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I may not have been blogging it but I’ve been doing some reading. I’m not sure what to make of this list:

• Lee Parks’ Total Control. Readable with nice glossy pictures. I didn’t learn anything particularly new but I will use the drill diagrams in my next parking lot practice.
• David S. Touretzkys Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation. Possibly the best $2.75 I’ve spent on a programming textbook. Genuinely entertaining for an introductory text though the LISP dialect is outdated and I was sometimes frustrated piecing it together on a modern implementation. I may throw a current edition to my son when he’s old enough.
• Eugene Charniak’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. I don’t have an interest in A.I. but it has a LISP orientation and presents two very good chapters on Parsing and Searching. For $2.25, I couldn’t pass it by.
• Guy L. Steele’s Common Lisp: The Language. Actually, that link is to the reference I should have bought. I mistakenly picked up the 1984 edition. Fortunately, it was only $2.80 and electronic versions of CLtL2 are in the CMU AI Repository.

A previous owner of my motorcycle at some time had the fusebox work loose and touch the exhaust pipe behind the muffler. They concealed the mess of hardened plastic slag by wrapping the whole in electric tape and zip tying it in place. I found this when I popped a fuse while replacing the rear tail light with an LED unit. Not good. Fortunately, BMW keeps an amazing parts inventory and Max’s BMW was able to get me the parts in a week.

Nathan slept, Maria read and I wrenched for an hour. Almost as good as new. I had to reuse the damaged rubber weather boot- the part number had melted away and I couldn’t find it in the parts fiche- but I wrapped the burned spot in good electrical tape. Not the greatest solution but at least the fusebox itself is sealed and mounted instead of rattling around in pieces.

Don’t forget that July 20th is Ride to Work Day. If you are not a daily rider, show your support for motorcycling by being seen and setting a good example. Another reminder, Parking Now has a New York City Motorcycle Parking Petition effort underway. If you’re an urban rider you need to sign.

I mounted a set of Fastway Pegs on my airhead but did not get much of a chance to test them. I put a few hundred street miles on them on Saturday and I have no complaints. The buzzing of the engine in 3rd and 4th gears around 4200-4400 rpm that blurs my mirrors can be strongly felt through the pegs but they otherwise feel good and give a great platform for my feet. I’ve read that the rubber from a 1150 or 1200GS can be wedged into the gaps to damp out the buzz.

This morning I mounted a set of Fastway Performance footpegs on my BMW R100GSPD. There was really nothing to it and the whole job took about thirty minutes. I picked them up from Adventurer’s Workshop. You can see the gallery here. The only hitch was that the pegs were intended for the R1100 and later models and Fastway supplies half a dozen .20mm washers to set depth of the camber adjustment bolt but this is too little to level the pegs on the R100. I used two zinc-coated steel lock washers from Lowe’s along with one .20mm washer to shim each peg.

I’ll have to see if I like them in the “standard” position. They have a “low-boy” position- achieved by driving out a collar, flipping it and moving the peg to the other side- that locates them down and back about an inch. That position might be more comfortable.

I’ll also have to see if I like the cleat arrangement. The F3 model pegs have removable Allen-head cleats. I opted to fill the first two rows with the shorter 8mm cleats and the rear row with the longer 10mm ones. I may end up removing the first row of cleats to let my boot hang a little at the edge of the peg.