Bikes

Iron Butt Charity Ride

| Richard

1000 miles in 24 hours (plus 400 miles to and from the start!)

I’ve signed up to do this: the Royal British Legion is holding an event under the Iron Butt Association SaddleSore 1000 rules. There are several aims, first to raise money for Royal British Legion. The second is to try and take the record from the Americans. And the third is obviously the personal challenge of trying to ride 1000 miles in 24 hours (plus a 400 mile round trip to and from the starting point!).

The event starts on Friday 19th June at 12:00 with riders briefing, with riders departing between 08:00 and 09:00 on Saturday 20th June, completing the ride by 09:00 on Sunday 21st June.

I have sent off my entry form along with a cheque for £30 but I will also need to raise at least £50 of sponsorship.

As for the ride there are four routes, two north, and two south. I am taking the Route B North Anti Clockwise.

The RBLR website and route details is here.

The easiest way for me to collect sponsorship is the just giving website at http://www.justgiving.com/richardhmorris – they can claim the gift aid on your behalf.

Please sponsor me!

2008 Motorcycle Show, NEC Birmingham

| Richard

So I went along to see the show on trade day and took my trusty camera with me to take a few snaps.

The show was actually quite disappointing and for the first time in a number of years, Kawasaki did not have a ZRX anywhere to be seen.

I do fancy a Triumph Street Triple R for town use – not to replace the ZRX but just for twatting about on in London.

Anyway, photos are here:

Blatant Discrimination

| Richard

I belong to a minority sector for whom discrimination is an everyday fact of life. The fact is that that discrimination is so blatant and unapologetic and is institutional discrimination but despite that, the media make little or no comment upon it.

It’s not racial discrimination. It’s not religious discrimination. It’s not sexual discrimination. No, I’m sorry to confess it’s far worse than that. It’s because I ride a motorbike.

The most recent example of this prejudice and discrimination comes from those well known haters of all things motorcycling – a Welsh police force. Their latest anti-motorcycle act is to effectively ban the annual Welsh National Motorcycle Show because:

“Dyfed-Powys Police are of the view that there is a significant risk of violence at this year’s Welsh motorcycle show.”

I see.

Surely on that basis the police should be cancelling all football matches? After all, as we saw with the UEFA Cup Final match in Manchester, there is more than a significant risk of violence with football matches. But amazingly, they are never cancelled. I wonder why? Could it be that the perception – reinforced by the police, Government and the media – that motorcyclists are all troublemakers and lawless?

After all, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee stated that:

“Motorcyclists are particularly liable to evade road tax. Nearly 40% of motorcycles are now unlicensed.

“If the DVLA’s motorcycle enforcement regime is not to be a complete laughing stock, then the agency and the department must make the most of new powers to enforce VED on public roads.”

They must also “strongly consider more severe measures such as impounding unlicensed motorcycles”, he said, adding: “Large parts of the biking community are cocking a snook at the law.”

Of course, that was completely inaccurate, and for once the MPs were forced to apologise when it was revealed that that was complete bollocks.

Is it any wonder we feel like criminals when we are treated like criminals and discriminated against?

I Love Angelina Jolie!

| Richard

Well! Who could resist yelling that (from Red vs Blue: Real Life vs Internet) in relation to any story concerning Angelina Jolie and that lucky bastard Brad Pitt.

Yes, it turns out that Brad and Angelina have decided to buy a $20M dollar house in Provence after they managed to get consent to build Brad his own personal motorcycle race circuit in the garden.

Bastard!

Now let’s all go home and masturbate!

Bikes on t’Telly

| Richard

Hmm. It seems that coverage of the Bennetts British Superbike Championship will be leaving ITV1 (and indeed ITV4) and will now be shown on Channel 4 as “a one-hour highlights programme on the Tuesday night after each event, with a repeat later in the week.”

We’ll ignore the satellite offering because there’s no way I’m paying Murdoch a load of money to watch his overpriced shite and stick some sort of chav accessory on the side of my house, thankyouverymuch.

So instead of live coverage of one race and highlights of the other, I’m reduced to watching an hour’s programme (with probably four ad. breaks as seems to be Channel 4’s wont these days) and no doubt it’ll be at stupid o’clock at night. Unless, that is, Channel 4 has learned from its frankly pathetic attempts at televising World Superbikes a couple of years ago which frankly killed it stone dead and drove despairing bikers towards Sky, whilst concentrating on ‘quality’ output like “Big Brother”, innit?

Meanwhile, the first two rounds of World Superbikes – four races – have been and gone unnoticed by me as there’s no terrestrial or Freeview coverage I’ve noticed.

Fortunately, the BBC are consolidating their broadcasting successes recently by showing MotoGP so that’s what I’ll be concentrating on watching again this year.

Cherished Number Plates

| Richard

As chance would have it, on The Rev Counter today there was a thread about personalised/cherished/vanity numberplates.

I have a couple of them: one for the car and one for the bike. I was lucky enough to get them directly from the DVLA a few years back. It’s interesting to see what similar plates are worth and one way to do this is to visit one of the website runs by sellers/brokers of numberplates.

I have found in the past that the amount some brokers will offer you for your numberplate is way below what they will seek to sell it for, pocketing the difference for themselves rather than taking a flat fee or a percentage of the sale value. One leading company did just that when I approached them: the difference was many thousands of pounds…

Anyway, I’ve since found out about Cape Plates who offer a free valuation service as well as offering to sell your plate for you;  they’ve also got a nice selection of Irish number plates for sale if your budget doesn’t stretch to a full-on cherished number. And yes, I will be paid a nominal amount to mention them and no, it doesn’t mean I’m writing this with a positive spin.

I wonder what their valuation would be of my two plates; 2000 RM and 3 RHM?

visordown.com – Alternatives?

| Richard

So then, given it is abundantly clear that the new Visordown is how it’s going to stay, I decided to do something about it. The alternatives were to put up and shut up, start a new message board or join another one and effectively leave Visordown behind.

Now, what makes a decent message board are first and foremost the people who post on it and secondly the software that runs it.

So I posted this suggestion on visordown.com:

“The old visordown.com was running vBulletin software which is just about to have a major upgrade released: see this thread over on vBulletin.

Now, although I can see why this change has taken place from the owners’ perspective, from the users’ perspective it’s not been a complete success, shall we say, with lots of folk asking for the old visordown.com back.

So what if something the same only new, starting from scratch was to be offered?

I have a spare licence for vBulletin that I am happy to pay to upgrade and install on a server somewhere. I have a couple of domain names regsitered that might be suitable:

TrackDayHero.com (currently pointing at my blog); or

BikeChatBoard.com (ditto).

I’d start by running Google Ads and a supporter scheme with benefits for supporters, so just like the old VD really. No publishing house looking over our shoulders, so perhaps more relaxed?

So, would anyone be interested?”

There was a lot of interest, but I was also reminded about the Revcounter which is shortly to be ported over to vBulletin and already has some of the old Visordown members on there. So to avoid duplication, my suggestion is on the back-burner and can be set up if needs be. In the meantime, I’ve changed the redirect for www.bikechatboard.com to the Revcounter.

visordown.com – An Object Lesson

| Richard

Once upon a time, a motorcycle journalist and his friend set up an online discussion forum for motorcyclists and called it visordown.com

The forum software they were using was vBulletin which is very fine indeed and the site became a great success. That success led to Ben Cope selling advertising space on the board and serving ads. as well as setting up a supporter scheme to suppress those ads. and presumably putting some of that revenue into the hosting and software costs (although there was a rumour that some of those costs were being met elsewhere).

Then a publishing house called Magicalia bought visordown.com to complement their motorcycle magazine, “TWO”. Initially things got off to a bad start with TWO including some content from visordown.com in an issue without asking for permission to do so.

It also appeared that visordown’s free and easy, say what you like attitude was being clamped down on by its new owners.

In the meantime, vBulletin announced that the latest version of their software – version 3.7 – was being developed with user blogs (basically extended user profile pages) and user galleries to make what was already the best message board software even better.

So when an announcement was made a little while back seeking testers for the new version of visordown.com and when the board was turned off yesterday for an upgrade, I was quietly pleased.

And then they re-opened the board today. It’s been moved to a different server now running different ASP board software. A server that appears to be common to the rest of the Magicalia sites all running the same board software. No doubt that decision makes sense to a large company running a number of message boards: one set of architecture to support. Of course that throws aside the history and treats visordown.com as a new site rather than an established one.

And the ‘new’ board software is, frankly, rubbish compared with vBulletin. It also appears from all the server error messages I was getting this evening when trying to post new threads or reply to existing ones, that the server or the software (or a combination of the two) cannot cope with the traffic that visordown.com generates.

I expect that the regular users will soon get fed up with the board issues and the lack of features they were used to before.

Let that be a lesson to us all…

NEC Bike Show 2007

| Richard

An earlier start than usual as I was heading off to the NEC at Birmingham for the bike show on Trade Day.

I picked up a friend just after 8.15am and was at the NEC at around 10.30am. Wandered around the other halls until 12.00pm when Hall 1 opened. This was where the big manufacturers were exhibiting as well as where TWO Magazine had their corner plot. TWO bought visordown.com earlier this year and they were running a competition involving their “Wonderwall”: a collage of photos of VD members as submitted by us. If you spotted your photo on the Wonderwall, you would be entered into a draw to win something, in this case a Shark Helmet.

As Hall 1 only opened at 12.00pm and the competition draw took place at 2.00pm (geddit?), there weren’t many entries today … two, as it turned out. And I won! Now all I need to do is ring Nevis Marketing and claim my prize.

Anyway, I took some photos: