Ephemera circa 2017

As I struggle to wrap my mind around YouTube and my barely nascent career as a YouTube 'creator', there are still mysteries in the blogosphere that are curious puzzles I am likely never to solve.

Among the puzzles are messages that 2017 has floated into my inbox praising this blog as a top-rated go-to moto-blog. As much as I can't help lapping up the praise, I remain skeptical.

There was a Dilbert cartoon I stumbled on that I have alluded to in the past where the punchline was "will work for recognition".  Since I don't get any financial reward for the work I do here, in the Dilbert spirit I have posted my 'awards' in the sidebar.

Most recently, I received a very nice email from some kind folks informing me that science and statistics had rewarded me with a fresh accolade:

I apologize for this evil display of pride, justly ranked among the seven deadly sins. Yet, I just can't help myself. In my defense, I feel that the kind people who went to the effort to find and list my blog deserve to have me recognize the recognition. There's that, plus, as the internet evolves as it must, this ephemeral praise will evaporate like the gasoline I often manage to spill when I gas up the Vespa. In that spirit this post is where the recognition belongs, where it will get buried as time passes and future posts pile on, eventually sinking into Google's bottomless basement storage locker until it gets dredged up from time to time in response to some random search.

Oh well, that's all for now.

It's time for me to get back to my 'studio' to grind away at the YouTube challenge cum mystery. I've got to crack 10,000 views on my channel to unlock some prizes in the shape of enhanced permissions and the shadowy possibility of some monetization that may or may not ever materialize. In this respect I'm like a teenager toiling away at a video game in the basement hoping that today is the day that I unlock the Sceptre of Ottokar (no... wait, that was a Tintin story...).

The Great Post-it Tab Hack

I am writing a book.

The subject is ultra-dry, and potentially crushingly boring.

It's about document management. More specifically document management for governance professionals.

I am working hard to inject as much wit and humour as possible as I plod along. With a little luck, my students and readers will come to share my passion for organizing the heck out of a potential maelstrom of information.

The book is to support a records management course I'll be teaching as part of the Governance Professionals of Canada professional education certification program.

Governance is a fascinating field because you work at the highest level of the organization you serve. The nature of the beast is that you find yourself responsible for a broad range of activities spanning the gamut from running the Board of Directors, to corporate and securities law compliance, ethics monitoring training and compliance, and a bunch of other stuff, as well as the mundane range of responsibilities that come with management responsibility including staffing, budgeting and the rest.

The result is that in no time you find yourself surrounded by records: minute books, corporate files, insider reporting files, mergers and acquisitions files, stock exchange compliance files, and the list goes on, and on, and on.

The key to taming the beast is to develop strong records management skills.

More or less in that vein, a trivial little skill I taught myself is to make quick-and-dirty custom-printed tabs to label files and books.

When a file becomes thick with documents, and grows into one volume after another, being able to find the four or five key documents in a hurry is a real blessing. The same goes for the key sections of the numerous weighty books sitting on the shelf. Thick heavy books like "everything you need to know about UK corporations law but were afraid to ask" (a thousand-plus page tome, and not its real name).  You get the picture.

In the context of working on the book, studying for Bar exams to come in March (yes, life is like a huge game of snakes and ladders after all), and organizing my home office, I remembered my little Post-it notes hack.

It occurred to me that some of you might benefit from this little trick as well.

Hopefully I managed to convey the gist of this trick in the video.

The music for this episode is Santorini 2 by Vibe Mountain made available courtesy of the YouTube Audio Library. 

Vespa, TREE-ed!!!

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Here is my desperate bid for YouTube viraldom!

Well, not really. I mean, don't get me wrong, I aspire to viraldom, but I'm not into kidding myself, I'm nowhere even remotely close to that. Seriously.

In this episode come along as a fetch a Christmas tree as a favour to my daughter Lauren.

This is where you learn that when you ride a Vespa, no errand is beyond reach.

The music for this episode of the vlog is Swipesy Cakewalk by E's Jammy Jams made available courtesy of the YouTube Audio Library.

If you've been living under a rock, and you've never heard of Steve Williams and Scooter in the Sticks, by all means go have a peak at what Steve's up to.

If you were hoping that this episode was going to be Five-0 in the 6ixI I'm afraid it's still in the studio waiting for more bits and pieces to come together. Hopefully when it finally sees the light of day you won't be disappointed. Also in the works are Vespa maintenance videos including an oil change, hub oil change, and yes, a cooling system flush and thermostat replacement. Exciting stuff indeed.

Thanks for watching, and stay tuned!

I broke my 40 year-old Ray Bans!!!

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I love, love, love my sunglasses.

I've posted before about my Ray Ban Outdoorsman aviators. My optometrist had told me, way back in 2011, that the Ray Ban Outdoorsman had been discontinued.

Lucky for me that he was wrong, wrong, wrong.

I just bought a brand new pair of Outdoorsman aviators.

Currently aviators are back in style.

In the years I have owned them, they have been out of style, in style, out of style, back in favour, outcast, and now, really back in style. I don't care, truly I don't. I love my Ray Bans.

They broke (actually only the left temple broke) because I subjected them to poor treatment. I admit this freely now, just as I admitted it in the past. First off, they are intended for use they way they come from the store, i.e. not with prescription lenses. I forced the frames to accept prescription lenses (which in fairness, is not really a problem).

The real abuse happened as my eyesight deteriorated over time. As my eyes got funkier, the lenses got way curvier, and well, there's the rub. Literally.

Watch the video. I think that I succeeded in describing the failure in exquisite detail that even the  most casual viewer will immediately understand.

Now for the good news.

If you have had similar issues, if you have given up wearing Ray Ban aviators because your prescription is interfering with the actual operation of the frames, then especially watch the video, because all these years later, I finally found the cure. Watch the video.

I am content, chuffed, happy, ecstatic really, that I now have a pair of Ray Ban Outdoorsman aviators that will outlive me, no matter how pathetic my eyesight becomes.

Yay!

Detailed show notes:

My Ray Ban sunglasses are the Outdoorsman model (model number RB3030) purchased in 1977 and worn pretty much daily ever since. The left temple snapped three weeks ago. The lenses are my existing prescription lenses. Here’s a link to the glasses.

The music for this episode of Life on two wheels was sourced in the excellent YouTube Audio Library and is Cop A Feel by Audionautix which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Artist: http://audionautix.com/ 

A conversation with Steve Williams

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Why would anyone in their right mind choose to write a blog?

Well... if that is a question that occasionally pops up as you browse among the more than 650 million web sites currently cluttering the interwebs, while you keep bumping into some of the estimated 200 million sites that are blogs, and you scratch your head wondering what on earth could possibly drive a person to blog, here, on a silver platter, is a golden opportunity to learn why two of us are driven to post aspects of their daily lives for all to see. Watch the video.

In fact, for all you social or behavioral scientists and psychiatrists out there, this is particularly exciting, because as Steve Williams and I, both of us seasoned well-followed, and (hopefully) well-respected bloggers candidly expose our respective motives, it will no doubt thrill you to know that I started blogging in some measure because I felt compelled to follow Steve's example. Somewhere in that overly long, tangled sentence, there is the tip of an epidemiological study in psychiatry begging to begin. Watch the video.

Anyway... I'm afraid you'll be compelled to watch the video if you really want to learn what makes us tick. Good luck with that. Watch the video.

If any of those social scientists and psychiatrists I alluded to watch the video and have insights into our character flaws they'd care to share in the fleeting hope that both, or either of us, might use those insights to mitigate our failings, please leave a comment below. You just never know. Please watch the video.

Steve and I thank you in advance.

The music for this episode is Laid Back Guitars by Kevin MacLeod and it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license and is made available courtesy of the YouTube Audio Library 
Source: Incompetech.com
Artist: Incompetech

Riding a Zombie

Can a Vespa rise from the dead?

Is it possible for a blown head gasket, something akin to a brain aneurysm, to heal spontaneously?

If not, was the gasket in fact blown?

And if not, whence the coolant leak?

So many questions. For the time being no satisfactory answer.

Here are the facts as I know them. I need your insight.

After a long day’s ride from State College to Niagara falls, some 370 kilometers, a coolant leak in the engine compartment brought the day’s ride to an abrupt end.

It was impossible to see the source of the leak. The coolant was running down onto the center stand pivot or axle and dripping from there. You can see this symptom in the video I posted as episode 22 of the vlog.

Other symptoms: when I opened the saddle to refuel, steam was rising from the engine compartment. When I removed the underseat bucket to reveal the engine, there was coolant everywhere, as if there was a spraying coolant leak. The underside of the seat compartment bucket was wet. When I started the bike with the bucket out, the coolant was dripping from the stand below the motor, but there was no evidence of a leak seen from above the engine.

That’s all I’ve got.

Last week I needed to get my bike down from its P1 parking spot to a temporary spot on P3 because the P1 level was being pressure washed.

I refilled the cooling system with tap water, up to the lower fill mark on the reservoir. I fully expected to see the water begin dripping down the stand. But there was no leak. I started the motor. Still no leak. I left the motor running until the bike reached normal operating temperature. Still no leak.

I rode down to P3. Still no leak.

Two days later I checked on the bike before riding back up to P1. Yup, still dry.

I discussed the situation with Ed Thomas. Ed thought that perhaps the water was leaking into the oil pan via the blown gasket rather than leaking to the outside. He suggested checking the coolant level in the reservoir, and checking the oil level. If both were at their normal levels, it would be reasonable to conclude that the coolant wasn’t leaking into the oil. I checked and the levels were normal.

Today I decided I would hop on the Vespa to run a few errands and eventually make my way over to Ed’s workshop, to talk, well... talk shop, and zombie Vespas. You guessed it, still no evidence of any leak. That, and I kept an eagle-eye on the instrument panel: the engine temperature remained normal the whole way. The check engine light lit up a couple of times, but reset itself with an engine restart. That happened three times on the way to Ed’s, each time shortly after one of my little errand stops. It never happened on the way home.

Ed’s as stumped as I am.

The only other thing I can think of, is that close to the Pennsylvania New York border, I refueled at a tiny country gas station, and I realized that the helpful attendant handed me a nozzle switched to regular gasoline with ethanol. I only realized it had happened further down the road when the engine started stumbling slightly. Three tanks of 91 octane fuel later, the performance symptoms disappeared. I don’t think that’s relevant. I just mention it because it’s the only other engine-related issue that occured on the trip.

So there you have it. The Vespa seems for all the world to be running like a top. Or at least running as well as it did when I set out for the wilds of Pennsylvania.

I know many of my readers have what I’ll call mechanical literacy. What is your take on this little Italian mystery?

Is there any chance that the coolant leak might have come from the coolant bleed valve at the top of the engine?

Can a blown gasket heal itself?

Should I overhaul the engine on the assumption that there is a defective gasket?

What would you do?

Like I said, I am stumped.

Thanks for reading.

PS: I also posted this mystery to the ModernVespa forum: here’s a link.

PPS:

In this shot taken from the Episode 22 video, filmed within 15 to 20 minutes of the discovery of the leak:

• The circle is the thermostat housing and the nubby thing in the circle at the twelve o'clock position is the coolant bleed valve.
• The arrows point to the areas that are wet as a result of the leak. 
• Remember that the pet carrier / underseat container was in place when the leak was leaking. It seems consistent with a leak from the thermostat that the wet areas are aft of the thermostat. 
• The areas forward from the thermostat are dry.
• Whatever that evidence points to, it is not really consistent with a head gasket leak, or so it seems to me.

Another MV'er (whom I believe to be another mechanically literate person) had this to say: "It is very rare to have an external coolant leak turn out to be a head gasket. It would usually go into the engine oil or out the exhaust."

Yet another MV commenter had this to say: "Hmm. Not clear whether you mean the gasket at the base of the cylinder (possible) or the one which seals the two halves of the crankcase (unlikely). You don't develop anywhere near as much pressure in the crankcase and spraying coolant all over does not seem likely to me. You would lose engine oil if anything. I think the thermostat/bleed valve area sounds far more likely as you suggest. Probably time for a trip back to Vespa Toronto West for reconsideration."