Timothy King – Page 34 – Mechanical Sympathy

I like ’em rough and ready

The Concours, not nearly so precious
with its kintsugi gold filled cracks…

Another idyllic night ride home this evening. On the way in I saw an older Honda on the side of the road with a for-sale sign on it, so I made a point of stopping on the way home in the dark to have a look.

It’s a 1974 Honda XL175. It looks like the owner is asking almost two thousand dollars for it, which seems a bit precious. I suppose this is officially a classic now, and with nostalgic Boomers wrestling with Hipsters to snap them up, a couple of grand may very well be possible. It has less than three thousand miles on it and looks like it’s been well loved.

I think I’ll save my money for something a bit less ‘just so’. I’m not interested in getting a dual sport bike so I can rub it with a diaper. Having said that, Mars Orange sure is a striking colour!

For a 1974 (41 year old!) motorbike, it’s obviously led a charmed life.
If you’re suddenly in love, you can find it here

Three Years Out

Here we are at the beginning of 2012. Our board is having a learning fair at the end of the summer (9 short months away) and they are looking at 21st Century learning and technology as a focus.

My suggestion is three years of time travel. It doesn’t sound like much, but at the current rate of change, we’re stretching the boundaries of reasonable speculation pushing even three years out. What will our class rooms look like in 2015, if we moved with the technology? Looking back might give us a clear idea of how little we may be able to guess!

*** 2009: An Archeological Review Of A Year In Tech ***

The economy was on its knees, a radical new voice was about to be sworn in south of the border, and gas prices were about to leap and then leap even higher; peak oil panics abounded. BRIC countries were in huge growth while the old democracies fed their young to capitalist bandits.

Three years ago, Facebook was in its massive growth phase and wasn’t a habit so much as a new sensation. Tablets were an in-joke on the Simpsons from the ’90s, and Apple was still a year away from getting it right with the first ipad. There was no tablet market as such.

Netbooks (net what?) were the new and exciting technology craze, what everyone thought would make personal computing affordable, portable and available to everyone. An obvious way to keep tech moving forward as the entire banking system fell into disrepute.

Smartphones were still half screens with keyboards, and ruled by RIM. An exciting new phone by a company called “Palm” was the buzz at CES2009 and Microsoft evidently once made a Mobile Windows OS for phones! The first iphone was a year old, stratospherically priced, attached to a single provider and had a new app store with no apps. Android wasn’t even a glimmer in Google’s eye.

In 2009 our school was in the process of installing wireless internet, but it was still a year away from being stable enough to use (and is still a poor second place due to bandwidth issues). Everyone in the school used a single core, IBM/Lenovo, board desktop etherneted to the wall, if they used one at all. Less than 1 in 100 students brought their own laptops to class (though more and more were beginning to bring netbooks, though they couldn’t use them online because they weren’t allowed to plug in to the ethernet).

Walking in to an old-school, centralized IT environment did not seem so silly in 2009. The network ran on board owned machines in a closed system. Other than email, cloud based storage was unheard of. It was a long three years developing UGDSB’s Google Cloud project; it was non-existent in 2009.

*** Can We Forecast a Classroom in 2015? ***

Things have zigged and zagged in surprising directions. Game changers like ipad and Android and the abject failure of the biggest technical buzz item of 2009 (those netbooks) show that there are some changes that sweep through our digital ecosystem so quickly that they are impossible to foretell.

Having said all that, I’ve been hammering away at ideal directions in Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and multiple ecosystem technical learning environments for months now, and think I might be able to take a viable stab at it.

I only hope my colleagues are willing to jump into mix with me. We could contribute to yet another real step forward in our board’s technical evolution:

Mini-lab: the decentralized Education Lab
The Future of Media Arts Labs
Future School
IBM’s 5in5 (great example of shocking changes that are probable)
Digital Skills Continuum (still not a thing years later)

Best advice on blogging

Fourteen months into Dusty World and I’m approaching 5000 views, which is exciting.

When I started blogging after ECOO 2010, I did some reading about just how to do it. A couple of suggestions have borne up well after fourteen months of blogging, but they aren’t your typical how-to-drive-page-views blog advice.

/WARNING
This isn’t a how-to-make-a-successful-business-blog type post. There are piles of how to become a pro-blogger advice columns out there; this isn’t that. I didn’t start blogging to make money or win fame. If you’re looking for a how to monetize your blog and push traffic type thing, then I’d argue that you’re a shallow git who doesn’t get what this really is. Blogging isn’t supposed to replace traditional media with a new way for a few people to target, market and sell to many, blogging is democratized publication. Old, industrialized media is dying. This isn’t a bad thing, stop trying to be like them.
/WARNING OFF

To that end, I found a piece of advice early that has allowed me to keep blogging regardless; always write about what you want, the way you want. This works for me in a couple of different ways. The main reason I’m still at it over a year later is that I find writing about problems, solutions and challenges in technology and teaching to be cathartic. Blogging gives me perspective, sometimes it prompts responses that help me see a way through, and ultimately allows me to be better at what I do. These are all ends in themselves; reason enough to blog right there.

I also never feel like this is work, more like therapy. I know I’ll probably feel better after blogging, so tend to want to do it. I’ve found that blogging tends to result in a very direct style of writing that clarifies thoughts and my feelings on issues (you can’t go on and on in a blog, it’s the wrong format).

I don’t shy away from a philosophical approach because I’m representing my peeps. I am what I am and write what I write, I wouldn’t expect everyone to read it, I wouldn’t want them to. I’m aiming at a specific reader (thoughtful, educationally and digitally curious), and I’m fine with that. If I wanted page views I’d write college humor blog entries (but that would be work).

Another suggestion I read was write often (and don’t forget to label your entries so people can find them). Once you’ve built up a library of entries, the views will find you. This has been the case. Looking at the stats, there is always a bump on a new post, but the archive gets more hits now than even the new-entry bump. Keep writing, eventually you’ll build up enough content on enough subjects that people will find you. Your entries get shared, and shared again, you start to see views from all around the world (which makes me wonder just how Canadian-centric my thinking may appear), and before you know it, there are many avenues to your blog, not just you pushing it out on your social networks.

Publishing your writing puts it out there. It makes you want to put your best ideas forward. I proof my entries, and try and make them technically correct because I never know who might end up reading them. Diary or journal writing for yourself doesn’t drive you in that direction, that’s a different sort of therapy.

As an English teacher, I feel like blogging makes me a better writer and gives students a chance to see how I do what I’m expecting them to do. So many English teachers don’t write, or don’t offer students access to their writing… it strikes me as a bit hypocritical.

In the meantime, I find myself, a digitally skilled student of philosophy and history, living at a pivotal moment in human history; the birth of a digital revolution that will rock the world in much the same way (and much more quickly) than the industrial revolution did in the past two hundred years. The world is changing in ways we can’t even begin to foresee, and I’m teaching in it!

It’s an exciting time to pick a timely new medium and enjoy using it. Blog well my friends.

Deep Learning AI & the Future of Work

Originally published on Dusty World in April, 2016: https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2016/04/deep-learning-ai-future-of-work.html

Most jobs have tedium as a prerequisite. No one does tedium
better than a machine, but we still demand that kind of work
for humans… to give them self worth?

This isn’t the first time our compulsive urge to assign monetary value to survival has struck me as strange. This time it was prompted by an article on deep learning AI and how machines are close to resolving many jobs that are currently reserved for human beings (so that they can feel relevant). We like to think employment is what makes us worthwhile, but it really isn’t, and hasn’t been for a long time.

The graph above is from that article and it highlights how repetitive jobs are in recession as machines more effectively take over those roles. As educators this leaves us in a tricky situation because we oversee an education system modelled on factory routines that is designed to fit students into repetitive labour (cognitive for the ‘smart’ office bound kids, manual for the other ones).

How can an education system modelled on Taylorist principles produce students able to succeed in the Twenty-First Century? It can’t, because it can’t even imagine the world those students are going to live in. There is a lot of push back in educational theory around the systemic nature of school administration, but I see little movement from management other than lip service. Educational stakeholders from unions to ministries and even parents like our conservative education system just the way it is.

Between neuroscience and freeing ourselves of academic prejudices
(ie: creativity happens in art class), we could be amplifying what
human beings are best at instead of stifling it. (from Newsweek)

In the meantime, people who are taught to sit in rows, do what they’re told and hit clearly defined goals are becoming increasingly irrelevant. We have machines that do those very things better than any human can, and they’ll only be doing more of it in the future.

Ironically, just at the time where human beings might have technically developed a way out of having to justify their survival all the time they are also crippling their ability to do what humans do best. In recent years creativity,as critically assessed in children, is diminishing. The one thing we are able to do better than machines is being systemically beaten out of us by outmoded education systems and machines that cognitively infect us with their own shortcomings!

Machines offer us powerful tools for a wide variety of tasks. I use digital technology to express my interest in the natural world, publish, and learn, but for the vast majority of people digital technology is an amplifier of bad habits and ignorance. Many people use the personalization possible in digital technology to amplify their own prejudices, juice their brains like Pavlovian dogs in empty games, and all while living in a cocoon of smug self justification.

Just when we’re able to leverage machines to free human beings from the tedium of working for a living, those same machines are shaping people to be as lazy, directionless and self assured as they wish.

In the meantime the education system keeps churning out widget people designed for a century ago and the digital attention economy turns their mental acuity into a commodity.

Rise of the machines indeed.

A nice bit of alternate future, but the description at the end is chilling – it’s how I see most people using the internet: “At its best, edited for the savviest readers, EPIC is a summary of the world, deeper and broader and more nuanced than anything available before. But at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational, but EPIC is what we wanted…”

Icy Days & Carburetors

It’s been ice-storm icy here

Without warm weather beckoning (we’ve been in the middle of an ice-storm here) I’m in less of a panic about not having a bike to ride. With an extended long weekend thanks to power failures and such, I’ve been hammering through four carb rebuilds.

The K&L kit I got came with a new bowl gasket, new pilot jet, washer and o-ring, and a new float jet. Breaking down each carburetor one at a time (so I don’t mix up parts), I cleaned out the carbs and blew them out with compressed air and then put them back together with the new parts.

Those little rubber bits
get crusty after 22 years
on a bike…

Adjustment wise I reset the float height (17mms with the float unweighted – held sideways). I also reset the pilot jets to two turns out from snug. The pilot jets varied from almost five turns out to under three turns out. I’m curious to see how this affects fueling. The manual suggested resetting them to what they were, and I did record them, but the factory setting is 2 turns from snug, so that’s what I reset them to. I’m not sure why I’d reset them to what they were when they weren’t working well.

The carb rebuilds weren’t particularly difficult, but they were a bit tedious (you’re basically doing the same thing four times). Things have ground to a halt again as I’ve found that I need o-rings to replace the old, broken ones that sealed the fuel lines between carbs. With some new o-rings I should be good to put them all back together again and re-vacuum tube them with new tubing.

Rebuilding the first carb – it took a bit longer as it was more exploratory

The second videos hows the final two carbs and then discovering the need for o-rings -both videos are based on photos taken every 10 seconds compressed into a video running at one photo every 1/10th of second.

As an aside, I thought it would be a good idea to go through Motorcyclesuperstore.ca, but they seem to have pulled back from offering Canadian customers a clear view of their prices. You used to be able to buy in Canadian dollars and there were no surprises. When you buy now they charge in U$D, so you’ve got to do some math to figure out how they compare to Canadian retailers. It looked like they came out about twenty bucks ahead of an equivalent Canadian order, until I got the COD message with border taxes. Suddenly that twenty bucks turned into paying an extra ten. I liked motorcyclesuperstore.com, their customer service went above and beyond, but their lack of clarity around pricing of orders to Canada puts them in the same category as any other US distributor. I’m not happy with canadasmotorcycle.ca’s ‘easy’ returns (they charge you for shipping), but I’m not playing roulette with customs costs again. I’m afraid that’s the last time I’ll use motorcyclesuperstore. I need to start looking into other Canadian based motorcycle retailers.

Two down, two to go…

The pilot jet (centre) – has a spring, washer and o-ring underneath.

The float bowl off and being cleaned out – the floats are held in a pin at the bottom – the float jet hooks on a tab in the middle

Carb Photos:
https://goo.gl/photos/kPhLXuQnb8HmdQFs9

Doing a Dangerous Thing Well (or not)

The rolling hills mean short sight lines and lightened
suspension. Patchy pavement means a rough ride.
Lots of corners means you’re depending on the sides
of your tires. The Bush Highway is a demanding ride.

After our horse ride in the Arizona desert we took the rental SUV down the Bush Highway and into Apache Junction for dinner. Over one of the many hills we came upon a dozen emergency vehicles with lights blazing. The road was closed down to one lane.

As we crept past we cleared the ambulance in the middle of the road and a rider came into view. He was sitting in the middle of the pavement my son and I had ridden down a couple of days before, his GSX-R a pile of broken plastic and bent metal on the gravel shoulder. He’d obviously been thrown clear of it.

He was sitting up because he was wearing a full helmet, armoured leather jacket, pants and boots. ATGATT meant this was an expensive crash, but not an overly injurious one, he looked winded and freaked out, but paramedics won’t have you sitting up unless they’ve ruled out a lot of more serious injuries.

Helmets are optional in Arizona. If this guy had come off at the speed he was travelling (he ended up a good sixty feet away from the bike) without a helmet he wouldn’t have been sitting up. He also would’ve left a lot of skin on the pavement if he wasn’t wearing armoured gear. As it was he looked cut free.

There might be a sport bike argument to be made here. Cruiser riders may ride around in t-shirts and no helmet in Arizona, but then they don’t try and tackle the bumpy, undulating Bush Highway at high speed either. If you’re going to ride a sports bike aggressively, full gear seems like an obvious thing to do. Exploring the limits of said sports bike on a bumpy, poorly maintained desert road with a patina of sand on it might not be such a bright idea either; that’s what track days are for.

I didn’t start riding until my forties. I could have started in my twenties when I had fewer responsibilities and much more free time, but a bad crash at work put me off it again. Every time I see a rider down my heart jumps into my throat. I want them to be ok, but I also don’t want it to be the result of a stupid decision they made. Every time that happens someone like me is shaken off the idea of riding, which means they are missing out on a magical experience.

Colourful is the new cool

What secrets lie beneath my Ninja’s flat black paint?

I’m finding the Ninja to be more and more manageable. I don’t think I’ll end up on a sport bike forever, but I’m glad I started with one so I have a sense of what a road purposed bike is capable of. One of the reasons I went with the Ninja instead of a KLR or other enduro bike is because it looked like it had been mistreated, and I wanted to make it happy again. The bike is super dependable, rock solid mechanically, but it’s had an interesting hidden life.

In the picture on right you can see where I’ve been working on the front wheel fender, taking the angry-young-man flat black off to find the original
Kawasaki Ninja metallic blue. It’s a beautiful colour, I have no idea why you’d want to cover it up, unless you’ve done things you want to hide… cheap.

Why would you ever de-blue this?!?

I’m guessing that the gas tank got replaced when the bike was dropped at some point. The replacement tank comes in flat black, so the owner decided to cover up the scuffs on the rest of the bike with a thin (though apparently professionally applied) coat of black.

The blacked out look is aggressive, tough, very angry young man, but I’m not an angry young man and I like colours, and I don’t want the bike to be invisible, I want it to be very visible.

I’ve removed the black from the front fender, a time consuming and tiring process, but I really want that black gone. There was a bur in the plastic on the back, some more proof of impact, but I’ve sanded it out and it looks smooth again. Between the paint remover and the scuffs on the fender, a good repaint will be in order. I think by stripping and prepping the parts, I can save quite a lot on the repaint (prep is very time consuming). I can also remove the parts that will be repainted, making them easier to finish. The only part
that won’t already be blue would be the gas tank, but when done it would match everything else.

Paint removal has been a trial and error experience. I’ve tried sanding (almost impossible to do on the complex compound curves of the body work). I tried acetone but it’s very difficult to work with. It seems to raise the paint and then immediately evaporate so the paint solidifies all mottled. Paint thinner works well as a final step, removing the last spots and any black haze left. It also does a good job of smoothing out any roughness left by the stronger chemicals.

For pulling off the paint in the first place the best thing I’ve found is graffiti remover. It pulled the unsealed black off the clear coated blue with minimal damage. If you work in small areas at a time, you can lift most of the paint. When you’ve got it virtually clear, switch to paint thinner and gently wipe the final pieces away, then wash it all down with water.

It helps to have a variety of lint free cloths on hand. Rougher terry cloths and even a soft bristled scrub brush helped to get into the black and loosen it off. I could then wipe it clean with the softer cloths. Even the graffiti cleaner dries quickly, so work in small areas.

burnt metallic orange

The current summer plan is to strip the bike back to blue and repaint it in the stock blue. While it’s naked I’m also thinking about painting the tube frame a burnt metallic orange. It’ll peak out from behind the blue and contrasts nicely with it. The end result should be a Ninja that is not only visible, but doesn’t look like it’s had the living daylights beaten out of it.

Tim’s Tat: inspiration for the Ninja
colour scheme

With some carefully chosen accessories that highlight the colour scheme, I should end up with a kingfisher Ninja that matches my tat. With the orange highlights on the frame I could match up the brake and clutch levers (which are scuffed) with something a bit prettier; burnt orange levers would be a nice touch.

Colourful is the new cool. Being visible isn’t an option, I want it to be the goal. Metallic blue and burnt metallic orange would pop and sizzle in the sun, be much more visible all the time, and would make for a happy, outgoing Ninja, rather than a war torn, black and beaten looking one.

KLR Curiosities

A super high mileage KLR, but it’s pretty new (mid-00s). Unclear on its mechanical details, other than it’s very tired and the plastics and tank don’t match.

$1300 seems like a lot to pay for a bike in such condition with unoriginal parts (probably because it’s been dropped hard).

If I got it I’d shelf it for a year while I broke it to pieces and rebuilt it. I might go as high as $800, but I’ll be spending a lot to give this tired old bike a second life. I’ve asked the owner for info…

Followup: I got a fantastic response from the owner. The bike has been fettled to within an inch of its life. The first owner took it from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, and did the Demptster Highway. The second and current owner has taken it to James Bay and various off-road adventures in the past couple of years. It hasn’t been dropped recently, but it’s an off-road capable bike, so it’s been down, once in Chile where they rider had to order in a new instrument cluster, the mileage is uncertain with the replacement instruments. This bike has had a life, and now it’s for sale in Southern Ontario.

I suggested he sell it back to Kawasaki, this KLR shows what KLRs are capable of.

The mods list is extensive:
EM Doohickey
Upgraded headlight wiring harness with relay
Headlight cut out switch
Glass fuses replaced with blade fuses
Oversized side stand pad
Subframe bolt upgrade
Scott chain oiler
Progressive 420 Series rear shock
Instrument and idiot lights converted to LED
Choke relocation mod
Stainless front brake line
Headlight modulator (not hooked up but still in the fairing)
UNI air filter
LED plate light
Perelli M21 tires with lots of meat on them
Shell Rotella every 2500km or so

Roads to Ride: Arizona

We just left Sedona and headed south to Phoenix. The Sedona area is astonishingly beautiful, and there isn’t anything like a South West Ontario dull road to be seen. The interstates have more twists and turns than the most interesting roads where I live. Coming back here on two wheels is a must do. Not only are the roads fantastic, but the scenery is otherworldly.

We stayed at the Arroyo Roble Best Western on the north edge of town and it made for a excellent base for exploring the area. The on site hot tubs, sauna and steam room would also ease sore muscles after a long day of leaning into corners on the byzantine surrounding roads.

Here are some of the highlights from Sedona:

The view just south of Sedona

Looking down into the Oak Creek Canyon…

Local micro breweries abound, America is no longer the land of Bud Light.
The Black Ridge Brewery in Kingman make a lovely IPA, while the Oak Creek Brewery
in Sedona make a fantastic Nut Brown Ale.

Any direction you look, Sedona is magical.

Top of Cathedral Rock Trail – it was worth a sweaty climb

Boynton Canyon, a lovely drive in, then a secluded canyon spoiled by constantly running machinery from the golf course
stuffed up the middle of it. There was an Apache ceremony at the vista coming in – flute sounds over a quiet desert
was much preferred to heavy equipment thumping away around the corner. Still petty though.

Trans Canada

Last summer I was driving past the bike on the right over and over again. Had I the means to ride it home, I suspect I would have snapped it up (they were only asking six hundred bucks and everything on it worked).

The idea of picking up an old bike, getting it going and then hitting the open road with it on a long trip has a lot of romantic appeal.

I’ve been trying to work out how to do a coast to coast Trans Canada trip when I live in the middle of the country. Riding one way and then flying to the other coast seems a bit heavy handed. To resolve the issue I’ve decided to plan it empty handed. I’ll fly out to the East Coast, find a used bike for sale somewhere on the Island, get it sorted out and then head west.

Go West Young Man

2008 VTX

One of the nice things about shopping the classifieds (besides not paying the rolling off the lot premium) is that you might pick up a bike that you otherwise wouldn’t.

Browsing the classifieds in St. John’s NFLD today I came across this Honda VTX. I’ve never even heard of this bike, but that is one cool looking ride. I’m the furthest thing from a cruiser fan, but you have to wonder what kind of relationship you’d have with that Honda as you ride coast to coast.

Maxim

It’d certainly hold its value well, I might even break even on the other side, and it would have long legs for that epic journey.

The Maxim on the right costs less than it would cost to ship a bike across Canada. It has just had new mufflers, tires and battery. With some minor fix ups I’d probably be well on my way for less than two grand. It might not have the style and presence of the VTX, but it would bring its own history with it and offer its own unique experience.

The nice thing about doing it this way is the trip itself is dictated by what’s out there, and the bike might be something you wouldn’t otherwise develop a riding relationship with. From thousand dollar cheapies to expensive chromed out blingers, on a quiet Tuesday morning in July there was an interesting mix of bikes available in the St. John’s area, and each one would make your cross country ride a completely different experience.

When it’s a one trip bike, you might ignore some of the must haves you usually think about when buying a long term bike. Those must haves often lead to a lot of compromises. Here is a bike you’ll ride for a few weeks one summer. Without the weight of a long term relationship, what would you want to try out that you wouldn’t otherwise?

I imagine I could fly out with my plates and find the bike, call back for insurance and be ready to go in only a couple of days. At the other end I could put it up for sale on consignment and have it settled out while I’m flying home. The only complication might be if you fell in love, then an extension on the trip might be in order.

Trans Canada

From St. John’s NFLD on the Atlantic coast to Tofino BC on the Pacific Coast

Leave at Sunrise over the Atlantic, ride to sunset in the Pacific…

Coast to Coast, from St/ John’s Newfoundland to Tofino BC

The only planned stop would be a home for a rest stop in Ontario on my way across. 7813kms across if I stay the course, but I’d be hard pressed to pass through places I’ve never been before without having a look around. Conservatively I’d guess that this would be a 10,000km trip.

At a couple of tanks of gas a day, covering 5-600kms would be easy and allow for some wandering time as well. I’d throw a goal that far up the road and see how it went. It’d be two weeks at 500kms/day, but with other stops and breaks, three weeks wouldn’t be a bad guess.

Roughing out costs, with gas at $40/day, hotels at $140/day average and food etc at $50/day, I’d be looking at $230/day on the road, $4830 for expenses over three weeks, and then whatever the bike costs/sells for. Through in a $1000 for the flight out to St. John’s and home from Vancouver.

Going lean I could probably manage under $100/day for hotels and shave $20-30 off the food/gas costs (bike choice would play in there). It would be conceivable to do it for ~$150/day ($2100 if done in 2 weeks). I like the idea of a tighter schedule with more saddle time, I’d probably see if I can do it in 10 days…

Three ferry rides (off The Rock, across a Great Lake and over to Vancouver Island), the Atlantic Ocean, the East Coast, across Quebec and Ontario, through the Prairies, over the Rocky Mountains and onto Vancouver Island for a final push to the Pacific Ocean. Coast to coast across Canada by motorbike!

Now I can’t stop looking at used bikes…

1983 Suzuki GS in Guelph, only about $1000.

1986 Kawasaki Concourse, about $2500

I guess I like the more angular style of ’80s bikes…

Agony! ‘84 Honda Interceptor: Had this been available in March when I was looking for my first bike, Tim’s Motorcycle Diaries would have started off way differently! I’ve had a crush on these bikes since I was a kid, and only $1500!