The Factory Metal Works caught my eye a while back when they built a bike for Shige of Mooneyes Japan. The bike is called “Moon Machine”, and is a unit construction Triumph, that’s been very tastefully customized.
It has great proportions, super-cool vintage-esque mini-ape handlebars, and lots of parts from Moon and The Factory Metal Works. Check them out at: http://www.thefactorymetalworks.com
I don’t say it enough, but I have an awesome wife. She rules. She has put up with my crazy projects for the past six years as my wife, and five years before that as my girlfriend. She let me, no, encouraged me to get a Buell when we had a four month old son. She didn’t balk at me dragging home a rusty wreck of a F-100 truck, and have it competing with her Volvo for garage space.
Well, this Christmas took the cake. I’ve been eyeing the Harley Blackline for about a year, and we figured sometime this next summer we’d pull the trigger and buy one. But a week before Christmas, I happened to find a used one online with 800 miles, and within thirty miles of home. The price was about $5000 less than new, so I mentioned it to her.
She said “let’s go look at it”, and the rest is history. That evening on the way to the company Christmas party, we swung by and checked it out. It was pretty much perfect, other than a little ding in the air cleaner cover. I went back the next morning, signed the papers, and rode it home.
I just got it back from having the 1000 mile service done(Hey, I’ve been in Seattle, and working from home, so not a lot of time for riding… plus it had 1200 miles on it when I brought it in, so there!), and I’m still loving this bike!
Thank you Michelle for being the best wife ever, and giving me a crazy nice Christmas present. I don’t deserve the bike, and I most definitely don’t deserve you! I love you dear!
I’ve been wanting to get a new bike for about a year now, and the one I keep gravitating back to is Harley’s Blackline Dark Custom. It’s a beautiful bike that is low, has the classic Night Train style, but is nearly a “factory custom” as overused as that phrase is.
I took a Softail Deluxe for a test ride a while back, and it was wonderful, but the dealers around Dallas have been hard-pressed to keep the Blackline in stock long enough for me to take one for a ride.
The other day I thought I’d take a look around the interweb to see what people had been doing to customize their Blacklines, and I ran across ThunderBike in Deutschland who created this killer Harley Blackline custom. I’m in lust.
If you read this blog much, you’ll know that I always have several irons in the fire. For the past two years I’ve been working on liink.it, a cloud-based bookmarking app. After much thought and deliberation (too much) I decided to shut it down, much to the disappointment of my several hundred users.
The problem was that despite having users, there was not a good way to make it pay for itself, much less make a profit from it. I ended up spending money every month to pay for hosting, and bandwidth, and although the service was nice, after a change in Google’s app engine, it ended up breaking the code, and I was not able to find a way to fix it without rewriting from scratch with a different framework. Lesson learned about using new, not-well-supported frameworks.
I’ve been working on support systems for the Nintendo Wii U since February, and have been using a car service to take me to the airport and pick me up each week. During this time, and in talking to the drivers, I’ve realized there is a gap in the existing offerings.
Today, the options are:
No one-time fees, setup fees, or ongoing maintenance fees. No long-term contracts. No painful management of servers. No installing software. No headaches, no hassles.
And all the things you want:
I’ve set the base price at $29.99/month for two drivers, with price breaks for yearly contracts. A 30-day FREE trial account will be available after the beta testing period.
Check it out here: carsparkapp.com
If you’re interested in being a beta-tester, or in signing up once we’re live, please shoot us an email at: hello@carsparkapp.com or me directly at: ben@carsparkapp.com
I remember when I was about six or seven years old, my parents got us an Atari 400 game system. My Father worked for Control Data at the time, and I believe was trying to trick my older brother and I into learning to program. We copied a few of the games in some programming books, and recorded them onto the cassette tape storage interface (yes, this was before floppy disks were very prevalent). It was fun, but a few years later when I went to a friend’s house and played on the NES it blew my mind.
I’ve been in Seattle working at Nintendo the past two weeks, and while it’s pretty exciting from the standpoint of a childhood dream realized, I find that I miss my family, and riding my motorcycle far more than I enjoy the environment and cool-factor of being at Nintendo.
I rode my Buell in to the office this morning, and wow, was that fun. It’s been over two weeks, and man how I’ve missed it! This isn’t meant to take anything away from my family, I missed them far more, but this is a motorcycle/hot rod blog, so I won’t belabor that point.
From time-to-time I find myself thinking maybe I should get a car, and stop motorcycling… it would be safer, it would be year-round (although I’ve discussed that semi-fallacy before), it would allow me to commute/travel in the rain with my laptop, etc. But really, I think the benefits of riding outweigh the few drawbacks. I don’t take calls on the bike, so I’m less distracted. I can’t carry a soda/coffee/food on the bike so I don’t mindlessly snack, and gain weight. I’m always in a better mood after going for even a short ride… you can’t help but smile at the burble of the v-twin, and the torquey grunt when you pin it at a stoplight, or on-ramp.
There are a lot of things in life that I miss: loved ones who aren’t with us anymore; family that I don’t get to see near often enough; friends who live several hours or days away; but there aren’t many physical things that I miss more than riding, and just like with people, sometimes it takes time away to make you appreciate it the most!
What a beautiful bike! I ran across this on a Triumph Bobber website I hadn’t come across before. In my humble opinion, this is one of the most elegant, and beautiful Triumph Bobbers I’ve seen. Good job guys!
Here’s a link to the Falcon Motorcycles gallery for The Kestrel:
http://www.falconmotorcycles.com/gallery/2-The%20Kestrel%20.html#0