Last Ride of 2017

Today I had my last ride of 2017.  I went out with my uncle in the afternoon.  It was a nice balmy and by that I mean a few degrees above freezing.  The extended forecast looks colder and snow.  Thus, this is the day.

I rode my uncle's Harley Fatboy.  He's really customized that bike.  He put a custom suspension that is better than the stock one on my Ultra.  And it can really lean down.  Pretty good response.  A nice fun bike to drive around town.

Just Try

The cold has me thinking back to spring when we signed my 3 year old for soccer. there was a huge difference in performance, magnitude level, of the toddlers. They were all on the same footing. All had toddler sized experience backgrounds and toddler sized bodies. The most common problem was giving up on the game and walking off the field. But then there were some toddlers who tried. The ones who tried made all sorts of mistakes - they would trip over the ball and kick it in the wrong direction. But then they would recover, keep trying, and they’d make that goal. More importantly, I’m sure they were the ones who had the most fun. And even though its been too long since I was 3, much of that feels like adult life. There are many new challenges and experiences, where we are all equivalent of toddlers, but we need to just try. And despite tripping over the ball or kicking it in the wrong direction, it really is the best path to success and fun.

Gear Shift Patterns During Morning Rush Hour

One of the worst things to deal with is traffic in a morning rush hour so to honor that fun memory, I put together my favorite morning shift patterns:

You're going fast, and you think you're only going to go faster, so you shift up.  Then right after shifting up, traffic slows, so you shift right back down.  But then traffic slows more.  So you shift down again.  The 1 up and 2 down is a classic.

Hello Ultra Limited

I bought a Harley-Davidson Ultra Limited 2015 with about 10 thousand miles on it.  (Ironically, just about the same miles that I left my last bike at.)  I got this bike to be able to take long road trips.  This is a bike for driving across the country, and I plan to do that on this bike.  Overtime of course, baby sitter pending :)

Goodbye Sportster

I bought my Sportster to learn how to drive.  Now that I know that, I wanted a bike for long road trips.  Thus, I traded in it for a touring model.  But before I talk about the new bike, I want to look back at the old bike.  I put almost 4.5 thousand miles on that bike.  (Ending with about 10k and starting with 5.5k.)  I came close to driving that bike more in half a year than it had been driven its whole life before me.  It was dirty when I left.  The sales manager said you drive in the rain a lot or just never wash it.  I was like maybe a bit of both :)  The funny thing is I had just washed it a few weeks ago.  As I said, I road this thing.  It wasn't a show piece in a man cave.  It was a bike on the road, through wind, rain, shine, cold, heat, and etc.  Just about the only thing I did avoid was lightning.

Changing Motorcycle Oil

I did something for the first time...  I changed my oil in my motorcycle.  Another great learning experience.  The best advice I have to offer is face you don't know what your doing.  I don't know what I'm doing.  I'm not qualified to be a Motorcycle Mechanic.  I just figured out how to drive the thing, let alone do any repairs.  But you know what?  Everything in life can be learned.  Thus, for real, read multiple sites, view multiple videos.  Read up on it until you feel confident you know the flow of what they are saying.  And don't be in a rush.  The people who do this everyday can do it in like 5 minutes, because well, they do it everyday.  Plans for this to take hours, give yourself plenty of time.

Playing With Salesforce Bot Toolkit

On the Salesforce developer blog, they had a neat post: A Toolkit for Creating and Deploying Bots Inside Salesforce.  It is only a simple regular expression based bot, and I'm sure there are other Bot APIs out there, but the post seemed pretty inviting and looked fun, so I decided to take it for a spin.  It was every bit as fun as I thought.  I may port Zork over to this ☺

First installing and setting it up was pretty easy, just follow the post about it.  Works just like they described.  I think I fall in love when I tried out the select feature.  I could imagine all sorts of neat developer utilities put into that like run test and search the audit trail for who broke my stuff :)

Of course, you don't truly understand something until you hack at it, so I created a few simple Bot Handler.  Just look over the Handler apex classes for examples.  Of course, before I set off to re-create Zork, I did a simple one to create a task.  I did it two different ways to play with the framework.

MongoDB and Spring Boot - Easy as a Dream

I have a long history with SQL databases.  I've almost been tempted to write a basic one from scratch a few times for the fun of it.  But I haven't worked with a NoSQL database before.  With it raining outside, this seemed like a great day to give one a try.  Thus, I started looking into MongoDB.  I was prepared for this to take awhile, but this was like a dream.  I think I spent more time writing this blog post than it took to get going.

She'll Be Comin Round The Mountain

Okay, not a mountain, more like a large hill, or whatever you call a pile of dirt that goes up over twenty feet with a windy road laid on top going around a sharp blind corner.

I was coming up on this corner, debating how fast to take the corner.  And I noticed I couldn't see around the side of it.  Thus, I opted for the suggested speed sign, always a safe bet on a corner.  As I was coming up the road, there it was.  A semi-truck pulling a trailer came around the corner towards me.  They weren't just slightly over the line.  They were a good solid into my lane by at least 3/4ths at apex and then started moving back into their own lane.

2 Thousand Miles

Two Thousand Miles!

1 Thousand Miles

Officially broke 1000 miles - Great way to start the New Year's!