May the gods scatter it to the winds!

She's divine.  When she smiles, she brings in happiness to the surrounding.  I have always wantded to be with her.  Seeing her face alone filled me with joy.  When I sit beside her, my soul is contented; it doesn't ask for anything else.  The moment I say bye and walk away, it sinks in gloomy loneliness which burns my nights.  I could ask her to be with me; but I know it's like asking Brahmaputra to sleep in my cave,  just because I like it.

All I can see is my tears.  I can't say why I weep.  Maybe I'm glad I'll remember her till I die.  Maybe I'm longing to be with her right now.  Maybe I'm afraid she'll leave me.  Maybe all the unspoken words spill through my eyes.  Before my want for her burns me alive, may the gods scatter it to the winds!

My Thunderbird Experience

Enough time has passed since I took my friend's Thunderbird for a trial run. For about 2 months, I have been using it for commuting to work, going around the city, and for a couple of long rides. The overall experience has been good. I like the Thunderbird. But definitely I am not in blind love with the bike. I wanted to get a better bike for myself when I took my Unicorn for a ride to Srisailem. It was a hilly area and we were riding as a group. I generally don't push my machines beyond what they can take very easily. During the Srisailem ride I had a pillion rider with me, so my maximum speed was 80 (kmph); sometimes I touched 85, and that's all. I felt a need for a bigger bike that can go at 90 or 100 with little effort. I don't like pushing the engine to/beyond its limits. When I started asking around, my friend Chenthil offered to let me try his Thunderbird for a while (how sweet he is!). So I took his bike and here I am, with the experience of using an Enfield machine for two months. Now I have to make a decision: whether to buy a Thunderbird for myself or not. But I am still clueless. While the power and stability of the Thunderbird is great, certain things really suck. For example, the bike doesn't have a centralised lock; we can't see the dashboard in bright sunlight; it's too noisy than I would like it to be; the rear view mirrors are too small; you can only see up to 2 or 3 meter with its headlamp; and maybe a few other issues. I know, these things are not big a problem. But I think, at least for my usage pattern, these things matter to some extent. What I am waiting for is a competitor for the Enfield range of bikes. Some 300 or 400cc cruiser manufactured by Honda would be a much better alternative. I don't know if some company would come up with such a bike. But for now, I am not buying an Enfield bike for myself. Maybe, I will change my mind after I return the Thunderbird and get back to Unicorn. Let's see what I feel then :-)

Turning off display in KDE

Kubuntu Gutsy has a bug that prevents screensaver from starting automatically in KDE. It is supposed to be fixed in the next version (Hardy). However, I am still running Gutsy and I cannot upgrade until my employer officially supports Hardy. I never shut down my laptop. After I go to sleep it keeps running with its LCD turned on for the entire night. This wastes energy unnecessarily. With some reading here and there, I wrote a shell script that will do exactly what I want to do before I go to sleep: lock the screen and turn off the LCD display. The script itself is very simple:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Locks screen and turns off display power.
# CAVEAT: Works only with KDE.

sleep 1                         # Wait for a second to let the user
                                # takes hand off keyboard.
xset dpms force standby         # This switches off the display.
exec kdesktop_lock --forcelock  # This locks the screen.

Now I have bound script to Ctrl+Alt+L key, which by default locks the screen. Whenever I step away from the computer, I can press Ctrl+Alt+L and it will turn off the monitor in addition to locking the screen :) PS: For information on how to assign shortcut keys to arbitrary commands/scripts, see this old post of mine.

My First Serious Road Trip

I can think of it as my First Serious Road Trip. I started on Wednesday from Hyderabad and came back just a few hours back (today is Sunday). I have done a few other trips before this. But I have always wanted the trip to not end when we return. This trip is an exception -- I was not too sad that the trip ended soon.

I left Hyderabad and rode my Unicorn to Bangalore. I met a couple friends and spent the night at Chenthil's place. Next morning, we rode over to Wayanad from Bangalore: me on Chenthil's Justforkix, Chenthil on his 650, and Poo on his Maximus (a Thunderbird). That was my very first time on a Royal Enfield. Like I expected, the bike was brilliant: it was a pleasure to ride. A few tiny problems here and there on Justforkix and the 650 made the day more interesting :-)

I met most of Rolling Thunder Motorcycle Club people. I must say it was very much fun staying with them. Everybody in the gang was "somebody" and they had something interesting to say or show. For example, Sam drove a Maruti Esteem at real high speeds in the roads around Wayanad. I was just amazed by the way he handled the car. He got a new nickname which was a hilarious event. To cut short the story, a lot of interesting things happened and I enjoyed being with them.

Me and Chenthil rode back to Bangalore on Saturday. We were keeping good speed (good speed according to my standards -- Chenthil was riding slow on his 650 so that I could follow him easily). Suddenly Chenthil stopped his bike and told me that it was going to rain. We wore our rain wear and got ready to face the rain. Within a couple second after we started to ride back, rain started pouring. I was surprised how Chenthil figured that out and happy that I was ready for the rain. We kept riding in the rain albeit slowly. This is the first time in my life to drive this far in rain. Thanks to my jacket and helmet I didn't get drenched. We reached Bangalore in daylight and everything went alright.

I didn't want to miss the opportunity to taste my favourite Corner House ice cream. I went out and picked up ice creams and food for the night. Started sleeping happily at around 11pm. By that time I didn't know the next day would be more eventful and interesting :)

I left Chenthil's house at 5.25 in the morning. It took a good 40km ride to reach NH7. After driving for about 70km in NH7 I fell off the bike[*] and managed to break the front brake. Somebody helped me lift the bike. Thanks to my riding gear there was not even a bruise in my body. Front brake had failed completely -- it didn't respond at all. I drove slowly to a nearby village and asked a mechanic to help. After looking at the brake he said there was no brake fluid in the brake and refilling it would fix the brake. I remembered brake fluid dripping off after the fall. He told me that I can get it fixed only in Penukonda (which was about 40km from there).

In Penukonda, another mechanic examined the brake and tried to fix it with all the tricks he knew. The brake was adamant and refused to work. After spending about 30 minutes he gave up and asked me to try changing the brake pads (which cannot be the problem as the brake pads are only a couple days old). I had to drive the bike till Hyderabad with only the rear brake. To compensate I learned a few braking tricks.

After writing them down those tricks look very simple -- but I learned them all after making small and big mistakes on the road. No need to say, I had my life on stake when I first learned those tricks. (Gear braking was the hardest: I didn't correctly release the clutch for the first two times. Oh boy, I was scared to death when my bike was running fast behind a lorry going at 40kmph.) Slowly I got used to those tricks and started riding fast. In less than an hour I was proficient enough to overtake (which includes slowing down and getting behind the lorry if suddenly a bus appears from the opposite side).

I never wanted to call this an adventure trip: but the last day was indeed kinda adventure (at least in my definitions). So that's about it -- the trip was a lot of fun, and I want to do more of it :-)

* Why did I fall down? My Unicorn has a very good front brake -- it's one of the safest disk brakes I have used. Since it's safe to hold it, I apply slight pressure on the front brake even when I just have to slow down. On Justforkix (a Thunderbird) I did something similar subconsciously and I was on the ground the next moment :(

Advanced Braking

Welcome to the Advanced Braking session, ladies and gentlemen! Let's say you are riding a motorbike and you want to stop your bike. What would you do? You would apply both front and rear brake and maybe shift down gears if you have enough time. Correct? Imagine you cannot use the front brake. How would you stop then? Applying rear brake alone will not even help to slow down the bike, let alone stopping it. If you don't know how, you have come to the right place :-) I will first tell you about a few braking techniques before answering this question. We will start with something called Gear Braking. This is done by shifting down the gear when the bike is on the move. Steps to follow: (i) Press and hold clutch lever, (ii) shift down, (iii) leave the clutch lever. Step (iii) is very important. If you keep the clutch pressed, the bike would go faster making things worse. If you shift down rapidly, the engine will make noise (because it runs at a higher RPM than it was before you shifted down). Don't worry about that; the bike is safe. When is it appropriate to use gear braking? When your bike is going in a moderate/high speed and you have to slow it down a little, but for some reason you can't use the brakes. The next one is very simple, and I bet you already know it. Rear brake. With your toe push the rear brake pedal down and that applies brake. Simple, huh? Next one is Pull Brake. When your bike is going at a very very low speed (say somewhere around 10kmph) you want to stop it without using the front brake. With rear brake alone, it might be hard to correctly stop the bike in the targeted place. (E.g. you want to stop the bike under the tree not near the tree.) To apply Pull Brake, you put one of your legs on the ground and pull the bike back with your hands so that it stops moving (sounds funny, huh?). You may also simultaneously apply rear brake; that will make things much simpler. Be careful when you do this; if the bike is not slow enough or you don't balance the bike properly you and/or the bike might get injured. Enough techniques. Back to our question: how do we stop a bike without applying front brake? One very important thing to keep in mind is that slowing down the bike without using front brake is a long-term plan, while stopping the bike without front brake is almost a 3-minute plan. As we already discussed, you can use gear braking to just reduce speed. To stop the bike completely, (i) Use gear brake and slow down, (ii) keep shifting down until you reach first gear, (iii) apply rear brake and reduce the speed still further, (iv) when the bike is really slow, use pull brake to bring it to complete halt. I know, I know. There are several other, maybe better ways to do this. But this is what I did when the front brake failed in my bike. So what is your favourite trick? PS: Exercise this with caution. I am no expert in biking and this is just what I did -- I have no clue how good this is to be recommended to others (i.e. I am not recommending this to anyone). PPS: Read my trip notes for more background information.