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

Oh how I miss school…

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

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!

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

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?”

http://www.indiansareasian.com/

Some of my favorite variables considered in this experiment:

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

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)!