Author: grant

I love my M.U.T.T.

Last Friday I took my first real ride on the bike. It was a lot of fun. Riding a bike with a 10k redline was also a new experience for me which made it fun. Honestly, it was sort of shocking to me, the engine seemed to have 3 moods:

  1. Meditating
  2. Purring
  3. Roaring!

I wondered where the engine should live for normal cruising, and Dale explained that where it seems happy, it is happy. Great. I can’t wait to get back out again to spend some time with my M.U.T.T. Who is M.U.T.T?
As Dan explained… the “Monster Under The Tank”!

Introducing my Concours

Here is a photo of the 2005 Kawasaki Concours that I bought last week:

I can’t wait to get her cleaned up, my riding gear sorted out, and out on the road again.
Addendum: 08/29/10
The previous owner included some nice gear with the bike:

  • Rifle Windshield
  • Throttlemeister Cruise Control
  • GenMar Bar Risers
  • Cee Bailey Bag Liners
  • Mag’s Bags Gear Bag
  • Passenger backrest
  • CoverMax cover

Motorcycling Enterprises’ Safe Rider Course

Not having ridden for 12 years or so, I thought it would be good to get back in the saddle again with some off-street street-time and re-learning of good safety habits already under my belt. Luckily for me a slot opened up in Motorcycling Enterprises’ Safe Rider Course. It was a lot of fun.
The teachers provided excellent in-classroom and on-the-track training; balancing good exercises with 1-on-1 attention that made a big difference in how quickly you acquired the skill(s).
Unfortunately for others I’m sad to see that they are retiring this year. While there are plenty of MSF certified classes out there, I’m still hoping that their trainers decide to take over their business.

R6RS macros with positional and optional arguments

[Makers] is a distribution of libraries for R6RS Scheme implementations. In the paper:

“Keyword and Optional Arguments in PLT Scheme“. Matthew Flatt and Eli Barzilay. 2009 Workshop on Scheme and Functional Programming.

the authors discuss ways to provide functions and macros with a mix of fixed and optional arguments to better organise abstractions. This package humbly proposes an alternative for R6RS implementations, without the use of “keywords” as disjoint type of values.

(via comp.lang.scheme)

Setting the background color in Slideshow

The OP asked how to set the background color in Slideshow as it is not obvious.
Matthew replied:

Locally, I’d superimpose a picture onto a color rectangle:

#lang slideshow
 (define (add-bg p color)
   (refocus (cc-superimpose
             (colorize
              (filled-rectangle (pict-width p)
                                (pict-height p))
              color)
             p)
            p))
 (add-bg (bt "Hello") "green")

To globally set the background, I’d use that in an assembler:

#lang slideshow
 (define (add-bg p color)
   (refocus (cc-superimpose
             (colorize
              (filled-rectangle (pict-width p)
                                (pict-height p))
              color)
             p)
            p))
 (current-slide-assembler
  (let ([orig (current-slide-assembler)])
    (lambda (title sep body)
      (ct-superimpose
       (inset (add-bg (inset full-page margin) "green")
              (- margin))
       (orig title sep body)))))
 (slide #:title "Example" (bt "Hello"))

(via plt)