I shut down the site over the weekend and upgraded / migrated to a new server operating system. Kelly’s World was running on Mandriva 2008.1 prior to today. As of now, the site is live on a Fedora 16 server. My main reason for performing the migration was to get an OS in place that could be updated more consistently.
My second big motorcycle trip of the year took me down the Coastal Highway (Highway 101). Road trip #1 had already established that I enjoyed motorcycle touring, so now it was about seeing where that enjoyment would take me. I still had questions I wanted to ask myself during the ride: how far in a day is too far, are scenic roads just a little more enjoyable than “main” highways, or a lot, and is driving through unfamiliar cities on a motorbike ‘way more scary than in a car? I packed up my bike and set out on August 1 to see what new things I could learn about myself…
Continue reading Motorcycle Road Trip #2: the Coastal Highway and Computer History Museum
2011 is the year I wanted to start taking my motorcycle on some longer, multi-day trips. I had lots of questions to explore: would I figure out how to pack what I need? Would the Road Glide be comfortable for the long haul? And most important: would this kind of riding be the kind of thing I really want to do- in other words, is it “fun” for Kelly?
My first road trip of 2011 was “back home”: to Edmonton. A destination I’m familiar with, through territory I’ve experienced before in a car. I miss my friends back in Edmonton, but haven’t felt particularly like making the trip in the last half dozen years or so. I like where I live, and my friends/family come out here often enough… but the bike gave me a reason to make the trip. And so I packed up and set out on June 25…
Continue reading Motorcycle Road Trip #1: to Edmonton and back
We knew it was a possibility, perhaps even probable. But that didn’t make losing Jasmine at the end of May any easier.
Irene and I both noticed something wrong as soon as we came back from our week-long cruise. Jasmine looked “puffy” around her chest, and seemed somewhat disinterested and dull. After a few days, she seemed to be having problems breathing. An X-Ray showed fluid and a possible mass in her chest cavity. Fluid was drawn, and ultrasound performed. The mass was quite large, 4 cm by 2 cm, and looked like a tumor. The fluid drawn from the chest, which eased Jasmine’s breathing for only a day or so, was also tested: it confirmed the worse.
It occurred to me shortly after I bought my first motorbike last year that video taping my rides might be kind of interesting. I started investigating the various options, ranging from duct-taping or velcro-strapping an off-the rack home video camera onto my bike, through custom-built video rigs specific to motorcycling. What I settled on was probably overkill for my needs, and turned out to have some unexpected frustrations: the Race Optics EVO-HD Camera system.
Continue reading Recording my rides: the Race Optics EVO-HD Camera System
Two weeks ago I came down with a cold, and a week ago I was diagnosed with a lung and sinus infection. The doctor said it was probably a variety of “mild” pneumonia, what is sometimes called “walking pneumonia”. So I’ve been coughing, clearing my sinuses, and generally feeling crappy.
On the plus side, the weather has been generally unpleasant as well. That sounds funny, I know, but for me there is nothing worse than being sick when it is beautiful and sunny and the birds are singing: it just feels doubly unfair. There were a couple of decent days this week, today not being one of them: however, it wasn’t raining, and I was feeling a bit better. This meant that was overwhelmed by a desire to get out on my motorbike, which I did.
I looked at the banner of my site today and see that Kelly’s World has broken the 1 million hits mark. Whoopee, and so forth.
I would like to imagine that this number represents some count of real people visiting, but the reality is less pleasant. I’d guesstimate that about 99% of the visits to my site are some combination of spambots and web crawling robots. For those of you reading this who can comprehend what I’m saying: thanks for being a real human being taking an interest in something I have to say.
I’ve had a couple of tiring and rather stressful weeks at work in a row, so I decided to take Friday afternoon off. Since it was cold (and getting colder) I couldn’t really go for a ride on my motorbike. Instead, I decided to practice some retail therapy and “upgrade” my BlackBerry Bold to an iPhone.
My BlackBerry is on Rogers, so off I went to my local Rogers Plus store…
Continue reading New iPhone: or why I cancelled my Rogers account
I run a simple little blog here. I don’t make any money off of my site even, although I’m not adverse to doing so as long as it isn’t obtrusive. I don’t sell anything, nor do accept submissions other than comments. The posts here are my own: they aren’t scraped, syndicated from, or re-posted from anywhere else. Mostly, this site is a vanity site, like a billion others on the Internet.
Despite the complete lack of commercial value to my site, it gets spammed. Comment spam was a problem a few years ago, and I’ve managed that via Akismet and Bad Behavior plugins for WordPress. There are still about about 100 spam comments a day hitting my site, but only one or two make it through my watchdogs. Lately, however, there has been a new irritant: spam users.
The entire month of December has come and gone, and I’m now staring down the deep, yawning abyss of another year. I’ve been at that age the last couple of years, an age I was reminded of recently by my birthday, where thoughts sometimes turn to all that has been left undone in life.
2010 was a good year in that regard: I took some risks like getting on a motorbike again, and made a lot of new acquaintances in the process. I also lost 15 pounds and started eating a bit better. There were lots of challenges and sad times as well, but looking at things from the slightly removed vantage point of the turning year I would have to say things are going fairly well.
