Well, That was a Fun One

 Im talking about 2020 in general of course...

Yep its been an odd and tiring year for everyone Im sure... Time for an annual update from me.

Early on in February I did manage to go take a week long break laying about in the sun on a Mexican beach... I went to the Caribbean side in the Cancun area which I had not visited on any of my motorbike travels in previous years... It was nice enough as far as" a week at an all inclusive resort" goes but I have no need to rush back and revisit the area or live there in retirement... But retrospectively Im glad I got to go do it before all travel anywhere on the planet got completely locked down. And it was nice and snowy in Vancouver when I left and nice and Sunny in Mexico when I arrived :) 

On that front, I think its quite a good thing for us all to see just how entitled and decadent we have all become over the last couple of decades. 

In my early adult life it was unusual for people to travel internationally to recreational climates and locals for annual vacations and they were certainly expensive and adventurous trips when they did happen... cut off from regular communications and funded with travelers cheques and $US cash... But recently every new-grad school kid does it with their friends to pretty much anywhere in the world, and we all constantly natter with each other on twitter and facebook and instaspam and money flits across the net with e-transfers and trip-advisor and airbnb bookings etc.

And Oh how we all howled like the world was ending when it all got shut down, and oh how all the pampered little people screamed for their individual freedom when governments tried to restrict personal freedoms for perceived social good.  Heaven help us all and our vaunted free democracies if there was ever a more significant or more directed actual threat... Any enemy who wanted to destroy us could easily do it because we clearly have no social cohesion and no semblance of personal responsibility toward others in our societies... Its all for one and one for self... Looks to me like we are all badly in need of exposure to a real threat with more direct and deeply felt consequences... 

Im saying we probably need serious group experience (war/revolution) of some sort to bring the facts home to us all so that the line we all draw somewhere between Us and Them gets positioned further away from our individual interests and more to our societal interests... Im not sure if thats positive or negative thinking though :)

What else did I do?

Well there were a few projects... Finished off a couple tables tops that I had worked on before.

Also finished off the little White motorbike I hade been building for a couple of years.

And I sold one car (It was getting too close to end-of-life) and two motorbikes (not using them and not working on them) over the year... But I bought a new car to replace the old one as my daily driver and bought one new motorbike to tinker with and modify... Its now done too so Ill likely sell it next year.

So Im one at less vehicle than I had last year and next year Ill get rid of another one... Im on a slow "vehicle reduction" plan for myself at the moment :)

And of course there has been all sorts of social turmoil and with Covid being in every conversation all the time for most of the year... 

For my part, Ive had it pretty easy. My work has been constant and mostly unaffected by it all... The company I work for did better than most in that its part of the whole internet infrastructure economy and that got a significant boost this year. Ive been going to work at the office throughout the pandemic. Most of the team I work with went through a few months of mostly working from home, but I stayed in at the office to be the one to adjust things in the lab for the rest of the team whenever they needed it. So its been same same for me for the most part.

It has been a disappointment to not be able to play sport or have dinners with friends nearly as much this year but on the whole Im not nearly as socially dependent as most people I know so Ive "suffered" far less than most I think. 

On the financial front its been an average year... I actually spent quite a bit less than in a normal year due to no travelling (either domestically or internationally) and less socializing, but I also took a significant financial hit from my tenant ( I rent out my house basement suite to help pay the mortgage) being stuck in Russia for 6 months! She went home to visit family in March and got stuck there for half a year, so I chose to reduce rent to a token level for that duration cos she had no source of income and no options to deal with her stuff while she was stuck over there... It has cost me quite a few thousands of dollars to absorb the hit but I think its cost her more, and Im one of the lucky ones so I think I can take on some of the struggle for others without complaining too much... So kind of a break-even year for me... I also note with disgust that all the large banks here in Canada posted pretty muck record profits this year while the Canadian Government and lots of the Canadian people posted record debt!

On the home front, not much going on with my little house... All I did this year was install a green-roof on the storage container I installed in the back yard last year... That was easy enough though it did involve me lugging about 2 tonnes of sand and rocks manually up a ladder onto its roof ... I needed the exercise anyway :)  The substrate is now in place on the container roof but it will take a couple of seasons for it to "naturalize" and the grasses to establish... The goal was a alpine lake shore or river bank effect.

On the down-sizing plan I mentioned last year, not much has happened. But I think I have figured out a way to do the "bridging finance" that I wanted to... So going into next year I will be actively changing around my debt management with my bank as my current mortgage comes due. And then Ill then be actively looking for a house in the specific area Im interested in... I hope to buy a new place and then probably immediately sell my current place... lets see what actually happens :)

Thats about all for this update.

Hoping everyone has a better year in 2021 than we had for 2020.

cheers

Grant

Something of a goal for the near term.

How goes my life at work?



So, Only a few posts ago I described my thinking on the subject of why I was signing back on to full time employment as an engineering team manager again…

And since then, it seems that two and a half years has passed… wow that went quickly… or did it take forever???... I cant tell


Clearly one side-effect of the job has been that I almost completely stopped posting to my blog… but then again, my blog only really seems to serve me significantly when Im “off doing stuff” and have lots of new stimulus to think about and that isn’t really what happens when we work in steady 9-5 type jobs...



Anyway, here is a status report:

Right, well I just reread my post “The Contractor Who Came In From The Cold” and I have to say that my assessment of what would happen and what it would be like were exactly 100% “dead on the money”…

Which is as usual disappointing but not surprising.


The company management behavior at the project level is exactly the same as before and is in my opinion highly dysfunctional and shows no inclination to change at all… and that is of course because exactly the same people are in charge as were there before and they have exactly the same attitudes as they did before… and as Ive said before, people just don’t change (and that includes myself).

And so, schedules are an eternal joke and the challenge of trying to do a good job managing in that environment is indeed a crappy one… And I was also exactly right in my assessment of my own behaviors in that environment… which is that try as I might to maintain an independent view-point and not get affected by the foolishness of others … well that’s just not possible… I get affected and I get angry and frustrated and well, it’s the same as it ever was.


And so, in short, Im not enjoying it at all.


Its also been 5 years since I went on my last long moto-tour and had a good long break to get the frustrations of work life out of my system (Ive been so spoiled in the past J)

Interestingly, I don’t have particularly strong urges to go off on another long moto-tour at the moment, though there are some rides Id like to do (not least through/around Europe)… but I certainly do have strong urges to not be doing my current job.


The trouble is of course that it still makes far more financial sense to keep doing what Im doing for a few more years… The mathematics is pretty straightforward really and it goes like this:

Ive done pretty well through my homes equity with the Vancouver property boom over the past decade or so (same thing has happened in many places around the world)… but, all that equity is tied up in the land and is not cash… Couple with that the fact that I still actually have a sizeable chunk of debt in the form of the mortgage… which I have lagged on paying off (with my multiple long expensive moto trips) somewhat because of the significant increase in equity… I still owe the bank enough to mean that I wont be paying the mortgage off for about another decade… which is the crux of my current “challenge” J


Because I really really don’t want to be doing my current job for another 10 years!... And therein lies the problem…
Technically, I am reasonably well off and could probably manage to retire… But my “wealth” is largely tied up in equity and is not “liquid”… While Im working, I can use the equity by taking out loans against the house and I can take my long breaks, but while I have debt, I have to work at a high paying job on a regular basis to pay back the interest on the debt… Otherwise the compound interest of the debt quickly grows and overwhelms the value of the equity (about 20 years away by my calculations)… and I then end up living out my later years in a cardboard box under a bridge somewhere… Not what I had in  mind!


The only way for me to be able to stop working is to not have debt, and preferably have “investments” that actually grow instead of decline at the bank. But the only way to do that is to sell my house!     Not so hard you say… just sell it…


Hmm well, that has a bunch of its own problems, not least of which is where do I live then… Ive traveled about quite a bit and Ive found that being an expat living my retirement in cheap foreign lands isn’t all its cracked up to be (at least for me as I understand myself)…
And anyway, I don’t really want to completely uproot myself and move somewhere significantly cheaper… I actually want to stay in the area that Im currently in … It is where all my friends are and it is where I can get the contracting work that I do want to be able to do as a “staged” retirement plan (I know I would not be happy outright retiring right now so I may as well earn some money working part time in roughly the same job I have)… So going to live on the cheap somewhere else is not really what I have in mind.


But, I do have a plan…

I have a crappy little house on a sizeable block of land in a city where real estate is very valuable… But the value of the place is in the land and not the house… That said, Im happy enough in my crappy little house, and so what I want to do is “down-size” my block of land…
Which is technically not allowed (cant subdivide my block), so what I will need to do is sell my current house and buy a different one… I should be able to do that and use the earnings from the sale of the larger land block to have zero debt on the new smaller block… And then Im a free agent and can go back to contracting and take some longer breaks again… Im sure Id be a pretty happy camper in that mode.


Right, so there is a solid high-level plan and Im 100% "on-board"... Yes I want to do that.

The problem now becomes how to achieve the transition… and that is made much more difficult than it probably needs to be by guess who… Yep Me!

The problem is I am very particular about several things in my proposed new “crappy little house on a smaller block”… I know within a couple of streets and a few dozen houses of where I want that to be (based on my assorted needs … which are more or less the specifications of my current crappy little house)… And there are no houses for sale that meet my needs at the moment.

That is not really a problem though because Im quite happy to wait up to 3 years or so to do the change. And its pretty certain that in that time frame the right thing will come up.

The problem though is that this means that I cant really sell my current house till after I buy the new one… And I cant guarantee that I could immediately sell my house once I want to.

And that means my problem becomes "bridging" finance…
Its pretty hard to go to the bank and say “Hey, can you please loan me a huge sum of money so I can buy a second house”!...
Sure I have the equity to cover the loan in my existing house, but the bank cares more about my ability to pay the interest with income… And as a single professional I admit I am well paid compared to many people, but sadly I just don’t earn enough to make the payments on such a large loan for a second house in this real estate market...
… Oh such first world problems I have J



The arrogance of me!...  Im being picky and greedy and its blocking me getting what I want… Yep, that sounds exactly like most of us humans J



So, there is my current challenge … trying to get comfortably free of mortgage debt so I can stage myself into retirement and give up the stress of having to work full time for a crappy corporation. But at least my direction is a bit clearer… I have a specific goal and a specific time line that is “within sight”… 2-3 years is very “immediate” compared to 7-10 years away which in my emotional mind just becomes “forever” away.


It actually feels good to have the core of a plan J
So now all I gotta do is figure out how to achieve it.

Bunch of 2019 pics of stuff Ive been doing.

Last years trip back to Australia... stopped in Bali to get over jet-lag for a couple of days.

Grew my beard and mo out for a few months... very silly appearance :)

Got this one going and then sold it.

Was going to sell this one that I restored/moded... but its too much fun to ride so I decided to keep it... Im such a hoarder!

Some of my summer frisbee team... Im still running around as best I can at 54yo.

My ugly little vespa next to some foreign university students car... seriously!

Another little coffee table that I made... gave this one away to a friend.

Complete rebuild/restore/renovate on this one ... Ill finish it this coming summer and then probably sell it.

Dont have enough space to store all my motorbike projects so I put some footings in and got a shipping container for them... Itll be my workshop now.

Last year I took a vacation week in Arizona... pretty warm red countryside.

Failure to Reconcile

Im struggling… I really am.


I am seemingly unavoidably, constantly, and profoundly disappointed in “humans”.


As far as we know, humans are the most intelligent species to have ever existed, and in probably little more than twenty thousand years of social development, have transformed from being small subsistence nomadic family groups of primates into a planet modifying highly technological pan-planetary (being a bit generous there maybe :) ) society. From understanding the essential survival skills of our dangerous existence in a hostile environment to understanding and utilizing deep quantum physics, highly structured political economic and social organizations and the beginnings of genetically manipulating our own biological form.


But for all those achievements we are by and large still absolutely abominably self-interested and have such little foresight as to be eminently happy to shit in our own drinking water or eat detergent pods because it will get us attention from other people… or any number of other highly self-destructive behaviors… and for the most part, these “bad behaviors” are not even malicious or “directed” activities… They are simply the manifestation of gross and obvious negligence…

I cant express how disappointed it all makes me feel…
It crushes my spirit to see what people constantly do to them-selves and each other and the planet and well, everything!  
Its killing me… I hate people!


And I cant possibly be alone in this feeling… Im not operating on some higher plane of intelligence… Im probably a bit smarter than average but far from exceptional… There must be tens of thousands of people who see the same terrible human behaviors, and the blatantly obvious consequences, and just like me are essentially powerless to effect change in the masses of people who don't see it and dont even bother looking at it.

So, I gotta ask… How are people able to “carry on” and watch it all happening without despairing?

Really… It must drive lots of people to give up hope and just bump themselves off… and clearly lots of people do just that.


For my part, I have no intention of taking such steps… but it does pose me with an ever intensifying existential crisis and increasingly obscured search for personal purpose…
Then again, perhaps that’s half the point of it all right there … well if you are the kind of person that needs to "find the point" of things.
But if there was no struggle there would be no reward, and whether there is reward or not, there is always struggle.

… essentially, I think Im just well on my way to becoming a "Grumpy Old Man"  :)

KowaSix Fix - (Jammed Winder)

This posting is intended as a "community contribution" for owners of the "Kowa Six" medium format film cameras...


Its an old 120 size film SLR camera, and my Dad gave me his old camera that had not been used for years and needed some attention and that I thought I might enjoy using.
Anyway, as I said, it needed some maintenance since it had not been used in years. So, I was trying to "loosen up" the shutter (its a leaf-shutter type camera rather than the more common focal plane type shutter of most SLR cameras) and aperture settings in the lens which were a bit sticky with lack of use... and with no film in the camera I was winding and firing the shutter in quite rapid succession.
Somehow I managed to get the winding mechanism jammed so that it would not wind forward and would not fire the shutter.
I tried removing the lense and pushing all the buttons and twiddling everything I could but it would not budge... and I dared not force the winder forward because I felt sure it would break something inside.

What to do?... well, go check out the internet of course... Which I did and I found a fair number of posts in various places that sounded like my stuck winder problem but absolutely no solutions to the problem that applied to my situation... I tried the suggestions I found but my problem was different it seemed... And the only clear response for the more complicated problems was a recurrent statement of send it off to so-and-so in the US who is the repair wizard guy for these old cameras... oh and by the way it will cost you several hundred dollars to get it fixed!

Not what I wanted to hear.
So, undeterred I decided that Id have a go at it myself, and after quite a struggle I did manage to fix it without damaging anything else... And the fix in my case was not too complicated and I think others could do it so Ive decided to share that fix here.

The Fix
1) You will need to peel off the vinyl covering on the winder hub... Its held on with contact adhesive so its quite a job to get it off, but that's what you have to do to get at the 4x little screws that hold the winder top plate in place... Be careful to not tear the vinyl (It can be reglued onto the cover after)
2) Remove the 4x small screws with a very small Philips-head screwdriver.

3) Remove the winder cover plate... which is now held in place by the winding lever spring plate so you have to lift an edge and slide it out.

4) Now you have to remove the winder which means undoing the two central screws in the middle... Don't worry about the little ratchet mechanism cos if you are careful it will all stay exactly in place as you lift the winder up off the camera. If things do get disturbed though, its no problem to put the little cog back between the "gripping levers" when you reassemble it all.

5) Now you need to get access to the 5x small screws that hold the camera side cover on... Again you need to peel back the covering Vinyl to get at them... I have a picture here so you can see where the 5x screws are so you need not fully peel off the vinyl. (Note there is also a slightly larger 6th hole there that has no use that I can see)

6) Now the side cover should simply lift up off the camera and reveal the guts of the mechanical mechanisms in the camera body (very scary!) 

7) Right now we are ready to fix things... But to explain Ill show a couple of pictures... These two are of the camera mechanuism in loaded and in fired positions respectively... almost no difference right!

and here is a third one with the mechanism in the "jammed configuration"...


The difference appears very minor (mostly in the subtle position of the L-shaped lever on the right and a small nub of a lever sticking out from under the brass center hub near it..

 It all looks very busy in the picture but all we have to do to fix things is do some poking with a screwdriver... There is a little lever with a turned up tab sticking out from under that multi-armed steel top plate that the winder axle sticks up through... its on the left side and is more clearly seen in the picture below.

Now if you winder is jammed like mine was then you cant see that little lever... cos its stuck back under the plate... In normal conditions, the little lever is "wound-back" anti-clockwise as you use the winder to advance the film and reset the shutter.. and it ends up almost in the same place after winding.
And when you fire the shutter, that little lever snaps clockwise full circle around the winder hub.
But when you fire the shutter and wind the film advance knob at the same time, things can get out of synch and the little lever only manages a portion of the rewind circuit.
So... How to fix it
I held the firing button in (ie in "fired" position) and I used a poker (ie very small screwdriver) to release that little lever from being stuck... It releases in little "leaps" when you push it in the anti-clockwise direction, so you have to poke it from several angles and chase it back to the start position on the left side of the winding hub... … You know its in the fully fired position when it stops spring releasing and is just loosely sitting there.
And that's all you have to do!

Now if you temporarily put the winder back on with the two screws, you should find that its all working as it should be... The winder retracts the mirror and advances the film and then levers-through and keeps winding but without resistance and the camera is ready to fire... Test it out a few times and then you can reassemble the side cover and winder in reverse order and you are good to go. The vinyl coverings can be re used with some carefully applied contact adhesive too of course.

Anyway, that's my fix... Hope it helps someone :)

cheers

Grant

Bunch-o-Pics

Just some pictures of various projects and activities

My summer Frisbee (Ultimate) team

And I up-graded my old coffee table to be a bit wider... Well I had to refinish it, so I figured I may as well make it a bit wider while I was at it...I like the result.

Another Coffee table I made... I long ago ran out of space in my house for tables. But I like to make them so this one was a wedding gift for a friend... Its surf-board themed based on the upgrade I did to my old coffee table.:)

 And that Vespa project that I started a couple of years ago is making progress again... It was on hold for well over a year while I waited for a 12V CDI conversion kit for it to be available again... Its now running very nicely with a larger 177cc cylinder and piston (originally 150cc 2-stroke) and larger 10" wheels (much more stable than the original 8").
But there is still lots of work to do... I expect it to take all winter to get it road worthy.

And a work project (now that I'm a team manager again)... I have little competitions for the engineers... I challenge them to be creative and constructive. This is my test of what I can achieve for the next "Challenge". Its a "span" that can hold a 2 litre bottle of water off the ground and it must be constructed in 1 hour and be made from nothing but 25 sheets of ordinary office paper, and Scotch tape... and it can not be "attached" to anything (must just "rest" in place) In this case I achieved a span of 84" (over 220cm)... Now we will see what the engineers at work can do :)

Not much else going on. I spend my weekends tinkering on several motorbike and wood-work projects and a small marine aquarium.

And this is a thin slab of Maple burl that I will use for my next wood-work project... It wont be a table-top because its too thin (about 2.5cm... Itll probably be a jewellery box or the like :)

cheers

Grant