I went for a ride with Jeff the motorcycle Jedi and Wayne, the parts guy from our local dealer, the other week. It was a 250km round trip out to the shores of Lake Huron and back. Since we were all on multi-purpose bikes we multi-purposed some of it:
Taking some winding back roads through the countryside we came across such natural wonders as deep mud holes and a lady sun bathing topless on her front lawn; it was a nice ride.
We stopped at one point and Wayne noticed the rear tire on the Tiger wasn’t doing very well. Coming from cars I’m used to using depth gauges on tread to determine a tire’s remaining life. Car tires burn through tread fairly evenly due to equally delivered lateral forces. Bike tires are undergoing a whole different kind of physics. You can expect to see fairly even tread wear on a car tire because of those lateral forces. Bike tires tend to wear from the middle out because the crown of the tire takes the brunt of the wear, especially in flat and straight South Western Ontario.
Wayne pointed out tears down the middle of the rear tire on the Tiger that I hadn’t even thought to look for. As you can see, the tread on the edges of the tire is still quite deep, but the wear in the centre is so deep it’s turning up the metal bands in the tires:
Those are some expensive pieces of wire poking through…
This prompted a call to my local dealer to try and get the bike in – they told me it’s over a month wait! I offered to remove the tires and they said they’d try and squeeze them in. Fortunately it rained a flood the next couple of days and with some cancellations I got a call a day later saying the tires were done. The bill was a staggering six hundred and ninety three dollars – for two motorcycle tires on rims that had been removed from the bike (so minimal shop work involved). I’m looking over the bill now. Looking up the Michelin Anakees I purchased online, the dealer prices aren’t crazy – about twenty bucks more than the online cost for the front and fifteen bucks more for the rear. There is a cost associated with a local dealer keeping this sort of thing in stock and I’ve got no problem with that. With that being the case these two tires came to a staggering five hundred bucks. By comparison, Corvette ZR1 Michelin tires – very high tech, huge rubber for a faster than light car – cost about three hundred bucks a pop (and include road hazard warranty). Motorcycle tires must be made out of platinum and unicorn horns – they are wickedly expensive!
The dealer prices on labour were also perfectly reasonable – about a hundred bucks to install and balance both new tires (with inner tubes). So the lesson learned here is that motorcycle tires are wickedly expensive. Even with perfectly reasonable labour costs at my local dealer I’m still out nearly seven hundred bucks for a set of new tires.
Fortunately the Anakees seem to be a very long wearing tire, so hopefully I won’t be looking to replace them again for a while. They ride great – much quieter than the Metzelers that they replaced, and the grip in dry has been very trust inducing. They might have cost me a mint, but they look like they might be worth it.
NOTES Anakee Review: it’s a road biased ADV tire (I’m ok with that – they feel great), it is long lasting, and it can handle light off road work, which is all I’d do on the big Tiger anyway.
The other day I was once again going over the details on the Tiger after taking the tank of for the billionth time. Even though the stock pipes for the vacuum controlled idle system for the electronic fuel injection hold vacuum when I test them, I can’t test that when they’re on the bike, so they might be leaking where they join. I happened to have some fuel line in the right size, so I’ve taken out the Triumph hoses and put these clear ones on instead to isolate another possible point of failure.
Once I got them in I fired up the TUNEBOY software and figured I’d run the idle control system test since it would move the plunger up and down and with everything off I could check to see that it’s all working as it should, except the ECU wouldn’t connect to the computer. I’ve done dozens of TUNEBOY adjustments now and know how the bike syncs with the PC over the serial port, but it wasn’t connecting. While trying some variations I turned the ignition on on the bike and the ECU made unfamiliar popping noise, and then none of the dash lights would come on (the running lights still do though). The ECU no longer clicks off when the ignition is switched off either, which suggests it’s not coming on either.
The intermittent nature of this failure always made my ass twitch in terms of it being electronic rather than mechanical. Mechanical failures tend to be more consistent and easier to diagnose, and I’ve replaced everything around the idle control system now, so unless Triumph sold me a dickey idle control motor, which seems unlikely since the first one lasted 17 years and did over seventy-six thousand hard, Canadian kilometres and survived seventeen -40°C Canadian winters. Assuming all the new parts are working as they should, an ECU that was losing the plot is as likely a culprit as anything else I’ve been chasing, and now it seems to have popped entirely.
So what do you do when your old Triumph’s bike brain loses the plot? Get another, I guess. Used ones seems to be extraordinarily expensive and look to be in rough shape out of US used parts suppliers on eBay. And for some reason they’re charging twice what European suppliers are for shipping. With that and the fact that The States seem like they’re on the edge of a civil war, I think I’ll be looking to the dependable Germans who have COVID19 well managed for a replacement Tiger brain. If I’m thinking that, I wonder how many other people are avoiding business with the US right now.
But before I go that far, I’m a G.D. computer engineering teacher, so I’m hardly going to let an ECU go in the bin without having a go at it first. If this is a short or something simple, I can solve that easily enough. If nothing else I can see how the ECU is set up architecturally, but more often than not I’m able to get electronics I have to open up working again. Time to flex my soldering prowess.
The most frustrating part about this is that I may well have solved the idle problem with replacement hoses, or maybe I didn’t. Maybe I chased down all of these hoses and parts for nothing and it was the ECU losing the plot all along. Electronic Fuel Injection (EFI) is a wonderful thing, but the early systems were fragile. There a lots of posts online about early Triumph EFI headaches, and I’ve added to them.
Guy Martin does a good special called The Last Flight of the Vulcan Bomber. They grounded the last of these nuclear bombers in 2015 because they no longer had the expertise and technology too keep them safely air worthy. In the show Guy talks about why there are plenty of older planes like Spitfires still flying when the Vulcan has to be grounded. He says the Spitfire was made from bicycle parts you could fabricate in a shed, so they’re relatively easy to maintain. The Vulcan was an industrial machine with early electrical and electronic systems that were many times more complicated. He goes on to talk about how the Vulcan looked like it came from another planet when only seven years earlier an Avro Lancaster was the state of the art. There are performance advantages in these leaps forward, but there are also maintenance headaches that mean these early jets will never fly again.
Early fuel injected bikes are a lot like that Vulcan – they can do things earlier bikes can’t like get better mileage, not need parts changed to ride at altitude and generally require less maintenance. I just fixed up one of the last carbureted bikes, a 1997 Honda Fireblade, over the winter. EFI was around then, but Honda wisely went for highly evolved carburettors rather than new, fragile and poor performing EFI systems. I rebuilt the carbs, which are a complex but highly evolved four-carb set, and the bike runs like a Swiss (or rather Japanese) watch. The EFI on the Tiger did the job without any attention for 17 years and seventy-six thousand kilometres including two rides into the Rockies – something no carburetor could do, but when it finally broke, boy did it break. It’s things like this that will make these first generation EFI bikes rare in the future. Like the Vulcan, they’re so complicated and difficult to maintain when they go wrong that they’ll get retired from service where an older, simpler bike might still be fixable.
RESOURCES FOR CHASING DOWN ECU PROBLEMS ON A TRIUMPH 955i MOTORBIKE:
I’m having one of those intersectional moments where my recent work in AI, coding and cybersecurity have me thinking about ways we can fix the worst parts of our digital adolescence. Media like the tweet below are wearing everyone down, but I think this is a digital media problem that digital media can help resolve:
Together, we can reignite the heart & spirit of our youth.
In this case an elected official is claiming to support children with special needs while at the same time doing the doing the opposite behind the scenes, even going so far as to ignore signed contracts and cancelling support. As I watched this misinformation I wondered why the digital system delivering it (Twitter in this case), couldn’t include links and information to clarify what I’m watching. Doing so would help users understand when they are being misled. Can you imagine a digital media ecosystem that actually encourages truth and accuracy instead of what we have now?
From a data management point of view, rhetoric and political spin should bump up against a scientific analysis of fact based initially on volume of data. Facts tend to have more data behind them (proving things takes time and information). Attacking this as a big-data computer science project, statements made by politicians could be corroborated by connecting to supporting digital information in real time. I dream of the day when I’m watching a politician’s speech live online on any browser (this should be baked into every browser) while seeing an AI driven analytical tool that is leveraging the digital sea of information we live in to validate what is being said.
This information enrichment would do two things. Firstly, it would create a truth-tendency over time metric that would allow voters to more accurately assess the accuracy of what politicians, news outlets and even each other are saying – a kind of digital reputation. Secondly, having an impartial analysis of social activity in real time would mitigate and highlight fake news and help social media to resolve its terrible handling of misinformation. There are layers and layers to digital misinformation. As we’ve moved from lower bandwidth mediums like text through still images to video, misinformation is keeping up, often under the guise of marketing. You can’t trust anything you see online these days:
It’s a new form of media literacy that most people are unaware of. There are plugins attempting to battle photoshopped images and videos that should help stem that tide of misinformation. Movement on this is fast because parsing image and video data is a more mathematically biased problem, but intentional misinformation either created or shared is also something machine learning systems can get better and better at identifying as they learn the peculiarities of why humans lie to each other.
We do IBM Watson chatbot coding in my grade 10 computer engineering class, and it is interesting to watch how the AI core picks up information and learns it. As it collects more and more information, and supported by students teaching it parameters, it very quickly picks up the gist of even complex, non-linear information. Based on that experience, I suspect a browser overlay that offers a pop up of accurate, related information in real time is now possible.
In software you have the front end that faces the user and the back end that does the heavy lifting with data. In the cloud-based world we live in, with people sharing massive amounts of data online, an unbiased, ungameable, transparent AI driven fake news overlay would go miles in restoring the terrible history Facebook, Google, Microsoft and the rest have in interfering with democracy. This shouldn’t be something squirrelled away and only available to journalists. It should be a technical requirement for any browser.
With that unblinking eye watching the dodgy humans, not only would politicians be held to a higher standard, but so would everyone. Those quiet types who happily retweet and share false information are complicit in this information virus. If your Twitter account ends up with a red 17% accuracy tag because you regularly create and share misinformation, then I’d hope it results in less people being interested in following you, though I don’t personally have a lot of faith in people to do even that. Left to our own devices, or worse, chasing the money, we’ve made a mess or things by letting digital conglomerates disrupt institutions that took years to evolve into pillars of civil society. It’s time to demand that they use the same technologies they are leveraging now to fix it.
We’re obviously either too lazy and/or self interested to make a point of fact checking our social media use. If we’re all on there sharing information, we should all make our best effort in sharing it accurately. This could help make that happen. It would also go a long way toward preventing the the cyber-crime epidemic we live in which thrives on this kind of hyperbole and irrational response.
There have been some attempts by charitable organizationsand students to create online fact checkers, but the browser creators (Google, Microsoft, Firefox, etc), and social media giants (Facebook, Twitter, etc) don’t seem to be the ones doing it, even though they’ve gotten rich from this misinformation and damaged our ability to govern ourselves as a result. Law can’t keep up with our technological adolescence and the data avalanche it has produced, but the technology itself is more than able.
We increasingly depend on people, often amateurs with little or no funding, to do our online fact checking, but the sheer volume of information, especially when driven by automated processes like bots, makes that unscalable. This is something that professional journalists used to do (at least I hope they used to do it, because not many are doing it now). However, the financial pressure on those institutions due to digital disruption means they are now more than happy to take inaccurate and misleading information and share it if it makes them somewhat relevant again. The only way to address this situation is by leveraging the same technology that caused it in the first place. What do you say tech billionaires? Could we redesign our digital media browsing so it encourages accurate information rather than making it irrelevant? You might have to actually put some financial support into this since you’ve effectively dismantled many of the systems that used to protect the public from it.
I’m a big fan of Top Gear, and I especially enjoy their travel/challenges. I’ve always dreamed of planning one, getting people silly enough to commit to it and then making it happen. In the summer of COVID I’m finding myself daydreaming of possible adventures, so I started poking around on the internet trying to find how far north roads go in Ontario. Bafflingly, Ontario has never connected to its own north sea shore by road. For a province that has thousands of kilometers of ocean shoreline, Ontario seems intent on convincing its citizens that it’s land locked. I’d love to ride 1000kms north to the sea, but it’s not an option. James Bay is roughly in line with Scotland, so its not like it’s in the arctic. In the meantime, it looks like Windigo Lake north west of Thunder Bay is as far north as you can ride in Ontario on your own wheels:
…which offers us a great thematic riding challenge! It’s time to go to Windigo (instead of Bendigo), Morty! Here’s the inspiration in case you’re not hip to Rick & Morty:
Here’s the Top Gear style WE’RE GOIN TO WINDIGO, MORTY! Moto Travel Challenge:
Each participant gets a $3000 budget for a bike and any farkles that must include a safety certificate. Ownership is by WG2W Productions, pending the bikes return to Elora within 10 days of the event, at which point ownership is signed over to the rider. Safety and taxes should be about $400, so that leaves about $2600 for a bike and farkles
Insurance and ownership is managed by the event
All riders must have a valid Ontario M class license
Camping equipment is provided to each rider individually based on a sponsored selection of gear (rider’s choice) Each rider will be provided with bear gear.
Each participant has to do any repair or maintenance on their own bike. Only other competitors can assist.
Google maps says it’s a 27 hour ride to Windigo. Riders can only be on the road between 7am and 7pm, so the most efficient (and luckiest) should arrive in Windigo on day three in the morning. At 12 hours per day of possible riding, 27 hours = 2..25 days of riding. The earliest rider with a perfectly timed ride would arrive at Windigo at 10am on day three of the event.
Timing for the event takes into account speed limits. Any rider caught speeding is disqualified.
Any overnight stops while riding to Windigo must be wild camping following leave-no-trace rules. Proof of camp site cleanup must be included on rider GoPro footage or a time penalty is applied.
The rider who gets to Windigo (getting to Windigo means arriving at the lake on your bike and dipping a toe in) as close to 27 hours of riding after leaving the start line as possible, wins!
Riders can choose how to use their daylight hours to ride. In the case of a tie, the rider to get to Windigo the soonest and closest to 27 hours of riding after race start wins
Winner gets a We’re going to Windigo, Morty gold medal. There will be silver and bronze finalist medals too. Smallest displacement and oldest bikes who finish also get awards
Any participant who finishes this long distance riding rally and is able to ride back to the start line within a week of the competition end can keep their bike!
…followed by 469kms of challenging unpaved roads to the end of all roads.
A paved odyssey…
This isn’t an easy ride. It starts with almost 1700kms of riding on paved roads ranging from the biggest freeway you can imagine to single lane tar patched, northern frost heaved back-road. You’ve then got almost 500kms of riding gravel up to where all roads end at Windigo. Trying to do this on a one trick pony like a cruiser would be entertaining, but likely unsuccessful. This is a challenge for a multi-purpose motorcycle!
The 599 highway isn’t Google car photoed once you get on the gravel, and you’re constantly dodging lakes this deep into the Canadian Shield. The closest I could get was this photo of the Mishkeegogamang Band Office, which shows a graded gravel road out front. Fuel stops are few and far between, some cunning planning will be required!
BIKES
There are some interesting choices at the bottom end of the bike market in Ontario:
A bike that’ll handle the off-road part of this trip, though it isn’t built for the thousands of kilometres of paved road leading to the hundreds of miles of gravel fire roads. Capable of handling the camping gear too. Should come in on budget on the road.
Low mileage, in good shape and comes safetied, so you’d have a bit left over for farkles. It’d chew up the pavement side of WG2W effortlessly, but that windshield might never see Windigo (Morty).
Big Honda touring bike, high miles, but it’s a Honda. It’d be a handful on nearly a thousand kilometres of gravel, but some people like that. Should come in under budget and ready to make miles. The paves stuff would flash by on this and it could carry camping gear with ease!
Low miles, Kawasaki dependable, in great shape. The Versys is short for versatile bike system, just what you’d need to get to Windigo (Morty). The 650 is a lightweight bike that’ll handle gravel, and it has luggage and mounting points for some soft bags. I’d probably be able to get it for $2300 certified, which gives me a bit for some soft saddle bags, then I’m off to the races! This’d be my choice. Might spill my extra cash on some 70/30 semi-off road tires.
There are lots of other interesting choices that you could get road ready for under three grand in Ontario. Seeing what people choose and how they prep the bike for long distance, multi-surface, remote riding would be half the fun. To stretch the choices there would also be trophies for the oldest bike and smallest displacement bike to finish the ride, so some people might go after those rather than the timed competition.
PRODUCING IT FOR TV
All bikes have GoPros to capture footage and all riders agree to provide at least 15 minutes of speaking to camera dialogue per day while in the rally. All competitors have to document their camp build and take down. There will be a production/sweeper vehicle with a trailer in case of any bike failures. The vehicle will be able to provide technical support in remote areas and be designed for the gravel portion of the event as well as offer a central point for production and media management.
Competition begins when all riders have their bikes delivered to a shared garage space in Elora.
Film Schedule:
Day 1: All bikes have arrived. Bike familiarity and maintenance, bike paperwork taken care of, all riders and production crew doing piece to camera introducing themselves and talking about the event and prep
Day 2: Bike familiarity and preparation, filming continues
Day 3: Bike familiarity and preparation, finalizing ride planning, filming continues. All bikes in park ferme at the end of the day ready for the morning’s off.
Day 4: 7am Race start in Elora. Filmed by production vehicle crew and GoPros on bikes.
Production vehicle stopping in Thunder Bay on Day 1.
Day 5: 7am start. Production vehicle stopping at Windigo to await arrival of riders (riders who arrive early will have a major penalty, so no one should be there until day 3)
Day 6: Production vehicle at Windigo Lake awaiting arrivals. End of day 6: close of event party on Windigo
Day 7: All rider camping gear to be taken in by the support vehicle for a lighter ride back. Sweeping the road south to Silver Dollar (the beginning of pavement). All competitors camping at Silver Dollar Campsite that night. Confirm end of event with all riders.
Day 8: Retrace/sweep route to Thunder Bay. End of rally event in Thunder Bay. Riders who want to keep their bikes have 3 days to return to the workspace in Elora in order to claim ownership. Riders who want to find their own way home can do so and bikes will be transported in the trailer.
Day 9: Production vehicle sweeps south clearing any bikes that have been parked.
Day 11: Any bikes that have returned to the workspace in Elora have their ownership turned over to their riders.
Episodes: 45 minute edited
1) Introducing riders, bike selection and preparation – possibly include off-road training at SMART Adventures?
2) Rally Start: day one on the road
3) Rally Continued: day two on the road
4) Rally Conclusion: day three on the road and rally winners and finishers highlighted
5) where did they go missing riders review, post rally interviews while returning to Thunder Bay, final presentations in TB, sweeping up, who got to keep their bikes
Total production time: 3.75 hours of edited footage
Other opportunities: Work with SMART Adventures out of Horseshoe Valley – include bits on how to ride off road, what riders can expect, how to manage bikes on loose surfaces.
Rough costing:
8 Competitors @ $3000 per bike = $24,000
Production Vehicle Cost (rental & gasoline): $3000
Insurance & Paperwork costs at $1000 each competitor = $8,000
Production equipment (cameras, drone, on bike GoPros): $5000
Production team hotels: 4 people x 2 nights Thunder Bay, 1 night on the road back, 2 nights camping in the north = $2000
Camping gear: $1000/competitor + production crew = $10,000 (mitigated by sponsorship?)
Total rough budget: $52,000. Estimated budget: $60,000 (mitigated by sponsorship)
Sponsorship opportunities:
– workshop/repair centre where bike setup takes place
Bullies are cruel, but demanding respect
from everyone is the worst kind of bullying
According to our newly created mission statement we’re supposed to be producing students who are respectful. I was advocating for responsible but respect got the nod. Respectful students serve order. Their docility allows a system to exist beyond reproach. If students are respectful they obey authority without questioning it. Respectful students are easy to manage. Any adult in the building doesn’t have to be respectable, they are automatically entitled to it. It’s a good way to ensure that students do what they’re told while the system can do what it likes. Misuse of respect doesn’t end in organizations, it has also crept out into society as a whole. We’re all supposed to give it to everyone all the time, but you earn respect don’t you? I’ve been told, and it’s printed on the wall of the school to be seen every time I walk in the door, that everyone deserves respect. I find this not only untrue but pathologically wrong headed. The temptation is to go straight to serial killers and death camp commandants in proving that not everyone deserves respect, but respect isn’t easy to earn even for the mediocre. Anyone who respects mediocrity is probably simple minded, or so desperate to not offend anyone that they appear simple minded. The motivation behind respecting everyone is to not offend anyone, but in the process of putting everyone up on a pedestal, individual effort and excellence is rendered meaningless. There is a confusion of language around the word respect. People use it to mean being civil or polite, but that isn’t what being respectful means. Being respectful arises from you holding something in high regard. Using respect as a demand instead of a recognition of excellence is manipulative, usually done by an organization that doesn’t want to be held accountable. Respecting a person comes from you holding their thoughts and actions in high esteem. It doesn’t come from valuing everything they do because they do it Blind fandom or faith is dangerous. Any organization that enshrines respect as a demand should do some soul searching. I can respect a system that strives for respectability. I can’t respect a system that demands it… it’s disrespectful!
The idea that everyone’s opinion matters is at the root of the
vapid everyone deserves respect belief.
People toss around statements like ‘respect your elders’, perhaps this is where schools get the idea to enshrine it in their mission statements. Respecting someone because they are old strikes me as quite irrational. The eighty year old draft dodger who ran away is hardly as respectable as the twenty year old who did his duty. One of the first realizations I had as an adult was that age is a poor indicator of respectability. We demand it in children to make them manageable, but that kind of ageism is little different than racism. We should value people based upon their thoughts and deeds, not on their social status. Everyone deserves to be treated civilly. Everyone deserves compassion, but everyone does not deserve respect. We like to enshrine it in school language in order to subjugate children into an unquestioning relationship with authority, but that isn’t particularly flattering. Teachers do not deserve respect. They deserve to be treated civilly, and compassionately, but they don’t deserve respect, no one does. I would hope that they earn it with their students, but many don’t, and then issues of classroom management arise. We might try to stamp out the individual assessment of respect, but it’s always there between people regardless of their age or job. Respect plays an important role in how human beings interact with each other. We should all strive to be respectable and earn the admiration of our fellows, but making respect an expectation belittles us all and encourages, at best, mediocrity. When everyone is automatically assigned respect individual effort becomes pointless. We should be aiming for more than misdirection and ease of control as educators. We should be encouraging individual excellence in our students, not hammering them all down with false demands of universal respect.
We were at SMART Adventures Off-road Training last week. You should go, same price as a day out watching professional sports-ball, but you’re the athlete and what you learn there will raise your bikecraft to another level. While there I got an opportunity to go out for a ride on the new BMW 1250GS with the legendary Clinton Smout. The new GS is a thing of beauty and a very capable machine, but what struck me most about it was how high the handlebars are set; the bike is very easy to ride while standing on the pegs, which is one of the ‘command’ positions when riding a dual sport or adventure bike. I’m a tall guy (6’3″) and often have to bend too much to operate a bike from the pegs, but not on that GS.
We switched to the big bikes after a couple of hours riding trials bikes, which don’t have seats at all. Standing up for that long on these super light weight, powerful and very twitchy machines pretty much wiped me out, so a chance to ride BMW’s latest evolution of the legendary GS was a nice change. It was a blisteringly hot day well into the mid-thirties Celsius and I was drenched after the trials gymnastics, so I did what I usually do and stand up on the pegs once we got moving to air out a bit and get a feel for how the bike moves.
Clinton doing pre-flight checks on the BMW – it’s a digital machine.
When we stopped for a coffee Clinton said something that surprised me. A friend of his was charged with “stunt riding” for standing on his pegs while riding. He wasn’t doing anything silly or speeding, he just stood up on the pegs on a bike designed to help you control it that way. This charge is an officer’s discretion situation and the OPP officer who pulled him over who may very well have no understanding of motorcycling or this kind of dual purpose machine made the decision that this was stunting. He fought it in court, but the judge told him if he wanted to stretch he should just pull over to the side of the highway and stretch, which is the kind of advice that’ll get you killed. Along with that bad advice he got whacked with a crippling stunt driving charge. I can’t imagine what this does on your driving record for insurance, let alone the fines and possible jail time. This is the same charge as doing over 150 kms/hr on a public road!
I’ve frequently stood up on the pegs while riding in order to maintain a level of comfort by cooling off or stretching that would allow me to ride with better focus. I’ve only done this on adventure bikes designed for it and there is no intention of stunting in this. At other times I’ve done it to navigate particularly gnarly pavement and construction or provide greater situational awareness by better seeing what’s ahead. The types of bikes I ride are designed to use this variation in rider position to actually enhance control of the vehicle.
The only place ‘motorcycle’ is mentioned in the law is around wheelies, otherwise generalizations around cars are all we get.
There was a recent local news article that talked about all the stunt driving going on in the area. One of the infractions listed in from the Ontario Traffic Act where it looks at the definition of stunt driving is driving while not in the driver’s seat. The intent there is obviously aimed at a car, but Ontario likes to cast a wide net so it can charge citizens and tax them with fines without question, so the vagueness is left in there intentionally and it cost Clinton’s buddy big. This once again reminds me of just how aggressively Ontario pillories motorcyclists.
I’m very conscious of how physically challenging motorcycle riding is and consider it a priority to retain maximum focus and control of these potentially dangerous vehicles. In Ontario, where riders can’t split traffic and filter, and where temperatures in the summer can easily hit danger levels, the unprotected motorcyclist under the baking sun is forced to sit in stationary traffic and fumes and isn’t even allowed to stand up to get some air when things move? It’s like Ontario wants to kill people who ride.
I’ve gone on rides at various times where road conditions are such that standing on the pegs actually helps me navigate circumstances and manage road hazards more safely. Standing on the pegs can, as CycleWorld describes it, turn “you into a dynamic part of your bike” and “an active part of the suspension.” Thanks to Ontario’s vague laws and officious police force and judiciary I can get had up for stunt riding when I stand up to correctly navigate terrible road surfaces (of which Ontario has many), road construction (of which Ontario has many) or if I simply need a better look at what is happening ahead. Situation awareness is just another one of the many benefits of standing on your pegs, but Ontario is more interested in charging citizens with harsh, non-specific generalizations that can financially cripple them.
The general advice online is if you need to stand just lift your butt a bit so you can make the argument that you aren’t standing – you are and you’re breaking the law, but at least you’re putting your life at risk doing it wrong so it looks legal. This doesn’t offer you optimal control, but safe operation of a motorcycle isn’t what we’re going after anymore, is it? The other way out is to have a nice, amiable chat with the officer and ensure them that what you’re doing is pertinent to the nature of the multi-disciplinary machine you’re on. You might not be able to make that argument with sports bikes or cruisers, but if your bike has any off road pretensions, standing on the pegs is something it was designed for that actually helps a rider manage difficult terrain.
Next time I’m on an atrocious Ontario road getting my teeth knocked out by a loose and dangerous surface I imagine I’ll do the safe thing and stand up to better manage it, but I better keep an eye out for the law while I do it. Wouldn’t it be something is safe vehicle operation was what drove our laws instead of vagaries that allow officious cops to make criminals of otherwise law abiding citizens?
https://onewheeldrive.net/2012/05/03/standing-illegal-bc-new-motorcycle-safety-laws-and-flaws/ More insanity, this time from BC, where the majority of roads aren’t paved by you can’t stand up and provide better control and safety while riding! “a majority of BC’s roads are unpaved and by the letter this law does endanger, if not make outlaws of, responsible dual sport, & adventure riders.”
I just found out I get to spend a glorious weekend at the end of May in Victoria BC. I’ve been out that way before, and after the worst winter in years in Ontario I’ve already started thinking about how I’m going to spend a day in something other than a frigid deep-freeze.
Cycle BC rentals and tours offers bikes out of Victoria for a variety of uses. I immediately began fantasizing about a glorious day tour through southern Vancouver Island on two wheels. With choices of a Suzuki V-Strom 650, Kawasaki KLR-650 (which I’m already on the verge of buying) and other smaller bikes, the Vancouver Island bike choices are ideal! The KLR would be nice, but the V-Strom is a whole other bike by a whole other manufacturer, and I’ve always been Suzuki smitten. The GSX-R 750 has been on my wish list since I was a teen. The Hayabusa has a special kind of charm (especially after sitting on it). The chance to ride a Suzi through the Pacific Northwest would be a dream come true.
After having a look over the options, I think the Port Renfrew-Cowichan Motorcycle Route is what I’m looking for. 272 kilometres of wild, North Western Pacific seaside, a winding route through the mountains and then back down the other side into Victoria again. After such a long, cold winter, the thought of riding around Southern Vancouver Island in late spring is a glimmer of hope in the darkness.
30:1 student to computer ratios? It’s too expensive to have a 1:1 student to computer ratio?
This is a load of nonsense. While the business world has moved on to individualized computing devices and cloud based software solutions, school boards still doggedly hang on to 20th Century thinking about centralized IT with massive, complex software images, difficult to manage intranetworks and remote maintenance of shared machines.
I’ve been on the ground, at class-level watching this fail again and again. Equipment is vandalized and left inoperable for weeks at a time because no one local bears any responsibility for it. Technicians are stretched thin between many schools, often not returning for weeks on end. The already dismal student access to technology becomes even worse.
Labs that contain over-priced, years old hardware are kept under contracted repair long after they have given up every ounce of their residual value and are little more than landfill (and a heavy weight on network efficiency). Those same labs contain the same, tedious software on the same, tedious hardware; a monotony of labs that offer nothing of the variety and opportunity available in the world beyond school.
The networks are overburdened with file sharing intranets that grind to a halt when many users begin to copy large files to network servers, or overfill limited on-site storage, causing the whole thing to simply stop. So much focus is placed on intranet software and file sharing that access to the internet itself is through a tiny bit of bandwidth, making access to the largest collection of human knowledge ever assembled jerky, slow or utterly useless.
A modern business office uses task specific equipment to enable users continuous access to their data and their colleagues. Phones are used when appropriate, but phones are never appropriate in school. Tablets and ultralight laptops serve the mobile employee, allowing them to input information and communicate as though they are in the office when thousands of miles away.
Technology in education studiously ignores the needs of the student who must travel from home to school and class to class, carrying bags of massive, out of date textbooks. Student to student communication is discouraged in most learning situations in favour of discipline and order. If students do communicate in school (and I assure you, they do), they have to do it in underhanded, devious ways that violate whatever the latest technology-banishing rules dictate.
Information Technology in school is anything but. Perhaps Lack of Information Technology would be a better title.
The mini-lab idea returns technical literacy to teachers from the star chamber of board based IT. It places local people in charge of local equipment and drastically reduces the costs of educational technology while dramatically boosting the student to digital tool ratio. Instead of the monotony of labs of out of date, inefficient, over-priced desktops, staff and students would gain access to an eclectic mix of digital tools and begin to develop meaningful digital fluency in both hardware familiarity and data management. It’s a first, small step in a diaspora away from centralized board IT and toward differentiated technology access that truly serves our teacher’s and student’s needs in the evolving datasphere.
While everyone else is going for the Harley Davidson leather thing, I’m looking for a bit more nerd in my biker look. I’m going with for an Imperial trooper vibe.I like the idea of white kit that gets used looking on the road. Having a white jacket and helmet will also be cooler in hot sun.
Star Wars Bike Culture!
The black and white theme can follow through to the bike too. White helmet with black trim, white jacket with black trim. White bike with black trim…
Monochrome but high visibility True North textile jacket. It’s armored (very Trooperish), and vented so it’ll be comfortable in the heat or lined in the cool. Wish it came in white. That’s the helmet I want, not the one I got, though the one I got was a full face white helmet with black trim too. A modular helmet would be fantastic – the fighter pilot style is a bonus.
I’d originally thought I’d go cheap on the kit, but this is where you get yourself sorted out so that you’re comfortable and protected, at least as much as you can be on a bike. To that end, I’m looking at all the details.
I’m all about the stream lined biking boot. They protect the ankle, offer good ventilation and water proofing, and aren’t as crazy expensive as I thought they’d be.
I read another new rider in Cycle Canada who tried to go with construction boots but was frustrated by how clunky they made his footwork with gear changes. I’m looking for boots that protect while giving me a good feel for the bike.
Getting kitted out for a bike is a cautious process. It’s important to get what fits well and suits the kind of riding you’ll be doing. A bit of consistency in the colour choices and style make for a bit more of a personal statement. I might not line up with the Harley crowd, but I’ll look Imperial cool.
COVID19 school early in the pandemic – all that infrastructure not doing anything. We can do better.
I’ve been reading the never ending speculation driven by an increasing panic on the part of educators as this school year approaches and this Ontario government seems incapable of planning for it. When the panic rises too high people start making demands for things that we’ve never had, like a guaranteed safe school. Teachers have been getting ill at schools since schools began, but this isn’t about that, it’s about managing COVID19 to the best of our scientific knowledge. The point isn’t to aim at the impossible, it’s to put as many reasonable processes in place as possible to protect the people in the system.
This is about secondary (high) school, which might sound odd because no one is talking about high school COVID19 planning, so I thought I’d give it a shot since no one else appears to be.
From my admittedly layman’s point of view there are two sides to COVID19 management. One is the social responsibility side, which is something people seem to be struggling with. The other is monitoring and response. For me, if the system were to spin up in September following these rules, I think we could get things working as well as possible under the circumstances.
INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY COVID19 MANAGEMENT
If your child had been in contact with anyone infected they should be withdrawn from school for two weeks in quarantine. During this time they are expected to keep up with class work remotely unless they have severe symptoms, in which case a doctor’s note can release them from school work
Any child who is screened and discovered to have COVID19 is isolated at school and sent home at the earliest possible opportunity with minimal contact with others. All schools have an isolated space reserved for this possibility
Testing will focus on students and staff who were in contact with any infected person
If an outbreak occurs (an outbreak is any traced transmission occurring at a school), the building is to quarantine/close for a period of 1 week during which time instruction will go online
Staff and students are to wear PPE when in close proximity to each other. When social distancing is possible it is the preferred method of management.
Any staff or student who does not follow PPE protocols is to be removed from interaction and re-trained
All staff are trained in PPE expectations prior to the beginning of school
All students are to be trained in PPE usage prior to beginning instruction
Heightened cleaning regimes are to be followed in all classrooms, especially focusing on shared work spaces and technology. All will be sanitized at the end of each period
Classes will be quad-mestered to reduce traffic, but secondary schools will be open all day on a regular schedule
Lunches are to take place in quad-mestered classes
Strict hall-pass protocols are to be in place to minimize wandering and out of class interaction
No student has locker access during pandemic protocols
Students will be required to wear masks while bussing, but normal bussing loads will occur
Students will be trained to minimize physical contact while bussing or transitioning between classes
Any student who does not comply with COVID19 safety training will be re-trained
Students or families unwilling to comply with pandemic safety requirements are to be withdrawn from physical schooling if re-training proves ineffective and offered remote learning options with credible expectations and work required or credits will not be granted
SYSTEM MONITORING & RESPONSE
All staff and students will be subject to random temperature tests
Any staff or student who show fever will be spot tested for COVID19
If COVID19 is found to be present, the staff or student with it are to be immediately isolated from the school population and sent home for a minimum of 2 weeks quarantine (remote learning is expected to continue unless symptoms are severe)
If COVID19 is found through tracing to be transmitting between people in a school then an outbreak shall be declared and the school shall be closed and quarantined for one week and all shared surfaces disinfected. During a school quarantine class work is expected to continue remotely
Upon return all staff and students will be tested for fever and any found will be tested for COVID19
Random spot checks for COVID19 testing will continue
School boards are responsible for putting testing procedures in place at every location that ensure a minimum of 10% of the school population will be tested for COVID19 each term
Any classroom which is so over full that it causes repeated closures is to be reassessed (and really should never happened in the first place because learning in such terrible conditions should never have happened to begin with), and reorganized to be more medically and pedagogically sound
TEACHING PRACTICE MODIFICATION
Teachers are to provide all in-class material online
Where possible teachers are not to provide material on physical mediums (like paper) which can transmit the virus
All teachers are provided with technology that allows them to video any instruction which are then to be shared in online classrooms for any students unable to attend
Teachers are encouraged to use blended learning strategies that leverage remote learning systems even when face to face
Any shared workspaces or technology must be cleaned at the end of each class
Remote learning outcomes are to be assessed using the same criteria as in-class learning outcomes
There are countries in the world who have proven that with appropriate individual responsibility, access to cleaning and personal protective equipment and with regular monitoring and rapid response, COVID19 can be managed effectively. If we’re going to argue that education is a vital service to society then we need to provide access to schooling to as many students as possible in as safe and transparently monitored an environment as possible. This suggestion emphasizes the importance of social engineering in managing the virus individually while also making it clear what system responsibilities are in responding to an outbreak. Instead of being paralyzed by this pandemic we should be applying these practical and effective solutions to managing it.
