For the last six weeks I've been making an effort to go riding almost every day. In early September I got my first motorcycle, a 1999 BMW F650 a/k/a Funduro. David and I both took the Humber College motorcycle course, and he also bought a BMW motorcycle, a 1983 R65.

The primary purpose of my daily riding has been to learn and improve my skills while being exposed to real traffic situations. I live in downtown Toronto, so no matter where I go I'm encountering unexpected events and drivers who don't deserve to be on the road. Some days my rides are relatively brief, say down to the CBC Broadcast Centre, and other days I have the time to ride outside of the city and into the country and broader bio-region.

The secondary purpose of my rides therefore has been to explore my region and see more of my city. When I first got my driver's license only 3 years ago, I started taking drives to the suburbs to see parts of the city I had never visited due to growing up downtown. Now that I have a bike I'm inclined to go even further, and my trips have taken me from the urban environment, to the suburbs, on to exurbs, and finally into farm land.

What has surprised me most is just how far you have to go to get out of the city. I used to joke that Peterborough was a suburb of Toronto, and while that is not exactly true, Toronto sure stretches far and wide.

Purists of course try to argue that Toronto ends at Steeles, or even older city borders such as North York, or cultural borders like Bloor, College, and even Queen. What you realize of course as you travel further and further away is that it's all Toronto, a seemingly endless sprawl of city.

Over the course of the summer I hardly published a thing on this site, in part cause I was really busy with work, but also because most of the blog posts I wanted to write had the word "sucks" in the title. I didn't want my blog to convey the idea that the summer sucked, cause in fact it was the opposite, one of the best summers I've had in a while. So now that I'm making an effort to write more regularly, I'm gonna post some of my "sucks" posts stored from the past couple of months.

As part of the work I was doing this Summer I traveled to Vancouver to meet with a few clients and run a few workshops. The following post was written on AC 101 Toronto to Vancouver.

Last week my CBC radio column covered the recent introduction of a 3D imaging surveillance system used at the Kelowna BC airport to screen passengers. Using millimetre waves the system is able to penetrate clothing and create a vivid 3D model of the passenger without clothes on. Thus it is a far more thorough system then the existing setup which only scans for metal.

Part of the focus of the column was on the privacy implications of such a system, and at the time CATSA (the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority) was claiming it had the support of the federal privacy commissioner. I mentioned this in my column, but also expressed skepticism that the current steps being taken to protect passenger's privacy was not enough.

Turns out, the privacy commissioner does not support the pilot project, and does indeed have concerns with how passengers privacy might be violated. Here's a quote from the Globe and Mail:

"However, the privacy commissioner's office said yesterday it is concerned about the implications of the new system and it never told CATSA officials that the body-scanning technology meets Canadian privacy standards.

"At this very early stage we certainly don't know enough to endorse the project, so the suggestion that we endorsed it is perhaps a bit off," commission spokeswoman Anne-Marie Hayden said. "I think we're going to have to watch it closely and we're going to want to ensure that individuals' privacy rights are protected."

Thanks to Blair Campbell for alerting me to this. Goes to show that even when an organization says it is protecting your privacy you should still question that assertion, and try and think of unforeseen ways in your rights my be violated.

There's something about the weather that fascinates me. I'm always looking at the weather page my buddy Ken Chase has setup, and I'm often outside observing conditions and comparing what I see and experience with the online forecasts.

Emily and I made our annual trip to Chicago this past weekend for American Thanksgiving. Explicitly we go to Palatine Illinois to visit Emily's grandfather Fred Pohl, and other members of the maternal side of her family. The last two years have been road trips as we've driven from Toronto to Chicago. Last year the weather was nasty, with all sorts of conditions ranging from fog, to snow, ice, rain, sleet, hail, you name it.

Recently, to celebrate Emily finishing the first draft of her second Natalie Fuentes novel, we took a quick road trip out to the Atlantic Coast of New Hampshire and Maine. I'm really getting into doing long drives, and we went at just the right time as the colours of the leaves were perfect.

This is the first video that I made with my Nokia e70 camera phone. Emily and I were driving against rush hour traffic to go visit her dad at the Trillium hospital in Mississauga. We were both amazed at how totally clogged the QEW was, and thus made this short video expressing just that!

After years as a militant cyclist and pedestrian I finally got my driver's license last August. Since then Emily and I have been on a few road trips.

Our first was to visit Eric in NYC, celebrating his engagement, and then wedding. Our second was to Chicago, for American Thanksgiving, at the house of Sci-Fi legend Fred Pohl (a/k/a Emily's Grandfather).