Apparently OK on both counts!

So – After just about 9 months, my busted scapula and the associated nerve damage were obviously a lot worse than I ever imagined after my first few hospital trips. I fairly soon gave up on the NHS – it’s never done (been able to do) anything much beyond simple first aid for me in the last 15 years I have had occasion to visit. Fortunately, I am in a position to take myself private when the occasion warrants and my shoulder was certainly one of those occasions! I paid to see one of the most highly rated folk in the country and after lots of CT scans (I think I glow in the dark!) and several consultations, I learnt that basically, surgery was out (too fucked up to risk it!) so time and physiotherapy were the options.

Time of course has been the great healer (plus an attractive South African physiotherapist – who has been well trained in massage which albeit painful, worked wonders). So here I am 9 months later, able to ride a bike on the road, with perhaps 90% movement in my shoulder and strength that varies from 10% to 90% depending on what I ask it to do. Naturally that calls for a celebration, so I am off to the USA for a 4000 mile trip through the USA and Canada with my buddy Jed whom I met on the trip to Tierra del Fuego.

“Here I am again after an unconscionably long time away. Some of that can be put down to recovering from my last accident, but laziness too has a part to play! That is one reason, I am back here, posting on Blogger and neglecting my other WordPress blogs. The frequent updates of the WordPress code, and the plugins I used were frankly depressing me because I couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to keep up with them all. I have now decided to embrace old age rather than fight it which makes dealing with my expanding waistline, toleration for my own crustiness and a host of other ailments a whole lot more palatable!”

The Italian trip was a fantastic experience and an excellent test of both bike and rider. Apart from the duff hand, I think both came through it fairly well. The GS was very pleasing, coping with both the long trip there and back (1200 miles each way of mixed motorway stuff and country roads through very hilly areas with lots of switch-backs and the like) and the off-road riding in the mountains with generally, deep, big and sharp gravel plus many very tight turns.

SIDESTAND MOD.

The thing that got my attention mostly was the dismal side-stand on the GS which, especially when travelling heavily loaded, had the bike leaning over much too far, to the point of being sufficiently unstable as to fall over at the slightest opportunity.

I had noticed this before I set off an had cobbled together a block of wood some 4 cm. thick, zip-tied to the side-stand. This helped in keeping the bike upright but was hell to deploy as it required leaning the bike over a substantial amount in the wrong direction to sweep the stand down and forwards to the point it was in position to support the bike. On my return I solved the problem partially by spotting a bit of weld metal at the point on the stand where it is stopped against the attachment for the stand on the bike. This had the merit of stopping the stand from swing too far forwards and as a consequence, it holds the bike more upright. I also ground off the leading edge of the stand where it had previously fouled the ground in its arc. This helped by reducing the amount needed to hold the bike off the vertical when deploying it.

FORKS

The bike needed a huge amount of cleaning after the trip and I decided to move/remove various bits of bike to facilitate this process. One thing I wanted to do was to have a look at the forks to check that no corrosion was taking place under the clamps (as this was a potential problem I had read about some folk having) so I removed them, discovering in the process that the left hand fork stanchion was badly scored around its circumference at the point where it is held by the lower fork bridge (triple clamp), making it very hard to remove and to adjust up and down in the triple clamp – even after wedging the opening in the clamp wider. I cleaned up the scoring and read the service manual on the subject of forks, which made it clear that they had always been set wrongly. As delivered to me, the top of the forks was flush with the triple clamp rather than being set 7.8 mm. above it as specified. I set the forks at the specified height and although the difference is hardly discernible, it does feel that the steering is a little quicker as one might expect.

I complained to the dealer I bought the bike from (South London Motorrad) about this state of affairs (Mainly the scoring on the stanchion tube) but they were less than interested and despite me telling them that I thought the fork was potentially unsafe, and a candidate for a warranty claim (on the grounds that if they hadn’t caused the damage to the fork, it must have been BMW at the time of manufacture). They took a few photos and said they would contact BMW and revert to me but of course I have heard nothing. My conclusion, after this incident and the two previous things that upset me badly about their servicing (jobs not done, wheel bearings not checked), is that SOUTH LONDON MOTORRAD servicing is very poor, the staff are unreliable and I recommend you don’t go near them.

Mainly as a consequence of my unhappiness with SLM, I discovered Mark Holden, who runs an independent, and very reliable, friendly and helpful service workshop in Bromley High Street. He has now done a number of things on my bikes (the GS and the TTR and I have nothing but praise for his approach, speed and standard of workmanship.

It was Mark who put me in touch with HM Racing at Green Street Green where Perry Leask, a many times national motocross champ works on bike suspension for race teams, individuals etc. Currently as a later post will mention, he is scheduled to work on my TTR.

Various attempts to resurrect the archives failed and I became so frustrated, I set up a new blog at Blogspot (running on the Blogger software). This worked fine except that I had to import all my old posts from the mysql database by hand which took three days! That I am still sane after this is a testament to my genes or more likely, Nurofen.

So, with one fully functional blog which is here, I felt moderately happy, except that all my comments had disappeared and as I started to look at various statistics, I realised that whereas my old blog was well spidered by Google etc. and came up as a first hit on many searches, my new one figured nowhere and reading various folks views on SEO stuff, I came the view that a blog at Blogspot was always likely to feature less prominently than one on a personal web site – other things being equal.

Anyone that publishes a blog is presumably concerned with getting read by someone and I am no exception – my deathless prose is not for me alone, so I started to look for ways of resurrecting my blog at woodgen.com. I won’t bore you with all the details, blind alleys, deathtraps, pitfalls and the like – tell me if you need more info but this is what worked in the end.

1. I set up a (free) blog at wordpress.com which is here.
2. I imported my Blogger data (all the posts) to my new wordpress.com blog, using the Tools>Import option
3. I exported my data from wordpress.com using the Tools>Export option
4. I set up a new database and WordPress site on my own hosted server
5. I imported the xml file generated in (3) above.
6. Hey Presto – I have a working blog.

Finally – because I was being driven crazy by double apostrophes appearing in my new blog – as used to happen in the old WordPress blog – when I wanted only one. I searched and searched until I found the solution.

7. I created a file called php.ini containing just these lines

magic_quotes_runtime=off
magic_quotes_gpc=off
magic_quotes_sybase=off

8. I copied the file to every directory of my new woodgen blog ( probably only one directory is important but by this stage I was past caring.
9. I commented out these lines in wp_settings.php (my // is already shown here)

// If already slashed, strip.
//if ( get_magic_quotes_gpc() ) {
//    $_GET    = stripslashes_deep($_GET   );
//    $_POST   = stripslashes_deep($_POST  );
//    $_COOKIE = stripslashes_deep($_COOKIE);
//}

// Escape with wpdb.
//$_GET    = add_magic_quotes($_GET   );
//$_POST   = add_magic_quotes($_POST  );
//$_COOKIE = add_magic_quotes($_COOKIE);
//$_SERVER = add_magic_quotes($_SERVER);

And now, finally, I can write let’s go to Jim’s place without appearing illiterate!

For the time being, I am going to be cross posting my stuff at the three sites that I now have with my blog – so determined am I not to have to go through the whole darn thing again.

Bottom line after this experience?

Blogger at Blogspot is by far the easiest blog to set up and use. It lacks some of WordPress’s bells and whistles and has fewer attractive themes to pick from although Wordpess themes are being converted for Blogger by enthusiasts. It is better integrated with other Google services than WordPress which will be of interest to folk running ads etc although the SEO stuff actually seems to favour WordPress on your own site.

As far as I am concerned, if only a few people read my stuff and find some value or amusement in it, I am well satisfied.

I am rather counting on Blogspot being around for a long time and for the software that powers it to be updated painlessly with no input needed from me when and if it happens. At first, maintaining my own web site was fun but it now seems just a chore and even though the WordPress installation I had on it was not difficult to manage, it had developed some irritating quirks like substituting double apostrophes for a single character.

I gave up maintaining a gallery of photography on my own site some time ago in favour of a SmugMug hosted account and that has proved a good decision, it may not be too much longer before I find a way to offload my remaining stuff on woodwork and genealogy and can get out of the site management lark altogether.

If you have stumbled across this for the first time, then I’ll just say that this blog is about my experiences on two-wheels – a BMW F800GS and a Honda Goldwing 1800. These are very different bikes and designed to do different things but I enjoy both more or less equally.

As the last line of this post indicates, I am trying yet another blog editor. Qumana doesn’t seem to offer anything significantly useful to me over Scribefire and above all, it’s not instantly available like Scribefire

Powered by Qumana

I have worked around it by installing yet another plugin – another rich text editor that replaces the tiny_mce editor used in WordPress 2.1.3. I found it here