” rebel attitude on this bike. We’ve kept most of it, just put the stock rearview mirrors back on because the custom ones were too small to see traffic behind.

So far, I’ve put just under 100 miles on it, but looking forward to more!

More photos here:
Flickr Motorcycle Set

I came across these “funny math” examples while blog-surfing yesterday and they made me laugh. Always a good reminder of how much of a nerd I am

Oh how I miss school…

So I recently added a bunch of new blogs to my Google reader and one of the areas where I really wanted to get more info about was personal finance. I’ve been quite meticulous in managing my finances ever since I took a wealth management course during my final semester at U of I. I’ve got a personal cashflow spreadsheet that tracks all my finances and also projects my cashflows 10 years forward (based on some assumptions that I’ve made such as average annual pay raises, average rate of return on investments, etc.). All in all, I think I’m on track to meet my financial goals over the next decade.

Yet, you don’t know what you don’t know, and I just want to see what others out there are doing about managing their finances, and if there are tools that I could be using to do a better job. I’ve only been tracking these blogs for a week now, and I’ve already got a bunch of cool info. Here are some of the blogs that I’ve subscribed to:

• 2MillionBlog - [Feed]- One person’s journey to reaching their goal of attaining a net worth of $2 million. This one has some good articles and is an interesting read to see what kind of things he does on a day-to-day level in order to slowly increase his net worth.
• CFO: Chief Family Officer - [Feed] - This one is written by an attorney who is also a mother and a wife, but most importantly, the financial manager her family. She’s got some good insights, but she hasn’t been posting much recently because she is expecting another baby.
• FreeMoneyFinance - [Feed] - This is a great blog with some super practical advice. I’ve already done quite a few things that make sense, or simple things that people should be doing as regular maintenance for your finances.
• fivecentnickle.com - [Feed] - This one has a lot of useful posts also - and usually has multiple posts per day.

I’m sure I’ll be posting links to interesting stuff that I find on these, just so share the wealth

I recently added the first lense to my SLR collection (other than the one that came with my Canon 350D kit), and its been a fun time since. I got the Canon 10-22mm wide angle lense from Amazon.com (link).

The lense is a wide angle lense, and its is quite amazing the change in perspecitive you get when you use it compared to the standard range zoom lenses. Here is an example. I took a picture at 18mm, which is the lowest focal length on the kit lense, from the corner of the master bedroom, and then I took one at 10mm. Here’s the difference:

Old lense perspecitive -

New lense perspective -

Need I say more? Anyways, you’ll be seeing a lot more wide angle photos on the photoblog since I havn’t change the lense to the old kit lense at all since I got this new one. I carry the old one around, but the new one is just so niiiiiccceeeee!

PhotoFriday.com is a website that hosts a weekly challenge for photographers and photobloggers. A new theme is announced each Friday, and everyone has one week to submit their entries that fit that theme. Once the submission for a theme is closed, visitors to the site can cast votes for the entries that they feel are “noteworthy.” The voting period lasts for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. After this period, the votes are tallied up and the six entries that received the most noteworthy votes are featured.

I have had the pleasure of having two entries within the last month being selected as noteworthy.

An interesting article I came across this morning about shooting in RAW vs. jpeg format when taking digital pictures.

http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/raw-vs-jpeg/

So, you’ve forked over at least $600 (but probably $1000) for your first DSLR camera. You have more buttons, dials, and menus than you know what to do with, even after reading through the fat booklet that came with your camera and explains its usage in ten differnent languages.

It’s all you can do to understand ISO, shutter speed, and how less is more when it comes to aperture. This beast of a camera can produce files in a Raw format, whatever that means, but it also has the nice comfortable JPEG format that we all know and love.

Like me you probably happily shoot in JPEG for quite awhile - getting used to the myriad of options available to you. One day you look at that Raw setting and ask, “should I be using Raw for the best quality? What is Raw, exactly?”

Check out http://yes.com. You just enter in your zip code, and it will tell you all the radio stations in your area. you can click on the radio station to get a minute-by-minute playlist of the songs they have aired.

Japan pictures are up! I’m in the process of writing up the day-to-day account of the trip, but in the meantime you can view the photos at http://albums.shayanmerchant.com/weekend_excursions.

This is something that has surfaced repeatedly thoughout my life since many of my friends are East Asian. Finally someone has compiled the evidence and made a scientific statement with real proof!

http://www.indiansareasian.com/

Some of my favorite variables considered in this experiment:

Leave it to an Indian to make a website about this…

One of the radio shows that I love to listen to is called “This American Life”. It is a show that brings forth the most thought provoking and interesting stories about life in the United States. Each Friday’s show has a theme and the show is presented in a set of acts; like a play.

A few shows back, the theme was “Mind games” (feel free to listen to the show online). The second act of this show was about a group of people in New York who pull off these “missions” to basically add some spice or excitement into strangers’ lives. They call themselves “Improv Everywhere” and they say that they are in the business of causing scenes.

Here are some of my favorite missions:

I’d like to start something like this in Chicago, unfortunately I’m never there - maybe I should stick to participating in something that already exists (more alt travel to New York)!