I Exist

Sigur Ros is being feature on YouTube’s home page on Friday. If you’ve never heard of them this is a great time to check them out. Maybe Google will unveil their higher quality video streams that they’ve been talking about for a while. Freakin sweet!

From the band…

Sigur Ros and YouTube make a little bit of history this Friday (Mar 7) with the band taking over the entire front page of the site around the world for a whole day, becoming the first group to ever have a feature-length music DVD streamed on the channel, with their acclaimed ‘Heima’ documentary shown in its complete 97-minute glory.

All 12 available slots on YouTube’s home page will be devoted to the Icelandic quartet for a full 24-hours, putting them before a global audience of hundreds of millions. The link-up follows the success of ‘Minn Heima’, a competition hosted by YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/group/MinnHeima) for fans of the band to create their own little version of ‘Heima’, using audio and video clips posted online. The 10 best entries, as judged by the band, will be featured on the home page, alongside the film itself, as well as a special message from the band, taking time off from recording their new album in Reykjavik.

YouTube has only previously hosted a handful of long form presentations, none for music DVDs. It is the first ever UK home page “takeover” since the launch of http://uk.youtube.com - the localized home page that allows for country-specific video rankings and comments.

Simultaneous with the YouTube promotion, the band will launch www.sigurros.com, giving away a free audio-visual download clip of the song ‘Ny Batteri’ filmed live in Reykjavik in the summer of 2006 as part of the Heima tour. ‘Ny Batteri’ is just one of a dozen additional songs not featured in the film that the band are intending to make available via the site in the near future. Information about the forthcoming album will also be revealed via www.sigurros.com…

I’ve finally done some decorating around my apartment. I bought a print of Raphael’s School of Athens. I went overboard on the size and didn’t realize how large a 3 x 4 foot print would appear, let alone the cost to have it framed. So I decided to frame it myself. I bought some baseboard molding, cut it to size, stained it and then protected it with a coat of polyurethane. I’m fairly pleased with the result. Here is the result:

Twenty one philosophers have been identified in this painting, making it the most philosophically dense image I’ve ever come across. Plato and Aristotle are featured in the center, where Plato motions to the heavens, alluding to his theory of Forms and Rationalism. Aristotle is motioning to the ground which displays his empirical method of thought. The other individuals are involved in various activities that is telling of their philosophy or character.

This gives you an idea of the size. I think it fits well on that wall. Since its been hung it has stirred up so much inspiration that I read through all the books on the table.

I’ve been in the middle of moving my site to a different server, so that’s the reason for the new look here. I’m keeping it simple until I’ve got everything ironed out. Most of my time is being spent on my new site: AtlasRider.com. I’m going to use that site for all my motorcycle related stuff, which seems to have been consuming my personal blog here. You can read more about what I have planned here. Feedback on my new site’s layout is appreciated. I’m not too good at this design stuff.

I had a four day weekend coming up. It has been my longest break from work in the past 3 months, so I planned a trip through California. Ever since my cross country trip I’ve wanted to ride longer and farther so I got very greedy with my routing. I had tickets to a Jim Gaffigan show in Vegas on Saturday, so I had Thursday, Friday and half of Saturday to explore. After my trip to LA and seeing only a few miles of the coastal roads, I decided that this would be my next trip. So I would head up the coast to San Francisco from LA, swing by Google, might as well see the Golden Gate bridge, visit the Sequoia National Park, then zip over to Vegas for the show and head back to Phoenix. Planning routes are always effortless and the realization of the miles I have to travel never set in until the morning before the ride. So I aimed high, but plans changed as they inevitably do on my trips. 2000 miles in 4 days. not insane, but not easy either.

This is the GPS log of my actual route. Some areas are spotty where my battery ran out, or I just plain forgot to turn it on =\

Day 1
Wednesday November 21st, 2007
Phoenix to the Coast

If I wanted to have my fun on the coast I would have to get the boring ride to it out of the way. I came to work that day with my luggage packed on my bike so that I could leave right after I got off. If I went back home it would have set me back and hour the majority of which would be me double checking that I have everything frantically and going over the list in my head. I couldn’t help but day dream about the upcoming days on the road and I was distracted from my work.

I was on the road at 5pm to pump out 500 miles. I forced myself to stay on the road until my low fuel light turned on. The light turns on after 150-170 miles. So it was roughly three gas tanks to the coast. I always use gas tanks as my unit of distance when I know I have to cover a lot of ground. “Three gas tanks” sounds a lot better than “500 miles”. Once one tank is down, I’m almost half way. After the second, I’m practically finished. All across the expressway there are signs that display the distance to LA. I could recognize the signs early enough to avert my eyes. It’s better not to know how much left you have to go. With signs every 20 miles my destination never seems to get closer, but after a couple of hours I give in to my curiosity and let myself take a peak. When I learn of my progress in terms of how many hundreds of miles I traveled rather than tens, it boosts my spirits.

For the past 400 miles I haven’t see a single rider going in my direction and only a handful in the opposite. A gas tank and a half away from LA and I see a Virago up ahead. I speed up and follow him for about 70 miles. My low fuel light flipped on and I was disappointed this time when I saw it. I had hopped that the Virago would need gas soon and could follow him into a gas station to chit chat. I pull up ahead of him and give him a wave that he returns quickly. I take an exit to a gas station, and he follows me. We chit chat about the ride while we fill up of tanks and warm up our hands. Darryl was visiting his Mom for the holidays in the San Fernando valley and he had come from Phoenix as well.

Just a gas tank away from the coast. This part of the ride is always the easiest. I got lost in LA after taking a wrong exit, but made it to the coast around 1am. The moon was full and the air was crisp. I had no idea where I was staying. I planned on camping, but did not make reservations. It is hard to find a place that will allow entry beyond 10pm, and I hate being held to the obligation of staying at that location since my plans can change. I found an RV campground 10 miles up the coast and tried to pursued the evening watch lady to let me in. She was concerned about the noise I was going to make…while people lay sleeping in their RVs. I told her that I could carry my gear into he grounds and pounding tent stakes in were not necessary for a single person tent, but she didn’t budge.

So rode up the coast for about 20 miles searching for some obscure road that I could explore to try and find a place to setup camp. I wanted to try out “stealth camping” anyways. I found an amazing spot to setup camp on a cliff facing the ocean. The full moon made setting up camp easier. The stars were stunning. Orion has never looked so large since I saw it two years ago in Yosemite. It was ten degrees cooler along the coast, so it was around 30-40 degrees but my camping gear performed very well. Occasionally I would roll off of my sleeping pad and I would wake up from the cold. You lose so much heat to the ground. I looked forward to the sight of the coast in the morning sun.

Still compiling the videos, and haven’t sat down to make a blog yet, but here are some pictures. Check out the album here to see captions.

I literally gasped with excitement when I read this.

You can use this feature to transfer placemarks from Google Earth to Google Maps, make an editable copy of some geographic data you find on the web, or upload KML data from a GPS tracking device. Then you can bring it back to Google Earth by clicking on the KML link to download a KML file.

Finally a place to organize all my GPS logs from my trips. But it’s not working =(

Here is the announcement from the Google LatLong blog:
Import your KML, KMZ, and GeoRSS files

I find myself want to be alone more and more lately. I don’t retreat from others for any negative emotions I have of them or myself. I just feel very comfortable just being alone, and find it more enjoyable at times. My motorcycle is perfect get away. Just me, the bike and the road. I ride for hours on end. An average of 10 and as much as 16 in a day while I’m touring. I take trips, whenever I can squeeze them in. A Saturday here, a 3 day weekend there. I say short, because it never seems enough. It’s not that I dread going into work on Monday, I actually am enjoying my job. There is sense of completely abandonment and freedom that I can’t get enough of while I am riding. So, I wonder how long this can last. People have said I would get tired of in a year or so, but it has only grown. Do my reclusive tendencies draw me towards motorcycle touring, or has my love of touring made me more reclusive? I don’t know if mama was right or if it’s Lieutenant Dan. But I think maybe it’s both. Maybe both is happening at the same time.

There are a lot of tiny rituals that take place before I start to ride. They’ve become so automatic I do them without thinking. Jacket on, pocket zippers down, tank bag on, ipod out, headphones in, glasses off, helmet on, headphones plugged in, helmet strap on, glasses in, gloves on, jacket zipper up, visor down, throttle open. I can do this in under a minute if I am in a hurry. I was in a shit hole town called Tuba City staying in a hotel that must have been an old high school. I think they just put up a wall in between the classrooms and called it a hotel. I slept terribly for some reason and when I woke up I was clumsy with my packing and securing of my luggage. I was in an all around pissed off mood. Cursing at nothing, and everything, having a childish hissy fit. Finally, I start to get into the rhythm of my pre-ride ritual and I start to calm down. I pull my helmet over my face and this warm soothing feeling drifts out over me. A relieved “ahhhh” escaped out my mouth without intention.

Have I slipped into some unhealthy state of mind? Maybe this hobby/obsession is my way of avoiding to meet new people. I can’t imagine that it is that simple. “Just Like You Imagined” by NIN, “Catapult” by R.E.M., “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” by Radiohead. I listen to each of those songs and I can instantly picture the exact road I was on while I was “in the groove.” An obscure cliff in Utah, the Blue Ridge Parkway’s sweeping curves and green hills, the sunset weaving back and fourth along that curvy mountain road north of LA. The only associations I used to make with songs involved moments with others, and now they’re replaced with tarmac. Thanksgiving is Thursday. Mine have usually been filled with friends and family, but this year I’ll probably be eating a turkey sandwich on the side of a gas station. This is the first Thanksgiving I’ve looked forward to.

I reach the top of Mt. Evans to find very cold temperatures, a stalling bike and mountain goats. This was the best location I visited throughout my whole trip.

The roads get so steep that I just turn off my bike and coast down for about 10 minutes. It is very eerie riding without hearing engine noise, but very cool at the same time. Just random thoughts in this one.

Taking a ride on an old back road I read about.