After looking around online for a replacement oil pan I have decided that $175 is just too much to pay for the part. I called up a friend of my fiance and they are going to weld a nut to the inside of the oil pan so that the bolt will have something to grab onto. This is the point where I say the project begins.

I started to look at the bike to see what route I would have to take in order to get the oil pan off and I am surprised it’s not that difficult but you do have to remove some pieces before you can get to it. In order to get the oil pan off the machine you actually have to remove the exhaust pipes from the engine and also have to remove your tail pipe. The issue at hand here is that you are supposed to use a torque wrench again at 16.5 ft-lbs for the bolts that are holding the exhaust pipes to the engine block. I fear that I may strip these if I use the same torque wrench again. I will try with 10 ft-lbs to start with and see just how tight it seems I guess. My first step however was going down to the auto parts store to pick up some penetration oil because the bolts holding the exhaust on seem be locked up tight and with it being made of aluminum I want to take no chances.

Anyway I will try to post some pictures of the process once completed.

When it came time to make the $650 purchase of a Jacket, Helmet and Gloves I made the trip back to Greater Boston Motorsports. This time however the staff was all running around as if they had 30 customers in the store keeping them all busy. There were maybe 5 customers in the store so I was a bit confused. I asked one guy about the jacket and when I found the jacket that I wanted (A blue Joe Rocket UFO 2.0) he just wandered off to help someone else. The guys that work there work on commission so you would think he would have asked if I needed anything else. After he wandered off I flagged down another staff member to ask about the helmets. I wanted to find one that would match my bike that also fit properly. I ended up choosing a helmet (A blue Scorpion EXO 1000 RPM) however they did not have my size in stock for any of the helmets I looked at. They advertise that they have the most helmets you will see under any one roof and I would be VERY surprised if that were true. They had a large selection of Icon and Arai but not much for any other brands. Also I bet there were no more than 40 helmets on the floor. I ended up having to order my size in the helmet which I was not too happy about because when you drop that much money you want the product right then. The salesman told me that my helmet would be in within 3-5 business days. I had ordered the helmet on July 1st and knew it would not be there within 3-5 days but rather business days since most companies were closed on Sunday and Monday was the day everyone had off from work for the holiday. After 6 business days I called the store and asked if my order was in. The guy took a look and told me well it looks like that product is back-ordered but the order was released today. I was not happy about that. They tell you one think when you place the order and another on the day you expect delivery.

I called and asked to speak with the manager and once I had him on the phone I stated that I just wanted my money back. He said come on down and we can settle this. I was expecting them to try to hit me with a restocking fee which I was going to dispute. However before I could even make it to the store the manager called back stating that they had the helmet in their NH store and could have it for me the next day. How convenient was that? Why could they have not just gotten it for me from that store prior to making me wait 6 days the first time. I agreed I just wanted the helmet and did not want to be lied to so I accepted the offer to get the helmet from the other store. The next day I called up to see if it had arrived and the manager told me it had. I hopped in the car and drove over to get my new helmet. When I arrived I spoke with the manager again and he ran down to receiving to get my helmet. When he finally returned he said it looks like they sent the wrong helmet. I was very amazed at the lack of competence anyone at that store has had. They were unable to order me a specific helmet after they said the order was placed and then to boot they have the wrong helmet sent from another store (Scorpion EXO 1000 Appollo). Not wanting to fight over a refund for the helmet because their policy is no refunds on helmets, I just accepted the helmet even though it was not the one I originally ordered. They are they same helmet except for the graphic design on the outside. When I agreed to just take the helmet the manager thanked me for my willingness to compromise which also made me angry. Why should I have had to compromise? He continued to tell me he just took over the store and things are still a bit rocky… You Think????

Needless to say I am not happy at all about the purchasing experience I had at Greater Boston Motorsports. I will never buy anything from this store again nor would I ever refer any of my friends to go there for buying their merchandise. From now on I will either find an alternative store or deal with the traffic to go to Parkway Cycle.

What store do you trust for your purchases? Please let me know in the comments below.

My only real disappointments with the device Is the lack of a front facing camera for use with video conferencing. The other slight drawback is the fact that iBook does not support PDF documents. For that I have found GoodReader which fills the gap. It would be very nice however if iBook actually supported PDF since there are really no converters that I have found which actually work. I am not Trying to convert the typical book with only text. I am trying to convert books like “Head First Php& MySQL” which contains a lot of images. When i convert a pdf book which has 300 pages it is converted into a malformed ePub as file with about 3000 pages.

If there is one thing that apple has done right with all of these devices it’s the app store. I have found that over the first few days of ownership i have spent about $100 on apps. Yes developers you are welcome

I love how Conceited Software is on top of things and has already released a version of Linkinus for the iPad.

there is one minor bug that i have found but i am not sure yet if it is a bug with the Spell checking of with the word press app that i am using to write this. The issue is when you miss-spell a word it is underlined red.z. When you tap this work spelling suggestions are shown in blue bubles above the word, tapping on the word you wish to use does not actually change the miss-spelled word.

Another bug with the WordPress app is if you are writing a post and you tap the gear icon at the top of the screen you can change the published date. If you set the date and then hit save you are taken back to the main screen but the dialog about the published date remains on the screen.

I just could not believe what had just happened.

I will get some pictures up of the bounce house soon!

Take a look at this picture:

I have had 2 Palm Pre’s on my Sprint account for the last 10 months. My fiance and I both have the phones and have been happy with them for the most part. However what really makes me angry is the quality of the phone. Now you see I can understand having to replace a defective phone from time to time but this is getting ridiculous. I have replaced my phone 3 or 4 times and my fiances phone is being replaced for a 3rd time now. Surely 2 phones should not have to be replaced 7-8 times over the course of a year. Shouldn’t phones that are “this expensive” actually be quality devices? I have no qualms with the way the phone operates. I rather like the WebOS operating system but without a phone that will function the OS is rendered useless as well.

I have contacted Sprint to see about getting different phones but I feel they are going to tell me that I am out of luck. This is the point where I will just end the contract with Sprint and find service elsewhere. I will update this post once I hear back from Sprint with their response.

Do you have a Pre? How many times have you had to have yours repaired/replaced? Please leave a comment and let me know.

In order to get started you have to add a method to your Bootstrap file. This method can be named anything you like however it has to start with _init.

I choose to call mine _initRoutes() because this is where I would put all of my routes. The first thing you need to do is make sure that the frontController has been setup and this is done with the call to $this->bootstrap('frontController'). Once that is completed you get the instance for your FrontController and create the new route object. You get the Router object from the FrontController and simply add your route. If you look at how I added the route you will see that I named the route 'default'. This is so that the Rest Route will become the default route for my application. This allows your entire application to be restful. You might be asking why that matters, couldn't you have more than one route in your application? The short answer is yes however if you add any other routes then you are going against the principals of rest by adding non restful routes to your application.

Once this portion is completed all you have to do is create a controller that extends from Zend_Rest_Controller as such:

With this in place your application is now RESTful. There is only one problem that I am facing. We are building a RESTful web API at work and I have been trying to put the API version in the URL. Currently we are using modules so I would expect to be able to do something like the following: /2.0/products/11 and have it call the getAction and return the product details for the product with the ID of 11. However in ZF you cannot name modules with the 2.0 syntax. Therefore I created the modules named m2m0 which stands for major 2 minor 0. I needed to find a way to actually route this properly. The Zend_Rest_Route would not route it properly by default because in the internals it checks the dispatcher to see if you have all the valid modules/controllers/actions defined. It fails when it looks for a module named 2.0 and falls back to use the 'default' module. I have tried using a FrontController plugin like you can with all of the other routes. The normal ZF routes do not check with the dispatcher to ensure that the modules/controllers/actions that are routed to are proper and thats where the issue lies. After trying everything I could think I ended up extending the Zend_Rest_Route and copying the match() method into the new file which overrides the match() method in Zend_Rest_Route. I was able to add my 4 lines of code to do the mapping for the module names but it also led to duplication of around 100 lines of code from the base Zend_Rest_Route class. This is not the best method but until I hear more from the ZF team it is the only work-around I have found. I have created a ticket on the Issue Tracker to see what the internal developers think about this issue.

About 5 months ago I had to have both my fiancé's phone and my phone replaced. Sprint would not honour the replacement even though I have the $7/mo insurance so I had to pay $100 for each of the phones just to get them replaced. I was not happy with this resolution because the issues were "known issues" however Sprint argued that while they are known to Google they are not known issues within Sprint.

This morning I woke-up to my pre being unresponsive. I could not get it to do anything. Touching the screen did nothing, it was as if the touch screen just decided to pass away in it's sleep. I got on the phone with sprint's customer service today and I told them about the issue and went through technical supports list of things to try but the issue was not resolved. When I got back on the phone with customer service I told them that technical support could not help me and that my phone needed to be replaced. I had to interrupt the customer service representative because they were in the middle of trying to transfer me to the insurance line so I could make my claim. I did not want this because the touch screen is not anything caused by me and therefore I should not have to pay $100 to get my phone replaced.

Today on lunch I went into the Sprint store and showed the phone to the store manager. Once he saw what was happening they put through a request to have a new Palm Pre sent to the store for me. They even gave me a loaner phone until the new one arrives although that should be tomorrow. The only thing I do not like about this entire process is the fact that Sprint always tries to push you off to the insurance claim rather than just replacing your phone when it is not caused by you. If you read the reasons for the insurance it is for lost/stolen or devices damaged by you, including liquid damage. It does not say anything about if your device just stops working make a claim.

I am glad that this is being resolved but I will personally think twice about Sprint when my contract is over.

I know the host could restore it for me but for them to restore my database to the prior day they were going to charge $75. While that is not a lot of money I am just not in a position to pay this price. I opted to lose the last year of posts (there were not that many anyway) and go on with life. Had this been more than my personal blog I would have opted to do the backup restore.

I am trying to pull my content from google cache and add it back into place however this does not include the comments left by users or user accounts that have been created since then.