Modern Vespa

Mmmmmmm...my mouth is watering just at the thought!

Those look like Ponderosa lemons. I had one of those in my yard in Florida, along with 8 other citrus trees. It was not a very big tree, but the amount of fruit harvested off it rivaled the other trees easily twice it size. And the lemons were the size of grapefruits.

We had a lemon tree here in Tempe that grew lemons as big as nerf footballs. Then it died*




*The fact that I cut it down is not the reason the tree died.

Here in California, Eureka lemons are widely grown and these are likely to be Eureka.

I have a Meyer lemon tree in my front yard, but it's about three feet tall and has never shown much interest in growing any taller.

I made my DJ debut at Vinyl Council Social Club, a monthly all-vinyl mod/ska/soul/reggae night in San Jose, last night. So much fun, and, amazingly, people danced to the records I played

Life is definitely giving me more lemons than I need right now.

This picture is completely unrelated to that unfortunately.

Guys, let he who has not done something equally stupid be the first to throw stones.

Which, you know, will probably ricochet off of something and hit you in the nuts.

OK, here's (one of) mine.

Years ago, long before YouTube, I was cutting the cloth wrapping off my bicycle handlebars with a utility knife. So far, so good.

Here's the stupid part.

I was pushing the blade toward my other hand.

You can see it coming, right, just as if you were watching it on video.

The blade slipped and buried itself in the meat of my other hand. I mean, buried.

Trip to the ER got it stitched up and, very luckily, there was no permanent damage.

Found an easter egg picking up the beers for our helpers today.

More. These bags contain 27 dress shirts, 7 pairs of pants, 5 pairs of shorts, 3 t-shirts, 14 belts, and one pair of fancy suspenders.

And more importantly, they have left the house.

My wife calls this "Swedish Death Cleaning". The idea is that as we all start to see our end coming closer, we lighten our load a bit to make it easier for those who have to deal with it all when our time comes.

Of course the same applies to closing one chapter of life and opening a new one. Both my wife and I gave away most of our formal work cloths when we retired. She was a Realtor and had a lot more formal work wear than I did as a software engineer.

I've started clearing out the garage a bit too. My collection of antique/vintage motorcycle parts has been cut down to just the parts I really believe I will use on my own ride. Most of the parts I had been holding for building another old chopper have been sold.

I loaded up the new camping cargo trailer with all our gear this morning. We're going to spend a few days on the west shore of Lake Tahoe this week. Everything fit in the trailer with ease and a little room to spare. The only things we'll put in the back of the car are the cooler and the dry food. This simplified camping model cheers me up.

Being a retired software engineer myself, this made me chuckle.

The minimum requirements, dress pants, shirt and tie (maybe a jacket) for the rare customer meeting. Thankfully those didn't happen too often.

My standard uniform was jeans, sneakers, and a t-shirt with some sort of mathematical equation that was a joke to those who could decipher it. 😂

Well hell i didnt know you worked at the NSA 😂🤪

I love the new setup. Makes it easier to say "Let's go". Less wind resistance and sleeping in the tent you described is easy peasy.

My shirts weren't quite that sophisticated.

I was more drawing a parallel to just the type of clothing in general.

There were many days when I was the most formally dressed individual in my entire building in my OCPs (the camo uniform), minus the security guy at the entrance.

When I left school I swore I'd never have a job where I had to wear a tie. And managed it. That was back in '69.

It's been confirmed the flight to Italy is On-Time!
Take off @ 19:35. Arrive in FCO @ 10:15.....

14 belts? I'll bet I've had the belt I wear for fourteen years!

Maybe belts for a Vespa?

Accumulated over about 30 years.

Even so...

OK, I admit, an expanding waistline (or its complement) might necessitate an extra belt or two, and they do wear out...

And I thought I was being fancy having two belts.

Bill

It's not like I was using all of them. Most had been sitting in the back of my closet because I've never tossed a belt in the bin.

Single-layer leather belts (and even the sewn double-layer ones) definitely wear out when you wear them day in and day out. I had several that were curved/warped at the end.

The bigger problem was that I had trouble finding one with a comfortable and usable buckle. The ones with sharp corners suck. And the ones with rounded corners showed quite a bit of wear, with the surface finish worn off of many of them.

And then there were a few belts that were part of costumes -- one with a skull belt buckle, and another with metal skulls all the way around the belt, maybe 20 skulls total. Neither of those were worn, having only been used a few times a year. I'm sure someone will find it at goodwill and think "Score!"

I've since settled on very simple, lightweight belts made of nylon webbing (not entirely unlike tie-down straps) with a simple plastic snap buckle. These are very comfortable and can easily be worn through airport security, as they have no metal in them.

My first job after graduation from University was at Motorola. I worked in a customer facing organization and had to wear not only a tie, but a complete suit. And 3-piece suits were the fashion in 1986, so that meant a vest too. All this in the summer heat of Phoenix, Arizona. 😂

uploaded my new Vespa Diag app to the store.

It can read/write both the bin and eeprom of a miug4 (eg GTS 300HPE). https://www.steelbytes.com/vespadiag/ So not just changing the maps but also virginising the ecu and removing the speed limiter etc.

I'll add plenty of the proprietary functions such as "active test coil/fan/headlight/fuelpump", "reset adaptive params", etc later. They are easy, just been focusing on getting the read/write working.

Also gotta make up my mind what I want to do for the UI ...

People ask me about my opinion on the modern AI hype and inserting it into every part of life. I saw this headline today:

"Study finds AI tools made open source software developers 19 percent slower"

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/study-finds-ai-tools-made-open-source-software-developers-19-percent-slower/

I wouldn't have expected that.

This was fun

Really leaning into that corner, weren't you?

I put my shoulder into it

Wrenching night with a couple of my Vespa Club San Jose buddies last night, pulling apart an old P200E engine prior to degreasing and rebuilding.

It was interesting seeing how the gearbox works, moving the cruciform up and down and seeing how the different gears turn in relation to the output shaft. It's amazing that all the power of the engine is transferred through that little metal cross!

Doh.

That is how these gear boxes work.
I hope you guys have made notes on what belongs where.

Yet again, after six months being left untouched, my UK GT200 fired up happily after five seconds of cranking to get fuel into the carb.

The Hornet lives! I must remember to tax it tomorrow (1st of the month) and get another MOT soon after as that runs out on the 15th.

John Muir's VW book had a lot of these images. Their workbench made me think of them.

I leave work at 3:30. I got a message from my wife at 3:30 :

"It's raining."

And it was. All of the weather services that morning pushed the rain out to 5-7pm. But ... Michigan.

And I knew this one wasn't going to be a wait it out event. It was going to be hours.

So, I had my first rain ride on the Sprint.

All in all it did very well. The balance is good, not enough power to really spin out ... by the time I got home I was actually enjoying it. Soaked, but I honestly could have kept going.

My wife met me at the door with a towel, trying her best not to laugh.