Jason Thompson's Weblog

Learning to Code: Fear

2012-06-20T00:00:00-04:00

Learning should be fun, not scary. But sometimes people are afraid to learn. I see this a lot when I’m teaching people how to do things on computers. They are paralyzed with fear, as if the next menu choice will destroy the computer. I never understood this. I’m an experimenter by nature, so if I can’t do something, I play around until I figure out how.

Then I noticed how my own fears were impeding my learning. This was an important discovery. I began to face my fears and watched them whither away one by one. I’m not done yet, but since I started this process, learning to code has been a lot of fun.

Fear of Reading the Source

I started messing around with Ruby years ago (before Rails, actually), but I’ve only made serious progress in the past year. When I first started I treated the libraries I was using as black boxes, a good practice when everything is working. But when something wasn’t working as expected and documentation was sparse, I was lost because I was afraid to look at the library’s source. Sure you can just google your error message and hope for the best, but even if you find an answer, you’re just cutting and pasting a solution that you don’t understand. These days the source for most of the libraries I use is readily accessible on GitHub, so solving your problem is that much easier. And of course reading source code is a great way to learn about your development stack as well as coding in general. I’m not great at reading code, but, as I tell my daughter, you only improve through practice.

Fear of the Unknown

I’ve understood how to use Ruby’s each iterator for a long time, and I’d even occasionally reach for map, but I found inject scary, so I avoided it. What was I afraid of? I intuitively grasped each, but inject wasn’t so obvious to me, so I avoided it. It was almost like I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to grasp it. But a few minutes playing with it in IRB, and this fear was allayed. There are concepts that are more difficult to grasp. I’m still working on fully understanding lambda’s and procs, for example, but now I see this as an exciting challenge, not a reason to run in the other direction. And every time I face down one of these fears, I gain confidence as a developer.

Fear of Looking Stupid

It’s been months since my last post on this blog. This isn’t because I didn’t have any ideas. I’ve been eager to start writing about what I’m learning about Ruby, Rails and programming in general, but I have been afraid to write about it out of fear of appearing stupid. MM hates that word and admonishes my daughter and I whenever we use it. She’s right to do so–it’s a demeaning word. So why apply a demeaning word to myself, if only indirectly? I’m not a Ruby expert, but their are plenty of blogs written by great Ruby programmers. Writing about my own journey of learning will help me form my own ideas and solidify my grasp of what I’m learning. There’s a reason why you write papers in University. And I’m confident that others can learn from my epiphanies and struggles.

Facing my Fears

So I have recognized my fears–what next? Over the last year or so, I’ve learned to see when I’m under the sway of one of these fears. It’s surprisingly hard to see what you’re feeling when you’re feeling it. When I catch myself wrapped up in fear, I argue with the fear. I’m a good arguer, but it takes a while to apply this skill to own thoughts. The thing is, most of these fears don’t stand up much scrutiny. Indeed, most of them seem silly once you’ve identified them.

To that end, I’m treating these types of fears as a bucket list. I’ve started to choose projects that scare me, which turns out to be a great learning strategy. What’s more, in facing my fears, I’ve frequently found that I’m better at programming than I thought.

Getting out of Toronto by Bike: Rouge Hill Go Station

2011-10-14T00:00:00-04:00

Rouge Hill GO Station

My favourite roads for bike rides are low traffic rural roads. As a cyclist I’m probably not alone in this preference. But one of my biggest challenges as a cyclist who lives car-free in a major city is getting to these types of roads without spending hours riding through the suburbs. In the interest of helping other Toronto cyclists, I’ll post some of my favourite routes on this blog.

During our first family bike tour last year we discovered an excellent shortcut out of the Toronto: Rouge Hill GO Station. It offers easy access to the waterfront trail, saving you a long slog eastbound through Scarborough and, as I later discovered, it also offers a short 8 km route to rural roads north of the city.

There is one downside, however. The major issue for me is that the first Lakeshore East GO Train to leave Union Station on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays is at 7:13. This gets you to Rouge Hill by about 7:42. I wish there was a 6:13 train as I would prefer to get an earlier start.

Goodwood Coffee Ride

2011-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

Looking west from York Durham Line.

Showing flagrant disregard for the weather forecast, a fine mist of rain starts to fall as I step out my front door into the darkness. As I place my handlebar bag and water bottles on my bike, Tara, I begin to have second thoughts about my planned ride. And is that a scratchy throat I am feeling? It’s probably just the dryness in our room last night, I theorize. Unfortunately this theory ignores two salient facts: that the climate was anything but dry last night and my daughter has had a runny nose for the past three weeks. It’s early, though, so I can be forgiven for this lack of acumen.

Inspired by these photos at Two Serious Bikes, but lacking a map or route sheet for his route, I decided to plot my own route to Annina’s Bakeshop and Cafe in Goodwood, Ontario. Rouge Hill GO Train station is a great place to start rides because it allows you to skip miles of suburbs to get to the good rural riding. In my case, I was starting my ride to Goodwood at Old Finch and Sewells Roads, so it made a lot of sense to take the train to Rouge Hill, and then ride 20 minutes to my start point. But I was intrigued by Google’s suggested route from my place to this start point. It was only an additional 35 kms and it followed some trails I had never ridden on its northeasterly journey to the top corner of the city. And the additional 35 kms would make the entire ride at least 100 kms.

All of which is a long way of explaining why I find myself lost 20 minutes into the ride. The sun hasn’t yet risen, so it’s hard to read street signs and the Kay Gardiner Beltline trail doesn’t seem to do what Google thinks it does. I’m still close to home, I think as I use my phone to find my location. Maybe this just isn’t my day.

I find my way back onto the route, but there will be many of these moments of confusion. And the worst is yet to come.

But I make an important decision: this ride is about finishing, not riding a fast 100 km. Today is about finding a way to enjoy the ride. Later on I will thank myself for making this decision.

And later arrives before I know it. After winding through suburban and industrial Toronto for over an hour, I finally arrive at Finch Avenue. Wonderful, I’m within 5 kms of nice rural riding, I think as I turn left onto Finch. The skies have brightened and the rain has stopped. Finally knowing where I’m going I adopt a brisk eastward pace.

I race through the intersection of Finch and Middlefield road, thinking, gee, all these street names sound the same. I’m sure I just saw Middlefield or Middlesomething anyways. But apparently I’ve got more important things to think about, because I put another few kilometres behind me before I realize that I should have hit Morningside by now.

I stop and ask a man waiting at a bus stop.

“Ohhh maaaan,” he responds, “Morningside? Ohhh maaan.”

“I’m going the wrong way aren’t I?”

“Ohhh man.” He seems more upset about this than I am as I thank him and pull a u-turn.

Looking north on Sewells Road. I'm an hour behind schedule and I have done more than 10 bonus kilometres, but I'm overjoyed to finally be in the countryside.

When I finally get to the intersection of Old Finch and Sewells Road, I’m an hour behind schedule and I have ridden more than 10 bonus kilometres, but I’m happy to be in the countryside. I pause to change to my new route sheet, eat a snack and text home. Then I’m on my way, with a nice descent toward Old Finch Avenue. There’s not a hint of sunshine yet, but on it’s short twisty passage between Sewells and Meadowvale, Old Finch is the kind of road that makes cyclists giggle with joy. Well, it makes me, anyway.

Aside from my poor navigation skills, 35 kph headwinds coming from the north have hampered me all morning. I reflect on the fact that I will be riding north for the next 30 kms or so as the wind tries to blast me back along Beare Road toward my warm bed at home. But I just duck down into an aerodynamic tuck and stop looking at my speed. Today is not about average speed; it’s about finishing.

Looking east on Concession Road 8. Now that's more like it.

A while later I turn east onto Concession Road 8 and I’m happy to see that it’s a dirt road without a car in sight. Most of my day will be spent on roads like these and I’m thankful for that as I roll down the hill. I am also entering the Oak Ridges Morraine, which means I’ll be doing some climbing before Goodwood.

I continue north up Sideline 30, which becomes Concession Road 2 at Pickering Uxbridge Townline Road in a place called Altona.

In Altona I see a couple of boarded up houses. This one is at the crossroads of Pickering Uxbridge Townline Road and Concession Road 2.

Here I see some of the first people I’ve seen in a while. It’s 10:15 and folks are gathering in an historic hall. Their cars are parked outside on both sides of the street. I don’t stick around long to find out what they’re up to, though.

The sun is winning its battle with the clouds as I head north from Altona. At least, I think, this wind is blowing away the clouds. To my right, sunlight shines down onto a pumpkin patch and, like any city person, I stop to take a photograph. My first instinct is to keep going, but I’ve decided that today’s ride is as much about sightseeing as anything else. I’m riding hard, but not worrying about the time.

A pumpkin patch seen from Concession Road 2.

I started these weekend rides in August as training for my first brevet. In the meantime, I discovered the Rocky Mountain 1200 km brevet, which is held every 4 years. It will be happening next July when I visit my folks in the Okanagan. To qualify for this brevet, riders must have completed a full brevet series (200 km, 300 km, 400 km and 600 km) within the past two years, so training has been very much on my mind these days. But, while I’m interested in pushing my limits and getting in better shape, I am a tourist at heart. If riding was just about training and times, I would find something else to do.

I’m thinking about tourism vs. training when I hit a series of difficult hills just before Goodwood and I’m thankful for the “training” time I’ve put in this year. But when the last hill comes into view I even consider walking. After all, it’s not really giving up, is it? I ride it.

My efforts are rewarded by a short eastward trip up Durham Highway 47 into seemingly stronger headwinds. The highway seems busy, but after seeing no traffic to speak of over the last hour, any amount of traffic would seem excessive. To make matters worse, there’s only foot and a half of broken shoulder keeping me away from the dump trucks that seem to clog the highway this morning. So when Annina’s Bakeshop and Cafe finally comes into view, I’m only too happy to pull into the parking lot.

There are eight or nine racing bikes outside and when I walk in, I see why: there is a huge selection of some of the best looking pies, tarts and cookies I have ever seen. I want it all. Instead, I opt for the Rueben with fries and a coffee. Then I go upstairs to lounge on a comfy leather couch with my coffee while I wait for my sandwich. The other cyclists are upstairs too, laughing loudly at someone’s story as they finish up their coffees. When my sandwich arrives a few minutes later, I make quick work of it.

I make quick work of my lunch.

I linger over my coffee while contemplating my ride home. I’ve ridden 77 kms into the wind this morning, so I’m looking forward to having a tailwind on the way back. On my way out I grab half a dozen cookies. I want to grab a half dozen tarts, but I’m traveling light with just a handlebar bag. Next time.

It turns out that Concession Road 3 is right outside the cafe, so I hop back onto Tara and before long I’m on a dirt road with the wind at my back.

Looking south on concession road three not far south of Goodwood.

This road is a bit rutted, but I easily maintain 30 kph. It almost feels as though it’s all downhill. I do a little climbing and a reoccurring I.T. band issue begins to bother me, but the kilometres go by quickly. On my way back I spend time on two busier roads, highway 7 and Taunton Road/ Steeles Avenue. The former has been freshly paved and traffic is light and the latter has a nice wide shoulder which turns into a bike lane once it becomes Steeles.

Trees along a freshly paved Highway 7.

The short section between Steeles and Meadowvale/ Old Finch Avenue is the only backtracking I do all afternoon along the morning’s route. I continue south on Meadowvale past Old Finch Avenue and ride the 8 kms back to the Rouge Hill GO Station, completing 38 kilometres for the afternoon for a total ride of 115 kilometres for the day.

Apparently I have just missed a train, so I wander down to Chesterton Shores Park just south of the station to relax in the sun.

Tara, my trusty bicycle, basks in the sun near Rouge Hill GO Station at Chesterton Shores Park.

Looking southwest across Lake Ontario from Chesterton Shores Park.

The next 45 minutes go by quickly as I photograph the park. But when I finally settle onto the train, I acknowledge to myself that I am indeed getting sick. By the time I get home, the sore throat has worsened and sinuses start to complain. But I’m thankful that I didn’t listen to that voice earlier in the day telling me to return to my bed. The ride has been a great success.

In the future, I’d like to create some longer rides in this area. A quick glance at the map confirms that there are plenty more small backroads to explore.

More photos available on Flickr.

Ride Report: Markham-Woodville 200

2011-09-23T00:00:00-04:00

Ballardian Dawn 1. When I saw the garish colours of dawn over the industrial landscape, the works of J.G. Ballard immediately came to mind.

Prologue

This is a post about riding my first brevet with Randonneurs Ontario. For those of you who haven’t heard about randonneuring, here is a great historical introduction. In short, a brevet is a long distance bike ride of a predefined distance (either 200, 300, 400, 600, 1000 or 1200 kms) that has to be completed within a set time frame. At 200 km in length, the shortest brevet in the series must be completed in 13 hours. To ensure that all riders are sticking with the prescribed route, there are a series of controls where riders must get their control cards signed. For Randonneurs Ontario brevets, these controls are unstaffed, so you ask someone like a general store employee to sign your card.

Getting There

If you don’t own a car, it’s hard to get to Randonneurs Ontario brevets because their starting points are usually out in the suburbs. In the case of the Markham-Woodville 200, the brevet starts at a Tim Horton’s in Markham, some 40 km northwest of my Toronto home. Of course most long distance cyclists, including this writer, prefer to ride in a rural setting. So for those of us who love long distance riding, but choose to live car-free in a large city, getting to these rural settings is challenging.

For the purposes of this ride, I took a multimodal approach to getting to the starting point, riding the 5:15 a.m. Yonge St. bus north to it’s final stop at Steeles Ave. From there I had a 20 km ride to the brevet’s starting point. I arrived at Yonge and Steeles at around 5:45, which left me plenty of time to get to my destination by 7:30 a.m.

I love riding at this time of day. Even suburban thoroughfares like Steeles are largely empty so early on a Saturday morning. My route took me along Steeles for about 9 kms before winding northwest through empty industrial land. I took it easy, conserving my energy for the day’s ride, but still found myself moving too quickly, so when the eastern horizon came into view with its almost garish dawn colours, I forced myself to stop and take pictures. These two scenes, found within 100 meters of each other, screamed J.G. Ballard to me. The results can be seen below and at the top of the post.

Ballardian Dawn 2. I got back on my bike, but had to stop again to photograph this new scene that presented itself. The colours seemed to intensify over the empty freeway.

In the end (or, at the beginning) I arrived an hour and a half before the ride was due to start, allowing time for a leisurely second breakfast. But as it turned out, I wasn’t really that early. I wasn’t even finished my cup of coffee when cars started pulling into the parking lot and disgorging riders and their bikes, so I spent the next 45 minutes meeting some of the other riders. This is where I should point out that my memory for names is horrible – it is perhaps the most embarrassing of my ADHD symptoms. I have even been know to temporarily forget the names of friends. That said, I remember a few names: Bob MacLeod, another first-time rider, Harry Kreamer, Kathy Brouse, the ride organizer, and David Thompson. I remember the first three names because I rode with all of them at various points throughout the day and I remember David, who would finish more than an hour before me, because we share a surname.

About ten minutes before we were to leave, I asked someone when we’d get our route sheets.

“You mean you didn’t bring one,” he responded?

No, I hadn’t.

Although clubs always post their route sheet archives online, many of them hand out up-to-date sheets at the beginning of each brevet. The Markham-Woodville route sheet available online hadn’t been updated since 2007, so I assumed that the route must have been tweaked sometime in the intervening four years. Wrong! My heart rate returned to normal when Kathy, the ride co-ordinator generously gave me her own sheet. Luckily she had a GPS with the route programmed into it and she’d be riding with others.

The Rider

As we gathered on our bikes in the parking lot, Kathy introduced Bob and I to the other 12 riders. With these formalities out of the way, we 14 riders eased their bikes out of the parking lot onto Highway 7. I had never ridden with a large group of riders before and I didn’t know anyone there, so I wasn’t able to match myself with similarly paced riders. Eventually, as we headed north on Ninth Line, I found a pace that suited me (somewhere around 30 kph), which seemed to put me in the middle of the pack. Soon, the people behind me fell back quite a ways and the riders ahead became specks on the horizon.

By this point I’d left the suburbs behind and I began to look around at my new surroundings. The morning was grey and cool, so I was glad I had kept my long-fingered gloves and windbreaker on. The landscape consisted of fields of various crops, punctuated by the occasional stretch of trees. Early in the ride, the climbs were easy, but soon enough (though I had not really foreseen this eventuality) we’d be riding through the Oak Ridges Morraine, with it’s steep glacier-carved hills.

Now I grew up in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley from which mountains where always visible to the north and south, at least on rare clear days, so mountains are in my blood. I think this is why I always forget about Southern Ontario’s hilliness. You don’t necessarily see these hills from far away as you would a mountain. Instead they just sort of pop out at you as you’re about to climb them. But you would think when I see road names like Mt. Albert Road on a route sheet, I would expect to do some climbing.

So as I approached the town of Mt. Albert, I reset my expectations. I was still making good time and a little ways past Mt. Albert I caught up with Harry who was sitting at a crossroads looking a bit confused about what direction to take. We rode together for a while and chatted about this and that. Invariably our conversation turned toward cycling gear. I should note here that my bike, a touring bike with stainless steel fenders, a hub generator, gearing optimized for fully loaded climbing, peddles with clips and leather straps and a Brooks saddle, really stood out among the other randonneurs’ bikes. Although I didn’t get a close look at all of their bikes, most of them seemed to be racing bikes (I did see a couple of Brooks saddles, however). So invariably throughout the day, people would ask me about my bike. I must admit that I was hoping to see a wider variety of bikes. I plan on building up a randonneur bike of my own when funds permit, but it will be based on a more traditional French design. And having ridden an aluminum framed bike for a few years over Toronto’s sometimes bumpy city streets, I will never ride anything but steel again.

Seen at the first control in Udora.

Soon, Harry and I arrived at the first control, a small gas station in Udora. We got our cards signed, bought some junk food and went back to our bikes. I was getting cold, but Harry was finishing his coffee and chatting with someone on the phone, so I decided to wait for him. As I waited, three or four others rolled in. Bob and Kathy were riding with this group. They made quick work of their control business and they were back on the road before we got moving.

I probably shouldn’t have waited. Soon after Harry and I got back on the road, he pulled ahead, perhaps revived by the cup of coffee he’d had. I was happy to be riding at my own pace again, but I realized that I should have left the control earlier. Ultimately, my ride took much longer than I’d hoped because I spent too much time at controls and over lunch. In future brevets, I plan to stick to my strategy of spending as little time as possible off my bike.

I caught up to Kathy and Bob as we approached Woodville. I was getting hungry by this point, so I slowed down to their pace. There was a small supermarket and a restaurant in Woodville and I opted for the restaurant along with four or five others. I hadn’t eaten enough during my morning ride, so I was ready for a big sit-down meal. As we waited for the food to come we chatted about past bicycle tours and brevets. Lunch took a while to get to us, which ultimately pushed my ride time for the brevet over ten hours, but it allowed me to get to know Bob, Harry and Kathy a bit better and it helped me recover from bonking on the way into town. I also found out that Bob also lived in Toronto and he had extra space on his bike rack, so he offered me a lift back into town at the end of the ride.

When we left the restaurant the sun was shining, so I wasted more time stowing away my windbreaker. Bob and I had decided to ride together after lunch. Kathy, a more experienced randonneur, was already back on the road ahead of us. I finally stowed the wind breaker and Bob and I got moving just ahead of Harry. But we wouldn’t maintain our lead over him for long. A few hundred meters down the road I was forced to stop once again to don my windbreaker. I somehow couldn’t get a handle on the temperature. While we were stopped, Harry passed us.

Finally back on the road, I established a good pace heading out of town with Bob following close behind. I’m not sure if the landscape got better after Woodville or if the sun just improved my outlook, but the old brick farm houses and the early fall colours were beautiful.

As we turned south, I was starting to feel overheated so I stopped to take off my windbreaker and told Bob to ride on ahead. I was pretty sure I’d be able to catch up to him again. Once I got back on the road, I did manage to close the gap between us, but I could only get so close. In the end I didn’t manage to catch up until just before the next control where he missed the turn onto County Road 13. In retrospect, I wasted too much psychic and physical energy trying to catch him. Although I enjoy the camaraderie of riding with others from time to time, I was forgetting that this was my own ride.

The hills on this part of the route were steeper and more frequent then they had been in the morning and I would have managed them better if I’d paced myself. At the same time, I was feeling some knee pain, so I was afraid to push myself too hard on the hills for fear of injuring my I.T. bands. And, obsessed as I was with catching Bob, I wasn’t eating and drinking enough.

When we finally got to the control at Leaskdale, I was really tired. I gulped down a bottle Gatorade and filled one of my water bottles with another. Five other riders were there, including Kathy and Harry. While we chatted, I opened two Cliff Bar packages and put them in my jersey pockets so I could easily eat on the move later on. Why I hadn’t thought of this earlier, I can’t tell you.

After a few minutes we were back on the road. At this point I was still making good time, so I thought I’d be able to make it in under ten hours. I passed Kathy, Bob and a few others on 6th Concession, but I got confused by the directions when I arrived at Main Street. My brain was getting slow, a sure sign that I hadn’t yet recovered from bonking earlier. I misread the cue sheet, which seemed to be telling me to turn right (westbound), but go east, so I just coasted until I figured out my error. By that point the rest of the riders flew by me.

We rode through Uxbridge’s historic downtown and then headed south along 7th Concession past a small lake and then up a hill into the countryside. Bob had already pulled ahead of us, when Kathy too pulled away. I was running out of energy, paying the price for my neglecting my nutritional needs earlier on. I realized that I wouldn’t make my goal of finishing in less than ten hours. The last kilometres of the ride where through beautiful countryside, but all I wanted to do was finish.

I was actually relieved when I got back onto the suburban section of Ninth Line. And I was surprised when, a few minutes later, Harry caught up to me. Apparently he had missed a turn, heading down a steep hill before realizing his mistake (there always seems to be a steep hill involved in a missed turn). Nevertheless, he managed to fly past me along the home stretch, but we didn’t have far to go, so I pulled into the Tim Horton’s parking lot a minute or two after him.

I grabbed a cup of coffee and joined the group of riders sitting around chatting about the ride. I was disappointed with my time, but as Kathy pointed out, our long lunch didn’t help things.

Getting Home

As it turned out, my bike didn’t fit on Bob’s rooftop bike rack because the fenders got in the way. He felt bad about leaving me there, but there was nothing else he could do. The only way my bike would fit in the rack is if I did major surgery on it and I wasn’t about to do that. I love my fenders!

I rode over to the go station and a bus pulled up almost right away, only there were two kids in front of me with their BMX’s, so the bike rack was full. My cell phone was down to 4%, so using GO’s web site was out of the question. Back home, MM was managing five sugar-crazed girls (my daughter and four friends were celebrating her birthday with a slumber party), but she generously took time out from this enviable task to check the bus schedule. There wouldn’t be another bus for an hour.

I decided to bike the 20 kms to Finch subway station (here I’m omitting the swearing and ranting that ensued when I realized my predicament). Lacking the battery juice for Google maps, I was forced to stick with main streets. It was getting dark out and, in contrast to road conditions early that morning, southbound traffic was heavy. But my Schmidt lighting system and reflective vest gave me some measure of comfort. The journey along Finch was interminable. Of course, compared to my brevet, this ride was nothing, but, given the circumstances, I just wanted to get home.

Unfortunately, the subway was only running as far as Eglinton due to track maintenance, but that was about 8 kms from home and forms part of my daily commute. I carried my bike up the stairs at Eglinton Station and emerged onto Yonge Street. Again, traffic was heavy, but at least there are more bikes on the road closer to downtown. I flicked on my lights and started pedalling north, slowing down to pass a minor accident scene. As I crawled past the cab of a tow truck, the driver chose that moment to fling open his door. Somehow, despite my fatigue, I still had some reflexes left, so I swerved to avoid direct impact, only catching my right hand between break lever and door.

“To honour your longest ride ever, we present you with your first Door Prize! Congratulations, Jason!”

The rest of the trip, thankfully, was uneventful.

Postscript

I did well riding my first 200 km brevet, my longest continuous ride ever. My time was much slower than I’d hoped, but I can easily shave an hour off that by making more efficient use of my time out of the saddle. I also have to remember to ride my own ride. Though riding in a group is fun, there are times when it makes sense to either leave them behind or let them pull ahead. Finally, although I have a lot of experience taking care of my nutritional needs on long rides, I ignored them on this ride because I didn’t want to slow down. Ironically, this oversight was to cost me time. I would have finished stronger if I had stopped to eat when I needed to.

Ride Report: Toronto-Hockley Valley-Toronto (Sunday, August 20, 2011)

2011-08-21T00:00:00-04:00

A look at the sky before leaving.

Now that I’d proven to myself that I could still ride long distances, I needed a new challenge. I also wanted to find a nicer route out of town.

At first I considered circling Hamilton, arriving there from the north and then following the coast back home, but I also wanted to explore the landscape around Kleinburg. A week or two earlier I had noticed a promising route out of Toronto following the Humber River. In the Google Maps satellite view, a verdant swath of land clings to the banks of the Humber as it winds its way between Vaughan and Brampton. Wanting to explore this further, I opted for Kleinburg.

But this route to Kleinburg is only about 34 kilometres, so I decided to use the town as a starting point for a longer foray into the countryside. A loop up through the Hockley Valley looked like just the ticket. The pictures I found online looked beautiful.I’d take Nashville Road/ Countryside Drive over to Airport road, follow that north to Hockley Valley Road and cross back over to Country Road 50 at Loretto, before continuing back down to Countryside Drive via 50, Old Church Road and The Gore Road.

I also decided that I would use the BC Randonneur’s cue sheet template to get used to following a cue sheet. The week before, Google Maps instructions had proven difficult to read and, besides, I thought, I should get used to reading a proper cue sheet in the lead-up to my first 200 kilometre brevet at the beginning of September.

The sky at 5 a.m.

On Saturday morning I woke at 4:00, an hour before my alarm, so I decided that I’d head out early and avoid the heat of the day. After eating breakfast, drinking a mug of coffee and doing a last-minute check of my gear it was just after five. I snapped a photo of the moon and clouds before getting underway.

I got to Wallace and Lansdowne before noticing that I didn’t have my cycling computer. My absent-mindedness was hampering my early start. After heading back home and finding my computer, I was underway for the second time at 5:24. Good.

One thing many Randonneurs suggest having is a headlamp to see your cue sheet and computer in the dark. I didn’t have one, but wasn’t worried since the dark part of my route would be in the city under streetlights. One look at my cycling cockpit proved the folly of that assumption.

I headed east to the end of Wallace to the West Toronto Rail Path and took that north. It was deserted at that time of the morning and I enjoyed the 800 metres between Wallace and the end of the line. From there I wove my way up to Albion road, which eventually led me to the upper section of the Humber Bike Trail. The city was quiet, so brief sections of Davenport, Keel, Weston Road and Albion where fine.

Humber river at dawn.

Humber river at dawn again.

Humber river trail.

The sky started to brighten as I followed the winding Humber River. Wisps of mist hung over the grasslands and the sky was streaked with beautiful oranges. I took a lot of pictures on this six kilometre section of bike path, which slowed me down a bit, but I’ve been guilty of not taking enough in the past. Along with these photo delays, I took a few wrong turns, so I was a bit behind schedule when I finally emerged from the path and found Islington, my road to Kleinburg. But the sun was rising and I was leaving the city behind me, so I my spirits were up.

Sunrise.

I arrived in Kleinburg without incident. Islington is a major thoroughfare, but it was still early, so I had a quiet ride. I made a note to myself that this quietude would be gone on my return journey, but that wouldn’t be for several hours.

Sleepy Kleinburg.

During my brief photo stop in Kleinburg, two men on racing bikes sped by me and turned left on Nashville. I caught up to them at the first intersection ready to draft, but they were really slow getting started, so I sped by them. They caught up to me again at a set of lights and we chatted as we waited for a green. They lived nearby and were sticking to a flatter landscape than I for their 100 kilometre ride. I rode off ahead of them when the light turned green. We were riding southwest, so I could see one of their shadows as he drafted me until the next intersection. After that I lost him. I think they headed south.

The day before I had bought a new squeezable water bottle, allowing me to easily rehydrate as I rode, so I took advantage of this. By Mono Road, about 8:20 a.m., I was ready for more water and a snack, so I stopped at a gas station. The hills I’d be climbing up the Niagara Escarpment where coming into view, which provided further motivation to stop for few minutes.

Looking back down the Niagara Escarpment along Airport Road.

As I laboured up this series of hills, I thanked myself for my nutritional/ hydration foresight. The sun was getting hotter and the trees at the side of the road afforded little shade. Storm clouds were collecting in front of me, which seemed to raise the humidity level considerably. The engineer who designed Airport Road clearly wasn’t concerned about the grade of the hills. I had climbed the Escarpment a few weeks before on a tour with MM, but this ascent from Burlington had been gradual by comparison. And each time I crested a hill, the next one would come into view.

Now, hill climbing is physically tough, but it’s more of a psychological test. Hills want to screw with your mind. On this particular ascent I would make it to the top of one steep climb only to have another come into view. But you need to be tougher than the hill. You need to make sure they don’t get under your skin. The trick is is to ignore all the external stuff. Don’t allow frustration to overtake you. Focus on the road directly in front of your wheel. When you’re successful at this, you enter a kind of flow. There were a few moments during this climb where I almost let the hill crush me, but I managed to keep my emotions at bay.

By 9ish I was in Mono Mills. I had depleted most of the water I bought half an hour earlier, so I bought some Gatorade and got back on the road. Hockley Valley road was still 10 kilometres away. I was partially repaid for the morning’s climb with a wild curving descent into Hockley Valley. However my joy at this descent was tempered by the realization that I’d have to make up this altitude again coming out of the valley. I was also more than a little concerned that I wouldn’t be able to slow down from my top speed of 69.6 kmph in order to make the turn onto Hockley Valley Road.

I managed, however, to make the turn. It was nice to get away from the traffic. Within minutes I was in Hockley, where I took my first wrong turn of the trip, climbing the steepest hill yet before realizing my mistake.

Looking North from Hockley Valley.

Break in Loretto.

My legs were sore, but the rest of the trip through the valley flew by. In Loretto I stopped for a break at an abandoned-looking baseball diamond. I had been eating and drinking as I rode, so I was in good shape for my return trip.

To my great relief, there weren’t any steep hills to rival the one I’d descended coming into the valley. Unfortunately the consisted of rolling hills for most of the way back. There weren’t any great descents down the Escarpment either. The rolling hills were really getting to me, but somehow the trip back to Kleinburg went quickly. I stopped at a Subway in a strip mall south of Kleinburg and ate a six-inch sub.

With all the afternoon traffic the trip back along Islington wasn’t as pleasant as my morning’s journey and the Humber Valley segment was all-too-short before I found myself in uptown Saturday afternoon traffic. Either way it’s a relatively short ride compared to other routes I’ve tried. I seemed to hit every red light, though.

In the end I rode a total of 170 kilometres through the hilliest terrain I have faced as a cyclist. My time in the saddle was seven hours and 15 minutes and the trip took a total of 9 hours (almost to the minute). This time I was successful keeping myself hydrated and fed, so I was feeling pretty good when I got home.

I had hoped for a total time of less than 8 hours, but in retrospect, the hills would have made that hard. Maybe next year. Now I’m setting my sights on the Mean Streets 200 kilometres brevet in a few weeks with perhaps one more training ride next weekend.

Ride Report: Toronto-Georgetown-Toronto (Sunday, August 14, 2011)

2011-08-19T00:00:00-04:00

A look at the sky before leaving.

I can’t remember where I first heard about randonneuring, but Raymond Parker’s excellent site, Velo Web, has finally convinced me to give it a try. I’m going to cap off my upcoming week of vacation with Randonneurs Ontario’s Means Streets 200 km brevet (pdf). But since I haven’t done many long rides this year, I decided that I had better start “training”, so last Sunday I set out to ride to Georgetown and back. It would also be a good opportunity to see if the tweaks I’d recently made to Tara’s front derailleur where successful.

Like many cyclists, my favourite roads to cycle are rural backroads, which are hard to find where I live in Toronto. The night before my Georgetown ride I consulted Google Maps in search of the quickest bike-friendly route out of town. Google tries its best to put you on bike paths and smaller roads, so it doesn’t pick the fastest route. I made a few modifications to the parts of the route I was familiar with, but deferred to Google for most of the directions. Perhaps this was a mistake.

The first time I got lost was in Centennial Park. Up to that point my route had been rather direct: west on Dupont to Dundas, north on Scarlett to Eglinton and then west along a bike path just south of Eglinton. I had been worried about the Eglinton part, never having cycled that street so close to the airport, but the separate bike path turned out to be nice. But the path ends at Centennial Park on Toronto’s boundary with Mississauga. Since my goal for the day was north of the city, I didn’t see the wisdom in heading south into the park’s confusing trails, but it was a beautiful morning and I was making great time. And the park would give me an opportunity for a nature break.

I managed to get through the park with the help of a kindly man out walking his dog. In fact he helped me twice. I finally got out of the park only to add my first bonus kilometres of the day. Google was telling me to turn left despite the fact that I was sure I needed to go right. Nevertheless, I dubiously deferred to Google and proceeded south. By the time I decided that I’d been heading South too long, I’d gone at least a kilometre out of my way. With the help of Google Maps on my phone (no bike directions on the iPhone app!), I got back on track adding about two or three kilometres. No big deal.

“Back on track” took me through the interminable twists and turns of light industry near Canada’s largest airport. I was amused to see that these industrial parks sported names like The Churchill Industrial Community. This park hosts to the mighty Loblaws and features a small lake in a crater surrounded by well-tended turf and the odd park bench. Somewhere nice to escape for lunch, I guess. But I wasn’t interested in eating lunch yet this early in the morning. It was Sunday, so the industrial parks were deserted, allowing me to wend my way north and west in solitude.

A look at the sky before leaving.

The problem with this solitude is that it was bought at the expense of speed. And you quickly lose your sense of direction navigating these curvy streets. But my desire for solitude won out over the need for a direct route , so I followed Google’s instructions, avoiding major roads as much as possible. And, as you can clearly see by the image above, this route did afford some encounters with nature. The geese stretched from one side of the street to another, so I stopped to snap a pick. When they seemed to be moving on, I started pedalling again, throwing their ragtag flock into disarray. Some of them sped up their pace across the street while others turned to hiss at me.

During the industrial phase of my journey, I had Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe express in my head and I kept imagining how J.G. Ballard would narrate the landscape.

I was making good time and soon I was racing along Steeles to 9th Line. This was to be the all-to-short rural segment of the ride, because, within no time, I was lost in the outskirts of Georgetown. From a bike tour earlier this year, I recalled a beautifully preserved Main Street that bore further exploration. What my wife and I hadn’t experienced at the time was the suburban sprawl on the south side of town. This is where Google’s directions ended. I had done more than 50 kilometres in really good time, so I considered turning back and retracing my steps, but I wanted a glimpse of idilic Main Street. With the further help of Google and some friendly joggers, I managed to make my way there, where I saw I coffee shop featuring organic coffee and a group of regulars nursing their coffees outside. I pulled Tara up to the side of the coffee shop and dug around the handlebar bag for money. This is when I noticed that I’d forgotten my wallet and change.

Oh well, at least I had some water and a banana. I walked over to a retaining wall in front of a church, which was still deserted this early on a Sunday morning. I sat there a few minutes, writing a text home, eating and drinking.

Georgetown main street.

The ride back home wasn’t that eventful. I decided to follow Main out of town, which quickly turns into 8th Line, heading back south through some pleasantly rural kilometres. I was making great time now, my speed easily climbing to 30+ km/h between stop signs.

One of the other disadvantages of the circuitous route I’d followed in the morning, was that its frequent twists and turns kept me concentrating on the next navigational cue when I really just wanted to relax and enjoy the ride, so I decided to follow 9th line south of Steeles and then cut across Eglinton on my way back.

Mississauga abruptly begins at 9th line near Eglinton. To my right the landscape was decidedly rural, but to my left were endless rows of townhouses. I turned onto Eglinton and rode it for what seemed like hours. Of course I had underestimated how long I’d have to ride this suburban thoroughfare before reaching the relative peace of the bike path, which starts at the edge of Toronto.

And I also started to run low on water. I was using a stainless steel water bottle from MEC that was hard to drink from while in motion, so I was only drinking at stops. Unfortunately, because of this, I wasn’t drinking nearly as much as I should have. I also ran out of food. Without money there was nothing I could do about that. I could have stopped for water from a gas station sink, but I was also hyper focused on getting home.

The one nice thing about this ride from one side of Mississauga to the other, was that I reached one hundred kilometres in exactly four hours of ride time.

By the time I got home, the humidity, thirst and hunger where getting to me. During the last few kilometre, I fantasized about a burger and a pint or two of beer (I know, that wouldn’t have helped my dehydration, but I was bonking here). Thankfully, MM had prepared a delightful chicken salad accompanied by the best biscuits (and gluten-free to boot!), so my hunger was soon satiated.

I’m not sure that I’d take this route again. It was definitely a confidence booster. I rode the 118 kilometres in about five and a half hours or 4:53 of actual ride time, but the endless suburban riding was a chore.

Preferences aside, I learned some important lessons: * Bring money * Eat and drink frequently * Carefully vet your cue sheet before the ride * Use a squeezable water bottle that allow drinking on the go.

Now it was time to start planning next week’s ride.

IA Writer Mini-Review

2011-07-01T00:00:00-04:00

IA Writer screenshot.

I do my best not to get too hung up on what writing tools to use. But after my daughter’s iMac died I was forced to convert all of her Pages documents to Word format so she could edit them on a Linux laptop. I too have old documents I can no longer open due to changes in tools and obsolete file formats, so I decided that I would start doing all of my writing in text using Markdown for simple formatting. That way, as long as I have a text editor, my documents will always be available to me. And, using a tool like Pandoc, it’s trivial to convert a Markdown file to the format of your choice.

At first I thought I’d stick with a text editor like TextMate or Vim, but, while adequate, these applications are better suited to writing programs. And I had been hearing about this new application for OSX called IA Writer. It’s designed from the ground up for writing prose in markdown and, with Fullscreen and Focus Modes, it provides a great distraction-free writing environment. Fullscreen Mode is easy on your eyes with a large off-white background and a perfectly-sized font. And Focus Mode greys out all but the current sentence. I wasn’t sure if I’d find this latter mode useful, but I have used it constantly.

There are no other features to speak of in IA Writer, but that’s what makes it so useful. I’ve been working on a short story for the past few weeks and IA Writer has allowed me to focus on my writing like never before. IA Writer is opinionated software: if you enjoy tweaking your writing environment or formatting your documents just so, then it’s not for you. But if you’d just like to concentrate on writing great prose, perhaps you should check it out.

Mindmap in Links

2011-06-14T00:00:00-04:00

I’m currently reading Geeta Dayal’s exploration of Brian Eno’s creative process in her book about Brian Eno’s 1975 album, Another Green World. One aspect of this creative process that I find particularly fascinating is Eno’s use of generative techniques. My interest piqued, I read about generative techniques in other arts and rediscover Jeff Noon’s work via this piece on Cut-up techniques. I say “rediscover” because Noon’s books fell off the end of my always-growing list of things to read a long time ago, so I’m returning him to the top of this list. Actually–scratch that–maybe not the top. Noon himself contributes to his quick demotion on my list with his list of top ten fluid fiction books wherein he recommends Ben Marcus’s “The Age of Wire and String”. Always a sucker for the off-beat and/ or experimental I head on over to Marcus’s site, which links to an interesting interview with him at HTMLGiant. And, yet again, a new book is added to the top of my reading list as Marcus recommends John D’Agata’s book-length essay, About a Mountain, which is described by Booklist as a “circuitous, stylish investigation” in which “D’Agata (Halls of Fame) uses the federal government’s highly controversial (and recently rejected) proposal to entomb the U.S.’s nuclear waste located in Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas, as his way into a spiralling and subtle examination of the modern city, suicide, linguistics, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, ecological and psychic degradation, and the gulf between information and knowledge”. I love essays and documentaries that take a collage-like approach. In fact I’m currently developing a multimedia project/ documentary of my own that’s structured this way. So, hungry for a sample of D’Agata’s work, I read his piece, Joan Didion’s Formal Experience of Confusion right away. I am also looking forward to reading his international anthology, The Lost Origins of the Essay,”An expansive and exhilarating world tour of innovative nonfiction writing”.

Compelling Architecture a Rarity

2011-06-13T00:00:00-04:00

Prince Arthur Towers, Toronto

After a late lunch on the patio of the Bedford Academy, Peter and I wandered up Prince Arthur Avenue to catch a matinée at the Varsity. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and we were in no hurry, so we stopped to admire Uno Prii’s Prince Arthur Towers. Like any other city, Toronto is full of bland residential architecture built after WWII, but there are exceptions. Harry Hiller, for one, hired Prii for his projects, resulting in some of Toronto’s finest buildings from the 60s. Today amidst Toronto’s condo boom, most of the new residential buildings are forgettable, to say the least. Sadly, it’s difficult to force a developer to design a building that makes a statement other than, “we’ve spent as little as possible on architecture here”. But, here and there, you can find gems like Prince Arthur Towers that richen the environment around them.

Prince Arthure Towers.

*[WWII]: World War II

Changes

2011-05-12T00:00:00-04:00

In the past few days I’ve made some changes to Digressions, most of which are invisible to readers. The following is a detailed description of these changes. Be forewarned.

Changing Platforms and Hosts

I’m an inveterate builder. Along with ideas for writing, photography, video and music projects, I’m always entertaining a few software ideas. So a few months ago, I decided to dust off my Ruby skills and learn Ruby on Rails to bring some of these ideas to fruition. I laid the groundwork for this tinkering by moving Digressions to a virtual server at Slicehost. Having a virtual server gives me the flexibility to set up the programming environment of my choice.

There are plenty of great books and tutorials for Rails, but I learn best by getting my hands dirty, so I decided to write my own blogging platform. For an experienced Rails programmer this could be done in a day or two. For someone like me who has dived in over his head, this took a few months of working an hour or two everyday before going to work. In the end I learned rails, but abandoned the blogging platform leaving it 80% complete.

While I didn’t end up finishing my blogging platform this project taught me a lot. One important thing I learned was to trust my instincts. And my instincts were telling me that Rails is too big for the task at hand. Sure, you could use Rails to create a wonderful blogging platform, but I wanted something simpler. Just as I was coming to this realization, I stumbled across Jekyll, “a blog-aware static site generator for Ruby”. The concept is simple:

Write your post using the text editor of your choice (I use MacVim) and save it in a folder called “_posts”;
If you’ve got images, save them in an images folder;
Run Jekyll at the command line in your blog folder to create the “_site” folder;
Deploy the contents of the “_site” folder using whatever method you want.

This sounds more complicated than it actually is. I created a script that takes care of the last two steps automatically.

There are many advantages to this way of doing things. For one thing, “baking” your weblog (i.e., generating static web pages instead of serving dynamic pages) results in better performance when visitor traffic spikes. Brent Simmons and Tim Bray recently made strong arguments in favor of baking, so I won’t repeat them here. Another advantage is that your blog is automatically backed up. At the very least there is one copy on your computer and another on your server. Moreover, because there’s always a local copy of your blog and because there are no databases to fiddle with, deploying to a new host is trivial. In contrast, moving a Wordpress or Moveable Type blog can be a pain. But even if you never plan on changing hosts, it’s nice to have your posts living in text files rather than hidden away in a database. Finally, if you want to make changes or add plugins, the Jekyll code is easy to wrap your head around.

Design Tweaks

While moving Digressions to a new platform, I decided to update the design. To begin with, I reimplemented the existing design using HTML5. If you look at the page source, you’ll see that moving to HTML5 paid off in cleaner markup. A lot of the header cruft is gone and semantic tags make your structure clear. And it’s a lot easier to style and/ or modify clearly structured HTML. With the new HTML in place, I tweaked the design to achieve a cleaner look. The most obvious changes are related to typography. I replaced Anivers, the font I was using for titles, with Adobe’s Myriad Pro Condensed because Anivers wasn’t displaying nicely on Windows XP computers (don’t get me started about Windows XP font rendering). Font sizes where also changed to make the design look more proportional on multiple devices. And taking the advice of The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web, I narrowed the paragraphs keeping lines between 65 and 70 characters long to enhance readability.

The redesign is still a work in progress (I did mention I was an inveterate builder). I only have Macs and Linux computers at home, so testing on Internet Explorer is difficult. That said, I have IE 8 at work, so I can check the site there and then make my tweaks at home. It’s currently readable on IE 8, but not as pretty as it is on modern browsers. A while back I made a commitment to stop waisting my time on designing around the quirks of outdated browsers, but I’ll make a few small tweaks to improve rendering in IE 8.

Now with all this change out of the way I can start posting words and images again. After all, isn’t that what blogs are for?

Kids as Media Producers

2011-02-21T16:52:30-05:00

Turning off the internet on our eight-year-old daughter’s computer turned out to be one of the best parental decisions MM and I have made. Like many parents we constantly wrestle with how to control her access to media. I have always believed that outright bans of TV or internet are a bad idea; you just end up making whatever you’re banning more desirable. And they’ll find ways of gaining that access through friends anyway. Wouldn’t you rather be around when they’re consuming media to make sure they’re picking up the critical skills they need? So we haven’t banned her internet use altogether. If she wants to check email or log onto a favourite web site, she can do so on our computers while we’re hanging around.

But she rarely asks to go online these days. Instead she has channeled her considerable creativity into making stuff on her computer. She writes stories in Pages (complete with images from iPhoto), edits slideshows with audio commentary and music in iMovie, designs multimedia programs in Scratch (a kids programming environment from MIT) and, just now, she came in to tell me about a comedy podcast she’s writing. When she had access to the internet on her computer, she always wanted to consume. Now she’s producing her own content.

And the most incredible thing of all is that she has figured out how to do this stuff on her own. I showed her Pages and she took it from there. She discovered iMovie herself and figured out how to make the slideshows. I’m not bringing this up to brag, although I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t glowing with pride at this. I bring this up because it’s surprising what happens when you limit your child’s easy access to media consumption. They’re full of creativity and I’d bet that they would rather produce than consume any day.

Early Experiences With E-Books

2010-12-11T15:06:06-05:00

If e-books aren’t somehow on your radar at the end of 2010 you’ve probably been lost all year in that Labyrinthine monastic library from Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Amazon’s Kindle has dominated the e-book space so far, but there’s also Apple’s iBooks and the recently-launched Google ebookstore. And these are just the biggest players. Unsurprisingly there has been a lot of talk about what the e-book will mean for traditional publishing, book buying and authorship.

But I’d like to leave these big questions aside for now to explore my early experiences reading e-books. Halfway through reading my fourth e-book, I’m ready to organize my thoughts on what it’s like to read an e-book and how that compares with traditional reading. But first some context. To give you a sense of the type of books I’m discussing, I list the e-books I’ve read (or, in the last case, I’m still reading) below in chronological order:

Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums
K.J. Bishop’s The Etched City
Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen
John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

So far I have purchased all of these books through Kindle, using the iPhone Kindle app to read them. I tried downloading a free version of Milton’s Paradise Lost using iBooks, but the iPhone app seems to choke on it, running so slowly that the poem is unreadable. I have also had trouble finding the books I want to read in the iBooks store. For example I couldn’t find any of VanderMeer’s books there. I hold out hope that this will change, but for now, the Kindle store has served me well.

The first thing many people say when I tell them that I’ve been reading books on my iPhone is, “how can you read on that tiny screen?” I haven’t had any issues with the size of the iPhone 3g’s screen or the resolution. I stare at a computer monitor all day and that takes its toll on my eyes. But I don’t feel any eye strain reading my iPhone’s screen, even after a day in front of my computer. By all accounts, the new Android and Apple models have even better resolution, so an already good situation only gets better.

And there are advantages to reading on such a small device. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of reading a brick of a book like David Foster Wallace’s Infinte Jest or Joyce’s Ulysses, you will understand what I mean when I say that’s it’s a pleasure reading a book that you can easily hold in one hand. Even better, you’ve also got an entire library of books inside this tiny device that’s always in your pocket. As long as you remember to bring your phone with you, you’ll never be bored on the subway or in a waiting room again.

In the Kindle app, turning a page is a simple matter of tapping the right hand side of the screen with the thumb of the hand that’s holding the phone. This is actually surprisingly easy. In fact I find that I flip pages unconsciously, making the reading experience flow as if you were reading a continuous pageless text. In this sense, it’s fitting that the first e-book I read was by Kerouac who wrote another one of his works, On the Road, as a continuous scroll.

But this pageless flow has it’s drawbacks. I miss the experience of intuitively knowing exactly where I am in a text by the thickness of the unread pages. Although the Kindle app provides a scroll bar at the bottom of the screen that indicates your place in the book, I still feel a bit lost. I have grown up with this physical feel for my progress through a book and it’s hard to leave this behind. I still find it easier to flip back through real pages to re-read a section or to flip forward to see where the chapter ends.

Then again the lack of pages works well with endnotes, which, in the Kindle app are hyperlinks. In City of Saints and Madmen, one of the stories is full of endnotes. You simply tap the link, which brings you to the endnote. When you’re done reading it, you tap the back arrow to return to the text. An e-book version of Infinite Jest would have worked so well this way. Flipping back and forth between the text and endnotes in that book was a source of frustration for me, though I’m sure Wallace intended it that way with his endnotes within endnotes. That said, I still had problems with the endnotes in City of Saints and Madmen. I’ve got fat fingers and when the endnote link was at the righthand edge of the page it was difficult to hit it without turning the page. It is possible for iPhone programmers to enlarge the active space around a button or link, so perhaps the developers of the Kindle app could experiment with this. However, this might not be possible due to another feature of the Kindle app: the ability to tap on a word to either leave a note, highlight it or look it up in the dictionary. Widening the active area around an endnote link may interfere with the active area of the word itself.

I haven’t used notes or highlighting yet, but I love the dictionary function. When you tap on a word, its dictionary definition appears in a little box at the top or bottom of the page depending on the location of the word in question. I have always been a bit lazy about opening up a dictionary, so I love this feature. Unfortunately, I have encountered several words that aren’t in the version of the “New Oxford American Dictionary” that comes with the app. Apparently on the actual Kindle device, you have the option of buying a new dictionary and using that as your default dictionary. I hope they add this to the iPhone app, because I would love to upgrade the dictionary to a non-American Oxford English Dictionary with more words. Depending on what you’re reading, this might not even be an issue.

The thing I dislike most about reading e-books is their poor typography. In his piece Embracing the Digital Book, Craig Mod, a designer who knows much more about typography than I do, covers all of my issues and more. I don’t have any problems with the font used in all Kindle books, PMN Caecilia, but I find the justified margins distracting. You end up with these awkward three-word lines with jarring space between the words. This could easily be solved with hyphenation. And I would prefer ragged right text like in a normal book. I’ll give Craig Mod the last word on this: >Physical books and e-books are both text at their cores. Book designers long ago established rigorous rules for laying out text blocks so they disappear to the reader. They took pride in turning the physicality of a book into a tool for efficiently and elegantly getting information into the mind of the reader. As any good typographer knows: the best typography goes unnoticed.

I encourage you to read the rest of his piece because, among other things, it includes a fascinating exploration of what e-books could really be.

Craig Mod also points to one of the features I hate about the e-books I’ve read: Digital Rights Management. I love sharing traditional books with friends – to me, this sharing has always been an important part of enjoying books. It makes reading social. Sadly I cannot do this with my Kindle library. I think the publishing business needs to reconsider it’s use of DRM. In the music space, companies like iTunes are making money selling digital music. People buy music on iTunes instead of downloading it for free because it’s easier to do. The same would be true for books. Although social media has emerged to dominate the web, the book world has taken a step away from the social by locking up it’s e-books.

On a related point, it would be nice if I could buy books from multiple sources. Although Kindle and iBooks will never offer this, Google Editions seems to be moving in that direction. Like the DRM issue, this could easily be a topic for another long post, so I’ll only say this: I love small bookstores with their own carefully chosen selection of books.

One final gripe I have has more do with the fact that I’m reading on my iPhone; I am constantly interrupted by incoming emails, texts and phone calls. I don’t mind being interrupted by a phone call since I don’t use the phone much, but the emails and texts really test my ability to focus. It’s somehow easier to ignore the vibration or chime notifications for these messages when the phone is in your pocket. This is probably more a question of retraining myself than anything. But with a paper book, it’s much easier to eliminate distractions like this.

There are advantages and disadvantages to e-books. Some of these disadvantages will likely be overcome. In the meantime, I will continue to enjoy them, but, for me, they’re not going to replace traditional books anytime soon. Once I finish reading my most recent e-book acquisition, The Art of Fiction, I will crack open M. John Harrison’s Viriconium, a book that I purchased at a cool neighbourhood used bookstore yesterday.

Don Cherry's Performance of Masculinity

2010-12-09T12:04:11-05:00

Around the same time that Don Cherry was making a mockery of democracy during Rob Ford’s investiture at Toronto’s City Hall, I read this great piece by Matthew Cheney at Strange Horizons called the “Failure of Masculinity”. Then, the day after Don Cherry’s infamous appearance in Toronto’s City Hall, I came across this photo of Don Cherry, “Looking like a lady’s handbag”, which prompted the following thoughts. Before continuing on, I strongly recommend that you take the time to read Cheney’s piece.

In “Failure of Masculinity” Cheney discusses suicides of gay men after being regularly subjected to homophobia. He argues that homophobia is a “weapon of sexism”, quoting C.J. Pascoe’s point that: “Achieving a masculine identity…entails the repeated repudiation of the specter of failed masculinity”.

It is instructive to read Don Cherry’s performance on Hockey Night in Canada’s Coach’s Corner as just such a repudiation of failed masculinity. For example, his incoherent right wing rants, his constant “feminisation” of European hockey players vs. their “tougher” North American counterparts and his valorization of fighting all underscore the “power fantasy” of “the ideal masculinity”, that Cheney discusses, wherein “‘real men’ are strong, dominant, and heterosexual.” Cherry’s incoherent right wing rants are “masculine” in this sense, not only because they are couched in “tough guy” language, but also because they are contrasted against McLean’s more “effeminately” eloquent and fair-minded views. Indeed, although the right has always appropriated the language of masculine toughness, it has more recently embraced (starting with Bush Jr.?) inarticulacy as somehow more genuine or authentic then the more considered and better-articulated views of the educated “elites” with their moral relativism and their Priuses. Obviously, you can’t just read this in terms of gender; the enemy of this new right is any manifestation of the Other as demonstrated by the recent “controversy” over Obama’s heritage. But gender plays a big role, especially in Cherry’s case. On the surface you could read his “Lady’s Handbag” suits as a failure of masculinity, but they’re nothing if not loud, brash and tasteless (taste being equated with a kind of visual articulacy). The suits draw the focus away from McLean, placing it squarely on Cherry. They are a perfect visual accompaniment to Cherry’s loud, inarticulate rants. At the same time, he can flirt with this failure of masculinity because his masculinity never comes into question. On the other hand, by the rules of Cherry’s universe, McLean could never dress that way without failing as a man.

During his Toronto City Hall performance a few days ago, Cherry described his suit in aggressive terms as an attack against the effeminate left: “I’m being ripped to shreds by the left-wing pinko newspapers out there–it’s unbelievable. One guy called me a jerk in a pink suit so I thought I’d wear that for him too today.” Wearing a pink suit to spite the pinkos? No ambiguity there.

When people discuss Don Cherry’s performances, they discuss them as if they were harmless antics. But his behaviour is anything but harmless. He performs for a national audience on Coach’s Corner and many of those watching are young boys who are in the process of developing their own ideas about masculinity. It’s possible that Cherry does not understand the ramifications of his public persona, but sexism and homophobia, whether conscious or not, are still harmful. Earlier this week, Cherry stepped into a more overtly political arena. Perhaps this is a none-to-subtle message that his employer, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, should reexamine the harmful ideology it perpetuates every Saturday night during hockey season.

Why do we suffer for our fun?

2010-07-02T09:53:46-04:00

We had taken the right fork (or was it left?) in the rutted sandy trail. It was raining hard again and all of my clothes were soaked. A few minutes earlier, unable to get enough momentum in the wet sand, I had been forced to get off my bike and push it up a hill with my daughter, Patia, in tow. It’s hard enough pulling a bike and child in her trailer up a hill, but in these conditions it took almost all of my strength. After the fork I tried to navigate safely through deep tire ruts along a wide curve, but I felt the trailer tip precariously onto one wheel before righting itself again. “Whoa!” Mary-Margaret, who was cycling behind us, confirmed what I had just felt. Close call. Nothing to do but carry on. We eventually came to a sign with a map of the conservation area as we crossed a narrow rural road. I stopped and tried to cross reference this map with my Water Front Trail map, but we’d clearly gone off course.

Sounds like fun, right? When I tell people about our overnight bike trip from Toronto to Darlington Provincial Park just west of Oshawa, they often tell me they can’t understand why anyone would want to do that. And they probably aren’t even imagining misadventures like the one I describe above. Bike touring can be difficult. You have to try to figure out how to pack a tent, sleeping bags, mats, cooking gear, clothing and various other items into four small bags. All of which adds considerably to your bike’s weight. Then there is the matter of pulling Patia’s trailer – not to mention making sure she is happy and occupied during the long day of pedaling. Oh, and did I mention this was our first real bike tour? This was our test run for a weeklong trip later this summer.

But at the end of the day, with our tent set up and a fire crackling in front of us, we both agreed that we felt good about the day. “It’s a lot like a canoe trip,” said MM. “You do a really long, nasty portage with a cloud of black flies around your face in the afternoon heat, but that doesn’t stop you from doing it again.”

But why? I wondered. My thoughts were interupted by the sound of the electric water pump in the trailer across the road from us. Why not travel in comfort? I looked away from the fire to our campsite: the two bikes, the tent, the soggy clothes hanging to dry and the view of the cloudy sky over the lake through a break in the trees. Here we were 80 km or so from our doorstep and we’d done it under our own power. The challenges we’d faced to get here were just the point. Those of us lucky enough to have well paying jobs and a comfortable place to eat and sleep tend to surround ourselves with so much “comfort” that we lose a vital link to the world around us, even to ourselves. I’m hardly the first person to note this: we learn a lot about ourselves when we strip away these comforts, and expose ourselves to the elements. We learn what’s really necessary, we connect to our environment and we gain a sense of self-reliance that’s hard to come by in a world of excess. And hopefully we come back to our everday world with our priorities realigned.

When people talk about the Northeast Blackout in 2003, it is often with a sense of nostalgia. When electricity, that one layer of comfort, was unavailable for several days, people stepped outside of their cocoons and chatted with their neighbours, had impromptu parties, looked up at the starry night sky together. People are nostalgic for that sense of connection we all enjoyed.

It was getting dark as we dried my socks next to the fire. The day had been difficult. We wouldn’t be able to fully dry our clothes until we got back home the next evening. But it had been a successful day of touring. We had met interesting folks and seen things that you would never see from the comfort of your car. Later, I walked over to the edge of the cliff overlooking the lake and listened to the water gently lapping against the rocky shore. What would tomorrow’s ride home bring?

Overcoming Writer's Block

2010-06-08T15:21:21-04:00

In the last few days I’ve written 1100 words of a short story. What’s so special about that, you ask? I’ve been plagued with writer’s block for almost a decade. The last substantial piece of fiction I finished was my MFA screenplay a decade or so ago. After graduation life intervened and swallowed me up. Financial issues, career stress and the many challenges of parenthood certainly played their role in stopping me from writing, but the main thing I had to overcome was fear. After the initial elation of finishing a screenplay wore off, I took a second look at it and hated it. After a year of writing, all I had to show for it was a shitty screenplay. I felt that I had failed. I became obsessed with finding the one brilliant idea that I could commit to for the next year or two of writing, but, of course, nothing seemed good enough. Every time I sat down to write, my inner critic – we’ll call him Mr. C – would rip into me for having the audacity to write. It got to the point where I was no longer able to sit down with the intention of writing. I would get an idea and knock it around in my head for a few days before Mr. C finaly put it out of its misery. It got to the point where Mr. C hated my stuff so much that I stopped having ideas.

I realized early on that Mr. C was really just fear of failure. This fear has been there throughout my life, but it gained strength during the last decade. But in the last few years I’ve begun to confront this fear in various ways. Meditation and exercise have been useful allies in this fight, allowing me to control my wayward thoughts. By the beginning of this year I was feeling much better – in January I committed to pushing myself outside of my comfort zone this year. I guess it was inevitable that, given how much better I was feeling, my thoughts would come back to writing. I realized that everything I had done up to that point, even my shitty screenplay, contributed to the next piece of writing. Failure is a vital part of learning. Indeed, I would rather fail than not try at all, because as Mark Twain said, “twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” It’s tempting to look back at the last ten years with this feeling of disappointment, but I’m getting old and I’m looking to take advantage of the next ten or twenty years.

A while ago I sat down and forced myself to come up with an idea for a story. Then over the next few weeks I grappled with it in my thoughts and in my journal. This time I would finish a project, even if it sucked. Evidently this work loosened up my creativity because a few days ago while I was washing the dishes another idea popped into my head. I finished up in the kitchen and went directly to my office to write the opening paragraphs. I have now established the first hour of my day, from 5:30 until 6:30 as my writing time. It’s not a lot, but the story continues to unfold.

The lesson I’m slowly learning is so simple, it’s embarrassing it’s taken me so long: you can’t write unless you put your ass on your seat and write. Everything starts with that.

Cutting Loose from Facebook

2010-05-14T15:42:57-04:00

I’ve wanted to delete my Facebook account for a long time, but I’ve always been too scared to go through with it. There’s always that nagging fear that without Facebook, I’m going to miss out on something. But their terrible privacy record, most recently with the implementation of Connections, has finaly forced my hand. Of course none of this is surprising. They’ve got to make money somehow. Indeed, these attempts to use your data to make money will only get more intrusive.

Aside from these privacy issues, I have never felt comfortable with the walled garden concept of social networking that Facebook represents. It seems strange to me that people so readily subscribe to this. What if all of your real world socializing had to take place in designated zones? Somehow I don’t think people would like that much. I know I don’t. So today I finaly got around to deleting my account.

Henceforth, this blog will be the centre of my social media universe.