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Some variations on a theme. Instead of attaching the 360 camera to the mirror, I’m trying some different locations. This time it was attached to the wind deflector mounted above the windshield:
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It was a cold and windy ride through the Superstition Mountains yesterday. The route we took after taking Gaylen’s advice at azride.com gets you out of the city and into the desert quickly and lets you bypass most of the urban sprawl east of Phoenix.
Our trusty mount was a Kawasaki Concours 14. I thought it would be interesting to compare my 20 year old Concours to a younger one.
After I got myself turned around and rode ten minutes the wrong way into Phoenix, we got moving in the right direction and soon found ourselves on the Bush Highway, a twisty, bumpy highway that doesn’t go anywhere – I guess that’s why they named it that.
I was unsure if this was a Concours 14 thing (doubtful) or an azride.com maintenance thing. CoG didn’t suggest any known brake electrical noise problems so I suspect this is a maintenance issue. The azride.com website didn’t mention what year the Concours was (unlike other rental sites which tell you it’s a 2015 but show you a five year old bike), but based on the body the bike we had was a pre-2011 model. Maybe it’s starting to get cranky in its old age.
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| Taking a water break on the Bush Highway. It was about 15°C, comfortable riding weather. Up in the mountains it was 5°C when we stopped for lunch. |
After owning three Kawasakis I have to say, man do they know engines. Every one I’ve owned or ridden has had a jewel of an engine and this Concours was no different. Passing through the tunnel leading out of Superior, the engine sounds echoing off the walls were spine tingling – it sounded like something straight out of MotoGP.
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| With that big wobbly wind screen up high you’re in a big air bubble, but it looks ungainly. Fortunately you can lower the screen in town to restore a sportier look. |
The engine didn’t disappoint in power either. My Connie does the business with carburators and 300 less ccs, but what this bike does with the monsterous ZX14 1300cc lump is truly ominous. I’ve ridden fast bikes before and this is one of the fastest.
On mountain roads this newer Concours felt smaller than my bike though they weigh the same. The newer bike is much narrower and quite wasp wasted compared to the chunky older model. That monumental engine that produces sixty more horsepower than my bike probably helps with that feeling of lightness too.
Wind-wise, I was able to ride in jeans all day into single digit Celsius temperatures without a problem. The heat that pours off my Concours was absent on this one, though it was a cold day so it wasn’t something I’d notice anyway.
The windscreen is electrically adjustable and at the top it stopped all but the top of my head getting hit by wind (I’m 6’3″ and I had given up on windshields doing anything for me). My bike gets me squarely in the shoulders and up all the time. I didn’t like how much the windscreen wobbled at speed, it looked flimsy, not to mention goofy in its highest position. Once I was back in town I lowered it back to a less Jurassic Park look. Goofy or not though, it made a cold ride through the mountains much more bearable. A transformable windshield is a piece of magic, though a more solid feeling one with manual adjustment would do the job better. I’d rather not have the added weight and complexity of the electrical one.
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| You can see just how ridiculously high the risers are in this view of the Concours back in the lot. The big googly-eyed headlights don’t do much for me either. |
I’ve got a 32″ leg and find my bike a bit cramped. The ZG1400 was a bit more relaxed in the legs. After a couple of hours in the saddle I had no problems.
The ergonomic problems began where azride.com made changes. The huge risers they installed on this Concours looked like comedy units off a 1970s banana seat bike – huge bull horn things that put the grips right under my nipples, or so it felt. They pushed me so far back that I was riding more on my tailbone – cruiser style – than I otherwise would have. The narrow Concours 14 seat wasn’t build for this contortion and it became quite uncomfortable. It makes me wonder how the stock handle bars would have worked. I have low risers on my old Concours and have a slight forward lean, which I prefer to a bolt upright or reclined stance.
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| No fancy paint, electrical wind screens or whining electronics, but it’s a solid old thing that does the business with gusto. I’m still wishing for the bike bag to magically whisk my bike along. |
All of the electrical noise from the brakes and fuel injection made me cross. I don’t mind electronics (I teach computer engineering), and my Ninja had EFI that was bullet proof, silent and efficient, but when the electronics are whirring away it is intrusive and just reminds you of another expensive thing that will break on you. I don’t feel that this Concours 14 gave me a fair idea of what the breed is capable of. I’d especially like to try a newer one to get a better sense of the machine. Maybe Kawasaki will be doing a riding tour again next year and I can try a 2016 model.
That whacky old-guy handle bar riser (and accompanying sore ass) conspired to make me long for my own bike. It might not have the heat management, or easier reach to the ground (which I don’t need anyway), or fancy moving windshield, but my old Concours feels solid, is usually the fastest thing on the road when you twist the throttle and offers a satisfying mechanical simplicity that I missed on this electronically whinny newer machine.
The final blog entry from my OISE computer engineering program:
Name and describe the school, board and ministry standards you must follow.
Our school and board follow Ministry standards and our collective agreement based upon it. One of the challenges we have is in following changing standards. One of those specific problems is the adoption of skills based assessment (a holdover from the Harris years). Many teachers have a great deal of trouble following this protocol (the learning to 18/student success plan works with it extensively).
I recently had to do a heads thing and sit on a committee that would create school level language around assessment. The fights were pretty epic. Many of the academic teachers believed that students should be marked on their behavior, not what they know about their subject. To them, school is about control and discipline, not subject matter (this dovetails nicely with a conversation I had with my wife last night – I think I’ll be blogging about it on Dusty World shortly).
In any case, our admin is determined to even out the radically different approaches to assessment that go on in our school (even within the same department). I’m curious to see how much this affects teachers this coming year. There is a great deal of professional latitude given to teachers whenever the door closes to the classroom. Unlike the US system, our lessons aren’t mandated and while we have invasive standardized testing, we aren’t held too tightly to them. US schools are required to force feed students lessons year round to feed standardized testing. They then rank poorly world wide.
As much as a loose, teacher centred approach grates on the nerves of hard core curriculumists, it does produce broad based learners who score well in general testing (and adapt well in a changing work environment).
I personally have issues with student success and many of the shortcuts they take in getting students diplomas. But even that process is one I can live with if it allows the majority of students to maximize their learning.
What would you see changed?
One of the few countries ahead of use in world rankings is Finland. Finland does a couple of things that I think would fit well with Ontario’s approach to education. Firstly, they expect teachers to be highly trained specialists in education. In order to teach in Finland, a teacher must have a Masters in Education. I think university focus on this isn’t a great idea, but I’d like to see teacher’s college be much more rigorous in producing teachers. A two year program that offers easy outs into other programs (teaching assistant, educational support worker, business training, etc), or out of education entirely, would be helpful. A greater stress on teacher’s college as an apprenticeship with many more weeks spent in-class with an associate teacher/mentor would also shake out the applicants.
I found a number of candidates in my program who wanted to drop out, but were given no option other than withdrawal with financial penalty. I’d really like to see a first semester drop out option (available after the first in school, teaching COOP session), that offers escape with no financial penalty. I’ve seen too many people teaching who aren’t particularly good at it, have no interest in changing that, and are doing it because they feel trapped into doing so. A more stringent, apprenticeship based, exit enabled teacher training system establishes higher standards (like Finland’s) without the university bias, and with a firm focus on developing teachers actually interested in teaching well.
The other thing Finland did was abolish all standardized testing. Standardized tests do not produce broad-based students who are able to adapt to new situations in creative ways. Standardized testing produces myopic, specifically focused students who fail in open, changing environments (the kind most students will be facing when they enter the workforce).
I’d also like to see a huge push away from the walled garden/board run IT model. The language around protecting students produces overly restrictive access to technology that reduces students’ ability to learn how to author, manage and effectively use current digital tools. If we want to remain relevant, we need to be able to meet students where they live, and show them how to manage modern digital tools effectively.
Develop an action plan to push forward your idea(s).Process:
I’ve done this by starting a blog that continually looks at current digital learning. I use it to reflect on my own experiences, think of ways to produce better results, publish my ideas and continue to evolve my own understandings of this very complicated (and very simple) 
profession. The blog led to presentations at Edcamps, conferences and PD. It’ll lead to a book at some point me-thinks.
The most important step in this action plan is to take action, and make other people aware of what you’re struggling with in education. If you’re a teacher who doesn’t think twice about teaching, I’d suggest that you’re probably not a very good teacher. If I had to mandate any Ministry requirement for teaching, it would be that teachers should be life long learners, who love the process of teaching and learning, and demonstrate how they are actively working to improve it, in themselves, their classroom, their board and their profession in general.
http://pinterest.com/scottmcleod/slides/ Some good (and funny, and sometimes nasty) comments on educational irrelevance
| I’ve been trying to understand this since reading the |
I’m trying to get a handle on PCP financing that seems to be popular in the UK right now. If you’re going to buy a Kawasaki Z1000 with ABS in the UK, you’re looking at a price of £10,389 ($17,453CAN). The on the road price in Canada is about $16,000, so you’re already almost $1500 ahead, but cost of borrowing is where I get really confused.
If you PCP (personal contract purchase) you’re paying a £2500 ($4200CAN) downpayment and then £147 ($247CAN) per month for 36 months. At the end of that time you’ve got nothing, all while paying 5.9% interest and having to ride the bike under mileage and keep it pristine to keep your investment intact. You’re also hit up for financing paperwork fees. If you go over mileage or the bike is in any way less than mint when you return it you suffer additional costs. I imagine the same goes with any farkling you might want to do – don’t. When you hand it back you’ve paid $13,092 Canadian dollars in interest and what basically resolves itself as rental costs; you own nothing. That’s when they ask you if you want to do it again with another bike or now pay a balloon payment equal to the current value of the bike (assuming it’s in perfect shape).
If you buy the same bike in Canada and put the same amount down, you’re looking at a monthly payment of $348 Canadian (£207), and at the end of the 36 months you own the thing. There are no mileage restrictions, no worries about keeping it stock and perfect and if it is in good shape you’ll have spent about $550 in interest and have a vehicle that UK Kawasaki says is worth £3628 ($6095CAN).
The pure costs of borrowing in the UK would be the down payment plus the monthly interest costs. That’ll be £2500 down payment + £465 in monthly interest, all for the favour of giving you this great deal. The pure costs of interest on the PCP deal is £2965 ($4981CAN). The amount of interest you’re paying to own (rather than borrow) the same bike in Canada is $460.
The context of borrowing in the two countries is quite different. The UK happily followed the US down the rabbit hole that caused the 2008 financial crisis by deregulating banks. That never happened in Canada where interest rates and the cost of borrowing has always been held to reasonable standards. Canadian banks still make huge profits (they now own a number of US banks that crashed in 2008), but they don’t break the financial system in the process and people who live here aren’t subject to the ridiculous costs of borrowing that British people seem to think reasonable. I frequently see ads on UK TV for credit cards with interest rates that would be illegal in Canada.
With that in mind, maybe throwing nearly five grand Canadian to borrow a bike for three years (that’s $139 a month just in borrowing and rental costs!) makes sense, but it sure doesn’t from this side of the Atlantic.
| UK Kawasaki’s PCP calculator |
| Canadian Kawasaki’s offer on the same bike… |
| Cost of borrowing on Canada Kawasaki’s 36 month financing offer… |
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I’ve had a number of conversations in the past few weeks that shed some light on a difficult subject. This all began at my men’s yoga class. One of the other guys there is a detective from the city south of us. He has been working on homicides for the past nine years and is starting to feel the weight of being around that much death all the time. He said the hardest part of is job is seeing his own demographic so prevalent in the suicides he covers. When I asked what he meant he said the suicides always seem to be guys in their forties and fifties. That was a heavy way to start a yoga class full of guys in their forties and fifties and not the kind of thing you soon forget.
From that I went into Christmas. The last couple of years have been good with trips away to warmer places. These adventures have been a great alternative to having how dysfunctional my family is rubbed in my face for two weeks. After a long bout of mental illness, a divorce and a suicide the local family members aren’t very good at getting together and all the rest are an ocean away. I feel remarkably isolated during the holidays and getting generic presents from in-laws only serves to emphasize how peripheral I am to the festivities. I can see why some people struggle with the season while the rest are manically happy.
With that all behind me I attended a lodge meeting this week that developed into a very insightful discussion by a group of sharp men on the steady deterioration of social interaction between our gender in the past two decades. Evidently I’m not the only man who feels socially isolated. Many older members lamented the lack of time and the means to enjoy that social time together. My sardonic reply was, ‘yeah, but we’re all much happier nowadays.’ Attendance in masonry is an ongoing concern. Twenty years ago the social aspects of the craft were central to a meeting with brothers often socializing long after the meeting was done. Back then we had time for each other, nowadays our commutes are longer, our work expectations more stringent and our family commitments more involved. We have less time for each other in the Twenty First Century.
We’re feeling time squeezed at a time when our debt levels are going through the roof in a desperate attempt to maintain that standard of living we enjoyed two decades ago. One of the first things you try to curtail when you see debt spiraling out of control are optional social events. The economics of Twenty First Century life is just another force acting to tear us apart. As Axl so aptly once said, ‘as our arms get shorter our pockets get deeper.’
Running the desperate treadmill of modern life has us feeling like we have no time to make connections with each other. To fix this problem we cunningly invented social media to fill that gap. You can stay in touch without sitting in traffic in crumbling infrastructure while burning ever more expensive gasoline to see people, but you’re not really seeing them. Having the time and means to actually meet your fellows and spend time with them without feeling like you need to be virtually or physically elsewhere is a basic human need many men have forgotten. I’m willing to bet many of those suicides my yoga buddy attended were lonely men feeling socially isolated.
The health considerations of poorly socialized, less active men are bad for everyone. I keep getting told 
to be active. I’d love to play hockey or soccer as I once did, but there is no access to the local cliques who do it. Men tend to be remarkably tribal and don’t like taking in outsiders. That makes it difficult to play team sports if you’re not living where you grew up with the people you grew up with (that’s most of us).
I’m going to make a concerted effort to try and cultivate the time and space to find the social discourse I seem to have grown out of as a middle-aged man. My family and my work are important, but so is finding the time and means to experience meaningful relationships with other men. It might even lead to exercise and a chance to expand my social network into something beyond words on a screen.
Photos from around Campbell River and Tofino, especially in the Pacific Rim National Park. Taken with the Canon T6i, various lenses…
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| wikispace live assessment/engagement tool |
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| TEJ wikispace: students learning about information technology through an etext shared on UGcloud. Notes are created in wikispaces and dropbox is used to quickly and automatically share student-made media. |
I’m being held hostage by an authoritarian government. These fascists (they certainly don’t believe in democracy) have demanded that I surrender my rights and work under their terms. In this impossible environment the people who speak for me have begun a legal battle on this government’s attack on my fundamental Charter freedoms. The process of overturning that legislation will take time, but it will eventually be overturned and will result in the end of this nasty, self-serving government and their illegal legislation.
My rep has also tried to bargain a deal to protect me in the meantime. The bargain was made with a Bill 115 Magnum aimed at our heads, so a fair deal wasn’t exactly the result of the process.
There was no negotiation, it was more like begging for our lives. This government was happy to turn the public against us in order to further their agenda.
If you’re held hostage you look for the basics, you don’t start asking for more than you had. It’s a moment of desperation.
If we don’t take the deal our rep has scraped together for us, this authoritarian regime will put us in an even worse situation because it has legislated our rights away. In either case we will no longer have anything like we had. We either lose a lot and keep a bit because our rep got some concessions out of the regime, or we end up in their even worse MoU prison, either way, we lose.
When someone has a gun to your head, do you start moralizing with them?
So do we vote for a contract that strips us of years of concessions because this government would rather flush money down poorly managed ehealth experiments, semi-privatized air ambulances, quarrelsomeness wind power and on again/off again power plants, or do we go to the wall and burn it all down because this is just wrong?
If we don’t vote for this, something even worse is imposed on us anyway. This is divisive no matter how you play it. Junior teachers lose their grid increases, senior teachers (who are the majority) don’t lose their retirement sick-day payouts. Some boards may OK this, others may not. This isn’t going to create labour peace, it’s going to create an uneven mess across the province.
In the meantime that fight to overturn the regime continues. In a year and a half, we could very well be standing over the ruins of Bill115 (and the Ontario Liberal dream of being the government) and be able to bargain a fair deal under Canadian law; we can’t do that right now. Whether we vote for this or not, our agreements will be in tatters because the Ontario Liberals and their Tea-party-Hudak lapdogs have pushed through this ridiculous, undemocratic legislation.
Do you go along with what you know is wrong hoping to protect you and your family as best you can or do you say, “NO, this is wrong, I will not be a party to it”? This isn’t an easy decision.
The lack of clarity, both moral and professional in this makes this a very uncertain, difficult decision to make. Unfortunately I’m a bloody minded kind of fellow; I fear I’ll vote for what’s right, whatever the cost, politics be damned.
PRIVATE TEACHER, PUBLIC JOB
After the ride to Indy I have a much stronger opinion about the Concours’ stock seat. It’s soft and comfy on short rides, but on long rides it turns into a kind of torture device. There are options for Concours seats that I can’t justify on an $800 bike, but the cheaper option arrived, so yesterday during the rain I gave it a go.
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| It’s tedious, but loosening the staples with a screwdriver makes for clean removal with needle nose pliers. |
The process took about an hour and a half to swap out the seat cover. The seat fabric is held down by industrial staples. I loosened them with a small flat-head screwdriver and then pulled them out with needle nose pliers. It’s time consuming because there are a couple of hundred of them holding the seat to the plastic base.
The cover peeled off relatively easy, only sticking where the Gorilla tape I’d used on the torn seam was touching the foam (that stuff is mega).
With the foam exposed I tried fitting the new seat skin and found that it had much more extra material on it. I was looking to firm up the seat a bit any way, so I took the gel pad I got on the Indy trip and found it would fit under the new cover. It would also raise the seat slightly, which would do my knees some favours.
Attaching a new seat cover is a tricky business. The vast majority of swearing happened while doing this. Rotating the seat so you can put weight on the staple as you squeeze the handle of the stapler helps seat it properly, but it’s a pretty muscley process. Getting the edges tight requires some practice. This one came pretty close, but future ones I’ll be pickier about and get even snugger.
In the meantime I’ve got a seat that feels firmer, sits a touch higher and isn’t covered in tape. I think the end result looks pretty good, and for thirty bucks plus shipping, it’s a good cheap alternative to those sweet Corbin seats.
I found this seat cover maker on ebay. The seat arrived quickly and is as advertised. I can’t speak for its toughness yet, but installing it I found that it was made of thick vinyl and the sewing was very strong. It’s a cool sunny day today, I’m going to give it a whirl and see how it does.
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| The stock seat tore on the stitching, Gorilla tape did the business until I could find a better solution. |
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| It’s alive…. ALIVE!!! |
After fiddling with the speedometer gear housing I was told to make sure I have the line on the back of the suspension and the housing lined up. I put it back together that way and still didn’t get anything, so I took it apart again and tried putting it on 180° from before and bingo, the speedo began to spin. If you’re having trouble with speedo gear housings, try putting it on the other way and turning it to line up with the fork housing mark.
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| Love that red – the Connie will be getting panels refinished over the cold months… |
All the gauges on the Connie work now, so I’m going to begin to reassemble it after changing out the oil and filter. I’m hoping to have it back together in the next week or so and then I can take an honest run at a safety and see how it does. Everything else seems to be in good form. It starts at a touch of the button and idles steadily after a moment on choke. The throttle is clear, sharp and very responsive now. The
brakes feel strong and sure. After reassembly and a final cleanup, hopefully it’ll fly through safety and then I’ll have to make some hard decisions about the Ninja.
It would be nice to get some miles on the Connie before the snows fall.
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| New speedo cable runs in behind the bottom of the front shock from the right. It reads accurately and runs quietly. |
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| Hard not to love that big one litre engine… it burst to life with a growl and revs with surprising eagerness. Smooth as butter too… |
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| Everything comes to life and reads accurately now… |
