BlakeBlog

Magazine Prices Hitting Rock Bottom

In today's mail I received a renewal notice for Guns & Ammo magazine. I like the magazine, although over the last few years they've lost many of the big name columnists (Cooper, Tillman, et al.). And, yes, there's rarely a critical word about any of the products they review, but everyone knows that going in. With a newstand price of almost $5, a subscription at $12/year works out pretty well since there's usually at least a couple of issues a year I'd buy for a particular article on some new firearm, ammo, or what-have-you.

In the last year or so I've become aware of Amazon selling magazine subscriptions, sometimes for a lot less than I've seen advertised elsewhere. Unfortunately Guns & Ammo isn't a very good deal over there right now--it's more expensive than the deal I can get as a renewing subscriber--but I was astounded to see the prices on some other good magazines. How about $5/year for Field & Stream, or $7/year for Popular Mechanics? Heck, I usually end up picking up a copy at the airport at least once a year for this price.

Now apparently this is a sale that's going on through the end of September, and it looks like they're all for "auto renewal" subscriptions, meaning you'll probably get charged the regular price next year. Fortunately Amazon has a pretty easy to use magazine subscription center where you can control all your subscriptions. Check it out!

Man I Needed That

I did a 220-mile ride yesterday, running down 101 to 25 to Panoche Road, then catching Little Panoche and stopping at the entrance to Panoche Hills across from the Mercy Hot Springs. There I talked with a beekeeper who was just leaving the area after watering some hives. (It turns out that the big bee die-off seems to have been caused by low amounts of protein in the pollen the bees have been eating, so supplementing with high protien pollen patties has helped tremendously.)

The area's closed to vehicles until October because of fire hazards, but I've heard that it's a good place to go for some long-distance target shooting (1,000 yards or so). It takes about two hours to get there, but that's shorter than the trip up to the Sacramento Valley Shooting Center.

After a brief break to drink water, I continued on Little Panoche until it hit I-5. Going south on I-5, I went two exits to the Panoche Road exit and then got back on Panoche Road going west. For the first 14 miles it's a graded dirt road with some areas of fine silt and one slimy water crossing. I was still running street tires (Pirelli Scorpion MT 90/ATs) at street pressures so they didn't hook up real well, but I made it through with just a couple unintended slides and no crashes.

Shortly after Panoche becomes paved again is the Panoche Inn, where I stopped and rewarded myself with a $1 ice cream cone. (I didn't think you could get a hand-dipped cone for a buck anymore!) With some dessert in my belly I continued on Panoche back to 25 and then 101 to home.

It was a great ride that let me brush off my rusty skills, and a perfect example of why I love my KTM for the fun roads around here—patched and re-patched until they're as bumpy as a teenager's face, with edges collapsing or covered with falling rocks from above, occasionally turning to graded dirt or gravel. If I'd still been riding my Sprint ST I'd have turned around at the dirt and been beaten-up by the bumps, but the long suspension travel and offroad design of my 690 Enduro let me enjoy everything the roads threw at me.

I also got to use my new SPOT personal tracker. It worked like a charm mounted on the front of my seat, reporting my location every 10 minutes to a Google map that's password protected and shared with my wife. It gives us both peace of mind when I travel by myself.

Oh, and yes I did break down and get a new Arai XD3 helmet—this time in medium instead of small. It fits much better than my old XD, with none of the forehead pressure I'd get after wearing the old helmet for several hours. The redesigned beak also catches the wind less, so although it was never really a problem for me even at highway speeds, it is nice to feel less wind resistance. The helmet also seems quieter, and Arai finally has a factory solution for an anti-fog face shield—the Pinlock system.

My Fun Labor Day Weekend…

…is starting with rebuilding Windows 7 in VMware since my Win7 VM in Parallels has taken to using at least half of my laptop's CPU cycles to do absolutely nothing. The Mac's Activity Monitor shows the Parallels VM process using about half the CPU, even while the Win7 environment's process monitor is showing nearly zero activity.

I thought upgrading from Parallels 6 to 7, just released yesterday, might solve the problem. The only change I could discern is that instead of slamming the CPU continuously, Parallels 7 spikes for a while, then rests for a couple seconds before spiking again, in an endless cycle.

So, I decided to download VMware's Fusion to see if it was any better. I imported the Parallels VM, uninstalled the Parallels Tools, rebooted, yet still saw the same piggish CPU behavior.

Now I'm rebuilding my Win7 environment from scratch in VMware to see if Parallels irreparably horked my Win7 VM, or if there's some problem with OS X Lion that both Parallels and VMware are triggering.

Either way, this is not how I wanted to spend my Friday before a long weekend. I lost a good half of the day to dealing with this—which means I have at least half a day's worth of work to do during what's supposed to be a long weekend. And now I'm wasting a Friday night that I'd much rather be spending with my wife. Call me one grumpy MFer right now.