The Screaming Viking

I bought a device off a guy that is known as “Jack’s O2 Mod“.  This thing is a resistor connected to a couple of couplers.  It plugs in line between the O2 sensor and the fuel management system.  What it does is “fool” the computer into thinking the mix needs to run a little richer.  In one of the first posts I put up about the 13o0 I covered where the bike is setup to run lean at idle or low throttle for emission purposes.  This shouldn’t cause any damage, but it’s not the ideal situation as far as heat and performance is concerned.

The page I linked goes in to some detail about how to make the mod yourself for around a buck.  My problem is I solder like a 2 year old.  I also don’t want to make changes to the bike that can’t be backed out.  If I splice into the wires…it’s pretty permanent.  I contacted a guy that has commercialized the finished contraption and he has stopped making them.  He was putting them together and sold them for 50 bucks.  I put a post on a 1300 message board to see if anyone had one they wanted to part with.  A guy answered me, and we made the deal for 30 bucks shipped.  I received it the other day, took about 5 min to connect and fired the bike up.  The mod does exactly what it advertises it does…it clearly richens up the mix at the lower throttle settings.

It’s tough to explain why this little adjustment is needed on a bike unless you ride.  Even then, some guys don’t put in the little bit of effort to improve the performance of their bikes.  I don’t get it.  It gives me a little bit more power at the lower end of the first couple of gears..which in town and on the gravel make quite a bit of difference.  Also, spending 30 bucks here will allow me to put pipes and another intake on the bike before I have to install a new fuel management system.

I got a bit of time to work on the squeak in the rear end.  I assumed it was from the belt being too tight.  To be able to adjust it, I had to take off the muffler, loosen the rear brake caliper, and loosen the axel nut.  Then I had to adjust the tension bolts on each side of the wheel.  This sounds like a little bit of effort, and for my first time taking it apart it didn’t go too bad.  I loosened it up quite a bit, because I assumed my weight would tighten up the belt when I sat down.  I set the belt and had the kid check the tension when I was sitting on the bike…incredibly loose…too loose in my estimation, but I still took it for a little test run.  It was clear on the driveway that I had done more harm than good.  Rain was coming in so I had to put things away for the night.

The next day pulling things apart, adjusting the belt and putting things back together took about 15min….the first night it took around an hour.  I tightened the belt up quite a bit and took a swing around.  I had thought initially the noise was gone, but towards the end of my ride the noise came back.  I checked the belt and it is still a bit looser than the mfg suggests.  I’ll tighten it up some tomorrow morning.  I am hoping to put a couple hundred miles on the bike…so maybe I’ll wait till after I get back.

I ran in to a guy at the bar tonight that rides a Stratoliner.  That bike is a bit bigger than the 1300.  Weight wise it has about 200lbs, it has a higher center of gravity and about 500cc’s more displacement.  I had thought pretty hard about looking for one of those, but I had my doubts about how it would handle on the gravel.  The guy I spoke with said it is not fun to ride on the dirt roads.  I think I could probably get used to it, but I’m glad I decided to go with the 1300 instead of something quite a bit bigger out of the gate.  Maybe down the line I’ll get something bigger…but we’ll see.

The last bit of maintenance I’ll have to do, that the previous owner clearly didn’t, is to adjust the valves.  The yamahas get a pretty good “tick tick tick” sound to them after awhile.  I called a dealer to see what they would charge to do it, I figured if it was around 200 bucks I would consider it.  I’ve looked in to the job and the first time I do it I’m expecting to take around 10ish hours.  After that first time I expect to do it faster…but while I’m figuring things out it will take more time.  They quoted me north of 500 bucks to do it.  For that price I’ll take care of it myself.  Man, I don’t see how guys own these things without doing their own wrenching.  Outside of changing tires and major engine work…I’m confident I can take care of whatever is going on.  Hopefully I don’t have a serious problem where I have to test that though.

It’s year end for the school, and with that comes the onslaught of ordering.  I like this time of year because I get a chance to play with a few new things.  It also gives me the opportunity to set things up the way I’d like them setup.  Like I’ve said before, there is nothing wrong with the way the previous guy configured things…I just have a different idea of how I want it to work.  I want to move towards a more “enterprisy” environment.  I want to be able to manage all the machines from one central point, and I want to do it as cheaply as possible.

So far we have received approval to build out 2 business computer labs.  I’m going to use iMacs for these labs running both lion and win7.  They are going to be setup to dual boot.  I think this gives us maximum flexibility.  For one of these labs they are looking at teaching multimedia applications and some web design.  We’re looking at dual monitor setups and all that.  I think it will be pretty decent by the time we are done.  The only real concern I have is getting enough data pipe to these machines.  I don’t think the network drops in that room was ever really designed to push as much traffic as these machines will potentially push/pull.  What I’m going to do is build out the room the way I want, then I’ll look at going back and attacking the networking situation later.  The way the building is segmented there is no real main switch closet.  There are a couple of locations that have auxiliary switches.  In the next few years I would like to run fiber…but I’m not sure how much that is going to cost.

Something else I want to do is replace all the ancient macs we have here.  There are 90 or more emacs, which at this point are long past their usefulness.  I wonder how much we’d save on power alone if these were replaced…  My thoughts are instead of replacing X amount each year, we finance it…replace them all at once and pay it off over a few years.  This is going to be quite a bit of work for me, but I think this would jump start us on to a regular replacement schedule.  Also, in five years maybe we would be looking at some kind of 1 to 1 initiative where we can downsize the desktop machines.  Right now I don’t know how that would work…but we’ll see.

If all this replacement action gets approved, it will keep me fairly busy over the summer.  Physically setting them up and moving things around will take a little bit of time, but the big time sink will be putting images on the machines.  With deep freeze it has to copy the size of the frozen disk with each image…that’s what takes all the time.

We’re also ordering a few iPads.  Not a whole bunch, I will probably have around 20 to mess with and get ready for the school year.  The management of the ipads is something that is a bit tricky.  I’ve decided to quite expecting that people won’t use them for personal stuff.  As long as they are ready for school and they have them for that…I don’t care what they are used for.

Gonna be a busy summer.

Attached is a letter from a death row inmate.  This guy killed a 17 year old girl to whom which he offered crack for sex.  From the article I read, the father of the girl was pretty distraught about the letter.

deathrowletter

For several years there has been a change coming down the road for education.  In the past few years, with the introduction of the smart phones really, that change has been accelerated.  A lot of knowledge that people insisted kids memorize has changed to knowledge that can be found on the internet.  We need to change some of our focus from recalled knowledge to retrieving knowledge.  I don’t think this should be a whole sale shift across the board…there is some knowledge that is important…but that knowledge is changing from “facts” to “concepts”.  Is it important that I know the capital of Mississippi?  What that ever important?  Is it important that I know how to spell?  To some extent yeah, it probably is…but once a kid has passed the 5th grade it’s time to switch that focus from memorizing how to spell words over to knowing where to find the data.  Do we need to extensively teach geography?  or should we focus on the the knowledge to use the tools to find out about the current geography in an area?  Writing and penmanship is getting less and less important, but composition and effectively communicating is becoming more important (IMO).  So many people have a personal blog, lots of people us facebook/twitter/txts to communicate…maybe we should offer some course work involving communicating effectively in 140 characters or less?

We have such a limited school day, limited dollars, limited resources in general, it’s unfortunate that educational institutions are not keeping up with the knowledge and skills that are relevant in society.  I could go on about this, expand on my ideas…but I’ve burnt up way more than 140 characters.