Post Vacation Update
Well, we are back from vacation in France, have been for a couple weeks. Vacation was wonderful, a sub-set pictures are here. I was playing with geo-tagging the photographs (I bought a GPS), so you'll notice the fun little "Photo Locations" window in the Picasa web album. It wasn't as easy as some would lead you to believe, but now that the location is tagged on the photo I never have to worry about it again, which is nice.

Another fun part of owning a GPS is tracking the rides I do at lunch. Every Wednesday my boss has posted a 'meeting' consisting of a mountain bike ride. We try to fit it in to an hour. Who am I to say no to my boss when he calls a meeting?

The trail consists of heading down in to the valley next to work and taking a series of trails. The photo I'm hoping to link in has the standard run. There are some very nice downhills that we are attempting to work in to the lunch ride. Sadly our office is on the top of a hill so the start is downhill and the end is uphill. I prefer the opposite. The gap in the bottom left of the green track is my building.

As most of you know, I have a subscription to the Economist (this will get relevant to the vacation, give me a bit). The Economist will always take the time to trash the EU policies on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) saying it is a waste of money and messes up the proper economic flow of things. After traveling around the south of France I have to say Hooray for the CAP! We had all kinds of local cheeses and produce available, there were loads of lovely farms and wineries as we drove around, it was pastoral paradise. I'm sure that would not survive the advent of corporate driven agriculture. If well paid bankers all the way to ordinary people in Europe have to pay to keep the farms and small towns running, so be it. Perhaps with the beauty of the countryside and slower pace more people may migrate to the country and reverse the flow of people to the city.

Perhaps part of the fix for France is to move people out of the banlieue and to the farms of France. Yeah, that'll get me in trouble.

That being said, and all irony aside, we are back in the U.S.A. and I'm back at work. I now have zero vacation time left, so yay for public holidays (since that will be all I'm getting for a while). I think I can say without breaking any rules that this year will not be horrible for my employer. We've been forced to cut temporary and contract people, which I think it is good idea. The credit crunch may be mauling other companies (think automotive and banks) but we have no debt and oodles of cash in the bank, so the credit crunch has no direct impact. It has impact on our customers, but I think we will get through this stronger.

I have finally passed motorcycle puberty (as my friend Kevin told me) and moved to a real motorcycle. My initial motorcycle was a third hand cruiser that treated me well. It's acceptable and boring. I used to describe cornering with it as 'falling' in to the corner. You could feel the weight of the bike move around and settle. The new one ... carves. Of course the big yay for me is now I have a gas gauge. On the last bike I reset the odometer after every fill up and rode it to around 120 miles before I filled up again. As you can tell from the photo, it's a BMW F800S and it was a demo bike, so I still don't have a 'new' bike, but it's close. The exhaust is after-market installed by BMW and it sounds much better than the stock ones :)

I'll take another photo after the rear storage gets delivered and installed.

So now the annoyance of putting the Yamaha and the scooter up for sale will start. I've never sold a vehicle in California before, well, I've never sold a vehicle ever. I'm getting set for large amounts of annoying red tape.

That's it for now. Hope everything is going well for people!