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.

The folks at Pig Trail Harley-Davidson put on a good show today to benefit a local NW Arkansas Children’s Shelter. The ride was tedious at times, but also a great balance of smooth curves and wonderful autumn scenery. There were hills that so green that the grass looked like it was painted on, topped with bright-orange trees.

Across the country, there are shelters struggling to handle this country’s influx of displaced children. Most are temporary situations, but a few do go onto Foster Homes. However, many areas of the country do not have enough Foster Homes, resulting in dire situations where kids are forced to live in a shelter until something can be made available for them. Even if you did nothing more than put a few dollars in the mail, or dropped off used items that would help put smiles on these kids, it would be an appreciated contribution.

Things aren’t like what they used to be.

ShawnReed.Com is back online, after two days of unusual events involving a failed Operating System. Normally, restoration would involve some OS reloading and application installation. However, after two days of trying the “established process” that involved close to twenty people in the end it was resolved by myself and a sharp engineer.

It’s not to say that some of the folks along the way weren’t helpful, but the leadership wasn’t there to support effective teamwork. Some could say that it’s the result of a commodity-driven hosting market, or that the industry is in a state where fast-changing technology isn’t being allowed time to stabalize.

After I finish restoring the sites this morning, I’m going to hug my wife and spend some time with the family.

AT&T (Consumer) has an interesting static-ip type of service that binds the address to your PPOE login. The self-install kit doesn’t provide the critical detail that one must call the SBC/ASI group and reachout to tech support.

The good news of it is that I didn’t have to put in that stupid freakin Windows CD and install the PPOE client software. The tech support team took me through a registration/login process that exists through the new DSL modem to create my PPOE profile. Then they had me put the DSL modem in bridge-mode and stayed on the line while I setup my new firewall appliance (building a new network at the same time).

Speed is faster, at least fast enough for me.

ShawnReed.Com went through several updates this time, including manual changes to the core code (again). It wasn’t to facilitate any tests really, just time to be done.

After six months of constant work, I came to the realization that without a local shop to work with there would be very little riding time. When you’re already burning up hundreds of miles per week, coming home to a handicapped bike with just a few hours to enjoy it just wasn’t working out.

In my usual style, the addition is something few riders purchase but many respect. Like anyone else, outrageous speed and power make for fun rides but the focus with this is to make up for thousands of lost miles.

A shop in Bentonville had the 2006 Honda Interceptor on a pedestal (pictured), otherwise known as a VFR-800. A smooth machine with a 781cc v-twin engine with all kinds of features.

The salespeople worked a great deal for me, and handled the situation well. We were all somewhat uncomfortable, given my status as a leading Triumph Enthusiast. Overall, the bike is flawless and I’ve done 10-hour rides (with the usual health breaks) without any excessive fatigue.

One comes to appreciate the love for Triumph when you’re not riding one. The VFR will be with me for a very long time, but I am looking forward to another Triumph next year.

In no particular order:

Suzuki GXSR-600
Suzuki GXSR-750
Yamaha R6
Honda Interceptor
Kawasaki ZX-10

I’m missing my first ride of the year, because I haven’t been able to either sit on or see all of the options. Sometimes it seems better to just find a last-years model in the local paper, buy it, and go have some fun

Although the Daytona675 is still a possibility, I’ll admit that other brands/models are being considered as well. When one can just go down to the end of the street for an R1/R6, Gixxer, or ZX-Ninja thoughts of being able to get back on breakfast runs and last-minute rides seem to be a reality again.

Read the article on the new R6 and it’s new “fly by wire” system, which sounds cool. However, the thought of sticking with a 1000cc bike is still very much a possibility if I can find a good deal on insurance.

It is possible to create pages that are coded to a single line of text. Yes, starting from the opening XHTML Tag (or HTML if your a coder from the Dark Ages) to the closing document tag. Even your JavaScript, which should be externally called, should be able to co-exist at the single-line level.

Realistically, if one were still coding static pages the concept would likely create more work and effort. However, if your site is dynamic and built upon objects that are easily referenced and re-usable the process is much easier.

Although the savings in bandwidth and server utilization is negligible, if added together the overall savings would be enourmous. Web Site Owners may sneer, but your users will appreciate the download and browser loading efficiencies from a site whose pages represent a single line of code. That includes your stylesheet as well!

The trick is to develop in what is easiest for you, as your web site (or web application) develops and matures tighten it up by defining common terms and layout code to variables and/or templates and making use of external CSS.