Timothy King – Page 60 – Mechanical Sympathy

Troughs of Disillusionment

It might seem a bit negative, but this process is anything but. Adopting disruptive technology is a difficult business, those inflated expectations create a lot of hope and enthusiasm (not things we like in education). With experience comes rationalization and a better understanding of how new technology can actually help. It isn’t all sunshine and flowers,but without a bit of heedless optimism, this kind of adoption would be too difficult for most to consider.

Alanna recently put me onto this idea of how the innovation adoption cycle actually works. It’s an interesting way of understanding how innovation ripples across established practices.

Though it’s business focused, it demonstrates how even flexible businesses have trouble effectively adopting and harnessing technological innovation. Education is much more conservative and inflexible, so this process is weirdly distorted in ed-world where many people still think that a chalkboard is sufficient.

In ed-world that technology trigger is usually ignored, along with the hype, excitement and enthusiasm. A kind of wilful ignorance blinkers many educators from even looking at technology, it’s all just a fad. What finally drags them into it is the fact that what they’re doing in the classroom is sadly out of touch with what the rest of the world is doing.

While teachers complain about lining up at photocopiers but won’t consider alternatives, the rest of the world got excited about cloud based documents and moved online. Even as school departments worried over photocopying costs (and forests moaned under the weight of learning the way it has always been done), tech-hype excited businesses were frantically connecting up cloud based solutions and searching out efficiencies. In business, management is often the most agile, forward looking part of the enterprise; the early adopters. Business’s willingness to adapt and seek out efficiencies is usually a lead by example process. Educational leaders tend to get there by towing a conservative line, they’re not interested in actually changing anything.

Without the lead-by-example business approach, technological change in education only seems to happen when there is no other choice. When a disruptive technology is finally so overwhelmingly apparent that educational management is forced to consider it, they aren’t leading by example and the vast majority of the people within their organization don’t want it either. Status quo rather than improvement is the point of education.

When it comes to education, we begin in the trough and usually don’t get out of it:

We ignore the trigger and have none of the hype that encourages people to experiment and explore possibilities, there is no hope for new technology in the educational apparatus. Beyond the classroom there is hope, excitement and possibility before finally dropping into the trough of disillusionment. I’d argue that this range of emotion when exploring new technology allows early adopters a better chance to grasp what a new technology is capable of and allows them to eventually optimize their plateau of productivity.

In education we grudgingly begin in the trough, grumble about the entire process and then pick it up as poorly as possible, never exploring it, never revelling in the possibilities it might offer. When it gets difficult we drop it, having never wanted to do it in the first place. The poor support around embracing new technologies is just another symptom of this.

If you wanted a perfect example of how not to effectively integrate innovative technology, you need look no further than the education system. There are outliers within the system who push against the morass of conservative norms that manage and run education, but they struggle to find support, often having to find indirect ways to explore and integrate new technology.

As long as schools are administrated by the most conservative elements in education (academia loves conservatism), we will always struggle to stay abreast of innovation, whether it be technological or otherwise.

Two Recent Examples

#1: I got an HTC Vive virtual reality headset for the computer lab. It’s an uphill struggle to get any staff to try it (students? No problem). The general comment I get is, “what did that cost?” My standard reply is, “less than your photocopying budget.” The Board is unable to connect the SteamVR software needed to update the drivers and programs on the headset, so I’m trucking the desktop home each week to update it at home.

Even during those rare moments when we do get current technology in, there is no hype, only criticism and doubt. For someone who gets excited about the possibilities of technology, this is a very exhausting environment to be in.

#2: We requested a Glowforge desktop 3d laser cutter in for the tech-design lab. Even though it comes equipped with Hepa air filters and doesn’t require any exhaust, we were stymied by board safety people whose default position is ‘no’, regardless of any facts we could produce.

To A Thousand Islands & Back

We’re looking at a few days in The Thousand Islands at the end of Lake Ontario before my wife goes to a conference and my son and I head home. Fortunately, between here and there lie some of the best riding roads in Ontario. I finally get a chance to Ride the Highlands!

The ride out is going to be an avoid the GTA at all costs exercise (like most things are). Other than getting pinched in Newmarket, it should be a straight shot across the top of population. Port Perry is nice and once I’m past Peterborough, Highway 7 is a winding ride into Canadian Shield.

Where I drop off Highway 7 at Mountain Grove and cut down to the godforsaken 401 looks like a roller coaster of a road. A quick blast (no such thing any more) down the 401 should finish the trip at Gananoque where I’ll meet up with the family and we’ll hang out for a couple of days.

The Ride Back is an even greater attempt to avoid the GTA, but this time with a find the twisty roads vibe. Using ridethehighlands.ca I linked together a series of suggested roads to get my son and I back to South Western Ontario in the lest efficient but most pleasurable manner possible.

We meander north west from the east end of Lake Ontario before finally cutting south around the end of Georgian Bay.

If we leave Tuesday morning, we’ll overnight somewhere around Haliburton before finishing up the ride on Wednesday.

All told it should be about 1300kms of riding some of Ontario’s best roads.

LINKS
http://explorersedge.ca/ride-edge-check-2016-top-touring-roads-explorers-edge/
http://ridethehighlands.ca

30 Hours

Elora to Creemore to Owen Sound to Lion’s Head to Oliphant and back home again in about 30 hours. We started out as three and expanded up to seven at one point before finishing with the original three again. It’s amazing how much you can get done in a day…

Photos and video done on a Ricoh Theta 360° camera and my Samsung S5 smartphone.

Through the wind fields – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA

Elora Ontario on the bridge on 2 wheels #theta360 – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA

On the dock of Big Bay https://goo.gl/maps/eoWBzaD5FFN2 #theta360 – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA

Stills from the 360° camera…

Some other shots from the smartphone…

Perception is Reality, except when it isn’t

When I’m packing up the computer lab at the end of the school year I usually do it imagining that I won’t be back. For an introvert like me, teaching is an exhausting business. I don’t get recharged by people the way others seem to; people drain me. The thought of disappearing out the door and not returning is a happy one.

As the year wound down I came to realize that information technology has become like plumbing or electricity: no one thinks or cares about it unless it doesn’t work. Fortunately I’m good at IT and get a a lot of satisfaction out of solving problems in it (not to mention my staying sharp in technology allows me to teach it better), so even though it is nothing I’m contracted to do I still beaver away in the background trying to create a more accessible, current and consistent educational technology platform for our teachers to use.

I find the year end back slapping tedious at the best of times. Everyone gets well paid to do their job and no one I know in the building stops there, but what some people do above and beyond is considered more important. While some were having meetings and planning presentations, I was hand bombing over a ton of ewaste out the back door of the school to a local charity. They have DD adults dismantle electronics and then make enough recycling it to pay for their charity work. It isn’t attention grabbing, but it matters.

The energy other people are willing to spend in order to shine a light on themselves obviously pays off, I’m just not interested in it. Fixing things that are actually broken holds much greater interest for me. Changing people’s minds is exactly what I don’t like doing. People should be able to make up their own minds based on the facts, not on how convincing I am.

This year has offered me some wonderful moments. By far the most positive experience was our run at Skills Canada this time around. Seeing my student’s surprise at winning provincials and then our experience at Nationals was awesome.

Another powerful moment was seeing software engineering actually produce viable projects this time around. That class offers students a chance to experience team based software development and then publish code while still in high school, and it has improved dramatically year on year thanks to a lot of curriculum building.

The least professionally rewarding part of my year was participating in the school leadership team. The work done seemed pointless and time consuming, and seemed to follow a predetermined process rather than actually being creative and meaningful in any way. A colleague dropped out of leadership a few years ago and she claims it frees you up to spend your energy on more productive things. I think I’m following her approach when my headship ends this year.

The summer is for finding my mojo again, and then refocusing on what works best for my students in the fall. A list is already forming:

Continue developing curriculum that still challenges and differentiates even when I’m regularly expected to teach five sections of class each semester. Skills Canada plays a big part in that, allowing exceptional students a chance to see just how good they actually are. Skills preparation also directs all students towards higher standards.
Getting equipment in that allows students to learn hands-on, even when I have classes of 31 students in a room. Have you ever tried to set up a classroom with 31 computers and then arrange additional space for students to safely solder, build electronics and dismantle additional machines with hand tools? It requires fore-thought (and perhaps some kind of time and relative dimension in space device)
While all that is going on I’ll continue to apply my senior computer engineering courses to school IT support. This year we repaired 26 chromebooks that would otherwise have been chucked (repair costs were $1250, replacement cost would have been $9100), Having a genuine engineering challenge in front of students is invaluable to them, saves the school board thousands and keeps the teachers they are supporting in working tech, even if it is thankless work.
Windows 10 free upgrades end before August, so I have to get into school at some point before July 26th and update all the student PCs in my lab. Having a DIY lab is a lot of work, but it offers students unique access to software in a building otherwise tied down to out of date board software. It’s $135 a PC otherwise, so I’ll go in during the summer and save the board another four grand.

But first, some summer…

Note: I usually write a draft, edit it once and then publish it on Dusty World. This got heavily re-written three times with an eye to repairing problems rather than just complaining about them. The end of the school year often gets me into a rather negative state of mind.

And Then There Was One

When I started riding I began to voraciously consume motorcycling magazines. It took me a while to figure out which ones were good, but for a while there I just went all in. Being Canadian I thought it prudent to get a sense of Canada’s motorcycling media, so I made a point of looking past the wall of American magazines to find a Canadian voice.

The two I settled on were Cycle Canada and Motorcycle Mojo. CC seemed to be edited by a writer with lots of motorcycle experience (rather than an expert motorcyclist with little writing experience). Reading other magazines sometimes felt like reading a kid’s essay that they’d been made to write. No one seemed to revel in writing like Neil Graham did. He was consistently acerbic, challenging and opinionated, but he clearly enjoyed writing. I really looked forward to reading him each month.

I found Mojo a short while later. Its modern layout (many other Canadian magazines looked like they’d been designed on a photocopier), and crowd sourced travel pieces got me hooked. Mojo feels like it’s put together by a community rather than a small group of motorcycle industry insiders who don’t know how to write very well.

A few months ago CC arrived at my door. As I got into it I discovered that the two writers who do the majority of the heavy lifting in producing the magazine were leaving. Many readers seemed relieved to see the back of the complicated and difficult Graham, but I missed that voice. A magazine that was once a drop-everything-and-read-it proposition (and Canadian!) was now filled with news pieces that looked like they were written by an ESL writer in single, giant paragraphs; a computer could construct better grammar. The new writer they brought in was an old writer they’d let go. His MO seems to be to say something controversial at the beginning of each article even if what he’s saying is inconsistent from page to page. The article on the new Harley Davidson is making fun of sport bike riders, the article on a sports bike makes fun of cruiser riders, and his recent piece on the new Honda Africa Twin allowed him to take pot-shots at adventure bike riders. I get no sense of who he actually is or what he likes. This approach seems disingenuous and makes me hesitate to trust him.

The newsletter modelled magazines that feel like they are driven by industry interests rather than independent editorial opinion have already been dropped. Mojo & CC were my only Canadian subscriptions to renew, but now it’s down to a single Canadian mag. The hole left in the Canadian motorcycling publication landscape by Graham leaving Cycle Canada has made a sure thing a has-been.

In the meantime I’m looking world-wide for my motorcycle periodicals. The three I’ve settled on are Motorcycle Mojo (Canada), Cycle World (US) and BIKE (UK). The last two are driven by professional writers who know motorcycles and not only write well, but seem to enjoy doing it. I’ve never read a complaint about having to fill up space with writing or meet deadlines in either, although this seems to be a common subject for editorial discussion in many Canadian magazines.

I’m not reading any more magazines, Canadian or not, that make me feel like I’m reading an essay a kid was forced to write for school. If the writing is that difficult, don’t work for a magazine. Writing is a skill unto itself, and it should be something you enjoy (it’s what will make you work to improve it instead of just trudging up to deadlines while complaining about them in print). Just because you’re an expert in the subject area doesn’t mean you’re an expert at communicating it in writing. Life’s too short to read things written badly by people who aren’t that good at it and couldn’t care less about their writer’s craft.

Flying: The Antithesis of Riding a Motorcycle

No Moncton Airport, you can’t cheer me up with a rainbow.

I’m in the middle of a five hour wait at Moncton Airport for a flight back to Toronto and then a shuttle up to Centre Wellington. All told it’ll be a 2pm to midnight commute, all on public transit. Ten hours of tedium, uncomfortable seats and no leg room… and constantly being reminded that you’re much bigger than most people.

To fend of the insanity of canned air, lousy, overpriced food and being herded like cattle at an abattoir, I’m dreaming of the best possible way to get home.

Riding from Moncton would offer a geographical opportunity as the Appalachian Mountains are in the way. The best route I can manage on Google maps takes me through Maine, Vermont and New York to Niagara Falls, before a quick blast up the QEW home.

Anything out in the wind on two wheels would be better than this synthetic hell I find myself in. At the moment I’d opt for a Honda VFR800 Interceptor and a good set of leathers, and nothing else. My only goal: to wind my way across some mountains to home.

If I left at 2pm from Moncton I’d have gotten to Augusta, Maine by about 8pm in the evening. A good sleep on a real bed and I’d chew up the remaining eleven hundred kilometres home the next day, wind blown, engaged and full of feeling instead of slowly dying inside in a darkening airport terminal waiting to be herded onto a plane.

Skills Canada Nationals

I’ve never been on a provincial team before, it’s quite the experience. In addition to the unnatural process of leaving school, getting on an aeroplane and flying away from the classroom in early June, it also puts you together with all the other gold medalists, some of whom you lost against in other categories, except now you’re team mates.

There are a lot of different students on Team Ontario, from the quietest introverts to the loudest extroverts you can imagine, yet they have all demonstrated advanced skills in their particular field of study and are proven craftspeople. They range from cocky and arrogant to nervous and uncertain; there is no typical Skills Ontario gold medalist.

There are a lot of different ways to coach a Skills competitor as well and the teachers here reflect that, but the one thing they all have in common is engagement – I’ve yet to see a shrug of indifference from anyone. I’ve been accused of not always playing well with others, but when the others are this capable and willing, it’s hard not to get caught up in it all.

We did a solid day of sight seeing yesterday (photos below) and today we’ve had the day off before the opening ceremonies in a couple of hours. I’m studiously taking notes so I can understand this new part of the process we haven’t done before.

I’ve brought the most experienced IT/Networking student I’ve had to date. It occurred to me the other night that IT, like many other stochastic technology skills, depends largely on experience driven intuition to overcome unclear problems in complex systems. A student who was willing to try and fail many times ended up developing into my best candidate because of that resiliency. I’ve brought students more skilled in academics to Skills Ontario, but never seen them break through because everything had to be just so. You can’t clarify a problem let alone solve it if you aren’t willing to flounder around in the dark trying things first. If you read any modern text on how to teach, floundering around isn’t favourable to a transparent, linear process of problem resolution. If everyone else keeps doing that, we’ve got an edge.

If you’re involved in Ontario education at all, the hashtags to follow on twitter are #teamON and #teamOntario, and the National Skill Competition hashtag #SCNC2016. Re-tweets of Team Ontario are appreciated (there is a team spirit award based on social media participation).

Later today and tomorrow we’ll be knee deep in the competition, and then I’ll be able to assess how well we prepared for this unknown. Until then, isn’t New Brunswick beautiful?

Team Ontario at Hopewell Rocks in The Bay of Fundy

Pointe-du-Chêne

Dinner at Catch 22 in Moncton

9lb lobster is watching you – 9lb lobster is unimpressed

Tiger Chains & Parts

Top gear at 4000rpm has me going
about 100km/hr, so it looks like I have
stock sprockets on the Tiger.

A one tooth more relaxed front sprocket
knocks a couple of hundred RPM off
the bike at 100km/hr and takes the
edginess off low speed throttle.

Chain & Agony: The Return

Now that I’m off a shaft driven bike, I’m back into the black magic that is chain geometry! A trip to Gearing Commander has me working out the details of an ’03 Triumph Tiger 955i’s chain and sprockets. The stock set is a 18T (eighteen tooth) front sprocket and a 46T (forty-six tooth) rear sprocket. The chain is a 530-50 114.

A number of riders suggested a 19T (nineteen tooth) front sprocket to calm the bike down a bit. The chain and sprockets are happy right now, but when it finally comes to a change, I think I’ll go the 19T way. Motorbike sprockets run backwards from bicycle ones – the smaller sprocket is attached to the engine, so the more teeth, the bigger the gearing.

LINKS & CHAIN INFORMATION

The 530 114 chain on the Tiger has a pitch of 5/8 of an inch (the 5 is 5 x ⅛” – a 4 series chain would be 4 x ⅛” or half an inch of pitch). Five-eighths pitch chains have a roller diameter of 0.400″. The 30 part of the 530 refers to roller width, which in this case is 3 x ⅛” or 3/8th of an inch. A 520 chain would have a roller width of 2 x ⅛”, or a quarter of an inch. If you want to understand chain sizes, get a handle on that rule of 8 (all the numbers refer to eighths of an inch).

The 114 refers to the number of links in the chain (its length).

Sprocket Centre

How to change a chain on a Tiger (video)
Triumph Tiger 955i parts list

Gearing Commander

Chain Specifications

Sprockets & Chains explained

<- 520 and 530 chains & sprockets widths compared

Tiger Changes of Oil

A fifty dollar US ($300CDN) magnetic
oil drain plug.

Triumph magnetic oil drain plugs.
M14x1.5×16
(that’s a metric 14mm width, 1.5mm distance between the threads, 16 mm long drain plug).

Entertaining Triumph oil drain plug banter (and the idea to put hard drive magnets on your oil filter, which is what I’m doing instead of ordering an expensive custom drain plug from The States).

The Tiger has been using a bit of oil (which is evidently within spec) but I don’t know what the previous owner’s mechanic put in it – putting in not Mobil 1 Synthetic (which Triumph states is the preferred oil) would be a great way to make money on an oil change. If I swap in the good stuff, then I know what’s in it.

I’m also putting on a K&N oil filter with a higher spec than the stock one and putting a couple of hard drive magnets on the bottom of it to catch any metal shavings dancing around in there.

I did the oil change yesterday. I’ve done thousands of oil changes (it put me through university). If that oil was changed last fall I’m a monkey’s uncle. The Triumph filter on it had rust on it, the drain plug didn’t look like it had been taken off any time recently. Either the previous owner didn’t do it, or his mechanic lied to him. The oil was black and punky too, looking like it had been in there a long time.

With that all done I’ll now look to see how much oil I’m missing every thousand kilometres (it’s 3-400ml at the moment – but goodness knows what was in it or for how long). The moral here is change the oil when you buy a used bike – you can’t trust what happened before it was yours and oil is vital to keeping an engine running well. I’m looking forward to seeing what new, correct oil does for the bike moving forward.

Other than keeping it shiny and lubricating cables and controls, there isn’t much more needs doing.

It’s supposed to be a beautiful long weekend. I’m hoping to get out for some time on my very orange Tiger in my very orange Tiger shirt.

Overnight & Doable

Alright, some of the recent day dreaming has been pretty extreme. With all the Ride the Highlands material I’ve been seeing recently, how about this…

The Longer Map
Bancroft Motor Inn
Saturday: Elora to Bancroft: 357kms
Sunday: Bancroft back to Elora via Algonquin: 561kms

Alternate shorter map
Saturday: Elora to Barry’s Bay: 412kms
Sunday: Barry’s Bay to Elora: 453kms
Balmoral Hotel

The longer route:

100kms shorter:

It’s also handily central in the province – the easterners could meet up with the westerners at a central location, somewhere like the Opeongo Mountain Resort (3 bedroom cottages for $150 a night!). Ride up Friday afternoon, settle in, leave everything in the cottage and enjoy a day of riding light on Saturday, Saturday night around the camp fire and then riding home on Sunday. That’d be one heck of a weekend. If it worked out well we could do it again at the end of September in the fall colours.

Dash to Ushuaia

The hardest financial part about a long trip is being out of work. It’s not just costing you for the trip, it’s probably costing you even more for not being at work, but I got lucky in that department. From the beginning of July until the end of August I’m off, and with the semester winding down all I can think about is how I’d best use that time. With the paycheque covered, could I get to Ushuaia in the time I have off?

600km days in North America seem reasonable, and I wouldn’t want to lollygag around where I live anyway. The point of this trip would be to go far in a relatively short time. Moving through The States quickly also means not coughing up for first world accommodation any more than I have to. 600km days would wrap up the North American bit in five days.

Mexico is where it starts to get interesting, and it’s also fairly straightforward, though it gets dodgier the further south you go. Travelling the length of Mexico means just over two thousand kilometres of riding. At a reduced 400kms/day (more in the north, less in the south), I’d be at the border to Guatemala in another five days. The urge to photograph would increase exponentially as I got into cultures and geographies I’ve never experienced before, so more time wouldn’t be wasted.

Central America is, by many accounts, the slowest part of riding down the Americas. From the southern border of Mexico to the Colon ferry terminal in Panama is only 2300kms, but in that time you cross six international borders that aren’t exactly state of the art. At a further reduced average of 200kms per day, it would be a twelve day ride crossing those borders, mountains and rain forests to Panama. Thanks to the one certain way of getting around the Gap closing down, those twelve days through Central America needn’t be rushed.

Crossing the Darien Gap looked like it was solved with a brilliant ferry service to Cartagena, Columbia, but the service appears to have stopped. There are other options, but run much less regularly and are more expensive. The best seems to be the Stahlratte, which will take motorbike and rider to and from Panama to Cartagena in quite nice circumstances for about the price of your typical Canadian airline ticket. The scheduled trips for 2016 pose problems though.

The Pan-American Highway portion of the ride is 10.300kms, and involves four international border crossings (five if you count the second Chilean crossing in Tierra del Fuego). At 500km average days I’d be looking at 21 days of travel to get down the spine of South America to the end of the world.

It’s another three thousand kilometers back up Argentina to Bueno Aires in order to drop off the bikes for shipping back to Canada. That’d be another six days at 600kms/day back to the big city and the flight home.

The Darien Gap poses problems because it throws the schedule off. With the ferry not running it’s either a chartered boat (expensive, timing not great) or air freight (expensive but timely). The schedule below is using the Stahlratte’s 2016 schedule:

… but even with those slack days before the trip over the Darien Gap, it still just fits into a summer off. Air freight over the gap is also an option that could shift those six days in waiting in Panama to the push down South America.

Shipping back from Buenos Aires looks possible but unclear. The most likely connection would be overseas from B.A. to NYC, probably getting the bikes back towards the end of October. A weekend flight to NYC, picking up the bikes and riding home would be the final bit of this epic journey.

That guy already looks like he’s on his
way to Ushuaia !

He builds entire luggage systems,
knows his way around a firing range,
and brews beer, and that bike is up
for it!

To make it even more plausible I’d tap a couple of buddies who happen to have bikes totally capable of making this trip.

Jeff’s Super Ténéré and Graeme’s V-Strom would both be more than ready to join the Tiger on a trip south, and both riders have the kind of skills and experience that would allow them to carry me so that I barely had to do anything! Jeff has been riding bikes since biblical times and Graeme has years of riding experience plus a long stint in the military, so he can read maps and everything! I could wander around taking photos of butterflies and videoing bikes winding through the Atacama while these two made sure we were moving in the right direction. Having a couple of capable, experienced riders on this burn south would help keep it on schedule.

Adventure motorcycling bits are wicked expensive!

I’d take Austin’s advice in Mondo Sahara and change all the wearable bits (tires, chains, fluids, etc) prior to leaving, but otherwise the bikes would be as they are. A Triumph, Yamaha & Suzuki tumbling down the Americas over a brief summer. If we’re not getting manufacturer support (unless all three band together in an alliance against the unholy absolutism of celebrity BMW adventure motorcycling!), maybe we can chase down some support gear.

We could do a lot worse than an assisted walk through the Twisted Throttle adventure catalogue. They’d do popular Japanese bikes like the V-Strom and Super10, but they also offer a lot of kit for my older Triumph.

The last weeks of school get pretty manic. Daydreaming of massive rides that last all summer is a survival mechanism.

Links & Maps