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More Traditional Bike Gear for Season 2

My first year of bike gear had a certain style to it, it also happened to be the least expensive stuff I could lay hands on.  After the no-name boots and pants I did a second round of gear buying as the summer began.  The Alpinestar boots and Macna pants I got were next level, but this year I want to expand my kit to include a more traditional biker look; it’s time for the leather jacket and an alternate helmet.  

Since everything else is technicolour, textile and sport-bikey, I’m going for more traditional looking gear this time around.  When I’ve eventually got more than one bike I’m hoping that a range of gear lets throw a leg over anything and go.




This time round I’m looking for an open faced helmet for the short commute to work and a leather jacket.  My current choices were found on Canada’s Motorcycle, Motorcycle Superstore and Leatherup.ca.

I’ve been looking for a classic motorcycle jacket that does the vertical stripe thing.  That look is surprisingly hard to find.  Short of going to a Pakistani garment manufacturer directly (along with the perils of ordering that way), they are surprisingly unavailable.


The flat black G-Max helmet is inexpensive and simple.  The Shark Soviet looking helmet is cool and expensive.  I’ve got gauntlet gloves and mesh gloves, but a pair of black leather gloves would be nice.

Since I started riding I’ve been finding that jeans are handy if I suddenly want to take the bike out.  A leather jacket would be a causal but convenient way to quickly get out on two wheels.  The full-on textile armoured jacket and pants still do the job for intentional longer rides, but for quick jaunts the leather and denim thing would mean just throwing a leg over a bike, not to mention not looking out of place on a more classic ride.  Getting on a Bonneville with the textile race wear looks a bit out of place.


 LLeatherup.ca‘s prices look reasonable too.  If they get back to me about the weird sizing on that jacket, I’ll be ordering shortly.




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The Money Trap

I know it’s hard to imagine, but there was a time when money did not dictate your self-value. This seems a foreign concept in the twenty-first Century, but prior to the neo-liberal ideas that we now take for granted, humans valued themselves in very different ways.

Bucky’s quote popped up the other day and got me thinking about self-value. Can you imagine a world where the purpose of people was to push the boundaries of their thinking instead of being forced into servitude to an economic system that reduces them to drudgery?


Rather than battle this kind of reductionist and inhuman economic thinking, education has been struggling to get on board with it (there is nothing worse than looking like you’re out of step with society – it’s never wrong).  Pathways to employment is modern education’s reason for being, and it plays nicely into 1% thinking that earning money is all that matters, all that makes you worthwhile.

The rich want you to self-identify with your earning potential, then they own your means of happiness. When your self-worth is tied to your ability to earn a trivial income you are drip-fed your reason for being by people who (according to your own core belief that money is what makes you valuable) will happily starve you for their own ends.

Asking a 21st Century person to believe that their income does not dictate their self value is impossible. This kind of viral capitalism is every bit as limiting to human potential as medieval serfdom, dogmatic church states or god-kings.

People are fond of criticizing history for ideas that seem silly in retrospect.  These are the very same people who argue for and justify our current woeful state of being.  Our unsuccessful students aren’t high earners.  Our successful students go to work for those oil companies.  It’s a difficult thing to see past the myths, misinformation and indoctrination of our own culture, but I suspect you’ll never find happiness if you don’t, especially in the early twenty-first Century.


***

It’s the day before classes start again and I’m up at 6am after too many tedious work anxiety dreams (not of being in the classroom, but of being in school.  Teaching doesn’t freak me out, the systemic nature of modern education does).

I had a good break, but now I’m back to seeing how far I can encourage free thinking before I crash into The System again.  I’m a 20%er at heart.  I always tend toward the more difficult road, I get more out of travelling on it but it’s tiring being a minority all the time.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been away from the classroom for a few days, found some perspective and wondered if I’m in the best place to learn.  The irony isn’t lost on me.
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Pushing 360° Video Quality on a Motorcycle

I’ve been messing around with 360° immersive video at work.  One of the best ways to quickly get familiar with the technology is to use it in a difficult circumstance so you can find its limitations.  At work we’re building immersive video to show a virtual walk-through of our school.  If the gimbal and camera we have will work on a motorbike, it’ll work stuck to a kid’s head as they walk through the school.

 There are a number of barriers to admission with 4k video and image stabilization.  Fortunately, the 360Fly4k windshield mount I have is so over engineered that it easily handles the weight and motion of the gimbal and camera rig.

I’ve previously done 4k video with the 360Fly4k, but it has a big blind spot on it, so this would be my first true 360 4k video.  The Fly is a tough thing that takes great footage, but I’d describe it more as a 300° camera than a true 360 one.

 This 4k 360 camera is the Samsung Gear 360.  I’m running it off the camera because the app won’t run on my Android non-Samsung phone because I guess Samsung don’t want to sell many of these cameras – it’s kind of a jerk move on their part so if these things don’t sell (because you have to have a Samsung phone to access it remotely), then they’re getting what they deserve.

 The Gear 360 has a small screen so you can see settings and using the buttons is fairly straightforward, though you’ll find yourself constantly accidentally pressing buttons while you’re handling it.  The Ricoh Theta 360 is still my ergonomic favourite in terms of control and handling, and they just came out with a 4k version of the Theta – perhaps they’ll lend me one to test.

 The gimbal is a Moza Guru 360°Camera stabilizer.  The typical gimbal design has weights to the left or right of the camera to keep things balanced, but on a 360 camera that means you’re blocking all sorts of sight lines.  The Moza gimbal is vertically stacked with the weights hanging below, mostly out of sight.  It has a power button and a push button joystick that lets you set shooting modes and centre your camera so it’s looking where you’re going rather that looking down the ‘seams’ between the two cameras.

Most 360 cameras are actually two or more cameras working together.  The resulting footage is then stitched together in software to make an every direction video.  The raw footage from the Samsung looks like this (on left).  A front and back facing fish-eye camera capturing separate footage.

 Because both cameras are capturing different scenes, you can often see where they are stitched together because of a difference in ISO which shows up as a clear line of brightness difference (on the right).  They all tend to be identical, fixed-lens cameras, so the aperture and shutter speed tend to be identical.

 The first test video has the Samsung camera set at highest resolution (4096×2048 pixels in video) and 24FPS.  The gimbal is in locked mode, so it’s always looking in the same direction even if I go around the corner.  The gimbal provides smooth video by taking the bike’s motion out of the video (it’s always looking in the same direction as the bike and I rotate around the shot), but a bike’s motion is one of the best parts of riding, so for the second shot I set it in tracking mode so it followed the bike’s motions.



Uploading it to YouTube out of the Gear 360 Action Director resulted in a flattened video that doesn’t allow you to pan.  In order to produce that kind of video in the G360-AD (what a ridiculous name), you need to PRODUCE the video in the software and then share it to YouTube from within the program.  My issue with this is that when you bring the program in it takes an Intel i7 VR ready laptop the better part of twenty minutes (for less than ten minutes of footage) to process it before you can do anything with it.  When you produce it (again) for YouTube you end up waiting another twenty minutes.  The Ricoh Theta saves the video (albeit 1080p equivalent) in a fraction of the time and the resulting saved version is 360 ready for YouTube; the 360Fly software is likewise efficient at 4k.  I’m not sure why I have to wait forty minutes to produce less than ten minutes of footage on the Samsung.  I know it’s a lot of data to work through, but it isn’t a very streamlined process.

 So, after a lot of post processing, the 4096×2048 360° video out of the camera shows up on YouTube at 1440s (s stands for spherical rather than p – pixels – spherical footage is stretched across a wider area and tends to look less sharp).  I’m not sure where my 2048s footage went – I imagine part of that big post processing was to shrink the footage to fit on YouTube more easily?

 If you click on the YouTube logo you can watch it in YouTube and adjust the resolution (bottom right) to see how it looks (make sure to do it full screen to use all your pixels).  If you’re lucky enough to be watching it on a 4k display, this will come close to filling it.


The quality is excellent, the microphone remarkably good (they get beaten up pretty badly on motorcycles), but the awkwardness of post processing and the ergonomics of the thing don’t make it my first choice.  Trying to manage it with gloves on would be even more frustrating.  What you’ve got here is a good piece of hardware let down by some weak product design and software.


The software does offer some interesting post processing options in terms of wacky arts filters, but if you’re shooting at 4k all this does is drastically reduce the quality of your video.  If you’re going to use those filters film at way lower resolution so you don’t have to wait for hours while they process.


I’m aiming to go for a ride tomorrow to look at the fall colours after our first frost.  I’ll bring the Samsung along and see how well it photographs.  It’s promising 15 megapixel 360 images and high dynamic range landscapes, so I’m optimistic.  Photography is timeless and my preferred visual medium anyway, I find video too trapped by the continuity of time.  Maybe the Samsung will be a good photography tool.  Of course, I won’t be able to fire the thing remotely because I don’t have a Samsung phone…


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A Nice Way to Turn 50…

Thanks to the Ontario Government ignoring the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and illegally forcing a contract on us, I had my 50th birthday off.  I had an entire year of saved up sick days stripped away, but hey, I got a day off for it.  So much for Charter rights.


I figured the Forks of the Credit would be silly over the long weekend, so I thought I’d head over there on the Friday afternoon.  Still lots of people about, but I got to have a couple of clean runs up and down the twisty bits where I wasn’t on the bumper of a duffer in a cage.  I’m not leaving rubber doing this, and I’m usually within 10km/hr of the limit, but cars through this twisty, technical road are a bit of a disaster.  It was nice to get a couple of runs without worrying about the processing capacity of the driver in front of me.


Photos are taken with a Ricoh Theta V on a custom built mount attached to the wing mirror.  Screen captured in the Ricoh software and modified in Adobe Lightroom:

The switchbacks at The Forks…

The little guy on the side of the road said, ‘woah!!!” so loud I could here him on the bike.  🙂

Always look where you want to go – sometimes that’s over your shoulder!

In the moment on one of the frew curves between me at the Niagara Escarpment.  If I lived in California I would be a regular canyon carver on the weekends.



Beautiful weather, minimal traffic and a frisky Tiger.  It was a good 50th birthday ride.

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Vehicle Branding

I sold the Yamaha XS1100 yesterday.  With the Concours on life support I haven’t had the wrenching time to work on the Yam, so I put it up for sale to make room in an otherwise overcrowded garage full of old Japanese bikes that aren’t running.

The Mid-Night Edition Yamaha came to me in rough shape both physically and legally.  With only a hand written note I had to figure out how to get continuity of ownership restored.  It was a relatively simple process, but you need to be lucky (I was) and figure out how to get an affidavit worked out (I did).

Where I got lucky was that the Yamaha didn’t have a brand on it.  Had it been a write off at any point previously (and it had a long and storied eleven page history – so it was entirely possible), I’d have been up a creek.  That legal ownership near miss got me thinking about more complex ownership issues, especially when I saw this Versys pop up on Kijiji with a sad history:

A lost Versys





A bit of research has shown that this bike’s ‘irreparable Ontario title’ means it’ll never ride on the road again, it can only be used for parts.  For a bike that appears to have relatively minor damage, this seems a shame.  Others have had frustrating experiences with insurance companies writing off bikes rather than letting them buy them back and repair them (people get emotionally attached to bikes).  It’s a matter of mathematics for the insurance company though.  A bike may be repairable, but the cost of those repairs outweigh the value of the bike, so it’s deemed irreparable.



So what would you do with this otherwise lovely Versys?  You would need to pick up another Versys frame with a working title (no damage, no history of crashes) and then graft the better parts from this Versys (not the front wheel) to that valid frame.  You’d have a low mileage bike with relatively new parts, but it would cost you two bikes and a lot of time and talent to make it happen.  I’ve never seen even an older Versys for sale for any less than twenty-five hundred bucks, so you’re looking at $5000 plus a lot of work to have a modern, road-worthy Versys 650.

If you had a high mileage, older Versys sitting in the garage, it might make sense, but things change over time (especially mounting brackets and other niggly bits), so you might find that your expensive donor parts don’t actually fit.  No matter how you frame it (!), it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

If this were a limited edition or classic bike, it might make a good parts bike, but a relatively anonymous, recent Japanese bike?  You can buy an immaculate, year older bike with half the kilometres and no crashes for less than five grand.

The moral of all this?  I’ve found two.  Firstly, you’re taking a big risk buying a bike without the ownership on hand.  I got lucky with the Yamaha, but I could have as easily gone in and found that it was scraped and what I’d bought could never legally ride on the road again.  Secondly, if you see a bike with anything other than a working title in Ontario, stay away unless you’re looking for a parts bike, in which case price it accordingly.


Links & Information on Motorcycle Branding in Ontario
(and generally in North America)

https://www.ontario.ca/laws/regulation/020376/v1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_title_branding
http://www.mto.gov.on.ca/english/vehicles/vehicle-branding-program.shtml
http://www.mto.gov.on.ca/english/vehicles/vehicle-branding-program-faq.shtml
http://www.gtamotorcycle.com/vbforum/archive/index.php/t-141734.html?s=73a91a4860714e30a183b20b315ff3d5
“In Ontario there is no “rebuilt” for motorcycles. They are either clear title, or scrap. If it’s ever been ‘branded’, then it can never be licensed for the road. You need to have a clean, unbranded frame in order to license a motorcycle for on-road use.”

http://ontariorodders.activeboard.com/t52382265/salvage-title/
http://www.kijiji.ca/b-motorcycle-parts-accessories/gta-greater-toronto-area/frames-with-titles/k0c309l1700272
http://www.gtamotorcycle.com/vbforum/archive/index.php/t-177188.html
http://www.gtamotorcycle.com/archives/archive/index.php/t-54857.html
http://www.gtamotorcycle.com/archives/archive/index.php/t-131215.html

Q9: Can I legally drive an “Irreparable” or “Salvage” vehicle on Ontario roads?
No. Vehicles branded as “Irreparable” can never be driven on Ontario roads. They can only be used for parts or scrap.
Vehicles branded as “Salvage” can’t be driven on the road, but they can be towed for the purposes of repair or receiving a Safety Standards Certificate. If you want to drive a “Salvage” vehicle, it must be upgraded to “Rebuilt.” This can only be done if it has passed a structural inspection and safety inspection to be registered for on-road use.

Q10: How can I change the brand on my vehicle from “Salvage” to “Rebuilt”?

To make sure your vehicle meets minimum safety standards, it must pass an inspection and be issued a Structural Inspection Certificate (SIC). You must submit the SIC and registration permit to a Ministry of Transportation licensing office. Once accepted and approved, the “Salvage” brand will be changed to “Rebuilt.”
Once the “Rebuilt” brand is placed on the vehicle registration file, you must obtain a Safety Standards Certificate from any Motor Vehicle Inspection Station so the vehicle can be declared “fit.” The vehicle may then be plated and legally operated (once it has been provided with a Drive Clean certificate, if required).
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Exceptional Times

Thoughts from the depths of the COVID19 pandemic: Rather than give in to the digital divide in times of crisis, why not leverage this moment and make moves to resolve it?


***


It has been suggested that due to the inequity of access to technology and internet, our education system should shut down during the COVID19 pandemic.  Rather than surrender to this inequity, why not attempt to address it directly?  We could leverage educational technology manufacturers and create one to one technology access for our student populations on the wrong side of the digital divide.


At the same time we could offer limited access to our public school library learning commons where students would have access to internet.  With appropriate safety precautions (limited numbers allowed, strict hygiene practices, solo seating arrangements), we could take immediate steps to bridge the digital divide and allow some form of education to continue for students across Canada.  Simply turning off the education system for months at a time will cause lasting damage for millions of students.


This is a measured and logical approach to resolving the digital divide (a lack of educational technology access to all students)  that has long plagued education.  Rather than having this pandemic make it worse, why not leverage it to make it better?

Handing out one to one technology for students in need so we can keep moving everyone forward educationally wouldn’t be as expensive as you might think and the alternative is significantly more costly.  Our public schools have developed the network infrastructure necessary to provide internet, so limited access to that infrastructure could still address the needs of social distancing while providing connectivity.

If this pandemic has shown anything, it’s that our ICT infrastructure is more vital than ever if we’re going to move against this crisis in a unified manner; communication is key.  There are existing technologies we could apply to extend school and municipal wireless networking out into the communities that surround them.  With fundamental networking infrastructure in place, some innovative final mile solutions (like Blimpernet – an idea that my students and I came up with last year) could make the internet available to many more Canadians just when we need it.


Wouldn’t it be something if one of the lasting results of this pandemic was that it helped us close the digital divide and improve equity through access to technology in our schools?  That it would also allow our education systems to continue in a limited capacity instead of shutting down is a consequence that would benefit all Canadians.


***


I sent this to a number of MPs as well as the PM.  I only hope a measured, reasonable response is still in the cards.

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Gamer culture, the alt right and online sexism

That link above takes you to a vetted story by our national broadcaster about a PhD student’s academically researched work on gamer culture.  If you can find an academically vetted refutation of these facts (not some dude’s YouTube video) then I’m all ears.  I doubt such a thing exists.  Merely implying that this isn’t true isn’t an effective response either.

 

It’s a salty but accurate explanation
of how the early internet evolved
toward what we have today.

This idea that online gaming culture may act a petri dish for alt-right thinking doesn’t surprise me.  Every year I have grade 9 boys begin my program, find out I game, and immediately begin testing the waters with shockingly racist and sexist language to see if I speak the lingo.  I don’t.  I come from an earlier internet where trolling and trash talk were used to instruct and support the kind of radical egalitarianism the early web was promising, not to protect the diminishing historical privilege of white males.  I used to think their offensive language was a function of living in a rural, conservative community but now I’m thinking that a pervasive, new online culture might be the cause.

The podcast above describes astonishingly sexist online situations and suggests that these aren’t rare.  I’ve run into similar problems teaching computer technology. Trying to keep girls in these courses is an ongoing frustration.  Back in 2014 I called this poisonous environment “nerd machismo” and had a great deal of trouble redirecting how many tech focused boys treated these classes like their own private domain.  In retrospect, if they were immersed onlline in the kind of sexism shown in the podcast above, it’s little wonder they were acting this way.  The odd girl who did appear in senior computer classes tended to drop out after a couple of days of listening to this bluster.  I could hardly blame them.

Girls are being chased out of ICT courses by an online culture that can
be best described as incredibly misogynistic.  In the process they are
missing a job sector with great prospects.

In managing my own online presence I’ve removed any online discussion functionality.  I’m happy to talk to people about what I write and thrilled if they share it but I’m not in the business of vetting comments and weeding out the increasing toxicity I was experiencing.  It became tedious and depressing trying to manage these idiots.  Online flaming has decreased in intelligence and increased in misdirected usage to the point where I don’t read (especially anonymous) online comments any more.  By default now my blogs and other online media do not allow for comments.  I don’t want to spend my time reading and erasing offensive material.  If people want to discuss it intelligently they can leverage their own social media presence to do it.  In some small way this mitigates the savage idiocy of the anonymous online flamer by assigning at least a minimal kind of ownership.  If I’m cutting and running from online engagement (a white, male, early adopter), I can’t imagine what kind of negativity has chased out others.


***


Last month at the ECOO Conference Andrew Campbell did a great presentation on how computer science was stolen from the pioneering women who did much of the coding in the early days:

 

 

When you consider how misogyny has directed the field of computer science in the past forty years it’s little wonder that the online culture arising from all that coding tends toward the same thinking.  The medium delivering the message is being made by the same special interests.  This is the worst kind of systemic sexism.


Between this podcast, my own experiences and Andrew’s presentation I seem to be at a confluence of ideas all pointing to a kind of misogyny that I thought was going extinct.  It’s 2016 but we seem to be wrestling with ideas that would look more comfortable in pre-suffragette days a century ago.


I’m a firm believer in developing technical prowess in everyone.  Democratizing technical know-how is the best defence we have against being manipulated by increasingly invasive digital systems continually rolled out by billionaires.  Excluding half the population from technical literacy simply because of their gender plays right into their hands.  No wonder political movements like the alt-right find such a comfortable home online where the powers that be don’t want you thinking about how it works.  In that place ignorance is power.  In the meantime I get to go to school and interact with children who think this is how you should talk to women:

Screen grabs of what women experience online.
In addition to experiencing harassment much more regularly, young women also experience a much wider
variety and intensity of harassment online.  If you experience this online how must you
look at the people you meet in real life?  I’d be constantly wondering what they really think.

 

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on the Verge of the Future

Sunday morning with a 3d
printer – I get a kick out of
making things work.

One of the best parts of my job is that I get to lay my hands on leading edge technology in order to figure it out so I can teach it.  I’ve always been an early adopter, if no no else has it I’m interested – more so if everyone else is afraid of it.  When most people didn’t know that TVs had alternate inputs I had a home computer with a printer.  When everyone was crying about how fuel injection meant no one could customize their vehicles any more I was hacking the on-board computer and using it for diagnostics and more horsepower.

Nowadays it’s all about how digital tools are making micro/bespoke manufacturing more possible.  Where once you needed an engineer, some machinists and a couple of hundred thousand dollars to build complex components, now you need twenty grand and a willingness to pick up some very easy to manage software.  The entry into machining your own, custom components has become much easier.

Not only are digital tools handing back basic production to individuals, they are also allowing companies to explore levels of precision in manufacturing that seem almost science fictional:

We’ve had 3d printers in the classroom now for a couple of years, and we find them invaluable for prototyping and even developing 3d thinking (not something students take to naturally).

I suspect the wedding-cake style melting-plastic-through-an-extruder 3d printer is an evolutionary dead end (there is only so much you can do to speed up a printing process that works around cooling plastic).  Fortunately, the next step has already happened:

… I’d love to get my hands on one of those.

Another building tool I’d like to try is a digital laser cutter.  Like other manufacturing tools, digital laser cutters have been tumbling in price.  Coming out this year is a desktop laser cutter called the Glowforge that’ll introduce laser cutting, etching and fabrication to many more people.  At only about $4000, this undercuts previous industrial units by tens of thousands of dollars.

With this kind of technology available to many more people, I get the sense that the garage of the future will allow us to build things that only get churned out by factories at the moment.  When I’m at the point that I can custom manufacture and laser etch bespoke motorcycle hard parts and print my own fairings, I’ll feel like my garage can keep up with my imagination.

A good guess might be the garage scene from Big Hero 6:

We’re on the verge of escaping from the mass-production Twentieth Century.  One day you’ll be telling your grand kids that we had to buy shoes that weren’t custom printed specifically for your feet, and they won’t believe you.

Recent advances in processing power and
optics mean VR is finally (after decades of
promise) arriving at a consumer level.

Last week I discovered that I’m going to be able to set up an HTC Vive in the lab.  We’re doing it so we can better craft the 3d models we’re building in Unity and Blender, but immersive simulation could offer a lot of opportunities in the classroom beyond 3d modelling.  The emotional impact on a student walking across Vimy Ridge the day after, or walking through Cambodia’s killing fields, or standing on the Moon and looking back at the Earth, get me revved up about making VR work in the classroom.

From a motorcycling perspective, an immersive simulation of the MotoGP circuit on Valentino’s bike would offer fans a new level of appreciation for the sport.  Preparing for an overseas ride by tasting the trip virtually first offer opportunities for safety preparation that simply don’t exist right now, especially if you’re trying to wrap you head around new signs and riding on the wrong side of the road.

We’re on the verge of the future, and I get another taste next week, I can’t wait!


3D printing

motorcycle 3d printing: http://3dprintingindustry.com/2015/08/03/motorcycle-3d-printing-picking-speed/

https://3dprint.com/65937/3d-printed-motorcycle/

http://www.stratasys.com/resources/case-studies/automotive/klock-werks

https://all3dp.com/3d-printed-motorcycles-know/

https://grabcad.com/library/128705


Virtual Reality

https://youtu.be/-Sd3wXNjLtk

http://motorbikewriter.com/victory-motorcycle-virtual-reality/

http://www.lifebuzz.com/virtual-motorcycle/

http://mashable.com/2015/03/13/oculus-victory-motorcycles-sturgis/

http://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/skully-opens-pre-orders-for-high-tech-helmet/

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Head Space

For the first time in my ten years of teaching I didn’t teach summer school or take an additional qualification this summer.  I did build a deck that you can land a helicopter on, restore a motorbike I found in a field and travelled across most of Ontario, but I’ve been far away from thinking about teaching.

What have I learned from my summer of George?  I’d be a very good retired person.  I’m seldom idle, I love learning new things and resolving engineering challenges.  I get a great deal of satisfaction in taking something broken and making it work.  Mechanical sympathy has always led me into technology, I tend toward an empathetic connection with machines.  I also enjoy working with my head and hands in concert (not just one or the other).  I spent the summer practising the engineering process, perhaps I can take a more active modelling role in the lab in order to keep that experience alive (for myself as well as for my students).

The writing didn’t slow down, it just changed focus.  Putting experience into words allows me to meditate on that experience and clarify my thinking about it.  It’s nice to know that whatever I’m doing, writing is a natural response to it.

I’m now in the process of re-engaging with teaching.  Empathy tends to lead me in this as well, though I find the irrationality and randomness of dealing with people exhausting and frustrating in comparison to the simple honesty of machines.  The education system is all about people, from the social complexities of dealing with fellow teachers and administration to the hugely varied psychology of students, it’s a complex system that is more about fecundity than resolution.

After a summer of making things work I’m most anxious about returning to a process that is often irrational, opaque and unsolvable.

Once more into the breach dear friends…