A carnival of technology

The first of the harvest festivals (not counting Canada’s) is upon us, setting the cogs of holiday unrelenting towards Christmas. It’s great to have an excuse for celebration and all, but I find the demand for spirit by some of the celebrants of these second-tier holidays to be a little unsettling. Y’all know that there’s a whole holiday season coming soon, right? You really ought to pace yourselves. Halloween can be fun, but it’s used as an excuse to hide the celebration of your fantasies, the parade of costume, behind the screen of the costumed crowd, making unusual behavior acceptable. You can dress in costume any day you want. Try it! Go against the flow. We have booze to erode inhibitions; we don’t need a holiday for it.

Perhaps my uncertainty towards Halloween in relation to other holidays stems from the food. On Thanksgiving you have a turkey, on Christmas you have some kind of feast, maybe a ham or something, but Halloween just has candy corn. My sentiments toward candy corn are similar to those of Lewis Black, though I’m a lot less angry about it, and I have a habit of making it through the whole bag before remembering that I don’t really like candy corn that much and that it makes me sick. I did manage to keep away from candy corn this year, but that was the only thing in the smörgåsbord of candy that I think of as a tradition. I can’t get excited about candy corn. Turkey and dressing, on the other hand, is going to be delicious, and I can hardly wait.

Enough about holidays: you probably see that lonely little category tag down there, and you know that what I really want to talk about is the bike. I did end up horizontal recently, but no one was hurt. It was raining a couple of weeks ago, and while racing down Mansell Road to catch the bus, I thought it wise to try to stop at a light instead of playing chicken with the guy turning left. I didn’t really count on my brakes locking up. Locked brakes was rather a new sensation for me, so my reaction was to get ready to fall instead of easing up a bit and pumping them. My landing was beautifully executed, all of the skidding motion happening on my gloves instead of on exposed fleshy parts, and I managed to move with the skidding, falling bike to avoid spraining anything on the foot I keep strapped in, but the handlebar hit a little hard, bending it down on the left side. This bike is made of aluminum instead of an alloy of steel and the heart of Mt. Doom, but I still can’t bend the damn thing back by hand. My solution is not to care, since it really isn’t bent very much. I guess I’ll buy a new handlebar eventually.

On a more recent disastrous note, I totally screwed up my tires on Sunday. I had known that they were getting a bit worn, but it took a definite failure to get me to replace them. I spent a good part of Sunday tooling around the metro Atlanta Northside, buying groceries, looking at books and deciding that I’m not ready to spend a hundred freaking dollars on waterproof pants to go over my ten dollar jeans. Contributing to the failure was my maladjusted fenders: they would rub the tire from time to time, but I usually just readjusted them at a stop light, making a note to tighten everything up later. I guess this wore a thin spot on the cheap tire I used to replace the one I killed on a particularly mean nail, since late in the Sunday afternoon I ran over some glass which left a huge gaping hole in what had apparently been a slightly bulgy part of the rear tire. I really wish that all these people drinking while driving would switch to cans. I came prepared, though, but while replacing the tube found that my previous hatred for Performance store brand tubes was really my own fault. The pump I use has a tendency to grab onto the valve which can end up pulling it off the tube if I’m not careful, which I wasn’t. It was all quite educational. The final result of this is that I now have two new tires (the front tire had an unsettling gouge and was starting to go square, so I figured I may as well replace that, too). I decided not to get the kevlar banded tires that were available, since the non-kevlar parts looked kind of crappy, opting for the same Italian brand that came with bike. The maximum recommended pressure is 10psi lower for some reason, and they have some tiny little treads where my original tires were basically bald, but I’m still ridin’ 25’s, and it’s all pretty much the same.

As far as other parts that need replacing, the brakes are mighty close to the wear lines now, and the chain, which I had thought about replacing a little while ago, is now definitely—according to some overpriced tool—at the 0.75% wear mark, which means it’s time for a new one. I’m not terribly worried about the brakes since replacing them is just a matter of positioning, but the chain requires a special tool, which makes me a little nervous. I have a funky-looking chain tool, but I’m not really sure how to use it. I guess I’ll find out this weekend. Wish me luck.

You know that XML thing? Ever notice that one of the frequent XML examples is how to encode a mailing address? I guess mailing addresses are something people use pretty frequently in their data. Well, I’ve noticed this, and I’ve also noticed that no one has ever (that I can find) made a standard for specifying mailing addresses. ADIS is the only thing I’ve seen, and that format contains a ridiculous granularity for addresses and requires that you include data that only a postal database could love. This XML Web 2.0 open source Internet is all about reusable modules, right? I can’t find anything to reuse, so I made my own thing. http://gophernet.org/schemata/address.xsd. It gives you enough data, according to the Fedex international waybill, to encode addresses for about any country. It won’t let you create databases searchable by county or delivery zone or whatever weird thing that foreign people use, but I don’t care about that, and I’m betting that you don’t either. For a quick example, here’s the president’s address using my new standard:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<address xmlns="http://www.gophernet.org/schemata/address.xsd">
  <recipient>George W. Bush</recipient>
  <address1>1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW</address1>
  <city>Washington</city>
  <state>DC</state>
  <postalCode>20500</postalCode>
  <country>USA</country>
</address>

The address type or element in the schema can easily be used in other schemata that need an address. You’re welcome, world.

I find it useful to be able to cut things in the normal course of a day. I’ve been carrying around some variety of a Victorinox Swiss Army knife nearly every day since sometime in high school. I guess I wasn’t really supposed to have a knife at school, but I knew the principal fairly well, so I didn’t really care. Knives get dull, of course, but I haven’t had to actually sharpen one in years. I end up losing them first.

The first knife I lost in recent memory was taken by a TSA employee since I had forgotten to ditch it before a flight. My flying habits are to take MARTA to the airport and to stuff everything into carry-on luggage, so I didn’t have much of an option. I think I lost another knife in between that one and my most recent one, but I can’t remember how. Most recently I lost a knife last week, a dull knife that I had been thinking about sharpening, but I think I dropped it somewhere on Mansell while trying to fix a problem with a bungee cord holding bags to my bike. Whoops.

So it’s time for a new knife, and I’ve been thinking about which one to buy. My past string of knives have been the Tinker model. It has two blades, a can opener, a bottle opener, that thing on that back that closes on your hand when you try to use it, and a Phillips screwdriver. The punch thing on the back is pretty useless (see hands, closing on), and I’ve had very few times where I needed the screwdriver and could actually fit it into whatever I needed to turn. I find everything else on the knife useful. I don’t really want any of the heavier tool options, like the saw, and I don’t think I’ll find a knife that doesn’t come with the punch thing, but there a few options for the screwdriver’s spot. The standard option is a corkscrew, and this got me thinking: would I find a lot of use for a corkscrew?

My parents are wine drinkers, and they’ve tried at various points to guide me down that path. It never really took, though, and I ended expressing my snobbery through beer, instead. I find beer easier to understand and less intimidating. The different varieties of beer are diverse enough that it’s very easy to understand to basic characteristics of each, and, though some varieties that take better to cellaring are often sold as part of a particular year’s “vintage,” the product from year to year isn’t going to vary as much as (I guess) one would expect from wine. Or if it does, the time that the beer was made at least isn’t advertised to the same extent. Wine is the just a single fruit, fermented, so I would expect more differences from year to year than with beer, the product of many ingredients and a consistent recipe. To me, wine is a bit overwhelming.

I’ve bought wine a handful of times for cooking, and I always feel lost when doing so. However, I recently had something of an epiphany: there’s a lot of stuff on the wine shelves in grocery and liquor stores, and a lot of people seem to like it, so maybe I should give it a shot. I didn’t figure out what beers I like by just looking at them, so maybe I should do something similar to my perpetual mission of malted discovery: try a bunch of stuff and see what I enjoy. So far I’ve had a couple of bottles from South Africa. I didn’t know where to start, but the depiction on the bottle of a giraffe as a “Tall Horse” seemed like a good compromise between the opaque (to me) and plain descriptions of some kind of grape and the ridiculous names that seem to have become popular in recent years. It grabbed my eye without offending me. I had a Shiraz, which (I looked it up) is some kind of grape that makes red wine, and I kind of liked that. I also had a Chardonnay, which was ok but not something I thought was all that great. I’m just a beginner in this and have no clue what I’m doing, but this was an eye-opening experience. I can enjoy wine. A whole new world of drinking is opened to me.

To get back to the knife, wine bottles have corks, and corks need a corkscrew. I have two: one of those big things with the levers that I bought at Target a while back because I thought I might need a corkscrew at some point, and more compact one that I got from the parents that unfolds into a corkscrew sticking out of a handle. I can’t seem to use the big one correctly—I can’t seem to screw it in far enough without going entirely through the cork to pull it all the way out, and once I’m partway out the whole assembly is stuck to the bottle so that I can’t just pull the entire thing out the rest of the way,—so the smaller corkscrew is the winner in my book. The one on the knife would be used in the same style as the small corkscrew, so I could probably get some use out of that. And who knows, maybe I’ll find myself lost in the woods one day and need to open a bottle of wine.

I should probably mention that I have received my plastic Breeze Card from MARTA. It’s useless to me until my October month pass expires, but November’s pass will go on the card. The November pass will actually be one of the new 30-day passes, not strictly tied to a calendar month like before, which is a nice change, but they could have done that with the magstripe cards.

I noticed this weekend while trolling my logs that one person arrived at my page while searching for “‘Breeze Card’ sucks.” I never stated such a thing, but I think that this is one of my nonsensical referral strings that I should address. As it stands right now, other than the improved fare gates, I do think that the Breeze Card kind of sucks for these reasons:

The machines are difficult to use. Under the old system, when you arrived at a train station, you put money in a machine and you received tokens. It was simple and easy to use. With the new kiosks, it takes several button pushes before you can purchase a fare, making the system more complex and difficult, especially for the visually impaired. Tokens had their weaknesses, of course. I don’t know if token sucking was ever specifically a problem, but I was forced to jump more than one turnstile after it refused to accept a token, and people selling tokens and transcard use was always a problem at North Ave. and likely elsewhere. Simulating the behavior of old token machines is not feasible with MARTA’s intention of charging 50¢ for the short-term Breeze tickets, but I see this as a weakness in the system. It should be as easy as possible to pay for a fare, whether that fare is recorded in a token or a temporary smart card.

The new fare gates are just as broken as the old ones. The old turnstiles were broken pretty frequently, and, though I don’t have any data on relative brokenness of the two systems, I would expect new gates to be completely operational at least for a little while. I find it especially annoying when both wide gates are broken at Medical Center at the same time. Lugging a bike onto MARTA requires the extra wide gates unless I want the system to think I’m tailgating myself, and, while I’m ranting, I really wish that people of an average width not carrying luggage or bicycles would quit using the wider gates. The old luggage/handicap/bicycle gates discouraged use by being of an entirely different form from the turnstiles and by often setting off an alarm even when used properly, but the wider version of the breeze gates is simply a more comfortable looking version of the ones adjacent.

It’s probably kind of expensive. One of the problems that has plagued MARTA since its inception is that, as mandated by a state legislature that would like to see it fail, only 50% of its revenue may be used for operational expenses, the other 50% going towards capital improvements. The law has been temporarily amended a few times, and I believe that MARTA currently uses a 45/55 split, but it stands that the state mandates their budget constraints without providing any funding. This is relevant to the Breeze system since Breeze is a capital improvement and, as noted above, the new kiosks can be difficult to use. This is currently mitigated by dedicated employees providing help and training to confused riders. I don’t know if this is currently covered under the capital or operational portion of the MARTA budget, but it’s going to have to become operational at some point, and the wages of Breeze employees takes money away from MARTA’s basic services.

Transfers are difficult. The habit of most bus riders is to put money into the bus fare machine rather than using any sort of card. During the Breeze transition, transfers are handled as under the old system: paper transfers are provided for bus-to-bus transfers, and magstripe cards are provided for bus-to-train transfers. I imagine that MARTA would like to eliminate the magstripe transfers in favor of Breeze cards, but this can only happen if every bus rider is required to purchase a Breeze ticket when paying in cash. Bus drivers are supposed to be able to sell Breeze services from their console in a manner similar to the kiosk, but this means that MARTA has a choice between continuing to waste money on bus-to-train transfer cards or delaying buses while customers purchase a 50¢ Breeze card for every transfer. The second choice, of course, would further inconvenience riders accustomed to simply paying $1.75 for a ride without the need for extra hardware, and the first choice, which I doubt they will take, will limit the Breeze system’s ability to track rider usage.

The transition from old fare media is a bit sketchy. For the transition from tokens to Breeze, the Breeze machines will accept tokens in exchange for a Breeze ticket loaded with one fare. However, tokens cannot, until the start of 2007, be used to reload existing Breeze cards. Up until the advent of my bicycling, I’d call myself an average infrequent MARTA user, and I’ve found eight tokens laying around from old rides. I’ll probably keep the Superbowl XXVIII one and the shiniest of the regular tokens for the sake of history, but that leaves nine dollars worth of fares that I’d like to spend. Will I be able to convert them into Breeze card fun bucks, spending them as part of a monthly pass, or even be able to turn them into fares on my Breeze card? Should MARTA even allow my former, ideal supposition? I’ve been riding MARTA off and on since 2000, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a couple of those tokens only cost me $1.50. I don’t know the best answer to these questions.

That said, I think that the overall changes of Breeze are good for MARTA. Fare evasion is much more difficult now, and, once the tap-to-exit system is fully deployed, MARTA will have data on rider habits that was impossible with the turnstiles. To add some anecdotal evidence to the positive aspect of this change, the East-West line was notorious for fare evasion as well as inadequate service with four-car trains becoming full before reaching Avondale from Indian Creek. By having more complete entry data (and fees) and knowledge of where these people exit, MARTA will be more able to provide appropriate service where needed. A tap-to-exit system also opens the possibility of distance-based fares. I don’t know if MARTA plans to implement this, but, given the amount of area covered, I don’t think it would be inappropriate to charge someone traveling from Midtown to Arts Center differently from someone taking the bus and train from Alpharetta to the airport. Lastly, having a Breeze card linked to a person rather than using anonymous tokens and magstripe cards allows MARTA to provide a form of theft and loss protection similar to what you would expect from a credit card. I don’t know if anyone was ever mugged for their tokens or month pass, but the fear of such can end with Breeze.

I think that the Breeze smart card system is ultimately a step forward. MARTA still has some crap to work out, and there are some disadvantages to the new system when compared to the old tokens and turnstiles, but Breeze solves some serious problems concerning fare collection and statistics. Tapping a smart card instead of swiping a magstripe card or inserting a token is only a different way to enter MARTA, not better nor worse, and the new system opens up several possibilities for MARTA to improve. I only hope that they take them.

I don’t usually talk about politics. I usually lean left, but I think that everyone in office is an asshole. When I go to vote, I vote against the incumbent when in doubt. The optimist in me would rather go with a punk who hasn’t screwed up yet over the punk who already has. The last candidate I cared a little about was Rufus Terrill, running as a conservative democrat for Georgia Lieutenant Governor because, in his AJC profile, while the other candidates answered the “favorite gadget” question by talking about their blackberrys, Rufus’s answer was “a gun.” He seems probably a little nuts, but at least he’s open about it. He got three percent of the vote in the primary.

Once in a while a candidate will do something so spectacularly bad, either in office or in their campaign, that I’ll actually go out of my way to vote against them. For this reason, I ask all of you in District 7 of the Fulton County Board of Education to vote against Julia Bernath. I, unfortunately, am in the absurdly arranged District 3 (including Sandy Springs and Hapeville), but this doesn’t stop me from seeing Ms. Bernath’s awful campaign signs. I don’t think that anyone who uses Comic Sans should be in charge of the county’s children.

This begins the week that I’m going to start trying to cut down on eating out. Friday night Mexicans and another recurring social event in the middle of the week will probably have me eating out twice during the week, but if I can eat in the rest of those nights and get into the habit of packing a lunch, I will have cut down my eating out by 11 instances (I had Chick-fil-a for lunch today). I don’t want to plan every day in advance, since I fear that planning too far ahead would make eating a chore again; hopefully giving myself a few options for a meal without limiting myself to any particular one will keep some spontaneity in this plan.

I don’t want to spend a whole lot of time cooking during the week, so I’m going to try to have enough prepared this weekend that I can quickly assemble a meal on a weeknight. Tonight I’m going to bake a meatloaf which should give me four or five servings, among those lunches being a possibility. Tomorrow night I’m going to cook something out of the pasta cookbook: orecchiette with spinach and garlic. I’ve made this recipe before, and I want to make it again in part so that I can use up the rest of the orecchiette I have from last time and in part so I can raise hell when I can’t find any spinach. Seriously, grocery people, it’s edible again. The pasta book claims that the recipe will make six servings, but I’m going to assume that I’ll end up pigging out and plan for three. For a couple more meals, I have some frozen gumbo from the St. Ann (I guess it’s Annunciation of the Lord now? The new name isn’t very catchy) Memorial Day shindig, and I can thaw that in the fridge on Monday (and possibly Tuesday. I don’t actually know how long things take to thaw.). For side dishes, I have a cob of corn, and I plan to buy some green beans today as well as fixings for some macaroni and cheese that I can make in an hour or so. I can either wait that long one night after work or make it on Sunday.

I figure that all this food gives me at least nine meals, and I can make non-meatloaf sandwiches for the other two. I hope that this works. Coming next week: crock pot adventures.

I need to cook more.

There are several reasons for my new cooking drive, the first being a boredom with eating out. In my rush to get home, I usually just grab a TV dinner from Publix or something to go from a restaurant, and I nearly never pack a lunch to work. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m so bored with all the restaurants around the places I live and work that choosing something to eat has become a chore. I no longer crave any particular food; I simply give up my search for desire and settle on one of the same places I always go. I want something new. Secondly, there’s my health. As you’re probably aware, I’m a bit overweight, and, though turning my commute into a workout has helped a lot, I seem to have bottomed out as far as weight loss. Though there might be some fat to muscle conversion going on in my legs to slow this down, the keys to dietary health are eat less and exercise more, and I’m only doing one of these things. I imagine that most of the things I cook are better for me than the average restaurant fare. I know I’m able to get rid of some of the gut, since I was a lot lighter in college when I was eating one meal a day on average, but I’d like to reach that state without starving myself anemic this time.

My weakness is planning. In the limited time I have at nights, I can’t waste a whole lot making up my mind what to cook, and my leftover management skills are rather poor. The crock pot gives me a means of cooking things during the day, but I’ve already had all of the things in the recipe booklet that looked good, which brings me to my next problem: available recipes. Chris Lumens’s recent posts on food have made me realize that I have similar troubles: though I have a couple of cookbooks for simple, unfrightening recipes given to me by my parents and by Mike, as well as a book of pasta recipes also from my parents, my cache of recipes doesn’t have quite the variety I would like. Also like Chris, I’d like to buy more food locally than from the supermarket, a problem I sometimes solve by visits to that market stand on Mount Vernon, but that’s a secondary problem for now. I want to get into the cooking habit first.

Beginning this weekend, I’m going to try to plan out some meals. To start I’m going to use the recipes I have on hand, maybe starting with my mom’s meatloaf which I haven’t had in a while, but I’ll eventually look for another cookbook for more ideas. When I cook something, I need to figure out beforehand how long leftovers will last, how long I can eat them before becoming bored and how much I should freeze. I need to include lunches in the plan so that I’m not eating so many burritos from that place on Mansell. I need to plan things a week or so in advance so I can have the ingredients and plan how much time I’ll be spending in the kitchen. I need to enjoy food again.

The parents came over to visit a couple of weekends ago using the pretext of returning those Breeze Kings and Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir CDs I left back in May. We went to the aquarium, which I guess is the thing to do now when visiting Atlanta, and I took some photos in case you were wondering what a blurry fish looks like. We also ate a lot of meat and drank some beer at the Five Seasons Brewery. I had fun, and I hope they did. Laziness took over my drive to clean before they arrived, so I’m not sure if mom’s lack of comment means that it wasn’t really that bad or she was just being polite.

I bought a new bike thing. I tried to buy a pair of SKS mudguards a while back from REI, but I somehow ended up with the messed up bent pair, and when I took them back, REI no longer had another pair of the right size. I now have a different style—the “Commuter,” still full fenders and still from SKS—that I bought at Roswell Bikes for not very much. They’re black. It hasn’t rained on me yet, so I can’t say how well they work.

I’m not really sure where MARTA is going with this Breeze card thing. I requested one of the plastic cards from their website but have seen no sign of it yet, and, though I haven’t used one of the kiosks recently, I don’t think they’re yet being sold elsewhere. When I last used the paper cards, there seemed to be about a 50% chance of it working on the bus, so I’m guessing that the bus conversion is the holdback. I think they also changed how transfers work. I don’t use transfers as part of my commute, but I had thought that a transfer was recorded for your breeze card when you enter the train station. I overheard on Thursday a MARTA employee explaining to a kiosk user that you tap the card when you exit to get a rail-to-bus transfer, and today I noticed stickers on the fare gate offering the same advice. I guess they’re trying to make sure you only get transfers to buses that make sense. I think right now the bus drivers still take your paper card when you use it, so I guess that’s going to have to stop before they allow more than more fare on the card at a time.

PS: flat tire. No obvious cause, but the crappy Performance tube looked like it already had some kind of patch where the hole is.