David Forster

Just received a call from Norwich Union, the insurance company of the guy that knocked me off my bike on Saturday. He has contacted them and admitted full liability for the accident, and they are going to send an engineer out to assess damage and they will pay for the repairs.I have to say this is a refreshing change. My insurance claims in the past have gone on and on for months, even when the other parties have admitted liability.A big thumbs up to Norwich Union for being both friendly and helpful. It’s a shame that they always seem to be too expensive when quoting for my bike insurance!

Damn! Got knocked off the bike again on Saturday. Silly driver switched lanes on me… Of course, he couldn’t check his mirror or indicate because he was too busy chatting on his mobile phone. Luckily I was not hurt, just a bruise here and there, and the bike went down reasonably gently with the R&G crash mushrooms doing an outstanding job (I still need to replace some panels though as the scratches won’t polish out). A nice guy who was behind the driver gave me his name and number as a witness and the guy who hit me said that he’d pay up so hopefully it should all get sorted pretty quickly.

I rode away from the accident and the bike is fine mechanically. I actually finished my journey to Rex Judd to get my alarm fixed, so at least that’s working again!

I swear, me and phones nowadays are like me and watches when I was little. I can’t stop getting newer, better models! I bought myself a T-Mobile MDA Compact (aka HTC Magician, Qtek S100, i-Mate Jam or 02 mini) yesterday. It’s a tiny little thing, not much bigger than a regular phone, but it runs Windows Mobile 2003, so it’s basically like my old iPAQ and a phone combined, which is exactly why I bought it.It was free on a new contract with T-Mobile, and it’ll cost about ?Ǭ£45 to cancel my current Vodafone contract, which is exactly how much my V550 is worth on Ebay at the moment, so it hasn’t actually cost me anything at all, plus the T-mobile tariffs are a little bit cheaper - that’s how I justify it anyway!!Of course, the first thing I did when I got it home was download the free software from xda-developers.com and unlock it so that I could use my Vodafone SIM until my number’s been transferred. I’ll also be installing the ‘BigStorage’ ROM from the site to get rid of the T-Mobile branding and gain a bit of extra memory.

Something I’m definitely guilty of! Chimping. Own up Jay!!!

Late last night I noticed that there wasn’t much cloud cover and decided to stare up at the stars for a minute or two while waiting for my laptop to finish burning a DVD.

I easily recognised Ursa Major (or ‘the Great Bear’, or ‘the Big Dipper’, or ‘the Plough’) and Polaris (the North star), but there was a bright star to the west, quite high in inclination that I didn’t recognise. I loaded up an astronomy program in order to figure out what it was and it turned out to be a star called Vega. I then got some binoculars out to look at it and I found that I could see lots of other stars that I couldn’t view with the naked eye. While I knew this happened, I was still quite amazed how dramatic the effect was, and how beautiful. I thought I’d try and use my camera to take some pictures - using an exposure of 30 seconds at ISO 200 brought out some detail but I think I’ll need to increase the ISO or use my remote shutter control to manually increase the exposure time. I will try both and see what happens.

The astronomy programs that I used are both free (open source) and are Stellarium and Celestia.

Had some trouble with the running of the bike. When the engine got hot, it would drop down onto 2 cylinders and plumes of smoke from unburnt fuel would start coming out the back! In order to make sure I had transportation I disconnected my new Power Commander and took the bike for a blast up the motorway in case it was some dodgy fuel that had got into the tank. Everything seems OK now, but I have yet to reconnect everything. I’ll put the Power Commander back on and see if it does it again - if so then it’s going straight back to the shop! I’m still not 100% convinced that was the problem though, as it had been on the bike for a couple of weeks without trouble.

Also, my Meta alarm has stopped beeping. If you listen closely to the alarm module you can hear static hiss from the loudspeaker. I put it down to dodgy electronics and need to test if the actual siren still goes off. Either way - It’s definitely going back for replacement. Take my advice anyone who’s getting a new bike alarm… Get a Datatool system, I’ve never had any trouble with the three that I’ve had.

Haven’t posted on this blog for a while as I’ve been busy with other things, so I thought I’d better put something up.

I’ve been thinking about redesigning this site to reflect my growing hobby of photography. I’m absolutely loving my Nikon D70 and like the idea of having a more prominent online gallery to share my photos with others. The other option of course is to simply buy a Flickr account!

Bike news: Thanks to a friend selling his R1, I’ve purchased some more tuning parts for mine. I’ve fitted:

• A new double bubble screen from Pyramid to improve looks and air flow (I wasn’t quite happy with the first one I bought)
• An Acumen digital gear indicator to stop me from riding down the motorway in 5th or trying to select 7th
• Some Goodridge braided brake hoses for extra braking power
• A DNA high performance air filter to allow the engine to breathe more easily and finally…
• A Power Commander to better tune the fuel injection system to the new air filter and my existing exhaust system.
• I’ve also got a Renthal front sprocket with one less tooth than standard but haven’t put it on yet (This is, by the way, by far the cheapest and best modification you can do to your bike, giving you a much better application of the available power with only a minimal loss of top-end speed).