I had some problems with my (previous) hosting company, supposedly for letting my renewal and domain registration lapse. Which was, of course, not the case - I had a year to go...
In any event, I've switched over to MediaTemple - designer-friendly, real tech support, four times the server space, and half the cost. Everything should be resolved by now, because if you're reading this, then everything is working as it should.
While I made the transition, everything went down - for a while, all of lawrenceotoole.com itself went down, which killed everything - all my sites as well as email. I apologize if anyone got mail bounced back to them. I assure you, all that has been fixed now.
There may be a few things missing here and there, such as images and the like - I'm going through everything now to make sure all is as it should be.
My main site lawrenceotoole.com is currently down for a redesign - everything is a mess now anyways so why the heck not? Hasn't had a major overhaul in something like four years... shame on me. Anyways I'm working on getting the R5 site (as well as the MINI site) more real estate on the front page, instead of being squirreled away as before. Stay tuned...
OK, not really news, but cool stuff nonetheless. Yamaha's popular motorcyles have been realistically captured into downloadable paper models. Apparently, "the challenge level and your satisfaction guaranteed!" They even include the YZR M1 US 50th Anniverary Edition with the paint scheme discussed in my post on Friday, July 08, 2005.
This is a site dedicated to the 1970-72 Yamaha 350 R5 two-strokes. These bikes are surprisingly fast for their size and age, lifting the front wheel in the first two gears and keeping up with modern bikes twice their size. It's also extremely flickable and great fun around the city or carving up canyon roads. It was the direct descendant of the Yamaha factory TR production racers. Dirty, loud, crazy quick and relatively affordable when new (and more so now!), it was, and still is, a giant-killer.
I picked up an R5C for my first motorcycle a few years ago, and was frustrated with the lack of information on these bikes available on the web. The original purpose of this site was to document the process of bringing the R5 back to life. But as I spent time gathering as much relevant and entertaining information as possible into one place for my own reference, I thought it would be helpful to share it with people who are also interested in these bikes, as well as other Yamahas, vintage bikes, and cool motorcycles in general.