2018.05.25 – Back to the dark side

For a while now, my travel laptop has been having some touchpad issues. I decided to try and fix it earlier this week. After unscrewing the bottom plate of the laptop some plastic bits fell out. It wasn’t until I reassembled everything when I realized the horror. One of the mount points to the hinge was broken.

While the touchpad now worked perfectly, the hinge was about to go rip itself out of the cage and damage the logic board at any minute. Given that I am planning on taking a bunch of road trips over the summer, this was not going to do me any good. The last few days I weighted my options. On the PC side, it was either going to be a Surface Pro or and Dell XPS13. But neither one really was hitting the right buttons for me. Plus, they were around $1,500 in the configuration I was looking at.

So I decided maybe it was time to look at the Apple ecosystem again. After all the iPad Pro is pretty much a desktop class architecture now.

In the three years I left the Apple ecosystem, the iPad has really grown up. Adobe, Microsoft, Google, and even Apple have realized that the apps need to be desktop class now. Lightroom Mobile can pretty much do everything I need to do on in the field. More so – support for keyboards has really improved with the newer iOS revisions. To the point where it really feels like a laptop now.

I am going to try and find time over the weekend to really try it out and see how much of my normal workflow I can do.

2018.05.22 – Truths About Motorcycle Riding I Have Learned So Far

30,000 miles later and I’ve got nothing!

Over the past 15 months, I have managed to ride nearly 30,000 miles on Matte. Over this time, I have taken a bunch of weekend road trips and some week long ones. As I do them, I continue to learn truths about touring around on a motorcycle. I am sure I can keep on adding to this list, but this is what I have so far.

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2018.05.21 – Death Valley Trip

In Death Valley again when it is above 100.

I keep going hot and cold on writing. A lot of this has to do with the situations around my personal life right now. When I am overly stressed, I tend to write less. Right now, I have a lot going on. Overall, I am OK – just really busy. If I have not been visible in the community it is because my personal and work life have been my priorities.

This weekend was Bay to Breakers and I just needed to get the hell out of town. I didn’t want to be around all of the straight drunk people who invade SF and act like complete assholes. Given the number of Irish pubs in my neighborhood, you would understand. I decided to pack Matte up and head out to Death Valley.

1200 miles in 52 hours. I left SF at 4:30 pm on Friday and got home around 8 pm on Sunday evening. It really felt like the trip was longer, but it was really only a weekend trip. It was well worth it – even given the fact that I managed to wear out the chain on Matte this trip.

Click here for the full gallery of images in on my SFW site

Otherwise continue down below here for how my trip went.

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2018.05.21 – Letting my hair down

Letting my hair down after my weekend road trip

1200 miles in 52 hours. Yesterday alone was nearly 600 miles of riding that contained 4 mountain passes and 100 miles of 30-40mph headwinds. On top of that my chain decided to go from being good but nearing the end of the adjustment range to OMG – REPLACE ME NOW in the last 150 miles of the trip.

But what a lovely trip it was. I will be posting up a trip report and pictures tonight or tomorrow. But it’s time to shower and get my ass to the office.