5 More Sleeps

I've been meaning to post an update since "7 days to go".  It's now just "5 days to go", and I'm firing this off before heading to bed.  This weekend I:

• changed the motor oil
• installed a camera mount on the bike, and took some very bumpy videos
• installed the rear forward mud guard
• charged up the battery
• put stickers on the panniers (CAN and VT)
• installed Windows on the MacBook via Bootcamp, and set up some software I'd be needing.
• spent way too much time working on my desktop computer, which recently died and holds some files I want. 
• took a nice walk with my wife at sunset to the local ice cream shop.  I'll miss this while away.

My apologies for the extreme camera shake in this video.  The road is much smoother than the video would indicate.  The camera is sitting at the end of a rather long arm, so every vibration is being amplified into some pretty gross movement.  I'll have to work on that somehow.



My desktop died on me last week the day after I copied all my music and all my photos over onto the MacBook we'd be taking on the trip.  It's fortunate I got those files off before it died, but I've been trying to resurrect it before the trip because there are a few more files I'd like to have with me, including the BMW's mileage and service logs.  Today I found the problem: both drives from my RAID 1 array died at the exact same time.  For you non-geeks out there, that's like having both your main and backup parachutes fail... although perhaps a little less lethal.  In this case, I think the first failure caused an event on the 12V line shared by both drives, and took out the second.  This is like the spare parachute getting tangled up in the main parachute, causing you to plummet.  I'm gonna stop with this analogy now, and just show you where the smoke got out.  (Every microchip runs on smoke.  When the smoke gets out, the chip stops working.)

 Redundancy FAIL

I've got an off-site backup of all my important data, although that copy is probably 6 months old.  I think I can get a new control board for one of the dead hard drives so I'll have all my data back eventually, just after the trip.

For now I've got to focus on the trip.  I've one last bit of bike work to do this week, which is changing the gearbox oil.  I plan on getting that done tomorrow night.  I've got a very extensive packing list, as well as a To Do list, but I still can't stop my mind from constantly racing about getting ready, getting ready, getting ready.  I'm normally quite good at not dwelling on things, and it's not like it's keeping me up at night (wait 'till Thursday), but it sure is distracting.