Harley-Davidson Over the Hill?

There’s an article on MSN Money asking Is Harley-Davidson over the hill? Points raised:

Harley is seen as a bike for baby boomers, who are reaching the age where motorcycle riding is no longer feasible. Younger riders want street bikes, not grandpa’s Harley.

Prices of $20+ are hard for people to manage in the poor ecomony for something that they want but not need.

On the positive side, Harley is successfully marketing to women riders, who are a growing part of the motorcycle riding population.

Gary has a Harley-Davidson Dyna Wide Glide. He enjoys riding it. I have an older Honda Shadow which I bought used. I think I rode it 3 times last year. Here’s an HDR photo I took of Gary’s bike last year.

Big Sandy Machine Gun Shoot

Saturday (3/28) we went to the Big Sandy Machine Gun Shoot in Wikieup, AZ. It was great fun! I got to shoot a M1919 heavy .30 caliber machine gun, Gary shot a .50 caliber BMG heavy machine gun. The weather was fine, we got to meet other shooters including R. Lee Ermey a.k.a “Gunny”. There are lots more photos on my Flickr account. Here’s Gary’s blog post on this event.

On the negative side, I saw some gun handling that would have resulted in the person being sent home if it occurred where I was a range safety officer.

Dagny with R. Lee Ermey "Gunny"

M1919 .30 caliber Machine Gun

Woman Firing Thompson Machine Gun

Gary Shooting .50 caliber BMG Machine Gun

Dagny Firing .30 caliber M1919 Machine Gun

Unix Turns 40. Happy Birthday!

ComputerWorld reports that Unix turns 40.  Why would anyone but the geeks care about this birthday? Because just about everything that works well on your personal computer has Unix roots – except for the graphical interface which came from Xerox PARC.

• The hierarchical file system in which a directory contains files and other directories which in turn contain files and directories, etc, etc.
• Linux, an open source Unix, runs most of the web servers of the world.
• Sockets, a programming layer on top of  the TCP communications protocol, first appeared on BSD Unix. All of the web and email services we rely on is built with sockets.
• Open source started at UC Berkley with BSD.
• Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web on a Unix based NeXT system using BSD Unix and  sockets.

Happy 40th Unix!

Willow Lake

We were at Willow Lake in Prescott, looking for wildlife photos. Neither of us had a long enough lens to capture what we saw, but we did get some decent images.

Willow Lake 1

Willow Lake 2

Cormorant at Willow Lake

Willow Lake 3

Graffiti Bike

I saw this bike decorated with graffiti in Prescott on Saturday. It was parked in the new Panda Express parking lot. I’ve seen some cars “decorated” strangely – or creatively – depending on one’s perspective. But this is the first graffiti bike I’ve seen.

Graffiti Bike