With Triumph giving up on my Tiger before I’m prepared to, I’m going to document the research and give details on what works when you’re trying to keep a Triumph 955i’s fuel system working by replacing old o-rings.
This has involved a crash course in o-rings and engine operating temperatures. As I work out a fix here I’ll post details on o-ring sizing, what type works and include data on measuring the intake manifold at temperature.
It’s been all Concours for the past few weeks while the Tiger is laid up. I’m hoping to get the fuel system sorted before the snows fly and I have to wait for next year.
Here are the measurements for the upper and lower fuel injector seals. The classy move by Triumph would be to open source publish the technical details for all the parts they no longer support so that the rest of us can get on with keeping the history of the marquee alive. With that in mind, here are the deets for the upper and lower fuel injector o-rings:
The thick ones go on top where the fuel injector meets the rail. My best guess is 3mm thick by 1.5cm outer circumference.
The skinny ones go on the bottom where the fuel injector slides into the intake manifold.
My best guess there is 2mm wide by 1.4mm outer circumference.
The Tiger is a metric bike, so I’ll work in mm (if Triumph went imperial on o-ring, what the actual f***). The thicker o-ring is 1.5cm or 15mm outside diameter (OD) and (I think) about 3.5mm cross section (CS). Looking at that chart, the #203 is a 14.58mm outer diameter with a 3.53mm cross section. That makes it mighty close. What would be nicer would be if Triumph just came out and gave us the precise sizes for these parts it has discontinued. Triumph?
The thinner one is also a 1.5 (ish) mm outer diameter (15mm-ish), but the cross section is thinner – perhaps two and a bit mm, and they have a 2.62mm cross section standard o-ring size. You’d have to hope Triumph didn’t make bespoke o-rings for their fuel injectors, right? For the skinny o-ring I think I’d take a swing at the 2.62mm cross section / 14.43mm (1.443cm) size.
The All O-Rings site also has a good description of the materials you want to get your o-rings in. Nitrile and Viton are what I went with in the pointless Amazon order, but those are the materials you want in a fuel heavy application like this.
That’s the configurator (right) – pretty straightforward, but it sounds like they manufacture each order, which probably won’t make this a viable solution for someone just trying to keep their old Triumph on the road.
If only there was some kind of network of retailers who supported Triumph motorcycles who could order this parts to help their customers keep their older Triumphs rolling… some kind of ‘dealer’ network who understand how parts work and how to order this sort of thing in large enough quantities to make a profit while offering customers what they need.
I’d prefer to use All O-Rings for the parts, but they might be a B2B type of thing, and I’m not a B.
Amazon’s kits:
Turns out Amazon’s shot-in-the-dark kits didn’t work either. There’s more to this o-ring sizing caper to come. I wish I could just 3d print the nitrile o-rings I was looking for (doesn’t look like it’s additive manufacturing friendly).
Cybersecurity is one of the more challenging subjects to try and bring into classrooms, even though every one of them depends on it every day to function; everything from attendance to lesson content happens via networked computers in 2023.
Few people have advanced digital media fluency when it comes to using software and hardware, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg with cybersecurity. It also depends on skills from many other technical subjects that don’t get much attention in K-12 classrooms, such as software development, networking, information technology, IoT and programming, but not just high level stuff, you also need to be comfortable looking at firmware and low level coding.
Cyber skills aren’t just about leveraging these interdisciplinary technologies though, they’re also about discovering, understanding and resolving the many points of failure inherent in them. This is something most people feel very uncomfortable doing. For the vast majority of users, when technology goes wrong it’s someone else’s problem. Even for the people who build and maintain networks, the dark arts of cybersecurity cause great unease.
One of my hobbies is restoring old motorbikes. There is a strange parallel to cybersecurity in this. Many mechanics won’t touch old machines because they don’t lend themselves to modular parts swap fixes, which is how all modern shops work – technicians don’t fix things, they replace them. Diagnosing an old machine takes patience and sensitivity that many mechanics haven’t learned in our digital world of part numbers, modular engineering and timed repairs to maximize profit. I’ve talked about this before in relation to Matt Crawford’s books and I think there is a corollary with IT and cybersecurity. Many of the people who build and maintain our systems aren’t interested in how they might break, they are only interested in keeping them running as cheaply as possible. That’s good for running your enterprise system as long as there are no surprises, but not so good if you want to build something bespoke or prepare for the many nasty surprises out there.
I was thinking about this challenging situation after attempting to convince school board IT departments from coast to coast about the technical requirements of the CyberTitan/CyberPatriot competition. I’ve been told again and again by people struggling to provide IT support in schools that they won’t run VMWare or Cisco’s Packet Tracer simulator because they:
1) are viruses (they aren’t, though they are a great tool for safely examining them)
2) pose a threat to their systems. They don’t – they actually do the opposite, but training people in the arcane cyber arts scares many of the people managing IT in education.
Virtual machines are used in cybersecurity (and network building) to test software and network environments. By examining a virtual machine cyber operators can explore how a machine has been compromised and what they might try to repair it in a safe (virtual) environment. VMWare is one of the biggest players in this field, and cleaned up at last year’s cybersecurity awards, yet many board IT departments declared it a hazard. I suspect the hazard is in teaching ICT and cybersecurity best practices, and isn’t that a tragedy?
I sympathize with the IT departments I’ve communicated with. They are responsible for running complex enterprise systems that support hundreds or even thousands of users with varying levels of system access (administrators, office staff, teaching staff, building maintenance, and more). That’s more than many IT departments manage in other industries, but educational IT also has to serve tens of thousands of vulnerable sector clients (students), all of whom are coming at them with a staggering array of hardware and software without any real training on it. To make it even worse, most of them will be connecting to these systems using out of date and possibly compromised machines.
An attack surface is a concept that helps cybersecurity types better understand how a bad actor might exploit their network. The software you’re using, the hardware it runs on, the network you’re logging in from, other software installed on your device, the operating systems you’re using, and the systems that connect it all together along with all the cloud based stuff you depend on are all components of a modern attack surface, and the education one is particularly complicated.
One of the last big network installs I did before I went into teaching was at Glaxosmithkline in the early zeroes. This was a network of hundreds of desktops, hard wired via ethernet into an onsite server that provided all the ‘cloud’ they needed. The desktops all ran the same operating system and software on identical hardware. No one on this network had internet access, closing down a massive headache in terms of attack surface (internet access in a world experiencing a digital skills crisis is a nightmare!). This kind of simplicity is a distant memory in 2023. With our rush to the cloud, attack surfaces now include all the online managed systems we so gleefully replaced our secure networks with. BYOD and off-site work only pile more complexity on.
Comparing that GSK network to any modern education network is an apples to fruit salad comparison. On any day at dozens of school and administrative sites across a board you’ve got a nearly infinite number of different devices logging in, from phones with varying software packages (most of which are probably out of date and may well contain malware) to other personal technology (tablets, laptops, etc) all peppering your network with requests that may be school related or (more often) not.
To try and mitigate this complexity inflation, many boards have dumped computers that do onsite computing (like desktops and laptops) in favour of an easier to manage (because it can’t do much) chromebooks. These simple machines can’t get infected like a fully interactive operating system can, but you’re still susceptible to fake browser extensions and compromised websites. This is usually solved by preventing users from customizing their chromebooks with extensions, further reducing what they can do.
With all this in mind, I was struck the other day by the idea that educational IT departments are missing a key component: a department focused on enabling technology empowered pedagogy (the reason we have schools… remember?). Early on in the edtech revolution we had OSAPAC in Ontario, which vetted software and created a provincial bank of safe to use software for learning digital skills in classrooms. With the rush to cloud based systems, OSAPAC evaporated and most school systems fell in with multi-nationals offering ‘walled gardens’ such as GAFE (Google Apps for Education) or the Microsoft equivalent. As this migration happened, teachers and students lost access to essential digital media literacy opportunities, especially when it comes to advanced digital skills such as 3d modelling, game design or cybersecurity.
A way to combat this skills deflation would be to create local IT support units dedicated to providing teachers with digitally enhanced student learning opportunities instead of starving us of them. I’d go a step further and suggest that the messy enterprise side of things that is such a headache should become the responsibility of the Ministry. Many cost savings and security enhancements could occur from centralizing these systems. It would also mean that students and staff moving between boards would be able to migrate more easily because everyone would be on the same systems. There would also be opportunities to collect provincial data more easily that would support better education policy, not that we like to collect data before making education policies in Ontario.
This does not mean the end of regional school board IT departments. Instead of chasing the tail of impossible enterprise expectations with insufficient funding, they would be provided by a central provincial authority with the secure standards and proper support. Imagine how much we might save if every board in Ontario isn’t reinventing the wheel over and over again with varying degrees of success.
Local school board IT departments would be entirely focused on working with their teachers to find the best hardware, software and cloud based learning opportunities based on the needs of the programs they are running. Instead of saying no and reducing technology access to enhanced pedagogical learning opportunities in our classrooms, our local IT departments would become sources of local technical expertise focused on helping public education close an ongoing digital skills crisis.
I’m writing this in a hotel room in the north end of Toronto the night before attending the Ontario Public Sector Cybersecurity conference. I want to believe that the people at this event are taking the challenges of technology enhanced education, including the tremendously difficult task of engaging with cybersecurity learning, seriously in 2023, but I fear it’s going to be all cartoons and platitudes. Here’s hoping.
If you follow the blog you’ll know I’m on a mission to get my 2003 Triumph Tiger 955i to roll over into six figures on the odometer. I picked up the bike with under forty-K on it and have done the majority of the now high miles on it. Over that time I’ve had an ongoing battle with the early fuel injection on the bike, but other than that it has been my preferred ride even as a series of other bikes passed through the garage.
Once again the fueling has gone off on the bike just as I was hoping to push it over the 100k mark in its 20th year on the road. If I lived somewhere that wasn’t trying to kill me for four months of each year this would be an easier goal, but trying to do it in Canada where the bike has to sit through minus forty winters and then navigate the frost heaved results in our too-short riding season? It’s technical a flex I’m up for, but it’s a shame that Triumph isn’t.
I tried the usual solution of rebalancing the fuel injectors, but the bike is still stalling out and running rough. I checked the valves less than 15k ago so that isn’t likely it. If it isn’t throttle body balancing, which the bike is prone to needing, perhaps it’s time to, at over 90k, to finally replace the o-rings and gaskets in the fuel injection system, but Triumph tells me that the majority of these parts are discontinued.
One of the reasons I enjoy the old Tiger is that it still catches eyes and prompts conversation when I’m out and about. Another reason I like it is that it can pretty much do anything (I’ve trail ridden on it and done multi-thousand mile two-up road trips too). It fits me better than anything I’ve ridden, is fun to chuck around in corners and has handled axle deep mud when I needed it to. The engine is full of character and pulls well even two up and, considering the miles it has done, the amount of TLC needed isn’t unreasonable. I’d love to keep this bike going indefinitely, it’s a shame that Triumph don’t feel that way.
I had a chat with the dealer (who isn’t particularly local, it’s a 170 mile round trip to go there physically – I usually get parts delivered), and they said that this is a problem with Triumph – they don’t support their older machines. He then went on to say I couldn’t use generic o-rings because the Triumph parts are strangely size specific. I’m going to try anyway because I really want to be able to jump on my old Tiger and ride. I wish Triumph felt the same way.
Never standing still, always pushing to get the best from ourselves, for our riders. Building iconic motorcycles that celebrate our past while embracing the future through bold design, original styling, purposeful engineering and a genuine passion for the ride. Always focused on delivering complete riding experience, creating bikes with the perfect balance of power, handling and style that totally involve the rider and bring out the best in them. This is our passion and our obsession. We are chasing the same thing as our riders THE PERFECT RIDE. Nick Bloor CEO Triumph Motorcycles
All good stuff, but maybe focus a bit more on celebrating Triumph’s past, Nick? That includes the bikes your reborn Triumph have been making since the nineties.
When you market on brand history and provenance, shouldn’t you support brand history and provenance? I’m coming at this hard because I want to believe… and keep my old Triumph rolling.
Alas, the Tiger’s fuel system is acting up (again), so it’s all Concours14 this fall, but the big bike is doing the job. It handles two up without breaking a sweat and when I want to ride it like a sports bike, it never misses a beat. It’s heavy, but once it’s in motion it seems to loose one hundred pounds. It’s no Fireblade, but it’s surprisingly willing in the (few) twisties we have around here.
This time of year the fall colours mean you can enjoy a ride even on our tediously straight roads…
If you’ve read this blog you know I’ve written a historical fiction of my granddad’s time in the RAF during World War 2. The two books I’ve done already are about his time behind Nazi lines in France in 1940, but after he escaped he got sent to Africa and spent the the next chapter of his time overseas crossing the Sahara (in 1940s vehicles!) and fighting in Egypt and Libya. I’m keen to eventually trace his steps but when am I ever going to be on the east coast of Africa?
The Allies didn’t have control of the Mediterranean in late 1940 (remember Guns of Navarone?), so the Royal Navy took Bill and his RAF squadron down the east coast of Africa to Takoradi in Ghana. There they unloaded their Hurricanes and ground support vehicles and then they (incredibly), saddled up in their 1940s vehicles and leapfrogged with their planes ***across the Sahara***!!! It’s a 5000+ kilometre odyssey that leaves me absolutely awe struck:
Sure, Tim, you’re saying, but when are you ever going to get to Ghana? Well… I applied to the Global Forum for Cybersecurity Expertise’s cyber-research proposals in the summer and my paper on quantum disruption in cyber got accepted… which means I’m going to Accra, Ghana to present it at the end of November at the Global Conference on Cyber Capacity Building. That puts me about 200 kilometres away from Takoradi where I’d have a chance to stand where Bill stood in late 1940.
I’m feeling pretty scrappy. The dream ride would be to get a collection of 1940s RAF bikes, cars and lorries and repeat that astonishing trek across the desert to the southern coast of the Mediterranean. That’s some pretty gnarly country, so doing it as part of a documentary with a film crew that looks at what life was like in the desert in World War 2 would be the dream part of this ride.
Some of my cousins ride and some of their kids are old enough to do it too. There are several times in Bill’s military career when he shouldn’t have made it out, but he had a knack for it. An opportunity for his descendents (who wouldn’t be here if he didn’t have that knack) to repeat this Sahara crossing while talking about the history and passing through the heart of the desert on 1940s technology would be… epic.
Yep, that’s what epic looks like.
Austin Vince did Mondo Sahara, which was ambitious. This is… more.
I’ve been watching the inestimable Austin Vince lead his latest VINCE trail riding adventure in the Spanish mountains on Facebook. Austin’s Mondo self funded world trips have gotten me through many a long Canadian winter. The chance to ride with the man himself through some of the most beautiful and remote parts of Spain would be epic.
We drove through Northern Spain last winter but it was in a rental Kia. This is Spain next level!
Puebla de Sanabria in a very empty Northern Spain in December. The mountains with Austin next?
I’ve been lucky enough to find myself in Canadian classrooms from St John’s to Vancouver over the past year. Canada is the only developed country in the world without a national education strategy, so this isn’t something many educators get to experience. The only people who do span our country are the edtech companies that have surged into being to resolve a digital skills gap that doesn’t look to be going anywhere any time soon.
At its heart the widening digital divide is a inclusion and equity problem. Students who can’t afford tech at home lack familiarity and fall behind when schools bring it in with no training for staff or students. It would be more productive if education in Canada did more than talk about DEI, but that would require vision which we lack.
In my travels I’ve come across many edtech ‘solutions’. These often involve off-the-shelf technology that has has been branded to meet a specific need in a ‘turn-key’ way so learning essential digital skills doesn’t actually require any on the part of the instructor. Of course, this all comes with a huge bump in price. I love seeing $15 open source Arduino microcontrollers paired with $10 in sensors and called a ‘climate change’ edtech kit, yours for $80! In many cases a hard sell accompanies these kits that are guaranteed to teach the STEM skills you don’t have. UNESCO has something to say about this global phenomenon:
The frustration around this has been gnawing at me and when I woke up this morning I had the edtech hockey stick floating in my mind, so I made some marketing for it:
It’s satire, it’s supposed to be over the top or it won’t land the satire.
The hockey metaphor (I hope) brings home the absurd nature of the edtech dance we’re in. Anyone who actually plays hockey will take one look at it and laugh. It looks like it might work like a player goalie stick, but it will actually do neither job – it’s the product catering to ignorance.
The actual solution is to learn digital technologies and media from the ground up instead of implementing patches like Chromebooks, the edtech hockey stickest of them all. This is a one trick pony that ties learning to a single multi-national’s browser and cannot provide any locally processed content. The cloud is where edtech solutions thrive because you can easily monetize access. The hard sell for strapped school IT departments is that Chromebooks don’t give you network headaches because they can barely do anything. Like the edtech hockey stick they look like they can do it all.
NOTES
There is no such thing as “Canadian Education”. The PISA results everyone waves the flag about happen on the back of the four largest provinces. If you’re elsewhere in the country you may be below the world average.
“PISA results show each of the Big Four provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia achieving significantly higher average reading scores than all G7 member countries except, of course, Canada. The Big Four also outperformed five of these six G7 countries in math and science (the exception being Japan, which scores below Quebec in math and below Alberta in science).”
“…if we only consider PISA results for the remaining smaller six provinces, Canada fares much worse, placing 17th in reading (below the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan), 18th in science (again, below Japan, the U.K. and U.S.) and 30th in math, just below the OECD average.”
That edtech companies are feeding off this siloed inequity is part of a larger problem. Next round of PISA is looking at digital skills (because we’re in a global shortage). I’m curious to see how that gets politicized. Wouldn’t it be something if we actually did something about it?
No pride here at TMD. The other weekend I went out for a ride with my lovely wife and we stopped for a snack. The parking lot wasn’t even but the bike was full of fuel and had the top box on and it was a very windy day. I had to lean on it to get it to stand up and thought it would be ok – you might see where this is going.
I was once told that bikes fall over, it happens to everyone, but I’ve never had it happen before. I’ll be more cautious next time. My best guess is the road behind the restaurant channeled the wind making for even stronger gusts and it toppled the bike. We were around the corner on the patio when I heard the worst kind of smashing sound and immediately got up to come around to see Big Blue on its side. I remembered the lift with your legs holding the handlebar in and the back of the seat, and got the big thing upright again.
It started right up and I rode it around the corner to another spot on more even ground out of the wind tunnel. Much swearing ensued but it was really my own fault. I checked it twice to make sure it was stable, but that second check should have told me I didn’t like how it was sitting and I needed to find a better spot. Lesson learned.
The wing mirrors on GTR1400 / Concours 14s are (big) plastic pieces over an aluminum frame. They’re one of my least favourite stylistic choices on the bike. They work well but they are enormous and make what is already a big bike look enormous, so my first reflex was to find a lower profile alternative. The bike looks much more svelte when it’s mirrorless.
The only aftermarket option I could find is pretty much the same thing – industrially big. I might be tempted to customize something, like perhaps an electronic rear view option, but something stopped me. I’ve worked hard to get the C14 to fit, but it never has. Bar risers, modified foot pegs and a pang Corbin saddle and it still feels like it was made for someone else. Love the engine and it handles well enough with the rear tire mod (slightly larger profile balances the bike forward a bit more) and getting the suspension set for my size helped too, but it still feels like someone else’s bike, so I started looking at other options.
I reached out to the metal shop teacher at my school but he can’t weld aluminum. He suggested Fergus Welding & Machine Shop just up the river from us. It was described as ‘turn of the century – 18th Century’. I gave them a telephone call (because they have no digital presence at all) and went over to show them my broken mirror frame.
Our shop teacher wasn’t kidding. This place is in an old stone building and it was indeed old-school with paper filing upstairs and blacksmith come metal shop downstairs. The broken bit was in fact aluminum and their Yoda-like welder said that if it was ‘white metal’ he wouldn’t be able to do anything with it and that he’d only find that out when he ‘hit it’ for the first time. I left my phone number on the box and off I went.
I got the bike undressed and cleaned everything up. I’m amazed at how strong the fairings are on this thing. Even with seven hundred odd pounds coming down on it the thing held up with only scratches.
Fergus Welding & Machine Shop called back end of the next day and Dave said he was able to sort it out. It cost me $25 and I tipped them with a six pack. The part was impossible to source used and a new metal piece was asking $260US, so I came out ahead there.
The job was really well done. Dave tacked the part back together following the break and then filled it like the magician he was described as. When I put the assembly back together it fit like a glove – all the holes lined up perfectly and when I took it out for a spin tonight everything is tight and works as it should. It gives you an indication of how over-engineered this bike is that it can tip over, break the metal mirror frame but not smash the mirror itself. There’s a lot to like about a C14, but me fitting on it comfortably isn’t one of those things.
Undressing the whole bike gave me a chance to clean it up properly. The owner before me parked it in a shed for several years and spiders made it their home. Many webby nests were found throughout, but they’re all gone now. It also gave me a chance to lubricate the throttle cables and clean all the electrical connections of which there are many. This bike continues to amaze with how complicated it is, but it’s build like a nuclear submarine.
Next steps? Sort out the fairings. If it were a more popular bike I could get some Chinese knock-offs and get them painted for a grand, but I’m not that lucky. I looked up Color Rite who I got the Neptune Blue touch up paint from when I first got the bike. The previous owner had it tip over on him (on the other side) and the touch up made it all but disappear.
Color Rite does good stuff, but it ain’t cheap and their shipping (at nearly $100CAN!) is astonishing. If I’m $200 in to touch up, perhaps I can remove the panels, flat them myself and then find a local paint shop to do them up for me. I’ll have to see what that costs.
To my surprise I made the finalists list out of hundreds of applications from across the globe (Netacademy runs in almost every country in dozens of languages – it’s a truly global platform). When I read about some of the other finalists I was thrilled just to be included with them.
On August 15th I was driving through the countryside to the University of Waterloo, listening to the awards being announced on spotty cell phone coverage. It cut out just as the innovation architect award was announced and then came back for the next award, so I didn’t hear I’d won when it happened.
At CEMC at UWaterloo I took a room full of computer studies teachers through cyber-range activities and while that was going on we heard that I didn’t just win the Innovation Architect Award, but also the Shooting Star grand prize which has me in NYC in mid-September for the Global Citizen Festival.
.As part of the prize Cisco gave me some communications and asked for shoutouts, and there are many. Innovating can often feel like a lonely exercise where most of what you’re doing seems to aggravate management, but it’s really a collaborative exercise, otherwise you’re by yourself in a room doing cool things that no one else knows about. The idea of a lone inventor hidden away working on their own is a fiction.
I could never have built the program I developed without getting my school board onside. There are two people in particular who became supporters and advocates for the unique work we were attempting. Charles Benyair was our SHSM lead and he provided the resources that my school would not to get us in motion, and Sandro Buffone in our IT department made a point of understanding what I was trying to do and helped clear away the technical bureaucracy to let it happen.
Convincing students to take on an international competition in a subject we’d never studied before was a challenge, but Cam, Cal, Nick and Justin were seniors in 2017 and bravely jumped into cybersecurity with me. We learned new concepts and got a handle on things to such a degree that we discovered we were going to the first Canadian national cybersecurity finals in Fredericton. Three of those students had never left the province or been on a plane so you can imagine the impact.
As the teams gathered for a photo I happened to be standing next to Sandra Saric, the vice-president in charge of CyberTitan at the Information & Communication Technology Council (ICTC). As the photo got taken she said under her breath, “where are all the girls?” Out of seventy odd students only a handful were girls. That observation put me on a mission.
Sandra went back and established a program for encouraging all-female teams to sign up and I went back to my junior computer technology classes (the exacting gender expectations of our rural high school make sure that there were no girls in senior computer tech classes) and cajoled six girls to give it a try. That next year we had three full teams instead of two-thirds of one. I encouraged them to find a name that speaks to their experience and the girls came up with the Terabytches (terabyte with a twist).
Those six pioneers faced derision from our school and when they went to nationals a member of one of the other all-male teams said to one of them, “you’re lucky you’re pretty, because you suck at this.” That year emphasized for me how important it is to give girls their own space away from the often corrosive male culture that forms around technology.
In a radio interview in Ottawa at those finals Rachel said something that stuck with me. “We used this name so that it couldn’t be used against us.” 2019 was an incredible year for getting my head around diversifying access to technology learning, particularly in the hyper-male dominated field of cybersecurity. But it was also a year of finding allies. Joanne Harris at the school board enabled us to attend nationals by coming along as our female chaperone and I got to meet Diana Barbosa, Sheena Bolton and Hayley Heaslip who ran the competition.
That summer Philippe Landry from Cisco Canada got in touch and asked if I’d be interested in working toward my CCNA Cyber Operations Instructor qualification. My last I.T. certification was CompTIA’s Network+ way back in 2002, so this would be my first run at a technical certification in seventeen years, and in a subject I’d only been looking at for a couple of years. Claude Foy at FTI in Quebec was my instructor and he was patient and very giving of his time. Over the summer I became familiar with Wireshark and all sorts of other cyber-tools and in September I wrote the exam and became the first K12 teacher in Canada qualified to teach cyber operations – I think I am still the only one five years later. Yes, innovating can sometimes feel a bit lonely.
Attending Cisco Live in the fall of 2019 I was again reminded of just how cloud based (and cybersecurity dependent) things have become. I also attended my first University of Waterloo Cybersecurity & Privacy Institute conference (bringing a bus load of students with me) which opened my eyes to the current state of networked technology where we’re barely hanging on. To underline that I had my local OPP detachment asking if I could forensically analyze digital evidence for them because they weren’t resourced to do it themselves.
We ground through the pandemic but CyberTitan was one of the few events that never cancelled on us. The diverifying of our teams in 2019 led to a richer and more effective co-ed senior team. Some of the girls wanted to join the best of the boys and that mix of skillsets led to a string of top five finishes including a top defender award. The girls team also continued, missing nationals in 2020 but earning top wildcard spots in the ’21 and ’22 finals.
In 2022 I discovered that I had been seconded to ICTC for the year to advocate for and support cybersecurity education nationally. In this role I’ve been in classrooms from Newfoundland to British Columbia and many points in between. I’ve supported two new provinces in joining the competition and continue to bang my drum for recognition of essential Twenty-First Century digital skills that are so often ignored in our school systems, like cybersecurity.
This spring I joined Katina Papulkas’ Dell K-12 Education Innovation Accelerator, Part of that program was an opportunity to mentor with someone in the edtech space and I was lucky enough to be placed with Julie Foss, who helped me re-contextualize myself in my first role out of the classroom in two decades.
The experience empowered me to apply for the Cisco award. Had I remained lost at sea in terms of understanding how to do what matters in my new role, I would never have done it.
Innovation is often lonely work. It can antagonize status quo types who are intent on maintaining a system that put them in charge, but innovation is also thrilling and can empower those not privileged by that status quo. If you’re serious about diversity, equity and inclusion, innovators aren’t people you want to be labelling as troublemakers, they’re simply committed to finding a better way.
The other nice things about innovation is that you meet the most interesting people. From Ella in UBC to Kyle at Inspiretech to Eric George at the CPI, I’ve had the opportunity to meet some fascinating people who don’t status quo anything and are always looking for that better way. Cisco, both as a company and as individual employees, have been wonderful enablers of innovation, providing me with resources in a subject that everyone uses all day every day in every classroom, but almost no one teaches. Being acknowledged as an innovator by such a forward thinking organization makes me think that I’m on the right track, even if annoys some of the powers that be.
I grew up next to the sea as a kid and miss it everyday. Sometimes I’ve just got to see some water. The nearest/nicest way to do that which actually hits the odd corner (I get what I can take in the corner desert that is SW Ontario) is over to the Niagara Escarpment and up it to Georgian Bay. Saturday was a 24°C perfect August day, so off I went.
Some quiet time on the trails at the end of Beaver Valley in the woods and then it was an hour blast back through the tedium to the maddening crowds.
