I put the rented Evox City520 electric bicycle through its paces tonight, riding out of Charlottetown on the Confederation Trail to Charlottetown Airport, and then out the Brackley Path that runs parallel to the Brackley Point Road, rejoining the trail and riding east as far as York.

The trip was 15.8 km in each direction, 31.6 km there and back. Here’s a picture of my ride, recorded as a GPX file by OsmAnd and displayed over PEI 2 meter contours.

This is farther than I’ve ever ridden a bicycle before, and the distance was only possible (at least given my current fitness level and strength of character) because of the electric pedal assist, which I used continuously.

The Evox has 6 levels of pedal assist and an 8 speed gear system; heading downhill, with full pedal assist and in the highest gear, I was doing almost 30 km/h. My average speed, over the entire trip, was about 20 km/h.

One of the reasons I suspect I’m not a good candidate for an electric bicycle is that the heady allure of pedal assist level six, with its effortlessness and breezy speeds, is simply too great to allow me to derive a significant enough amount of fitness from the endeavour.

I got nowhere to go, really, and so I think I’d be better off sticking to the grinding effort of my trusty non-electric Palomar, sticking closer to home, and leaving batteries out of it; I think I’d end up a better person.

Which brings up another issue, the feeling of being an asshole that one experiences when you blithely pass the non-electric-riders on the trail, expending half the effort and traveling at twice the speed as they are. I’ve always had a feeling of solidarity with fellow trail riders when I’m riding unassisted, and it’s not uncommon to give a nod of the helmet or a wave of the hand when passing in the other direction; flying by on my electric jet-bike I felt like people in first class must feel when we coach passengers mope by. It wasn’t a warm feeling.

All that said, the Evoc City520 is a nice piece of kit. It’s easy to get on and off, has a low centre of gravity, and is comfortable to ride. As I mentioned earlier, it’s heavy as hell, and was a challenge to wrangle in the front door of the house to charge this evening (I think the battery is removable, but I don’t have the key to unlock it, so I had to bring the whole thing inside for the night).

The pedal assist system is control by a simple three button toggle and a centre-mounted display:

The display shows speed, pedal assist level, battery level, and an odometer. I like the fact that it is integrated into the handlebar post (in the centre of the “cockpit,” as bike nerds like to say), rather than zip-tied to the handlebars like a lot of other ebike-controllers are.

Perhaps the best takeaway from this evening’s ride was the reminder of how lucky we are to have the Confederation Trail in our midst: 30 minutes from downtown Charlottetown (15 minutes on an ebike!) and you can be in the middle of the countryside, by yourself, hearing nothing but birds and tractors.

I’ll do some more tooling around on the Evox tomorrow before returning it to MacQueen’s, but I think I’ve got the ebike bug out of my system for now.

When he finished high school in mid-June, Oliver transitioned to the day program at Stars for Life, an organization I believe in deeply, and from which he will derive great benefit.

The primary logistical challenge of this is that Stars for Life is located 5.5 km from our house, and I need to get Oliver there every morning and pick him up every afternoon.

Given that we own a car, and that I can drive, our fallback position is that I’ll simply drive him to and from.

But as we only have 12 years to become carbon neutral, it’s time to start the planning for alternatives to that, and so I’ve started out by focusing on alternative methods for the trip home.

Baseline

Heretofore I’ve driven both ways. Traffic there is usually pretty light; traffic back is slowed when encountering the mass of public servants leaving the office at 4:00 p.m., which creates some jams, but only in the Charlottetown sense of the word.

Generally I’d leave home at 3:45 p.m., arriving at Stars for life at 4:00 p.m. and arriving back home about 4:25 p.m.

• Total Time: 40 minutes
• Driving Distance: 11 km

Experiment One: Bus, Walk, Bus

Yesterday was the first experiment: Oliver was coming home early, and I needed to pick him up at 1:00 p.m.

I caught the 12:45 p.m. Route № 3 bus from Confederation Centre and arrived at Stars for Life exactly at 1:00 p.m.

Oliver and Ethan the Dog and I then walked down Beach Grove Road to North River Road, across North River Road to pick up the Hermitage Creek Trail, and walked along the trail to the back yard of the PEI Union of Public Sector Employees where we emerged onto University Avenue. We walked down University Avenue to the UPEI bus stop where we caught the 1:54 p.m. Route № 1 bus downtown, arriving at 2:00 p.m.

Statistics

• Bus Fares: $6.00
• Bus Distance: 8.6 km
• Walking Distance: 2.8 km
• Total Time: 75 minutes

Pros

• Convenient bus connection, almost door-to-door on the way there, only a short wait on the way back.
• Mostly pleasant walk along the Hermitage Creek Trail.

Cons

• The Hermitage Creek trail has some muddy/soggy spots, and could use some maintenance.
• Connection between the Hermitage Creek Trail and University Avenue is more “cut through a field” than an official trail.
• Adds 35 minutes, compared to driving, to the pick up run.

Experiment Two: Bike, Bus

One of the things I was curious about is whether having an electric pedal-assist bicycle would make it more possible for me to build cycling into the trip somehow.

Oliver doesn’t have a bicycle yet, so I can only cycle to Stars for Life for the pickup, and need a way of getting the bike back home.

For today’s experiment I rented an Evox City520 electric bike from MacQueen’s for 24 hours. It wasn’t cheap, at $86 taxes-in, but it was cheaper than buying an ebike, and I plan to amortize the rental by taking it for a longer spin tonight.

I left home on foot at 3:00 p.m. heading toward Outer Limit Sports where I’d originally intended to rent the bike; along the way I phoned them to confirm they had something in stock and learned that a 24 hour rental is considered two days in their calculations, and so I’d end up spending $150 for the experiment.

So I rerouted to MacQueen’s, which has a more sensible policy, arriving at 3:20 p.m. I was in and out of MacQueen’s in 10 minutes and it took me 13 minutes to ride the 2.8 km to Stars for Life (maxing out at 30 km/h coasting down the North River Road hill down to Ellen’s Creek).

It was here that things went slightly off the rails, as the buses stopping at Stars for Life–Route № 2 going clockwise and Route № 3 going counter-clockwise–only run once an hour, and when I arrived at 3:45 p.m. the next Route № 3 bus downtown wasn’t for 45 minutes.

So we caught the 3:58 p.m. Route № 2 bus.

Getting on the bus involved a complicated ballet of son, dog, bike, and me. I tied Ethan to a stop sign while I mounted the bike on the cowcatcher and then retrieved him and Oliver and I got on, paid our fare, and sat down. It wasn’t elegant, but it worked, aided by a very patient bus driver.

We had a chance to quicken the journey when we got to the Charlottetown Mall at 4:15 p.m.–we could have transferred to Route № 1– but I wasn’t eager to repeat the ballet, so we stayed on Route № 2 for a complete clockwise-tour of Charlottetown, seeing parts of the city I didn’t know existed.

We arrived at the Grafton-Polyclinic stop at 4:45 p.m. where I repeated the ballet in reverse and we walked the block to home.

Statistics

• Bus Fares: $4.00
• Bus Distance: 13.6 km
• Bicycle Rental: $86.00
• Cycling Distance: 2.8 km
• Total Time: 105 minutes

Pros

• The electric bicycle was fun to ride, and made short work of the hills: it felt like nothing at all to climb the 5% grade up Beach Grove Road from Ellen’s Creek.
• Despite the complexity of our party, we pulled off the ballet of mounting the bus without problems.

Cons

• The electric bicycle rental was expensive (although the purchase cost would be amortized across many trips in a more permanent scheme).
• The bike was heavy–54 pounds–and unwieldy, and so it was a lot harder to get on and off the cowcatcher than my regular bicycle.
• Although the cowcatcher held onto the bike well, despite the pothole-ridden streets and speed bumps, I had a background fear that it would fall off and I’d be out the cost of an expensive bicycle.
• The long bus journey home (which could be mitigated by a change in schedule that would allow a more direct return home on Route № 3).

What’s Next

There are lots more options to experiment with, including Oliver cycling (we need to figure out a trailer or basket for Ethan to make this work), repeating today’s experiment with my regular non-electric bicycle, or taking the bus there and walking all the way home.

Stay tuned; I’ll update this post as we forge on.

I’d missed this somehow: there’s now a setting in 1Password’s Android app under Filling labelled “Auto-copy one-time passwords” that does exactly that (just as the Mac version has done for a long time):

If you’re using two-factor authentication (and you should be: if you’re not, look it up and figure it out, or ask someone to explain it to you), using 1Password to generate your one-time passwords is light years ahead of using a standalone app like Google Authenticator, and this feature makes it double amazing.

Niti Bhan writes about African governments blocking access to parts of the Internet, Facebook among them:

As civil society groups and others raise their voices in support for peoples disconnected the global digital economy and society today, I believe we need to be cautious about what we’re speaking up for. I would not speak up for Facebook’s rights – there’s ample evidence they’ve trampled on mine even though I’m not a registered user of their platform – nor would I support other private sector tech giants headquartered far away.

The perception that people cannot communicate with each other, nor organize rightful protests, without the use of this one company or that one is a dangerous one in a world where these companies neither care for our rights nor our privacy.

Instead, there’s an opportunity for the emergence of a plethora of independent African “anti-block” social and commercial solutions -whether SMS based or USSD based or whatever the technology specialists deem fit – that can then be supported if shut down, instead of us raising our voices in support of the Facebook Group of Companies.

There is tremendous opportunity here because we already built and have experience using a decentralized Internet and many of those who had a hand in that are still alive. It’s only been relatively recently that we’ve re-CompuServed the Internet, and it’s not too late to rediscover more robust, decentralized networks of networks.

Sneak peak of a two-colour job I just finished printing. I printed the black yesterday, the grey today. And found–as I did the first time I printed grey–that the recipe for grey is “white plus half of an infinitesimal smidge of black.” Drying today. Mailing tomorrow.

Tourist season has begun in earnest and with it comes the bane of all pedestrian Charlottetowners, the four-abreast sidewalk-taker-uppers. Here’s an attempt to illustrate one small slice of this today, as I hurried to catch the bus uptown (do they think we can’t hear them?).

Read from bottom to top (that’s a bug in the design!).

It’s 15ºC and cloudy here in Charlottetown today, which, to my taste, is about as good as it gets weather-wise, especially if you want to do things outside. And, looking at the current temperature map for North America, it appears to be the best weather on the eastern side of the continent right now. Those pink shades of the map in Georgia and Arizona? 100ºF and higher.

Oliver and I have been experimenting with new and interesting ways of getting from Stars for Life back home: today’s experiment involved walking down Beach Grove Road, across North River Road to the Hermitage Creek Trail, and then along the trail to University Avenue where we caught the bus downtown.

Along the trail, just in front of Tremploy, we came across this “Freshwater Marsh & Pond” sign, with both the CADC and West Royalty logos on it:

West Royalty hasn’t existed as a separate community since 1995, meaning this sign must be at least 24 years old. It’s held up surprisingly well.

I wonder when CADC (now also defunct) built its last nature trail.

I was updating 1Password on my Mac this morning and took the occasion to look at the “About 1Password” dialog:

I was intrigued by that long list of places: it seemed to suggest that 1Password is maintained entirely by remote workers. And, sure enough, it turns out to be true; from the 1Password jobs page:

Work remotely, from anywhere, flexibly. You could be in a sweet home office, then a café for part of the day, and even in your camper on a caldera – so long as there’s a reliable Internet connection. We’ve got folks in over 30 cities, from New Zealand to Germany to our office in Toronto.

I pasted that list of places into MapCustomizer.com to generate a map of all of them; here’s what I got:

It turns out that a good number of those workers are in southern Ontario, not surprising as it’s a Toronto-based company:

I see they have workers in Burlington (where my parents live) and Brantford (where my grandparents lived) and Peterborough (where Catherine and I used to live).

I like being about to put a geography to my software creators, especially those that create software that’s as mission-critical to my everyday as 1Password is.

I just made a donation to John Andrew’s Green campaign for the deferred election in District 9.

Everything I’ve learned about John over the past month has shown him to be a thoughtful, intelligent, universally well-regarded person with a deep connection to his home, his watershed and his district.

John is never going to win points for theatricality. I wouldn’t look to him for a disabling political barb levied at his opponents.

But we’re not casting a drama, we’re hiring someone to help solve gnarly problems, and John’s had a career of doing that. He is the right person for this job.

And if that isn’t enough, the view from his back porch is about the greenest possible view you can imagine.