Page 24 – Mechanical Sympathy

The Week After New Years: Take 2

If it’s a seven grand proposition to get over to California and rent a bike to ride the Pacific Coast Highway, how cheaply could I do something else?

As if by magic, this popped up across the road from work this week. If they’re asking between five and six grand, it would be a straight trade for the commuter car I drive to work in the winter. This type of motorcycle transportation system has a cargo carrying capacity of over 3000lbs, so it would comfortably carry a bike or two.

Tiger to scale
in that van.

The Tiger, a fairly substantial adventure bike, is about 89 inches long, 34 inches wide at the handlebars and 55 inches tall. The cargo area in this kind of van is 124 inches long, 53 inches wide at the narrowest point of the rear wheel arches and about 53 inches tall. With the windshield removed, even two tall adventure bikes would fit in the back of this thing with only a bit of handlebar overlap. Two six hundred pound bikes would barely dent half the load capacity of the van. It would barely feel a single bike at all.

With the Tiger (and maybe a Super Tenere) loaded in the back, we could make the great escape south on the week after New Years.

It’s an all day trip to Knoxville.

If we left on New Year’s day we could be in Pigeon Forge on the edge of the Smokey mountains that night.

Monday morning we could hit one of a number of local motorcycle friendly routes. There are so many choices that other than a freak snow storm, we’d be on excellent riding roads, making miles in January.

Best Western Toni has a sale!

Pigeon Forge is nestled right in the middle of it all and their winter temperatures feel downright spring-like compared to what we have up here – hovering around 9°C on average. It’s cool, but no cooler than riding in the mountains around Phoenix was last New Years. On warm days we might get right up into the high teens Celsius. It’s a bit of a chance, but the reward would be getting some beautiful winter rides in while the north is under a blanket of snow.

Compared to the Californian coast, you can get fantastic hotel deals down Knoxville way. The Best Western in Pigeon Forge has a $74 Canadian a night deal on, and it’s a 4+ star reviewed place with indoor pools and hot tubs and included breakfast; the perfect launching point for a series of rides.

Lots of pretty roads around Pigeon Forge

Being a regular winter work week for most people, the roads would be empty. The Tail of the Dragon is only 54 twisty miles down the 321 from Pigeon Forge, and at that time of the year it’ll be anything but packed. The Dragon is just one of many excellent motorcycling roads in the Great Smokey Mountains area.

After exploring the Smokey Mountains from Monday to Thursday, we’d get a good night’s sleep and make the drive back back north into the frozen darkness on Friday (giving us a spare day or two in case of weather). The costs aren’t anything like trying to get out to California. With no airfare or motorcycle rental, the most expensive bits aren’t there. On top of that I’d get to ride a bike I love instead of getting on a rental I’m ambivalent about.

Compared to the seven grand California week, this one comes out to about sixteen hundred bucks depending on how getting my hands on a cargo van goes. There is more of a chance of weather getting in the way but if it holds out it’s a dramatically cheaper way to ride some fantastic roads in the middle of winter.

Maybe I could get Enterprise Rent-a-van to sponsor the trip…

Cost breakdown:
– swapping out the Mazda2 for a van, I think I can about break even there. I only use the Mazda for the 10 minute commute to work in the winter – the van could easily do the same thing for not much more in gas because the commute is so short.
– gas down and back (assuming 15mpg) ~1500 miles = 100 gallons of gas ~380 litres @ $1 a litre = ~$400Cdn in gas for the van (gas is cheaper in the States).
– Food & toll costs on the commute, say $100 each way: $200US ($250Cdn)
– Hotel for the week (Sunday night to Friday morning) in Pigeon Forge: $411Cdn
– Daily bike gas & food costs: say $100US ($150Cdn) per day, so for Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu it’d be about $600Cdn

All totalled up, that’s 2 days of travel and four days on two wheels in Tennessee for about $1600 Canadian dollars. That’s $5400 cheaper than the same amount of time away in California, and with six less airports.

the end of comments in a flattening media-hierarchy

Oh, the incivility!

Recently the Toronto Star turned off online comments on their website. I beat them to it by about a year. I was recently asked why I would do that. Don’t I want people to interact with my online content?

I sure do! And if they want to they can share my blog and then comment on it to their heart’s content. What do I possibly get out of running a comments section on a blog? Nothing! If you ask for a login no one bothers to do it, if you allow open, anonymous comments you get buried in advertising and nastiness, the typical by-products of human interaction.

With the advent of pervasive social media the idea of needing a comments section within your online content has had its day. Anyone reading online content has their own social media presence of some sort nowadays. They are more than welcome to leverage that in order to comment on my content. In doing so they share my content. It’s the least they can do if it prompted them to have an opinion on it that they want to share.

We’ve moved from stratified, traditional, paper based media delivery though early adopter online media delivery to a more mature, everyone-has-a-presence-online media delivery system (nicely explained in this essay lambasting education’s inability to free the essay from its millennium of bondage). Embedded comment sections are a hold-over from an earlier internet where online readers tended not to have their own online presence.

Digital technology is forcing an increasingly flat media-scape. Millennials spend almost no time in traditional media. They could barely pay attention to Star Wars in the theatre when I was there last week. I’ve stopped showing videos in class because asking Millennials to watch media simultaneously is alien to them and frustrating for me. In a world where people distrust and often ignore the patronizing nature of traditional media it’s best not to fight the flow.

If you’re determined to hang on to the comment section in your online content you’re swimming against the current. You’re assuming that your content is somehow more established, more authentic, more valuable. You are belittling your visitors’ online presence by making them work in yours. It’s ultimately about you refusing to surrender control of your content in an increasingly democratic communication medium. That idea of control is a holdover from traditional, paper-based media hierarchies, it isn’t surprising that a newspaper struggled with this. You’ve got to let it all go Neo.

If you want insipid examples of human nastiness and stupidity you’ll find them online, especially in anonymous, internal comment sections. I’d long stopped reading The Star’s comment section for this very reason. I also tend to blacklist those brave (often conservative) souls on twitter and other social media who hide behind anonymous or fake user names. They feel very brave and are usually overly aggressive in their anonymity.

What’s funnier are those people who create social media presences based on their real self and then proceed to advertise their ignorance to the world. If someone is going to confuse Twitter with texting there isn’t much we can do for their employment prospects. People who are nasty online tend to get bitten though. It’s a self correcting process and it’s happening less and less because we’re getting better at it.

This flattening media-scape isn’t just hurting traditional media, it’s also snapping at people who don’t realize that their reach has changed. Democratizing media means empowering people who have no experience with publication, and make no mistake, every time you post on social media you’re publishing to the entire planet. People in Timbuktu can read your tweets if they are so inclined.

There will come a point when there have been enough cautionary tales and social experience with self-publication that people will learn best practices and the vast majority will realize just how empowered and potentially dangerous we’ve all become in our flat new world.

In the meantime, if people want to comment on my content they’re welcome to share away, but I’m not providing a comments section because it belittles my reader’s own online presence and dilutes my material with mean and often irrelevant comments.

Off-Roading Dreaming

My son, Max, got handy with dirt bikes at SMART Adventures last week and now I’m dreaming of some options that would let us explore trails together on two wheels. If I had half a million dollars sitting around we could get ourselves into a winterized house/cottage on Lake Benoir on the south edge of Algonquin Park. The only reason I’m even thinking about that is because of COVID. In any other situation I’d rather travel than own more property but well over a year into this pandemic it doesn’t look like travel as normal will return any time soon. That’d be a couple of acres in the woods in a small, simple house (electricity but mainly heated by wood burning stove) that comes with a good sized workshop. They have some nice resorts on the lake so this isn’t as rough of some of Northern Ontario and it’s right in the heart of the Canadian Shield. Off-road trails abound in the area as well as some of the best riding roads in Ontario. We’d immediately get ourselves Ontario Federation of Trail Rider memberships and then get into the woods!

Back in the real world where half a million bucks and doubling down on real estate isn’t in the cards, getting off-road could happen in a number of different ways. Here’s the most to least expensive in order:

NEW STATE OF THE ART OFF ROAD KIT

Jeep Gladiator Overland: $65,000

A capable off-roader that can get us to the trail head while carrying the bikes. It’d make a great base from which to ride from and then would be able to get us out of the bush at the end of a long day of riding. There are a lot of camping options that let you leverage the vehicle to make camping a bit less mucky including truck bed mounted tent systems and proper bedding.

2021 CRF250F: $5649 x2

I took one of these out for the day at SMART Adventures and really got along with it. I’d buy an Ontario used dirt bike but the prices are absurd. Broken 20 year old bikes are asking ridiculous money! New dirt bikes aren’t madly expensive and this one, being a Honda, would last as long as I’d ever need it to. I’d get two of the same thing to make maintenance more straightforward and then my son and I could ride together.

Total (the camping gear is another grand): $77k

LIGHTLY USED OFF-ROAD KIT

2015 Used Jeep Wrangler: $36,000

It’s got 90k on it, a 5 speed stick and a V6. It looks in good shape and comes with the towing cubbins I’d need to tow bikes to where we could use them. The Wrangler has a pile of camping related gear for it that isn’t crazy expensive. The tent off the back is three hundred bucks and the rear air mattress less than a hundred. The whole shebang would come in under $37,000 and would be good to go pretty much anywhere while still doing Jeepy things like taking roofs and doors off.

Used Dirt Bike: ridiculous prices

Here’s a random selection of used dirt bikes online in Ontario in 2021. People are asking nearly four grand for sticker festooned, brutalized and rebuilt bikes covered in replacement cheap plastics because the OEM ones were smashed off. Four grand for these POSes! I don’t know that there is a cost effective alternative to dirt biking, at least in price crazy Ontario.

Here’s another example of the insanity complete with questionable literacy skills: 1998 ktm exc 250 2 stroke, Needs a crank seal, witch (sic) I have. ( don’t half to split the case) it’s a 40 min Job if that, it does run but I wouldn’t without doing that seal first as it pulls tranny oil in other than that it needs the front breaks bled and a few small things like bolts for a couple plastics and such, I have the ownership, full gasket kit for the motor, all the paper work on the bike. $2,500OBO That’d be a sticker festooned, broken and abused 23 year old (!!!) KTM for two and a half grand! I just can’t make sense of Ontario’s used dirt bike market. By the time you’ve sorted one of these wrecks out you’d have dropped over five grand on it anyway, which would get you a new bike.

But then there are some Chinese manufacturer option:

SSR SR300S dirt bike: $5000 x 2

Here’s a 31 horsepower, 300cc, 286lb well specified off-roader that undercuts the Japanese equivalents by almost a grand. Of course, the ‘Japanese’ bikes aren’t made in Japan either so everyone is spending a lot extra on brand and dealership accessibility. I’d have headaches finding parts for beaten up old Japanese brands anyway, so worries about parts don’t really matter. For a couple of grand less than two new Hondas we could still have new bikes, just without the branding.

Here’s another:

Vipermax 250cc Apollo: $2899 x 2

Based on Honda tech, these 250cc bikes have disc brakes and other modern tech and weigh in under 300lbs as well. They’re not quite as big and powerful as the SSR above but they’re capable, new and feature a lot of recently updated tech. The two of them together would cost almost what one CRF250F ($5800 for two vs $5650 for one CRF250F). They’re probably built in the same factory. Isn’t globalism fun?

If I could find a couple of used but serviceable 250cc trail bikes for a couple of grand each I’d happily take that on as a winter project, but they simply don’t exist in Ontario and with the Chinese options, why buy terrible, expensive and used?

***

A Jeep would open up camping and off-roading options beyond what the bikes could do and it’s something I’d like to get into in any case. There are dirt bike hitch trailers for the Wrangler and it could tow a trailer too.

There are a lot of ways to get off-road and out into the wilderness, I just have to figure out the one that works for us.

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Part 1: Magical Technologists

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C. Clarke

I’m reading Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, and in the opening he compares computer programs to Harry Potter’s magical spells. It seemed spurious when I read it, but now I’m wondering how it looks from other eyes.

I’m the go-to tech guy at school, and I dig the position. I’ve joked before about how people need to sacrifice a chicken (or just wave a rubber one over the computer) if they want something to work, but now the metaphor is resolving a bit more.

Today our soon to retire head of guidance came in all worked up because he couldn’t take a document and put it in his powerpoint. He was using and old, hobbled, board laptop with an ancient copy of, well, everything on it; it was state of the art in 2002 when he got it.

I copied his (wordpad!) file onto a USB key, opened it on my competent, not-board computer (it actually uses Windows 7 instead of XP – the ONLY OS of choice for our board) and MS Office instead of Wordperfect. I opened the DOC in Office (which just works, unlike Wordperfect on the board laptop) and then screen grabbed the guidance material he wanted into two jpegs. I then copied them onto the USB and moved them back over to his sad, old laptop. In moments I had one of the jpegs filling a slide on his powerpoint. After I did the first one, I got him to do the second one. He was happy, it all worked, and he even had some idea of how to put jpegs into powerpoint too.

Looking at the order of operations above, it looks pedantic and pretty this/then/that to me, but many people reading it would get lost in the acronyms or the logical sequence of it. It assumes an understanding of what works with what and how to bypass difficulties around software not cooperating, among other things.

From another point of view, it might look like I pulled out my own, newer, better wand (laptop), and made some arcane gestures (trackpad), spoke some gobbledigook (tech-talk) and dropped a regent into the spell (the USB key). and made what seemed impossible possible. Without comfort level, experience and equipment, it looks like I made something happen out of nothing.

The councilor with him said I was the secret technical mystic they turned to when things just didn’t work.

I try to be transparent with what I’m doing, and explain it to people as I’m doing it, but I see their eyes glaze over when I use the first acronym and then they just sit there with a happy smile on their face as the issue gets resolved. I’d like for everyone to be able to cast their own spells, but I fear many would rather just applaud the magician.

Which takes me back to Harry again. There’s a scene where Dumbledore escapes from the evil Ministry in spectacular fashion. He could have just disappeared, but he doesn’t, he does it with a flourish. Kingsly the auror says afterwards, “Dumbledore may be a criminal, but you’ve got to admit, he has style!”

If you’re going to be a tech-magician, and if you’re reading this you probably already are, then don’t cast your spells flat, be like Dumbledore, have some style!

Part 2: Digital Horcruxes

Staring Into The Abyss

Originally published on Dusty World in October, 2012:

I was just reading Doug Peterson’s Blog about how a number of edublogs are looking at the Amanda Todd story. I can understand the urge, but I’m coming at this from a different angle than most.

I’ve had a particularly difficult year dealing with suicide. In September I received an email from the coroner with a PDF attached. In many pages of astonishing detail I read the science that showed that my Mum’s death wasn’t an accident, that she took her own life. When you’re staring into an abyss like this the rhetoric currently in the media sounds astoundingly shallow. Suicide isn’t a rational choice, or even an emotional one, it’s an existential choice, the most profound one imaginable.

To pin an action like this on a single motivation (ie: cyber bullying so you can amp up anxiety around technology use with children) is simplistic and manipulative. I have no doubt that cyber bullying played a part, but to base suicide on a single motivating factor is asinine and seems more in line with pushing a political agenda than recognizing a complex truth.

When I was in high school I was big into Dungeons and Dragons. At the height of the hobby a kid in Orangeville killed themselves and the press gleefully pinned the cause on D&D, causing panic in parents and making me, as an avid player, feel isolated and vilified. They’d done something similar a few years earlier with Ozzy Osborne and another suicide. This kind of simplification fills up the reports of the chattering classes, and helps idiots create fictions that let them push agendas. That many in the public swallow it is a lasting sadness.

From an educator’s point of view, this is being treated as a management issue. I fear suicide is being used to manipulate cyber bullying as a political tool – which under my circumstances seems particularly callous. Rhetorical stances like ‘suicide is never an option’ and rationalizations abound in an attempt to direct this very difficult aspect of human behavior. Control is the goal, based on a very real fear of the outcome. But the rhetoric still comes on in response to the presses’ assertion that cyber bullying caused this death.

I’ve been staring into this abyss for a while now. It has made work difficult, it has made life seem like the self made experience that it is, which is exceedingly heavy if you’re like most people and happy with distractions and assumption as your reason for being. Nothing is inherently valuable, life is what we make it – literally. In my Mum’s case she was battling mental illness and was finally on medication for it – which she overdosed on. Did mental illness play a part in her death? No doubt. Was it the only cause? Not remotely.

The suicide I’m dealing with didn’t happen in a vacuum, I suspect none of them do. I also suspect that none of them has ever, ever happened for a single reason. There is no doubt that Amanda was bullied, and that this was a factor in her suicide. What I question are the responses that focus on dealing with a single social issue that has always and will always exist as though resolving it would somehow magically have prevented her death.

People are naturally social and competitive. Bullying is a result of this basic human nature, it always has been. The twist now is that many of the clueless digital natives are publishing what has always happened privately for everyone to see. Instead of being seen as a window to a previously hidden behavior, the media has dubbed this a cyber bullying epidemic and called into question the very technologies that have made a problem as old as humanity obvious.

The educational response has been to try and get out in front of this invented epidemic. As someone who has circled this abyss, I’d ask everyone involved in education to consider the situation from more than a single perspective. Please do not simplify suicide into a misunderstanding that can be rationalized away.

We are not serving our students well if we simplify this into an administrative exercise solely to reduce suicide numbers. Appreciate the complexities of suicide and try to see the people who end up in this darkness as whole people with many interconnected, complex issues, and not something to be convinced, coerced, manipulated or managed into doing what is more comfortable for everyone else.

Suicide is complex, terrifying and present. It deserves our full attention, not a soundbite.

Art Therapy.

Long Distance Rallying: Lobo Loco’s Comical Rally

We were up early on Friday morning getting ready for the Lobo Loco Comical Rally. This was a tricky one with super-hero themed locations but without a set start and finish location. It sold out well before the start day and had people from all over the place participating in it. A long distance rally like this gives you a list of theme based locations you have to research and plan to visit in a set time period. This one also had a minimum distance requirement of 400kms in 12 hours.

For us we were looking at a warm (28°C), sunny day in Southern Ontario. Our plan was to create a ‘skeleton’ map of where we wanted to go and then research locations on the route that would get us points. Because this rally was a human-focused one, it made sense to head into population to find locations, so I elected to make a route that would lead us to Niagara Falls eventually. This would mean riding in the dreaded “Golden Horseshoe” – the most populated area in Canada and usually a sure way for me to lose all hope in humanity.

I usually aim away from population when I ride. Sitting in traffic and dicing with distracted drivers isn’t on my to-do list when I go for a ride, but one of the advantages to doing a rally is that it pushes you outside of your comfort zone. In this case it would help me hone my highway riding and traffic management skills.

The plan was to take the new Concours 14 on the trip but after a pre-rally ride on it we got home and looked at the Corbin seat on the Tiger and decided to take the older, less dependable and less long-distance touring ready bike simply for a saddle that doesn’t feel like a sadist’s dream. The Tiger also has nicer foot pegs for pillion and wasn’t giving me any reason to doubt it so I spend the day before making sure everything was tight and ready to go.

By 10am we were on the road getting points. We looped through downtown Elora to catch our first super-hero bonus (IRONMN1) and then bounced over to Fergus to get our first villain bonus at the Lutheran church there (LUTHOR1), then it was down to Guelph to catch a Spiderman themed stop (a science building at a university) before heading on to our first comic book store stop at The Dragon in the south end of the city. We’d hoped to also do a motorcycle themed comic book cover in the store but thanks to COVID they were running on reduced hours and weren’t open yet.

We’d done a lot of research and planning for the rally but you’ve got to be ready to pivot while you’re in a timed rally in order not to burn time. Unfortunately, at that moment the Tiger decided to get temperamental and wouldn’t start. I finally got it going again so we decided to grab a MOVIEP bonus for a superhero themed movie poster at a theatre nearby instead (you could only pick up 3 stops in teach location).

The Tiger wouldn’t start again after stopping at the theatre (turning over but not catching when hot). I was now anxious and worried that we’d get stranded while far from home during a never-ending pandemic. It finally started and we pulled over at a local Starbucks to have a coffee and a think. The bike was working perfectly other than the hot-start issue so we decided to press on. Because we parked the bike for 15 minutes while we had the coffee, the Tiger fired up no problem – so it starts, just not immediately after you turn it off. This is a problem in a long distance rally where you’re starting and stopping up to 25 times, but a manageable one.

South down Highway 6 we immediately got stuck in traffic coming off the 401 mega-highway. It was starting to get properly hot now but once we got moving the temperature was bearable. We were going to stop at Flamborough Patio Furniture to get a photo of one of their giant chickens (the INHULK bonus was to get a photo of an oversized road-side attraction), but there was no place to safely stop and I’m very conscious of safety when we’re rallying, so we pressed on to Terra Greenhouses where we got the GOBLIN1 bonus for finding garden gnomes. We stopped long enough that the Tiger fired up no problem – 10 minutes seemed to do the trick, so on we pressed to Hamilton and our next three targets.

Another science building stop at McMaster University almost got us the REALHOx real hero bonus (get a real-life hero to sit on or stand by your bike) when a nurse came out of the hospital still in scrubs on her way home, but we couldn’t find her once we pulled into the university parking area. After McMaster we headed downtown looking for a Wonder Woman bonus (stature of a woman), but construction meant we would have been sitting in traffic for 20 minutes trying to get there so we bailed, hit the Levity Comedy Club for a JOKERx bonus before riding out along Hamilton’s rough dock area.

The next target was Do Eat Sushi in Grimsby where they serve octopus on the menu (the OCTOPI Doc Octopus villain bonus!). We stopped for an excellent lunch at Station 1 across the street before pushing on to St. Catharines. Our Skills Ontario GIS medal winning son was at home so we had him look up an alternative Wonder Woman statue we could do and he found a great one! St. Catharines was the end of the Underground Railroad that helped slaves escape the land of the free south of us. Harriet Tubman was a real-life wonder woman who helped free hundreds of slaves and then went back to the US to fight for the Union in the civil war. Her statue in St. Catharines, where she lived for a time, was in a meditation garden on the side of a small church in a rough area of the city, and it was lovely and all the better for it because we were originally going to just grab a statue of a queen instead. Canada has a lot of hidden history like this but queen statues are a dime a dozen.

From Harriet we worked our way through St. Cats getting a Peter street and a Parker Street along with another science building to complete the Spiderman combo bonus (Peter & Parker streets, GOBLIN, OCTOPI and science building – so all the Spiderman – points).

We headed out toward Niagara toward Queenston Heights for our second wonder woman statue (Laura Secord this time) but the canal was closed while a massive ship with what looked like huge steel building construction on it closed the way over. Some cars were turning left so we followed them down the canal to the next bridge and got over as the big ship was entering the lock upstream. It was cool to see but slowed us down. I missed a turn to get on the highway and we ended up travelling through Niagara wine country instead, which was an improvement.

As long as we didn’t stop the Tiger and expect it to start right away it was flawless, though the clutch was starting to make some odd noises. Maybe it’s time to change the sparkplugs. We collapsed in a heap on the grass in the Queenston Heights across from Laura’s statue at 5pm. At that point we’d done about 160kms and hit 14 locations. Our initial plan was to do 24 locations (one under the 25 limit) and continue on to Niagara Falls before looping back and catching our final stops in Cambridge and Kitchener on our way home, but my phone was acting up and the bike was causing worry and I was concerned about our stamina (over the past 3 years our family has faced cancer and heart surgery).

As we sat there with our boots and socks off (I took my pants off too), we had a picnic of apples, granola bars and water, cooling off and stretching, we made a decision to call it. With better circumstances, a less questionable bike and better stamina on our part I think we could have aimed for a 10k score, but for this one my main goal was to finish and do it with a smile on our faces.

Finishing meant we had to do a minimum of 10 stops and cover at least 400kms. The distance requirement was going to be tricky and we wouldn’t meet it by retracing our steps. Just before my phone died I mapped an alternative route that would have us dodge west on the 403 to the 401 before heading home on the highway. Going this longer way around on the highway would mean we wouldn’t be on the road so long (but it would be at speed in rush hour traffic) and we’d just get over the distance requirements.

We set out about 5:30pm and bombed down the QEW without any slowdowns. When we got to the bypass around Hamilton things ground to start-stop with compression waves of impatient people cutting each other off and making it worse. We sat amidst the rows of idling SUVs, minivans and trucks, all spewing carbon into the atmosphere while everyone made a point of slowing things down in hopes of getting themselves a few feet further down the road. In circumstances like this it’s hard not to see every GTA rush hour as a metaphor for why we’re willing to make the world uninhabitable just to get ourselves a bit further down the road. It takes a special kind of blindness to not see that when you’re sitting in it every day.

The jackass in an Audi wagon with fifteen grands worth of carbon road bicycle on his back bumper who ran right to the end of a lane before cutting in front of the row of traffic was in the majority. Nothing makes people worse than there being too many people, and there are more too many people in the world every day.

I’d suggest lane splitting for bikes but after watching Ontario drivers fail to indicate and drive irrationally just in order to get ahead one space in traffic, I don’t think Ontario can handle lane splitting or filtering of motorcycles, we don’t have the culture or the driving skill to do it safely.

Once clear of the idiocy that is Canadian city driving (there’s a reason the only accidents Ewan & Charlie had when they rode around the world was in a Canadian city), we made tracks on the 403 away from the apocalyptic Golden Horseshoe. The Tiger doesn’t have much in the way of wind protection (it’s basically a tall, naked bike), but the motor is a treat and we bombed down the 403 to Woodstock where we stopped to fill up at about 7pm. The Tiger was managing over 50mpg two up with luggage. The long ride into the setting sun had dried us out so we grabbed a Booster Juice and stretched before hopping back onto that lovely Corbin saddle for the final run home.

The 401 is a lot like Mad Max but without the speed limits. As we got out onto the near-empty mega-highway we merged with 18 wheelers already doing 120km/hr and made tracks for Kitchener. We got there in what felt like a matter of minutes and ducked off at Shantz Hill to take Regional Road 17 past the Waterloo Regional Airport and home.

The sun was low in the sky and the sunset was beautiful. We passed through several small, Germanic communities around Kitchener and I figured at least one of them would have a Lutheran church so we could pick up another LUTHOR bonus, but all the little village churches had switched to United Church and I didn’t have it in me to go hunting this late in the day.

We pulled into the same Esso station in Elora that we’d left at 9:40am at 8:30pm and 407kms later. If you factor in our three extended stops, we were in motion for 9 out of those ll hours averaging 45km/hr including 14 stops for points.

If you’ve never done a long distance rally like this you’ll find that you’re exhausted at this point. Riding a bike is much more physically taxing than driving a car, especially an air conditioned one on a hot day. We’d made a point of hydrating whenever possible but you always end up in a deficit doing an event like this.

This was our first timed rally as a team and we both have a much clearer idea of what’s needed to be more competitive next time. An ergonomically sorted Concours would be a better tool for this kind of long distance work, especially covering the highway miles, and it would erase bike mechanical worries. Stopping for hydration and to sort ourselves out is a good idea – being frantic and chaotic on something like this doesn’t help you maximize points. We got penalties for misspelling not putting addresses in some of our emails, though our photos were good so we’ve got that down.

I had to get the Send Reduced App on my generic OnePlus Android phone in order to meet the size requirements for attachments which adds extra work to sending in stops. Iphones and Samsung Android phones do these file reductions automatically in their email programs so that’s one place to trim wasted time and maximize scores.

It took us 9 hours in motion to make 14 stops. You don’t want to rush stops because you can lose points making mistakes, but you also don’t want to end up with stop lag. An efficient stop would probably be a couple of minutes if you’re finding a safe place to stop, parking up the bike, getting the rally flag ready and taking the photo and sending it correctly. Some of our stops lagged up to 10 minutes. If we’re running for maximum points we’d need to tighten up our stops, but retaining the breaks is a good idea to maintain hydration and limberness.

The biggest place to pick up points would be in building our stamina so we could run competitively for the full 12 hours. This would require physical training. There is also an element of circumstance/luck in a long distance rally. If you get stuck in traffic or COVID reduced business hours you end up missing points that might otherwise fallen to hand. I’ve always felt that if you practice your luck it will improve; experience makes luck happen.

Our rally prep is strong and our ability to pivot away from bad situations while in motion was good. If we can improve our tools and stamina we could aim for a 10k+ finish points wise which would put us mid-pack.

The Concours is a better bike for this kind of work compared to the 80 thousand+kms, older and cantankerous Tiger, but I haven’t ergonomically tailored it to our needs yet. A phone that streamlines submissions would help as would an on-bike navigation system rather than me trying to do all that through my generic and increasingly disappointing OnePlus Android phone.

TomTom makes a moto-specific GPS system (so does Garmin) that would allow me to create a full rally route rather than the limited number of entries Google Maps allows. G-maps is also (like all Google apps it seems) a poorly designed afterthought designed to collect user data rather than provide an optimal service – we pay for free in many different ways. Having a navigationally specific tool would make for much more streamlined directional plan.

Our goal was to finish the rally and we achieved that. By building on our strengths and consolidating this experience and improving our tools and processes, we’ll be able to aim for a more competitive result next time.

Here’s our rally planning spreadsheet:

If you’ve never tried a long distance rally, give it a go. It’s a great way to hone your bike craft while riding with purpose. You also end up finding things you might not otherwise known about, which is one of my favourite things about it.

Below are the final scores. We finished, but just. Check out the mileage on the top runners! Managing over 1100kms in 12 hours means you’re averaging over 90kms/hr for 12 straight hours. I can’t quite wrap my head around how that’s possible if you’re still stopping for points all the time. Even if you’re pulling up, taking a photo, sending it and then immediately going again, you’d have to be really moving to manage that. Even our perfect run wouldn’t have gotten us in the top 20. The skill and stamina shown by the top runners is incredible.

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British Driving Culture

We’ve been in the UK for almost a week and yesterday spent the day skulking about London. Like the rest of England, London makes demands on a vehicle operator’s attention that many North Americans would find onerous. The small lanes, lack of shoulder and volume of traffic conspire to create a very intense and focused driving environment. Efficiency of motion isn’t an option, it’s an expectation.

A few years ago they set up a roundabout in our small town in Southern Ontario. The locals used to bring out lawn chairs and sit and watch the circus as Canadian drivers tried to negotiate an intersection that didn’t have lights telling them what to do. At a roundabout in the UK you tend to accelerate into an opening. If you slow down (or stop as many Canadian drivers do) before entering it, you’re going to create a chorus of honks behind you. You can expect others to see you coming and make space, but you need to be attentive and collegial in your approach. Ignoring others by cutting them off doesn’t fly here. Being a waffling idiot and not taking an opening won’t make you any friends either. A demanding kind of efficiency and cooperation that is foreign to many North American drivers is the expectation.

London traffic is that kind of urgent efficiency turned up to eleven. Oddly, British drivers are still very polite, waving thanks and making eye contact when they are facing a problem, like cars parked on an otherwise busy road blocking an entire lane of traffic, which seems to happen constantly. If the obstruction is on your side of the road you’re supposed to wait for traffic in the clear lane to pass, but people often pull over to let through cars that are stuck if it improves the flow of traffic and doesn’t slow them inordinately. This kind of consideration is another aspect of North American driving that is vanishingly rare, especially in the Greater Toronto Area where drivers tend to take on more of a ‘get yours and screw everyone else’ mindset.

Based on what I’ve seen, even a hesitant, relatively slow British driver would be considered near the pinnacle of driving talent in Canada, which is one of the reasons I find driving a car there tedious. Given a choice, Canadian drivers are content to give over about half of their attention to driving effectively, mainly because the massive roads with constant shoulders, signalling that tells you what to do rather than take initiative and minimal traffic volume encourage it. When things do get busy, as in Toronto, asshole is the default rather than let’s all work together to make this go more smoothly.

Even with steep congestion taxes London is a constant flow of traffic, but it’s all moving, and usually quickly. Into this maelstrom, thanks to demands of space and emissions requirements, motorcycles thrive. My first view when we got above ground and out of The Tube was a blood delivery bike effortlessly cutting through traffic on a busy Thursday morning. An older guy on a Suzuki Vstrom, he handled his machine with the kind of effortless grace you see of people who have a lot of miles under them. He seemed to see everything at once and disappeared through the delivery vans and cars in a flash of effortless speed.

Two wheeled delivery vehicles thrive in London, with couriers of all shapes and sizes on everything from 50cc scooters to big BMWs making the rounds. As we were walking toward Camden Market a rideere pulled into one of the few unused pieces of tarmac in London (the small triangle a car wouldn’t fit in before a curb) and carried out an animated conversation over bluetooth head piece with his dispatcher.

The efficiency of small vehicles like motorbikes isn’t ignored in England like it is in Canada. Bikes can squeeze through gaps that would cause a queue otherwise and split lanes. Parking is more efficient for bikes, so half a dozen commuters can and do park in the space taken up by one SUV.

Being a dispatch rider in London is considered a badge of distinction by motorcyclists here. If you can survive that you’re a good rider with exceptional awareness and control. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t last.

We’re now on a train to Norwich (my dad’s hometown) where we’re picking up a cousin’s car and driving in the UK for the first time. I always look forward to it because it’s engaging and challenging. You can’t eat or drink and drive here like you can in Canada, but you wouldn’t want to. You seldom stop due to a lack of traffic lights and a plethora of roundabouts and the roads are tight, twisty and require your attention. To top it all off everything is backwards. For the first couple of days I chant that like a mantra inside my head when I’m driving here. It keeps me on the right side of the road and gets me used to indicators and wipers being on opposite sides more quickly. Within a day or two I’m acclimatized and accidentally cleaning my windows way less.

I might try and find a motorbike rental while I’m home and see if I can find out where my Granddad Bill took that picture on his Coventry Eagle and get a photo of myself on something similarly English and iconoclastic, perhaps an Ariel Ace?

The other night I was in the car back to my cousin’s house and we were intent on making time. With the twisty, tight roads it felt like navigating a rally stage As we thrashed down the highway a Porsche 911 blew past us like we were going backwards. I love UK driving culture.

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Affidavits & Broken Ownerships

The XS1100 is finally mine. After buying it off a clueless millennial who had managed to lose all useful paperwork associated with the bike, I’ve been able to re-establish ownership. Here’s how you do it:

In order to reconnect continuity of ownership you need to get a signed affidavit from a legal notary. Your local town government will have a notary on hand that can sign, stamp and date your declaration of ownership (they’ll offer this as a service). I stopped in at the Centre Wellington Town Offices in Elora and explained the situation (clueless kid was previous owner, etc). I showed them the ownership history the MTO had printed out for me (all six pages of it!), and the letter of sale from the previous owner. I also said I’d made repeated attempts to find the last legal owner (I suspect he’s deceased).

The county clerk (who is a notary) signed, dated and stamped the affidavit I provided (that’s it above), and I took it back to the MTO office the next day. In just a couple of minutes I paid the taxes on the sale price and the bike was attached to my name and a new ownership was printed out. They keep all the relevant paperwork, including the affidavit.

It’s a bit of a pain in the neck to reestablish ownership, but it’s not particularly expensive (twenty bucks to get it signed) and just takes a bit of leg work by the new owner. I’d argue a hundred bucks off the price for your time and costs to get the bike sorted – more if the previous owner is a tool (which they probably are if they lost all their paperwork).

Eye Of The Storm

We pulled into Creemore just past noon with rain forming on my visor. My lovely wife (who is very
good at finding a seat in a restaurant) got us just that on a covered patio at the Old Mill House Pub and we enjoyed our first meal out since the pandemic started while watching the rain fall.

The thunder cell past over just as we finished lunch so we had a nice walk around Creemore checking out the Creemore Bakery & Cafe coffee shop and the local, independent bookstore, Curiosity House Books. Of course, we stayed just along enough that the next cell was moving in, and it was a humdinger! We could have sat it out but the afternoon was getting long and we had a doctor’s appointment to get to back home, so we got ourselves ready and jumped on the bike just as the rain came again.

This wasn’t a summer shower like the last one, it was torrential. By the time we turned on to County Road 9 to follow the Mad River up the Niagara Escarpment and hopefully through the storm, the road was a river itself and visibility was down to just a few car lengths.

This was my first time tackling this kind of weather on the Concours and I was doing it two up and on a schedule. I don’t know if Kawasaki Heavy Industries makes nuclear submarines (they do, of course), but the Concours handled this biblical end of time storm like one. With the windshield raised I was able to duck out of the deluge in my face and track through the tsunami.

County Road 9 twists and turns as it follows the Mad River up the side of the escarpment and the volume of rain was already causing flash flooding. As we approached Duntroon a construction site on the left side of the road had washed out leaving half a foot of muddy water running across the road. I angled the bike to hit it at 90° and we crossed effortlessly leaving a wake of muddy water. Further up the river had burst its banks and had flooded the dirt roads leading over it.

Stopping seemed more dangerous than the alternatives so I just pressed on. As we climbed out of the valley the rain, which had been thumping down in quarter sized drops so heavy I thought they might be hail eased and stopped as quickly as it came. As we crested the summit the sun broke out, highlighting the green valley behind us that was still under a diabolical sky. We pulled up to the intersection with Grey Road 124 which would lead us down toward Horning’s Mills, Shelbourne and then home, except the sky south of us wasn’t just dark and sinister, it was green, like a fresh bruise.

“I don’t think I want to ride into that,” I said to Alanna.

“Noooo…” Alanna said, eying the apocalypse south of us.

“How about we jog west to Dundalk instead?” I said, nodding to the turnoff just south of us.

The sun was out and the road was steaming as we sat there watching Shelbourne getting rocked by a storm cell that would go on to Barrie and wreak havoc half an hour later.

A deke onto County Road 9 and we were passing through county side washed clean by the passing storms. We caught another followup cell past Dundalk but it was nothing compared to the submersion we’d experienced coming out of Creemore.

It was one of those moments when you bond with a new bike. You ride it well and it performs like the fantastic piece of engineering that it is. As we thundered home (making the appointment with 10 whole minutes to spare), I found myself appreciating the Neptune Blue Kawasaki in a new light. This bike offers a level of versatility, even in the most obtuse situations, that opens up riding opportunities that I might otherwise not have considered.

On Friday we’re taking a run at Lobo Loco’s Comical Long Distance Rally. We’ve got the right bike for the job.

Some Kawasaki Concours fan-art…

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Tablets are like high heels part 2

The original: Tablets are like high heels

A while back I tried to wrap my head around tablets and why they are so popular. I struggled using an original ipad and eventually gave up. A bit later I had an opportunity to use a windows tablet and almost broke it across my head in frustration. I’m a tech savvy type, so I kept at it. If tablets are so great, what wasn’t I getting?

This past year I got my hands on an Asus Transformer – the tablet that would convince me that tablets are handy (because it also comes with a keyboard). It only convinced me that Android has a long way to go in being a tablet OS.

I’ve got an ipad2 and the Asus Transformer floating around my department waiting for robotics to start, so I offered them out to my staff for test drives. 18 emails requesting the slower, lower memory, single tasking ipad, one saying either would be fine (he got the quad core multi tasking Asus). Marketing works. Perhaps that is the key to tablet success.

The sell on tablets is a hard one. You’re getting epic style (yes, Picard has epic style) along with interweb access. I want to be peppy, mobile and look like I come from the future! I want a tablet, right?

Turns out I don’t. After trying and trying to tablet up, it just isn’t sticking. It appears I’m at an impasse when it comes to tablets and how I use the internet.

When I go online it’s a full contact sport. I like to get into many things simultaneously (that knocks the ipad out), I’m constantly taking pictures from one thing and slapping them into another. I’m in and out of photoshop, dreamweaver and other processor heavy software, I want lightning fast responses, the ability to create media on the fly, a keyboard that rewards me for years of learning how to touch type, and a screen that offers a clear view of as many full colour pixels as I can lay my eyes on.

Keep your filthy touch screens!
I want no part of it!

I expect to be able to toss something I found online onto my twitter feed or Facebook or linkedin, or flickr or evernote, or Ning, or Edmodo or any of a million other online tools without having to wonder if it’ll copy and paste this time or not.

Touch screens drive me bonkers. Until I’m getting Iron Man like performance from my 3d touch interface, I’m not interested in taking stabs at data to see if I can pick them up over and over again. Watching people do this on tablet baffles me, they seem content to have to attempt the same action over and over again, resigned to it – the inefficiency drives me batty. The fact that you look like a lost mole looking for a hole makes me snort in derision!

Then there’s the screen itself. I’m the kind of guy who cleans the windscreen in his car often (or his glasses before he got the lasers). If I have to look through it, I want it pristine. Peanut butter encrusted high def screens hold no interest for me at all. Even a plain old finger print smudge makes me wonder why you’d pay for the high-def screen in the first place. I’m a visual person, I want my digital window to gleam.

Tablets are for people who like to watch, spectators. If you are a passive web media consumer, I’d suggest going back to TV, but if you’re determined to lurk, tablets are a good fit for you. You look nice, but can’t do much; we’re back to the high heels again.

If you’re an active web user, someone who produces (and by produce I mean generate media, not merely be a retweeting machine) as much as they consume, then you’re going to find that the all show

Geeky high heels.

and no go reality of tablets frustrating.

There is no single moment where I’ve wished for a tablet when I’ve had my ultrabook handy. Light, fast and fully capable, and running on a full/real operating system instead of the dumbed down mobile OSes on tablets; that is where my proclivities lie!

If I have to have a tablet at all, it’s a phone and it fits in my pocket. It has a good camera, can get me online in a pinch, the batteries last all day and it doesn’t run so slowly as to drive me around the bend. I’ll live with the lame mobile OS until they get better and it’ll do everything I’d ever need a tablet for without spending hundreds of dollars on a redundancy.

At any other point, when I really want to hit the web, I’ll turn to the laptop.

Tablets might be a good fit for how you go online if you’re a freaky lurker, but otherwise stay clear! You’ll look great using them, but you won’t actually be doing much. If that’s your M.O., an Apple genius is waiting to take your order.