Joe Blog's

WARNING! DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU HAVE NO INTEREST IN COMPUTERS OR MOTORCYCLES

One of the advantages of being in and around Birmingham are the excellent transport links, so I managed to kill the proverbial two birds with one stone.

My laptop, now 3 years old, came already loaded with Vista and has been getting on my tits nerves as I could possibly go and make a cup of tea waiting for it to boot up. I don't have the need for a new machine so thought I would do something about it by buying a new Hard Disc Drive and do a clean installation of Windows 7 in an effort to cut out as much of the dross as possible by keeping the old drive in a caddy.  In the not too dim and distant past I frequented computer fairs and bought components from ads in Micro Mart to build my desktop PCs. So I raided the piggy bank and bought Micro Mart (I know you can read them F.O.C. in Smiths but sod the expense). To my surprise the ads for components are few and far between.  Is it that PCs are now so cheap people don't build their own plug and pray PCs anymore?  So I had a look online for Computer Fairs and to my delight there is one held at the National Motorcycle Museum on Saturdays. I managed to buy all the bits I wanted for the laptop relatively quickly and reasonably priced.

This left me plenty of time to amble round the museum. I must admit that the majority of bikes I have owned were Japanese and the museum is solely for British bikes. However, it is well worth a visit as many of the machines on display show a lot of technical innovation.

I been allowed to post a couple of photo's: The BSA Bantam is a D7 which is the same colour/model as my first bike. The tank and exhaust tailpipe shapes are slightly different as mine was an older version. The others are of a race bike ridden by Barry Sheene who did a lot to promote bike racing to wider audience.