Watching broadcast media, one of the giants birthed of industrialization in the Twentieth Century, struggle with the recent Olympics was enjoyable.
Early on, CTV’s London desk was showing video of a flash mob at Wimbledon. The broadcast anchor said, “I don’t get this at all, why would people do this? What a waste of time.”
He doesn’t get why people would do back flips to get on mainstream media? Dude, your entire career is predicated on what they are doing… did you enjoy getting made up for your camera time today? Does your agent do what those people are doing all the time just to get your mug in front of more cameras? Do you throw a fit when they bring you the wrong tie?
The ‘let them eat cake’ distance that the corporate broadcast media has from a bunch of sweaty fools having a good time on a hill at Wimbledon underlines how truly out of touch they are.
Technology has miniaturized and communications have become a widely distributed two-way medium, yet the corporate broadcast media cling to their unidirectional economic model, frantically milking it for all it’s worth before the weight of inevitability forces change. I’m not saying there won’t be a place for professionally created media, but technology is allowing for smaller, niche groups to make what they want, how they want, and do it well while still making a living selling to niche audiences. The days of centrally controlled media are ending because the need for expensive corporate backing are no longer a technical necessity.
Where once an artist had to gather the corporate power of a massive enterprise behind them in order to get their hands on the technology needed to broadcast their story, they now find themselves increasingly able to create their vision and distribute it themselves, assuming the wallowing dinosaur doesn’t have a room of lawyers on hand, which they do. Deinnovation by legislation. Deinnovation by lawsuit.
A couple of years ago I came across Quinn Norton’s brilliant column in MaximumPC on the calamity that was Nina Paley’s attempt to express her own miserable breakup using a complex mash up of Flash animation, Annette Hanshaw’s blues, and The Ramayana. To call this copyright theft is ridiculous… this mash up is insane (and brilliant – I use it every year teaching media arts). Yet Paley was run out of business by copyright trolls (lawyers) who look for out of date art, copyright it, then lay in wait, hoping to squeeze money out of something they purchased from other copyright lawyers – an open market of dead artist’s work being held to prevent new art from forming.
If that isn’t an example of the desperation of the broadcast media system, I don’t know what is. They are so intellectually bankrupt that they can only recycle and steal other ideas. The corporate media machine continually pumps out near identical films at virtually the same time, desperately trying to tap into cultural memes that they aren’t agile enough to keep up with. Indy and social media media create far more current, personalized and pertinent media in the early 21st Century, and younger viewers are cottoning on to it, even while everyone tries to dodge the wallowing dinosaur’s departments of lawyers.
There will always be money to be made in a good bit of story telling, and digital media is nothing if not a good bit of story telling (even the news). What we’re seeing now is a slow, painful adjustment as the habits we invented around expensive, industrially driven broadcasting give way to cheaper, individualized, technology supported media. Professional media isn’t dead, but we don’t require millions in corporate backing to produce it any more. Don’t expect an industry worth more than two trillion dollars to give up on squeezing it though.
I’d hope that instead of trying to cobble together another massive production, corporate mega-media would be trying to spin off divisions that support small, agile groups feeding niche markets, but I don’t imagine that’s the case. The problem with really big animals that are ideally suited to a specific environment is that they are horrible at adapting. They’re great while the ecosystem stays the same, but the minute the social media asteroid appears, they just keep trying to do what they’ve always done, thrashing around, hoping to hold off the inevitable, until they are extinct.
Note: thanks to Quinn & Nina, Sita will be shown again in the middle of our Flash animation unit this year. I’m looking forward to another year of grade tens wrestling with who owns what, what art is, how no one is free from influence, how The Beatles could steal other people’s musical influences and then lock down their own for ever, what is appropriation of voice, and the future of media art. That one little column led me to a wonderful teaching piece that is still raising hard questions for hundreds of students years later. Thanks!
As a family we attended a blacksmithing day at Happy Knife Forge last weekend. Highly recommended, it’s money well spent. Jason will not only show you the basics, but is keen to get you up and running as a blacksmith. My granddad was a coal merchant back in the old country and the smell of coke burning on the forge prompted a sense memory from the crib; it smelled like home.
I’ve ruminated on fabrication and micro-manufacturing on TMD before from a digital perspective using the latest techniques. Given the space and tools I’d quite happily spend my time designing and creating using everything from medieval blacksmithing through 20th Century metal working and on into 21st Century digital manufacturing techniques. Connecting these processes separated by time but with the same intent would produce some genuinely interesting and bespoke combinations.
I’ve had the itch to get back into welding for some time, but a lack of space and gear means I’m not while I’m where I’m at. The blacksmithing experience has me wanting to expand my metal working beyond just welding, which means even more space and kit getting added to the wish list. You can do a lot in a tight space, and I am, but when it comes to storing the chemicals and managing the heat in some of these processes, there is no substitute for space.
A property with an old industrial building on it would make for a fantastic restoration leading to a multi-millenial foundry covering everything from blacksmithing to digital design!
Given the time and resources I’d hit an intensive welding program, then set up my multi-millenial forge/shop/maker space with everything from blacksmithing tools through metal working and mechanical to 21st Century 3d scanning, digital modelling and printing. The forge would be in the corner of a repurposed, old brick building that also includes space for metalwork, all very fireproof. Across the floor in the same open concept.would be space for a paint booth/shot blasting station and plenty of mechanical workspace. Upstairs (open concept, with just a railing) would be digital design and manufacturing in a cleaner workspace. If I could walk out to that every morning to create, restore and repair, I’d hardly care if there were pandemics or anything else. Put it near some good riding roads (ie: not in Southern Ontario), and it’d be just about perfect.
I’ve been thinking about a digital workshop for a while now, but the blacksmithing experience has me thinking old school as well.
The future-garage scene in Big Hero 6 gets the digital side of it right.
After a long day at work I found myself watching the sky change colours and jumped on the Tiger for a ride down the river. It felt like riding through a Van Gogh…
All photos taken with a Ricoh 360 camera mounted on the windshield, autofiring every 8 seconds.
Photos are in reverse chronological order. Sunset was at 8:30pm – I was on the road from about 8:10 to 8:50pm.
If you want a breakdown of how to get on-bike 360 photos like this, check THIS out! If you really want to digitally flex, you can create a 360 ‘tiny planet’ stop motion film out of this kind of photography:
In January the president of the Ontario Association for Mathematics Educators (OAME) sent me an email after seeing our online activity around game development and coding and asked if I might present at their conference in May. If you’d have told high school me that I’d one day present at a maths conference I would have thought you’re having me on. For me, maths and science were the hammers that the education system used to teach me that I wasn’t good enough, but I’m rethinking that egotistical framing.
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One of my co-presenters also didn’t have a positive maths experience in high school and we were both worried that it would be like being back in class again. That’s where the teacher would single you out and make sure everyone in the room knew that you didn’t know what you were doing, then they’d fail you, usually with a caustic remark about how ‘this isn’t for you’. I’d internalized the idea that maths (and science) went out of their way to make me feel stupid, but after doing our presentation (everyone was lovely, of course), I’m reconsidering my failures in maths and science from another angle.
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We immigrated to Canada when I was eight years old. A lack of research had us moving to Montreal right after Bill 101 came in, which wasn’t great for a little kid from rural England. By 1980 we’d moved to Streetsville on the edge of Mississauga and that’s where I grew up. Various calamities happened both financially and emotionally while I was in high school. I didn’t play school sports because I worked every day after school from the age of 12 on. School sports, like maths and science, are for those privileged children of leisure who have the time and money to participate – that’s why we shape entire school cultures around them.
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In senior high school my dad was in a near fatal car accident that had him hospitalized for months. During that time I was working as well as doing all the home things that he usually did. This meant that the hours of homework meted out by maths and science teachers didn’t get the attention it demanded. The tedious and repetitive/rote nature of S&M homework didn’t help either. Before grade 11 science I was daydreaming of becoming an astronomer. After I failed it, not so much. High school accommodated my lack of socio-economic clout by guidancing me to go find a job that Canadians don’t like doing – like a good immigrant should.
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I dropped out of grade 13, worked as a night security guard (full time) while trying to attend Sheridan College for visual arts. I dropped out of Sheridan when I couldn’t get to class after not sleeping every night before class. Eventually I found my way into a millwright apprenticeship which offered me the economic stability I needed to finish high school, which I did at the age of 22. I eventually left millwrighting and went to university, finally settling on English and philosophy degrees, but even there my maths trauma haunted me.
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A requirement for my philosophy degree was to take the symbolic logic course. My first time through it was run by a computer science prof who didn’t like how big the class was so he used every rotten maths trick in the book (surprise tests, undifferentiated instruction, sudden changes in direction, etc) to shake out the ‘arts’ students who needed it for their degree. That course could also be used as an ‘arts’ credit for the STEM types who took it as a bird course. That prof succeeded in chasing out all the philosophy students from that philosophy course. The next semester I tried again, this time with a philosophy prof. I told her of my fear of maths and she went out of her way to differentiate both instruction and assessment. I ended up getting an ‘A’ on the mandatory course I thought I’d never finish. I can do maths and complex logic, just not when it’s weaponized against me.
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As a millwright I never had a problem tackling applied maths when I needed it. When I transitioned into information technology, again no issues using applied maths as I needed it to do my job. It appeared that I wasn’t as bad as maths as the education system had repeatedly told me I was, though I still carried that luggage with me.
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My anxiety was high as I got ready for this presentation. Alanna made a comment that resonated though. If you work in a secondary classroom you’ve probably heard teens talking about how this or that teacher ‘hates’ them. Alanna reminded me that this is a great example of everything-is-about-me teenage egotism. My maths and science teachers didn’t hate me and weren’t vindictively attacking me for my failures; no student matters that much. Having done this teaching thing for over two decades now, I can assure you that ‘hate’ isn’t something most teachers feel. To be honest, when we’re not at work even the most difficult students aren’t on our minds. For the teachers who do feel hate for students, you need to find another career.
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Looking past the teen-egoism of my own mathematical inferiority complex, I got along with my STEM teachers pretty well. I certainly wasn’t a classroom management headache. In retrospect, what happened to me in class wasn’t vindictive on their part, it was a result of my lowly socio-economic status. Had I been a stable, well off, multi-generational settler whose ancestors were given whole swarths of Canada for free, I’m sure we’d have gotten along just fine. Were I not in the middle of family trauma, perhaps I would have stuck it out. Had I been a student of a less creative nature who thrived in structure and repetition, I imagine I’d have found a place in STEM even without the financial means – I did eventually embrace my technical skills despite the system’s best efforts to alienate me from myself.
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Last week one of our maths teachers emailed the entire building asking how she could punish students who are skipping tests in order to give themselves more time to prepare for them. Our principal emailed all reminding everyone of Growing Success, but this didn’t stop a science teacher from jumping in with our written-in-the-1950s student handbook which still contains escalating penalties (including handing out zeroes) for late or missing work, even if that is directly contrary to Ministry direction.
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In my last round of IT testing for my grade 10s I left each chapter test available for three tries, and students could take it open book if they wished. When you finished the test it would even review it for you and tell you what the correct answers were and why, if you could be bothered to do that. Ample class time was provided to review the material both on screen and hands-on. You could not design a more equitable and differentiated approach to learning computer technology. Our class average on these three tries/open book tests/wildly-differentiated and in-class supported tests? 11.07/20 – that’s a 55% class average. Even when you differentiate and build in equity to support assessment in COVID-world classes, many students won’t bother doing any of it anyway, and this is in an optional subject they chose to take! I turned down the weight of those results, not because I think my subject doesn’t matter, but because the COVID malaise on students is real (it’s real on staff too, not that anyone cares) and holding them to pre-pandemic standards is neither compassionate nor pedagogically correct.
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If someone wants to skip a period to get more study time in, let ’em. What would be even better is having open and honest communications with your students to the point where they can simply ask for extra time rather than feeling like they have to skip because they know you won’t give give it to them They probably won’t use their extra time anyway and the result will be what it is. Clinging to schedules and testing that only examines rote memorization (another issue in STEM that produces A+ students who don’t know how to apply what they know), is the kind of undifferentiated and tedious ‘learning’ that made me despise maths and science in high school.
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After COVID swept through our family recently, my son returned to class only to get no lunches for days on end (while still recovering from the virus) as he took test after missed maths test. When he didn’t do well on them we had to intervene and ask for some compassion. Why do S&M subject teachers believe that curriculum comes before differentiation based on circumstances (especially IEPs!), or even basic wellness? We’re all in exceptional circumstances. I suspect these teachers believe that this ‘rigour’ makes them a credible and serious discipline of study. I’m not sure how you change that rigid culture founded on privilege, conformity and exclusion.
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My maths trauma in high school sent me on a crooked path before I was finally able to come to terms with my intelligence and abilities; it made me doubt myself and misaim my expectations. I’d hope public education would do the opposite of that, but it still doesn’t. We’ve got too many classes still predicating success on hours of homework using undifferentiated and repetitive rote learning under the assumption that everyone has the time and inclination to find success in that. It’s even worse now two years into a pandemic. During quadmesters it was particularly acute with students in S&M heavy quads telling me they were expected to do 4+ hours of homework EVERY DAY – even as the working ones were forced to take on extra hours as ‘heroic’ front line workers.
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In my classroom I aim to find every students’ talents and help them find digital pathways that will support them in our technology driven economy. My senior classes are supposed to be ‘M’ level post-secondary bound students (which is why they cap me at 31 like an academic calculus class), but in actuality the majority of my students do not attend university and good percentage go straight into the workplace. We also frequently have essential level and special needs students finding their way in our program because we differentiate even when the system holds us all back with an inequitable distribution of resources. My stuffed classes serving all pathways help make grade 12 academic physics classes with a dozen students in them happen because those very special kids need that credit for university.
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In order to find student strengths I focus on foundational skills like practicing an effective engineering design process, which is more about organization and self-direction than it is about technical details. I could drill them on tests about technical specifics and fail the ones who skip rote memorizing reams of facts for a variety of reasons (they can’t afford the time, their IEP doesn’t allow them learn like that, etc), but then I’d be doing exactly what was done to me in high school. That’d be a jerk move.
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“You! Yes, you! Stand still laddy!”
When we grew up and went to school
There were certain teachers who would
Hurt the children any way they could
By pouring their derision
Upon anything we did
And exposing every weakness
However carefully hidden by the kids”
We don’t need no education, but we all need direction to help find our strengths… especially in STEM.
Faster (2003) is a fast paced documentary with fantastic inside access to MotoGP. With long-form interviews with all the major names in the sport in the early 2000s, it offers you an accessible look at the sport.
I’ve been a Formula One fan since the early 1990s when I saw a rookie Michael Schumacher astonish in an inferior car. His race in the rain in Spain with only one gear cemented me as a fan. While I’ve always enjoyed the technology in F1 it’s the driving that really gets my attention. I’d much rather watch a Senna or a Villeneuve than a Prost or pretty much any of the modern crop of scientists at the wheel. I long for rain in a race not for accidents, but to see who can actually drive.
Faster showed me a sport where the human being is still the main element in creating speed. At one point one of the many interviewees said, “in MotoGP the rider is 80% of the equation and the bike is 20%, in Formula 1 it’s the other way round.”
After watching the last couple of seasons of Formula 1 I’m tempted to agree. Engineers practically drive the cars from the pits. Given the top car any one of the drivers would win with it. I’m no fan of Alonso, but he is a once in a generation talent, like Schumacher, or Senna, and he seldom lands anywhere on the grid except where his engineers place him. I’d love to see F1 with no live telemetry or radio contact, no driver aids and more open engineering options, but it’ll never happen. The F1 circus is on its way to Nascar – just a staged media event.
That 80/20 split is of much more interest to me as someone interested in how human beings and machines can combine into something magical. I really have no interest in seeing how quickly robots can travel around a track, it’s the human expression through machinery that fascinates me. It’s as apparent in comparing MotoGP to F1 as it is in driving a car or riding a bike on the road.
Maybe that’s the magic of this that I haven’t been able to articulate: motorcycling is complicated, challenging and offers you, the operator, a much more expressive means of interacting with your machine.
The other day I tried a variation on the on-bike 360° photography I’ve previously done. Rather than mount the camera on a flexible tripod on the front of the bike, I attached a carbon monopod to the rear top-box rack, extended it and put the camera on top.
The bottom part of the monopod had a screw in point. With that removed I could bolt this very light weight, carbon fibre monopod to the rear luggage rack (which itself is attached to the frame) very securely. In almost an hour of riding on typically lousy rural Ontario roads both the camera and monopod were very secure and the photos showed no evidence of wobble or blur.
With the camera over a metre above and behind my head, the three-sixty degree pinched perspective makes the bike and I look quite far away:
After doing a round at full extension (the monopod extends to just over five feet or 160cms), I reduced the bottom leg. I couldn’t see the results of the shots until I got back and I was worried that the full extended monopod would produce wobble and blur or be structurally stressed (it didn’t and it wasn’t). The monopod only weighs a couple of hundred grams and can hold 10 kilos or 22 pounds of gear – the Theta weighs less than a hundred grams.
With the camera reset closer to four feet above the back deck of the bike I did some more miles, including riding over some very rough roads. Even in those circumstances the rig was solid, unmoving and took sharp photos, even in the relatively poor light (it had been heavily overcast, foggy and raining on and off all day).
The pavement leading up to the West Montrose Covered Bridge is particularly rough, but even then the photos were clear and sharp.
Good horizons on such a tall camera mount, and this is at the lower setting.
With the camera set so much higher, corners don’t seem as dramatic. When the camera is mounted on the rear view mirror it turns with the handlebars, amplifying the lean effect.
Perhaps the best example of the camera’s lack of wobble was the shot from inside the covered bridge. On an overcast, dim day in a poorly lit environment with the bike bouncing over rough pavement, the sharpness is still surprisingly good. This was so dim that I had to raise the sun visor in the helmet:
I’d call this a successful test. Setting up this kind of monopod on a Givi tail mount for a top box works really well. The monopod base fits snuggly in the tail mount, which is a very solid, over engineering piece of kit designed to carry potentially heavy luggage. The monopod takes a big quarter inch bolt. I used a big washer on the bottom and a smaller one that fit perfectly inside the lattice on the top of the rack. With the monopod tightened down with a ratchet it was extremely secure.
The camera didn’t wobble on full extension, but with the monopod retracted one level (the shortest, narrowest one at the bottom) the monopod rubber met the top of the luggage lattice and it was even stronger. With the camera on the shortened tripod, the photos still offered a surprisingly distant perspective:
With the monopod shortened one level it’s still well above six feet off the deck (I’m 6’3″).
It’s another unique perspective to pursue with 360° on-motorcycle photography, but I have to say, I think it feels a bit alienating because everything is so distant and you can’t see the rider’s face. Short of flying a drone perilously close to a rider, there is no other way you could get this perspective though…
One of the few sunny moments on the ride – you can see the monopod’s shadow on the road.
Something like this might look really cool on a bike doing a wheelie, or someone knee down in a canyon. It also does a nice job of capturing the surroundings, but unless I’m looking for shots that are more about the scenery than the ride, I doubt I’ll be doing it again. I prefer the more intimate and exciting angles you get from mounting the camera closer and in front of the rider:
I’ve been assisting with the Ontario Literacy test this week at school. Watching students have to put phones away in a system that allows full access all the time is like watching a long distance runner getting a foot amputated before having to run a marathon. Students didn’t understand the instructions and many ignored them and had to be individually assisted in unplugging themselves from their devices. They then looked disorientated and confused, and then we hit ’em with a high stakes literacy test!
The threats and fear generated by the test are also part of this wonderful experience. “You can’t graduate without this” is the most common refrain. I’ve been wondering why it’s all stick and no carrot with the literacy test, and then I got one of those ‘support education’ emails that’ll send the email an organization wrote in your name to your members of parliament.
We have a provincial election approaching and the stakes are high. My problem is that no one has any vision for Ontario’s public education system that would actually improve it or make it sustainable into an uncertain future. Liberals are entirely invested in keeping things as they are (they’re also the main reason why things are the way they are), and the conservatives aren’t interested in improving it at all as they collect supporters intent on privatizing it.
Rather than send off someone else’s words to my representatives, I sent a suggestion for a leaner, diversity-of-pathways honouring system that might also be greener, but no one in Ontario politics has a vision for public education beyond either keeping it as it is or selling it of to their donors. Ontario students deserve better…
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Dear Candidates,
I’m going to cut out the form letter and speak frankly. After years of Liberal stewardship, the public education system in Ontario wasn’t in the best shape and needed an overhaul.
As a teacher in the system, I believe the entrenched political entities (councils, unions, colleges etc) have become more fixated on their own continued status quo than they have in an education system focused on student needs.
I had hoped that the current government would go about the serious business of fixing it, but they seem entirely focused on dismantling it for private benefit, which isn’t going to help anyone.
Ontario’s education system was broken by the 2006 learning to 18 amendment to the education act. There are many pathways and learning should be a lifelong commitment; schools do not own the concept of learning. Forcing students to stay in public schools until 18 has done irreparable harm to students and the system itself, though none of the many groups with a vested interest in a bloated public system will want you to address this.
A lean and individually responsive education system (that is also more fiscally responsible) could be achieved if we shelved this legislation and opened up pathways by allowing students who have demonstrated sufficient literacy and numeracy skills to move on if they wish. In this way our high-stakes and expensive OSSLT would offer an opportunity rather than being a purely punitive experience. If students were able to graduate at the end of grade 10 with a basic Ontario diploma which would allow them to pursue pathways directly into the workplace or into alternate learning situations like apprenticeships, our senior classrooms would no long be daycare centres for students who don’t want to be there. The students in senior high school would be there with intent and the system would be able to align their limited resources to serve students who are learning with the intent to continue on into post-secondary.
This change would drastically reduce our overages on building maintenance by reducing the number of buildings needed. It might also offer an opportunity where schools can amalgamate beyond the rigid elementary/secondary system we run now, offering hyper local schooling that drastically reduces busing costs. In a world where fuel prices are skyrocketing and supply chains are stretched to breaking, this seems like an inevitability. Moving towards a digitally enhanced, hyper-local future now would mean it doesn’t come as a violent upheaval later.
With strong digital/remote skills and effective leverage of emerging technologies, we could create a leaner, greener and more individually responsive public school system in Ontario. Academic teaching in classrooms works for students who understand that they need what’s being taught in order to prepare for post-secondary, but for many Ontario students who aren’t on that pathway, these final years are torture for them and for front line education staff trying to deal with them with ever shrinking resources.
No one will consider options like this because there are far too many organizations committed to the way things are for their own benefit. Conservatives won’t do it because their private school friends won’t like them taking away customers. The Liberals are so entwined with unions and other educational groups that they too won’t touch this. I hope someone can see the light here and make moves to create a more student responsive, less bloated and more environmentally responsible education system. In such an Ontario, redundancies like multiple education systems serving the same region would also end, but no political party will touch that either for fear of upsetting status quo religious privilege.
Our public education system wasn’t in great shape before the last four years beat it to a pulp. If Doug doesn’t win again this June, whoever does will give us half of what was stripped away back and we’ll be told by the various colleges/unions/councils they’re aligned with that we should thank them for it. I don’t want things to go back to the way they were, I want them to respect the many pathways students choose and honour those choices by not forcing students to remain in classrooms that aren’t aligned with their learning needs until they are eighteen. Does anyone in Ontario politics have anything like this kind of vision?
After getting the basic gear and riding as soon as snow was off the road, I’m now wondering how the summer will go. I’ve been wearing jeans when I ride in to work, but they aren’t particularly comfortable, though they are cooler than the bike pants I got on sale. Those pants, other than a zip up the side, are solid with no venting. They’re great on a frosty April morning and they are nice and wind proof, but the thought of putting them on in a thirty-five degree summer day is daunting. I didn’t even need the liner in them when it was 5°C, I can’t imagine when anyone would need that liner (riding in a snow storm?). Now that I’m getting a sense of what sort of kit I’m in need off (I tend to be warm by nature, so cooler is always better) cooler gear is what I’m looking for. I get the sense that the super touring pants (the kind you see on TV) offer a kind of cooling that my cheaper ones can only dream of. I wish I could get my hands on a pair of the super pants and see just how good they are, but they are expensive and no local retailer in Southern Ontario seems to have any on shelves. My only option to buy is online, sight unseen, and that makes me uneasy when you’re buying a pair of pants for upwards of three hundred dollars. My ideal pants would have armor where you need it and lots of ventilation up and down the legs and in the seat. They would also be a light colour so they reflect heat as well. The Olympia pants (below) seem like a solid choice, but again, I’m only able to go off the description online, and that’s a lot of money to sink into a best guess.
I was in Toronto recently and stopped by Cycle World in Scarborough. They actually had the Alpinestars S-MX 1 boots in white there, so I tried them on. Nice, light weight, low cut boots that breathe well, but for some reason they are $40 more if I drive over to Scarborough to pick them up, so I didn’t. At least I’ve tried them on and have a tactile idea of how they feel. I’d have been happy to pick them up right then, if they weren’t so price inflated. I’m still happy with the Joe Rocket jacket I got. It fits well, has a removable liner (which I’ve had out for a month now). With the liner in and a sweater on, I’m toasty and windproof. With the liner out and the vents open, I need only get moving to cool off. The Zox helmet I got is working well, though the wind noise is something I’ll address in my next helmet. In the meantime, I’m loving the swing up face, the drop down sunscreen and the inside of the helmet is very comfortable. For the money, I don’t think I could have gotten a better lid. Having the right kit on does a couple of things for me. It puts me in the mindset to ride, and makes me feel like I’m ready for it. Windproof clothing is worth its weight in gold when you’re up at speed. If you’ve never tried it, you’ll be amazed at what you’ve been missing. Being comfortable while riding is an important part of having your head on straight and avoiding problems. So many people tend to ignore the gear you need to ride well, which is a shame, because with the right stuff, you’re likely to get out and do it much more often.
My next purchase? Then I hope I’m ready to ride in the heat… from CANADA’s MOTORCYCLE
… and it wasn’t so bad thanks to all the (quality) gear, all the time. This weekend we had family friends coming over so I took their son and mine up to S.M.A.R.T. Adventures for an afternoon dirt biking. My boy did a day on bikes last year so he was stepping up to intermediate level, the other boy had never ridden before.
It was a glorious day. We had snow last week but it was 15°C and sunny on Saturday, and we weren’t gettting on a bike until it had already reached that lofty high.
They kit you up good at SMART!
We got kitted up and out to the bikes. Ethan went with another new rider and did the how-bike-controls-work introductory lesson. Max hadn’t been on a bike in 10 months and had only had a day when he last did, but he remembered all the basics so off we went.
We had Joe instructing us who I’ve had a couple of times before. He has psychic trail reading skills and is a joy to follow in the woods. He’s also big on the basics (elbows up, sit at the front of the saddle right above the pegs and most of all, clutch control!). Max had the basics down, but his work on the clutch dramatically improved his ability to ride off road this time around, it was time well spent!
We did the ride-over-a-log thing and after a tentative start Max got a handle on that too! All in all it was a very satisfying afternoon of riding.
To end the day we joined the new riders and did some of the easier trails. Earlier we’d been talking to the instructor who had been looking after the new riders and he said you can never underestimate how tired the newbies are. The physical and mental demands on learning to ride from scratch are heavy. We all lined up as a group and headed out into the woods for one last ride together.
We were coming down a washout with rocks and loose dirt when the instructor eased up at the bottom, perhaps deciding which way to turn. I was up on the pegs behind him and was able to stop, but Max was behind me and couldn’t. Ethan was behind him and said Max hit the back brake hard enough to lock up, but with the loose surface and incline he slid right into me, trapping my ankle between his front fork and my bike. When he came off, his bike surged forward as it stalled, driving into my ankle even more.
It was trapped so tight I was thinking it was already broken, but SMART doesn’t mess around with the kit. Those SIDI off road boots are the balls. Having been caught between the two bikes (which were now locked together), there was an incredible amount of pressure on my ankle, but the boots were taking the brunt. I couldn’t move and was frustrated that I hadn’t avoided the situation entirely, but it was a series of events I couldn’t see behind me and the accident was no one’s fault. Max was feeling terrible about it, but once the tail end instructor had run down the hill and seperated the bikes, I got up and tested the ankle and was stunned to find I could stand on it without any real pain. Even now, a day later, it’s only mildly bruised and I’m able to walk on it without any pain. If I hadn’t been in good off road boots I’d have dust for an ankle.
We got the bikes sorted out (one of the plastic panels had popped out on my Honda 250cc, but was popped back in – it wasn’t even cracked!) and continued the ride. At the end of the day we got back to the SMART office and all was good.
As I told Max, “this was about as ideal an accident as you could have!” He learned about leaving space, keeping his eyes up and experienced target fixation for the first time (which might one day save his life if he’s learned to look where he wants to go). It also underlined my belief in ATGATT. I tell you what, thanks to SMART I’m going to be looking for some SIDI dirt boots when I finally get my own kit. They aren’t cheap, but then neither is a broken ankle. Wear the right kit and even if you have an accident, you walk away!
I’m still hoping to get Max and I sorted out with a couple of tidy 250cc bikes to go trail riding together. It’s great exercise, a wonderful way to get deep into the woods and sure, it could be dangerous, but with the right kit and a sensible approach to riding it’s a manageable risk that can also have minimum environmental impact. A knowledgeable trail rider leaves no trace while exploring wilderness in a way that few other activities allow, often enjoying over 70mpg.
I know a lot of people think of motorcycling as a pointless risk that is destined for injury, but that isn’t the point at all. When done well, as we did it yesterday, riding is the best kind of exercise for your mind and body, and something I’m always willing to mitigate risk on in order to enjoy. I’ve heard of many people who have an accident and never ride again, but that isn’t my way.
We’re aiming to do a full day SMART later this year. Funds permitting, we’ll get ourselves independently riding off road eventually, but in the meantime, SMART provides the kit and the bikes along with some vital mentorship. We’ll both be better riders by the time we’re soloing on the trails in our own gear on our own bikes.
We had a break in the Canadian winter (in April) and I finally got a chance to exercise the Concours. This jaunt took me over 250kms from where I live in the tedious industrial farming desert of South Western Ontario, an hour up to the road to the edge of the Niagara Escarpment where I have a small chance of finding a corner to ride around. It usually gets colder by the lake, but contrary to physics, it went from 12°C when I left up to 27° by the lake. It only dropped down into the low 20s again once I found some altitude on Blue Mountain (a hill anywhere but in Ontario).
It is actually nuclear powered! I feel like I really bonded with the Connie on this ride – we sailed for miles and we had many more in us when we stopped for the day. If you’re light on the throttle it gets reasonable mileage, but it’s a wonderful thing when you wake up that motor. Kawasaki has a special touch with engines.
I had the 360 camera along for the ride and put together a montage using an incredibly complicated process that involves batch processing the 360 panaramas into ‘tiny planet’ images and then clipping them all together in video editing. It isn’t for the faint of heart, but it sure looks unique. This is the how-to if you’re feeling brave.
, “I don’t get this at all, why would people do this? What a waste of time.”
was Nina Paley’s attempt to express her own miserable breakup using a complex mash up of Flash animation, Annette Hanshaw’s blues, and The Ramayana. To call this copyright theft is ridiculous… this mash up is insane (and brilliant – I use it every year teaching media arts). Yet Paley was run out of business by copyright trolls (lawyers) who look for out of date art, copyright it, then lay in wait, hoping to squeeze money out of something they purchased from other copyright lawyers – an open market of dead artist’s work being held to prevent new art from forming.
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