Ural Hand Guards

I just noticed that I missed the 2000th post onto this blog. This is post #2003. When I started this, I had no idea that it would go on for so long. We arrived back in Fairbanks at 2 am. Those flights are starting to feel longer and longer.

There was a box from Revzilla waiting for me at home. I had been thinking about some hand guards for a while but wasn’t sure what would fit the Ural. Kevin, who’s place we stayed at in Montane, had ordered a set from the dealer for his new Ural. So thanks to his purchase, I now had a Barkbuster part number. I shouldn’t have over thought it as it is a generic hand guards for 7/8” bars. Note that it doesn’t have the nice aluminum bar that attaches to the handlebar end. It’s purpose seems to just keep wind off of your hands which is fine with me.

To get some clearance for these hand guards, I moved the windshield slightly more vertical. There is now less wind noise so that’s another plus.

10 Years on Blogger

On May 1, 2007, I moved my blog to the Blogger platform. Initially, it was hosted on different university servers. The first two in Fairbanks run by the UA Public Relations office and the third on a server operated by the IT department on the Juneau campus. After that, someone must have decided that personal blogs shouldn't be on university servers. Up until that point, the only purpose of the blog was to encourage university staff and faculty to participate in a walking program which was part of a wellness initiative. I was one of several that were asked to start "blogging" about my participation and later started placing plastic bottles filled with poker chips with the "Start Walking" and university logos on them. Kind of like geocaching but with clues instead of coordinates. Back then, phones didn't have GPS capability and not everyone had a handheld unit. Other participants would collect chips from each cache and claim a prize.

The program ended that summer and I continued to post including a short post on the MSF class I took in August, 2007. Once it was on the Blogger platform, I was able to set up the blog.machida.us CNAME. Way back then I was also running a Wordpress instance on my home server (an old Digital Equipment Corp. 80386SX desktop). I thought about just moving the blog onto that machine but I preferred to rely on Google for authentication and not have anonymous comments. The Wordpress install was shut down a couple months later after I was able to move email and the web server for the machida.us domain elsewhere. Eventually, the web site was deleted and email was moved to the gmail platform.

Initially, the posts were very short and rarely had pictures as I didn't have much to say. 1530 posts later, I still don't have much to say...

Blogger "Comments"

I don't know about others but I have been regularly getting generic "comments" left on blog posts. Not obvious spam but the text of the comment is so generic that it doesn't relate to the contents of the post and the name is a link to a commercial site. Following the instructions on this site, I edited the Blogger template to disallow links in the comments. This disables the backlink that these commenters were looking for supposedly to improve their Google ranking. The following was added right before the end of the body block.

Our weather hasn't really changed much and wasn't really conducive to doing anything outside. Even the heated garage was hovering around 40°F so no bike work was done beyond digging out the battery tenders. I did need to reinstall the plow since we've gotten about 8" of snow since we've been back from PA.

There was a great turnout on Monday evening for our last Airhead meeting at the Silver Gulch. I believe that 20 people showed up. Several harassed me since I didn't ride out.