The topic for today's rant is the Pressed Steel Frame bikes that BMW produced between 1929 and 1941 or so. Actually, it's not about them at all, but rather, the English language nomenclature surrounding them.

So, I was chatting with Ted Porter last week and we got on a subject that apparently drives him as wild as it does me. So I thought I'd address it here:

This title applies to two things going on at the moment. The first is this web site.

My website had grown by accretion from 2001 through 2009. Other than having a few templates via Adobe Dreamweaver (which is a pretty darn good integrated web development environment), some barely integrated JAlbum photo albums (another extremely easy and creative tool to use) and some custom PHP and Javascript scripts, it was all hand coded.

I had an odd thing happen a couple weeks ago. I jumped on my 1953 BMW R51/3 to go visit a guest in town over at a friend's house. I fired it up — first kick start, just like usual — and rode down the hill. But as I tried to use more throttle going up the incline towards the back exit from my home, I found that the engine seemed to be missing about about 3/8's throttle. I turned around and rode back home, struggling up the steep road to my house.