Minus 20 outside, so it’s time for another round of macro-ice crystal photos using the Canon T6i Rebel with macro STM lens…
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Mid-Winter Macro Ice Crystals
Tim’s Ten Bike Wishlist
One of the pieces they had in the recent big 100th edition of Practical Sportsbikes was a 10 bike wishlist. Being a magazine focused on older sports bikes, that’s what their lists were. My wishlist is more wide ranging, covering everything from pre-war classics to the latest digital machines. There is a bit of 80’s representation, but it also has a pile of other bikes both old and new.
My dream list would lean heavily on the dreams…
Tim’s Ten Bike Wish List:
1) Granddad’s Coventry Eagle
I’ve talked about my Granddad’s Coventry Eagle previously. This particular wish involves me coming across old NG4743 in a barn and restoring it myself. Being able to restore and ride a bike that should have been in our family for multiple generations would be a moving experience. I saw some Coventry Eagles at the British Motorcycle Museum a couple of summers ago and got surprisingly emotional at the idea of riding one. The most magical one would be the one Bill owned. If you’re going to wish list, wish hard! I couldn’t begin to guess what this would cost as it probably doesn’t exist.
2) Kawasaki Z1000
There are a number of modern bikes that have caught my eye. A consistent choice has been the shamelessly anime inspired, Sugomi designed Kawasaki Z1000. New ones go for about fourteen grand Canadian. I’m partial to the orange one from a few years ago. There is a low mileage one in Drummondville, QC for about nine grand. As modern naked bikes go, this one is big enough to fit me and scratches every Robotech Cyclone anime dream I had as a kid. The only thing better would be if it could transform into battloid mode – and it looks like it might.
3) Honda VFR750F
Most of my 80’s bike fantasies revolved around the Honda Interceptor. The VFR-750F RC30 came up on many of the Practical Sportsbike lists as well; it’s an ’80s kid’s dream superbike. Because it hits that nostalgic twang, it’s now a collector’s item and an expensive proposition, but hey, this is a dream list! Something like this would allow me to maybe edge into vintage racing and track days, though both things are pretty thin on the ground in Ontario. The RC45 race bike derivative would be an even better choice for vintage track riding.
4) Yamaha XT500
Another nostalgic choice would be a twinshock trail bike that I could use in vintage off road events. I’ve thought about trying to get my father-in-law’s old Suzuki, but he sold it on and I’d probably end up paying more than it’s worth to get back. Thanks to Henry Cole and crew, I’ve got a soft spot for Yamaha XT500s. A restored XT would let me pursue silly things like classic enduro rallies and the V.I.N.C.E..
5) 1938 Triumph Speed Twin
With all the research into World War 2 I’ve been doing, the Triumph Speed Twin keeps coming up as a huge leap forward in two wheeled technology. If I were to own a pre-war bike, this would be a more likely dream choice. Perfect versions go at auction for $24k+ Canadian. I’d be happy with a less perfect bike that I could actually use.
6) 2019 Ariel Ace
The Ariel Ace is one of those bespoke and bizarre machines that could only exist for me on a dream bike list. Since first seeing the almost architectural design of the Ace’s girder front forks and trellis frame, I was smitten. The Ariel uses a stock Honda motor but is otherwise a custom machine that you can design to your own wishes. At £24,950,this is very much a dream list bike.
7) Kawasaki H2
The Kawasaki Ninja H2 supercharged superbike is an unbelievable piece of engineering. Since the first time I saw the state of the art processes Kawasaki uses to mold the supercharger to hearing it break the sound barrier while spinning, I was a fan. This dream bike is north of thirty grand, but it’d let me maybe see the dream of 200mph on two wheels, all while listening to that supercharger chirp.
8) CCM RAFBF Spitfire
CCM’s Spitfire custom model comes in a variety of styles, but my favourite is the classically styled Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund Spitfire. This 600cc customized thumper is a lightweight thing that looks like it would be a blast to ride on twisty roads. As a modern bike with classic styling, it would fill a niche in my dream garage that nothing else does. £18,000 isn’t cheap, but dream list, right?
9) Honda Goldwing Touring
Say what? A Goldwing? One of the functions of my dream bike garage would be to participate in as many different kinds of riding as possible. Of all the big touring bikes, Honda’s new, lighter Goldwing is the most capable all-round tourer there is, and it’s Honda bullet-proof. Another bike north of thirty grand, it’s something that would only be on a dream list, but it means I could take a happy pillion with me and tour like we mean it.
10) Husqvarna 701 Enduro
Husky’s 701 Enduro is an off-road capable bike that’ll also handle the roads needed to get you to the edge. This would be another one of those bikes selected to let me experience a specific kind of riding. The 701 only weighs a bit more than I do but is a big, capable off roader that would fit me, keep up with traffic when needed and still be able to off road. At about $14,000 Canadian, it isn’t a cheap dream off roader.
I feel like I’m missing a modern track day bike. A Honda Fireblade or Yamaha R1 would be on my shortlist for that duty, though with no Ducatis in the mix here, the new V4 Panigale R would probably win dream bike wishlist status over the more mundane Japanese choices. I might be convinced to swap the Z1000 out for that.
I’m also partial to weirdness, and a sidecar outfit would scratch that itch. I like older styled outfits, so a Royal Enfield or classic modern Triumph with a bullet sidecar would be a cool thing to add into the list, perhaps after swapping out the XT500. I only leaned toward the Goldwing as a touring option instead because you get to lean on the Honda.
Rather than go the Husky route, a stranger choice there might be getting a Lyndon Poskitt rally bike made. At thirty to sixty thousand Euro, they aren’t cheap, but that’s what a dream bike list is all about, right?
***
I’ve managed to cover a range of bikes from the early 1930s to the latest models. With a sweep of almost ninety years and what are some truly weird options, I hope I’ve managed to express just how diverse and strange my motorcycling proclivities have become. My final list would include bikes manufactured in England, Japan and Europe and range in price from pretty accessible to pretty much unattainable.
If nothing else, a dream bike list lets you stretch your expectations and expand your considerations around what you might ride. From doing the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride on my grandfather’s Eagle to seeing the wrong side of two hundred miles per hour on a supercharged dream machine, for me the dream stable is about opening up possibilities rather than creating a museum exhibit.
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The Digital Divide is Deep and Wide
The idea of computer technical proficiency has come up many times over the years on Dusty World. Whether you want to call it digital literacy, digital fluency, or twenty-first Century skills, there is obviously a big gap in the computer user skills we’re graduating people with. This isn’t a new thing, I’ve been benefiting from this lack of fluency in the general public since the 1980s.
After dropping out of high school in the late ’80s I started apprenticing as a millwright. At our warehouse the new building control systems were becoming computerized and all of the very skilled welders and mechanics in our department were leery of them, so guess who got to take that on? The new guy who had been working with computers since he was ten.
A summer job I got while going to university in the early 1990s involved converting an engineering shop over to computerized ordering (they’d hand written all parts orders and completed shipments prior to that, ironically while producing telephony computer electronics). I got Lotus1-2-3 (which I’d never used before) working with the formatting so we could print out orders using our existing forms. This took a bit of trial and error, but I wouldn’t have described it as particularly difficult, it just took a willingness to make effective use of digital technology in problem solving.
After graduating from uni I continually found myself moved into technology implementation simply because of this fluency I seemed to have that many people didn’t. This eventually led to me getting IT qualifications as a technician. It even followed me into teacher’s college where I found myself teaching other students software and has been a mainstay of my teaching career.
This week I came across a recent study that sheds light on all of this anecdotal experience. The Distribution of Computer User Skills research across wealthy OECD countries all point to some rather astonishing facts:
“Overall, people with strong technology skills make up a 5–8% sliver of their country’s population, and this is true across all wealthy OECD countries.
What’s important to remember is that 95% of the general population in North America cannot make effective use of computers in resolving even simple problems or overcoming unexpected outcomes.”
Computer use isn’t just poor, it’s abysmal. Over a third of Canadians aged 16-65 can’t do anything other than simple, rote, habitual work in a digital environment. If asked to do tasks that I would consider straightforward and with no particular digital expertise, they are unable. Keep in mind, this is only looking at the skills of work-aged people. It’s not even considering seniors who generally have much weaker computer skills – so the actual computer skill level in the whole population is even lower than this implies.
You’re probably doubting your ability to be considered an advanced user in this study, but you shouldn’t. None of these tests involved programming or having to do anything engineering wise with a computer, it’s all user focused work using simple software. To be considered a strong (level 3) computer user you had to be able to “schedule a meeting room in a scheduling application, using information contained in several email messages.” If you’ve ever had a group of people email and work out a date for a meeting and then you’ve put that meeting in Google Calendar, you’re considered a high end user. If you’re reading this online blog, you’re probably considered a proficient, level 3, high-skills user.
The article that started this leads on to another on the digital divide, but rather than hang it all on economic factors it also considers psychological and skills based limitations. A few years ago I attempted to provide local households that said they couldn’t afford one with a computer. It was a complete failure – like giving books to illiterate people then wondering why they weren’t illiterate any more; there is a lot more to the digital divide than economic barriers, though they no doubt play a part in it. The fast evolving nature of technology means relatively recent computers are available often for free to people who otherwise can’t afford them, but the problem isn’t just access to technology, it’s the inability of our education system to build sufficient digital fluency in our population to make use of them. There is no point in handing out technology to people who can’t make use of it.
With all of this in mind, who are we aiming at when we introduce digital technology into the classroom? What are we doing when we pitch elearning at a general public who have this distressingly low level of digital fluency? The vast majority of our students (fictitious digital native prejudices aside) are functionally illiterate when using digital technologies in even simple, user focused ways. We seem to think we are graduating students who are able to make effective use of computers – except we aren’t. Many educators dwell in that level 0 to 1 poor user category themselves.
| I’ve been advocating for it for over five years – nothing changes. |
If our digital fluency were seen in terms of literacy, we’re handing out the complete works of Shakespeare to illiterates and then wondering why it isn’t working and why it’s being vandalized. At some point we’ll stop dumping the latest multi-national prompted tech fad (ipads, chromebooks, whatever) into classrooms and start teaching a K to 12 digital skills continuum so people can actually make use of the technology we provide.
Last week one of my essential students intentionally punched and broke a Chromebook in my classroom. This made me quite angry because I saw a useful and expensive digital tool being broken. After reading this report I can’t help but wonder if he was just breaking a thing that he can’t do anything useful with that frustrates him.
“Educational technology has failed to move the needle on either cost effectiveness or student success in the past ten years…” – Brandon Busteed, Gallup Education
(they were talking about this in Phoenix in 2014)
OECD (2016), Skills Matter: Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills, OECD Skills Studies, OECD Publishing, Paris, France.
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The Future of Work: Bridging The Digital Skills Divide
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| Bridging the digital skills divide |
Once again I seem to have found my way into an upper management summit. I imagine I’ll be the only classroom teacher in there, but that’s no bad thing. If more front line people were directly connected to decision makers, our policy decisions wouldn’t seem as fictional as they sometimes do. The other nice thing about a summit like this is that I get to dust off and exercise the philosophy degree, which in a computer technology classroom sometimes lays dormant for too long.
The keynote for this summit is Cheryl Cran, an author and speaker on the future of work. Her approach seems to be very human resources based, which is appealing to a teacher who works with those humans every day. Digital transformation tends to diminish a company’s need for human resources since it’s really just another form of automation/mechanization. Can digital disruption actually lead to better relationships with the humans in your organization? Perhaps for the few that are left. If digital disruption is going to lead to mass unemployment, then how effective our companies run is going to be the least of our problems. Making too much of the human population redundant never ends well for the society that does it. This is a very difficult path to tread, so I’m very curious to hear how Cheryl presents it.
Cheryl sent out a pre-summit Q&A on where attendees think the future of work lies. Here are the questions and my responses:
1. In your opinion what does the future of work look like?
The social contract between employers and employees will continue to deteriorate. Private employment will be limited to short term as needed contract work for the vast majority. This is dressed up in “always be retraining/adapting” corporate speak, but the end result is usually downward pressure on everyone’s work/life balance. The ‘try harder’ language of private business can get hard to believe when you’ve retrained (paying for your own training) multiple times only to be be made redundant again. Meanwhile wealth is being concentrated into an ever decreasing class of ultra-wealthy entities.
Only the management class will still consider themselves employees of a single company. A universal wage may be instituted to stabilize and pacify a large under-employed working class. Even specialized skills will increasingly become redundant under more advanced automation. This is less about profit than it is about control. Machines are much less demanding than people.
2. What do you think are the current challenge for employers right now in regards to attracting youth to work for their companies?
Companies tend to approach employee relations in a conservative fashion with little change in approach from previous years. GenZ expectations around work have been formed by evolving educational experiences. With the school system no longer holding students to deadlines and graduation standards much more flexible than they used to be, employers find dealing with young employees who have never had to work to a deadlines challenging. Attracting youth to a company successfully would have a lot to do with clarifying expectations in the workplace and training to cover that gap between an employer’s expectations and the young employee’s experience.
3. What do you think needs to happen to prepare today’s youth for the future of work?
Our education system (in Ontario at least) has already started moving towards a universal pay standard by moving from graduation by proven skill to graduation as a general expectation. This was largely motivated by Ontario’s learning to 18 legislation. As education has reorientated on a graduation for all approach, there has been increasing friction between graduates and workplace expectations. If k-12 is an experience everyone is expected to graduate from, then it will fall to post-secondary education to provide support for students as they transition into the workplace. That support is vital as students are not being taught that deadlines nor even attendance are mandatory. If we can’t train to bridge that gap, then the workplace itself will have to evolve to expect employees who may or may not be there and may or may not meet deadlines. From a social efficiency point of view, that obviously isn’t the way forward.
4. What inspires you about today’s youth? Why?
They are as bright and capable as any other generation. Only lowered expectations create a social perception of laziness and lack of focus. One need only attend Skills Canada Nationals or CyberTitan to see just how capable this generation can be of mastery learning. Whenever I hear someone slagging young people I remind myself of all the great students I’ve seen graduate who have produced world-class results in spite of a system that did not encourage it.
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Tough Ricoh Theta360 Photography on a Cold Spring Ride
Barely above freezing, but the sky is clear and winter blue. The camera is a Ricoh Theta S on a Gorilla Pod wrapped around the rear view mirror, until it wasn’t. Without a hint of a problem it suddenly let go at 80km/hr as we rode down a country road. The tripod and camera slid down the pavement for 50 odd metres before coming to a stop. We turned around and went back to find the camera case popped open and electronics hanging out, I figured it was dead.
Once home I put the guts back in and snapped it shut again and it powered right up. All the photos on it were fine, only the plastic piece at the top shattered. It’s now covered in tape and looks like the tough little camera that it is. If you’re looking for a hardy 360 camera, the Ricoh Theta has survived thousands of miles on a motorcycle taking all sorts of photos and videos, and now it has hit the road at high speed, and it still keeps on ticking.
I’d kinda hoped that this nixed the Theta S so I could upgrade to the new Theta V. At this rate I’m going to have to drop this thing into the sun to kill it! #onetough360camera
I had the camera set to take a photo ever 10 seconds. I hoped that it happened to be taking one as it came off the mirror, but no luck. In the meantime, here are a selection of stills and 360 movable images from the Ricoh on the ride:
Dress warm for a cold ride. – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA
Cold, easly spring #Triumph ride #theta360 – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA
Westmount Rose Covered Bridge https://goo.gl/maps/sCEvFbtqgrC2 – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA
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A Commute Home from a Different Angle
Some variations on a theme. Instead of attaching the 360 camera to the mirror, I’m trying some different locations. This time it was attached to the wind deflector mounted above the windshield:
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Trying to understand UK PCP deals on motorcycles from a Canadian perspective
| I’ve been trying to understand this since reading the |
I’m trying to get a handle on PCP financing that seems to be popular in the UK right now. If you’re going to buy a Kawasaki Z1000 with ABS in the UK, you’re looking at a price of £10,389 ($17,453CAN). The on the road price in Canada is about $16,000, so you’re already almost $1500 ahead, but cost of borrowing is where I get really confused.
If you PCP (personal contract purchase) you’re paying a £2500 ($4200CAN) downpayment and then £147 ($247CAN) per month for 36 months. At the end of that time you’ve got nothing, all while paying 5.9% interest and having to ride the bike under mileage and keep it pristine to keep your investment intact. You’re also hit up for financing paperwork fees. If you go over mileage or the bike is in any way less than mint when you return it you suffer additional costs. I imagine the same goes with any farkling you might want to do – don’t. When you hand it back you’ve paid $13,092 Canadian dollars in interest and what basically resolves itself as rental costs; you own nothing. That’s when they ask you if you want to do it again with another bike or now pay a balloon payment equal to the current value of the bike (assuming it’s in perfect shape).
If you buy the same bike in Canada and put the same amount down, you’re looking at a monthly payment of $348 Canadian (£207), and at the end of the 36 months you own the thing. There are no mileage restrictions, no worries about keeping it stock and perfect and if it is in good shape you’ll have spent about $550 in interest and have a vehicle that UK Kawasaki says is worth £3628 ($6095CAN).
The pure costs of borrowing in the UK would be the down payment plus the monthly interest costs. That’ll be £2500 down payment + £465 in monthly interest, all for the favour of giving you this great deal. The pure costs of interest on the PCP deal is £2965 ($4981CAN). The amount of interest you’re paying to own (rather than borrow) the same bike in Canada is $460.
The context of borrowing in the two countries is quite different. The UK happily followed the US down the rabbit hole that caused the 2008 financial crisis by deregulating banks. That never happened in Canada where interest rates and the cost of borrowing has always been held to reasonable standards. Canadian banks still make huge profits (they now own a number of US banks that crashed in 2008), but they don’t break the financial system in the process and people who live here aren’t subject to the ridiculous costs of borrowing that British people seem to think reasonable. I frequently see ads on UK TV for credit cards with interest rates that would be illegal in Canada.
With that in mind, maybe throwing nearly five grand Canadian to borrow a bike for three years (that’s $139 a month just in borrowing and rental costs!) makes sense, but it sure doesn’t from this side of the Atlantic.
I’m also left wondering what a flood of lightly used bikes will do to the marketplace in the next few years. In classic short term financial thinking it looks like PCP will flood the market place with short term ownership and then flood the market again with bikes people couldn’t afford in the first place. Won’t this eventually hurt new bike sales as dealers become swamped in returned PCP bikes? Maybe the idea is to return the bike and the go looking to get a massive discount on it when you show up a week later and they don’t have enough room on their lot to hold all the PCP returns.
I’m starting to see why the UK found keeping up with the EU too difficult to continue. They seem to have a very loose grasp on how marketplaces work and seem determined to ignore anything like sustainability. I’m heading over there in a couple of weeks and enjoying a great Canada/UK exchange rate thanks to their wobbly economic choices. I’m curious to see if I can get a first hand look at what this approach to bike selling is doing.
| UK Kawasaki’s PCP calculator |
| Canadian Kawasaki’s offer on the same bike… |
| Cost of borrowing on Canada Kawasaki’s 36 month financing offer… |
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But we’re all much happier now…
I’ve had a number of conversations in the past few weeks that shed some light on a difficult subject. This all began at my men’s yoga class. One of the other guys there is a detective from the city south of us. He has been working on homicides for the past nine years and is starting to feel the weight of being around that much death all the time. He said the hardest part of is job is seeing his own demographic so prevalent in the suicides he covers. When I asked what he meant he said the suicides always seem to be guys in their forties and fifties. That was a heavy way to start a yoga class full of guys in their forties and fifties and not the kind of thing you soon forget.
From that I went into Christmas. The last couple of years have been good with trips away to warmer places. These adventures have been a great alternative to having how dysfunctional my family is rubbed in my face for two weeks. After a long bout of mental illness, a divorce and a suicide the local family members aren’t very good at getting together and all the rest are an ocean away. I feel remarkably isolated during the holidays and getting generic presents from in-laws only serves to emphasize how peripheral I am to the festivities. I can see why some people struggle with the season while the rest are manically happy.
With that all behind me I attended a lodge meeting this week that developed into a very insightful discussion by a group of sharp men on the steady deterioration of social interaction between our gender in the past two decades. Evidently I’m not the only man who feels socially isolated. Many older members lamented the lack of time and the means to enjoy that social time together. My sardonic reply was, ‘yeah, but we’re all much happier nowadays.’ Attendance in masonry is an ongoing concern. Twenty years ago the social aspects of the craft were central to a meeting with brothers often socializing long after the meeting was done. Back then we had time for each other, nowadays our commutes are longer, our work expectations more stringent and our family commitments more involved. We have less time for each other in the Twenty First Century.
We’re feeling time squeezed at a time when our debt levels are going through the roof in a desperate attempt to maintain that standard of living we enjoyed two decades ago. One of the first things you try to curtail when you see debt spiraling out of control are optional social events. The economics of Twenty First Century life is just another force acting to tear us apart. As Axl so aptly once said, ‘as our arms get shorter our pockets get deeper.’
Running the desperate treadmill of modern life has us feeling like we have no time to make connections with each other. To fix this problem we cunningly invented social media to fill that gap. You can stay in touch without sitting in traffic in crumbling infrastructure while burning ever more expensive gasoline to see people, but you’re not really seeing them. Having the time and means to actually meet your fellows and spend time with them without feeling like you need to be virtually or physically elsewhere is a basic human need many men have forgotten. I’m willing to bet many of those suicides my yoga buddy attended were lonely men feeling socially isolated.
The health considerations of poorly socialized, less active men are bad for everyone. I keep getting told 
to be active. I’d love to play hockey or soccer as I once did, but there is no access to the local cliques who do it. Men tend to be remarkably tribal and don’t like taking in outsiders. That makes it difficult to play team sports if you’re not living where you grew up with the people you grew up with (that’s most of us).
I’m going to make a concerted effort to try and cultivate the time and space to find the social discourse I seem to have grown out of as a middle-aged man. My family and my work are important, but so is finding the time and means to experience meaningful relationships with other men. It might even lead to exercise and a chance to expand my social network into something beyond words on a screen.
Photos from the road: The West Coast
Photos from around Campbell River and Tofino, especially in the Pacific Rim National Park. Taken with the Canon T6i, various lenses…
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Summer 2018: Things to do list: Horizons Unlimited Ontario Meeting
Horizons Unlimited is having a big meeting in central Ontario in May and it’d be nice to go. It’s a three hour ride from home but only about an hour and a half from the inlaw’s cottage. I looked into staying over but it’s a pretty penny. Staying at the resort it’s at is north of eight hundred bucks for the cheapest condo type place available. Even assuming I could find some people to divide the cost with, that’s more than I’m willing to pay.
Heading up Friday I could do a loop around the Kawartha Highlands on some twisty, Canadian Shield roads before landing at the cottage. The whole thing would be about 850kms over a long weekend. A day of riding up there, a day at Horizons and then a ride home on Sunday – entirely doable.
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| The ride around Kawartha |
They structure the pricing to get you there for the whole weekend, so even if I just went for the day it’s still seventy five bucks, but then I guess I could always go back Sunday if it really did the business. I’ve had friends attend before and really enjoy it. If there were wild camping opportunities in a less resorty location, I’d be more willing to commit, but refugee camping (in rows, on a site) isn’t my cup of tea, and the alternative staying in a building ends up being money I’d rather spend elsewhere.
Still, for seventy five bucks, it might be a good way to get a sense of the overlander adventure club, I just wish they offered a first time taster’s package. They say ‘come to an HU event and find your tribe’ – but I tend toward a tribe of one. I want to believe, and I want to go, but I don’t want to end up spending a mint on something that ends up not being a fit. The aspie in me wants me to just go for a long ride in the Haliburton Highlands – I’m trying to use that to convince him to go and meet people… something he really isn’t fond of.
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