T’was a lovely evening and everyone was napping or having quiet time, so I pulled the Tiger out and went for a cool, sunset ride up and down the Grand River. Almost no traffic at the end of the day, but lots of bugs on my visor when I got back. Here are some photos of the ride. If you’re curious about how I’m doing this, I’m getting an article on it published in Adventure Bike Rider, but in the meantime you can find the how-to on my photography blog here.
All photos taken on a Ricoh Theta clamped to the wing mirror. Screen grabs were post-processed in Adobe Lightroom. The ‘little planet’ photos were uploaded through the Theta software to the Theta website and then it’s a one button click to get the tiny planet look:
I’m revising my Computer Technology (TEJ) course offerings to encourage students of all technical skill levels to become more fluent with the digital tools used in pretty much every job these days. This has happened, in part, because of an article I read a few months ago about the atrocious technical skills human beings in general, and our graduates in particular, have.
The presentation above describes how even a least a basic understanding of computer technology has become a useful skill in pretty much every pathway a student can take. From straight into the workplace, through apprenticeships and college to PhDs, being able to make functional use of computers will assist you in many aspects of your Twenty-First Century workplace.
I was recently talking to a dairy farmer who was telling me about the computer network they use for milk capture and assessment. This wireless system allows them to keep track of individual cow health and has produced a significant bump in the quantity and quality of their produce; he also thought it made for happier cows. Last summer we gave a ride to a French PhD student from the University of Guelph who got stuck on a bicycle in a thunderstorm, he was a doctor of genetic engineering. When I asked him if he wished he’d studied anything else he immediately said, ‘computer programming.’ When I asked why he said that all of the gene sequencing they are doing is taking place in computer simulations and not being able to program meant he couldn’t do it as well as he wanted to. From farmers to gene sequencers – technical fluency in computer technology is influencing and redefining the work they are doing.
Individualized technology training for students at all
levels of experience and skill.
My previous approach in M-level (post secondary bound) TEJ (computer technology) courses was to focus on students looking to make a career in the field. This intensity frightened away a lot of students who were just looking to increase their technical fluency. I’d initially thought this might have been resolved by offering essential level computer tech courses, but the poor handling of students in this high school stream made for an expensive and frustrating semester dealing with several students who have been groomed by the system to expect zero consequences for bad behaviour. My goal now is to make M level courses more accessible and engaging for all students, regardless of technical experience. I’m hoping that this also brings in more female students as they are vanishingly few in our conservative, genderized school where digital technology isn’t considered an appropriate course of study for a girl.
I’ve changed my grading and assessment from an absolute skills analysis to a vectored improvement approach. I don’t measure what students know, I measure how much their knowledge and skills have improved, and grade them based on that improvement. In this way a student with no background in computers can still improve their fluency and get grades that don’t drive them away from the course. Post secondary focused students tend to be marks focused, so holding them to hard standards when they don’t have the background means chasing people out of computer tech, but if I treat it like a form of literacy rather than a specialty, students of all experience levels can improve their technical fluency without worrying about grades.
Research indicates that the general technical fluency of Canada’s population is abysmal. Holding students to an absolute standard isn’t a way to induce them into voluntarily (unlike geography, history, phys-ed and art, ICT isn’t a required course in any Ontario classroom) improving this deficit. If we believe the simple fact that information and communication technical fluency will help you in pretty much every job these days, then this approach focused on accessibility and empowerment should be the norm, not the exception.
I’m currently teaching two grade nine classes of introduction to computers and coaching the senior boys soccer team. In both situations I’m trying to understand and develop their response to failure. This is something we’re singularly bad at in education. Instead of developing resilience around failure we try to mitigate failure entirely.
The soccer team has shown such a lack of resilience that they are essentially in tatters. When given opportunities to recover from failure they have responded with dishonesty, poor sportsmanship and a lack of character. Continually trying to coax them into right action has been exhausting and ultimately a failure on my part as a coach which I find very distressing. There is a culture on this team that I’m finding impossible to overcome.
The grade nines, while tackling Arduino for the first time, are also running into failure though they are handling it much better than the soccer team. When they realize that they won’t be made to suffer for failure (this involves overcoming years of training by our education system), they begin to play with the material in a meaningful and constructive way. Removing fear of failure from the equation has been successful in both classes and the confidence that results is based on real, hands-on, experiential learning.
So much of what we do in a classroom is artificial. Artificial challenges in an artificial environment producing artificial assessments while working on artificial timelines. The same can be said of those epic wins players think they own in video games.
This brought me back to an article I read in WIRED a long time ago called Generation Xbox wherein they talked about the culture of gaming in such a forthright way that it stuck with me. Anyone who has been teaching kids in the last ten years will see a lot of truth in these observations.
One of the reasons gamification has connected with education so comfortably is that the two things deal in artificialities. Both focus on engagement and subvert realism in order to ensure continued attention. Being in a classroom is much like being in a game complete with rules to follow and points to be scored. We grade students in much the same way that a game gives out points – we award players for willingly submitting themselves to the rules of the game; submission is a prerequisite for victory and victory is given rather than taken.
When you win in a video game or in a classroom you aren’t experiencing success in a real way. It is an artificial environment designed to breed success, you are in a place designed by committee to appeal to the widest range of people. The attention and engagement of the student/player is the goal, everything else is in support of it. Yet people develop very real senses of themselves around these false victories. Our self image is molded around what we think we’re good at and many digital natives consider themselves masters of the universe because they have played games successfully. Many academics believe that they are masters of the universe because they were able to submit to education successfully.
If social constructs like games or education or economics are designed to focus entirely on inclusive engagement then the result is a population with no ability to think outside of these social constructs. They don’t develop meaningful meta-cognition or resiliency. When you’ve been beaten badly it shows you something about yourself. When you’ve been beaten badly it knocks you out of habitual response and into a new and potentially more successful means of overcoming your failure. In that scenario even a less painful loss could be seen as an improvement, but we are doing all we can to remove pain from everything.
One of the reasons gamers migrate to multi-player versus games is because you can test your ability against someone who isn’t a benign agent of the game’s mediocrity engine. As in sports you are able to test yourself against your peers. You can bet that the human being on the other side won’t bell-curve their play to suit your level. That’s how you end up with 9-1 soccer games, or getting pwned online. It’s in these extremes that gamer culture and sports seem most alien to educators. It’s in these extremes that my soccer players have nothing in their vocabulary to respond honestly and constructively to failure.
When starting the circuit building unit in computer studies the grade nines were overwhelmed by something completely new to them. I gave them detailed instruction and support but would not do it for them. I did stress that if they weren’t paying attention to what they were doing they would find this impossible and when one would ask for help while simultaneously looking at their smartphone or with an error I’d already helped them with once I’d walk away. Circuit building wouldn’t bell-curve for the class, it wouldn’t simplify things to make it easier if students didn’t get it. They had to respond to reality and reality wasn’t interested in making it easier.
At one point a colleague from the English department wandered in and watched them working on their circuit building for a few minutes. He said, “it’s nice to be in a classroom where the students are actually doing something.” then, after a pause he added, “you really don’t have to worry about engaging them do you? They’re all right into it…” Reality can do that to people, it’s a genuine challenge. My job as a teacher is to give them the time and materials to figure it out for themselves.
If you’re excited about gamification then you’re excited about what is simply a new layer of artificiality around an already artificial situation. Not everyone should see success in every endeavor. It’s good for you to fail every once in a while, it makes you more compassionate, humble, creative and self aware; all areas I see the digital native struggle with because their virtual wins have more to do with entertainment than they do with reality.
If you’ve seen success in a system designed to provide it you’ve got to question the value of that success. If you want to earn success look for a challenge that wasn’t designed by committee mainly to keep you engaged. Whenever what you’re doing has engagement at its heart you’ll find the victory to be false because it was designed to ensure it for you in order to keep you playing.
The primary function of Dusty World is for me to reflect on my teaching practice in order to resolve problems. This one’s going to sound like a lot of complaining, but it leads directly to the following posts that suggests outlets and ways to manage this overwhelming curriculum.
***
I’ve long had difficulty managing the byzantine history and fractured approach to computer technology in Ontario high school classrooms. Our subject council email is clogged with desperate pleas for qualified teachers to fill absences that, if not filled, will result in the closure of programs; most of them don’t get filled. Meanwhile, existing computer-tech programs are treated as an afterthought, often overloading teachers and students with multi-stacked classrooms. A colleague recently noted that less than 30% of Ontario high schools even offer the computer technology course of study. In 2018, being able to make effective use of computers is a fundamental skill that will assist students across the entire spectrum of employment and post-secondary training, yet few students enjoy access to this vital Twenty-First Century skillset. If you can get a computer to work for you, you immediately have a socio-economic advantage; fluency in computer technology is foundational skill in the Twenty-First Century, but only 30% of students in Ontario can access it?
Ontario technology curriculum is based around absolute skills arranged in a hierarchy, so as courses progress they become less and less accessible to students with no previous experience. This is at odds with the TEJ3M curriculum that describes the course as having no pre-requisite, yet the technical expectations of TEJ3M are complex and wide ranging (starting on page 76 – give them a read, they’re astonishing). In post-secondary programs and industry, any one of the strands in this curriculum would be its own course of study and most are degree programs, but in Ontario high schools they are all lumped together in a course with no previous experience required.
Many students, even those who have taken the optional junior TEJ course, struggle to grasp the wide range of knowledge and build the experience required to cover the 3M curriculum. Senior TEJ M-level courses are the equivalent of asking a student to walk into senior advanced science with no previous experience and then study biology, chemistry, environmental science, space science and physics simultaneously. All of this highlights Ontario education’s poor handling of computer technology. Yet fluency with information and communication technology is becoming a fundamental requirement in pretty much every pathway a student can choose in 2018, while specialists in the field enjoy clear advantages in the workplace. I feel I’m well within my professional scope to revise and make these poorly formulated requirements more accessible for my students. In the process I hope to address, in a small way, the digital illiteracy that plagues Canada’s (and the world’s) population while also supporting my digitally focused experts.
The fractured computer technology curriculum is one of many reasons why there are a dearth of educators qualified to teach computer tech (less than 30% of Ontario high schools even offer the subject). Our subject group frequently gets emails saying programs from ICT to robotics will be shut down unless a qualified teacher can be found, but there are none available. This seems at odds with how many computer tech programs are treated in the few places they exist. In our own board we have schools closing down irreplaceable computer tech labs in order to support subjects more designed to entertain than employ.
The few teachers willing and able to take on digital technologies are overwhelmed by the expansive curriculum they are expected to attempt. My technical background was as a millwright and then a computer technician. I am professionally competent in information technology and networking and have a considerable (though not equal) amount of experience in electrical work. My experience in electronics is passing at best, but I make do. My coding background, which I’m also supposed to be an expert in, is mostly self-taught (Ontario has been failing to provide an applied technical education for computer focused students for decades). Finding a teacher who can teach the Ontario computer technology curriculum is the equivalent of finding someone who isn’t just qualified academically in multiple fields, but is also has working experience across multiple industries; if they do exist they are polymaths making millions. We accept science teachers who have never worked a day in the private sector, but computer technology teachers are required to show years of industry experience in addition to academic qualifications.
Then there is cost of teaching tech. I used to take home about $920 a week as a millwright in 1991, and that was with a full pension and benefits package. As a senior teacher with 13 years of experience, 5 years of expensive university training and three additional qualifications including an honour’s specialist I had to spend months and thousands of dollars on, I bring home about $250 more a week in 2018. I often wonder why I’m teaching when I could have been making a lot more doing what I’m teaching, and with a lot less political nonsense.
The vast majority of Ontario Education is
designed to feed that 10% unemployment
rate in the Canadian youth job market.
Then there is the split focus of Ontario education with digital technologies falling somewhere in between. If you teach in academic classrooms you’re what the whole system is designed around. If you’re teaching a hard tech like transportation, carpentry or metal shop at least you fall into another category, albeit one that is often treated like more like a necessary evil than a valid pathway for millions of people. However, digital technologies get the worst of both worlds. Hard techs have reasonable course caps of 21 students in order to ensure safety. Academic courses in standard classrooms get capped at 31, but digital techs have no specific Ministry size limits and are capped at whatever local admin wants. At my school that’s a class cap of 31 students, the same as a senior academic English class, which is absurd. 31 students might work (barely) when you’re working out of texts in rows, but trying to teach 31 students soldering with guns running over 400 degrees, or working inside computers with power supplies powerful enough to knock someone unconscious?
Safety is a constant stress in the computer tech lab. We’re expected to maintain all the same safety standards and testing as hard techs, but with a third more students. On top of that, since my classes are capped at 31, if 20 students sign up for it (which would run as a section in any hard tech), my courses are dropped or combined into stacked nightmares of assessment, management and differentiation. Classes that only load to 60% are usually cut. Last semester I had five preps, four of them in one period. If you think the breadth of computer technology curriculum is already too much, try teaching it in a stacked class with four (4!) different sections at once. The majority of computer tech teachers experience this joy every semester. Taking all of this into account, it’s no wonder there aren’t more computer technology courses running in the province.
With little hope of the curriculum getting sorted or computer technology being treated as anything more than an afterthought, I’m still working to try and make my courses as applied, effective and accessible to as many students as I can, because it’s important that young people understand the technology that so influences their lives. If more people knew how it all worked, we’d have less abuse of it.
I spent time on March Break getting my heart tested because I’ve been having trouble sleeping and have been getting a jittery feeling in my chest. My doctor tells me I’m strong and healthy physically, the nerves and jittery feeling are a result of stress. I can’t imagine where that comes from. He suggests I take steps to reduce it, but I told him it’s not in me to mail in what I’m doing. I find teaching to be a challenging and rewarding profession and I believe my technical background is an important field of study. I tend to dig my heels in when I believe that something is important, even more so when there is systemic prejudice against it. I intend to keep fighting for what I believe is important learning for my students, but this is one of those times when swimming against the tide of indifference feels overwhelming.
At best, our current government’s interests seem to be driven entirely by making education as cheap as it can be. At worst I fear the intent is to drive public education into such a state of disrepair that private charter schools will suddenly appear as a solution to this managed failure, but privatization produces a whole new set of problems and charter schools often result in poorer performance at greater cost. I always thought Ontarians deserved better, but perhaps we don’t.
Ask any teacher who has done remote elearning and they’ll tell you that a two-thirds credit achievement rate is about as good as it gets – and that’s in a group of students who volunteered for remote learning and all have the ability to access it. Attrition is more common in elearning than learning is, they should call it eAttrition. This is the kind of false economy the repeated demands for mandatory elearning will give us – it’ll look cheap on the surface but high drop out rates will make it more expensive in the long run. The fact that any Ontario students are still engaged at all in remote learning is a testament to the thousands of teachers doing back-flips to try and reach them by any means available in a system that seems intent on doing it poorly.
While all that’s going on, proudly trans-illiterate teachers are still sniping at the situation and blaming everything on the fact that the medium they grew up with isn’t the medium literacy is delivered in half a century later. If you can’t navigate the medium, you can’t fully comprehend the message – this is one of the basic foundations of media literacy, yet there are is a majority of righteous teachers intent on protecting this dated idea of what literacy is. Instead of putting their outmoded concepts of literacy on a pedestal, perhaps it’s time to learn something new and accept that the society you grew up in fifty years ago has moved on significantly.
We’ve always had a hate on for changes in medium, life long learning is just such hard work. Instead of moving with the times, these Luddites will cling to their habits to the end. That they’re usually senior teachers in leadership positions with the most secure jobs and highest pay says a great deal about how well our system is able to adapt and stay relevant in a constantly evolving media-scape.
As we stagger to the end of this absurd year I’m just trying to keep my head above water. I had a momentary sense of traction the other week when we were finally allowed into our school so we could put together some computers that we had sitting in there and get them out to teachers who desperately needed them – over 8 weeks into this remote learning crisis. Getting out and doing something felt good, maybe too good. It reminded me of the multi-dimensional approach to teaching I’d always adopted, doing work both in and beyond the classroom, school and even my board to help improve our practice in as many ways as I can. After getting a taste of it for a day it was difficult to go back to the do less with less mandate of remote learning.
Instead of engaging in this simple and inexpensive solution to minimizing the digital divide on a system wide scale, I’m back at home repeatedly hearing about a digital divide that no one in management seems to want to acknowledge. Only about one third of our staff responded to our short survey of who needed tech at home. Even though we resolved the digital divide for those staff members, two thirds of them in our building may very well be trying to remote teach without the right tools. In other schools across our board and across the province we could be addressing the digital divide in terms of a lack of technology access for staff. Suddenly finding myself back to doing less isn’t how I approach my profession and is a source of constant frustration that I have to let go of less it drive me mad!
Which is where I’m at on this lovely Saturday morning. Not caring eases the anxiety and frustration, but it also means the clowns running this circus get to sell it off to their cousins who happen to be starting up charter schools. In the process we will have sold Ontario’s children to these greedy bastards and made things worse for everyone.
Even though I’m exhausted and feeling defeated by this today, I’ll be back when I’ve had a couple of days away, because I have an important job that it’s important to do well. I may be playing dead right now (and I’m not even doing that particularly well), but I’m just waiting for an opportunity to move when we have a chance of winning Ontario education back from the hands of this circus that a minority of mis-guided people elected.
I tend to run hot, body temperature wise, and find that I can ride well into the single digits without too much worry. My people come from a cold, wet place and that’s what I’m built for. Heat, and especially humidity, are my achilles heel. I’ve gone to great lengths to try and find hot weather riding gear that will allow me to ride when it’s sweltering.
Currently my go-to hot weather gear is a Fieldsheer mesh jacket in the lightest colours I could find. I’ve never understood why someone would go with a black mesh jacket. It defeats the purpose of trying to stay cool, unless you’re just aiming for the other kind of cool.
This jacket is brilliant. It keeps the sun off you while feeling like you’re not wearing a jacket at all. I think I’m actually cooler wearing this than I am in a t-shirt; much less likely to burn anyway.
The pants are where I’m having trouble. A few years ago I found the most ventilated pants I could from Twisted Throttle. These Macna vented pants do a great job of running air over my legs, but do very little where I need it most around my crotch. To supplement those pants I got some riding shorts with a crotch pad, but they strangely disappeared, leaving me to ride with regular cotton underwear which is not remotely up to the job.
One of the great things about the convertible Roof Helmet is that you can swing it open for some wind on your face. Even in that configuration the visor covers most of your face protecting you from Canadian sized summer bug impacts. I just wish Roofs were a bit better ventilated across the top (the newer models might be, but they won’t give me one to test). An adventure/off road styled Roof with a roomier chin bar and more ventilation across the top and back of the helmet would be a must-buy for me.
A long time ago I found the Alpine Stars vented SMX-1 boots and have never looked back. I’ve put tens of thousands of kilometres on them and beaten them senseless, but they still do the job so well that anything else on my feet doesn’t feel right when changing gears. They also keep my feet cool and are even good for walking around in (though they are very broken in). When and if these ones give up the ghost I’ll go get another pair just like them. The lightest ones now have a touch of Valentino yellow on them, which is no bad thing. They keep changing the colours, so maybe I’ll get lucky and have a shot at some Lucifer Orange ones when I need them.
I’m focusing on fine tuning the bike/bum interface. The best time of year to buy summer gear is the fall, and this fall is no exception. Klim gear is usually a bit too rich for me, but I was able to find some vented Klim Savanah pants for under $200CAD. I’m looking forward to seeing if the Klims really are all that.
I’m also replacing the biking underwear that wandered off. It isn’t cheap, but a good pair of technical underwear was the suggestion from many people when I asked. Sixs makes a wide variety of riding focused sports underwear, so I went with the butt padded, seamless boxers. The other pair I had looked a little less fancy, so I’m hoping this will be money well spent. Their range of gear covers everything from top to bottom, so this might be the first of many purchases.
In order to keep the dreaded monkey butt from rearing its ugly head during hot weather riding you need moisture wicking underwear. On my long ride last weekend my cotton boxers were soaked when I got back and I was so sore I couldn’t sit down. You do not want to get sweaty and wet under there, but your butt is on a black, vinyl seat so it’s going to trap heat. I’ve been looking into options to introduce some air under me. Adventure Bike Rider Magazine mentioned Cool Covers a few issues back, but they don’t make a cover for my fifteen year old Tiger.
Another option is the Bead Rider seat cover. I’ve heard mixed reviews on beaded seats though. They work well on shorter rides but over a long day they start to feel like torture. I’m still considering my options here but the Cool Cover’s futuristic look appeals more than the cabbie look of a beaded seat cover.
When I asked online, two super-stars who had just managed to complete a Bun Burner Gold very hard to do long distance ride had some hard won advice. Everyone swears by technical sports underwear that wick moisture, so that’s an easy fix even if you just go for Under Armour or something like. Wolfe’s suggestion of a Bill Meyers custom seat isn’t cheap but isn’t as expensive as I feared it might be (about the same as a new set of tires). The old padding on my seat would benefit from a refresh and would go a long way towards making the Tiger all day rideable.
His other suggestion of the King of Fleece cover follows a popular bike habit of using pelts to separate your butt from unforgiving vinyl. Sheepskin is a traditional choice, but I suspect some of the engineered solutions above might produce better results.
There are various new seat options, but not for my old Tiger, and spending that kind of money on a new seat for an old bike doesn’t make much sense. If I’m going that route, I think I’ll be giving Bill Meyers a call. A Canadian winter would be a good time to send the seat in.
I’m curious to see how the new undies and pants will do on hot future rides (which are only going to become more common). The old, stiff seat may eventually get some attention, and I have a contact in mind in Bill Meyers. You’ve got lots of options for finding ways to ride in comfort even in hot and humid weather. Hopefully this helps you find ones that work.
That’s one clean Ninja! And the water isn’t solid outside today.
We got swamped with snow and very cold weather early this year, but we’re enjoying a thaw now. It’s finally given me the chance to clean up the Ninja and put it to bed for the winter. I fear I’ve been neglecting the Ninja while the Concours demands attention, but leaving it goopy over the cold months wouldn’t do it any good, and it really cleans up pretty. Once I get a bead on the oil cooler situation, I’m hoping to get the Concours back in shape and then begin working on the fairings and paint.
I picked up a metal, vintage Triumph sign for the garage.
After a wash and some lubrication, the Ninja’s ready for bed.
Meanwhile the Concours is still oil cooler-less. I’m waiting to see if our machine shop teacher can seal the crack in the banjo bolt housing.
Time to put the bike away, right? Not so much… it’s 10°C and sunny out today!
I was all proud of myself for pushing into late November on two wheels this year. When they finally laid down salt and sand after the first real snowfall I put the Concours away and stripped it down for winter maintenance. I like having a twenty year old motorbike, but it isn’t a hop on and go kind of machine, it needs TLC. A bigger mistake was putting away the KLX even before that. A newer machine with no need for heavy maintenance, it would have made sense to keep it handy just in case. The past week I could have ridden in to work several times, but I’m finding myself bike-blocked by too early hibernation habits and a single purpose motorbike.
Riding into the frost line is a good time! Next year I’m going to keep an iron horse saddled just in case.
I coulda been riding in this!
I wouldn’t be going on any long rides, just commuting, but that means 2-up with my son to drop him off at school. I got the Concours because it does this job well while still letting me fly when I want to. The KLX just manages the job of carrying me (it struggles to run at speed on the road with my 250lbs), but with storage and a second passenger? I think it would be fairly miserable. Perhaps that’s what’s stopping me from hauling it out of the shed again.
It’s away too soon! Too soon!
The Concours isn’t going anywhere, but the KLX, while a good introduction to off road riding isn’t the Swiss Army knife of a bike I was looking for. Come spring I’m going to liquidate some biking assets and go looking for a more multi-functional alternative.
I think I’ll clear $1000 on the XS1100 I’m currently fixing up, and I think I’ll be able to get what I bought the KLX for ($2000). Getting the $600 back I spent on the little Yamaha should also be possible. With $3600 on hand I have some interesting choices when it comes to a Swiss-Army knife bike I can keep handy for multi-surface riding while also being able to ride 2 up while commuting. The 650cc dual sport class of bikes has three contenders worth considering…
$1700 sitting in Kingston. an ’01 with 55K, well maintained,
KLRs are cheap and plentiful. It’d also be more generally
usable than the KLX.
I’m thinking once again about a Kawasaki KLR650. A tank of a bike. Not fast, but fast enough, able to carry two up, and rugged. If looked after it’d hammer along for a long time. The KLR is the darling of the cheap adventure rider and has an awful lot of after market accessory clobber as a result.
$3400 over in Waterloo. Top of the price range, but it’s an ’05
in immaculate condition with 24k on it. Nice photography too!
Honda makes an equivalent bike, the XR650. It looks more off road focused, and it’d be my first Honda. Other XR650s hover around $3000 with low kilometres. They seem a bit more expensive than either the KLR or the Suzuki, but Hondas are famous for holding value like that.
I looked at a DR600 last year, but shied away from such an old bike (this was an ’89 in poor condition). The DR600 evolved into the DR650 which is still in production today. All three of these 650cc dualsports have enjoyed strangely long production runs with minimal changes. That gives them a deep and well supported parts availability though. I could creep into the adventure bike genre proper for about twice what I’ve got. At under ten grand I’d consider the current crop of mid-sized adventure touring bikes, especially the ones with some off-road capability. The Honda NC750x rolls out for just under $10k. Suzuki’s V-Strom 650 is five hundred bucks cheaper, and the Kawasaki Versys 650 is a grand under that, though it isn’t much of an off-road machine. The Honda CB500x rolls out for seven grand, making it an even cheaper option. These bikes tend to put on the airs of an adventure bike without delivering any real off-road abilities. Being new they’d all handle the job of an always-on/Swiss army knife bike better than the venerable Connie though.
Triumph’s new Bonneville Scrambler is a pretty thing.
Yep, we look good on that!
At just over ten grand I’m into Triumph Scrambler territory. This would scratch both the classic itch as well as the multi-surface riding itch. I’m not interested in MX riding. My off roading would be dirt roads and light trail riding. Staying away from the brightly coloured, long shocked dirt bikes would be OK with me, especially if I were on a classic looking Scrambler.
My kind of off-roading… very civilized!
The Scrambler genre has picked up as of late, with Ducati and BMW both entering the fray. Yamaha is also doing it (though overseas), and Scramblers have long been a favourite of the custom crowd. But unless I can make more space, a home made custom isn’t the dependable always on machine I’m looking for… though that hasn’t stopped me before. Rather than just jumping into another dual sport that puts function before everything, maybe I should just start working toward the Scrambler I’d rather have.
However, the adventure bike rabbit hole goes all the way to the 1%er land. On the way to Silly-Rich World you’ve got some multi-faceted mid-level adventure machines that are both stylish and capable. With much disposable income I could go with the new Triumph Tiger 800cc XCx (about $16k). With more cash on hand I’d be onto the new Triumph Tiger Explorer (north of $20k) or perhaps Honda’s newly re-released Africa Twin (maybe $17k?). In this territory you can get a stylish, long-distance able, off road capable machine. Once you get into the high end adventure market things get silly quickly. Suddenly you’re thinking about Ducati Multistradas and superbike fast KTM Super Adventures. Bikes with more computers than a moonshot. Every time I read an article about these bikes they are described as fantastic, followed by a long list of all the things that broke on them but were covered under warranty. I guess that’s an adventure of a sort. These kinds of bikes wander into more than just disposable income. If I’m buying a bike like that I’d better be at my leisure. Dropping upwards of $30k on a motorcycle that can handle dirt roads (but needs expensive TLC every time you do) should mean you’ve also got a stable of a dozen other bikes and lots of time to ride them. Back in the real world I’m motivated to expand my riding season and have a machine on hand that can do more than one thing if the Connie is feeling her age. Come spring I’ll be considering options to scramble or dual sport, but it’ll be scrambling unless I can afford an actual adventure bike. If I’m going to look for a multi-purpose always on bike, I’d also like to get one that tickles an aesthetic itch.
The mighty Peter McAsh shared a link to Yale’s most popular course: The Science of Well Being, which is designed to address the psychological misconceptions we all labour under that have produced some of the worst depression in human history. Laurie Santos, the professor running the course, describes the course (which has since become Yale’s most popular) as a necessary response to the plunging rates of happiness in her students. It’s free on Coursera right now.
It’s worth your time. Seligman was a pivotal researcher into applying psychology to finding happiness rather than just treating illness. I’ve since been sucked into Dan Gilbert’s The Surprising Science of Happiness. Dan’s book was suggested in the course. In his TEDtalk he’s hard pitching the idea that our reflexive over estimation of outcomes to our choices makes us select things that make us less happy – we overestimate the opportunities choice gives us and it seldom makes us happy. He gives the example of Harvard students who select a course that gives them more choice, but those choices produced a lot of unhappy students. This has some interesting ramifications in a world where choice is considered a sacred right, whether it’s choice of government, partner or anything else. We’ve designed our society around choice, but choice is a mechanism that defies happiness.
If we’re pre-programmed to select for choice (which I suspect is another word for control), and more choice makes us less happy, then we’re pre-set to make ourselves less happy. Our consumerist economic system and our democratic systems are designed to make us less happy – and they’re working.
That I’m looking at this at a time when everyone feels hard done by due to their individual freedoms being curtailed by the COVID19 pandemic is pretty ironic. Perhaps people will find some happiness in their lack of choice, but soon enough that’ll all be forgotten as we struggle to restart all the social systems that are strangling us.
Some post apocalyptic music by Sturgill Simpson helps frame the situation…
I picked up a Celestron digital microscope/camera a few weeks ago. These are surprisingly cheap and let you take some astonishing video and photography on a micro level you might not otherwise get to see with a normal camera and even the fanciest macro setup. The model I got takes 4mb images and does high-def video at high frame rates (for smooth slow motion). After messing around with ice crystals and eyeballs I turned the it on the Ninja.
I’ve always thought the petal type rotors on the Ninja are a nice feature, and up close they take on an abstract modernism that is really beautiful. I couldn’t help but critically exam them while they were under the microscope, they seem to be wearing very evenly.
Looking at the chain up close was another matter. What I thought was a clean, well lubricated chain didn’t look so clean under a microscope. The road grit that gets caught up in the lubricant is obvious at even low magnification. I suppose the only time your chain looks nice is before you use it.
The radiator fins made another interesting closeup. These look perfectly formed and even to the naked eye, but up close the folds in the cooling fins look like they were made by hand. It’s another world when you get to micro-photography. No corrosion and they look to be wearing well though.
The small-print on the tires are very sharp considering that they are branded into rubber. The sidewalls look to be in very clean shape after my first season too. What was freakier was looking at the micro-detail in the treads. Motorcyclists have such tiny contact patches on the road, they tend to be much more tire focused than four wheeled vehicles. With the naked eye the tires on the bike still look in great shape, but under the microscope they made me nervous. Don’t look at your bike tires under a microscope unless you’ve got a strong stomach:
That’s the narrow end of one of the tread cuts on the rear tire (not quite a season old) of the Avon Storms on the Ninja. Once again, they look in great shape to the naked eye, but tires are the sharp end of the spear on a bike and up close they show their wear in the tread grooves. In this case it looks like the contact patch is in good shape but the rubber in the grooves has dried out. As a photographic exercise the Celestron digital microscope/camera was a lot of fun to play with, and at only about fifty bucks it might also make a handy diagnostic tool (the photos are jpgs and the videos are avi, so you could easily share them with people too). In video mode it could create high-def, high frame rate (slow motion) images as you scan over an area and show cracks or damage in fantastic detail. It would be interesting to run this over internal engine parts after high mileage to get a sense of how they wear.
