Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Lady Thunder - Update #1

As you may recall, I didn't do Lady Thunder any favors a few weeks back by taking her down Lime Creek and exiting the road in a non-standard way. :(
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Ok, that's cool. I didn't know I could embed a Google map into my blog. Color me impressed. Well, now you know where we went down. So here's the brief update...

Lady Thunder's parts arrived on Friday the 21st and the guys (psst..., let's not say anything about Ty's Glamor Shots(TM) photo there. He's bigger than me) have nearly completed the work on her, except for one thing; the fuel tank.

They ordered a Victory Vegas tank from Victory Parts HQ, but what they received was a correctly colored, but differently styled tank. Two problems with that. Lady Thunder is all about the "White". This Victory Vegas Kingpin tank is 2/3 gray instead of 2/3 White, as the straight-up Victory Vegas should be. The other problem is that the Vegas tank has a very nice 'spine' on her the runs down the dorsal line of the tanks. That's cooler that you may think. The Kingpin tank does not have that.

Sooo, back goes the tank and we all can cross our fingers that a proper Victory Vegas (spined) tank can be found, in the right colors, in the right proportions. If not, then I'll probably settle for an unpainted Vegas tank and have the paint genius match it, and stripe it. This painter is AWESOME. I'll link him someday when I find out who he is.

Until then, my withdrawal deepens. Trying not to twitch.

-- Mike

Friday, March 14, 2008

An incomparable week

(* Psst, like so many e-mails in my Drafts, this has been sitting since 14-March. Deal. *)

This week has been like no other in my life. Monday morning I awoke to a beautiful morning in Prague, Czech Republic. I had spent a wonderful weekend there with a great friend, and former colleague at StepNexus, Inc. I flew home to Austin from Prague by way of London's Heathrow Airport and Chicago's O'Hare Airport. A long day, and all I could think about was Prague on the way back to Austin. Yeah, Prague. That's it.

Prague was immediately preceded by a week in London for the purpose of celebrating the 10th Anniversary of MULTOS. Sadly, that week also coincided with some very difficult decisions being made within the owning organization, StepNexus. We'll get to that in a bit. But there was some really cool stuff in between...

So I land in Chicago and breathe in the fresh air that is 'unlimited' internet on my Hotspot account at ORD's Admiral's Club lounge - ahhh, Twitterbuds are a Twittering, and with SXSWi going on back home in Austin, there was no telling what this week would be like. Sure enough, there's a Tweet sitting in my box, "how about lunch on Tuesday"? Me, turn down a lunch out? Not a chance. I picked up @karasoluri and @khaynes, and their new SXSWi buddy, @vero, and we were later joined by none other than @whurley. Good times.

I worked a bit at my favorite coffee shop, Dominican Joe, and I get a Tweet and a call from @adelemcalear and @collencoplick who were also at SXSWi, launching their new company, 99directions. Colleen called me and said, "Let's get BBQ!" "Oooook, I said.", but of course if you know me, you know that I could eat BBQ indefinitely. Cutting to the chase, I jumped the HP/@scobleizer bandwagon and crashed their BBQ at The Salt Lick. County Line on the Lake for lunch, The Salt Lick for dinner. Beat that with a stick. I can't.

So that was a day of opposites: Lunch with @whurley and sitting next to @iJustine at dinner. Talk about opposites, those two. Well, @whurley does have nice hair, too.

Also on Tuesday morning, I received an e-mail from a fellow that I was trying to meet up with for a drink for over nine months. We'd had a good chat on a ORD/AUS flight and I told him all I knew about smart cards in about (* cough *) two hours, and he STILL wanted to talk biz with me later. Finally did. That happened on Thursday the 13th. Very cool. Hopefully more on that later.

And on Friday, the wheels fell off of the good ship StepNexus. On Monday, I posted this to a wee-wittle news group I'd created so share work-related news to those interested in my industry. That caused a little bit of a stir, but as you may indeed read, it is entirely truthful and actually very positive on my former employer. They just weren't ready for the aftershocks of pulling the plug on the company so abruptly without a communications plan in place. Gotta have that, kids.

All for now. I'm lining up work for April, and still open to ideas for what I should/could be when I grow up. :)

-- Mike