A Sunday in the teens (Celsius) meant that riding was inevitable. The Tiger had been sitting in the garage as it hailed and snowed outside this past week, but once again we get a break in the neverending Canadian winter, so off I go.
The ThetaV has better processing power for video than the older model, but the camera is similar spec, so still photos, where I like to work, weren’t likely to change. Once nice thing about the V is that it processes way faster, so can do a photo every 4 seconds instead of the old camera’s one every eight. Having twice the chance of catching a good corner was no bad thing and resulted in a number of good shots as I rode up and down The Forks, usually behind confused people driving beige minivans as slowly as they possibly could. I waited for a gap on the return ride and got a bit luckier with space, though it was pretty busy on the first sunny Sunday of the year.
Winter run-off everywhere meant a cautious line, but the Tiger on Michelins is always sure footed whether it’s on snow runoff or piles of sand left over from winter.
I guess someone missed the switchback – bet it was a fast and furious type…
Stuck behind that tool in a big maroon mini-van again, so I’m waiting for a gap. Nothing more frustrating than riding for an hour to find some curves only to be stuck behind a yobbo in a mini-van.
Quality of photo is similar between the ThetaSC and the ThetaV, but the V takes way more photos quickly, so you’re more likely to capture a good moment.
Parked up at Higher Ground in Belfountain. Don’t order a specialty coffee if it’s busy – the regular brew is good and you get it right away.
As capable as the V is, it suddenly flashed out on me when I went to ride home and wouldn’t start. This was a bit of a surprise as all previous Thetas have been astonishingly tough. The Theta V seems to have magically fixed itself today, but now I’m wondering if it’s up to the job.
In the meantime they’ve come out with the Theta Z1, a higher resolution 360 camera with a faster lens and even faster processing performance, including in-camera stitching of images together. It looks very nice, but if my first upgrade won’t take photos when I need it to after it’s first real weekend of use, I’m second guessing a bigger, more expensive step further.
In another meanwhile, GoPro has the Fusion 360 camera, which is tough and offers similar high resolution imaging. It’s a bit of a brick, so the Theta still seems like a more aerodynamic and logical choice for on-bike photography, but not if it doesn’t work. More to come. Hopefully this in-and-out Theta V was a one time thing.
I never intended to become hooked on Kawasakis. The motorcycle fixation of my younger self was always Hondas, but when I finally got into motorcycling it was Kawasakis that kept appearing in the right place at the right time, and they’ve generally been good to me. To date I’ve owned three Kawasakis, two Yamahas and a Triumph; not a Honda in sight.
After selling the Yamaha XS1100 custom project bike last summer I decided to double down on the wounded Concours which, in spite of a lot of work and money spent, wasn’t sellable. When I can ride I ride but when the snow flies I tend to get busy in the garage, and this winter is no different.
The winter garage is a busy garage. The Tiger’s having a rest while I work on the Concours custom. Before the spring season begins the Tiger’ll have new fork oil, spark plugs and a coolant flush.
The Concours is in an unprecedented state of undress. With the rear end removed and the plastics off it looks like a completely different machine. Yesterday I removed the coolant reservoir located under the oil cooler behind the front wheel. It’s going to get relocated to the back of the battery box so it’s out of the way of rocks being kicked up from the road. There are a lot of after market options for a coolant reservoir, so finding an alternative that fits well in the new location shouldn’t be hard.
The 7 inch round headlight with built in LED indicators showed up from Amazon but I’m still waiting on the tail light. I’d initially thought of doing some kind of front fairing but now I’m going bare bones with only metal framing to mount the light and minimal instruments.
I purchased some stainless steel framing and I’ve been cutting it into muffler mounts and the rear light fairing bracket. That rear fairing piece is going to be as minimal as possible as well. Perhaps even a box for the rear light in bare frame. Visible girder frame pieces are going to become a part of what this will look like when it’s finished.
I took the instrument cluster apart to see if any of it was salvageable (it wasn’t), but the insides look like something out of the DaVinci Code!
Some 90° brackets on the upper fork clamps has me ready to try some headlight mounting ideas.
My 360 degree on-motorcycle photography experiment continues. The process has evolved over time from handheld, manually shot photos to automatic, bike mounted shots. I’ve tried half a dozen different cameras and mounts on locations all over the bike, most recently on the tail rack.
I’ve always wanted to be able to catch the front of the bike while in motion. Mounted to the windscreen the Ricoh Theta doesn’t quite reach. This time I purchased a 1/4 inch threaded rod and cut it to size (about a foot long) and used it to extend the camera out front of the bike. Double fastening the camera at one end and the tripod at the other with extra nuts meant I had no trouble with the rig moving.
The results speak for themselves…
Early shots are using the extension rig mounted on the upper windshield. It clears the camera from the fairing and gives clear shots of the whole machine and rider while in motion. The rig is stable and holds the camera for steady shots. It never budged on a variety of roads at various speeds.
From the windshield I moved the camera rig to the right rearview mirror. There was a bit of flex in the windshield with the rig attached, but none from the mirror. The shots were once again very stable and steady at a variety of speeds on a variety of different road conditions. This one is at about 80km.hr on a country back road. This angle still shows the front of the bike, but gives more of a 3/4 view of the back of the machine.
The distance further off the fairing means a wider view of corners. Even with energetic riding on the twisty bits the rig was problem free.
Further along I angled the rig up higher for a more top down view. The tripod ball joint that lets you easily angle it. If kept tight you can do this on the fly with ease.
One of the benefits of this on-bike camera rig is that it gives a good sense of speed and captures the intimacy of riding because the camera is doing everything the bike and rider are. Here I’m up to triple digits on a highway.
For the last angle I put the camera as far up and out to the side as I could angle it off the rearview mirror. This catches the whole side of the bike and rider well, as well as offering a good sight lines up and down the road.
That worked. All images are screen captures in the Ricoh imaging software cleaned up in Adobe Lightroom.
Originally published on Dusty World in March of 2019: https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2019/03/whats-in-name.html
Last year we drove across Canada. We were having breakfast in Drumheller, Alberta when a big family came in. The grandfather/patriarch of the family was talking to a granddaughter he obviously dotes over. She was going into high school the next fall and he asked her what she was looking forward to and she said, “wood shop!” He immediately responded, “why would a pretty girl like you want to do that?” She did the only thing she could think to do without causing a scene and laughed. I didn’t laugh, I was staggered by that exchange. Welcome to the world of #girlsinSTEM.
***
We’re taking our second run at the CyberTitan cybersecurity competition this year. Last year’s success suddenly meant a surge of interest, so I was able to quickly put together two teams. When none of them were female (again), I started asking the keenest girls from my junior classes if they would be interested in forming an all-female team.
Cyberpatriot, the competition that Canada’s CyberTitan works out of, has also recognized how few women there are in STEM in general and information technology / cybersecurity in particular, so offered to waive the application fee for all-female teams this year. At national finals last year an ICTC organizer noted how few girls were in the competition. With that observation and support I was able to convince six of my strongest former grade 9 girls to give it a go.
Early on I noticed how differently they approached the intensity of the competition from the two boys teams. Where the boys tended to specialize and generally work independently, the girls were constantly conscious of how everyone on the team was contributing and were always finding ways to integrate each other into what they were doing. In some cases, members of the male teams did very little, but none of the girls were so relegated.
All three teams were new to this (all of last year’s team graduated), so no one had previous experience of the competition, but the sense of ownership was much more absolute with the male teams. That sense of male ownership and dominance has been an ongoing theme in teaching technology – I’ve been writing about it for years.
One of my standard team building approaches is to encourage the teams to name themselves to help bring them together. Both male teams took names that were almost an afterthought because they were only loosely teams and didn’t feel like it mattered, because it didn’t – they all feel empowered and capable. The female team came back to me with something that spoke to their experience, charged them up and caused a sense of belonging vital to survival in such a difficult circumstance.
I have to admit, the name did cause me to pause, but my first reflex was to support this sense of edgy self-identification, especially when I saw how it unified the girls and helped them deal with the pressures on them. I passed on the name to admin and it was ok’d for competition with no discussion, which surprised me a bit, but also delighted me because it meant (I thought) that the the difficult circumstances of this team were being recognized.
A byte is 8 bits of information – typically a byte is used to denote a character in a computer using ASCII code, so each letter you see in this blog is a byte of information. A terabyte is an almost inconceivable number of bytes – about a trillion of them. How big is a trillion? If you spent a million dollars a day since year zero to now in 2019, you still wouldn’t have spent a trillion dollars. It’s a powerfully big number used in the male dominated field of computer technology to denote massive amounts of memory.
The girls’ team came upon the idea of combining terabyte with bitches into the Terabytches. I doubt the grandpa telling his granddaughter to do girl-appropriate things would approve, but anyone with any degree of feminist sympathy would recognize the power in combining a traditionally derogatory term used to limit and belittle women (especially smart, vocal ones) with a powerful technology term from deep within tech-bro culture. The Terabytches put up with the condescension (most of it unconsciously delivered without malice) of their male colleagues throughout the competition by looking after each other and generally ignoring it. In our conservative, rural school, the idea that tech is for boys is firmly entrenched in spite of my ongoing best efforts. At one point one of my seniors who is also an engineering lead (and a genuinely nice kid) said, “why are there so many girls in here?” at lunch one day. There were two girls in a room of 20+ people. I immediately called him on it and said, “you mean the two girls in here are too many?” and he quickly backpedaled, but the assumptions implicit in the comment still echoed around the room.
My male teams both did very well in this competition, but at no point did they ever feel like they shouldn’t be there, the girls frequently questioned their presence in it. This was a subject that boys did in a room almost always full of boys. Even in my most gender diverse class I’m lucky to approach a 20/80 gender split, most are much less. Many of these culturally enabled boys will go on to successful careers in digital technology while being told, ‘atta boy’ by family and friends. Meanwhile, girls are being asked why they are wasting their prettiness on technology… and that’s the nicest kind of negativity they’ll get. More often it’s outright dismissive chauvinism. The fact that they had each other to lean on allowed them to battle on in a chauvinistic field of fierce competition.
I had a female teacher tell me last week in Ottawa that she won’t run all-female teams because it’s unfair unless all of her students can participate. That kind of pick-and-choose-equity when it comes to fairness is very frustrating to hear, especially from a female colleague. When we don’t live in a remotely equal society, saying that everyone should get the same supports is really code for maintaining status-quo prejudices.
The chauvinism the Terabytches face hasn’t been limited to passive aggressive face to face situations. When we discovered that they had gotten through to nationals and neither of the male teams had, the first thing out of most of the boys was, ‘they only got through because they are girls.’ My response would be, ‘they got as far as they did in a workspace and field of study that they were continually alienated and dismissed by.” That included barbed comments from anonymous people online and having to study material written almost entirely by men for men while competing in a contest created almost entirely by men for men. A better question would be, with all of those advantages, why didn’t you boys do better? The Terabytches finished right behind our senior all-male team in points and beat them in some aspects of the contest.
Picking a sharp name that counters stereotypes is not only a smart move from a competitive point of view, it also highlights all of those assumptions people make around gender and technology. Boys teams can name themselves after generally european rapists and murderers, often with names that glamourize the violence. They can be raiders with creepy viking logos and (white) crusaders battling (brown) infidels, they can be marauders and pirates, cavaliers and knights. Pick your strong male historical context and there’s your team name. The male culture of team naming also likes to identify with violent animals and revel in that association with male predators. If you see a bird logo it’s a male-centric one. The cardinals are red, the blue jays are blue, the orioles are orange and the falcons are big and burley and aggressively male in appearance. If you want to go mythical, you’ll see all sorts of griffins, dragons and argonauts, but medusas, sirens and harpies? Not so much, because the connotation is different. History and culture aren’t kind to strong female stereotypes. When ‘babe bunch’, ‘daisy dukes’ and ‘fembots’ are in your list of ‘top powerful female team names‘, you know we have a long way to go on this.
With media attentionramping up now that the Terabytches are the top all-female team in Canada, concerns have arisen around the name. Worries about how the media will spin this to create sensationalism are fair, but my first reflex is still one I’m comfortable with, especially knowing how intelligent and outspoken these Terabytches are. Having any male tell these young women that they can’t create a strong, edgy team name that speaks to their experience in facing obvious and open sexism while outperforming all-male teams from all over the country is something I’m going to dig my heels in about. Should they face reductive, sensationalist press in the process of being national finalists, I have no doubt that everyone on the team will be a spectacular ambassador for girls in STEM.
Jaime, the reporter at out local paper, had a great interview with the girls the other week. She has written a newspaper article about it, but it’s only the tip of a thirty minute interview that had the Terabytches talking so frankly about the challenges of competing as girls in such a male dominated contest that I was tearing up. The fact that they are an all-female team has allowed them to weather the negativity and succeed in spite of it. Though several of them are very competitive by nature, they all want to reform the team again next year and aim even higher. Competitive teams tend to double down on the male stereotypes when identifying themselves. If a female team attempts to do the same thing from their own lived experience, there are questions around appropriateness that start to feel like status quo sexism. Competing in bro culture of technology in the male dominated world of cybersecurity in a conservative, rural community was always going to be an uphill struggle. I know the Terabytches are up for it. I need to lean on the strength of my convictions and back them through the continuous and sometimes overwhelming static. If every educator approached the sexism systemic in our subject areas with the same zeal, we could eventually level the playing field and let everyone participate on equal terms.
In the meanwhile, I’m proud to be a Terabytch!
Think I’m over stating male dominance in cybersecurity? As one of the most conservative specialties in a male dominated industry, women in cybersecurity face challenges a lot more perilous than an edgy team name. If you’re an ally, be an ally:
From Canadian Thanksgiving (early October) to the first snows of December. All taken with the trusty Canon T6i in my own backyard. I have a thing for nature macros.
Amazing architecture, but by the end of the long walk up the history of humans being shitty to each other you might be tempted to step off one of the many ledges; I was.
I just spent a long morning walking up the architecturally astonishing Canadian Museum of Human Rights. By the end of it I was reminded of a comment one of my profs made after he visited the Holocaust Museum: “You don’t end up thinking worse about Hitler and the Nazis, you end up thinking worse about everyone else.”
By the time I got high up in the museum I was feeling pretty done with being human. The Museum tries to introduce a sense of hope, but I had trouble accessing it, especially when the subtext of the whole thing and how it presents itself highlights the horror of human social nature.
What all the apartheids (the travelling exhibit on the first floor was called Mandela), holocausts, genocides and the general disharmony of human history had in common was our urge to establish ourselves as a dominant culture and then destroy anyone weaker or non-compliant. This self serving, centralizing behavior is a foundation of human group think. In the senior year of my philosophy degree I suggested that human beings are, by their nature, violently tribal and selfishly motivated when in groups. They’ll use any means at their disposal, from ability, race and gender to religion, culture and politics to isolate and attack each other for the benefit of their own tribe. We’ll invent a reason to segregate and attack each other if there isn’t an immediately physically obvious one. The prof adamantly and immediately shut down my line of thinking, saying that it had been proven in some kind of scientific sense that this wasn’t true, but there is a museum in Winnipeg that shines a bright light on this central aspect of human nature.
We’re not falling far from the family tree. Just like chimpanzees, baboons and most other apes, humans feel the urge to attack and victimize strangers, not usually at an individual level but at a group/social level. We have an in-built urge to aggrandize our own culture at the expense of others because it offers us a chance to be selfish while dressing it in virtue. Murder becomes patriotism, genocide becomes an act of faith. Human society is founded on this urge and the ones that survive embrace it wholeheartedly, the ones who didn’t have already been eaten. Our complexity has allowed us to glorify and express this viciousness in ways that are unique on our planet; our cruelty is truly boundless in regards to the natural world, but especially with each other.
You’re supposed to reach the Israel Asper Tower of Hope at the top of the museum and feel hope, but I wasn’t. The Museum suggests an evolution of human rights towards something greater, but the world today seems to be awash in technology that is at best confusing any sense of advancement even while we’re staggering under the weight of global issues we’re all too selfish to address.
The Museum seems to have stopped recording human rights abuses at about 2012. Considering the delicate political dance being done this isn’t a surprise. Pointing out the human rights failures of current governments and corporations while they’re funding you wouldn’t keep the lights on for long.
The museum describes social media as a great democratization of media and a powerful means of giving everyone a voice, but nowadays we have a differing view on that. Western democracies were soaring under black US presidents, politically strong European Unions and an expansive sense of hope when they stopped recording this selective history. Sure, we were staggering under the weight of a banking collapse of international proportions that was designed to drive wealth from ninety-nine percent of us to the one percent, but that’s not mentioned anywhere either unless you look to the sponsors list.
The human rights march we’re all supposed to be on towards an ideal the museum tries to present feels like it has faltered now that we’re in our unscripted future; maybe it was never there to begin with. It would have been wonderful to have seen new pieces on fake news, modern economic terrorism (banking), modern propaganda (social media), and how populism in Western democracies has put pressure on many human rights. White supremacy in the Twenty First Century? Human rights problems didn’t end five years ago, we’re not at the top of a mountain of human rights achievements we built, we’re on a rickety house of cards that seems doomed to collapse, but the museum is strangely silent on this.
There also seem to be some gaps in the museum’s historical analysis. No mention of Palestinians, or Syria, or dropping nuclear bombs on untouched civilian populations to get accurate statistics, though the Japanese comfort women system was mentioned. You can’t help but feel there are some Western political undercurrents going on here, which of course leads me back to what kicked this whole thing off: we’ll use any means necessary to gain and keep a social advantage, even if it means weaponizing human rights themselves as a political tool.
Insights from the general public at the end of six plus floors of human rights atrocities.
The idea of online echo-chambers where you only ever see ideas that imitate your own bias has been a recent topic of concern. Since battling my way through a philosophy degree at the University of Guelph, I’ve made it a point of trying on difficult ideas even if my first reflex is to disagree with them. I was once again testing myself like this at ICTC’s Future of Work Summit this week.
One of the main themes that kept popping up in this summit was people from private for-profit sectors suggesting that we completely rejig the public education system to serve up graduates who integrate with their employment needs more effectively. Ontario’s new government has a similarly reductive view of public education’s role. I teach technology and have always encouraged my students to discover and cultivate pathways that will lead them to a meaningful and financially effective careers, it’s one of my go-tos, but this subsuming of public education into the needs of private business pushed me further down that path than I care to tread.
I usually tweet my responses to ideas that come up in conferences in order to document them. It helps me remember what happened when I’m reflecting on them later. My initial response to a number of for-profit businesses asking that the entire public education system get rejigged for their benefit was to try and point out the difference between what public education does and what they think it does. Contrary to popular belief, our sole function isn’t to crank out employees whose only function is to make profit.
There was a strange tension, for me at least, between the aboriginal opening prayer song and talk of inclusion with the profit driven interest that kept bubbling up in various presentations. Perry McLeod-Shabogesic‘s thoughts on the wisdom of honouring everyone’s contribution and his careful wording around being a helper regardless of profit or personal benefit felt sharply at odds with the keynote by Cheryl Cran, whose lean, aggressive management strategies produce small but exceedingly efficient profit driven teams. Part of me likes that vicious efficiency. Drop the dead weight and maximize your effectiveness. I continue to participate in competition because of that drive, but I can’t let it motivate my teaching as a whole because my function is to serve the whole. I couldn’t help but think, “all business speaks from a place of privilege but has no idea that it does.” The idea of profit only exists as an option when fundamental needs are met. For many of the people in the world (and it’s the majority) who are still battling with fundamental needs, profit is a privilege they can’t afford.
In a public classroom I teach students who will never earn profit for someone else in their lives. Some will choose to work in the public sector helping society as a whole in healthcare, education or support services. Others will want to push back against the profit driven economy that is putting the fate of humanity in jeopardy. Others still may want to focus on meaningful work that is ignored by the private sector, like raising children or volunteerism, and some of them simply aren’t capable of working in the exclusivity of a for-profit workplace. I think Perry would think laterally and find ways to value all of those contributions. That indigenous philosophy based around the health of the community over the wealth of an individual is very helpful for a teacher considering their clientele. In the privileged world of business, all those people in my classroom don’t exist. Business focused speakers would want to ensure you never hired any of that sizable chunk of the population in the first place.
The changing Canadian job market: between public sector and NGO employees, a sizable chunk of Canada’s working population doesn’t operate in for-profit business. There is much more to society than business need.
If a sizable portion of Canada’s population doesn’t work in for-profit business, rejigging public education to serve that single sector demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how society works. From a social justice point of view, you could argue that public education should focus on producing engaged and socially aware citizens. From an aboriginal point of view, we should be speaking to people from a place of community. From a special needs point of view, we should be working toward greater compassion and understanding of everyone’s contribution. An environmental point of view might also be a driver in public education. Environmentalism is increasingly diametrically opposed to globalized business and an ever-expanding economy in a world that is fraying under the weight of this unsustainable philosophy. Public education needs to address all of these perspectives of human society.
During the 2008 market collapse, one of those periodic moments in history when profit driven people lose their minds and fictionalize the world we all live in to such a degree that it becomes obviously unsustainable and collapses in on itself, I saw an online comment that said, “you don’t feed profit driven business steak, you let it feed off society’s waste, like the cockroach that it is.” That’s a harsh thing to say but people were pretty mad in 2008, though most seem to have forgotten all about it now, though we’re still paying for it.
The idea of inclusivity was a recurring theme at the summit. One example given was was how remote communities don’t have digital connectivity yet and this was held up as an example of a lack of equity. It is indeed a lack of equity, but you can bet that no profit driven business is going to provide that infrastructure. The infrastructure we build in society, especially the stuff to address remote communities where profit isn’t going to motivate action, is always done with public money. Roads are built not by the corporations that ruin them with transport trucks, but by governments supported by taxpayers. ICT infrastructure is no different. Corporations make their profits on the backs of infrastructure built with public funds. In this way, there is no real private company – they all rest on the back of publicly funded infrastructure. This is neither good nor bad, it’s just the way it is. Business is too fragile to make profit without support – fragility is the underbelly of that business privilege. That many business people wave their profit focus around with pride is always baffling to me. There isn’t a single billionaire who hasn’t made their wealth on the back of publicly funded infrastructure. To make that fragility the primary focus of public education is absurd.
This isn’t to say that private, profit-driven business does not have a function in our society, but it isn’t the heart and it certainly shouldn’t be the brain. At best, profit driven business is an appendage, like the arms or legs. Important, no doubt, but it can as often injure the body politic as it does help. Healthy, supported private business is important, but it isn’t the beall and endall of human society, and tailoring public education to cater to it is, at best, myopic and self serving.
***
Over this past weekend in Toronto I’ve had a strange breadth of experience. On the Saturday night we went to the Tiff Lightbox to see Apollo 11, incredibly restored and rendered footage of the Apollo 11 Moon mission…
I was born two months before that happened and spent my early years in love with the US space program. I was in tears watching this film. I consider it a pinnacle of human achievement that points to a possible, sustainable future. My love of technology was fostered by NASA’s work around Apollo. I fear we’ve lost anything like the vision and drive needed to get back to this summit. Watching the film, I couldn’t help but remind myself that this wasn’t a public or private enterprise, but a brilliant combination of what we are capable of when we combine our various talents and work together.
The next afternoon I was at Sting’s The Last Ship, a heart wrenching and de-humanizing tale of conservative globalization in 1970s England. I have family from Tyneside where this takes place and it rocked me. As a pro-union story valuing humanity over the economic forces that diminish us, it amazed me that it was playing in the capital of Fordnation. That the theatre was full of one percenters who daily throw people on the heap for their own profit was a disconnect, but that’s Toronto for you. As we stepped over homeless people laying on the sidewalks on our way back to the hotel, I wondered how Torontonians can keep it all straight. Perhaps seeing Sting is all that matters and the story doesn’t, but it should.
The next day I was sitting in this summit on the future of work where well dressed business experts talked about how we should rejig the public education system to better serve their profit margin. The Last Ship part of me was struggling with a rising anger, but there is more to this than just dismissing the needs of business. The purpose of public education isn’t to serve business elitism, but there are a number of situations where what we do in public education aligns with business need. A literate, numerate and digitally fluent population helps everyone regardless of the sector of society they go on to participate in. The digital divide we contribute to by graduating students with little or no digital fluency is hurting much more than business’s bottom line. From that point of view, business and the rest of society are in alignment.
If you’re digitally illiterate in the Twenty-First Century, you’re in real trouble whether you’re working in the public sector, the private sector or at an NGO. It even hurts you if you’re not working at all. Canada as a whole would benefit from a more digitally fluent society. ICTC may have aimed this summit at the needs of private enterprise, but addressing that new literacy goes well beyond the needs of business. ICTC’s drive for a digital skills continuum jibes with my expanded view of public education as much more than human resources training for business. Our country and our planet would benefit from more digitally effective citizens. How to make changes to Canada’s complex ecosystem of educational organizations was also a concern at the summit. Canada is the only leading OECD country without a federal ministry of education or a centralized idea of education, yet Canada performs astonishingly well in the world. Could it be that our mozaic of often competing education systems has protecting it from gross simplification by other social interests? A central system would be much easier to manipulate.
At the end of three days in Toronto, I’m stretched between being excited about the ideas of agility and efficiency advocated in the Future of Work Summit and worried about the dehumanizing effects that globalization and business efficiency tend to bring with them. In a more perfect world I’d hope we could chase efficiency for something other than profit.
Real estate and rental and leasing (13.04%), Manufacturing (10.36%), Mining, quarrying and oil or gas extraction (8.14%), Finance and insurance (7.1%), Public administration (6.33%), Wholesale trade (5.66%), Retail trade (5.41%), Transportation and warehousing (4.44%), Utilities (2.27%), Accommodation and food services (2.17%) and Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting (1.65%)” http://www.imaginecanada.ca/blog/getting-know-canadas-nonprofit-sector-why-we-need-better-data
One of the pieces they had in the recentbig 100th edition of Practical Sportsbikes was a 10 bike wishlist. Being a magazine focused on older sports bikes, that’s what their lists were. My wishlist is more wide ranging, covering everything from pre-war classics to the latest digital machines. There is a bit of 80’s representation, but it also has a pile of other bikes both old and new.
My dream list would lean heavily on the dreams…
Tim’s Ten Bike Wish List:
1) Granddad’s Coventry Eagle I’ve talked about my Granddad’s Coventry Eagle previously. This particular wish involves me coming across old NG4743 in a barn and restoring it myself. Being able to restore and ride a bike that should have been in our family for multiple generations would be a moving experience. I saw some Coventry Eagles at the British Motorcycle Museum a couple of summers ago and got surprisingly emotional at the idea of riding one. The most magical one would be the one Bill owned. If you’re going to wish list, wish hard! I couldn’t begin to guess what this would cost as it probably doesn’t exist.
2) Kawasaki Z1000
There are a number of modern bikes that have caught my eye. A consistent choice has been the shamelessly anime inspired, Sugomi designed Kawasaki Z1000. New ones go for about fourteen grand Canadian. I’m partial to the orange one from a few years ago. There is a low mileage one in Drummondville, QC for about nine grand. As modern naked bikes go, this one is big enough to fit me and scratches every Robotech Cyclone anime dream I had as a kid. The only thing better would be if it could transform into battloid mode – and it looks like it might.
3) Honda VFR750F
Most of my 80’s bike fantasies revolved around the Honda Interceptor. The VFR-750F RC30 came up on many of the Practical Sportsbike lists as well; it’s an ’80s kid’s dream superbike. Because it hits that nostalgic twang, it’s now a collector’s item and an expensive proposition, but hey, this is a dream list! Something like this would allow me to maybe edge into vintage racing and track days, though both things are pretty thin on the ground in Ontario. The RC45 race bike derivative would be an even better choice for vintage track riding.
4) Yamaha XT500
Another nostalgic choice would be a twinshock trail bike that I could use in vintage off road events. I’ve thought about trying to get my father-in-law’s old Suzuki, but he sold it on and I’d probably end up paying more than it’s worth to get back. Thanks to Henry Cole and crew, I’ve got a soft spot for Yamaha XT500s. A restored XT would let me pursue silly things like classic enduro rallies and the V.I.N.C.E..
5) 1938 Triumph Speed Twin
With all the research into World War 2 I’ve been doing, the Triumph Speed Twin keeps coming up as a huge leap forward in two wheeled technology. If I were to own a pre-war bike, this would be a more likely dream choice. Perfect versions go at auction for $24k+ Canadian. I’d be happy with a less perfect bike that I could actually use.
6) 2019 Ariel Ace
The Ariel Ace is one of those bespoke and bizarre machines that could only exist for me on a dream bike list. Since first seeing the almost architectural design of the Ace’s girder front forks and trellis frame, I was smitten. The Ariel uses a stock Honda motor but is otherwise a custom machine that you can design to your own wishes. At £24,950,this is very much a dream list bike.
CCM’s Spitfire custom model comes in a variety of styles, but my favourite is the classically styled Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund Spitfire. This 600cc customized thumper is a lightweight thing that looks like it would be a blast to ride on twisty roads. As a modern bike with classic styling, it would fill a niche in my dream garage that nothing else does. £18,000 isn’t cheap, but dream list, right?
9) Honda Goldwing Touring
Say what? A Goldwing? One of the functions of my dream bike garage would be to participate in as many different kinds of riding as possible. Of all the big touring bikes, Honda’s new, lighter Goldwing is the most capable all-round tourer there is, and it’s Honda bullet-proof. Another bike north of thirty grand, it’s something that would only be on a dream list, but it means I could take a happy pillion with me and tour like we mean it.
10) Husqvarna 701 Enduro
Husky’s 701 Enduro is an off-road capable bike that’ll also handle the roads needed to get you to the edge. This would be another one of those bikes selected to let me experience a specific kind of riding. The 701 only weighs a bit more than I do but is a big, capable off roader that would fit me, keep up with traffic when needed and still be able to off road. At about $14,000 Canadian, it isn’t a cheap dream off roader.
I feel like I’m missing a modern track day bike. A Honda Fireblade or Yamaha R1 would be on my shortlist for that duty, though with no Ducatis in the mix here, the new V4 Panigale R would probably win dream bike wishlist status over the more mundane Japanese choices. I might be convinced to swap the Z1000 out for that.
I’m also partial to weirdness, and a sidecar outfit would scratch that itch. I like older styled outfits, so a Royal Enfield or classic modern Triumph with a bullet sidecar would be a cool thing to add into the list, perhaps after swapping out the XT500. I only leaned toward the Goldwing as a touring option instead because you get to lean on the Honda.
Rather than go the Husky route, a stranger choice there might be getting a Lyndon Poskitt rally bike made. At thirty to sixty thousand Euro, they aren’t cheap, but that’s what a dream bike list is all about, right?
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I’ve managed to cover a range of bikes from the early 1930s to the latest models. With a sweep of almost ninety years and what are some truly weird options, I hope I’ve managed to express just how diverse and strange my motorcycling proclivities have become. My final list would include bikes manufactured in England, Japan and Europe and range in price from pretty accessible to pretty much unattainable.
If nothing else, a dream bike list lets you stretch your expectations and expand your considerations around what you might ride. From doing the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride on my grandfather’s Eagle to seeing the wrong side of two hundred miles per hour on a supercharged dream machine, for me the dream stable is about opening up possibilities rather than creating a museum exhibit.
