February 23rd: First Ride of 2020

The Weather Network suggested that we might get a break in the never ending snow and ice, and on the weekend of all times!


After a couple of days of near zero sun, Sunday hit the target with a 6°C high and lots of blue sky.  The last time on two wheels was November 26, 2019, so that’s 89 days of misery.  That should be the longest break as I’m likely to steal some more rides in the coming weeks.


Here are some photos from the ride using the Ricoh Theta V wrapped around the rear-view mirror.  Here’s the how-to on doing on-bike 360 photos.  I stopped to look at the bison since they were right by the fence…




Back home again I washed the salt and sand off and hibernated the Tiger again.  The new LED indicators work a treat.  The old Triumph fired up at the first touch of the button after a nearly three month hiatus.  The new front brakes were a little vague until they bedded in, then they felt as sharp as ever.  The chance to ride has me dreaming about making miles again soon.




from Blogger https://ift.tt/2VhU35K
via IFTTT

Changing Motorcycle Fork Oil

A three legged Tiger.

Changing fork oil turned out to be pretty straightforward.  The most time consuming part is removing any niggly body panels so you can get at the forks themselves.   Make sure you loosen the top fork plug before you remove the forks as you need the forks firmly held while you do that and the clamps on the bike are designed to do just that.  Once you’re there, undoing the clamps that hold the forks means they’ll slide right out, so be ready for that.

The spring on the Tiger is a
progressive rate unit – it is
sprung tighter the lower it
goes.

Once on the work bench it was a matter of taking off the rubber fork protectors and cleaning up the unit.  I then slowly removed the top of the fork using a 22mm ratchet while keeping pressure on.  The book said the cap is under ‘considerable’ pressure from the spring, but with the fork fully extended it released quite gently.  With the cap off I removed a spacer, a washer and the spring slowly as the fork is full of oil.  Pulling the spring out quickly means you’re pulling oil out and making a mess.  With the parts out I inverted the shock assembly and poured the old oil out into a measured container to see how much was in there and what condition is was in.


The oil came out looking pretty dark – the new stuff was completely transparent.  Since the previous owner didn’t appear to change the oil in the engine, I doubt fork oil ever got looked at; this stuff has probably been in there a while.  There was no corrosion in or on the forks themselves or on the internal components, so after a cleanup I poured 710ml of new fork oil into the fully compressed fork.  I had to raise the fork to install the spring, washer and spacer and then put the cap back on snug.  I later tightened it to torque specs when it was reinstalled on the bike.

Spring number two gave me about 660ml of oil after a good emptying.  The first one was at about 650ml.  It got refilled to 710mm of heavier 15 weight fork oil to reduce the floatiness of the front fork and deal with my weight better.  I’m looking forward to feeling the difference when the snows clear.

If you’ve got a bike with fairings I’d guess a fork oil change would take you an easy afternoon of work.  If you’ve got a naked bike then this is a matter of removing the front wheel and brake calipers, loosening the top cap, loosening two clamp bolts on the triple tree and handlebar clamps and sliding the fork out.  Removing the cap and internal components and emptying the old oil would only take about ten minutes per fork.  Refilling a compressed, empty fork with the required amount of fork oil and putting it all back together another ten minutes.  Once you were familiar with the process on your naked bike it wouldn’t take more than an hour to do a fork oil change – longer if you have a lot of finicky fairings to remove.

The left photo is of the fork assembly off the bike prior to removing the rubber fork gaiter (which cleaned up nicely with warm soap water and then some Armourall).  On the right:  all back together again.  The front wheel got regreased and cleaned up.  The speedo housing was especially mucky.


LINK to the specs research I did on fork oil changes on this particular Triumph Tiger.

The other fork had about 650ml in it – pretty black considering it was clear when it went in.

 

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2jNmaae
via IFTTT

West Coast Siren Call

I came up with the idea of setting up motorcycles down south in rental storage units to access over the winter a while back.  This is just the sort of thing I’d do if I had that kind of disposable money laying around.


To set up San Francisco bike storage I’d need to get an Ontario bike down there and parked up in the storage facility.  The idea is to have a ready to go bike that I can fly to with minimal luggage.  I’d eventually be able to fly in to San Francisco with only a carry on bag, take a cab to the storage unit and be on two wheels in one of the best motorcycling locations in the world within a few hours of flying out of the snowbelt.  For the setup I’d take known, works-for-me gear for the ride and then hang it up in the storage unit along with the bike.  Flights back at the moment are one stop, seven hours and about $700 Canadian.


The weather is already closing in here.  We’ve had dustings of snow multiple times.  This would be one of my last chances to make the ride out west before the white wall of winter descends on us.  In trying to make good time to SanFran, I’d also aim to get a motorcycling bucket list item done:  an Iron Butt thousand miles in twenty-four hours:



Day 1:  Elora to Hampton Inn Portage IL.  Just under 500 miles over the border and to the edge of Chicago.  Make sure everything is ready for the big push on Day 2 (the Iron Butt 1000 miles in 24 hours).  Make sure everything is good to go on the bike, get in early, eat and rest up for an early departure.


Day 2:  Portage IL to Denver, CO.  Be on the road by 5am for the big push west.  Cross Chicago before rush hour picks up and then thump across the plains.  1027 miles in 24 hours.  Get in to Denver overnight and then 2 days at the Embassy Suites by Hilton Denver Stapleton.


Day 3:  Rest day in Denver.


Day 4:  Denver to Grand Junction.  Into the Rockies, 333 miles to the Hampton Inn Grand Junction.  A lower mileage day means this should be as much about enjoying the mountains as it is about making time.

Day 5:  Grand Junction to Ely.  429 mountain miles to Ely and the Ramada by Wyndam Ely passing through 3 national parks, so it should be a pretty ride.





Day 6:  Ely NV to San Francisco.  554 mile day to wrap up the trip.  Get into San Francisco late, park up the bike and put everything into hibernation mode.  Load up a carry-on bag with the essentials and take a cab to the airport.  Retrace the four thousand plus miles back in five hours.


I should be able to take the bike out, park it up and be back home within a week, then I’ll have a bike on-call on the West Coast.


For this trip I need something that can cover big miles effectively but is still a useful tool on twisty roads.  The big Triumph Tiger 1200XRx is a long distance capable bike that fits a big guy like me.  It’s also easy to maintain (shaft drive, fuel injection) and comes with many long distance handy abilities like long suspension to soak up bad roads and luggage for the long trip.


A big Tiger in this format costs just over $24k Canadian.  It’s a pretty thing, I saw the new ones in the flesh at the Triumph Tiger ATLAK meet up last summer.  Many magazines describe the bike as very large, but I didn’t find it overwhelmingly so.  In fact, I was surprised at how svelte it was for a 1200cc adventure bike.


But there are some things about the big Tiger that I’m not a fan of.  I’ve never gotten excited about the big aluminum panniers thing on adventure bikes, or any bike for that matter.  I like the colour matched lucifer orange ones on my old Tiger.  I think the aluminum ones look half assed and unfinished, and I get to pay hundreds more for the privilege of having them because others think they’re a fashion item.


The other issue is a recent BIKE Magazine review in which their Tiger developed a number of electrical issues.  Whatever is waiting for me on the West Coast would need to work when I opened that storage unit roller door.  The Tiger is also a reasonably sensible choice, but it’d be nice to have something a bit more come-hither waiting for me in San-Fran.


For surprisingly similar money there is something that I’d describe as more of a dream bike:  the Kawasaki H2 supercharged demon bike in sport touring form.  The H2 SX is an efficient, powerful, supercharger-chirping-as-it-breaks-the-sound-barrier thing of beauty.  It weighs about as much as the big Tiger but produces prodigiously more power and looks like a Japanese super model.


On top of that it has beautifully designed and colour matched panniers that practically disappear into the stunning looks of the bike, rather than looking like tacked on, low-rent metal boxes.


Having the SX sitting in a storage unit in San Francisco would be a constant West Coast siren call.  If I wanted to go far, it could handle it, if I wanted to canyon carve in and around San-Fran, it’d do that to.


As much as I love adventure bikes for how well they fit me, I think I’d have the Kawasaki super model waiting for me on the west coast.  It’d be a blast to ride on the trip out there and would fit in with Californian bike culture much better.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/2Fe996b
via IFTTT

Canada Learning Code: Iterating a Romantic Engineering Process

We had a romantic Valentine’s Day evening after school on a Friday night at Canada Learning Code’s HTML/CSS Valentine’s Card coding nightCLC offers a lot of coding experiences for people who haven’t done it before.  You get a room full of volunteer experts who code all day for a living, which I found particularly interesting because I wanted to see how they solved problems.


The majority of people in the room had never looked behind the webpages they view every day, so the presentation started off with explanations of what Hypertext Markup Language and Cascading Style Sheets are (you’re using them now to read this).  From there we all installed ATOM, an HTML/CSS  editor, onto our laptops and got stuck in.


Coding can seem like an all or nothing proposition to people new to it.  Unlike written language, if you have a single error in code the whole thing can become unrunnable with no clear reason why.  Imagine writing an English essay and if you have a single grammar or spelling error the whole thing is nonsensical.  That’s the challenge of coding, but there are some supports you can put in place that help you deal with this absolutism, and CLC introduces you to all of them.

The ATOM IDE (integrated development environment – like a word-processor for coding) colour codes your text as you’re typing and offers suggestions.  It quickly lets you add and change what you’re working on.  When you save your code in ATOM you pivot over to your browser and refresh your page to see what’s changed.  


While coding is harsh when dealing with errors, a good IDE and that iterative approach of being able to quickly try something helps you work around those error landmines, but getting people into that mindset is tricky, especially after school where we tend to drive students toward one-try grading (quizzes, tests, exams, interviews, performances, pretty much everything we do in education).  As a result students have learned not to iterate.  If it doesn’t work at first you’ve failed, which is a disastrous approach to coding.  Recognizing the value of the engineering process and iteration was the biggest single takeaway for me at this event.


At one point Michelle Mabuyo, the lead of the KW Chapter of Canada Learning Code, ran into a problem with the animations we were running on our websites.  Without hesitation she immediately attacked the problem using the same engineering process I continually drill into my students.  As she iterated attempts at fixing the problem she kept escalating her scale, eventually reverse engineering the error out of the code from a known good, working program.


Watching someone who is good at something turn it on and do their thing is something I really enjoy.  Michelle wasn’t aiming to put on an engineering show, this was supposed to be a gentle introduction to web development, but an error made her kick it up a gear and engineer a solution in real time.  My best seniors get to this point by the end of high school, and when they do I know they’re ready to tackle whatever post secondary is going to throw at them.


At one point Muhammad, a software engineer from Google who was volunteering at this event, came by to see how I was doing.  He doesn’t spend any time in HTML at Google, but once you understand how code works, you can move laterally into other languages quite quickly.  I was trying to do something with the falling hearts animations that was a bit beyond the instructions, so he said what I always say, “look it up!”  I told him about the Futurama Fry meme and he laughed because he has a copy pinned up by his desk… and he’s a software engineer!


That self deprecating piece is something that people who are good at something tend towards.  The cocky types tend to be way back in the Dunning-Kruger effect.  People who are good at something tend to be aware of how difficult it is and are more likely to take a more humble approach.


I really enjoyed our nerdy Friday night Valentine’s Day at Canada Learning Code.  I always doubt myself coming in to something like this (my comp-sci teacher did a number on me in high school), but coding (at least when you’re doing it as something other than an academic exercise) isn’t about mathematical perfection, though that was how it was portrayed in my high school comp-sci classes before I dropped them.  Coding is an applied process; it’s about an experimental, agile, iterative mindset and never taking your eye off the goal of a functioning solution.  From that point of view, coding is little different than tuning the carburetor on my motorcycle.


I have no doubt that I could get more fluent in coding, but it’s a small part of the many subjects I juggle when teaching Ontario’s vague and encompassing computer engineering curriculum.  In the meantime, I’ve got the agility and experience to quickly find solutions and modify them to work, and I need to acknowledge those skills.  From that I could quickly develop the familiarity with coding needed to do it with less lookup.  As a goal for my students, that’s an achievable, applied target, and not something to be ashamed of.


As we were wrapping things up another of the volunteers came by and commented on how much he liked the flip-card 3d effect in HTML.  I asked him how it worked and you can guess what he said… look it up!  So I did, and was able to get it working in about 5 minutes at the end of the session.


Coding is an opportunity to take risks and not worry about failing because iterating your way out of a problem is the solution.  I only wish more computer science teachers would take that approach in Ontario classrooms.





If you get a chance, go to a Canada Learning Code workshop.  They have specific meetings for girls, kids, women, teachers and teens, so you can always find a comfortable fit.


At the end of this particular meeting they also offered some pathways for people looking for a career change, which is a whole other angle to thisCoding familiarity is a vital employment skill these days.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/2V2NxzJ
via IFTTT

Toronto Zoo Photography








The trick to zoo photography is to catch your subject without the enclosure, which becomes an exercise in framing.  The Toronto Zoo is a particular nice place to do zoo photography because of the quality of the enclosures.  It also happens to have one of the finest plant collections in the world, so if you like taking photos of plants it’s brilliant.


These were taken in the summer of 2012 using the Olympus EPL-3 PEN micro four thirds camera.



from Blogger http://kingfisherimaging.blogspot.com/2018/01/toronto-zoo-photography.html
via IFTTT

If you had £70k to spend on a car, which would you choose? Much more than a car!



£70k?  Yikes, that’s $121,026 Canadian!  If I can opt out of the dick swinging options above, here’s how I’d spend my hundred-and-twenty-K on things with four wheels, and two:


Mazda 2019 MX-5 RF GT
$44,870 CAD
That’s a GT model with bells and whistles.  Put me on a twisty mountain road in this and your typical knuckle dragger in one of Top Gear’s choices and I bet I’m the first one to the end… and I won’t be sending it in for service and repairs every five minutes – and it looks spectacular!



RAM ProMaster Van
$44,625 + $15,375 upfit = $60,000
If you’ve read this blog before you know I’ve got a Guy Martin/van obsession that often coincides with a mid-Canadian-winter psychotic episode (I’m getting close now) involving escaping south with a bike in the back for a chance to get on two wheels again.  The Ram’s a funky van.  I’d keep back another $15,000 to upfit it into a long distance camper/bike hauler/multi-use vehicle.




That puts me at about $105,000 Canadian with two new, very different vehicles.  What to do with the other sixteen thousand?

Suzuki DR650SE
$6000 (!)
They’re on sale at the moment and a rock solid piece of off the tarmac ready kit.  It’ll keep up with traffic on the road (unlike the KLX250 didn’t) and take me anywhere – including expanding the short Canadian riding season by tackling the odd bit of snow.  I might look into some enduro competition with it too.  It’s be a rough and ready option in situations where I’d be worried about a more road ready bike.




I’ve still got ten grand to play with and I’ve already had more fun than any of the try-hard Top Gear choices.  Time for something really frivolous that’ll be as fast or faster than any of Porsche/Renault/Lamborghini nonsense that kicked this off.

’08 Suzuki Hayabusa
$7000
The first thing I stumble across on Kijiji is a $7000 ’08 Suzuki Hayabusa.  Odd that Suzuki is the only Japanese manufacturer I’ve never owned and I’ve got two on the list this afternoon.


I’ve got a thing for orange bikes, and this one looks a peach – older rider, low mileage for the year and well looked after.


I’d hold back the other three grand just to make sure this is faster than anything on Top Gear’s list because I like to be Tom… Petty.




If I had £70k to spend on a car?  I’d buy a nice car, a useful van and two awesome and very different motorcycles!  Why be dull?

from Blogger https://ift.tt/2SwkkM3
via IFTTT

Elspeth Beard’s Lone Rider

I just finished Elspeth Beard’s Lone Rider on Kindle.  In the early 1980s Elspeth rode around the world on her already well used BMW.  I’m a big fan of neuro-atypical voices in writing being one myself.  As a dyslexic (who I also suspect is on the ASD spectrum) who struggled in school, Elspeth isn’t your typical writer’s voice, and the book is all the better for it.


From her struggles with family and friends when preparing for her around the world ride decades before it became a television opportunity, to her honest observations of what it was (is?) like to travel solo as a woman, you get a sometimes painfully transparent look at the emotion and effort stirred up by such a massive undertaking.  The repeated machismo she runs into in the motorcycling community in 1980s London is frustrating.  What’s more frustrating is that it hasn’t changed as much as it should have in the past thirty years.


The way that Elspeth describes the eccentricities of her dad and herself, I suspect they both live somewhere on the ASD spectrum (something I empathize with).  This atypical way of thinking, in addition to her dyslexia, gives her descriptions of the cultures she is riding through a degree of perspective and originality missing in other travel books.

Travellers tend to throw on the rose coloured glasses when describing India, ignoring the difficulties of trying to move across a continent with well over a billion people on it.  Elspeth’s experiences, exacerbated by her gender, along with her brutal honesty, give you what is probably the most accurate description of riding in India you’ll ever read; no rose tinted glasses on here.  From the fumbling sexual advances of men stuck in the middle ages to breath taking child cruelty, Elspeth’s wide open eyes see it all and she doesn’t shy away from telling you about it.


I would highly recommend this book if you enjoy motorcycling, travel writing and/or feminism and aren’t frightened off by people who think differently.  It doesn’t read like your typical motorcycle travel book, but Elspeth wasn’t just riding, she was also elbow deep in keeping an already old, high mileage 1970s BMW running through sandstorms, biblical rain and everything in between.  If you have any mechanical sympathy at all, Elspeth scratches that itch too.


As much as I enjoyed the travel writing, what I missed most at the end of the book was Elspeth’s unique way of seeing the world.  Her struggles understanding people and dealing with bureaucracies, especially with her wit and dry humour, are often hilarious, disheartening and hopeful all at the same time.


I’d urge you to give this book a read, it’s available on Amazon as an ebook for less than ten bucks Canadian.  When the movie comes out in a couple of years, I hope they give it the nuance and depth it deserves.  Elspeth provides a voice and insight into a lot more than just her gender.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/2PCH61c
via IFTTT

Niagara Falls In Winter

Niagara Falls on a quiet Sunday at the end of January.  Most photos taken with a Canon T6i using a prime lens or the stock telephoto…

Except for this one, it was taken with a Ricoh ThetaV 360 camera.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/38q04kO
via IFTTT

Niagara Falls In Winter

Niagara Falls on a quiet Sunday at the end of January.  Most photos taken with a Canon T6i using a prime lens or the stock telephoto…

Except for this one, it was taken with a Ricoh ThetaV 360 camera.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/38q04kO
via IFTTT

Building Capacity: Taking CyberTitan from Niche Activity to School Culture

Just over three years ago I stumbled across the inaugural CyberTitan Student Cybersecurity Competition on ICTC’s webpage while looking up statistics for the information and communication technology job market.  I managed to convince four of my seniors to take a swing at it.  We got better and better round over round as we honed in on the expectations of the US CyberPatriot competition that CyberTitan works from.


In the competition students are given a virtual machine image (imagine a computer operating system like Windows operating inside a window).  These images are broken, with improper settings and things installed that shouldn’t be.  If you’ve ever had to try and clean a school laptop after a student has used it, you know what sort of messes can occur.


We were already pretty good at IT & Networking and CyberTitan offered us a way to exercise those skills while also discovering a newly emerging aspect of computing:  cybersecurity.  I found that our expansion into CyberTitan directly supported our Skills Ontario preparation – the two things are symbiotic.


We surprised ourselves by getting an email inviting us to the first Canadian National Finals in Fredericton, New Brunswick in May of 2018…




That success made some noise and the next year we had three teams of six students each.  While standing at the student photo for the 2018 finals, Sandra Saric, then VP of Innovation with ICTC, said under her breath, “where are all the girls?”  I took that and ran with it, encouraging my strongest grade 9 girls (I barely keep any of them into senior computer engineering classes) to form an all-female team for the 2018-19 season.


The girls did fabulously well, often chasing down our senior team on points.  Our junior team, the Cybears, also got us into the top tier of the competition for the first time before getting eliminated in the state finals.  The Terabytches offered me an inside look into systemic sexism in education as well as technology and made it clear why so many girls don’t pursue technology pathways in high school and beyond.


The Terabytches won the top female team in Canada wildcard spot for the 2018-19 National Finals in Ottawa and did a lot of press which I think (hope?) opened up the possibility of ICT and cybersecurity careers to more girls.




While 2019 was definitely the year of the Terabytches, it was also a good year consolidating our skills and building capacity.  For the first time in 2019/20 we had students returning who were no longer rookies in the competition (our first year team had all graduated).  For the 2020 season I encouraged the most experienced and engaged students to make a senior team with the intent of scoring higher in the competition than we’d ever done previously.  The team consisted of one of the Terabytches from the year before and the junior team who had gone platinum.  They re-branded themselves Kings Guard and tackled the 2020 competition with a focus that can only come from experience.  


In previous years we were usually the best of the rest, getting beaten by specialist, urban schools from the big cities across Canada.  This year Kings Guard beat all but two of those teams for a third place finish in the semi-final round.  We went top-tier platinum and then proceeded to land in the top quarter of the best teams in the world.  We’d never breathed the air up here, and it tasted good!


The Terabytches experienced some turnover, but with three veterans and three  rookies,

consistently beat their national champion scores from the year before.  Our two junior teams also scored well, with Altron in particular punching well above their weight.  Both junior teams made it to the gold tier semi-finals and produced strong results.  Altron finished top 12 in the world out of thousands of teams.  Seeing our little, rural school (it is literally surrounded by farm fields) on a list with some of the top cyber-schools in North America never gets old.


We’re waiting on CyberTitan to announce the Canadian finalists for this year’s competition as I write this, but regardless of the outcome this year’s students have produced outstanding results which point to a way forward for educators across Canada who want to engage their students with a subject that frankly freaks people out.


We aren’t magic.  What got us into this was an opportunity to explore an emerging field in technology and make our program more relevant.  If you’re curious and willing to give it a whirl, and can find students with the same curiosity, you can get involved with CyberTitan and begin to build capacity in this vital 21st Century fluency too.


Krista Sarginson, who teaches at St Leonard in Manotick near Ottawa, took the plunge this year and had an epic rookie season, finishing second in Canada in the middle school division.  As more teachers get involved with CyberTitan, the network grows, as does the support.


Krista described the competition early on as techy and quite particular, but it didn’t take long for her to get a handle on the process and, as you can see from her team’s results, they very quickly got good at it!  What could happen next?  Hopefully her Cyberlions all head off to middle school (St Leonard is a k-6 school) and encourage them to participate next year.  Those vets are likely to clinch a national title!  Meanwhile, Krista is encouraging and engaging other teachers in her board.


What does your school get out of CyberTitan?  It teaches students and staff hands on about best cybersecurity practices and raises your digital literacy in meaningful ways.  Your board’s IT department will love your participation in it as it helps raise awareness around cybersecurity and promotes a healthier digital infrastructure.  The media glow around it is also very positive.  We’ve had a lot of attention from local and provincial media who are also very aware of the cybersecurity shortage we’re living in.  I won’t mention the swag students and coaches receive that includes t-shirts, all sorts of technical support, access to Cisco’s Netacademy, along with medals and awards.


You can find lots of statistics on how behind we are on cybersecurity, and education can play a big part in that.  The CyberTitan/Cyberpatriot competition offers students and teachers a well supported and engaging introduction to this exciting field of study, you should give it a go!


This is what nearly 600% growth looks like – it’s gone from a niche activity to a culture…



CyberTitan is only in its third year and has seen growth similar to our own, with over 200 teams from across Canada participating this year.  It’s my hope that by 2022 there are over 500 teams competing and the national finals is expanded to include three middle school teams who will duke it out for their own national title.


If we’re going to depend on ICT infrastructure to run our critical infrastructure (and we increasingly are), then we owe it to ourselves to take securing that infrastructure seriously.  ICTC’s CyberTitan helps raise cyber-fluency in our education system which will in turn make for a safer, more secure Canada.

***


Wondering how to support CyberTitan from industry?

https://www.cybertitan.ca/index.php/about/partners-and-sponsors/become-a-partnersponsor/


Wondering how to support CyberTitan from government?

https://www.cybertitan.ca/index.php/about/partners-and-sponsors/national-program-ambassadors/


How CyberTitan works:

https://www.cybertitan.ca/index.php/competition-results-2018-2/how-the-competition-works/


This is the US CyberPatriot competition that CyberTitan works with:

https://www.uscyberpatriot.org/Pages/About/What-is-CyberPatriot.aspx


Here’s the presentation I’ve been doing around Ontario education for the past two years:

https://prezi.com/h4kf8yfkdtyr/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy




from Blogger https://ift.tt/2Hdp7eK
via IFTTT