Now, normally I’m a pretty apolitical person. I vote for who I think will do the best job, rather than along any party lines. I’m conservative on some issues, liberal on others, and middle of the road most of the time. But this election year, the vote affected me quite personally- I work for a Sheriff’s Office, and my boss, the Sheriff of this county for 24 years, is retiring. This opens the field up quite a bit on who will be my boss- and direct my job- for the next four years. In the running for the Republican Primary were the current Chief Deputy, a man who’s run the Sheriff’s Office for the past four years, is a bar certified attorney, graduate of the FBI National Academy, and someone who’ve I known to be a very decent, honest person. He has his faults, but is widely believed to be the most experienced choice. On the other side of the ticket is a Sergeant in a local police department, who’s been in law enforcement for 10 years and is also a decent person; but who has never worked in a Sheriff’s Office (which is a whole different beast from a police department) and has some skewed ideas about how a Sheriff’s Office should function. In his favor is that he’s the home-town boy. Of course, as the campaign wore on, the local guy’s supporters got nastier and nastier. To his credit, he hasn’t done anything really dirty that anyone can point to, but his fans are another matter.

So, who wins the primary in July? The home town guy. In my mind, the voters of the county threw out the nastiness of the local guy’s supporters and the vast experience of the Chief Deputy just to vote in the local guy. What’s really annoying is the fact that many of those people who voted for the local guy called the Chief Deputy after the election and asked him to stay on as Chief Deputy- “because (local guy) is going to need a lot of experienced help”. Are you shitting me? Add on to this the fact that out of 65,000 people in the county, only 31,000 are registered to vote- and only 6700 of those bothered to vote at all. What’s the point? It starts to make me wonder why I bust my ass every day for these people when only 1/10th of them vote and those that do seem to have said “We don’t like how you do your job”. The same trend is towards voting in county commissioners whose only concern is stopping growth- not controlling or directing it, but stopping it altogether and taking the county back to a small, agrarian, rural area. Hmm. Good luck with that- the growth is coming whether they want it or not. We’re too close to Atlanta and on too many transportation arteries for it not to. By sticking our heads in the sand, it will grow uncontrollably and in directions that will cause many, many problems in the future. But no, let’s stop it altogether- as if that’s ever happened without destroying the community.

Yeah, it’s got me annoyed and grouchy, questioning the idiots in this county, and wondering if I should flip them all the bird and go work somewhere else.

Only iPod power/audio adapter I could find ended in a cigarette lighter plug, so I needed a corresponding socket. It was also pretty short, ending at the edge of the tank. But, socket and plug fit (barely) under the tank skirt:

With the cover on the Bluesea fusebox… fits under the seat with a hair’s width to spare:

Mounts for the GPS and iPod should be here Monday; then it’s frame sliders, Datel voltmeter, and (pricey) Starcomm unit to tie all the audio together and feed it to the helmet.

I’ve got plenty of room in the garage for it now, as my roommate just sold his Suzuki SV1000. Well, he never rode it, anyway.

In the early ’90s, when the bikes I rode were all used ’80s Universal Japanese Motorcycles, Yamaha was producing a “sport touring” bike called the FJ1200. Sport tourers are comfortable, long distance touring bikes that still retain the power and handling of their sportier cousins. While plenty of people racked up amazing mileage on long trips on relatively small displacement UJMs in the 80s, long trips were definitely a chore. The Honda Silverwing and later Goldwing reached bigger, plusher sizes in the ’90s and became the long-distance touring motorcycle standard; but, while I’ve seen folks ride the hell out of those things, they’re far from sporty. Sport bikes and supersport bikes took off in the 90s and got faster and faster- and more and more uncomfortable for long trips. Towards the end of the 90s, Harley Davidson re-invented itself and the cruiser era took off.

But, for me, the slick plastic enclosed crotch rockets left my back sore; and the underwhelming cruisers left me unimpressed. There were sport touring bikes, sure- the ST, Concours, Pacific Coast *shudder*; but they were still more touring than sport and out of my price range. The Bandit was the closest I could come to the old reliable UJM of the 80s… but I kept my eye on the FJ (now FJR) as my “ultimate” bike.

Sooo… last Monday I traded in the Bandit on a 2008 FJR1300. I had to wait until Thursday for it to be delivered; and, of course, it decided to rain for the next three days. I’ve still managed to put 100 miles on it in that time. But what I’ve found so far is that it’s just as sporty as the Bandit was while being far more comfortable and suited to long rides. The adjustable windscreen keeps me a lot warmer (and drier) than the Bandit’s, I’ve got saddlebags now, the seat is far more comfortable…

I think I’ll keep it.

I guess I can’t complain. ‘07 wasn’t that bad for me. There were highly annoying boss issues, co-workers getting arrested issues, still being single at age 37 issues… but I’ve paid off my car and am in better financial shape than I’ve been for many a year. Still relatively healthy, if not in the best physical shape; better if I can quit the 11 year tobacco habit this year. All in all, not too bad. We got the best reception we’ve ever had for the annual banquet video this year… although I think that’s more a function of our audience having low expectations than anything else.

When I went home for Christmas, Dad gave each of the kids a copy of his will. Nothing sinister; my brother-in-law’s brother died recently and didn’t leave a will behind, and it’s caused quite a bit of trouble for their family. I think Dad’s trying to avoid that. One thing that did surprise me, though, was his request in the will to have his ashes scattered on the top of Blood Mountain. Not that this is such an unusual request, but… Blood Mountain has always been one of my favorite places; someplace that I’ve been drawn to since the first time I climbed it. What I didn’t know is that it meant that much to my Dad, as well.

Time to let 2008 wet his nappies.

Well, OK, mostly lazy. But there has been a lot going on. For one, I underestimated the amount of equity I had in the house… by quite a bit. I swallowed hard and got an equity line of credit. Foolish, in this day of defaulted sub-prime loans and collapsing mortgage industry? Not really. I avoided the traps that led to a lot of foreclosures. With the equity line, I’ve paid off all of my debt, including the car, except for the house itself; and owe less than the house is worth. My monthly payments are far less than they were before the debt consolidation, so there’s more paycheck left for savings. Why didn’t I think of this earlier?

Of course, I still have watch my spending habits, and avoid using credit for anything other than emergencies. Hard to do with a toy fetish like mine. Speaking of toys… with all the demands from work for video footage-banquet video, recruitment video- I’ve replaced the old Sony DV camcorder with a Sony V1U high-def camera. Far more camera than my current skill level merits, but I’m working on it. As a side effect, I can’t watch a movie these days without studying the framing, camera movements, color correction choices, etc. Don’t know if it’ll rub off on my production values, but it can’t hurt- at least until I get too cliche’d.

The garden has been cleaned, tilled, re-bordered, and planted. I even got the borders around the house done halfway. Ian and his girlfriend have split, meaning the bills and mortgage have gone up, now that they’re split two ways rather than three. (However, the latest appraisal says we’re sitting on about $40k in equity!) I finally have a replacement assistant at work, and he seems like he’ll work out fine. We finished teaching one week of Senior Deputy classes with another week coming up and have somewhat of a lull, although I need to get Radar Instructor materials put together; and the Fall Citizen’s Academy and Banquet video are still hanging over my head. Just have to split some stuff off to the other guy and get busy.

I was in Forsyth at Digital Photography class when the I35W bridge collapsed in Minnesota. I predicted while watching it that there would be a slew of “Are our bridges safe?!?” stories and indignant outrage all over the media in the days that followed, and I was right. Not that this was an astonishing prediction. And I knew I would get annoyed by it.

Why annoyed? Because the fact that a huge percentage of bridges in the US are in bad shape is not news. We’ve known that for at least twenty years. I can remember news stories and articles from the 80’s discussing the need for bridge repairs and upgrades across the country and the enormous costs involved. The fact that one collapsed is not incredible, it’s inevitable. There have been major bridge collapses in this decade, in fact. But the trend lately is towards 24 hour coverage (repeating ad nauseum the same tiny snippets of information) and breathless “experts” rendering their opinions, which the general public gobbles up as pre-digested fact so they can avoid having to decide what they think about it. There’ll be some tsk-ing, some self-serving aggrandizing and grandstanding by politicians, and the issue will slowly fade away; or quickly, if some other news-worthy tragedy appears on the horizon. And everyone will forget what we’ve known for a long, long time- the nation’s bridges are in poor shape.

On the tirade front, I still get annoyed reading clips about the Virginia Tech shooting and aftermath. Once again, a never-ending media circus, with the same few video clips played back to back to back while an announcer gives the same information and pundits postulate about what they would have done if they were there. I hope all those retired “tactical experts” and “former police chiefs” remember what it was like to have one of their operations second-guessed. First on my list of grievances: “Why did it take so long for them to act after the first shooting?” Well, let’s see. You have a call to a man and woman shot in a dorm room. What, exactly, leads you to believe that this is the first act of a shooting rampage? Looks to me like a double murder, possibly out of jealousy or a domestic dispute. I expect that’s how it looked to the responding officers, as well. Only Nostradamus would predict that the shooter would return and kill 31 more.

Second: “Why didn’t they immediately notify everyone on this (2600 acre, 20,000 student) campus?” OK. Unless things have changes significantly since I worked for a university police department, there is no method for reliably contacting each and every person on a campus that size. None, Nada. Zip. Zilch. Bupkis. Email? Right, I’ll read it later. Whoops, it got put in my spam filter. Oh well. Alarms of some sort? Heh. Every single fire alarm call I responded to as a campus cop, there were many, many people who refused to evacuate and were ignoring the alarm. Needed to catch up on sleep, or too busy finishing that project. Weather alert monitor of some sort? Signboards? Few and far between. Evacuate the school? Excuse me while I laugh out my spleen. Even if you could reach everyone, that sort of evacuation is likely to cause far more harm than good. The campus I worked at had a population of 45,000 students, faculty, and staff. Good luck with that.

Third: A little more specific, but one of the news channels had a so-called “tactical expert” berating the officers for not having the equipment to open chained-shut doors. It took them five minutes to get past the doors. Now, my old agency did have a hydraulic door tool. There are burn-sticks, Hurst tools, all kinds of equipment on the market. But my current agency… has none of that. We’d have to get it from the fire department or improvise- and I guarantee you it would probably take longer than 5 minutes. I don’t know how they opened the doors, but I applaud them for getting them open in that amount of time. Did I mention the “tactical expert” sells tactical equipment? Wonder how he formed his opinion. “Why, if they only had the equipment I sell, they’d have had those doors open in seconds! Every police department needs to buy my… er, this equipment!” Guess he never worked with a small budget. Hey, pal, how about doing us a favor and shut your spoo-hole? You weren’t there. That goes for the rest of the armchair warriors who lined up to have their face on CNN and Fox News.

Sigh. There goes my happy weekend. Oh, and cocobuttr? Did you ever get my email?

Then I went to Microcenter, looking at upgrade parts for my ailing PC, and glanced over at the Macs in the back. Now, I’ve always sneered at the Mac commercials- I’ve seen plenty of Macs that crashed just as often as their Windows brethren, and that smarmy, oh-so-hip advertising schtick always annoyed me- but when I saw the 24″ Core2Duo iMac running XP, I had to stop and look closer. XP applications seemed to run fairly fast, and with a keystroke (and a pretty nifty animation) I was running OS X and then back again. I ended up spending an hour playing with it, and ended up taking it home.

So, now I’ve got to learn a new OS; albeit a fairly easy one to pick up. I’m still tripped up by my XP habits, but it’s getting easier; and that display is gorgeous. There are native Mac versions of all the software I use the most, and if I miss the Windows only games I play, I can dual boot over to XP and fire them up; thanks to the Intel hardware. The only stick in my craw is having to purchase Photoshop again. They offer cross-platform switches; but they insist on a full-version serial number to de-certify. I’ve been getting the upgrade versions for so long that I don’t have the original version I started with. Sigh. So my photo editing is a bit hampered until I choke up $600+ for a full version of CS3; which only partially explains the poor quality of the above picture.

Almost immediately, I was seized with a desire to change the channel. While some folks would stay their hand for the amusement value, or to try and plumb the mental recesses of the man’s speech, or even because in some wierd way they felt it would be impolite to interrupt the man no matter how insane he is, forgetting subconsciously that it’s just a television; I began to feel physically ill from listening to him. As if his speech was the vector for a new stupidity flu. When I considered it (after changing the channel to something equally as vapid but less nauseating), I realized that I have that reaction to a lot of conversations. Something in my brain says “Holy hell, this conversation is rocketing down the IQ chart; begin escape procedures!” and I start looking for ways to get away. Only societal pressure keeps me from blurting out something along the lines of “Wow, you are nucking futs. My brain hurts, and I feel less intelligent for having known you. Please leave.” A little inhibition lubricant, such as alcohol, would no doubt result in such a scene. And so, for a lot of conversations, I find myself looking for an escape route more than a thoughtful reply. I’ll often catch myself making subconscious glances at a door or watch, or verbal tics, that border on the rude; if it’s a really mind-boggling speaker, I might not care that I made them.

Oh, and yes; I realize that I’m not necessarily talking about “stupidity”; yes, some of the speakers may have real mental issues that they can’t help… but “awkward social vocalizations cause by psychological defect hurts” makes a poor title.

Then there’s the opinions- often very vehement- that just leave me scratching my head. The insistance that communism is a good idea, for instance- despite the fact that there hasn’t ever been a true communist state in history; because humans just aren’t mature enough to make it work. Anarchy is another one… sure, preach anarchy all you want; but unless you’re the biggest badass on the block, expect to have your shit taken from you by the person who is- and there’s always someone else bigger than you. I recently visited a website that espoused the idea that all prisons were unnecessary and evil. Sure, I can agree from a philosophical standpoint; taking away someone’s freedom is bad… but do they offer any solution? Any alternative showing what to do with those who have broken from society and, in fact, harmed it? No, of course not. Therefore, everyone associated with prisons-guards, cops, judges, politicians- is evil, stupid, and reprehensable. Except the prisoners themselves, of course; oh no, they’re saints, worthy of worship. My suggestion is: save all us taxpayers some money and take these poor, misguided souls into your own homes. You rehabilitate them. You feed them. But don’t be surprised when you get bit, and they shrug and say “You knew I was a snake when you picked me up”. But can you tell the people that created this website that? No, of course not. They’ve already made up their mind, and nothing you or I can say to them will ever change that.

A certain black-hearted part of me secretly wishes for the collapse of civilization; an abrupt transition to that anarchy for which ill-formed youths long, that would shatter the dearly held illusions so much of society labors under. When the biggest agenda for your day is simple survival, a whole lot of bullshit gets thrown out the window. Scrounging in a dumpster for food tends simplify your outlook.

Well. What a nice, upbeat outlook for the day I have. Just call me grumpy.