the "killing time before leaving for orchestra" entry.
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bluepoof.com
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May 17, 2001
I've read two separate news articles in the past two days which have mentioned specific brands of motorycles. Unfortunately, the Honda F4i in one article and the Suzuki SV650 in the other article were referred to as a Honda 600FX and a Suzuki SU50, respectively. OK. I understand having a deadline. I understand skimping a bit on the research. But you'd think that if you were going to go to the trouble to specifically name the brand of bike, you'd, y'know, at least attempt to get it right.
So, I'm dedicating today's entry to the press.
if you can't beat 'em, join 'em!
Speaking of writing, I'm going to be writing some articles for the
SU50 website and the
Women on Wheels
magazine. I've been wanting to submit some writing to some bike magazines
for a while, but have had no idea what to write about; Peter suggested that
I do a write-up of my upcoming Calistoga trip, which
I thought was a great idea. So I sent a little "would you be interested?"
email to the two aforementioned groups, as well as Woman Rider
magazine. The latter sent me a very nice email saying that they aren't
accepting first-person non-staff submissions at this time, but the editor
sent me the magazine's writing guidelines for future reference, which I
thought was pretty cool. At any rate, both svrider.com and Women on Wheels
said they'd love a write-up of the trip.
I'm pretty excited about that. Obviously, I write on this site, but I don't really pay any attention to writing style (I fix glaring typos and horrendous grammar, but that's about it) or audience or anything. My 9th grade English teacher probably just had a remote coronary when I typed that, but it's true. I used to be a really good writer, and spent a lot of time writing stories and articles, but then, on a dark day back in 1996, I declared my Computer Science major. It's funny how, as the years went by, being a CS major made me exponentially more stupid. Oh, sure, I was learning all sorts of useful day-to-day stuff like Dijkstra's algorithm and integrals, but I realized after about a year that I was completely forgetting how to use the english language. I stopped reading for pleasure, I stopped having non-CS-related conversations, and I watched in horror as my vocabulary probably halved while I was in college. I'm the only person in the world to pay $100,000 and come out dumber after four years.
The sad thing is that I still couldn't tell you what Dijkstra's algorithm was, or how to integrate anything.
So, anyway, I'm really looking forward to having a focus for writing; that being a specific artcle to write for a specific group (or groups) with a specific audience. Hopefully it'll go well, and people will like the articles, and I'll want to keep writing some more. Then I can add writing bike crap to the list of stuff I'll do with myself after I'm retired and spend my days sipping beer in the shade and mucking with engines and watching the cats fight.
speaking of my su50s
It's been a dark week, my friends, a week without sunshine, as I have not
ridden my faithful SU50S once. S'true. I decided that it might be
appropriate to pull a back muscle over the weekend, and woke up around
5:30am on Tuesday morning with really great back spasms. They're just now starting to go away. Two days of back pain joy. So, considering that I
can't even sit in a chair or lie down for more than about 10 minutes, I
didn't think that riding would be a really great idea. *sigh* It sucks.
But it hasn't been too bad today, so maybe I'll try to ride in to work
tomorrow.
Whine! Whine whine! :D