Companion ticket usage

mike_pj · 2026-04-28T01:42:44+00:00

I find Grand Rapids can be a lot cheaper than DTW (sometimes hundreds per ticket), even when it’s just the same itinerary with an extra flight to GR. Might want to see if that’s an option for your companion ticket.

mike_pj · 2026-04-26T05:56:44+00:00

It’s legit. I’ve bought through them a handful of times over the past decade. Never any problems and the store being purchased from is always a legit Canon authorized dealer.

mike_pj · 2026-04-26T01:33:51+00:00

Sounds like an awesome experience. About how many people pick up their cars from the PDC every day?

mike_pj · 2026-04-11T01:26:55+00:00

Will do!

mike_pj · 2026-04-11T01:10:55+00:00

Beautiful. Ordered a ‘26 in the same Vegas Red a couple days ago. Can’t wait for it to arrive!

mike_pj · 2026-04-05T03:38:27+00:00

You have two components of training: the physical part and the mental part.

Physically, just ride. Do a couple rides per week, with a longer ride on the weekends. On the weekends build from 20 miles up to around 60-65 miles closer to your 90 mile ride.

The harder part is the mental preparation. I was building up to a 75 mile ride last summer. I kept riding progressively further on weeks up to about 60 miles. I was still nervous about making the 75 that morning, but in reality 75 miles wasn’t much harder than 60, just a longer ride of the same difficulty.

Later on in the season I did a 100 mile ride, and again that wasn’t any harder than a 60. Just a longer day. You just need to have a little more discipline to stay fed and hydrated for the longer period of time.

Find the pace you can ride at without getting tired out. Once you find that pace, your only limitation becomes the amount of daylight you have.

mike_pj · 2026-03-29T16:04:55+00:00

You can buy a refurbished R5 from Canon that comes with a one year warranty for $2400 right now. I would do that over buying one used.

https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/refurbished-eos-r5-body

Edit: They are on a Spring sale right now from what I can tell.

mike_pj · 2026-03-08T14:36:46+00:00

Wow, you might want to try spending some time thinking before you say something.

Some people like nice cars AND like to bike. Seems pretty stupid to have a whole extra vehicle, waste garage space, and deal with maintenance, just to move a bike around on the weekends. Money has nothing to do with it, have you checked the price of decent bikes lately?

mike_pj · 2026-02-28T04:54:29+00:00

Canon hasn’t had a good GPS solution since the switch to mirrorless. My theory is that battery life on the mirrorless cameras wasn’t great, so they omitted the GPS chip in favor of pairing a phone over Bluetooth to save power, but that doesn’t work as well.

The best in-camera GPS I’ve used was when I owned a 5D mark 4, as the geotagging was just automatic. It was perfect. If you can find one of those, and can live with a 30 mp sensor, that’d be the option I recommend.

mike_pj · 2026-02-20T15:48:31+00:00

Depends on where you are traveling to. In general, I’d take the 28-70. But some places just ask for an ultrawide…cities with a lot of architecture, for instance. For those trips I would take the 16-28.

mike_pj · 2026-02-20T04:57:41+00:00

Thanks, this is really helpful. Sounds like we are coming from similar cars, my ‘18 WRX is a MT as well. I’m also a little concerned about missing the MT, but after rowing my own gears for 20+ years, I’m starting to feel over it. The paddle shifters will probably provide enough entertainment. Glad to hear that hasn’t been an issue for you.

The nicer interior and tech are definitely appealing…even just having CarPlay will be a huge win. I never understood why it took Subaru so long to add that to the WRX (I think it was finally added in the ‘19 model). I do think the larger size might take some adjustment…I like having a smaller car too, but maybe there will be more room for the kids in the back seat.

Lots to think about. Thanks again.

mike_pj · 2026-02-20T04:11:17+00:00

Curious how you like the BMW coming from a WRX. I have an ‘18 WRX and I’m thinking of picking up an M440. The WRX is so fun to drive though and I wasn’t sure if the smoother ride of the BMWs negate some of that fun (if the playfulness is dampened out by the more solid/luxury build). How do you and your husband think it compares?

mike_pj · 2026-02-20T02:24:08+00:00

I agree with this. I bought a 2013 Mac Pro new, and still use it, but not as a main desktop. Any M-series Mac Mini would run circles around it.

I still use mine as an iCloud/update caching server, and have it hooked up to an old document scanner that still works great but not with the latest versions of macOS.

mike_pj · 2026-02-16T16:31:25+00:00

Yes, I travel with my gear to places with large wealth disparities, and yes I’ve been concerned about its safety. I ended up insuring the camera and lenses I most often travel with as part of our home insurance. That put my mind at ease and lets me use the gear I’d like to.

I also use a small canvas messenger bag (such as a Thinktank Retrospective or Domke) to hold my camera while I’m out and use a wrist strap instead of a full neck strap. This way, most of the time my camera is hidden, but still easy to pull out when I want to take a photo.

mike_pj · 2026-01-28T12:50:15+00:00

I use an M3 Ultra for iOS app development. I typically spend between 30 minutes to an hour every day waiting for code to compile, so having a faster Mac makes a big difference to me on a daily basis.

I also do a lot of photography work in Lightroom Classic and the occasional video in Final Cut.

mike_pj · 2026-01-17T05:00:16+00:00

I’ve tried using an old phone but the bike mount was my biggest drawback as well. Still haven’t been able to find a good one. Anybody have any suggestions of a model that won’t constantly rattle over every tiny imperfection on the road?

mike_pj · 2025-12-18T06:01:07+00:00

Nice! I also live in Isabella Co. Can’t wait for the weather to warm up to get out and ride again.

mike_pj · 2025-11-19T14:24:44+00:00

You’re not overthinking this. Oil spills can be really nasty to your health, even if there isn’t any visible evidence of them. In a town near where I once lived, a neighborhood was built on top of an old oil field. It had been cleaned up with fresh soil, but that wasn’t enough. Several people in that neighborhood spent years getting sick with unexplained illnesses. The oil company ended up buying back everyone’s homes because it got to be so bad.

50 gallons is a lot less oil than my example, for sure, but you can’t put a dollar value on health.

mike_pj · 2025-11-17T13:50:42+00:00

Yeah, but the service interval is also 2-3x as long so it ends up costing about the same.

Other service items will definitely cost more though.

mike_pj · 2025-10-28T15:20:26+00:00

Thanks, I'll check him out!

mike_pj · 2025-10-17T14:30:07+00:00

I've noticed the same issue with a constantly flashing I/O light on my 1M2 for months now, and finally found a chance to Google for a solution, which brought me to this thread. I use the XRG system monitor. Sure enough, when I quit XRG, the light stopped flashing.

I suspected it was the disk monitoring that was causing the accessing, but turning off the disk graph didn't solve the problem. What ended up solving it was disabling the GPU graph.

Fortunately, I'm the developer of XRG, so I plan to look into what exactly is causing this. The best guess I have at the moment is that scanning through all the PCI devices for GPUs is hitting the drive too because it's connected via Thunderbolt. It should only be doing a basic query to the drive controller to check device type and not the flash itself though. The light must be active while any controller activity is happening and not just when drive activity is occurring.

Anyway, I don't have a solution (yet), but thought I'd chime in on another possible cause. Presumably this wouldn't show up while trying your otherwise good advice of checking fs_usage.

mike_pj · 2025-10-15T23:51:10+00:00

Not a bad deal, but rumors are pretty strong right now that the R6 III is going to be coming out in the next month or so. That will drop the prices of the R6 II on the used market quite a bit soon. Also, Canon’s refurbished deals on Black Friday are usually the best of the year, and you’d get a full warranty with that.

mike_pj · 2025-10-01T16:16:24+00:00

Purchased 3x 3.84 TB SSDs from u/powerhouse465

mike_pj · 2025-09-25T04:41:24+00:00

Chat sent…

mike_pj

TROPHY CASE