My Hayabusa along the St Joe River

I just love my Suzuki Hayabusa! Not only is it an incredibly sexy looking machine, but it’s also a marvel of engineering.

I’ll explain where my passion for this bike comes from…

How many other machines can be: purchased for $10,000; ridden at 200 mph; easily take corners at over 100 mph and more than a 45 degree angle; run constantly and truly for many hours while the engine is revving from 1000 to 12000 rpm and doing speeds from 20 to 180 mph; and go over 32,000 miles with all the internal workings of the engine in perfect alignment…?

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Wow! I quickly found that the hardest part of this was keeping the blog up to date! I find myself torn between the desire to keep a record and let others know of my progress… and the drive that these trials are for me alone to continue improving myself, thus seeming like a very private and personal matter. It’s not that I want to hide it, but rather I don’t want a feeling of obligation to be the motivation behind my actions, rather my inner desire and/or awareness…

I will post this one, but don’t plan at the moment to continue the practice.

As a final update: I finished the 30 days, and for workouts did very well… Overall working out every day was a breeze and enjoyable. No problem there. Drawing didn’t keep coming quite as easily. I love doing it, but I often get stuck on a drawing and feel like I need to finish it, but don’t really want to. And meditation I ended up converting to tiny breath meditations throughout the day instead of blocks of time.

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January 4th, 2009 – Another drawing out of my animal book. It’s where I go for inspiration. This African Moon Moth is from a small photo where the moth has just hatched and it’s wings are just finished drying out.

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Continuing on with my 30 days of Meditation, Drawing and Workouts. I’ve gotten some decent meditation time in, and lots of workout time. Drawing probably needs more than 20 minutes to get into the flow and really produce though.

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Meditation

A friend of mine asked if I could post some meditation links for him, so I thought I’d explain a little more about what type of meditation I am trying.

I have tried meditation off and on, but never stuck with it for very long. This month I am doing it for 20 minutes every day and recording more about what happens or how it affects me, so I’ll learn a little more.

The first 2 weeks I’ll be doing “Deep Meditation”, the second two weeks will be “Connecting with the Inner Body” explained below. Both styles are about quieting the mind and finding the stillness within you.

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Drawing

Meditation

Workout

For the month of January I have chosen 3 places to focus my efforts on my 30 day trails. Usually I would want to focus on just one item, but I’ve done these 3 before. Namely: Drawing, Meditation, and working out.

I want to really establish these activities as part of my daily practice, along with testing out what kind of physical shape I can establish with a full 30 days of working out.

I’ll be consolidating the reports on each day into batches of 5 days or so.
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Contemplation

Although I don’t do the standard “New Years Resolution” each year, I have been doing something similar but much more limited in scope and more often. It’s called the “30 day trial.” I’ve been doing this “30 day trial” for a couple of years now off and on.

This has included tons of various improvements in an attempt to either start a new good habit, or break an old bad one. Examples of ones I’ve already tried are vegetarianism for 2 months, writing daily in a journal, recording my dreams, morning exercise, getting up early, flossing, no alcohol, and more.

I’ve had some success and some were not so successful. Most of the unsuccessful ones were because I didn’t stick to the full thirty days and gave up. To help alleviate that, I am going to take the next step forward and publicly post my progress on my trials to hold myself accountable and keep a log of how well I did.

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I try to use a portable thumb drive with portable applications for all of my application needs wherever I go. This provides me with security with the fact that none of my data is left hanging around on any machine, security also with the fact that I use an SSH tunnel for my internet needs thus avoiding someone snooping my traffic on the network, and ease of use as all of my programs are accessible anywhere I am at as long as I have a windows computer to plug my drive into.

I’ve had a few requests from people to give them a copy of all the programs I use… however, this isn’t quite what I want to do as my personal data is often saved into the application folders of those programs. So I decided to create a post about the items I use and provide links.

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Hard times are coming… the only question is: How hard will they be?

The financial meltdown was predicted a few years in advance along with the mortgage crisis that precipitated it, and even though the majority of people want to remain positive (or blind) and turn their head from the coming years of hardship, the fact remains that there is no good news on the short term horizon. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

I just don’t know how far “worse” goes down the ladder at this point. I mean, is this a worse as in gas costs $6/gal and people have to start tightening their belts, or is this a worse as in complete financial collapse and another great depression, or is this a worse as in zombies rule the world and you’re the only remaining human alive?

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Update on my Asus eee PC 900: (Note- I’m typing this post up on my Asus eee )

After traveling around with it for two months I really appreciated it’s size. It fit perfectly into my motorcycle tank bag and at less than 2 pounds it’s practically not noticed when carrying it around.

The size of the screen is actually not a problem at all for using the internet or doing most other normal work.

The only thing I found myself disliking are that the buttons on the touchpad don’t always work, and the low powered CPU can at times be slow enough to be irritating.

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Popularity: 3%