Timothy King – Page 33 – Mechanical Sympathy

Motorbike Wants

I’ve been re-watching Jo Sinnott’s Wild Camping. That Roof Helmet she wears looks fantastic. It’s a French designed, multiple function helmet with a fighter pilot vibe. The Desmo Flash in Orange and black gets itself on my want list.

ROOF Desmo Flash from Canada’s Motorcycle: $550

I’ve heard a lot about Aerostich. It started when I read Melissa Holbrook Pierson‘s The Man Who Would Stop At Nothing. For serious long distance riders, the Aerostich is pretty much the only choice. Armoured, weatherproof and virtually bullet proof, it’d be nice to have the last word in motorbiking overalls, but they don’t come cheap.

Aerostich Roadcrafter Classic: $1014

(Black Friday deal! usually $1127!)

I’m hanging in for a fix on the oil cooler on my new-to-me, found-in-a-field Kawasaki Concours, but what I’d really like is a new one. They aren’t cheap, I’m looking at about $500 with shipping and customs costs – which is only a couple of hundred less than I bought the bike for. I could pick one up from ebay used for about sixty bucks delivered, but it might not be much better than the one I have.

$500 new – not going to happen. Han would never by a new part for the ‘Falcon. I’m going to aim for the $70 delivered used bit and see how it goes.

Rumour & Innuendo In The Age of Information

TVO’s Agenda did a diligent job this week of fact checking following the round table discussion they had with teachers. In retrospect, what this discussion did was bypass the political spin of teacher unions and the government and give Ontarians an insight into how teachers themselves are seeing this on-going mess. What I found unnerving was how insular and, in some cases, inaccurate our thinking is.

In post-show fact checking it was shown that some of the commonly held beliefs by teachers were not exactly true. The bankruptcy lawyer story had been circulated out of the union all year. Paikin seemed surprised that all the teachers there knew of it, but it was loudly repeated by our unions as a way of framing this disagreement prior to 115 coming in. In fairness, these lawyers do deal with bankruptcies and they were unfamiliar with education negotiations and were aggressive in their demands, but to call them bankruptcy lawyers shows a use of absolutist language aimed at polarizing union members in order to make them feel victimized. It’s this kind of manipulation that makes me uneasy.

That the KW bi-election was a reason for the ridiculous piece of legislation called Bill 115 appears to be a matter of record. That Kathleen Wynn can say it was a cynical, Machiavellian move to win a bi-election while having voted for it still makes me question her credibility and these ‘social justice’ values she seems to have branded herself with. In the meantime our unions are still funding the OLP, even as they encourage us to demonstrate in front of their leadership convention. I’m not sure who is on what side any more. With four parties involved in this (the provincial government, grassroots union members, union provincial executive who seem out of touch with the members they’ve tried to direct, and school boards), it’s murky at best.

The followup research on the sick days/leave issue indicates just how deeply the political spin of this has cut teachers.

“…it’s strange that they would seem to think the province would just leave them in the lurch in terms of short-term disability. It either shows a colossal failure of communication on behalf of the government or on behalf of the union to its members. It certainly illustrates that the level of distrust of teachers with the government is extremely high, which is just very, very sad.”

The negativity itself around 115 created such momentum that the provincial executives who were pushing it suddenly found their members turning down contracts they wanted passed. Executive was building up this fervor as a bargaining tool, but the anger was genuine, and now the rifts between teachers, the government and internally in their unions are deeper than ever. There hasn’t been a lot of honesty with how this has been managed. How a teacher couldn’t feel manipulated in this by all the parties involved is beyond me. Trying to get a clear eye on the issues is almost impossible with all of these giants hurling boulders at each other.

I was ardently against Bill 115, I’m still astonished that it got passed – it is one of the most offensive pieces of ‘law’ ever put into the books. I was more than willing to go to the wall over fighting it, I still believe we should have walked immediately when it was passed. As one of the wiser heads in my school said in a staff meeting, “it’s a bad law, you fight bad laws or we lose everything.”

Watching those teachers on the Agenda line up behind the vitriolic rhetoric of our unions when I find union interests focused on the political self interest of certain (older) members makes me question much of what I’m hearing. I certainly no longer feel represented by the people who lead us, and while I don’t agree with all of the fact checking done, it does make me question the accuracy of what I’m being told.

I find myself a teacher who is very uncomfortable with how this has been handled, the mess in my own district aside. The Agenda’s round table only emphasized for me how insulated and groomed our thinking around the turbulence in Ontario education is.

A Week After New Years

Norman makes the PCH look pretty magical.
At nearly a thousand bucks a day for this Canadian,
it would have to be.

Strange timing means I’ve got the week off after New Year’s Day this year. That means flying is a less expensive possibility, so what motorcycling trip might I do with that time? Norman Reedus did the PCH last year, that’d be nice. If my son and I were to go what would that cost?

1) Drive to Detroit would be a bit of gas, border & hotel money, pack only bike gear and a single change of clothes. Parking in Detroit would cost about $170 for the week including a night in a hotel (the flight leaves at 6am).

$250 for the first day and night (trip, hotel & parking). And that’s just to stay in Detroit!

2) Flights from Detroit to LAX are going for about $675. Throw in another $50 to eat bad airport food.

Land in LAX, cab over to EagleRider (10 miles) $30. EagleRider renting a BMW sport tourer for a week costs over $1400US ($1900 Canadian) if you want decent insurance coverage in the liability driven US.

Figure $300US a day in food, gas and hotels (travelling fairly minimally), and our eight days and nine nights on ground should run us about $2400US ($3250 Canadian).

The flight back is another $574 plus expenses…

Once back it’s another four hour slog over the bridge and back into Ontario through potentially lousy winter weather. Figure in an extra $100 for gas, tolls and eating to get home.

A thousand miles up and down the Pacific Coast Highway
would be a nice way to end the holiday break, but
at seven grand it’s a salty trip.

I might have the time free, but this cheap-as-I’ll-go trip to California for just seven days (plus one in Detroit) would run to almost seven grand. It’s a nice bike, but the price difference between that and a smaller, less able bike to carry us and our stuff around isn’t that much (maybe thirty bucks a day less). This is assuming $100 a night-ish hotels, so nothing special and nothing near anything good. Other than the riding there isn’t much left to visit anything with either.

Renting a bike is expensive. Flying is expensive even if it isn’t a peak times and even if you drive to Detroit first. Hotels aren’t cheap, and the whole thing jumps up by 32% when I pay for it with the Canadian money I earn.

I guess I won’t be doing that the week after New Years.

Re-awakening

From August, 2012 courtesy of Dusty World:

I just finished reading Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class for Soulcraft”, a philosophical look at the value of skilled, physical labour. Having come from a mechanical background into an academic one, a philosopher-mechanic’s critical examination of the ‘creative economy’ we’re all dying to jump into was refreshing.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12108000

I’ve often missed the clarity and satisfaction I found in repairing machines, and now I have a philosophical explanation of that sense of loss. Crawford delineates meaningful work in terms of objective standards, a sense of community and individual agency. He then goes on to disembowel the MBA speak found in the otherworldly knowledge economy that can only exist in an entirely abstract sense of work, one I fear that has been applied to the skilled trade of teaching courtesy of lawyers and politicians.

It’s been a few weeks now since I finished the book. I’m finding that the lasting impression is one of embracing my smart hands again. The idea that mind work is somehow superior to hand work is nonsense, though our school is streamed according to that logic (academic/applied, university/college). The argument that we discover the truest aspect of human intelligence when we work our minds through our hands continues to ring true for me.

The other, unintentional side effect has been a re-awakening of my love of motorcycles. I’d originally gone after one when I was 16, but my parents offered to up what I’d saved to get me into a car. It’s probably one of the reasons I’m here today, it was a smart move. At 43 I’m not interested in wrapping myself around a pole. Riding is a way to be alone with your thoughts, no obtrusive media, and the development of a constant awareness; you can’t let your mind wander on a bike, they are ruthlessly observant of incompetence. Riding also offers an intimate familiarity with a machine in a very minimalist way that is appealing.

I come by my urges honestly. Here is a picture of my Grand-dad Bill in the late nineteen forties… I need to get myself some white riding shoes! I later learned from my Aunt that Bill was a stunt rider in the R.A.F. motorcycle tatoo (they would do gymnastics and stunts while doing drill on the motorbikes). Wild!

I hope to be licensed and riding in the spring.

Tyranny of Numbers

I’ve always found a strange disconnect between my experience in coding and how it is taught in school. Back in the ‘80s, matheletes owned computer science, and still do today. More interested in the theoretical number games they could play on computers than in actually building things, I found myself making sprites and digital media and coding games while everyone else wanted to make math… I quickly failed out of that culture.

My self-taught experience was one of hacking and building. Tweaking pieces of code and refining them until I got the desired result. I could see the logical construction, but it was never numerical for me, it was mechanical. Later in life I worked as a millwright and an auto mechanic before coming back to computers as a technician. I’ve always had a love of machines and computers have always been included in that mechanical empathy. That mathematics stole coding from me is something I’ve always regretted.

That tyranny of numbers still holds sway in coding no matter what attempts are made to pry it free. I’m previewing a video for my computer studies class and came across this bit:

The Machine That Changed The World

So there you have it. Had we developed computers with different intent, our analytic engines or even better, universal engines (!), wouldn’t have been confused with calculators.

One of the perilous moments I experienced while getting my philosophy degree was trying to get the mandatory symbolic logic credit. My first attempt had me in a classroom full of science majors all taking symbolic logic because it was being delivered as a math course. I fled the scene and worried that I’d never get this credit, the math-bullying in that class was something else. I ended up taking symbolic logic the next semester and getting an A in it. Why? Because it wasn’t taught by a math major. I can appreciate logic, I have trouble with it when it gets abstracted in numbers.

The term ‘computer’ is prejudicial. Computers were originally people who did tedious math problems, mechanical computers supplanted them, but modern computers aren’t number crunchers. Modern code on a modern computer is a construction of complex logic that produces results well beyond mere calculation, to reduce that process to mathematics is absurdly simplistic.

The whole thing makes me want to change my department from “Computer Studies” to “Universal Engines” and escape from the confusion of a historically inaccurate name, and that tyranny of numbers.

Meet Your Maker

www.arduino.cc

I’m working my way through my second semester with grade nines in computer studies. I’ve tried to bring as much ‘shop’ as I can into computer studies. My background was in I.T., so getting into the nitty gritty of electronics has been an expansion of my craft which I’ve enjoyed as much as the students seem to.

Using Arduino microcontrollers we bridge the gap between hardware and software and get students comfortable with the idea of building circuits as well as controlling it with code. This year I’ve also gotten a Raspberry Pi up and running as well as building dozens of desktops. A resurgent maker culture has made electronics much more accessible and customizable; it’s a good time to be teaching computers.

Maker Culture

This semester we’ve been pulling apart broken electronics and reusing digital displays, microphones and other components in our Arduino Frankenstein creations. Some of it will work, some of it won’t, but the process will make Makers of many of the students.

The real fear in using technology is that many users don’t have the faintest idea how things work. When it breaks there isn’t a frame of reference of where to begin, fixing anything seems impossible. After breaking apart their first digital clock, or radio, or electronic game, students begin to recognize the components because they’re already familiar with the bits and pieces having used them to assemble a dozen Arduino projects already. With the mystery gone, they begin to grasp the power their minds and hands have.

I’m re-reading Matthew Crawford’s Shopclass as Soulcraft. It’s such a complex read, with so many ideas packed into each page, a second run through will do me good. If you’re an educator, and you can take some well intended criticism, reading the first couple of chapters will challenge many of the assumptions we wrongly found current educational theory on. I imagine most educators won’t find the criticism comfortable, no matter how well intentioned.

I’m about to get my first motorcycle and I’ve found myself casting about, trying to figure out who I can get to maintain it for me. A chapter in and this ex-mechanic is getting his hands on a shop manual and doing it himself. One of the reasons I want to begin riding is to develop a closer relationship with the machinery I use. The plastic covered, warrantied cars I drive don’t do that. The nakedness of a motorcycle begs for it; I’m looking forward to that quiet, focused mind driving busy hands.

There is something inherently valuable in being able to fix what you use. I’ve never had to argue for the value of what we do in computer studies, the learning has inherent worth, is immediately useful, and applicable in a surprisingly wide range of situations. From the insides of an operating system to the flow of electrons around a circuit, these students develop a familiarity and comfort level with something that most people are more than happy to use in blissful ignorance (until it breaks). The tactile nature of the work also draws in even the most reticent. Working with your hands, making something real work through trial and error, offers an experience missing from much of academia. Crawford’s philosophical attack on the globalized knowledge economy happens every day in my classroom.

Many of these students will move on to other interests in other fields, but none of them will ever again be at the mercy of their ignorance while working with a computer. I’ll have to paste rubrics and marks over all this to make it credible to the establishment, but the moment a student who has been whacking his head against his own bad wiring for half an hour realizes what he’s done and fixes it himself, he has developed a tiny bit of independence, and perhaps realized that paying attention is a powerful ally. Learning shouldn’t be frustration free, if it were, it wouldn’t mean anything. With minds and hands engaged in a battle with realistic demands, the rewards are hard to quantify in a mid-term mark.

A word about educational how-to videos

In the tragically depopulated videos suggesting how personalized assessment is to be done, cheerful teachers in half empty, quiet, ordered classrooms dealing with compliant, earnest, hard working children one on one, take a great deal of time reviewing their work in meaningful, specific ways. This is something I often see in ‘this-is-how-you-should-do-it’ videos.

I first noticed this in teacher’s college when the assessment professor gave us an article by a teacher who went into great detail about how teachers should create student specific learning opportunities and assessment. Everyone oo’ed and ah’ed this wonderful insight, but I had a nagging feeling while watching it. Two minutes on the interwebs at home that night had me coming into class the next day and showing everyone that this teacher works at a private school with mandatory laptops for each student, and class caps of 16 students. The students were all, “students of professors, lawyers and diplomats in the suburbs of Washington DC).

I sometimes work with students whose parents can’t feed them, let alone pay $2o,000 a year to put them in a private school. We just got a technology ‘refresh’ which involved us losing labs and dozens of computers from the school (to be replaced by wifi and the hope that students can bring their own tech) – technology support for all? Not where I live, and I work at what I’d describe as a good school in a pretty wealthy area, but we are a public school that serves everyone from trailer parks to mansions.

And I certainly have never seen an English class with (at the most) 16 students in it – double that and throw in 5-10 students are are clearly in the wrong stream; that’s what I see. In that environment crowd control is as much a part of my day as learning is.

I know they are trying to focus these videos on the specifics of what they’re talking about, but if a video production team can’t do that in a class of 30 students, 12 with IEPs, 8 who performed brain chemistry experiments at lunch and 6 who aren’t sure that they remember your name after being in your class for six weeks, what makes them think a single teacher can?

Instead of making the video to sell a book (and a dream world of magic), how about some real world candid video of what happens in real classes, warts and all? Or will marketing not ok that?

Invisible Man

I was riding down to the city south of us today for a dentist’s appointment. Out on the 2 lane high way that cuts south through Guelph I had my first experience of being invisible. In bumper to bumper traffic moving at about 80 kms/hr, the blue minivan driven by an elderly man (wearing a hat), suddenly lit up his indicators and with no shoulder check immediately moved into the lane I was occupying.

I had the radar on and saw everything he was going to do before he did it. I eased on the brakes, weaved onto the curb and avoided being hit by him. I honked (first time I’ve ever done that) and raised a hand in wonder at his cluelessness. The guy in the cage jumped when I honked, then made a point of ignoring me when I gestured. I frightened him by honking, he was happy to knock me off the highway and then ignore the consequences.

I’m surprised at how not-angry I was. Even though this clueless old git had no idea what was happening around him I couldn’t get angry with him. Like so many other caged drivers he is in his own world, remote from the consequences of his ignorance; happy to thump down the road at 90 kms/hr without knowing what is going on around him.

After shaking my head I was back in radar mode, wondering what the next cage driver would do. Riding is only really dangerous when you’re doing it with a lot of other human beings.

I got to the dentists and had a nice chat with my hygienist who rides. The ride home was without any such drama, but I’m left wondering how often cage drivers think about what’s around them.

Fundy Roads

The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world. The shape of the bay forces huge quantities of water into and out of the bay every twelve hours, making for a rather bizarre ecosystem.

A few weeks ago I spent a few days in Moncton at the Skills Canada National Competition, just up river from the bay. All of the rivers and streams in the area have always wet mud banks on them as the tides rise and fall constantly, even miles inland.

I spent a tedious tour bus ride trundling down this road:

… which is every bit as bike friendly as it looks. When it wasn’t bending left and right it was chasing huge verticals. On two wheels it would be marvellous! Maybe next time.

After a nice ride from Moncton to Hopewell Rocks, you can walk along the sea floor, before a 40 foot tide comes in!

The Damn It Moment

It was a good week of riding. On Saturday, Sunday and Thursday I covered over six hundred kilometres around Southern Ontario.

Saturday had us dancing around in front of the coming storm. The horizon south of us was ominous to say the least. We dodged and weaved but eventually rode into the curtain of rain only to have one of the old Kawasakis in the group (and I mean old, it was almost as old as I am) run rough when it got wet. Fortunately we had already been to three local microbreweries and had loaded up on craft beers, so we were all set for a rainy evening indoors in Owen Sound.

Neustadt Brewery, where you find a variety of craft beers not available for general distribution. The bikes ranged from a
modern GSX-R to forty year old Kawasakis, a modern Super Tenere, my Connie and a Triumph Scrambler.

Maclean’s in Hanover, with impending doom on the horizon.

We rode into the rain and then away from it as quickly as possible – but it was coming again in 30 minutes! In the
meantime the cranky old Kawi worked enough to get us home.

Not so happy in the rain (though the other 40 year old Kawi was flawless and my Connie ran like a Swiss watch).

Scrambler pipes in the rain.

After watching Canada’s girls’ team get kicked out of the world cup (but England won so I was still happy), we watched some Isle of Man TT, talked bikes and drank local brews. The next morning the torrential rain continued. After some hot coffee I hit the road to test my rain gear like never before, and get to the family cottage in Bobcaygeon where my wife and son were worrying about me.

I was the warm and dry centre of the universe making a Tim-on-a-Concours sized hole in the rain. Since Jeff had told me to move the petcock from “Pri” to “On” (Pri doesn’t mean the primary tank, it means prime, as in giving the engine lots of extra gas to start after being off for a long while), the Concours had developed a new smoothness with no more lumpy low RPM or gas burning backfires when I came off throttle. With the Connie running better than ever I was ready for a challenge.

The south shore of Georgian Bay in Midland.

I tried to stop at Blue Mountain for breakfast where my son and I had gone ten weeks earlier on our first ride of the year, but it was a zoo. I eventually found a Tim Hortons and had some hot tea and breakfast. Pushing on from Collingwood I kept hoping I’d ride out of it, but it only came on heavier.

Riding in the rain is nice, everything smells fantastic and the colours are super saturated. It gets less magical when you’re doing it in heavy traffic. Drivers see you even less than they normally do and you’re dealing with spray and slick pavement as well. Many moons ago a friend of mine (an ER nurse) invented the Trotter Precipitation Index, which theorized that driver IQ is inversely proportional to the amount of precipitation falling (drivers get dumber the more it rains). I’ve generally observed this to be true, but it takes on terrifying new dimensions on a motorbike.

The slog in traffic from Collingwood to Orillia was tense and the rain had finally found a way into my rain gear, soaking my crotch. Nothing makes you crankier than a wet crotch.

I’d been on the road about three hours when I got to Orillia. I was on my way (still in heavy traffic) across the causeway on the north end of Lake Simcoe when everything stopped due to an accident. The road was closed, it was pelting down with rain and so dark street lights were kicking on. I pulled off into The Point restaurant and was saved with excellent service, hot coffee and home made soup. I looked so bedraggled that the waitress didn’t even charge me, but I left a big tip.

An hour later my core temperature was back up and I was uncramped and ready to take another run at this underwater ride. The traffic had finally cleared and the road was reopened so I crossed the causeway and headed south around the east side of Simcoe. No sooner had I saddled up than it began pelting down again. My warmed up dampness became cold and rain soaked in short order, but I was closing in on my goal.

I pulled out of the stop-start traffic on the local through road and headed toward Beaverton and some dirt bike boots I saw on Kijiji, but missed a turn in the torrential rain and ended up 10 miles down the road I needed to take to the cottage before I realized I’d missed it. I couldn’t bring myself to turn around so I pushed on toward the finish line.

The air temperature was only about 15°C and I was soaked again. Just when it looked like I had this thing in hand, and with no warning, the road was suddenly gone, replaced with deeply rutted mud and gravel. The old guy ahead of me in his new SUV was worried about getting it dirty and kept stopping (!) in the mud while he tried to figure out where to drive next. Ever tried riding a loaded Concours in ankle deep mud and ruts? It isn’t easy to keep upright, especially when you have to keep stopping and starting.

My Zen beginning to this trip was ebbing away. I was cold, sore, and tired, and I’d missed my turn and a chance to pick up some lovely Alpinestars dirtbike boots for a song. Now I was hanging on for dear life, trying to keep the big bike upright in this strange, slippery, grey mud. To top it off I was stuck in traffic that had been inflicted with the TP Index.

I might have stopped but there was nowhere to do it. Cars (but mostly SUVs) were splashing around in both directions, and I was covered in mud. There were no shoulders to speak of. At this point I started to get angry. Alright, fuck this, I’m getting where I’m going instead of doubting myself. Standing on the pegs I aimed the Concours around the deepest ruts (courtesy of yahoos in cars spinning out in the start-stop traffic) and picked my way through. When you take doubt out of your riding the bike responds to your determination with a sure footedness that I found encouraging. Ten agonizing, slow and muddy kilometres later I emerged onto tarmac once again.

As I rolled into Fenelon Falls I grabbed the brakes for a stop sign and nothing happened. The gravel they’d laid down in the construction was full of limestone dust and that grey paste had gotten into everything, especially my front brakes. I got it stopped and pulled over for a pee in the rain. By this point I was ready to pick up the bike on my back and carry it the rest of the way, some squishy brakes weren’t going to slow me down (literally or figuratively).

I saddled up again and rode through Fenelon Falls which was backed up with cottage traffic. Passing the mall some yahoo in a Mercedes SUV thought he’d suddenly pull out to get into the line of traffic inching along the other way. I hit the brakes, skidding the back tire in the never-ending rain, he saw me at the last moment and stopped. Had he hit me I’d have jumped through his windshield and beaten the shit out of him, I was pretty wound up at this point. He got a fine what-the-hell-dude gesture but didn’t want to make eye contact with the guy he almost hit so he could sit in a line of traffic.

I was finally out of Fenelon and on my way to Bobcaygeon. The bike was running on empty, but I was ok with that, I still had miles of gravel fire roads before I got into the cottage and lighter would be more manageable. I ignored the gas station in Bobcaygeon and pushed on to the cottage road with the odometer showing 236 miles since the last fill up.

The cottage road was slippery, but not like that damned construction, and it was graded properly. I was making my way down this roller coaster of a road when the bike started to chug. I was monkeying with the choke to keep it going when I remembered how low I was on gas. A quick twist of the petcock to Reserve (which got me all the way back out four days later to fill up at 248 miles on the odo) made everything happy again and I road the final couple of miles without incident.

The cottage road – sort of like a rally stage. The Concours was sure footed on the wet gravel.

It was still hosing down when I pulled into the cottage garage and took off my helmet with shaking hands. Should I have stopped? Hells no! I was looking for a challenge and the weather, traffic and horrible roads had provided one. Doing a difficult thing well is its own reward, and this epic submarine riding trek becomes another unforgettable experience that I can add to my riding résumé.

Still the most comfortable (and cheapest) helmet I own. Hours in the rain it kept me dry, was virtually fog free (I waxed
the visor before leaving – water beaded off), and comfortable.