But this wasn't just any track, it was Laguna Seca. Not only is it one of the most technically challenging tracks on the planet, with dips and crests, sweeping hill climbs, and blind summits, it was the track that had been my introduction to motorbike racing. Nine months earlier, I'd watched my first Moto GP race "in the flesh" and stood in awe as the riders threw their screaming machines around its tortuous bends. And now here I was, riding through the corner I'd seen Jorge Lorenzo flipped mercilessly from his bike on the first lap. Here I was falling into the corkscrew where Rossi had rolled the dice as he wandered off track, cutting his way past Casey Stoner. And now, here I was crawling the last turn of the track, where Casey Stoner had run into the gravel, and the duel of the season had ended.

It was all a little too much for me to take in at once.

After the orientation laps were over, the led us back into the pit lane. Our on-track coaches for the day introduced themselves to us at this point (mine, Jon, was a Brit in his fifties), and reminded us of the first drill of the day. We had five sessions on the track through the day, and each time we'd have a drill (something we were supposed to be practicing) and a control format (conditions or restrictions under which we were supposed to perform that practice). First time out, throttle control through the corners was the drill, and using only fourth gear and no brakes was the control format. I found the drill part of it fairly easy to follow - the concept of accelerating through the turn once you've got to your chosen lean angle made sense and was something I'd been trying to do on roads in any case. What was slightly new to me, and something I've noticed since, is that I do have the tendency to adjust my lean angle during the turn - particularly increasing it towards the end of the turn and winding up the throttle. Apparently this is the most common reason for crashing on track as a newbie, so it's something I tried hard not to repeat. And I've sinced noticed that MotoGP riders are at their maximum lean angle at the center of the turn (the apex), and that as they come out of the turn they straighten up. So that's one to work on.

The concept of using no brakes was something I never really got comfortable with, however. Twice coming over the crest on the approach to turn six I realised I'd completely misjudged where the turn was and how fast I was approaching it, and my bike writhed momentarily undernearth me as I grabbed a handful of front brake and stomped on the back brake before pulling the bike round the left hander. Even when I was allowed the use of brakes later in the day, turn six still proved to be problematic for me. I think it was the way that there's such a steep climb out of turn five that it seduces you into winding the throttle fully open. Just as you're beginning to enjoy the surge of power, you come over the crest of the hill and see that turn six is a little closer than you remember it being, and it's slightly downhill, so your sense of the speed of the bike and what will happen when you come off the throttle and onto the brake changes dramatically. And before you know it, you're on the corner. I found myself panicking internally, thinking, "you're not going to make it", and then turning in and looking where I wanted to go, and miraculously the bike just followed.

The second drill of the day was focusing on the turn in point. They'd placed yellow crosses on the track at the turn in points and the idea was to hit that and then begin your turn, and this time we were allowed the use of third and fourth gear, but still no brakes. This one was also fairly easy I thought although I found the turn in point on turn five to be a little early. I really should have done what they suggested and tried turning in before it and after it, but it took me a while to realise that this one was weird for me, and by then the session was almost over.

Each session was preceeded by some time in the classroom, and followed by a short consultation with our on track coach. I found the classroom sessions good, although sometimes a little long, and the short consultation afterwards did seem to be a little formulaic. "How did you find that?", "What could you improve next time?" "Ok, let's work on that then". I think without a one on one and possibly video footage of me riding, it would be hard to get the most out of this. On the other hand, video would most likely have been more of a distraction than a truly valuable teaching aid. I would ideally have liked to have the guy been saying, "this was good, you need to work on this, I noticed you're doing this, okay try this". Anyway, still overall more than worthwhile having done it in this format rather than just going out on the track on my own and repeating my old mistakes. And not even realising they were mistakes.

I think the biggest wake up for me was that I thought I actually had pretty good technique. Six months ago or so I'd come across a riding group just south of San Francisco led by Doc Wong, a chiropractor by trade and motorcycle enthusiast by choice. He's been running informal clinics on different aspects of motorbiking such as cornering, ergonomics, suspension, and dealing with different road conditions for over 15 years. Some of the principals he covers come from the same school of thought as the California Superbike School, so I thought I pretty much knew what was involved with riding a motorbike, and it was just a case of having a playground to practice on, and applying it.

In fact, it felt like most of the day I spent re-learning how to ride, and I don't think I was alone there.

And then going out again this weekend on the twisties on the Ducati confirmed "MOTORCYCLING - YOU'RE DOING IT ALL WRONG". I felt like I don't initiate turns by countersteering, I don't accurately gauge the lean angle I need for turns, and I end up adjusting through the turn sometimes. But I now feel like I have some of the tools I need to identify what I'm doing wrong, and to try and work on it. I definitely need to keep getting corrective feedback sometimes, but hopefully I'm on the right track (no pun intended).

So here's what I need to focus on:
- Pick a good line
- Focus on the turn in point
- As you approach the turn in point, pick your mid corner point
- As you hit the turn in point, turn in quickly to the desired lean angle with the countersteer. And push the bars horizontally, not downwards.
- Once you've reached the lean angle, relax your hands on the bars
- Roll the throttle through the turn, hitting your mid corner point and then out from there
- Enjoy the turn!

And what about Laguna Seca itself? I don't really have a frame of reference, not having ridden on any other track, but here's my rough run down. Turn one is really scary. You come under the walkway and slightly uphill which encourages you to pin the throttle. You then crest a hill and the road bends to the left and turn two looks scarily close already. I don't feel like I ever really nailed turn two, or the other slow corners (the corkscrew and turn eleven). I felt like I usually hit the brakes in the approach them sooner than I needed to and that there was a period when I was coasting up to each corner. Turn three and four are a lot of fun. As you come out of turn two you flow from the right hand side of the track to the left in preparation for the sweeping right hander of turn three. Turn four is another sweeping right hander, and I felt comfortable gunning that short straight and then peeling into it. Coming out of turn four there's a slight dog-leg right, but mostly I found it to be one of the fastest parts of the track. I seemed to be able to judge the entry to turn five fairly easily, so sweeping round that and up the hill also felt pretty nice. This is where things got tricky for me. I'd pin it up the hill, and before I knew it, the crest was on me, the suspension was unloaded, and I couldn't brake as fast as I'd like into turn six. I think in the end it's just a case of being comfortable turning at higher speeds, and once you're through that, you can then gun it up the hill for a bit again. But once again, coming up to the corkscrew I was always thinking, "shit, it's the corkscrew!", so was backing off a little bit sooner than I probably needed to. Once or twice I felt like I got it flowing nicely through there, but mostly it just felt dog slow, and I wasn't sure at what point I could really open the throttle again. Coming down from the corkscrew and around the left hander never really felt good. Just never quite sure where to be on the bike or how fast to hit it. But once I was around that corner it was nice after that - you're out wide to the right, and it was a case of flowing back to the left, and lining up turn ten which swept to the right. Turn eleven I think I was more worried about that I needed to be. It's a 90 degree turn, not a hairpin, and I never really felt like I came out of it strong. I was always winding up the bike on the straightaway for longer than I'd like before you got that hit of acceleration. Which in retrospect probably wasn't a bad thing, as coming up to turn one again with too much speed really would be scary as hell.

What a track. I will ride it again. That much I know. Hopefully when I've had a lot more experience with tracks, and with riding, and hopefully it'll all feel very different...

So I headed out over the bridge into Marin for my usual circuit around Mt. Tam, down to Stinson beach and back along PCH. I was a little concerned about the back left indicator, which broke off when I had a cover on the bike a few weeks back and has been wedged in place with varying degrees of success ever since. So I kept looking in my mirror to make sure it was there. But other than that, perfect riding conditions.

There were quite a few cars and especially bicycles on the road, so there were a few slow sections, a few overtaking sessions, and then onto some clear road. About 6 or 7 hairpin turns short of Stinson Beach, it finally happened. My first fall on the bike. Was coming round a hairpin corner not any different from any of the others, but on this one I clipped the footpeg on the ground, and so brought the bike upright in reaction to that. Next thing I knew I was running out of road coming out of the corner. It was a steep downhill section, left hand hairpin with a grassy drop-off below the road. I danced on the edge for a while, and maybe in retrospect I could have leaned a little more and pulled it back onto the road, but in any case, my tires hit the edge of the road, then gravel, then the bike dived into the grassy bank below it, falling up hill, luckily. I put my hands out to stop myself falling, and there was some kind of a (very slow) impact.

I was able to pick the bike up fine, and with some gentle coaxing, was able to get it back on the road by standing uphill of the bike and gently accelerating it in the roadward direction while trying not to spin the backwheel in the soft grass, or hit it at too steep an angle. Once back on the road, after the embarassing moment of one of the people movers I'd passed a few minutes before stopping to ask me if I was okay, I rode on to the next roadside stop. I then got off and inspected the damage. I was damn lucky. Nothing at all really. Possibly a very marginal bend in the left hand handlebar as it'd taken some of the force of the impact, but probably because it was such a soft and slow landing, that was all. And for myself, I have a bruised left hand at the base of the palm. It'll be fine - the question is will I still feel it on Wednesday, and if so how much. Hopefully it'll all be fine, but tomorrow I'll have a better idea - if I wake up and it aches, that's bad news. If it's already on the road to recovery, then I should be all set.

So how do I feel? I wouldn't say I'm shaken, but it has made me think twice about my riding style. I've been riding so far for almost two years without incident, and have been riding progressively faster as I've got more comfortable with the whole experience. I'm now at the stage where I ride pretty aggressively, but smoothly (or so I thought). But the fact that this happened while I was riding in what I'd call my "normal" style, without any huge "oh shit, I screwed up" moment means one of two things. Either I'm riding way too fast for my ability and I've just been lucky so far, or I had a moment's lack of concentration, and the fact that it didn't feel especially different means that I could have a similar moment again. Whichever one it is, I think I need to slow down on the road for a bit, and work on my technique. Which is why I think in a strange kind of way, it's perfect timing that it happened now, because it'll make more just that bit more cautious on the track on Wednesday, and will hopefully mean I learn more and get more out of the experience as a result.

Bring it on!

Through all this chaos, the mouse hardly moved.

Even as I flicked the hall lights on, it just sat there. Even as I slowly lowered our rice cooker's bowl over the top of it, it hardly moved. Just sat there, self-contained, on the carpet. Even as I slid the placemat underneath, lifted it up and made to take it outside, it hardly moved.

I headed out to the patio out back, but realised I was either going to be putting it in our back garden (okay, garden's a bit of a generous term), or someone else's, so I realised I better put it out front.

Shirl let me out the front door, and I tip-toed to the fencing at the end of our row of houses and let him out.

And he just stayed there, squatting cutely, as I backed away and headed inside.

Shirl saw him today, squashed.

Hooked up with some old friends last night, which was very cool. Along with watching the Six Nations, the ability to call people on a cell phone and have them be right there is definitely the highlight of life in the UK so far. Or at least it was, until I decided to walk from our place in Crouch End to Simon's in Stoke Newington. About a half an hour walk in the end, and definitely more than I'd thought (oh well), but along the way I discovered Green Lanes, a cool street which is littered with parks and green spaces (including Finsbury Park), and is also the home to Castle Climbing. How frickin cool is that. We three musketeers will be going to investigate tomorrow afternoon. Oh yes.

So I was sworn in on Tuesday at the Masonic Center in San Francisco as a US Citizen. It's a modern auditorium with two floors. Shirl was relegated to the viewing gallery above (which is where all the pictures were taken), while I got to take my place amongst the 1215 other folks getting sworn in with me from a total of 93 different countries.

I think these things are typically supposed to be very moving for the participants, and I have to admit there was a moment when we were singing the national anthem and the 60 year old Chinese guy next to me started crying when I was close to being moved. I was moved for him at least. And it was pretty moving to see all these people from all these different countries and to imagine what it meant to them and what they'd been through to get there.

But for me? Well, yes it has been quite a journey to get here, what with being thrown out of the country and everything, but I didn't feel that emotional about the whole thing. Obviously it was all a little different for me as the real reason I was getting citizenship was so that I don't have to keep coming back here every six months now that we live in London (ironically), and also because I'm not escaping persecution or something like that. But if that was the case, why did the Canadian guy two rows ahead of me spring out of his seat with the pride of a two year old who's successfully completed their first bathroom visit? Too funny.

I just found it hard to get excited (or proud) about the whole thing when they followed up the Oath (the part where we're all officially citizens) with "Proud to be an American" blaring over the sound system. I took my eyes from the screen to see what everyone else was making of it. Everyone else seemed glued to the screen. I guess my cynicism isn't infectious. Although the opening guy (the compere, MC, what-have-you) was pretty funny, That was nice. His best joke was when talking about the lyrics to the National Anthem which we'd be singing later, he cautioned us not to confuse "Oh say can you see" with "Jose, can you see?".

So anyway, the symbolism. Well, I'm there at the ceremony getting my citizenship, and just after I'm handed my certificate of citizenship, I discover I've lost my British passport. So that was a major downer on things (sorry, Shirl) because I really needed it to fly home with three days later. And what happens? A US Citizen, who is there with his French wife for her swearing in, finds it and hands it into the British Embassy, where I pick it up later that day. Forget jammy (which I know I am), just ponder the metaphorical meaning of a US Citizen finding my British passport for me...

I've decided with absolute finality that there's no way I can live in LA, simply because it's way, way too hot for me. There are other reasons as well, of course, but that pretty much sealed the deal. I don't think I was ever considering it seriously, but our three weeks there in the unbearable heat was like a huge slap-in-the-face reminder.

So first impressions of the UK? It's always kind of hard to say since I'm so used to the place - it's so familiar and new at the same time. On the physical level, I definitely notice how green everything is, the narrowness of the roads, the age of the buildings, and the smaller relative size of the buildings. But all of this is really just a way of informing me of the underlying shift in the feeling of the place. Which is? Hard to describe. Approachable? Dare I say quaint (but of course, that is only felt in relation to the US - looking at it on its own it definitely isn't quaint and no-one here thinks of it as that)?

Was somewhat shocked to be asked for my address and phone number when buying something __with cash__ the other day. But turns out it was just the particular store I was at (PC World). I don't think that's in any way normal. Will have to keep my eye on that one.

1) Creative leaps - an incomplete fossil record does not mean something didn't happen.

2) Random mutations producing so many successes - I think the whole point of survival of the fittest is that all the failures don't survive, ergo there's no fossil record of them. That doesn't mean they didn't exist, though.

3) How does evolution know where to stop - who says it stops or has stopped? Sharks and turtles have been around so long because they are extremely well suited (for the moment) to their environment. Any evolutionary changes haven't been able to improve upon those designs, so that's why they've remained unchanged.

4) Multiple mutations - why is this a problem? After all, there's nothing magical about the number one. If you take a look at the theories of cellular automata, you see that very small changes in the conditions lead to vastly different outcomes. Maybe it's the same with life/DNA. A small change in the structure of DNA could have a huge range of changes in the outcome of a species' design.

5) Why are we so intelligent - again, you're presuming that humans are the "end goal" of the evolutionary process. Perhaps our intelligence is not so remarkable, and we really aren't so much more intelligent than other creatures. I mean, if you compare the difference in intelligence between us and monkeys, and us and algae, which is the monkey closer to? And who's to say that in the long run our intelligence is going to serve to make us any more likely to survive than the algae?

6) Why do forms replicate - that I have no answer for, except to say that I'm not sure why that leads to any specific conclusion in relation to this issue.

7) Simple molecules coming into contact with life - oxygen (and other molecules) enters the body and becomes part of the complex chemical interactions of our bodies. Why does that make them intelligent? If you knock a pinball through a pinball machine it will follow a complex pathway - does that make the ball intelligent?

8) How can whole systems appear all at once - isn't this similar to point number 4?

9) The tautology of "survival of the fittest" - I don't think the modern interpretations of evolutionary theory are suggesting that the key to survival is simply fighting to see which organism is fittest. This is simply the label that's been attached to evolution. What is actually meant by this is the fittest/most appropriate for a situation, not the fittest as in the strongest, fastest, biggest, etc.

10) Competition being suspect - evolution (and nature's) goal is survival of species, not individuals from a species - that's a profoundly human concept, born from our "intelligence". And even for us, if we are evolved to survive as individuals, why do we die after only 100 years?

11) Symbiotic co-operation - you're looking at two end products and saying "wow, how did those mysteriously spring up?". Evolution is a process, and likely the co-operative instinct developed over time, as did the specializations of the long tongue and deep calyx of your example.

12) Beauty serving no purpose - depends how you look at purpose. And also I think you've negated your own argument by saying first that beauty is everywhere, and then that non-beautiful creatures have survived too. Also, don't name any specifics, as I can guarantee you that any example of something either beautiful or non-beautiful will be shot down by at least one person who disagrees with you. We all find beauty in different places.

I think most of this stems from the misleading term "evolution". I think it ideally should be renamed altogether, but failing that I think we need to try and understand it for what it is - a non-directed process that has created some amazing (okay, a whole lot of amazing things). I don't understand why some people insist that there has to be a direction for it to "make sense". Personally, I think it's astounding as it is without trying to attribute a specific direction or intent to it.

I'm not quite sure why no-one seems to have challenged the Administration on this point. I mean, I'm no expert on this by any means, but it seems to me that in the end, right, the idea is that we want to get out of Iraq. And maybe providing a timetable will actually help things, because the "terrorists" are there at the moment to exploit the unstable situation and protest (violently) what they see as the US invasion and occupation. Surely if the US were to announce it was leaving and set a date, that would take the wind out of their sails because it would mean that it's obviously not a continuing occupation.

Could it just be that the assumption that if we provide a timetable for leaving that would be a bad thing(TM) is wrong? Could it be that that would actually be a good thing(TM)? Why is there no discussion of this.

I'm not suggesting we should leave no matter what the internal situation and just let everything descend into chaos. But how about if we (funny how I say "we" even though I'm not an American citizen) change our status from current US presence to Iraqi invitation - have them drive things, not us (by which I mean the Administration). In other words, we're not there because we want to be there, but because we're asked to be there by the Iraqi government, and they're directing everything and determining how long we stay, where we fight, what we do, etc..

I think the practical reason for this is that the Iraqi government isn't yet in a position to do that, but how about at least laying out a plan for getting there? Isn't that better than essentially having no plan at all (which is what we have now - "We'll stay until the job's done" - well what if the job never gets "done"?).

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Discussion is one thing the Administration doesn't do. I guess it doesn't show "strong leadership" or something....

Half way down the street I noticed a CD rolling vertically along its edge underneath the body of the car ahead of me. It wasn't quite going fast enough to keep up, so before long it was running out on the road between me and the car before me, and then was quickly swallowed up underneath my car. I tried to make sure my tires didn't go over it.

I never found out what happened to it, or why it felt impelled to make such a heroic leap into the traffic, but I wish it luck on it's course through this crazy life!

And then there's this one as well. Why DRM won't work.

thoughts are just thoughts

What this means to me is that:

- You can't control them, and you shouldn't attempt to.
- You don't have to pay attention to them and become involved in them.
- It's harder to do this if you aren't used to it. It's still hard if you are.

The main thing that I can't quite understand about the Christian cosmology is the concept of heaven and hell. One is a place that's great and fantastic and bathed in God's love, and the other is where sinners rot in misery and pain. What I don't quite understand about this (or rather, one of the things that I don't quite understand about this), is this: imagine you're in heaven. Everything's cool. God loves you for the rest of eternity. Great?

No.

How can it be? How can you feel great when you know that there are millions upon millions of people/souls who are in constant agony and perpetual pain in the depths of hell? How exactly are you supposed to feel good about that? Surely the existence of Hell makes the existence of Heaven impossible.

Who cares if they lead sinful lives? A little forgiveness here? They didn't know any better. Obviously they didn't, or they wouldn't have condemned themselves to this fate. So come on, God, cut the poor bastards some slack, just let everyone into Heaven. Why not? Surely you can do that? You're God, after all, so you _make_ the rules.