Timothy King – Page 5 – Mechanical Sympathy

Caution, Fear & Risk Aversion in Students

The first ever post on Dusty World from way back in 2010!

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
Bertrand Russell

… but we don’t set up schools to nurture a love of learning, we set them up like 19th Century factories.

I’m teaching a grade 12 class on computer science. If my computer science teacher knew I was doing this he would roll over in his grave. I haven’t coded since the ’80s, I’m a technician. I got knocked off coding by that same computer science teacher who could only approach coding from a mathematical/logical direction. My hackering/tinkering/non-linear approach to generating code depended on a natural fluency with syntax and a willingness to break things in order to come up with something new. I never cared about solving for x, I was always about the why.

So here I am in a class full of students who my old compsci teacher would have adored: math wizes who have learned how to learn so well that they can’t do anything else.

Lisa Simpson (during a teacher’s strike): I can’t take this anymore! Please, mom! Grade me! Grade me! Validate me!!!

That’s at the bottom of it all. These A students are so trained to the system, so inured, that they can’t possibly get unplugged from the Matrix. The idea of learning for sheer curiosity’s sake has been beaten out of them by a dozen years of positive reinforcement enforced by their spectacularly successful student careers.

When I suggest we take a left turn instead of doing more pointless actionscript programming that no one else on the planet except Ontario Elearning finds valuable and go after C++, which none of them have any experience in, only one is even willing to try it. The rest are paralyzed by fear of failure, or even worse, not being able to demonstrate consistent mastery because that’s how you get that high average. You only get perfect if you’re already ahead of the material. You can’t get low marks at the beginning, continually improve (and actually learn something), and end with an A+. Those early failures that produced learning are considered failures and factored into your grades; we penalize learning in the classroom. There has been some change in this, formative/summative and such, but the vast majority of grading still follows the broken example above. Learning is a non-linear process, experimentation, failure, reassessment, reattempt, fail in a new, more interesting way… but we train students to think it’s an inbuilt ability which you either have or struggle with. How we grade them enforces this.

Even the one student willing to self-direct his learning and take on a challenging new language (one that his university uses extensively and we’re pushing him toward with no experience whatsoever) sent me an email anguishing over his grades if he cannot demonstrate fluency in C++ in the 5 weeks we have left. I’ve approached this a number of ways. Firstly, by working with him to set attainable goals (this still freaks him out, he can’t see the grades for the learning trees in setting the goals to a reasonable level so feels his marks will suffer). Secondly, I’ve gotten him into a course of study that leads him through the beginnings of C++ in a clearly defined and logical fashion. The end result should be a working familiarity with a language he’s never seen before demonstrated by some basic scripts that show him coming to terms with the material. Thirdly, I told him to forget the numbers. He is putting hours in on this, not because he has to but because he wants to. The end result is irrelevant, he is directing his own learning – a dead art in an education system designed to force conformity in order to keep costs down while appearing academically credible. He’s doing something no one else is willing or able to do. He’s also learning something that will immediately assist him in university next year. How is any of this not 100%?

I only wish I could overcome the caution and apathy born of risk aversion in the other students and set them free. We feed them a steady diet of caution then wonder why they aren’t willing to take risks in learning.

I’m not the guardian of knowledge, I shouldn’t even get to decide how they learn, I should do everything I can to ensure that they do though.

Update: I just ran into this student at the Grad ceremony a couple of weeks ago. He’s in his first year at Waterloo U doing computer science (a wickedly difficult course to get into). It was nice to hear that the C++ really payed off in a way that the actionscript stuff never would. He’s finding it difficult, but he’s seeing success, and his greatest advantage? Taking a run at the programming language they use at university before he got there, errors and all.

The Week After New Years: Take 2

If it’s a seven grand proposition to get over to California and rent a bike to ride the Pacific Coast Highway, how cheaply could I do something else?

As if by magic, this popped up across the road from work this week. If they’re asking between five and six grand, it would be a straight trade for the commuter car I drive to work in the winter. This type of motorcycle transportation system has a cargo carrying capacity of over 3000lbs, so it would comfortably carry a bike or two.

Tiger to scale
in that van.

The Tiger, a fairly substantial adventure bike, is about 89 inches long, 34 inches wide at the handlebars and 55 inches tall. The cargo area in this kind of van is 124 inches long, 53 inches wide at the narrowest point of the rear wheel arches and about 53 inches tall. With the windshield removed, even two tall adventure bikes would fit in the back of this thing with only a bit of handlebar overlap. Two six hundred pound bikes would barely dent half the load capacity of the van. It would barely feel a single bike at all.

With the Tiger (and maybe a Super Tenere) loaded in the back, we could make the great escape south on the week after New Years.

It’s an all day trip to Knoxville.

If we left on New Year’s day we could be in Pigeon Forge on the edge of the Smokey mountains that night.

Monday morning we could hit one of a number of local motorcycle friendly routes. There are so many choices that other than a freak snow storm, we’d be on excellent riding roads, making miles in January.

Best Western Toni has a sale!

Pigeon Forge is nestled right in the middle of it all and their winter temperatures feel downright spring-like compared to what we have up here – hovering around 9°C on average. It’s cool, but no cooler than riding in the mountains around Phoenix was last New Years. On warm days we might get right up into the high teens Celsius. It’s a bit of a chance, but the reward would be getting some beautiful winter rides in while the north is under a blanket of snow.

Compared to the Californian coast, you can get fantastic hotel deals down Knoxville way. The Best Western in Pigeon Forge has a $74 Canadian a night deal on, and it’s a 4+ star reviewed place with indoor pools and hot tubs and included breakfast; the perfect launching point for a series of rides.

Lots of pretty roads around Pigeon Forge

Being a regular winter work week for most people, the roads would be empty. The Tail of the Dragon is only 54 twisty miles down the 321 from Pigeon Forge, and at that time of the year it’ll be anything but packed. The Dragon is just one of many excellent motorcycling roads in the Great Smokey Mountains area.

After exploring the Smokey Mountains from Monday to Thursday, we’d get a good night’s sleep and make the drive back back north into the frozen darkness on Friday (giving us a spare day or two in case of weather). The costs aren’t anything like trying to get out to California. With no airfare or motorcycle rental, the most expensive bits aren’t there. On top of that I’d get to ride a bike I love instead of getting on a rental I’m ambivalent about.

Compared to the seven grand California week, this one comes out to about sixteen hundred bucks depending on how getting my hands on a cargo van goes. There is more of a chance of weather getting in the way but if it holds out it’s a dramatically cheaper way to ride some fantastic roads in the middle of winter.

Maybe I could get Enterprise Rent-a-van to sponsor the trip…

Cost breakdown:
– swapping out the Mazda2 for a van, I think I can about break even there. I only use the Mazda for the 10 minute commute to work in the winter – the van could easily do the same thing for not much more in gas because the commute is so short.
– gas down and back (assuming 15mpg) ~1500 miles = 100 gallons of gas ~380 litres @ $1 a litre = ~$400Cdn in gas for the van (gas is cheaper in the States).
– Food & toll costs on the commute, say $100 each way: $200US ($250Cdn)
– Hotel for the week (Sunday night to Friday morning) in Pigeon Forge: $411Cdn
– Daily bike gas & food costs: say $100US ($150Cdn) per day, so for Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu it’d be about $600Cdn

All totalled up, that’s 2 days of travel and four days on two wheels in Tennessee for about $1600 Canadian dollars. That’s $5400 cheaper than the same amount of time away in California, and with six less airports.

the end of comments in a flattening media-hierarchy

Oh, the incivility!

Recently the Toronto Star turned off online comments on their website. I beat them to it by about a year. I was recently asked why I would do that. Don’t I want people to interact with my online content?

I sure do! And if they want to they can share my blog and then comment on it to their heart’s content. What do I possibly get out of running a comments section on a blog? Nothing! If you ask for a login no one bothers to do it, if you allow open, anonymous comments you get buried in advertising and nastiness, the typical by-products of human interaction.

With the advent of pervasive social media the idea of needing a comments section within your online content has had its day. Anyone reading online content has their own social media presence of some sort nowadays. They are more than welcome to leverage that in order to comment on my content. In doing so they share my content. It’s the least they can do if it prompted them to have an opinion on it that they want to share.

We’ve moved from stratified, traditional, paper based media delivery though early adopter online media delivery to a more mature, everyone-has-a-presence-online media delivery system (nicely explained in this essay lambasting education’s inability to free the essay from its millennium of bondage). Embedded comment sections are a hold-over from an earlier internet where online readers tended not to have their own online presence.

Digital technology is forcing an increasingly flat media-scape. Millennials spend almost no time in traditional media. They could barely pay attention to Star Wars in the theatre when I was there last week. I’ve stopped showing videos in class because asking Millennials to watch media simultaneously is alien to them and frustrating for me. In a world where people distrust and often ignore the patronizing nature of traditional media it’s best not to fight the flow.

If you’re determined to hang on to the comment section in your online content you’re swimming against the current. You’re assuming that your content is somehow more established, more authentic, more valuable. You are belittling your visitors’ online presence by making them work in yours. It’s ultimately about you refusing to surrender control of your content in an increasingly democratic communication medium. That idea of control is a holdover from traditional, paper-based media hierarchies, it isn’t surprising that a newspaper struggled with this. You’ve got to let it all go Neo.

If you want insipid examples of human nastiness and stupidity you’ll find them online, especially in anonymous, internal comment sections. I’d long stopped reading The Star’s comment section for this very reason. I also tend to blacklist those brave (often conservative) souls on twitter and other social media who hide behind anonymous or fake user names. They feel very brave and are usually overly aggressive in their anonymity.

What’s funnier are those people who create social media presences based on their real self and then proceed to advertise their ignorance to the world. If someone is going to confuse Twitter with texting there isn’t much we can do for their employment prospects. People who are nasty online tend to get bitten though. It’s a self correcting process and it’s happening less and less because we’re getting better at it.

This flattening media-scape isn’t just hurting traditional media, it’s also snapping at people who don’t realize that their reach has changed. Democratizing media means empowering people who have no experience with publication, and make no mistake, every time you post on social media you’re publishing to the entire planet. People in Timbuktu can read your tweets if they are so inclined.

There will come a point when there have been enough cautionary tales and social experience with self-publication that people will learn best practices and the vast majority will realize just how empowered and potentially dangerous we’ve all become in our flat new world.

In the meantime, if people want to comment on my content they’re welcome to share away, but I’m not providing a comments section because it belittles my reader’s own online presence and dilutes my material with mean and often irrelevant comments.

Part 1: Magical Technologists

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C. Clarke

I’m reading Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, and in the opening he compares computer programs to Harry Potter’s magical spells. It seemed spurious when I read it, but now I’m wondering how it looks from other eyes.

I’m the go-to tech guy at school, and I dig the position. I’ve joked before about how people need to sacrifice a chicken (or just wave a rubber one over the computer) if they want something to work, but now the metaphor is resolving a bit more.

Today our soon to retire head of guidance came in all worked up because he couldn’t take a document and put it in his powerpoint. He was using and old, hobbled, board laptop with an ancient copy of, well, everything on it; it was state of the art in 2002 when he got it.

I copied his (wordpad!) file onto a USB key, opened it on my competent, not-board computer (it actually uses Windows 7 instead of XP – the ONLY OS of choice for our board) and MS Office instead of Wordperfect. I opened the DOC in Office (which just works, unlike Wordperfect on the board laptop) and then screen grabbed the guidance material he wanted into two jpegs. I then copied them onto the USB and moved them back over to his sad, old laptop. In moments I had one of the jpegs filling a slide on his powerpoint. After I did the first one, I got him to do the second one. He was happy, it all worked, and he even had some idea of how to put jpegs into powerpoint too.

Looking at the order of operations above, it looks pedantic and pretty this/then/that to me, but many people reading it would get lost in the acronyms or the logical sequence of it. It assumes an understanding of what works with what and how to bypass difficulties around software not cooperating, among other things.

From another point of view, it might look like I pulled out my own, newer, better wand (laptop), and made some arcane gestures (trackpad), spoke some gobbledigook (tech-talk) and dropped a regent into the spell (the USB key). and made what seemed impossible possible. Without comfort level, experience and equipment, it looks like I made something happen out of nothing.

The councilor with him said I was the secret technical mystic they turned to when things just didn’t work.

I try to be transparent with what I’m doing, and explain it to people as I’m doing it, but I see their eyes glaze over when I use the first acronym and then they just sit there with a happy smile on their face as the issue gets resolved. I’d like for everyone to be able to cast their own spells, but I fear many would rather just applaud the magician.

Which takes me back to Harry again. There’s a scene where Dumbledore escapes from the evil Ministry in spectacular fashion. He could have just disappeared, but he doesn’t, he does it with a flourish. Kingsly the auror says afterwards, “Dumbledore may be a criminal, but you’ve got to admit, he has style!”

If you’re going to be a tech-magician, and if you’re reading this you probably already are, then don’t cast your spells flat, be like Dumbledore, have some style!

Part 2: Digital Horcruxes

Staring Into The Abyss

Originally published on Dusty World in October, 2012:

I was just reading Doug Peterson’s Blog about how a number of edublogs are looking at the Amanda Todd story. I can understand the urge, but I’m coming at this from a different angle than most.

I’ve had a particularly difficult year dealing with suicide. In September I received an email from the coroner with a PDF attached. In many pages of astonishing detail I read the science that showed that my Mum’s death wasn’t an accident, that she took her own life. When you’re staring into an abyss like this the rhetoric currently in the media sounds astoundingly shallow. Suicide isn’t a rational choice, or even an emotional one, it’s an existential choice, the most profound one imaginable.

To pin an action like this on a single motivation (ie: cyber bullying so you can amp up anxiety around technology use with children) is simplistic and manipulative. I have no doubt that cyber bullying played a part, but to base suicide on a single motivating factor is asinine and seems more in line with pushing a political agenda than recognizing a complex truth.

When I was in high school I was big into Dungeons and Dragons. At the height of the hobby a kid in Orangeville killed themselves and the press gleefully pinned the cause on D&D, causing panic in parents and making me, as an avid player, feel isolated and vilified. They’d done something similar a few years earlier with Ozzy Osborne and another suicide. This kind of simplification fills up the reports of the chattering classes, and helps idiots create fictions that let them push agendas. That many in the public swallow it is a lasting sadness.

From an educator’s point of view, this is being treated as a management issue. I fear suicide is being used to manipulate cyber bullying as a political tool – which under my circumstances seems particularly callous. Rhetorical stances like ‘suicide is never an option’ and rationalizations abound in an attempt to direct this very difficult aspect of human behavior. Control is the goal, based on a very real fear of the outcome. But the rhetoric still comes on in response to the presses’ assertion that cyber bullying caused this death.

I’ve been staring into this abyss for a while now. It has made work difficult, it has made life seem like the self made experience that it is, which is exceedingly heavy if you’re like most people and happy with distractions and assumption as your reason for being. Nothing is inherently valuable, life is what we make it – literally. In my Mum’s case she was battling mental illness and was finally on medication for it – which she overdosed on. Did mental illness play a part in her death? No doubt. Was it the only cause? Not remotely.

The suicide I’m dealing with didn’t happen in a vacuum, I suspect none of them do. I also suspect that none of them has ever, ever happened for a single reason. There is no doubt that Amanda was bullied, and that this was a factor in her suicide. What I question are the responses that focus on dealing with a single social issue that has always and will always exist as though resolving it would somehow magically have prevented her death.

People are naturally social and competitive. Bullying is a result of this basic human nature, it always has been. The twist now is that many of the clueless digital natives are publishing what has always happened privately for everyone to see. Instead of being seen as a window to a previously hidden behavior, the media has dubbed this a cyber bullying epidemic and called into question the very technologies that have made a problem as old as humanity obvious.

The educational response has been to try and get out in front of this invented epidemic. As someone who has circled this abyss, I’d ask everyone involved in education to consider the situation from more than a single perspective. Please do not simplify suicide into a misunderstanding that can be rationalized away.

We are not serving our students well if we simplify this into an administrative exercise solely to reduce suicide numbers. Appreciate the complexities of suicide and try to see the people who end up in this darkness as whole people with many interconnected, complex issues, and not something to be convinced, coerced, manipulated or managed into doing what is more comfortable for everyone else.

Suicide is complex, terrifying and present. It deserves our full attention, not a soundbite.

Art Therapy.

Affidavits & Broken Ownerships

The XS1100 is finally mine. After buying it off a clueless millennial who had managed to lose all useful paperwork associated with the bike, I’ve been able to re-establish ownership. Here’s how you do it:

In order to reconnect continuity of ownership you need to get a signed affidavit from a legal notary. Your local town government will have a notary on hand that can sign, stamp and date your declaration of ownership (they’ll offer this as a service). I stopped in at the Centre Wellington Town Offices in Elora and explained the situation (clueless kid was previous owner, etc). I showed them the ownership history the MTO had printed out for me (all six pages of it!), and the letter of sale from the previous owner. I also said I’d made repeated attempts to find the last legal owner (I suspect he’s deceased).

The county clerk (who is a notary) signed, dated and stamped the affidavit I provided (that’s it above), and I took it back to the MTO office the next day. In just a couple of minutes I paid the taxes on the sale price and the bike was attached to my name and a new ownership was printed out. They keep all the relevant paperwork, including the affidavit.

It’s a bit of a pain in the neck to reestablish ownership, but it’s not particularly expensive (twenty bucks to get it signed) and just takes a bit of leg work by the new owner. I’d argue a hundred bucks off the price for your time and costs to get the bike sorted – more if the previous owner is a tool (which they probably are if they lost all their paperwork).

Tablets are like high heels part 2

The original: Tablets are like high heels

A while back I tried to wrap my head around tablets and why they are so popular. I struggled using an original ipad and eventually gave up. A bit later I had an opportunity to use a windows tablet and almost broke it across my head in frustration. I’m a tech savvy type, so I kept at it. If tablets are so great, what wasn’t I getting?

This past year I got my hands on an Asus Transformer – the tablet that would convince me that tablets are handy (because it also comes with a keyboard). It only convinced me that Android has a long way to go in being a tablet OS.

I’ve got an ipad2 and the Asus Transformer floating around my department waiting for robotics to start, so I offered them out to my staff for test drives. 18 emails requesting the slower, lower memory, single tasking ipad, one saying either would be fine (he got the quad core multi tasking Asus). Marketing works. Perhaps that is the key to tablet success.

The sell on tablets is a hard one. You’re getting epic style (yes, Picard has epic style) along with interweb access. I want to be peppy, mobile and look like I come from the future! I want a tablet, right?

Turns out I don’t. After trying and trying to tablet up, it just isn’t sticking. It appears I’m at an impasse when it comes to tablets and how I use the internet.

When I go online it’s a full contact sport. I like to get into many things simultaneously (that knocks the ipad out), I’m constantly taking pictures from one thing and slapping them into another. I’m in and out of photoshop, dreamweaver and other processor heavy software, I want lightning fast responses, the ability to create media on the fly, a keyboard that rewards me for years of learning how to touch type, and a screen that offers a clear view of as many full colour pixels as I can lay my eyes on.

Keep your filthy touch screens!
I want no part of it!

I expect to be able to toss something I found online onto my twitter feed or Facebook or linkedin, or flickr or evernote, or Ning, or Edmodo or any of a million other online tools without having to wonder if it’ll copy and paste this time or not.

Touch screens drive me bonkers. Until I’m getting Iron Man like performance from my 3d touch interface, I’m not interested in taking stabs at data to see if I can pick them up over and over again. Watching people do this on tablet baffles me, they seem content to have to attempt the same action over and over again, resigned to it – the inefficiency drives me batty. The fact that you look like a lost mole looking for a hole makes me snort in derision!

Then there’s the screen itself. I’m the kind of guy who cleans the windscreen in his car often (or his glasses before he got the lasers). If I have to look through it, I want it pristine. Peanut butter encrusted high def screens hold no interest for me at all. Even a plain old finger print smudge makes me wonder why you’d pay for the high-def screen in the first place. I’m a visual person, I want my digital window to gleam.

Tablets are for people who like to watch, spectators. If you are a passive web media consumer, I’d suggest going back to TV, but if you’re determined to lurk, tablets are a good fit for you. You look nice, but can’t do much; we’re back to the high heels again.

If you’re an active web user, someone who produces (and by produce I mean generate media, not merely be a retweeting machine) as much as they consume, then you’re going to find that the all show

Geeky high heels.

and no go reality of tablets frustrating.

There is no single moment where I’ve wished for a tablet when I’ve had my ultrabook handy. Light, fast and fully capable, and running on a full/real operating system instead of the dumbed down mobile OSes on tablets; that is where my proclivities lie!

If I have to have a tablet at all, it’s a phone and it fits in my pocket. It has a good camera, can get me online in a pinch, the batteries last all day and it doesn’t run so slowly as to drive me around the bend. I’ll live with the lame mobile OS until they get better and it’ll do everything I’d ever need a tablet for without spending hundreds of dollars on a redundancy.

At any other point, when I really want to hit the web, I’ll turn to the laptop.

Tablets might be a good fit for how you go online if you’re a freaky lurker, but otherwise stay clear! You’ll look great using them, but you won’t actually be doing much. If that’s your M.O., an Apple genius is waiting to take your order.

Riding In the Desert On an Iron Horse with No Name… for reals this time

I’ve been through the desert on a lousy rental car with no name,
now I’ll do it properly on two wheels!

I landed a free trip to Arizona a couple of years ago for an educational conference. I’d never been to the desert before, it was a great trip but the cunning plan to rent a bike fell apart when I discovered they don’t rent over the Easter weekend when I was flying in.

Ever since driving a lousy Nissan rental car through the Superstition Mountains, I’ve wanted to go back and do it properly on two wheels. My time has come!

We’re doing a family trip to Arizona over the Christmas break. Opportunity never knocks twice, except when it does, like this time.

Eaglerider’s selections look all of a kind,
a kind that doesn’t really grab me.

Eaglerider has a huge selection of bikes, but AZ Ride has exceptional customer ratings. I’ll end up looking into both and seeing which grabs me.

AZ has the Indian Scout, which tickles a fancy (riding in the desert with an Indian Scout, c’mon!), along with the ZG1400 Concours, which I’m curious about for obvious reasons.

Eaglerider has a lot of Harleys and a smattering of other very heavy offerings from other manufacturers. In other locations they offer Triumphs but not in Phoenix. Scraping floor boards doesn’t make me think of spirited riding, it makes me think of a poorly designed motorcycle. Lugging a massive hunk of iron that can’t corner around the desert doesn’t strike me as a good time.

Looking at what’s on offer, and taking into account the customer ratings on Google, I think I’ll be giving AZride a go. They’re both up the right end of Phoenix to get to easily, so location isn’t a factor. I’ll be aiming at a Concours if my son wants to come with or the Scout if I’m solo, then it’s off into the Superstition Mountains for a day… or is it?

309kms/192 miles, with that many bends should make for a good day of riding

The road to Roosevelt is something else. I skipped it in the Nissan rental car, but on two wheels it might be reason enough to live in Phoenix. It’s about 80kms of serious switchbacks through breathtaking high desert, except it’s a dirt road! All my day dreaming about riding switchbacks of smooth Arizona tarmac aren’t happening unless I go the long way around and stay on paved roads.

Once up on the plateau I’ll make a point of stopping at the Tonto National Monument, which is a magical place. The ride back down the other side offers a couple of nice stops, but also some tedium. If that road to Roosevelt is as magical as it looks, I might just come back that way.

How do you say no to a road like that? AZride has a BMW 800GS Adventure, but a ride like this would be the perfect time to try the new Triumph Tiger Explorer – alas, no one rents it. I’ve been eyeing the 800XCx as well as the new Explorer, but no one rents ’em. There is a Triumph dealer in Scottsdale. Think I could convince them to let me have a 300km test ride along that crazy road?

***

In a more perfect world I’d rent bikes I’m curious about owning. A short list would include:

The new Triumph Bonneville with the Scrambler package (favourite classic) – It’d also look awesome in the desert!

A Kawasaki Z1000 (favourite naked bike), though Kawi just came out with a Z800, which I’d also like to have a go on – but I’d be trapped on pavement.

The Kawasaki H2 (because it’s bonkers) – but not so good on a dirt road in the high desert…

The Ariel Ace (because it’s sooo pretty) – but I suspect it lacks off road chops.

I’m in a conundrum now. I really want to ride out of Apache Junction on the Apache Trail, but the bikes I want to ride are all pavement specialists while the adventure bikes I’d want to rent aren’t available to ride.

Meanwhile Triumph cruelly taunts me with their lovely new machines.

Damn it!

FOLLOW UP

Instead of turning left before Globe,
head on towards Show Low. The
roads be magic there!

All is not lost. If we’re on pavement for the ride there is a nice triangle that’ll make for a fine high-desert ride. The road north out of Globe into the higher mountains looks like a corker too. I don’t think I’ll be suffering too much if I can’t ride the Apache Trail. Either of those would be a blast on a big Connie.

Now to find a day when the weather is cooperating and see if I can make this happen.

Midnight Thoughts

What we have here is a Yamaha XS1100 ‘Midnight Special’. It looks like it needs some love and is for sale for $500 along with some extra parts. The flash from the phone makes this ’70s bike look pretty disco!

The XS1100 is a late ’70s/early ’80s ‘super’ bike. From what I’ve read it’s Yamaha’s Vincent Black Shadow. You’re spoiled for choice as far as customization goes with the XS1100. It’s a big, air cooled engine with the old fashioned dual rear shocks. It begs to be café racered a bit.

As a tear down/rebuild, this makes a pretty good basis for a winter project. It would be my first air cooled bike, as well as my first tear down/rebuild.

The Clymer manual is readily available (I’m finding Haynes manuals lacking in covering many motorcycles). This could be a winter sanity thing.

Parts on Order Makes me Stop & Consider

Over the Easter long weekend I’ve rebuilt four carbs and put them back together again. Unfortunately they won’t go back on nicely thanks to two decade old rubber boots, so they’re on order. It’s nice to have a forced day off.

If you’re ever rebuilding carbs on a ZG1000, and the airbox on it is more than ten years old, it’s a good idea to get some airbox ducts (that connect the airbox to the carbs). Supple, soft rubber is important when connecting these up. I tried for a frustrating couple of hours to get them to join properly. This is especially difficult when the inner boots are rock hard, even when warmed up. Steve suggests new carb boots to cut down on swearing, he ain’t kidding:

Sixty bucks and should be here by
Wednesday.

I contacted my local dealer and they can have boots here by Wednesday. They’re charging less than they are going for on ebay or online retailers. Score one for my local. Sixty bucks means less swearing and an easy install. Wayne, the Yoda-like parts guy at Two Wheel, says you’re lucky to get two decades out of a set as they harden over time and eventually split.

With the weather going sideways again, there won’t be much of a chance to ride any time soon. Hopefully this means I can get this odyssey finished and the bike back on the road by the time the weather clears again.

The airbox ducts/boots that need replacing – the old ones are not only beaten up, but they’ve gone hard.
Even putting heat on them doesn’t soften them up. Note the flat spots up by the airbox that show you which
way to turn the boots.

Heating up the airbox boots – but they’re too old!

A big empty where the airbox and carbs usually go

This ordeal has me rethinking things. My wife suggested I unload everything except the old XS1100 and buy a regular motorbike that is more dependable. When I started riding I got a dependable bike that just needed some cosmetic work. It was so dependable it was tedious. Since then I’ve gone back in time and enjoyed the world of carburetion and two decade old rubber, perhaps a bit more than I wanted to.

I genuinely enjoy mechanics, but never when there is a time demand on it. I’ve already missed three riding opportunities because of the stuttering Concours, and this irks me. The idea of wiping the slate clean and moving forward appeals. I started riding late and moving through a number of bikes seems like a way to catch up on my lack of experience. Maybe it is time to put sentiment down and move on. I didn’t start riding to watch the few lovely days we have in a too-short riding season pass me by.

A Tiger? In my garage?

The little Yamaha and the KLX are gone now, netting me about $3000. As it happens, a 2003 Triumph Tiger is available just over an hour away for about that much. Come the end of the week I might be able to say, “a tiger? In my garage? Must have escaped from a zoo!”