Ride to Chatanika

This morning seemed too nice to just sit at home so I took the RT out for a ride. I initially headed to the University (out of habit) and realized that I wasn't wearing boots so back home to get them. Headed out towards Ester then back towards town on the Old Nenana Hwy. I turned on Goldsteam Road towards Fox then up the Steese Highway to Chatanika. After a brief stop at the roadhouse (picture found on the Internet), I headed back towards Fairbanks. I stopped briefly at the Felix Pedro Monument before heading back home. I briefly thought about heading up Chena Hot Springs Road but figured an hour was about right for a "short ride". Plus there were things I wanted to do on the bike and I didn't bring a camera.

This afternoon, after the bike cooled down, I checked the valve clearance. One exhaust was at 0.012" and the other at 0.009" so I reset them both to 0.008" as specified in the manual. There is a lot of discussion on the Internet on the correct clearance and think I set them loose last year. I'm glad to see that they weren't getting tighter which would have suggested problems with the valve seats. Replaced the brake fluid while I was at it then washed the bike (for the first time since I got it) since there was quite a bit of mud from riding during breakup. I messed up the left valve cover pretty bad from my spill a couple of weeks ago so I should probably look for a replacement. Or maybe just sand it down and add a little paint. Hmmm, a project.

So far, no issues at all with the Dell Mini9. I'm getting used to the keyboard with the exception of the apostrophe key. It really is in a strange location. I used a shareware program called Xslimmer to shrink down all of the applications by removing other architectures and language options. When I installed OS X, I used the customize option to remove all of the print drivers except for HP and all of the languages except English. That reduced the installation to about 8 GB. The installation of 10.5.7 added about 1 GB and running Xslimmer removed about 1 GB, Last night, I added some drivers for the touchpad which enabled some of the multitouch functions but it made the touchpad a bit less responsive so I disabled the multitouch and enabled vertical scrolling using the left edge of the touchpad. Works pretty well.