After much consideration, I’ve left my current job. I’m going to be taking some time off to consider how much I really want to work, as the time and expectations of this job really burnt me out. So if anyone knows of a swank techie job kicking around Seattle, feel free to drop me a line.

I took a motorcycle basic rider course recently through the Motorcycle Safety Company. The course was one weeknight and one weekend morning of classtime, followed by a pretty simple multiple choice test. After that we spent about six or seven hours each on a saturday and sunday in a parking lot learning basics. At the end of the last day we had a skills test; upon passing I got a waiver for my motorcycle endorsement on my license.

So recently I picked up a 2006 Yamaha xt225 at Eastside Motorsports in Bellevue. They were pretty helpfull, but didn’t know a whole lot about the machine. I went in looking for an xt225 though, so it didn’t matter that the sales person didn’t know how many gears it had when I asked, I already knew. I’d been looking around quite a bit for the right ride. I rode a Yamaha TW200 dual sport at my class and knew I wanted a dual sport, preferably something inexpensive. The tw and xt series are well known for being reliable, and while not particularly powerfull as far as engine size goes, the xt will maintain highway speeds but is more for riding around both off and on road. I put over a hundred miles on it today, riding out to the penninsula and then taking the ferry back (note, when riding a motorcycle onto a seattle ferry, PASS GO, COLLECT 200 DOLLARS. That is, you’re supposed to drive around the line, board anywhere in traffic you can fit in, proceed around to the front of the ferry. You get off second, after the bicycles, but before the cars. Quite nice.)

I’d like to leave town for a few days, but I’m helping a friend move on Saturday, so I’ll be poking around in search of some forest service roads, trying to put my last job behind me.

The suburban’s on the road again, and it’s been through enough testing I’m willing to say that out loud. After the trouble with the broken head bolt and my inability to press the power steering pump pulley back on, I did get everything back together.

I washed off the underside of grease, and there appears to be a small oil leak somewhere on the passenger side that I can’t determine. Looks below the heads, but above the starter. Not a great sign, I’m sure something important and much harder to work on back there is leaking. Anyways, it’s running.

I had trouble getting the exhaust manifold flange gaskets to seal back up, so I took it to a midas and asked them to replace those and check the timing. Two days later they had broken a bolt and realized they didn’t have a timing gun, so I took it back, bought a timing gun, wasted a bunch of time getting parts from Schucks, but got it all back together again.

A couple days later the muffler fell off. So I took it to Dan Fast Muffler in Bellevue and got everything replaced with high-flow performance parts from the y pipe back. The original catalytic converter in my suburban had pellets instead of the honeycomb style that’s standard, so this opened the exhaust up quite a bit, definately improving performance, hopefully improving mileage a tad. It’s 3″ from the y-pipe back to a passenger side exit behind the rear axle.

Wendell and Hannah are staying at the SS Awful Shark as they’re moving here. They came up over the holiday weekend with Denny. We saw a couple movies, including Howl’s moving castle at the egyptian midnight show which rocked. Monday Wendell, Hannah, Ken and I drove out to Mount Rainer National Park and wandered around the Sunset visitor center. The mountain was amazing and I was glad to have finally gotten so close.

I’ve been consulting a lot this week, which means fixing user problems. I had a problem with a fresh install of Excel from Office 2000 Small Business, after I had done a restore using FAST. Excel kept giving me errors saying “Cannot open C:\Program” and “Cannot Open Files\Microsoft” in sets. Three sets to be exact. Obviously a quote problem. I eventually found some keys in the registry under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Excel\Options called OPENx where x is blank or a number, which contained excel files that it auto-opened. I surrounded the path’s with double quotes and it worked okay.

Been watching “House” lately to stay distracted. Funny show. Check it out.