幾鬼秘的部落格

Can you guess what the sign means?  I’m not sure how long they’ve been up, but I saw them all around YYZ for the first time last weekend when I went there to pick up somebody.  At first I didn’t know what they meant and simply ignored them.  Like the many cheapskates who tried to save a few bucks on parking, I was cruising around the airport waiting for the cell phone call to summon me for the pick up, when I saw the electronic road sign warning that parking is prohibited on the shoulders, followed by the notice "free parking in cell phone lot".   I immediately followed the said signs to arrive at what looked to be an abandoned parking lot.  I mean, there were probably fewer cars in the lot than on the shoulders around roads of the airport.

One would think that by doing this the airport is probably losing potential income from drivers who would otherwise go for the paid parking.  But I guess the "park on shoulders" situation is really getting out of hand, and it’s an indication that if people are determined not to pay, they’ll find other (illegal) ways to avoid it.

The free cell phone parking lot is not only free, but very close to terminal 1 (~2 min drive away).  But from the number of cars still parked on shoulders, they probably need to be advertised a little bit more.  Hopefully this blog will help.

With my first new car 7 years ago, as well as my latest one, I’d broken them in by simply trying to avoid driving them at a constant RPM.  I didn’t baby them as some people suggest, but drove them as I normally do.  A few months ago I came across this article that suggests something really different for the break-in procedure.  In short, run it hard!  Considering that I probably won’t keep my new bike for long, as well as its relatively low cost, I thought this was probably the best specimen that I’ll ever have for this experiment.

While the suggested procedure is not particularly difficult to follow in theory, it is not the most comfortable thing to have a single-cylinder machine buzzing under your butt at redline all the time.  I had to look down at the tach whenever I shift to make sure that I’m at least hitting close to, but not over, the redline.  People say that the bike will come "alive" after the break-in this way.  I’ve now put almost 1000km on the bike and admittedly the engine has become noticeably more willing to be rev’ed to the redline more freely.  While most sources quote the bike’s max speed at ~120km/h, last week on the 401 while "cruising" home, I haphazardly looked at the speedo and saw 140+km/h, with the tach needle well into the red zone at 11+K RPM!  I doubt that the bike can go any faster however, unless I lose a lot of weight

For the past few months before I got my bike, I’d been spending ~$270/month on gas driving my car.  For the month of June, having the bike for only half of the month, I’ve reduced my car’s gas bills to $200, plus $17 for the bike!  Even with the aggressive style of riding for the break-in, I averaged 2.7L/100km on the bike, just a little over the quoted rate of 2.5L/100km on paper.  The gas savings paid for the insurance ($28/month) with change!  And not only am I saving the environment, I even get free parking

Last weekend didn’t have a good start as I spent all of Friday working on performance issues of our application - not fun.  I was the last one to leave work, heading home for a quick dinner before going to the ACC for the Show Mi concert.  I borrowed an 80-200mm lens from MK and was promptly stopped and questioned by the security at two different gates.  I managed to sneak it in but didn’t use it until the latter part of the concert, afraid that I’d be kicked out

The concert was ok, but neither CL nor I liked the sound system.  If you didn’t already know the songs, you’d probably have a hard time making out the lyrics.  Except for the part where Sammi gave 2 guys a chance to make fools out of themselves on stage, which was pretty hilarious, the concert was rather ordinary.  But she definitely showed what she was capable of during the upbeat dance numbers, which I enjoyed the most.

Saturday morning CL and I joined MK+WL on their "shopping" trip to a kitchen/cabinet store.  They’ve just moved into a big house and will be adding cabinets to their breakfast area and laundry room.  I, on the other hand, was just there to get an idea of how much it’d cost to put some valance under my cabinets.  It would be an affordable and small job that the salesperson recommended that I do it myself.  We’ll see…

After a nice lunch at Michi, CL and I drove all the way to Etobicoke planning to get some motorcycling gears, only to find 2 of the 3 stores closed!  We spent almost 2 hours at Parker Bros trying on jackets and helmets, but came out empty-handed.

We were pretty dead tired by the time we went home.  I took a quick nap and had a quick dinner before heading to the Level 7 concert to help out as a photographer.  I still have to process half of the photos - hope they’ll turn out ok.

Sunday morning we met up with MK+WL to drive up to King Township for some
hiking.  We picked hike #0; we wanted to start on Sideroad 16 but couldn’t find the "entrance", so we ended up starting on the east side of Keele, just as the map shows.  I was quite surprised by the number of photo ops the hike offered.  Lucky that I brought my full gear with me

Holiday Monday was the most relaxed day of the weekend.  I spent the morning surfing the net, processing photos and watching Wimbledon at home.  After lunch with DF+MJ, we went to World Bowl for the first time since I don’t know when.  I was pretty consistent, even scoring 200+ in the final game.  I hope the spare ball that PT gave me will help boost my average when I get back to league play, because I was starting to lose motivation last season with my average stuck at 150.