As usual, it was a rushed visit but was fun nonetheless. If you’re a Ducati fan you can’t sit on the display bikes – but their display is quite impressive. It is a completely-enclosed area with a front entrance and actual models strategically positioned with adequate space for standing and gawking with your friends.

The Honda display wasn’t that great, it was too easy to see the four-wheelers over the actual bikes. Yamaha and Suzuki’s displays were nice, but couldn’t spend much time at them.

Harley and Buell had great displays. I’m a fan of Buell motorcycles, just haven’t found one that has emptied my wallet yet. Sat on a couple Harleys, one was nice – the rest weren’t worth the effort.

The Guzzi models were cool to look at, but strange to sit on. Aprilia had some very nice machines available to sit on, but for me it’s more difficult to own a Aprilia than a Triumph. There were some Vespa scooters, but as usual I was the only one out of the group that was impressed.

Some of the accessory vendors were missing, yet still plenty of opportunities to spend money. I liked the vendor demonstrating a new type of motorcycle stand for pickup beds or trailers; wish we had ordered one before leaving.

If you’re a Toyota fan, they had this tricked-out FJCruiser on display. Complete with onboard gaming and GPS System. There’s a couple additional highlight pics of it in my photo Album. For all of the pictures, go to the 2006 Show in the TriumphRat.Net Photo Album.

This morning, the familiar yellow security icon appeared in my desktop tray. I knew what was going to happen next, Internet Explorer was going to get updated.

I was right, it was the only issue that needed to be updated.

Downloading wasn’t much of a challenge. Roughly 16mb at first, and I ran an errand while the subsequent download/install phase took place. When I got back from the grocery store, my computer was ready to reboot.

Changing the default text-bolding mechanism was the first step, and fixing some of the toolbars around so that I could get a grasp on what was going on with the menus. Chose to stick with default tools only for now.

The true scare came when I saw how a couple of my sites looked under IE7. I did a similar test recently after upgrading to Firefox 2 with no issues; but IE7 was trashing primarily DHTML and CCS menus that were being used on some sites. Even though these sites validated 100% at the W3C Validator, as some of you already know it doesn’t matter much when you’re dealing with buggy browsers.

My sites that relied on primarily HTML 4.0 code, with more tables than css, weren’t harmed by IE7 bugs.

IE7 was basically a solid install without any issues. It isn’t crashing or behaving erractically. So in that respect, we can say Microsoft did well. However, Microsoft has some work to do before IE7 will be accepted within the enterprise market.

For me, I’m going to use Firefox a bit more.