World’s Smallest Electric Motorcycle

A pocket bike is a miniature motorcycle.  Often referred to as MiniGPX or “mini-moto” and first made popular as ‘pit-bikes’ for drag racers to travel around in the pits during races in the late ‘50s. These days pocket bikes are available in both gasoline and electric versions with engine’s ranging from 40cc to 50cc.  A [...]

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Motorcyclist Location Tracking

It’s disturbingly commonplace and pretty workaday stuff for law enforcement. If you are an owner of one of the country’s 277 million cell phones, it’s possible that your cell-phone company retained records of where your device has been at all times. Cell phones have tiny GPS devices embedded inside or because each phone call is [...]

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Motorcycle Road Food

When traveling the open road it’s important to grab a snack in order to maintain driving alertness level. I’m not talking about a SlimJim or a can of Vienna sausages and a cracker here.  Rather, a big stack of buttermilk pancakes augmented with some eggs, link sausage, bacon, fried potatoes, cat head biscuits smothered in gravy [...]

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Motorcycle Safety Tactics

The pacific northwest and Oregon in particular has an abundance of great motorcycling roads. If you are like me you have a lot of pent up desire to get out there and hit the open highway.  The riding season is always too long in coming due to wet and cold weather, but this past weekend [...]

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Harley-Davidson Absenteeism

Productivity. It’s the manufacturing mantra of the corporate world.  It’s about making X number of  “widgets” an hour and reducing unplanned absences to maintain plant productivity. Harley-Davidson’s CEO and President, Keith Wandell, told analyst during the Q4 2009 revenue results that the company intends to enhance profitability through continuous improvement in manufacturing, product development and [...]

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Tiger Geniu$

“What a long, strange trip it’s been,” said the infamous Jerry Garcia. And how true that statement is after tuning in to the “news briefing” by Tiger Woods yesterday.  The whole controlled and sterile event with a so-called heartfelt speech was bizzare. The new American sport is apologizing. Maybe it should be an Olympic event?!  [...]

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Rally Etiquette

For more than a year I’ve commented ranted about the various motorcycle rallies and the city council fiascos. Many concerned city governments do their best to dissuade motorcycle rallies altogether using a series of tactics designed to run off motorcycle tourism.  By raising vendor and booth fee’s or trying to rein things in with stricter [...]

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Value Maps

Harley-Davidson marketing experts have consumption maps. Basically it tracks how customers perceive the value of their products and they “map” out benefit-vs.-price along with a number of other purchasing criteria and behaviour dimensions when customers evaluate H-D products against competitors. I’m not referring to this type tool.  Rather it’s the visual representation of what’s called [...]

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The Losers

It was a Dark Sky Film made in 1970. The film also appeared under the title Nam’s Angels.  The plot included a biker gang, the Devil’s Advocates who were recruited by the CIA to execute a daring rescue behind enemy lines in Cambodia. After customizing their Yamahas into combat-ready death machines, the gang roars into [...]

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The Fez

It’s roots have an Arabic theme and come from founders Billy Florence (an actor) and Walter Fleming (a physician).  This symbol is part of a fraternity and wearing the red with black tassel is one of the most distinctive.  It derives its name from first being manufactured in the city of Fez, Morocco. I’m talking [...]

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