Wahey it works!
it’s been a mixed weekend; the good bits I’ll tell you about later, the boring bits I am using right now. I reformatted the iBook’s harddrive and rebuilt MacOS Panther from scratch.
That required a PRAM reset, 15Gb full backup with redundant copy, blanking the disk, a full install, update, reupdate, rereupdate, 15Gb copy-back, install third-party apps, and tweakage. It’s been the best part of a day, with the bulk I/O running overnight.
That said: my home directory is now encrypted which should make any further hardware maintenance a doddle (no more erase/flood before mailing) and I’ve blown-away the old UFS partition which although useful was tying up a few too many Gb. Alas the rebuild doesn’t seem to have fixed the lack-of-sleep-on-lid-closure problem. One more for Applecare.
I have also deleted Fink, having gotten hacked-off with it.
As for the good bits: I took a R1200GS out for a testride yesterday.
I want one. Oh boy, do I want one.
The DRZ400S is of course a totally different bike, in so many ways, but riding that against the R1200GS back-to-back on the same route really drove home the differences; the DRZ is a light bike, and the rider (in my case, at least) is 45% of the combined mass of the bike and rider.
The DRZ is rather a lot of hard work but if you have the muscle for it, it’s great. It’s a bit like what I remember about riding horses: tall, agile, the two of you work together to shift relative position and mass in pursuit of a common goal: to change direction.
Rear tyre steps out of line on some gravel? Lock your legs to the body and swing your hips to kick it back. Going round a big bend? Ride it like a sportbike (hang off) or ride it like a berm (lean the bike over[1]) – the choice is yours.
The BMW R1200GS on the other hand, is no effort at all. You are not half the machine, but rather you are the pilot. Where the DRZ is twitchy and agile, the GS is very, very, very planted. You pick a line – preferably the right line – and it tracks it like radar. You lean it over, and oh my, isn’t the tarmac suddenly awfully close? You twist the throttle and, erm, roll off again very gently and smoothly because you weren’t wanting to lose your license quite so quickly. Overtaking is ballistic. Actually, the whole thing is ballistic, precise, quick – and it stops, too.
Actually, that’s the one nit I have. Make that two nits.
The first nit is that attempted gentle braking in slow traffic can be surprisingly fierce, I suspect due to the action of some sort of brake-booster mechanism, or maybe some aspect of the ABS.
The second is the BMW indicator switchgear, the cancel switch for which is pants; although having tried it I now agree that having separate left and right indicator buttons greatly simplifies changing indication halfway round a roundabout – but I am still not sure I like it.
But the rest of the bike: superb.
Thing is, if I got one, where could I keep it? It’d never fit in the living room…
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