Clay Dowling's blog

My Motorcycle Now that I've had the motorcycle for a few months I have a little more perspective on it. It's turned out to be really fantastic. There is still something a bit scary about being on a motorcycle, but at this point it's a good kind of scared. It's an exhilaration, a bit of an adrenaline rush.

President: Now Available in Black It's a happy day for me. Less so for my right-leaning wife and step son. This is something I've been waiting for since I was a kid: when a black man really could be elected president. To be sure, it took a perfect storm of circumstances. The Republican party needed to discredit itself with the public, and the candidate had to be somebody extraordinary.

For those of you who haven't heard, Debbie K. Schmidt died on Sunday.

I rode my motorcycle to work for the first time today. It was 37 degrees when I left this morning, and the ride was 45 miles long. Sunrise occurred just as I arrived at the office. As an added bonus, I took the windshield off my motorcycle last week, because I was tired of the turbulence behind it. Which made the ride very smooth.

I've been riding since early September now. So far it's been really great. I've been easing into this thing fairly slowly, steadily increasing the complexity of what I attempt. Last weekend I took it on the highway to my parents' house (55 miles), which was by far the biggest challenge I've taken on with the motorcycle.

At my day job I've been learning Java. For my training I installed Eclipse, the free Java IDE, and Java development was easy. A simple install, lots of easy instruction via the web and books. Things worked. In fact, one of the cool things about Java was that some otherwise tedious tasks like parsing XML are pretty easy in java. When I wanted to try web development with java I installed Tomcat, a free and powerful web application server. Getting Eclipse to play nice with Tomcat was a bit more of a challenge, but one I eventually solved with a little google-fu.

New MotorcycleI put down a deposit on a motorcycle last night. It was an unbelievably rash thing to do. I was nervous as a cat with puppies all yesterday in anticipation of a test ride. Ultimately I wasn't confident enough in my very minimal skills to take it out for a road test (i.e. I was trying to take off in the wrong gear), but the seller put me on the back and showed me what it could do.

Leg Joint DetailIn my previous post about my desk, I mentioned that the legs had experienced a catastrophic failure. Today I rebuilt the legs based on the lessons I learned from the previous attempt. The new construction uses a hanger bolt through the corner brace. I also changed the way I attached the corner braces to avoid producing weaknesses in the wood.

Writing TableBack in the spring my dad built a pretty neat little knock-down writing desk. It was something that could be built inexpensively, looked nice, and was highly portable. I decided that I wanted something similar for my own desk in my office, instead of the particle board desk that I bought when I was in college.

I put this together over the weekend. In the process of doing it I learned a few things:

1. I don't know beans about joining table legs.