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Leatherup.ca order up!



I made that order for Leatherup.ca even though I couldn’t get a clear answer out of them about sizing on the jacket.  I was told by their ‘live’ support that the jacket measurements were the outside of the jacket – which I’ve never heard of before.  Why would I want to know what the outside dimensions of a jacket are?  It’s the inside dimensions that would fit me, why would I possibly care about the outside dimensions?

Anyway, based on the weird sizing I should be a small (I’m 6’3″, 220lbs, a 46 chest and a 40 waist).  My current jacket is an XL and the idea that I’d be a small seemed absurd.  I tried looking around for alternate size descriptions and found another on ebay.  That chart suggested I should be in a large, which still isn’t where I usually look for a jacket but isn’t as out of whack as a small or medium.

Inevitably, the large was too small.  I could get into it, and I think it would have fit without the liner but it ain’t no 42″ waist.  I’ve since sent it back for an XL safe in the knowledge that Leatherup.ca is very proud of their return policy.  Having said that, it cost me $22 to return it, so this jacket is already getting more expensive.

The good news is that the jacket was a quality piece with excellent stitching, heavy duty zippers and a nicely finished liner and details; it felt like a quality garment.  The helmet and gloves I got were both excellent.  The gloves have solid build quality with nice leather and stitching, and the helmet has also exceeded my expectations being light, comfortable and offering a lot of options for venting.  Both (gloves XL, helmet XXL) are perfect fits and follow normal sizing.

I’ll let you know how the return process goes with the jacket, I’m hoping it’s as effortless as they claim.  If you want to save some headaches in trying to figure out their strange jacket sizings just go with what you’d normally go with.  I get an XL jacket normally, I should have just trusted in that rather than the weird sizing charts.

update:  I’m a week into the exchange and Leatherup.ca has been completely radio silent – no ‘we’ve received your exchange’ email, no, ‘your exchange is in process email’, no, ‘your new jacket is on its way’ email.  After requesting information (twice), I’ve gotten no replies either.  Everything may be proceeding, but it’s like I sent that jacket back into a blackhole.  Between that and the lack of information on sizing that got me into an exchange situation in the first place, I’d have to say that Leatherup.ca isn’t very good at communicating.  Well priced quality gear?  Yep.  A smooth, customer orientated ordering process?  Not so much.

update again!  Leatherup suddenly woke up on Saturday.  I found a $600 motorcycle jacket at a garage sale for fifty bucks so I asked for a refund rather than an exchange on the returned cafe racer jacket and within ten minutes they’d ok’d the refund.

I’m happy with the kit I got, quality stuff at a good price, but their communications aren’t great.  I do a lot of ordering through work and the good companies (Amazon, Tigerdirect to name two) are constantly updating statuses and letting me know where they are in process.  This can be automated, so I hope Leatherup goes that route.  Having said all that, I’ll order from them again.


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Following Rivers

I just took a quick ride today along the Grand River.  In Ontario, where all the roads are painfully straight, you have to think geographically to find a road with some kinks in it.  Following the river offered something other than driving the Ontario grid.

Riding the banks of The Grand River


I got to the covered bridge at the end of the route and stopped for a photo.  I noticed that there was some drippage underneath the bike so I looked it over.  I’d just lubricated the chain before leaving so I thought maybe I’d put a bit too much chain oil on, but what was coming off looked runnier than chain lube.  A quick look under the fuel tank showed a gas leak.  

I got the bike home and took off the tank.  I hadn’t been happy with how the fuel line had gone back on, it never seemed to sit right.  After futzing around with it for a few minutes it suddenly popped right on properly and locked.  No more leak.

It was nice to get out for a short (45 minutes or so) ride even with a headache on a cold, windy day.  It’s been raining for days so I couldn’t turn down a chance to get out, even for a little while.  Diagnosing and fixing a leak that quickly afterwards was just as satisfying.

I’d really like to find a junker that I can break down and rebuild as a learning exercise, but finding an old bike in Ontario isn’t easy.  
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Moving the Needle

.

There were a number of incisive and critical reviews of both the U.S. education system and the role education technology plays in it at this year’s ASU/GSV Summit in Phoenix.  Constance Steinkuehler mentioned data exhaust, which I’ve already mulled over.  At a later discussion another speaker by the name of Brandon Busteed stunned the audience with this:

“Educational technology has failed to move the needle on either cost effectiveness or student success in the past ten years…” – Brandon Busteed, Gallup Education

This is an astonishing thing to say at an education technology conference, but he went on to back up his statement with a boat load of facts that fit so well with the anecdotal experiences of the teachers in the room that many were nodding along with him.

With the magic ipad, Google Apps and wifi for everyone we must surely be personalizing education away from that industrialized factory model we all find so abhorrent. In this digital renaissance we are using our newly found access to information to individualize learning and cater to the needs of each child, right? Surely we aren’t using it to create data from standardized testing. That would be like getting one of those new-fangled automobiles and then hooking your horse up to it so you could tow it into town and show it off.

The chart on the left is completely fictitious. After reading Busteed’s quote from my notes I went looking for data that would prove him wrong; I couldn’t find any. What I did find was that in longitudinal analysis PISA results aren’t particularly flattering to an increasingly digitized learning environment.  

Pick your country, from strong performers like Finland and Canada to poorer countries struggling to reach the average, it appears Brandon is right, education technology isn’t moving the needle, in fact it may be hurting more than it helps. That PISA numbers are at best inconsistent and at worse show a decline (especially in digitally focused countries) in the past eleven years should suggest that educational technology might not be as revolutionary as we suspect, or that we’re doing it wrong.

There are a number of influences pushing down student scores. Ironically, many of them are also under the influence of the information revolution. Income disparity is increasing in large part because the world is recovering from an economic crisis inflicted on it by Wall Street quants who harnessed newly available digital technology to play an economic shell game on a global scale. Workers displaced in both economic and workplace digital disruption are not able to raise their children in the same socio-economic environment that they were raised in. The middle-class itself is evaporating as the wealthy harness digital connectivity to push wealth beyond the reach of governments; technology is amoral and caters to the needs of those who can afford it without consideration for right action. Socio-economic factors are one of the key indicators in student success and the vast majority of people in the world are poorer today than they were a decade ago.

***

That digital disruption seems to feed economic disparity on a systemic basis should be a cause of concern for everyone, but especially people in an egalitarian social project like education. Is digitization a tool of income disparity? I’m not sure that we’ve answered that question yet, though I’d argue that if we are creating consumers rather than hackers then yes, it is. Passive acceptance and integration of digitization is a recipe for a newly efficient kind of serfdom.

This could as easily be the promise of edtech

The way digital technology disrupts existing industry is very exciting to the people who sell it. They have been so successful in presenting the idea of freedom from industrialization that digital disruption has become a desired expectation, especially for younger people. Expectation becomes inevitability but the results are producing efficiencies where we aren’t looking for them. Instead of individualizing education (like all the digital education tools promise) we are using digital technology to propagate the worst aspects of the industrial system we’re still clothed in, such as standardized testing and data collection. Instead of freeing us from systemic, cookie-cutter thinking, education technology is supporting a political push to re-institute data driven learning on such a wide scale that no one will be spared. The promise of easily manipulable data thrills educational management because it lends an air of credibility to what has always been a difficult to analyze process.

Instead of complexifying and diversifying our understanding of pedagogy, educational technology is supporting a political push to drastically simplify it, and it’s doing it under an onslaught of data and statistics. Had other examples of digital disruption led to that promised land of personalization, self expression and equality for everyone I might have hope, but as it stands, if you’re just using it you’re also just feeding its assumptions.

 

The art of our times…

When we put technology into the hands of students without expecting them to understand it we’re asking them to internalize and accept all the compromises and assumptions inherent in that technology, and make no mistake, all that complex hardware, software and networking are full of compromises.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, unless we teach students how this technology we expect them to use works, we are laying the foundation for a new generation of systemic thinkers that will make factory formatted graduates look like an egalitarian dream. There was still space to be individual among the gears of the old regime, there is no space between the ones and zeroes of the new one.

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Squids

I came across this term today while looking up gear.  It was funny to see it tied to a major manufacturer of motorcycle gear at the top of a Google search.  Being a keen new motorcyclist I looked it up.  You can’t look like you know anything about bikes if you don’t know the lingo.  Fortunately Urban Dictionary had a thorough explanation.

One of the things that knocked me off getting a motorcycle was a ‘squid’ killing himself outside my work one day.  He was late and he threw his GSX-R through a just-turned-red light at better than twice the speed limit.  He went over the hood of a car turning left onto the road in front of him and died on impact with the road.  His helmet wasn’t done up and flew off on first impact leaving him to skid down the road helmetless in a tshirt for sixty feet.  Seeing this all happen first hand put me off riding for a long time.

When I think now about motorcycling I think of it as a meditative and conscious activity. The people I’ve met doing it are the antithesis of squids.  Many seem to have a poet’s soul and a technician’s considered approach to their riding.  In many ways I feel like I’ve found my tribe when I talk to other motorcyclists.  That a squid did something that stupid twenty years ago and robbed me of what I’m enjoying now so much is a source of irritation.  These idiots have a disproportionate effect on how non-riders see motorcyclists.

That the internet gives this idiotic motorcycle subculture such a hard time makes me happy…






“Squid Shopping”


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Dogmatic Digitization

Digital technology thrives on a covenant of radical democracy that promises information for all.  The giants of technology market themselves on this egalitarian ideal.  From Google’s corporate counter culture to Apple’s fixation on design to empower the user, technology companies are founded and thrive on the idea of a future of individual empowerment.  People love them for it and self identify with digital technology companies in a personal way that is quite foreign to other consumer relationships.

Social norms have changed over the past five years.  Where once pulling out a smartphone demonstrated your importance and wealth, it is now a common gesture for pretty much everyone in North America.  We’ve passed a tipping point, the majority of people are on a computer connected to the internet all the time.  If you don’t believe me go for a walk in any public place and see how many people are operating handheld computing devices.

As the majority adopts digital platforms I’ve seen a consistent dumbing down of digital tools and content in order to reach as wide an audience as possible.  This is probably a complaint form many early adopters, but when I see simplicity and limitation rather than functionality and access begin to infect how we use technology in education I have to question the pedagogical value of our educational technology.


In order to cater to as many people as possible educational technology has created systems that hide much of what happens behind simplistic interfaces.  Can the promise of radical democratization of information survive when most people want to be spoon fed in the most limited manner possible?  Free access to material doesn’t matter when most people only want to use the internet in the same, simplistic way.

Digital technology still presents itself with those early ideals of democratic information access and transparency, but like everything else as it matures it begins to develop a more pragmatic approach.  My feeling now is that these egalitarian, transparent technology companies are actually anything but.  No one that wealthy feels the need to be transparent, or to educate others.  When you are worth billions your goal becomes market share and monopoly.

Educational technology, as an offspring of the digital technology giants, suffers from this dogmatic stiffening of its intent.  Rather than focusing on individual empowerment and the promise of de-industrializing the education system they are happy to embrace dehumanizing, data-driven testing, especially if it offers ease of implementation.  If education technology isn’t interested in offering users diverse, personally nuanced, highly adaptive, open ended digital learning tools in a transparent and universal access to information, then what hope have the rest of us in a consumer driven digital world?  We’re preparing the next generation of drones.

Tweets from the ASU/GSV Summit in Phoenix

We’re in a position as educators and educational technologists to try and direct digitization away from closed systems with limited access to tools and information but the money infects our good intent.  Rather than focusing on diversity and acclimatizing students to the radical openness of the internet (something that, like the Wild West, may soon disappear), we preach walled gardens and monopolistic access.  We teach students to value limited access in order to train them for a future internet controlled by the rich and we do it because it’s easier, not because it’s better.

For some new tools empower,
but for far too many they create
habitually driven repetiton

That this is all done under the guise of freer information for all is laughable.  How can education claim to support the ideals of the early information revolution if it is in bed with pragmatic companies pushing for tiered access to information based on wealth?  If the information revolution was ever about ideals it has long since been replaced by moneyed interest.

Between datamining users to support wrong headed standardized testing policies to simply fleecing student data to generate sellable marketing information, the flipside to education technology is complex and not particularly flattering.  As a teacher of technology I hope to empower my students with knowledge of how information technology works in order for them to remain independent entities in the brave new world we’re creating.  For the other 95% who take no computer studies and yet live on this technology all day every day, I see a future every bit as dogmatic and limited as the industrial one we are now shedding.  In fact, it may be much worse because, unlike the punch card factory worker of the Twentieth Century who was reduced to a number for eight hours a day, dogmatic, digitized information demands your undying attention and submission 24/7/365.

If you can’t hack it, it owns you.

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Who Owns Your Data?

Tweets from the #edinnovation Summit
There was much hand-wringing over privacy and data ownership at the recent ASU/GSV conference.  Serious people in designer suits explained that security is expensive, must be shrouded in secrecy and is never full-proof.  Sounds like a great fear-sell for cash infused education systems (sic).  Fortunately you can’t really oversee it either because that would be a breach of security; it’s a brilliant piece of hard-salesmanship with minimal oversight.

Listening to the urgency and paranoia in these discussions had me thinking about how privacy and data ownership are framed in digital environments.  I’m the first to suggest we be cautious with how student data is shared, but the idea that anything digital can somehow be locked down and owned is ridiculous.  I’ve heard ed-tech ‘experts’ go on about walled gardens at length.  You can leap over any of those walled gardens with a simple screen capture or text grab, and then it can go viral on the wild internet.  Trying to keep data in check is like trying to hold back Niagara Falls with a door, digital data is incredibly fluid, that’s why we can do so much with it.

The second tweet at the top sheds some light on how we are misframing data as an ownable entity.  Like your appearance or your reputation, the data you give off is information you emit socially; you can’t own your data any more than you can own your appearance or your reputation.  In all three cases you can, of course, influence the social outputs you’re giving, but you can’t own them.  Realizing this would stop us from trying to control the uncontrollable and instead let us begin teaching students (and everyone else for that matter) best practices for creating desirable data emissions (there has to be a better word for that, digital reputation? digirep? virtual scent?  vBO?).

If we begin to see digital data emissions as a natural byproduct of online interaction (and make no mistake, they are), then the idea that if we throw enough money at it we can make everyone safe gets questioned.  You’re never going to hear education technology companies that market based on security suggesting this mindset, there’s no money in it.

The other side of this is privacy.  The idea that we can suddenly have privacy now when we’ve never had it before is baffling to me.  Before we became industrialized we were mostly geographically locked to where we were born.  Without the ease of fossil fuel powered vehicles most of us never travelled more than a dozen miles from where we were born.  Do you think anyone had privacy in those circumstances?  You were a well established element in a fairly static society.  The idea that you could shield your actions from the public eye only really began in the twentieth century.  Industrialized anonymity was as much curse as it was something desirable.  It was only in the conformity forced on us by industrialization that the illusion of privacy existed.

If the NSA and CIA can’t stop it, do you think that edtech companies can?


We are emerging from that drab, industrial anonymity caused by cookie cutter conformity.  The digital world doesn’t expect us to be passive eyeballs counted as ratings in front of a TV screen, it demands interaction and individuality and it restores our voices.  As we emerge into an individually empowered, digitally driven world of shared information, expecting privacy is a wish for a poisonous illusion that never really existed.

Privacy isn’t dead, it never existed.  Prior to industrialization we had no social privacy at all and during industrialization we were dehumanized into bricks in the wall and given the illusion of privacy because we barely mattered as individuals.

When you’re online nothing you do is private, nothing you do is owned by you.  Just as you can influence your appearance by good hygiene or your reputation by performing right action, you can affect your data-appearance by presenting yourself well, but ultimately any data you give off is out there and can spread easily, just like gossip.

The nascent study of digital citizenship addresses a lot of this, but like other digital skills it is an afterthought, never integrated into core curriculum.  No wonder men in expensive suits can make lots of money preaching fear and convincing educators to spend their budgets on myth and innuendo.  Perhaps one day educators will take the job of understanding and teaching digital skills seriously and ignore the snake oil.

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Mechanical Sympathy

 At the end of a twisty road, deep in the hills, the shop of my dreams…

 

courtesy of www.floorplanner.com, it’s easy to play with, give it a whirl!

Since doing bodywork on my first bike, I’ve remembered how much I enjoy doing it.  The new shop will be a working paint shop with a booth and an oven capable of power coating parts.

PAINT



Open faced paint booth: Paint-booths.com

Price:  $2599

PAASCHE HSSB-30-16 30″ Paint Spray booth

Price: $525

MECHANICS

DSA800SE-GL2 30L (8gal) 1600W dual 20/40KHz Ultrasonic parts cleaner
$850

20 Gallon Heavy Duty  solvent parts cleaner
$115

Anderson Motorcycle Stand
http://andersonstands.com/workshop_stands.htm
700x2100mm
$2900

Industrial Air
60 Gallon Electric Air Compressor
24x27in footprint
$710

accessories (hoses, connectors)
$50

Lincoln Electric Handy Mig Welder Kit
$450

Lincoln Electric Cutwelder
$330+tanks $300

It’s a work in progress.  Wouldn’t this be a nice thing to retire into?

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Learning Curves

Following up on the ‘just tell me the answer‘ post last week, I’ve been trying to find ways to articulate what I’m attempting to do with students so that they don’t become frustrated.  It’s said that familiarity breeds contempt, but what I’m hoping is that familiarity breeds confidence and a willingness to experiment and push the boundaries of student knowledge.  

The germination of self-directed learning should be the goal of instruction in any teaching.  A student who is forever dependent upon a teacher is a poor student indeed.  With that goal in mind I’m working out the process of developing self directed learning in students using Prezi to map out how familiarity breeds confidence and self direction.

 


Some brilliant Google+ sharing by Liz Krane &
Carmelyne Thompson via Josh Kaufman

Explaining this to my senior computer engineers I tried to stress that this process is what I’m looking at, not necessarily what you know.  Even though the seniors are supposed to have previous experience many don’t so the course needs to be flexible in how it approaches a wide range of abilities.  If I see steady growth in familiarity through guided instruction the inevitable result should be the formation of self-directed learning demonstrated through experimentation, collaboration and troubleshooting.  Looking for what a student knows is much less important than looking for where a student is in this learning process towards mastery.  Mastery itself is really just another word for a person who knows enough to error correct and self direct their learning – expertise never came at a teacher’s hand, mastery is always self taught.

Josh Kaufman’s TEDtalk on how 20 hours takes you through the initial steep climb (humbling and intensely rewarding) when picking up a new skills is telling:


We fail to do a lot of these things in school.  Distractions in the form of bells, announcements, lousy chairs and tables, large classes, and dozens of other interferences break focus.  I like to say, “stop learning now, you have to leave” to students when the bell goes and students who were lost in what they were doing are jarred back into the present.

Kaufman’s learning curve,
seems perfectly sensible…

On top of school itself we now have digital technology which is most effective at monetizing us if we ‘surf’ rather than focus.  The habits we develop while being consumers online plague educational technology as students who are used to being digitally shallow out of school bring the same lack of focus to their learning.  That we ignore digital habits and corporate influence in educational technology will probably be the reason it never does what it promises it might do.

Beyond industrialized settings and digital distractions education systems fail to recognize the basic process of learning and in doing so spend a lot of time and money producing under-performing students.  When 50% is a pass even a perfect pass rate isn’t saying much.  If our learning happens on a curve as Kaufman suggests, then we are doing this wrong in just about every possible way.

About a year ago I took a weekend course in order to begin riding a motorcycle.  Difficult and uncompromising it demanded my full attention both in the classroom and for hours in the saddle.  Not paying attention resulted in possible injury (and several people were).  That weekend course might seem too short but it just happens to be about twenty hours long (what Kaufman suggests you need to get over the steepest part of the learning curve).  With the right kind of support (small class size with a 1:4 instructor/student ratio and everything we needed to learn the skill including bikes, space, etc) and an expectation of focused learning, that twenty hours got me over the hump and able to continue developing expertise in a complex skill set that I had no previous experience in.  I’d have to say, anecdotally, that Kaufman’s 20 hours seems right on the money.

We don’t think about learning curves in school.  We don’t consider how students feel when they are picking up a new skill and feel inadequate; feelings aren’t in the curriculum.  Worse, we consider learning to be a twelve year long marathon in school rather than a series of short sprints.  Student goals aren’t always clear or consistent, failure isn’t considered an option and learning itself is less a focus than are irrelevant personal details like your age.  We’d rather bunch students by age than where they are in their learning process.  We lose sight of the possibilities and challenges inherent in the first twenty hours of new learning in favour of decade long statistical growth.

Can you imagine a school guided by Kaufman’s logic?  Students are given focused learning to get them into a self correcting phase and then are expected to self-direct their learning. There would be classrooms with very high student:teacher ratios where the focus is on early learning.  There may be other times and spaces where students are entirely independent and producing their own directed learning.  Instead of a blanket approach our classrooms and schedules would reflect our variable learning curves; our schools would be responsive to how we learn instead of the other way round.

 Digital technology would lend itself to this kind of learning by offering information, collaboration and communication to students on a profoundly personalized level.  If we don’t begin taking the training of digital tools seriously the consumerist habits developed by everybody (students and staff) outside of school won’t allow us to de-industrialize education and adapt it to how we learn.

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Digital Motorcycle Reading


I just finished Nick Sander’s Incredible Ride on an ipad mini and really enjoyed the experience.  The integrated digital media in the ebook drew a different picture of that trip compared to just a written narrative.  It wasn’t always better (as deep and developed) as a well thought out narrative piece of prose but it offered an interesting reading experience in a different way.

I’ve tried reading digitally before with older ipads and other tablets but have been unsatisfied with the quality.  The Retina display on this Mini is a revelation though, it has better screen resolution than my 15″ laptop; it’s so sharp and clear that it’s shocking!  I also find my eyes don’t get tired reading off it (perhaps as a result of that clarity).  With all that in mind I started thinking about alternative ways to read my motorcycle media.


My Cycle Canada subscription is coming to an end and I want to renew, but I think I might go digital.  I’m also keen to get into Bike magazine and Adventure Bike Rider magazine, both UK titles that cost me $13+taxes a pop when I find them in a local store.  Rather than get stuck into another year of dead trees I tried reading digital samples on the ipad Mini.
  

Bike Magazine showed the multi-media possibilities of a digital magazine.  The embedded video and layers of information available in the digital copy were fantastic.  The high resolution images on that Retina display were jaw dropping.  There is no doubt the digital copy is the way to go, and at £48 for a year (£4/$7.40CAN per issue) it’s a much better deal than the $15 with taxes I’m paying at Chapters for a paper copy.

ABR is an even better deal.  Instead of $15 an issue in Chapters I’m looking at £20 ($37CAN) for a year with access to all back issues.  I’m going to check out its digital content, but if it comes anywhere close to what Bike is doing then it too will be a no-brainer.

Cycle Canada was a bit more basic.  The online sample said it wasn’t at full resolution, so it expects me to commit to digital without knowing what it will look like, which seems a bit weak. 

The only downside to the digital copy is that I can’t settle into a hot bath with an ipad.  Maybe I’ll re-up Cycle Canada on dead trees for a while longer so I have an amphibious option.

If you’ve tried digital and not liked it give it a go with Apple’s Retina display, it might surprise you.  The additional depth and media you get from the digital copy only seals the deal.

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MotoGP And The Dragon’s Tail

I noticed that the US MotoGP race is in August at Indianapolis this year.  I’ve never attended a MotoGP race before, but it makes a great excuse for a road trip!

Mapping it out in Google, I immediately extended the trip to hit the GP first and then continue on to the Tail of the Dragon before riding up the Blue Ridge Parkway and returning into Canada at the Thousand Islands.

The round trip would be just over thirty-five hundred kilometres.  The race happens over the weekend of August 8th to 10th, so leaving on the Thursday morning would get us there Friday afternoon, we could catch Saturday qualifying and then Sunday’s race and leave Monday morning.  But rather than head back north we’d be heading south east for The Tail of the Dragon!

Working our way up the Appalachian Mountains, we’d go from the Tail to the Blue Ridge Parkway to the Skyline Parkway before pushing back north to re-cross into Canada at The Thousand Islands.



The trip consists of three high speed sections (Ontario to Indianapolis, Indianapolis to Knoxville and Front Royal VA to Thousand Islands), and some slow sections (Tale of the Dragon, Blue Ridge and Skyline Parkways).


With a three night stopover for the Indie race, the schedule falls into about a ten or eleven day trip:

Leave on the Thursday, get to Indianapolis on Friday afternoon, Saturday qualifying, Sunday races, Monday morning departure and cover some ground, Tail of the Dragon on Tuesday, Blue Ridge Parkway Wednesday & Thursday, Skyline on Friday and then the run north for the border, we’d be back in Canada  on Sunday, August 17th.
Tail of the Dragon in Tennessee.
Blue Ridge Parkway in the Appalachians.



This would be a MotoGP event at a legendary venue followed by some epic rides in mountains that we simply don’t have in Ontario.  The start is by my place, the finish is by my buddy Jason’s place.  He didn’t take his bike out at all last year, I’m hoping this changes his mind.