I took the bike across Whidbey Island again on Sunday, for a quick afternoon ride. Rode north on I5 to Anacortes, crossed the Deception Pass bridge (shown above) onto Whidbey, and rode south to Clinton for the ferry back to the mainland. It was a quick ride, a couple of hours in the afternoon. I intended to explore the Destination Highway on the island, but in the end just rode the main highways (20 and 525, I believe) and enjoyed the nice day. Next weekend, if it's clear, I'm going to head back and look for some with better twisties; I hear there are quite a few along the coast.

As I grow accustomed to the new, sportier Zoë that the 'busa shock and Metzlers give me, I'm really starting to like it. I still haven't gotten the shock dialed in; there's a bit of chatter over rougher areas of road, but the bike handles wonderfully. Turn in is so much faster than it used to be, and yet she's solid as a rock leaned over through corners. I did spend some time on one particular easy-to-find backroad with a fair number of twisties, and it was a really exhilarating ride. I'm looking forward to more of the same in the future.

In other news, I think I've arranged for a helmet camera setup. Yay for ride movies!

This Saturday (the 22nd) is my Experienced Rider Course. I'm taking it up in Everett from the Motorcycle Safety Company, the same folks that taught my Basic Rider Course so long ago. From what I hear, it's basically all the same exercises as the BRC, except on your own bike rather than the little 125s and 250s that the BRC teaches on. I expect it won't be all that much more difficult for me, as Zoë is a fairly agile and light bike, but I'll be very interested to see the folks on big Goldwings and Road Kings and the like go through the exercises. One day only, and no classroom, which is good.

In other news, I have now recieved all the components of my helmet camera setup. They consist of a Canon Elura 50 camcorder, a CamEye SPORT LANC remote control, and a relatively cheap 480-line bullet camera. All of these parts came off eBay, which helped keep costs down. I am now in the process of figuring out the final hookup: how to get power to the components from the bike's electrical system, where to mount the camera, etc. Power is only troublesome in that the Elura takes a 7.4v input, and the bike (of course) gives 12v. I've got a few links where I think I can find the appropriate adaptor; we'll see how that goes.

It's supposed to be beautiful, sunny and in the high 60s / low 70s this weekend. Great for the class, and hopefully there'll be a good opportunity for riding on Sunday. With luck, I'll get a chance to break the video system in...

Here are the components of my helmet camera setup. At the top left you can see the digital camcorder itself; a Canon Elura 50. It records to miniDV tapes, as the models that record directly to DVDs apparently have a problem with the high-frequency vibrations of a motorcycle. It's about the size of one hand, so it's very easy to use and doesn't take much space in my tankbag. It also acceps a variety of inputs: external mic and camera, LANC wired remote, and hardwired power are the important ones for my purposes.

Directly below is the bulletcam, or "lipstick camera" to readers with more delicate sensibilities. It records at 480 lines of resolution; not the highest out there, but certainly good enough for the highly-compressed videos I'm going to be making. As you can see, it's very small. It's housed in a relatively tough aluminum housing with a clear plastic front lens guard, so I have some concern as to its ability to sustain a road-debris impact. The housing is weatherproof, though, so barring a big pebble strike, it should be fairly durable. It also came with a small powered mic, which will probably hang out in the tank bag with the camera and give me some element of road noise; I can always edit it out in final production, but I'd like to have the option of having the engine sound (or whatever) make it onto the tape. I'm not yet positive where the camera's going to be mounted; options include:

• my helmet (nice view, but more loose wires aren't helping anyone),
• on the fairing or rear-view mirror stalks (lots of fairing vibration below 6,000 RPM on Bandits, which will probably mess up my image),
• low on the case quards or frame (nice view of front suspension, but less of a panorama),
• or somewhere else I haven't figured out yet.

At the top right is the LANC remote. This magic device is going to be Velcro'd to the outside of my tank bag within easy reach of my left hand. It runs to a port on the camcorder which allows me to remotely start and stop recording while leaving the camcorder safely in the bag. It also has an indicator LED which tells me whether the cam is in standby, is recording, is close to the end of the tape, etc etc.

Below, and still in its package, is a cheapie 12v DC-DC convertor which I'll use to get power to the camera. I found it at Target for $9.99. Since I intend to wire the camera directly into the electrical system, rather than through my one and only cigarette lighter socket, I'm going to have to tear this adaptor apart and re-wire the guts as needed. Shouldn't be hard, these are generally pretty simple inside.

The quarter in the center is in there for scale.

Well. Today was my ERC, up at the Everett range, in a parking lot at the Boeing production facility. 12 students. Of those 12, 10 were on V-twin cruisers, about two-thirds Harley and one-third metric. Then there was a nice older fellow on a Honda ST1300, and Zoë and I. The short version: today's course was very good for my self-esteem, and a reassuring reminder that I have in fact been learning quite a lot since I started riding.

The majority of the exercises were very simple, and similar to the BRC tasks: quick stops, cornering, swerving, the U-Turn Box, and slaloming through cones. There was one exercise that we didn't see before; the Kidney Bean, a set of linked curves that formed the general shape of a kidney, and I suppose would be challenging to a freeway-only rider. However, since I've made a point of looking for curvy roads, it was a particularly easy one. With the exception of one turn in the U-Turn Box, I felt very comfortable all day long, very relaxed, and very secure in my riding.

After the class, one of the instructors came up to me and mentioned "Thanks so much for coming; you are AWESOME on that bike." I was very surprised to hear that; I don't know whether it's a comment on my riding skill, or on the fact that it's got to be much easier to throw my light, agile little Bandit around than the half-ton Harleys. Whatever the reason, though, I'm glad for the compliment. I was also asked to consider signing up as a RiderCoach; those classes are fun, and I'm certainly interested in learning more. We'll see.

There were a couple of colors-wearing Badass Harley Riders(tm) in the class; I don't rightly know why 1%ers would be taking an ERC, so I assume their colors were just a normal motorcycle club, despite the skulls, chains, and "FUCK OFF" patches. One of them weighed about 350 pounds, absolutely looked the part of the huge scary 1%er, and had a bunch of stickers on his lid; most were generally offensive and not very funny, but right at the back center, he had a big sticker that said "I BEAT ANOREXIA." That, right there, is some seriously funny shit, my friends.

In other news, the helmet cam is operational. I will write more tomorrow if I get a chance to get some pics of the install, but I wired it all up and took it for a quick ride-test tonight. The quality of night-time video is very low, but that's to be expected; I didn't buy a camera that is intended for low light. I'll take it out for a real ride-test tomorrow and see whether it works better in the daylight. The last issue remaining with the camera is the mounting strategy; it looks like the best approach would be to pick up a few more R.A.M. Mount pieces and affix it around the frame. Right now, I only have a single RAM that I'd intended to be for my GPS; I've modified it to mount the cam on my handlebars, looking past the tach and speedo and through the windscreen. Until I can get better mounting hardware (maybe a RAM ball sized for my front fork?) this will have to do.

...so at one point in yesterday's class we were discussing cornering. The instructor asked the group "How do you judge proper corner entry speed?" and one of the Harley riders piped right up with "Proper entry speed is usually posted." As the lone semi-sportbiker there, I felt obliged to jump in with "HALF of the entry speed is usually posted." Always worth a good laugh, I find.

I did need to get some jabs in at them in exchange for all the crotchrocket jokes - the best of all was Giant Scary Harley Dude casting aspersions on us "Jap bike riders" for drinking too much when we ride and getting into wrecks.

Pot, it's for you. It's the kettle calling.

In other news, there are a couple of ride groups from Sport-Touring.net going out today. I was hoping to go along on one of 'em, but the site is down and I can't get to my messages to find the meet-up locations. I swear, that is the absolute best riding community around, but that site's uptime is abysmal. Steps are in progress to get it migrated to a new, more reliable host, and I'll certainly be kicking a contribution to the admin when that happens. It would be a damn shame if that site lost its users for such a simple reason as unreliability.

Sunday was beautiful. I had finished all the wiring and setup on my bulletcam on Saturday night, and figured it was time for a real break-in ride, so off I went. Near on 200 miles total, and all of it on secondary highways - nice and twisty, and unfortunately, a lot of other riders (and cagers) appeared to have the same idea. Traffic was a lot heavier than I'd have liked. All the same, a good ride.

I'll post more details after I get home and can jimmy up a route map, and hopefully within a couple of days I can post a link to the video, once I edit it down from the two hours of footage I've got to a more reasonable 10 minutes or so.

In other news, it's finally gotten warm enough to break out the mesh jacket. Nice.

Ladies and gentlemen, my first ride movie is live. The upload process seems to have really killed the vid quality; I may have to try and find a better way to distribute the vids, but this is a good one for starters. Check it out if you're into it.

The vid's just over 13 minutes long, and for a first attempt ever at video editing, I'm moderately proud of it.