motorcycles, technology, music, business

I have been riding fairly regularly, read once or twice a week, now that I am not going to classes and do not yet have a job. Today I needed to go to the post office in Boston, so I took the bike. As it turned out, the weather was perfect. It was sunny and slightly cool. On the way to the post office I was riding slightly aggressively and that was fun. On the way back however, I kept riding and ended up in my local regular spot, the Blue Hills. There were very few cars which allowed me to open it up much more than regular. It was great. It made me remember why I ride a motorbike and why I ride a sport bike.

I found myself being too conservative, because I am used to traffic. There is a lot more road to exploit in both directions than I realized. I even did some right hand turn practice on a clover leaf highway exchange and some left turn practice on a big roundabout. It was great fun to work on my chicken strips a bit and to ride the bike a bit harder than I typically do during every day commuting.

I tracked my ride with a new iPhone app. I normally use MotionX which has worked well for me. I came across this review of EveryTrail iPhone app. Paul, the writer of the blog, swore that this was his favorite GPS app. I decided to give the free version a try.

I like it well enough. I like the end product with the “playable” route and the speed and elevation graph. However it suffers the same woes of all iPhone GPS apps which is GPS inaccuracy. For example, my top speed for this trip was 1043 mph. (UPDATE: I was able to figure out how to edit my route on the everytrail website which has greatly lowered my top speed to around 500mph. Also, I noticed something peculiar in that the website only displays the duration of the trip when clicking on the “info” tab of the graph insert. It does not show this in the trip details toward the bottom of the page. Annoying.) While that speed would be something special, I am not that special on my Yamaha FZ1. Because of that mishap, my speed graph has been rendered relatively useless since the Y-axis scale is so expanded.

Here is the end result. There is a play button on the bottom left, and you can remove the graph and pinpoint specific point in the ride. It’s all pretty cool:

post office run

Here is the full size version: Click Here!

I liked it enough to try it again. The UI is more “Web 2.0″ than MotionX and therefore a bit more attractive.

Unfortunately, no GPS app on the iPhone will ever be as accurate as a dedicated GPS unit from the likes of Garmin.

thanks for reading and happy riding.

If you are not from the Boston area, you would not know that the north and the south shore are practically different states. Those from the south don’t want to travel to the north and vice-versa. This is my proposed route for the day. (Rachel is out with her mother and our baby)

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I will be going directly to class from this ride. I will post my actual route after class.

UPDATE: Here is my actual route. I stayed pretty much on course.

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Distance: 87.1 miles
Elapsed Time: 2:32:57
Avg. Speed: 34.2 mph
Max Speed: 90.3 mph

The ride was really just ok. It was colder than I had expected due to high winds. Also there wasn’t enough variety in the roads. Route 2 is newly resurfaced but highly patrolled by the police. Route 117 west of concord is lame but east of concord it is nice for about 10-15 miles or so.

I got my bike serviced and had new tires put on. I did a total of 125 miles today. Here is the bulk of those miles.

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Distance: 106 miles
Elapsed Time: 3:31:30
Avg. Speed: 30.1 mph
Max Speed: 77.7 mph

I recorded this track with MotionX iPhone app. It did pretty well, though it sometimes loses signal. The max speed is not right and the average speed is the total average speed, rather than the average speed while moving.