As we move into the heating season here in southern Ontario, I have been thinking about a trend whenever evidence is presented for the promotion of a new “Green” technology, where heat is described as an undesirable “Waste” product. For example, it’s been long understood that the incandescent light bulb converts 5% of the energy it uses into light, and the other 95% is “wasted” as heat. The same is said about the internal combustion engine; that a lot of the energy is heat waste. It seems to me whoever came up with these conclusions is pretty ignorant of the reality of the world I live in. Perhaps these conclusions are of people who are fortunate enough to live in warmer climates closer to the tropic of Cancer than I do. I will now put a light on my own reality with some graphs.

So one of my favourite podcasts went into radio silence. I am of course talking about Hacker Public Radio, a free culture and technology oriented podcast, to which I have contributed a few episodes, in the spirit of listener generated content. I haven’t done a podcast in a while, spending more time in the real world, taking a break from tech and getting back to basics and messing around with my bicycles. I still tuned in once in a while, which is how I came to learn through other sources that I was no longer able to download any new episodes due to the fact that the Internet Archive was hacked. The Internet Archive is the server where episodes of hacker public radio were served from.

I broke a spoke on the rear wheel of my Trek FX-3 hybrid bike, so I decided to switch back to my 28 year old Raleigh Tarantula mountain bike I’ve owned since 1996 for my commute to work today.

Sally has the same model in the same colour in her size so we would have matching bikes. This is the bike I left locked up at Union Station when I worked downtown Toronto in 2012, and it would be faithfully waiting for me every morning I stepped off the train. It’s the bike I used to tow my son in a bicycle trailer when he was little. It’s also been on many camping adventures with us, including riding the famous Track and Tower at Algonquin Park. There’s a lot of history in this mountain bike, and that is the reason why I maintain it. That, and it’s a great steel frame mountain bike from the 90’s with classic powerful cantilever brakes that you just don’t see on bicycles anymore.

Today, my wife and I joined our son and his girlfriend at Palmer Park in Port Perry, Ontario to enjoy the waterfront and the downtown area of this charming town on the southwestern shore of Lake Scugog.

I noticed there was a bicycle repair station next to the bicycle lockup next to the waterfront. Now if only there were decent dedicated bicycle trails between Oshawa and Port Perry.

This morning, we set out to conquer the entire Track and Tower hiking trail. This marked a special occasion for us, as this is the second time in our lives to have completed this difficult trail. On this adventure, I brought my Pentax KP with my “Nifty Fifty,” which was the only lens I used for all of these shots with a polarizing filter. We started out by signing the Visitor’s Register at the trail head.