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Well folks, it’s here. We got it at the beginning of last week. It’s the brand new, highly anticipated 350cc two wheel racing machine from KTM. Factory test riders loved it, and despite the high price tag there are people fighting to get on the waiting list. Thanks to my grandfather’s notoriety in the area we were given high priority and picked ours up as soon as they came in to Valley Moto Sport. I want to send a huge thanks out to Barry Wellings for his consideration; even though his respect for my grandfather, not myself, is what got us the bike I still profit from it after all. Ok, I’ve talked enough for now without giving you something pretty to look at. Here you go:

The new 2011 KTM 350; isn’t it beautiful? Plus, the infamous Agassiz corn.

We spent a few days during the week checking it over, breaking it in, changing the oil, checking the plug, disconnecting and reconnecting wires, and all around basically playing with it. Getting the feel of it, if you prefer that way of thinking. Becoming one with the bike. Also making sure everything was put together properly, which it thankfully was. It was easy to see from the start that this bike was going to be good. The very first ride on it was a shock as the throttle was light and quick to respond. It felt more like riding a 250 2-stroke than any of the four-strokes I’ve ridden (a fair amount).

Only a few minutes old and it already knows how to jump. The parents must be proud.

The first few hours riding it were very trying on my patience. I wanted to see what it could do, but I had to keep things gentle for the new engine. However, even at 75% throttle this bike is extremely capable. In combination with a bit of seat bouncing it was enough to clear all of the jumps on our track, including a hundred foot jump right out of a corner (see below). In fact, all these pictures were taken before the bike was completely broken in.

We call this our “hundred and six footer” from when we made it, but it has worn down a few feet since.

Yesterday we had a sanctioned CMA practice event at the track and went there with the bike fully broken in. Valley Moto Sport had another KTM 350 for people to test ride (quite a teaser; there were already 16 people on the waiting list to buy one at the start of the day), and I saw two other people at the track riding them (theirs weren’t broken in yet, however). I like to think that I put on a worthwhile show for the people watching. After all, I have to do my part to show off the Valley Moto Sport logos on the bike.

The pictures are somewhat blurry, due to a low quality camera and a shaky grandfather. Sorry, it’s the best I have.

The bike’s performance is incredible. It feels in many ways like riding on a nice light 250 but with the power of a 450 at your fingertips. The only real difference I noticed in the power between our older KTM 450 and this new 350 is the gear ratio change from having five gears instead of four. Maybe a brand new 450 would have more power, but our two year old one had nothing on this 350, and I’ve heard that the pros are holeshotting against the 450s.

One lap near the start of the day, enthralled with the power I could unleash by pulling the throttle fully open, I accidentally overshot the aforementioned hundred foot jump and flatlanded on hardpan. The bike bottomed out, but barely. There was no huge “clack” and jarring of the bones that I normally associate with those hard landings. The only way I could tell I had bottomed out was by checking the rear fender and seeing tire marks. To be fair, we tightened the suspension three clicks all around from stock because I ride it pretty hard.

In summary, I think the bike is top of the line. Unless you’re good enough to have the factory building bikes just for you, you won’t find any better quality than the new KTM 350. We’re already making plans to get another one when the frenzy dies down to replace my cousin’s YZ 250F. He rode the 350 for a few minutes and loved it, saying that it was easier to handle than 450 while still having much more power than his 250. If you can afford the 5-digit price tag, it’s time to head on down and buy one. I certainly can’t afford it, but that’s what grandparents are for, right?

In a transition that took far more work than it should have (yet far less than I expected it to), I have moved this site from the old location at personal.aparadine.com to simply aparadine.com. I had been using the top level domain to host a website for business dealings I set up using the Aparadine name (it made my bids look more competitive on programming contracts). As I have been making the transition to focusing on writing more and programming less, it now makes sense to list my personal site on the more convenient URL. The old site still forwards to here so it shouldn’t be a big issue unless you’ve linked to some of my content directly (in which case you’ll have to update the link or it will just forward to the main website). Which reminds me, I still have to update a few of my own pages which do exactly that. Silly me.

While I haven’t tested it yet, the Buzz settings indicate that this blog is now set to be re-posted automatically. I assume that means when I publish this message it will be similarly published in Buzz. I spent almost an hour looking around for solutions online and found, if anything, far too many solutions — for enabling a “Buzz This” style button on your WordPress blog, which is not what I wanted to do. Finally I asked a friend who suggested the answer: Set up your website on Google Webmaster Tools and the option to display it in Buzz just appears magically!

Now I’m going to post this and see if it works. Wish me luck

It’s been quite the weekend here in sleepy little Agassiz: We were proud to play host to the British Columbia event of the international old timers motocross championships. Riders up to 84 years of age took part in this family-oriented racing endeavor. Classes are separated into under 30 (support), 30+ (over the hill gang), 40+, 50+, 60+, 70+ and 80+ as well as a ladies class. My own family played no small part in this massive undertaking with the majority of the credit going to my grandfather Laurence St. Pierre, a very well respected and long time member of both the BC Old Timers and Canadian Motorcycle Association. He was there the majority of each day for almost two weeks before the event took place overseeing the cat work and preparing the track. My cousin, Justin, and I also helped him in preparing the track. My mother, aunt, and grandmother did the lap scoring for the races as well as sign-up.

The event was unfortunately not the financial success we might have hoped, but the low turnout of riders was no reflection on track conditions. The weather couldn’t have been more perfect with a couple hours of rain after the races were over Saturday night keeping down the dust for an overcast Sunday. To my knowledge, we didn’t receive one single complaint about the track over the entire weekend. On the contrary, we received many compliments and sent home a lot of very happy riders. My cousin and I had a great time riding the support class with our family claiming three of the four holeshots (first rider out of the first corner off the start) for the weekend (myself with two, him with one). Though my grandfather isn’t much of a photographer he did get a couple of good action shots on our cheap digital camera, which I will try to post as soon as I get a chance. Update: Myrna Hansen has her excellent photos up on her website. Photos including me are available here.

All in all, it was quite a weekend. Everyone involved feels stiff and sore and more than a little worn out today, I’m sure.

I’m in the process of updating my website, albeit slowly. I’ve decided to add some more content for users to (let’s be optimistic here) enjoy. Whether or not they enjoy it is entirely up to them of course. Up until recently I’ve largely used this website as a placeholder for people who wish to Google me. Now I think I shall use it as a place to post various pieces of information as I think of them. Let’s face it, writers like to write. Sometimes to excess. Speaking of that… this post is about over. I just wanted to say: Beware of construction!

I am attempting to teach myself Spanish. Simple enough, one might assume. Of course, in writing Spanish words on the computer one must learn how to use those fancy little accents and weird upside-down characters. Actually, the information supplied at my university was to the effect of “Here, take this file full of special characters and copy/paste them whenever you need it. Or you can memorize these painfully abstract alt codes to have the same effect.” It worked. I memorized the alt codes for use, painfully, while I was at school.

Recently, I have taken a renewed interest in learning Spanish. This time it is at home, on my own computer. This means I am no longer on Windows and can no longer use those not-so-friendly alt codes. So should I copy and paste each character each time? Ridiculous, I say! Of course, it is ridiculous, and alternate keyboard layouts were designed to solve that very problem. Here is where the simple things get complex. I don’t use the regular QWERTY (aka “US style”) keyboard layout. I use the Dvorak layout, which is much more efficient. I would expect, given that Dvorak is at least somewhat popular, that there would be more than one person in my situation and as such I would be able to select “Spanish Dvorak” or “International Dvorak” and be done with it. Not so. There are both such layouts included on my system, and I have tried them both. They are both ridiculously complicated for what I need, and the Spanish Dvorak keyboard layout switches some keys around on me. All I want is a few simple acute accents and an upside-down question mark / exclamation mark.

After searching around online for a very simple Dvorak keyboard layout that included the keys I required, I concluded that there was no such keyboard. There are many overcomplicated attempts which seem to feel that after including the needed keys for Spanish, they might as well turn it into a full international keyboard. At the current time, I don’t need any such thing. Whatever is a poor, tired programmer to do? Oh, I know. I got fed up and modified my current Dvorak layout to suit my needs. All the tutorials I found on how to create custom keyboard layouts were too out of date to really help me, but they pointed me in the right direction and I eventually managed to find the proper file to edit in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us (since Dvorak is a variant of the “US Layout” aka layouts for the English language). Simple as pie! Now using the AltGr (right alt) key in combination with normal letters brings the proper diacritical mark (acute accent for vowels, tilde for n) and reverses the exclamation/question marks. No extraneous marks have been added. This is a pure Dvorak layout for those needing to type Spanish text.

¿Lo quieres? Download it here.