Black Knuckle Levers

Black Knuckles

"Black is the New Chrome" knuckles black picture.

These Knuckle Levers add some "attitude" to your bike. They are CNC machined from T6 extruded billet aluminum and mount to all Harley Davidson’s for 1996-2007 with manual clutch except 2004 – 2006 Sportster. Also fits 2003 & older Big Dogs (not 2004 & 2005!) and American Iron Horse, PM control applications.

Currently not available for VRod

*Note: Bike must be started in neutral when using the levers on 2007 and newer HD.

More details at www.aeromachmfg.com

Outstanding Mirror and Grip

Flash Some Chrome in Daytona

Sometimes you are just arrested by what you see. And these ladies saw a flash of chrome and spent of few minutes checking out the custom mirrors and grips.

In Daytona, bikes are part religion, part entertainment and it is always surprising who knows what about custom motorcycles.

For Softail Motorcycles

These knuckles are machined out of aircraft grade aluminum, which offers strength and reduced weight. They feel comfortable and slide nice in the mount. They come in black anodize.

Customer feedback are that these levers add an attitude to the ride and that they often become coversation pieces. For more details click here.

YikeBike by the Kiwi design team is a radical electric bicycle that just weighs 9.8 kg and folds to 67—56—12 cm to fit in a backpack.

Featuring a powerful 1.2 kW electric motor and controller that replaces chain pedal, gear box, mechanical brake, cables or levers, it is gonna be the first bicycle in the market with electronic anti-skid brakes

Source:
http://www.thedesignblog.org/entry/yikebike-electric-penny-farthing-for-the-21st-century/

I once listened to the VP of a services business unit describe the levers available to him to drive the business.  Here is his formula.  While I agree with him about the formula, it was clear that we need to understand the difference between levers and drivers.  

If these were all just levers, would we not be justified in pulling the levers as quickly and as hard as we can?  If we make a small adjustment to the formula, we can take the argument another step farther.

If we breakdown Average Deal Size into its components of hours and rate, we identify the one item that can probably be used as a short term lever – Rate.  We can lower or raise our rates much easier than the other items.  The other items require longer term programs.  We need to train our sales force on new ways to improve winning percentages and shorten sales cycles.  We need to create marketing programs to find new opportunities.

It is one thing to understand the drivers of the business, but we usually need to build programs around the levers to understand how they impact the business and how/when they should be used.  If we are not actively managing the levers, they are really just mathmatical drivers.

Here are a few cartoons I did for an educational web site: Planet Science along with a testimonial from the editor!

Levers
So what’s the big deal about levers? Well, they are simple machines that help make your life easier. Have a look at this….

Archimedes (Greek mathematician, 287 to 212 B.C.) said, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth,” meaning that if he had a lever long enough, he could move the Earth by his own effort.  At the very least we can show that a child can lift an adult:

Archimedes lifting the Earth!

You will need:
* An adult
* A child
* A brick or block of wood
* A plank of wood 1 inch thick and at least 4 feet long

What to do:
1. Make a lever by placing the plank over the wood block.
2. To take advantage of the properties of the lever, make sure the fulcrum (wood block) is closer to the end of the lever on which the adult will stand.
3. Have the adult stand on the short end and the child stand on the long end. What happens?
4. If the child cannot lift the adult, adjust the fulcrum so that it is closer to the side on which the adult is standing.

“We’ve used Richard a lot for various features on http://www.planet-science.com
His cartoons and illustrations are winners for us, I think because at
heart he’s a very talented artist and can draw anything well. He has a
great knack of being able to quickly absorb what it is you’re aiming at
and adding loads of wit, cuteness and clever ideas to your project,
whilst listening and using any feedback you have for him too. He has
always met (some pretty tight!) deadlines and is great at sticking to
your budget if you have a limit. Thanks Richard!”

http://www.planet-science.com/sciteach/index.html?page=/experiment/

Katie Walsh, Editor, www.planet-science.com

The latest craze accross the world from South Africa to England are the new Italian Door Handles on the market.

I recently bought a few chrome door handles for my house and I’ve been extremely pleased so far. The next step is to try and get a few Italian ones, as they are known to be some of the worlds most stylish handles.

These handles are suitable for cupboards and inside the kitchen. It’s amazing how much difference such a small change in your home can actually make. You need to be creative with your decor ideas and you’ll see that just by changing a door handle or two you will be able to give off a completely different impression inside your house.

The levers come in various styles and sizes, you get pull and push levers aswell. You can buy Italian door handles from various hardware stores, just make sure you ask for the right ones and you’ll be able to spot the most stylish one as soon as you are shown a selection of knobs.

Welcome to my new blog dedicated to door handles. I am crazy about constantly upgrading my home and in this way I found a passion in the door handles field.

Many people might think that a door handle is just a simple object and don’t want to waste their time in finding the perfect one for their house.

Designers will spend hours looking at decor ideas in order to find the perfect door handle for their house. You get different types of handles, hinges and knobs such as for cupboards and bathrooms. I plan on writing down my experience with my new hobby which is door handles, so keep checking back for the latest information about the South African door handle industry.

Usually when I’m writing minor AJAX applications for internal use I revert to moldy old CGI. Most of the time
I follow a design pattern in which I define some functions and use a dispatch table which branches over a
field in the request then executes the matched function. Tired of repeating this ad nauseam I wrote a short proof of concept library which automates the building of the dispatch table. To make the transition as smooth as possible I used pythons meta capabilities. I felt as though it was a learning experience so the final library might be more of a lesson in doing these sort of things (what ever they are) than anything practical. I decided to call the library levers.

Source (I have omitted the large doc header):

if __name__ == "__main__":
    print __doc__

else:
    import os, sys, inspect, traceback
    from cgi import FieldStorage
    from Cookie import SimpleCookie

    Form   = FieldStorage()
    Cookie = SimpleCookie()

    if "HTTP_COOKIE" in os.environ:
        Cookie.load(os.environ["HTTP_COOKIE"])

    environment = inspect.getmembers(sys.modules["__main__"])
    functions   = filter(lambda x: x[0].startswith("lever_"), environment)
    lookup      = dict(environment)

    dispatch = {}
    for s, f in functions:
        dispatch[s[6:]] = f

    try:
        branch = "default"
        if "lever" in Form:
            branch = Form["lever"].value
        function = dispatch[branch]
        function(Form, Cookie)
    except:
        print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n"
        if ("Debug" in lookup) and lookup["Debug"]:
            print traceback.format_exc()
        else:
            print "Error!"

Download (rename it to levers.py)

And here are some examples:

hello.py

#Access using http://x/hello.py
def lever_default(f, c):
    print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n"
    print "Hello, world!"

import levers

poll.py

#To vote http://x/poll.py?lever=yes or http://x/poll.py?lever=no
#To see results http://x/poll.py?lever=result
def lever_no(f, c):
    open("poll", "a").write("no\n")
    print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n"
    print "no"

def lever_yes(f, c):
    open("poll", "a").write("yes\n")
    print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n"
    print "yes"

def lever_result(f, c):
    poll  = open("poll","r").readlines()
    votes = len(poll)
    yes   = len([ x for x in poll if x  == "yes\n"])
    no    = votes - yes
    print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n"
    print "Yes: %s No: %s Votes: %s" % (yes, no, votes)

import levers

I was pleased with the result although it is at best a rough draft and certainly the scripting language scene doesn’t need anymore half finished frameworks. I hope someone finds the code helpful.

Some randomness for this Friday:

Who’s your daddy? >>

Some fantastic postcards by andre jordan called “Postcards I may send”. These cards should absolutely should be made. I would buy a 50 pack of the birthday card since I usually forget people’s birthdays. (Sorry!) I think these would be fun to send to random people I don’t know. But that would be wrong.

Watch out for the pigeons! Warning! Due to overfeeding some pigeons can become aggressive.

Check out the fantastic “Patsy videos“: a concerned mother protecting her kids from drugs. (My favorite is the last one.)

I’m not sure what the objective of this game is… but I had fun trying to figure out what it’s about. If you figure it out, let me know.

Another wonderfully obsessive game called levers by vector park.

You can test your colour IQ. Basically you have to order hues between two colors. I did pretty well (27), but didn’t get the coveted zero.

The sweetest video I’ve seen this week:

And a fantastic advertisement:

Have a wonderful weekend.

I ett av mina tidigare inlägg tipsade jag om flash-spelet Feed The Head…men länkade visst till fel resurs på nätet. Det faktiska spelet låg på Vectorpark.com vilket ledde till att jag hittade ytterligare några spel. Kolla speciellt in Levers som går ut på att skapa jämvikt. Man blir lätt sittandes. Tjja..kolla in allihopa är mitt tips.

A fine Sunday morning — cuckoos singing, wind whistling, and strangely, bhOndOO awake. “We two seem to be the only humans in the department.”, bhOndOO thought of the security guard. After drinking water, bhOndOO was returning from the water cooler, when he saw his advisor’s office open. “Is he in? Or is it a thief?”.

Feeling concerned, bhOndOO tried to peep inside Prof Krishnamurthy’s office, keeping as much portion of his body outside as possible. Seeing nobody, bhOndOO took out his neck and the hollow structure above it outside the office, and was shocked to see Prof Krishnamurthy coming his way looking straight at bhOndOO.

“G…Good afternoon, Sir.”.
“Good morning, bhOndOO.”.

bhOndOO went past him and cursed himself for peeping inside the office, “What must he be thinking of me! I shouldn’t have done that.”.

“bhOndOO?”, he heard his advisor calling him. Threatened, bhOndOO turned back to say, “Sir, I was simply checking that there is no thief in your office.”.

“Do you have access to a printer?”.

“What?”, bhOndOO’s involuntary reply!

“Actually, the printer pages of the faculty printer are over and no one is there to fill in the pages, and I need a printout rather urgently. Can you get a printout for me?”.

“Sure.”, and bhOndOO started going towards stairs to reach the ground floor Computing Lab where the printer was kept.

“I will send the PDF by email to you.”, Prof Krishnamurthy almost shouted from behind.

“Oh! Yes, Sir.”, bhOndOO realized that in excitement he had not even bothered about it.

On the second last step, bhOndOO stumbled and fell down. His strong spects were intact, but bhOndOO knew from the fall that the printout business was not going to be easy. It was a warning.

bhOndOO found the Computing Lab locked. He returned to the entrance to see the security guard missing. He remembered his advisor waiting for the printouts and felt uneasy. He waited for an enormous amount of time and after two minutes, saw the security guard coming from the rest room.

“Computing Lab keys.”, bhOndOO did not allow him to spend time in asking useless questions. But the new security guard was innocent. “What is the room number, Sir?”.

bhOndOO was red with anger. But he controlled himself, went to the lab again, and came back with the answer, “Hundred and fifteen.”.

“What, Sir?”, the guard did not quite understand.

“One one five.”, bhOndOO uttered each word with force, and before the guard could say anything, took away the key labelled “115″ from the key-box in the guard’s hands. The guard was unimpressed.

bhOndOO inserted the key into the lock and turned it to the right — the levers did not move. He knew the problem of that lock not opening, since the key was a bit deflated, and kept trying for another five minutes. At the end, he had the lock unopened and the key more deflated. He looked at his sole rescue team member and the security guard happily came to help him. The guard inserted the key into the lock, turned it to the right, and the lock opened.

bhOndOO did not know what to say. He, in fact, did not say anything.

The security guard opened the door of bhOndOO’s fate. bhOndOO knew that his advisor must be waiting for him. He swung into action again. Managed two unsuccessful attempts to log into his account. He knew that another unsuccessful attempt would lock his account. Hence he typed the password carefully one letter after another, closed his eyes, and pressed enter. When he opened his eyes, he saw a shell prompt.

bhOndOO opened pine, downloaded the PDF from Prof Krishnamurthy’s mail, remembered Murphy, and fired a print. Nothing happened. He went to the printer and checked its power and other cabling. Everything looked fine. bhOndOO checked the paper trays and found around 50 pages. Suddenly, he noticed the LED near Start button turned off. He pressed the Start button and the printer came alive with a roaring sound of a lion.

The first page came out and bhOndOO felt happy. The happiness vanished after he read the page. It was the project report of Chunni Babu. “I must wait till the previous requests are over.”. A few printer jobs were already queued.

bhOndOO waited for a while and then suddenly realized that the prior printouts could eat away all the pages. He got uneasy, thought for a while, and then declared, “Prof Krishnamurthy’s printouts are more important than those of Chunni Babu.”, opened a tray, took away 6 pages out of it, and closed it. The printer continued printing Chunni Babu’s project report.

“Six are enough — five for ten-page PDF and one as a backup!”.

After the printer stopped, bhOndOO checked the tray — it was empty. He then inserted back the printed pages into the tray and closed the tray. The printer continued printing overwriting the printed project report. Then it printed a few slides, and then bhOndOO’s PDF — making almost all the project report unreadable.

When the printer stopped, bhOndOO removed the remaining pages from the tray and inserted his six reserved pages. He then fired the print from the shell prompt. The printer started roaring again and started printing. bhOndOO was very happy with his paper management. He was only five-page away from a Thank You note from his advisor.

The printer’s roaring suddenly turned into a hiccup and it came to a hard stop! bhOndOO checked it to see the very first paper jammed into the printer. “Why does it happen to me?”, bhOndOO’s usual response. He recalled Murphy, opened back cover and started pulling the paper out. He succeeded in getting half of it out. He cursed the printer, then cursed Murphy and then himself!

bhOndOO sat in the Computing Lab for a while, then decided something and went to Prof Krishnamurthy’s office.

“Sir, there is some problem with the students’ printer. Therefore, I have brought these five pages for you. You can take the printout from the faculty printer now.”.

“Thank you very much, bhOndOO.”.

It seems to me that the word “machine” is getting to be a bit out of date. For centuries, words like “mechanical” made us think of simple devices like pulleys, levers, locomotives, and typewriters. The word “computerlike” inherited a similar sense of pettiness, of doing dull arithmetic by little steps. But we ought to recognize that we’re still in an early era of machines, with virtually no idea of what they may become. What if some visitor from Mars had come a billion years ago to judge the fate of earthly life from watching clumps of cells that hadn’t even learned to crawl? In the same way, we cannot grasp the range of what machines may do in the future from seeing what’s on view right now.

– The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky