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Domino Effect

I find myself fighting a constant battle with non-riders over just how dangerous motorcycling is. They can’t understand why I would risk life and limb (or my son’s life and limb) to do something so superfluous.  Unfortunately, the press is more than willing to inflame this perception.

While I was away this weekend a news story appeared that threw more gas on the fire…

 
“In an attempt to avoid collision with the fifth wheel, the motorcycles came in contact with each other, creating a domino effect and one rider, the deceased, came in contact with the fifth wheel,  Eight men and one woman were sent to hospital with multiple injuries. The driver of the truck was not hurt.” 

 

Bloodbaths, and then five people ♥’ed it?

Where do I even begin with this?  The people involved in this crash made a number of bad decisions that led to a disaster.

 A group mentality had them passing a vehicle en masse, something you never do.  Any sane motorcyclist knows that your pass is yours and yours alone, even (especially?) when you’re in a group.  You make the move when it’s safe and practical to do it, not because the people around you are.  This is yet another reason why I don’t like riding in groups, there is pressure to ride as a unit instead of an individual.  That kind of thinking is the antithesis of why I ride.

A few weeks ago I met up with an eclectic group of riders up by the Bruce Peninsula.  At its biggest we were about half a dozen bikes.  There were a couple of times during the ride when people crossed double yellow lines and dived around traffic.  They’ve all been riding a lot longer than I have, but I found some of the moves a bit reckless, and didn’t follow.  My ride is my ride, I make the decisions.

My best guess at what the point of impact looked like.
In the video below it looks like the bikes are in a pile
in the oncoming lane, so they attempted to pass to the
left of a left turning truck and trailer.  Done on
Draw Accident Sketch.

Looking at video from the accident, it looks as though the bikers were trying to pass the left turning camper in the oncoming (left hand) lane – they were trying to beat the turning vehicle, which sounds like a bad idea no matter how you phrase it.

This reads like a litany of things not to do while riding a motorcycle.  Apart from the group mentality, attempting to pass a left turning vehicle on the left suggests a real deficit in road reading, let alone basic physics.

This kind of riding is what stopped me from getting on a motorcycle just when I was going to get my license the first time twenty years ago.  In that case a kid, late for work, gunned it through a red light and went over the hood of a left turning car; instant fatality.  The cautionary tales that come from these situations always have more to do with poor road craft than they do with the perils of riding a motorbike.

Riding a motorcycle isn’t easy.  10% of my class failed to get their introductory license through a combination of poor coordination and inability to manage the many things you’re doing on a bike (you’re using both hands, both feet and your whole body to ride it), and that was in a parking lot.  On the road there are a whole raft of other considerations on top of operating the bike.  You need to develop advanced defensive riding skills because you’ll lose in any collision; it doesn’t matter who is at fault when you get in an accident on a bike.

My suspicion is that these bikers thought their numbers and loud pipes would humble any other road user into waiting to let them pass.  Using intimidation as a road management tool is a slippery slope.  I’m not trusting my life to other people’s perception of me – more often than not they don’t see me at all.

This video was shared with us by a man who stayed at campground on the roadway where this mass accident took place pic.twitter.com/ySWNYx2FYw
— Shane Fowler (@CBCShane) July 30, 2016

Shortly after this happened I came across this great article explaining to car drivers why motorcycles act the way they do.  I’m willing to bet the people involved in this accident had no familiarity with these habits.  Riding a motorcycle is a difficult thing, but doing it well is very satisfying.  Doing it poorly is just asking for trouble.  If you’re a non-rider and you want to trot this out as an example of why motorcycling is dangerous, it’s a poor example.

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Pretty Things

I was at the local dealer yesterday getting parts (just not all the right parts).

There were pretty things in the show room:

The new Yamaha FZ-10. Some don’t like the look, but anything inspired by anime mech is mega in my books!
It’s arresting in person.

The old school Yamaha yellow & black block looks spectacular on the R1…

Like this…  Kawasaki’s awe inspiring H2 supercharged missile.

Kawasaki’s Z125pro monkey bike, what a hoot that would be (I’d look like a circus bear on a trike on it)

Logo & strakes on a ZX-14.

There is something about a sexy Italian in a bikini (fairing) that fixates me.

Moto Guzzi V7

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The Ruminating Rider: Entropy

en·tro·py

ˈentrəpē/
1. lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.
“the old bike finally succumbed to entropy amidst the weeds.”
synonyms:
deterioration, degeneration, crumbling, decline, degradation, decomposition, breaking down, collapse;


Out of high school it looked like my life’s work was going to be mechanics.  I apprenticed as a millwright and quickly found a comfortable living doing work that I found satisfying.  When I put down the tools and went to university I spent a lot of time chasing down philosophy and literature that was looking at a perfected idea of the world.  The thought of spending my time thinking about machines that were in a continual state of decay (in fact, every time you use them they are literally falling apart), seemed silly.  That they also produced pollution (both in operation and manufacture) and were generally quite wasteful put them further from my mind.  I ended up leaving mechanics and my love of vehicles behind and going into I.T. after university for those reasons.

Shop Class as Soulcraft:
if you enjoyed Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance, you’ll
love this read!

I’d been teaching English for a number of years when I had an opportunity to switch to computer engineering.  I ended up going back to school to get my teaching qualifications as a computer technology teacher.  At that training my instructor put me on to Shop Class as Soulcraft.  Suddenly, here was a deep, insightful argument against academics for the sake of academics and a profound argument for why you should not only exercise, but celebrate your manual technical skills.  Those skills are what can ground our intelligence and give it meaning in the world around us.

You sometimes hear the term, ‘it’s academic‘ – meaning it doesn’t matter in the real world.  If you’ve spent any time in institutions of higher learning, you’ve probably noticed how insular and self serving they are.  The value they assign to academics is generated entirely by the people involved, there are no subjective criteria.  When you tie intelligence to something in the real world, the real world will cruelly and repeatedly correct assumptions that would otherwise happily exist in academia.

Having real-world hardened technical expertise is a very different thing than a background in academia.  One is relentless and demanding, the other political and collaborative.  As long as you tow the line in academia, you generally do well.  You can tow the line all you want in engineering, but if you don’t submit to the demands of reality you won’t get anywhere, no matter how well you get on with your colleagues.

I find I’m able to integrate the intellectual muscle developed in university with my manual skills very effectively; they aren’t concordant, they’re complimentary, but the idea that what I’m working on is in a constant state of entropy still bothers me.  The very best you can hope for with a machine is to maximize the time it’s operational before it inevitably fails.  I missed the perfection and timelessness of ideas found in academia.

A meditative mindset in the wind.

Like Pirsig in Zen, I often find myself ruminating while I ride.  The complex machine interaction, balance and awareness needed to operate a motorcycle sets your mind in motion, but leaves your intuition free to chase down ideas.  I write better after I’ve been riding because my brain is full of meditative juices.

On our recent ride around Lake Huron, I was pondering this idea of entropy.  I’m in my late forties now and the concept of entropy no longer applies to just machines.  I’m watching everyone get older and struggle with the inevitable.  Entropy isn’t just a state in machines, it’s how reality works.  Everything is in the process of disintegrating, the trick is to dance gracefully in the decay.  Holding back the inevitable is what life is, and if I can perform that life affirming act by resurrecting an old bike, or replacing a failed component in an injured machine, it’s not a wasted effort.  Perhaps that is part of the joy I feel when I see an older vehicle on the road long after it should have gone to scrap; it’s a symbol of defiance against the inevitable.

***

Do not go gentle into that good night
Dylan Thomas, 1914 – 1953

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.


William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
       THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


Samurai Jack & The Mountain

 

 

The journey’s the thing – if you’ve got 20 minutes and 
haven’t seen this before, it’s worth the time (and two bucks).
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Launching an Odyssey & Circumnavigating Huron

Jeff, the motorcycle Jedi, is crossing Canada with his lovely wife on a Honda Goldwing.  They leave shortly and we get to tag along on the first day!  We’ll accompany them to Massey, Ontario and over to The Sault the next morning.  They then continue up over Superior on their pan-Canadian odyssey while we cut south over the border into Northern Michigan and hug the shore of Lake Huron before popping back into Southern Ontario in Sarnia.


While Jeff and MA are heading west for days on end, we’ll be wandering through Hemmingway’s Michigan before arriving back home.  This’ll give me my second great lake circumnavigation (or maybe my first real great lake because Georgian Bay is a bay).

https://goo.gl/maps/UTLra6j7ZEL2

Daily Schedule:
day 1- The Mohawk Inn, Massey ON
day 2- The Breakers Resort, St Ignace, MI
day 3- Bay Valley Resort & Conf Ctr, Bay City
day 4- Home

Mileages:
Elora to Massey, ON:       496kms
Massey to St Ignace, MI:   296kms
St Ignace to Bay City, MI: 381kms
Bay City to Elora, ON:     395kms

http://explorersedge.ca/

Riding the twisty roads of Northern Ontario
The quiet shores of Huron in Northern Michigan…

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Troughs of Disillusionment

It might seem a bit negative, but this process is anything but.  Adopting disruptive technology is a difficult business, those inflated expectations create a lot of hope and enthusiasm (not things we like in education).  With experience comes rationalization and a better understanding of how new technology can actually help.  It isn’t all sunshine and flowers,but without a bit of heedless optimism, this kind of adoption would be too difficult for most to consider.

Alanna recently put me onto this idea of how the innovation adoption cycle actually works.  It’s an interesting way of understanding how innovation ripples across established practices.

Though it’s business focused, it demonstrates how even flexible businesses have trouble effectively adopting and harnessing technological innovation.  Education is much more conservative and inflexible, so this process is weirdly distorted in ed-world where many people still think that a chalkboard is sufficient.  

In ed-world that technology trigger is usually ignored, along with the hype, excitement and enthusiasm.  A kind of wilful ignorance blinkers many educators from even looking at technology, it’s all just a fad.  What finally drags them into it is the fact that what they’re doing in the classroom is sadly out of touch with what the rest of the world is doing.

While teachers complain about lining up at photocopiers but won’t consider alternatives, the rest of the world got excited about cloud based documents and moved online.  Even as school departments worried over photocopying costs (and forests moaned under the weight of learning the way it has always been done), tech-hype excited businesses were frantically connecting up cloud based solutions and searching out efficiencies.  In business, management is often the most agile, forward looking part of the enterprise; the early adopters.  Business’s willingness to adapt and seek out efficiencies is usually a lead by example process.  Educational leaders tend to get there by towing a conservative line, they’re not interested in actually changing anything.

Without the lead-by-example business approach, technological change in education only seems to happen when there is no other choice.  When a disruptive technology is finally so overwhelmingly apparent that educational management is forced to consider it, they aren’t leading by example and the vast majority of the people within their organization don’t want it either.  Status quo rather than improvement is the point of education.

When it comes to education, we begin in the trough and usually don’t get out of it:


We ignore the trigger and have none of the hype that encourages people to experiment and explore possibilities, there is no hope for new technology in the educational apparatus.  Beyond the classroom there is hope, excitement and possibility before finally dropping into the trough of disillusionment.  I’d argue that this range of emotion when exploring new technology allows early adopters a better chance to grasp what a new technology is capable of and allows them to eventually optimize their plateau of productivity.

In education we grudgingly begin in the trough, grumble about the entire process and then pick it up as poorly as possible, never exploring it, never revelling in the possibilities it might offer.  When it gets difficult we drop it, having never wanted to do it in the first place.  The poor support around embracing new technologies is just another symptom of this.

If you wanted a perfect example of how not to effectively integrate innovative technology, you need look no further than the education system.  There are outliers within the system who push against the morass of conservative norms that manage and run education, but they struggle to find support, often having to find indirect ways to explore and integrate new technology.

As long as schools are administrated by the most conservative elements in education (academia loves conservatism), we will always struggle to stay abreast of innovation, whether it be technological or otherwise.

Two Recent Examples

#1:  I got an HTC Vive virtual reality headset for the computer lab.  It’s an uphill struggle to get any staff to try it (students? No problem).  The general comment I get is, “what did that cost?”  My standard reply is, “less than your photocopying budget.”  The Board is unable to connect the SteamVR software needed to update the drivers and programs on the headset, so I’m trucking the desktop home each week to update it at home.

Even during those rare moments when we do get current technology in, there is no hype, only criticism and doubt.  For someone who gets excited about the possibilities of technology, this is a very exhausting environment to be in.

#2:  We requested a Glowforge desktop 3d laser cutter in for the tech-design lab.  Even though it comes equipped with Hepa air filters and doesn’t require any exhaust, we were stymied by board safety people whose default position is ‘no’, regardless of any facts we could produce.




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To A Thousand Islands & Back

We’re looking at a few days in The Thousand Islands at the end of Lake Ontario before my wife goes to a conference and my son and I head home.  Fortunately, between here and there lie some of the best riding roads in Ontario.  I finally get a chance to Ride the Highlands!

The ride out is going to be an avoid the GTA at all costs exercise (like most things are).  Other than getting pinched in Newmarket, it should be a straight shot across the top of population.  Port Perry is nice and once I’m past Peterborough, Highway 7 is a winding ride into Canadian Shield.

Where I drop off Highway 7 at Mountain Grove and cut down to the godforsaken 401 looks like a roller coaster of a road.  A quick blast (no such thing any more) down the 401 should finish the trip at Gananoque where I’ll meet up with the family and we’ll hang out for a couple of days.




The Ride Back is an even greater attempt to avoid the GTA, but this time with a find the twisty roads vibe.  Using ridethehighlands.ca I linked together a series of suggested roads to get my son and I back to South Western Ontario in the lest efficient but most pleasurable manner possible.

We meander north west from the east end of Lake Ontario before finally cutting south around the end of Georgian Bay.

If we leave Tuesday morning, we’ll overnight somewhere around Haliburton before finishing up the ride on Wednesday.



All told it should be about 1300kms of riding some of Ontario’s best roads.

LINKS
http://explorersedge.ca/ride-edge-check-2016-top-touring-roads-explorers-edge/
http://ridethehighlands.ca

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30 Hours

Elora to Creemore to Owen Sound to Lion’s Head to Oliphant and back home again in about 30 hours.  We started out as three and expanded up to seven at one point before finishing with the original three again.  It’s amazing how much you can get done in a day…

Photos and video done on a Ricoh Theta 360° camera and my Samsung S5 smartphone.

Through the wind fields – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA


Elora Ontario on the bridge on 2 wheels #theta360 – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA




On the dock of Big Bay https://goo.gl/maps/eoWBzaD5FFN2 #theta360 – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA

Stills from the 360° camera…

Some other shots from the smartphone…





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Perception is Reality, except when it isn’t

When I’m packing up the computer lab at the end of the school year I usually do it imagining that I won’t be back.  For an introvert like me, teaching is an exhausting business.  I don’t get recharged by people the way others seem to; people drain me.  The thought of disappearing out the door and not returning is a happy one.

As the year wound down I came to realize that information technology has become like plumbing or electricity: no one thinks or cares about it unless it doesn’t work.  Fortunately I’m good at IT and get a a lot of satisfaction out of solving problems in it (not to mention my staying sharp in technology allows me to teach it better), so even though it is nothing I’m contracted to do I still beaver away in the background trying to create a more accessible, current and consistent educational technology platform for our teachers to use.

I find the year end back slapping tedious at the best of times.  Everyone gets well paid to do their job and no one I know in the building stops there, but what some people do above and beyond is considered more important.  While some were having meetings and planning presentations, I was hand bombing over a ton of ewaste out the back door of the school to a local charity.  They have DD adults dismantle electronics and then make enough recycling it to pay for their charity work.  It isn’t attention grabbing, but it matters.

The energy other people are willing to spend in order to shine a light on themselves obviously pays off, I’m just not interested in it.  Fixing things that are actually broken holds much greater interest for me.  Changing people’s minds is exactly what I don’t like doing.  People should be able to make up their own minds based on the facts, not on how convincing I am.

This year has offered me some wonderful moments.  By far the most positive experience was our run at Skills Canada this time around.  Seeing my student’s surprise at winning provincials and then our experience at Nationals was awesome.

Another powerful moment was seeing software engineering actually produce viable projects this time around.  That class offers students a chance to experience team based software development and then publish code while still in high school, and it has improved dramatically year on year thanks to a lot of curriculum building.

The least professionally rewarding part of my year was participating in the school leadership team.  The work done seemed pointless and time consuming, and seemed to follow a predetermined process rather than actually being creative and meaningful in any way.  A colleague dropped out of leadership a few years ago and she claims it frees you up to spend your energy on more productive things.  I think I’m following her approach when my headship ends this year.

The summer is for finding my mojo again, and then refocusing on what works best for my students in the fall.  A list is already forming:

  • Continue developing curriculum that still challenges and differentiates even when I’m regularly expected to teach five sections of class each semester.  Skills Canada plays a big part in that, allowing exceptional students a chance to see just how good they actually are.  Skills preparation also directs all students towards higher standards.
  • Getting equipment in that allows students to learn hands-on, even when I have classes of 31 students in a room.  Have you ever tried to set up a classroom with 31 computers and then arrange additional space for students to safely solder, build electronics and dismantle additional machines with hand tools?  It requires fore-thought (and perhaps some kind of time and relative dimension in space device)
  • While all that is going on I’ll continue to apply my senior computer engineering courses to school IT support.  This year we repaired 26 chromebooks that would otherwise have been chucked (repair costs were $1250, replacement cost would have been $9100),  Having a genuine engineering challenge in front of students is invaluable to them, saves the school board thousands and keeps the teachers they are supporting in working tech, even if it is thankless work.
  • Windows 10 free upgrades end before August, so I have to get into school at some point before July 26th and update all the student PCs in my lab.  Having a DIY lab is a lot of work, but it offers students unique access to software in a building otherwise tied down to out of date board software.  It’s $135 a PC otherwise, so I’ll go in during the summer and save the board another four grand.
But first, some summer…
Note:  I usually write a draft, edit it once and then publish it on Dusty World.  This got heavily re-written three times with an eye to repairing problems rather than just complaining about them.  The end of the school year often gets me into a rather negative state of mind.
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And Then There Was One

When I started riding I began to voraciously consume motorcycling magazines.  It took me a while to figure out which ones were good, but for a while there I just went all in.  Being Canadian I thought it prudent to get a sense of Canada’s motorcycling media, so I made a point of looking past the wall of American magazines to find a Canadian voice.

 The two I settled on were Cycle Canada and Motorcycle Mojo.  CC seemed to be edited by a writer with lots of motorcycle experience (rather than an expert motorcyclist with little writing experience).  Reading other magazines sometimes felt like reading a kid’s essay that they’d been made to write.  No one seemed to revel in writing like Neil Graham did.  He was consistently acerbic, challenging and opinionated, but he clearly enjoyed writing.  I really looked forward to reading him each month.

I found Mojo a short while later.  Its modern layout (many other Canadian magazines looked like they’d been designed on a photocopier), and crowd sourced travel pieces got me hooked.  Mojo feels like it’s put together by a community rather than a small group of motorcycle industry insiders who don’t know how to write very well.

A few months ago CC arrived at my door.  As I got into it I discovered that the two writers who do the majority of the heavy lifting in producing the magazine were leaving.  Many readers seemed relieved to see the back of the complicated and difficult Graham, but I missed that voice.  A magazine that was once a drop-everything-and-read-it proposition (and Canadian!) was now filled with news pieces that looked like they were written by an ESL writer in single, giant paragraphs; a computer could construct better grammar.  The new writer they brought in was an old writer they’d let go.  His MO seems to be to say something controversial at the beginning of each article even if what he’s saying is inconsistent from page to page.  The article on the new Harley Davidson is making fun of sport bike riders, the article on a sports bike makes fun of cruiser riders, and his recent piece on the new Honda Africa Twin allowed him to take pot-shots at adventure bike riders.  I get no sense of who he actually is or what he likes.  This approach seems disingenuous and makes me hesitate to trust him.

 The newsletter modelled magazines that feel like they are driven by industry interests rather than independent editorial opinion have already been dropped.  Mojo & CC were my only Canadian subscriptions to renew, but now it’s down to a single Canadian mag.  The hole left in the Canadian motorcycling publication landscape by Graham leaving Cycle Canada has made a sure thing a has-been.

 In the meantime I’m looking world-wide for my motorcycle periodicals.  The three I’ve settled on are Motorcycle Mojo (Canada), Cycle World (US) and BIKE (UK).  The last two are driven by professional writers who know motorcycles and not only write well, but seem to enjoy doing it.  I’ve never read a complaint about having to fill up space with writing or meet deadlines in either, although this seems to be a common subject for editorial discussion in many Canadian magazines.

 I’m not reading any more magazines, Canadian or not, that make me feel like I’m reading an essay a kid was forced to write for school.  If the writing is that difficult, don’t work for a magazine.  Writing is a skill unto itself, and it should be something you enjoy (it’s what will make you work to improve it instead of just trudging up to deadlines while complaining about them in print).  Just because you’re an expert in the subject area doesn’t mean you’re an expert at communicating it in writing.  Life’s too short to read things written badly by people who aren’t that good at it and couldn’t care less about their writer’s craft.

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Flying: The Antithesis of Riding a Motorcycle

No Moncton Airport, you can’t cheer me up with a rainbow.

I’m in the middle of a five hour wait at Moncton Airport for a flight back to Toronto and then a shuttle up to Centre Wellington.  All told it’ll be a 2pm to midnight commute, all on public transit.  Ten hours of tedium, uncomfortable seats and no leg room… and constantly being reminded that you’re much bigger than most people.

To fend of the insanity of canned air, lousy, overpriced food and being herded like cattle at an abattoir, I’m dreaming of the best possible way to get home.

Riding from Moncton would offer a geographical opportunity as the Appalachian Mountains are in the way.  The best route I can manage on Google maps takes me through Maine, Vermont and New York to Niagara Falls, before a quick blast up the QEW home.

Anything out in the wind on two wheels would be better than this synthetic hell I find myself in.  At the moment I’d opt for a Honda VFR800 Interceptor and a good set of leathers, and nothing else.  My only goal:  to wind my way across some mountains to home.

If I left at 2pm from Moncton I’d have gotten to Augusta, Maine by about 8pm in the evening.  A good sleep on a real bed and I’d chew up the remaining eleven hundred kilometres home the next day, wind blown, engaged and full of feeling instead of slowly dying inside in a darkening airport terminal waiting to be herded onto a plane.