Warning!

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Overly specific.

Among the various disclaimers and warnings in the manual that accompanied a new Bluetooth headset was this oddity:

Do not place this unit in a place exposed to humidity, dust, soot or steam, subject to direct sunlight, or in a car waiting at a traffic signal. It may cause a malfunction.

Huh? I’ve seen my share of odd warnings, but warning against using something “in a car waiting at a traffic signal”? This is new to me. So assuming I have this thing in my car while I go from A to B, what am I supposed to do when I reach a red light? “Yes, I saw the red light officer, but do you know how dangerous it would have been for me to stop? I have a bluetooth headset in my bag!”

For the record, Sony informed me that this is an error in the manual and it’s meant to caution against using the headset while driving. I’m not at all sure how that would “cause a malfunction,” though. Either way, I’d say that this warning is a good argument against writing owner’s manuals while in a car, whether driving or stopped at a red light.

How to take your bike on a business trip (or vacation)

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Tikit at home

Step 1: Get a folding bike. Mine is a Bike Friday Tikit. This bike has a million options, from the most basic Model T (the one I have) all the way up to a fully tricked-out road bike with drop handlebars, lots of gear inches, and just about any component choice you could imagine. The hyperfold model folds in five seconds. I don’t have that one, so my Tikit takes a full 15 seconds to fold. The best thing about the Tikit is that although it looks weird and the wheels are tiny (just sixteen inches), it feels and rides like a normal-sized bike. My riding position on this bike is basically the same as on my mountain bike, which is perfect for commuting and tootling around the city. But don’t take my word for it, get yourself to Urbane Cyclist and give one a test ride for yourself.

Samsonite 30-inch Flite case

Step 2: Get a suitcase that your folded bike will fit into. The 30″ Samsonite F’Lite GT is the case that Bike Friday designs their bikes to fit into, so it seemed like a good choice. With only minor disassembly (one wheel removed and a half-dozen bolts loosened or removed), the bike fits neatly into the case with lots of room left over for a repair kit, pump, locks, and other cycling gear. Because the bike is designed to fit into a suitcase, there’s no guesswork involved; the manual shows the packing process in detail, right down to the correct way to orient the cranks. I didn’t manage to squeeze my helmet in, but I’m sure I could with a bit of practice. Practice could also get my packing time down from around 45 minutes the first time to maybe 15.

Homemade crush protector

Step 3: Get a crush protector to keep the side of the suitcase from collapsing on your fragile bike. Even a hard-sided suitcase like the F’Lite has a lot of give in it and given the way that baggage handlers toss luggage around, it would be pretty easy to end up with a bent wheel or chainring after a flight. The crush protector is just a support that keeps the sides of the suitcase from compressing, ensuring that there’s never any weight bearing down on the sensitive bits of the bike itself. Bike Friday sells crush protectors for $7, or you can make your own for about the same cost from parts available at any hardware store with a decent stock of electrical supplies. That meant Home Depot for me.

All packed up

Step 4: Pack the bike in the case, following the instructions in the manual. Bike Friday sells packing kits that include little fabric bags and sleeves to help protect the sensitive bits, but I found that a short length of packing foam, some old rags, and a few elastic bands did the same job.

Step 5: Check your bike at the airport, now indistinguishable from any other piece of luggage, and laugh at those ridiculous charges for bike boxes that airlines love to charge.

Ready to go

Step 6: Unpack at your destination. It only took me about 20 minutes to unpack and reassemble. I didn’t do too badly for my first-time packing: the rear reflector was broken in transit, but everything else survived without a scratch.

At the Texas Capitol, 2200 km from home

Step 7: Have a good ride!

So I’m in Austin, Texas at the moment, midway through a week of working hard, eating meat, and riding a bit. The Texas Capitol is about 2200 km from home, or a much more reasonable 10-minute ride from my hotel. Work commitments are keeping my exploring to a minimum, but I’m trying to get as much in as I can. There’ll be some more random posts about Austin in the days ahead.

Supermarket Finds: Code 4651

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Individually labelled mushrooms from Loblaws

While I recognize that memorizing all of those codes can be difficult for cashiers and it can’t be easy telling whether that bag of apples has a dozen galas or fujis, I think that painstakingly tagging every individual mushroom in the store is going a little overboard. Not only do labels not stick to mushrooms all that well, but I can’t imagine that it’s very efficient to pay some poor stocker to sit over boxes of mushrooms all day long with a label gun. And as with all tagged produce, the worst part is standing in the kitchen removing all of the labels. Good thing those printed codes save me five seconds in line; I can apply that time to the two minutes I have to spend standing over the cutting board de-labelling a bag of shiitakes.

I try to avoid my local Loblaws whenever possible, but occasionally it’s just too convenient to pass up. I never fail to be surprised by something there, and today was no different. At least they don’t shrink-wrap as much of their produce as the local Sobeys does.

Moose-oween

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The once proud Toronto Moose, now relegated to playing bit parts in off-Bayview productions

It’s hard to believe that it’s been ten years since Toronto was overrun by Moose in the City. Why, I remember it like it was ten years ago…

There are still a few moose dotting the city in various states of disrepair, but you can almost see the sadness in this one’s eyes as he gazes back on his glory days as a tourist attraction from his current position as a Halloween prop near the corner of Bayview and Moore. Hang in there, buddy; Halloween’s here in a week and I’m sure you won’t have to wear any silly Christmas costumes afterward. Besides, this getup is much more dignified than the one Google Street View caught you in. They didn’t even have the courtesy to blur your face.

Informed democracy

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“Who are all these people on the ballot? I thought there were only five people running for mayor.”

“They’re just a bunch of random people who don’t have any chance of winning.”

— An ill-informed voter gets an equally ill-informed answer from a worker at Sunday’s advance poll.

"I saw you"

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So it’s a gorgeous autumn morning and I’m riding east along Queen Street, having just made a side trip to one of my favourite stores on the way to the office. I’m approaching a green light at York Street, with pretty much no other traffic around. There’s a westbound car at York, the driver signalling a left turn and waiting to turn south onto York. The car is motionless and there’s no sign that the driver is going to do anything other than wait for the one car, three pedestrians, and one cyclist (that would be me) to clear the intersection before turning. I continue in my straight line, and just as I reach the intersection, he decides that he’s going to make a run for it and guns the engine, leaping into the intersection.

At this point, he’s turning straight into me and whether I keep going or screech to a halt, slow down or speed up, there’s nothing I can do; if he continues, he’s going to hit me broadside. At the last second, he slams on his brakes, the front of his car diving deep down from the inertia. He stops about two feet away from my bike. He’s just accelerated hard from a standing stop across almost two lanes of road straight at me before realizing that he’s about to hit me. I come to a stop a bit further down the road, just out of his way should he start up again. I’m upset, but more bewildered than angry. I look at the driver and he looks back, a little sheepish. One of the pedestrians in the intersection is almost right behind me, next in line to be hit had the driver continued on his path. The other two pedestrians are standing on the corner looking shocked at what they’ve just witnessed.

The driver puts his palm up in a conciliatory gesture and rolls down the window to say something to me, looking more concerned than angry. “I saw you.” What? You saw me? I was expecting “Sorry,” or “My bad,” or even, “Get off the road.” But “I saw you”? It seems like such an odd thing to say. “Hey, I know I accelerated straight at you and came within a whisker of T-boning you and sending you flying across the road on this beautiful day, but no worries mate, I knew you were there.”

“Really?” Bewildered, it’s the only response I can come up with. I say it in the same tone I may use if someone tells me that the Earth is flat or the Leafs are going to win the Cup this year; we both know that you’re just bullshitting me, but there’s always that small chance that you actually believe what you’re saying.

“Yes, I saw you,” he repeats.

“It didn’t seem like you saw me.”

“I did.”

“Is that why you drove straight at me?”

At this point, the peculiar assertion turns a little nasty. “If I hadn’t seen you, you’d be flat on the ground now. Are you on the ground?” His demeanor changes from misguided cover-your-ass to misplaced aggression. He’s not blaming me so much as telling me that I’m lucky he’s not a psychopath. It’s in his tone as much as his words. He begins inching forward again. Wonderful thing about cars; moving forward can be both fight and flight.

The pedestrian standing behind me pipes up at this point. “You did not see him.”

“Yes I did. I didn’t hit him, did I? If I’d hit him, he’d be lying on the street.” At this point, the penny drops. When he says that he saw me, he means that he woke up halfway through his turn and managed to recover just in time. Avoiding a collision set into motion by your actions is as good as not setting it into motion in the first place. I call this Dodge’s Theory of Driving Relativity: From any given observer’s frame of reference (most commonly the driver’s seat of an automobile), nothing that happens outside that frame is your fault. As long as contact between your frame of reference and someone else’s frame of reference is indirect (“a close call”) rather than a direct hit, you are absolved of responsibility for anything that follows.

You can be the hero who defuses the bomb, even if you’re the one who planted it in the first place.

The pedestrian continues arguing with him. The two pedestrians on the corner have graduated from shock to amusement. No one is hurt, and they’re laughing and shaking their heads as the driver continues arguing with the pedestrian that he was in the right. As for me, is it time for fight or flight? Neither. It’s too nice a day to argue with a brick wall and it’s obvious that nothing I can say will change the version of the story that the driver will be telling at the office this afternoon. So I’m just going to shrug my shoulders and continue on my way. “I saw you,” eh? What happened to, “I’m sorry”?

People reflexively say that they’re sorry over so many little things: sorry I have to slip past you in the supermarket aisle, sorry I’m trying to get through the same door as you, sorry that you’re trying to get on the elevator at the same time that I’m getting off the elevator, sorry you stepped on my toes while walking backwards (I must have been in your way), sorry we did a little two-step on the sidewalk while trying to figure out how to pass, sorry I don’t have exact change, sorry that I’m paying with pennnies, sorry, sorry, sorry. Why is sorry so difficult for the things that really matter?

The warning clause

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The introduction to the otherwise standard warning on this plastic bag would seem to illustrate the perils of sending an email to a translation service and blindly accepting the result. It reminds me of this prime example of a translation request gone awry, though on a much smaller scale, of course.

R.E. Dietz, famous American manufacturer of hurricane lanterns, is run out of China these days.

Licence play

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IAM VAL

It’s funny, the things you keep around in your photo albums. See the last picture in the gallery below for the story about the photo above.

A couple of years ago, I spent the better part of four months examining every truck, tractor, piece of heavy equipment, and work site I passed, looking for warning labels. The end result was the Travails of Mr. Stickman. It was fun, but boy howdy, was I ever ready to stop looking for warning signs after I was done. Soon after I finished that project, I embarked on another: taking pictures of vanity licence plates. Two years and a few fits and starts later, here’s the result.

Compulsively looking at, taking pictures of, and remembering licence plates has an interesting side effect: it can somewhat de-anonymize people in cars. Other than the familiar ones I see on my street or parked along my regular commuting route, I don’t really think that I encounter any individual car more than once in my life. For the most part, people in cars are anonymous to everyone else, and you don’t really attach any significance to one Honda Civic versus another. Is it the same car and driver that I passed last week? Different? Does it matter?

Several times, I’ve seen the same plate twice in two completely different places. In North Toronto and on the Danforth; Deer Park and the Home Depot on Laird.  Somewhat more startling, I’ve occasionally seen the same plate on two different cars, with the sightings separated by weeks or years. I may not know anything about the owner of the car, but I do know that the complete stranger whose licence plate made me laugh on Merton Street in the spring traded in her Land Rover for a convertible that she was driving up Pape Avenue last week. Last week, I completed my first triple sighting of a single plate: first on Summerhill Avenue, then on the 401, and finally in Liberty Village.  I wasn’t able to get a picture of the car in any of those encounters. Fourth time lucky, maybe.

And then there was the driver who blasted his horn at me as he passed me way too aggressively on a wide-open street two weeks ago. As he cut inches in front of me on a quiet residential street (and signed bike route, no less), he almost certainly didn’t realize that I not only recognized his peronalized plate, but that I knew exactly which driveway it was parked in three minutes earlier, where I see it virtually every morning. The wronged cyclist’s dilemma: let him know, or let it go. I’m still undecided.

IM URSThrough all of this, there was only one complaint about a guy on a bike (usually) with a camera stopping to take a picture. The vast majority of drivers that I spoke with were not only amused to be part of my project, but also told me the story behind their personalized plate. The owner of IM URS, for example, told me that he’d inherited it from his mother and it was one of the things he remembered her by. Most of the time though, the cars were empty and no one was around to tell me the personal significance of a plate.

Of course there were almost too many to count that got away, passing too fast for a picture, in weather I refused to subject my camera to, or just at the wrong time of day while I was too busy scurrying along my way. Many them were better than the ones that I did catch. Oh well. For the next post.

Check out the full gallery below the fold. Those of you reading through the RSS feed should visit the original page for the full gallery effect with commentary.

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Which way to Mount Pleasant Sema…Seme…Cema…Ceme…burial ground?

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A misspelled wayfinding sign in Toronto

This wayfinding sign recently appeared on the Belt Line, just outside the entrance to Mount Pleasant Cemetery. At least the arrow, complete with hand-lettered spelling correction, is pointing in the right direction, unlike some other signs I could mention. There’s an old saying in woodworking: measure twice, cut once. Surely there’s a similar axiom in the sign-making business.