The story of buying my BMW R1200GS Rallye.

I bought a new motorbike and I am hard at work making motorbike content at the moment. Trying to schedule as much as I can on youtube so it can automatically release when we work the next touring season. Hopefully I can cross a desert with the new bike on the way to work later in the year.

https://www.youtube.com/@marclazarusgriffith

My best crash so far.

I was fine.

And one of the bigger long form videos. With some of its script below.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-Br050iHx0

This year we made the transition from the desert safari G wagons to Outback Spirits luxury 4wd overland trucks.  We moved from camping to staying in hotels and this gave me a little free time to have a good look on bike sales.
I was looking at the 07 to 12 K25 models and my short list was down to a few bikes. I’d been considering a modified R1200GSA called the ‘Beast’ as a 21 inch front might be an option in the future, but that sold. The HP2 was out of my price range. Then I spotted the Rallye. What a sexy looking Rhino. One sold after being up for only a few days but this one had been online for a few weeks.
At this stage I’d made no enquiries then pretty much the day we flew home from WA the price dropped. 
I rang the fellow up and had a good chat. Let’s call him Jim.
On the phone Jim seemed fairdinkum I said I was very keen and would fly down. Jim even offered to pick me up from the airport. Awesome.  I bought a ticket for $490 AUD. In 5 days hopefully I’d be riding it home.
Then an actual famous youtuber Adam Riemann announces he was flying to Brisbane to buy his next project bike, a Rhino! Bugger, was I missing out? Was I going to get burnt by Jim only to see my dream bike bought by one of my heroes?
Turns out he got an older and no doubt cheaper R1150GSA. Phew.
That story is developing and worth a look.
 
Anyway Jim and his wife ‘Carol’ picked me up. They were just like a lot of the clients I take on tour. Salt of the earth retired old aussies.
I took my time inspecting the bike. It was pretty dusty, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The only fault I could find was some corrosion on the front subframe and the crash bars had been slapped on in a hurry. 
3 keys, service history various spares. Lets do it. Where is the paperwork?
Now there was a lot of confusion at this point and really I should have done my homework. Jim and Carol really were not that tech savvy. And none of us really knew how the private sale process worked. I was expecting a paper RWC but they didnt have it. I almost walked away.
Anyway it turns out are done digitally these days and lodged with Queensland Main roads. We transferred ownership then and there online.  
I handed over a fat wad of hard earned tips and we settled the balance with a bank transfer.  
The bike was mine for $8600.

Tiny Aussie Bees. A new project from Marc Griffith.

Introducing Tiny Aussie Bees.

Here I will focus on Australian Native Stingless Bees. Mostly Austroplebeia and some Tetragonula.

I've been working a bit over the past few years mucking around with native bees and 3D printers. Time to start sharing this with the world.

Goal at the moment is to build hive numbers (currently about 12) and perfect my hive design. Long term will be pollination services or even honey production. Not going to quit my day job yet but its a covid proof option for the future.

Dinosaur footprints of Broome, Western Australia

The worlds largest dinosaur footprints along with thousands of others can be found near Broome in Western Australia. They are located on spectacular coastline which many tourists come a long way to see. The tourists are often completely oblivious to the fact that beneath their feet are 130 million year old impressions of dinosaur feet embedded in the sandstone.

Since working in the Kimberly area I have been a little obsessed with the footprints and spent quite a lot of time doing my own exploring of the area. The coastline up here is vast and strong tides can change the landscape quickly so there is every chance you can go out and discover prints that have not been seen by any human, ever. Best to get a photo because the next tide will do its best to turn that print back to sand. 

This would make a great Biodiversity Shorts episode. So I went out, filmed a lot, used a drone to document what I found and generally just enjoyed exploring and imagining dinosaurs all over the place. I did this between tours over a couple of years. Then, on the plane flying out of Broome I watched an awesome little segment in a documentary called '"Outback" The Kimberley Comes Alive' on the very same footprints. I discovered a fellow named Steve Salisbury had been studying the footprints for years and had even documented them all using drones. At the time I was a little disappointed that someone had beat me to it but I later found that in order to watch that documentary again I would have to book another Broome-Perth flight with Qantas.

With my seasonal work cancelled this year and some necessary self isolation I had the chance to seriously nerd out. I learnt all I could on the subject, experimented with some cool special effects and polished the footage into what I think is a half decent documentary. 

So this is my contribution to raising awareness, promoting and telling the world about the dinosaur footprints of Broome, Western Australia. 

Big screen, big speakers. Enjoy.

More of my mini documentaries.

www.biodiversityshorts.com

Credits and references.

What is Steady Wombat?

Its a brand name to represent a brand that can be attached to anything, memorable enough to that you do not forget it and unique enough that no one else had the domain name already. Plus wombats are cute, Australian and useful for all sorts of tasks such as carrying camera gimbals and digging up carrots.

My other brands are RCHacker (Radio Controlled Hacker) and BiodiversityShorts (Short nature videos). Never successful enough to ever do full time and both niche topics, something I regard as hobbies today. I started making some videos on advanced photography techniques which I put under my own name on youtube. Marc Griffith. That has worked pretty well, at least when I incognito google search my own name I that channel comes out on top. A small problem there is another Marc Griffith, and he is on IMDB, and he recently co-directed a movie called 'Great Bear Rainforest'. I wonder if he has seen Biodiversity Shorts? Drop me a line Marc, I'll come and work with you after this covid business is all over.

On Covid19. The last few years I have worked as a tour director on the Canning Stock Route. Its about as good as it gets for that type of work in Australia. Challenging, rewarding and the pay is not too bad. Trouble is the 2020 Season has been cancelled, so no job for me. Tourism is great because you can create wonderful experiences for people out of nothing. Only trouble is when shit goes down its the first type of work that disappears. Tourism really is non-essential.

Hence Steady Wombat. I'm using this time to re-train myself as a software engineer. Something I used to do before I became an overland tour driver.
Artificial Intelligence, machine learning I find it super interesting and it is rapidly becoming part of everyones lives whether we like it or not. The aim is to bring all my knowledge and experience tie it all together with some machine learning and make a business with it, or at least have fun learning and get a job out of it later.
So I created 'Steady Wombat' and have started studying tensorflow. Hopefully Steady Wombat will be an essential AI business in the future supplying fruit picking robots, but for now just me sitting on a domain name with a one post blog.

Meanwhile if you need someone to film something special or produce a little video I'm available. :)

Watch this space.