A carnival of technology

Man, bicycle brakes are annoying. Atlanta is hilly, and I’d rather not launch myself into a speed bump or stopped traffic while racing downhill at high speeds instead of, you know, doing those things, so I have a definite need for brakes that make me slow and even stop, and I use them a good bit. I wore through the stock brakes after three or four months, and I wore through the replacements I got from Roswell Bicycles a week or two ago. They were Avid, I think. It’s probably just as well that they didn’t last too long after the wheel replacement, since Avid seems to have a reputation for eating rims. Maybe this is more of an issue for people with ceramic rims; I don’t know. They did make some unpleasant grinding noises from time to time, and if that was indeed the sound of damage being done, I’m glad to be rid of them.

Brakes are complicated. Rather than the traditional bicycle part feature matrix of durability, lightness and cheapness (pick any two), brakes have a dozen other factors to consider, such as kindness to rims, stopping power, noise, and probably some other stuff. While I do have preferences on some bicycle parts (Vittoria has me sold on tires, since they’re reasonably light and I haven’t been able to puncture them with anything short of a nail), I’ve not formed any serious opinions on brakes, so I just bought two pairs of the ones that were on sale at Nashbar. They’re Aztec 2 pads, which I now guess are supposed to be pretty nice, but the problem I immediately encountered was that the front brakes scream like a banshee. Like a car, most stopping power comes from a bike’s front brakes, so this was kind of a problem. It’s embarassingly loud. Brake squeal is most commonly caused by improper toe-in, the technique of positioning pads so that the trailing edge with respect to rim direction (the edge nearest the front of the bike) hits first in order to pull the rest of the pad against the rim, but no amount of positioning, cleaning the rims and repositioning changed the noise in the least.

At this point I consulted the Internet for advice, and in this I learned two important lessons: firstly, I should probably check for reviews of parts before I buy them. I was somewhat upset to see reviews of Aztec pads at mtbr.com contain phrases like “they will probably stop you eventually.” Secondly, I should probably double check the brand before I go looking up reviews. Aztec 2 pads are different from regular Aztec, and Aztec is rated much higher, so much so that Aztec 2 is in the mtbr hall of fame, whereas Aztec pads are only .19 (out of five) points away from the hall of shame. So they’re good brakes or something, but they’re still noisy as all hell on my bike. I decided to try what I did last time for brakes: walk into Roswell Bicycles and see what they hand me. This completely ignores my first lesson, of course, but it worked ok last time. This time Roswell Bicycles handed me a pair of Koolmax Thinline pads, which are kind of weird and still kind of noisy. Maybe I should just have the shop put them on and see what they can do.

The Koolmax pads are weird in that they have an extra little chunk of rubber at the leading edge of the pad intended to make the pad work better in wet conditions. The idea is that this wedge will scrape water and mud and whatever else off the rim before it gets to the rest of the pad. That sounds like an ok idea, but it raises questions as to how the hell they’re supposed to go on. I’ve tried a variety of configurations, and though they’re less loud than the Aztec pads, I still can’t get that comfortable quiet hiss that I so crave. The Internet was of no help here. One guy suggested toeing them out. I found a post that Sheldon Brown made to some forum that suggested positioning them flat against the rim (and thus sort of toed-in, since the front and rear of the pad will be touching the rim, but not the back forward of the wedge) would be the most effective use of the squeegeeing power of the brakes. I went with this flat(ish) configuration, and for now I’m just living with a bit of noise. I guess the pads have a break-in period, so I’m hoping it’ll go away after a while. If not, I left one pair of pads unopened, so I can return half of my purchases if I decide the pads suck, and maybe I’ll get the shop to try to work some bike shop magic to reduce the noise.

In other news, I’m still playing Zelda II, but I’m not playing it very much. I’ve reached a somewhat frustrating point in the game. This iteration of Hyrule is separated into two large halves crossable through a short dungeon, and everything interesting at this point is in the second half. The hammer can be used to open up the road between the two halves, but I don’t think I get that for a while. To do anything in the game I first half to pass through the same annoying dungeon I’ve crossed a dozen times and then open myself up to annoying forest and swamp encounters before reaching the road again. The overworld monsters in the first Legend of Zelda were kind of neat in that you could ignore them if they weren’t blocking anything. In Zelda II, an encounter takes you out of the overworld entirely, and you have to fight your way back. In addition to that, the means of fighting is very different. Link is two sprites tall, and attacks can come high or low. Standing, you attack high and defend high, and ducking you attack low and defend low. So you have to pay attention to what’s coming at you and the vulnerabilities of your opponent. This is especially annoying on the enemies that can simultaneously attack and defend at different levels, and these seem to be the same ones where the full-health shooting sword is ineffective. The fighting is becoming annoying, and I’d like a return to a simpler system, or at least to overworld enemies that I can ignore while I walk to the levels.

I think I’ve watched enough as far as goofy documentaries and relatively new movies in the two movies I’ve rented from Blockbuster, so now it’s time to use my membership for its true purpose: watching movies I probably should have seen already. I returned Thank You for Smoking today (it was pretty funny, and I thought it interesting that in a film about the tobacco lobby they never showed anyone actually light a cigarette) and rented The Godfather and Rocky. That’s right, I’ve never seen Rocky. I think I’ve watched Rocky IV on TBS or something, or if not IV then whichever one had the Russian guy who was maybe from space, and I think I just described a Superman movie instead. Sure, I know what it’s about, and it’s basically a two-hour training montage, but still, not seeing that is just downright unamerican. The box says it was the best movie of 1976, and I’ve been burned on that before—An American in Paris was the best movie of 1952 and even recommended by some old guy wandering through the same section of the movie store a few years ago, and that movie was a piece of crap—but I don’t expect Rocky to be any good. I expect a cheesy movie about a boxer given a chance to make it big, and as long as Gene Kelly doesn’t spend twenty freaking minutes dancing through a Mary Poppins candyland fantasy at the end, I can’t think of any way this movie will disappoint.

I’m not sure what to think of The Godfather. It’s another classic, sure, but it’s supposed be a good movie as well, so I’m not sure if it has enough lowbrow appeal to be part of that moviegoing zeitgeist that would make me less of a person for not having seen it. I’m not really sure what to make of gangster movies since I’ve really never bothered to watch any. I’ve seen Once Upon a Time in America, but I’m not sure that really counts. It’s a four-hour movie by Sergio Leone, a director best known for his spaghetti westerns with Clint Eastwood, and I think that this probably colors my perception of gangster movies. I like westerns, and I liked Once Upon a Time in America for the ways in which related to westerns. The move from a barren frontier to an urban setting was a huge change, but it still centered around flawed heroes and cold-hearted criminals. It wasn’t as much an off-genre western as Yojimbo (the story for which Leone adapted without permission into A Fistful of Dollars), but there was a definite progression along the same theme through Leone’s last three films. Coppola hasn’t done any westerns I’m aware of, so I don’t really know what to expect. The only other gangster movie I’ve seen was a recent one, The Departed, and that was pretty good, but I don’t know how well that relates. The Departed seemed to me like just a well done action movie with some convoluted plot twists, and I would hope that the best picture of 1972 (there’s that stupid award again) would be better than that. It’s number freaking 1 on the IMdb best movie list, so I should probably see it.

Both Rocky and the The Godfather have sequels, so that opens up even more rental possibilities once I’m done with these two. I know that the Rocky sequels are ridiculous, and I’ve been told that the third Godfather movie is not so great, but whatever. That’s the beauty of renting: I can watch crap and enjoy it without the guilt of paying twenty bucks for a bad movie.

The clerk at Blockbuster asked me today if I was interested in joining the Blockbuster Rewards program, and I’m not sure what to think of that. I said no reflexively without even asking what it was. Now that I’ve looked it up, it appears to provide free rentals every now and then for repeat customers, but I can’t figure out what the advantage to Blockbuster is. Most customer loyalty cards trade customer data for discounts, but Blockbuster already has a unique ID attached to all my of rentals. Why don’t they just give the free rentals to every member, like a coupon or something? Maybe there’s some kind of extra fee like with Barnes and Noble? If there’s an extra card involved, I want no part in it. I currently have nineteen cards stuffed into the main pocket of my wallet: my driver’s license, three credit cards, a MARTA Breeze card, three insurance cards, four customer loyalty cards, my Blockbuster membership card, organ donor information (if any of y’all want my parts when I die, you can have them), the RFID keycard that gets me into the office, my Fedex account number, a card that gets me into a handful of goofy Sandy Springs events, and a card that gets me a free burrito after I eat another five. I don’t need any more cards. I already feel like I’m dealing a hand of poker when someone asks me any particular one. I guess I’ll have to ask some questions about this program, but right now I’m not too worried about losing a free rental a month if it means one less card.

I just really don’t like customer loyalty cards, though I’ve been able to justify pretty much all of those presented to me except for the Kroger Plus card. Kroger trades customer data for normal prices disguised as a discount, but other stores seem to provide genuine discounts compared to their competitors. The Barnes and Noble card costs $15 (or something) a year and provides a 10% discount, so it’s bascially a gamble that I’m going to spend $150 (or whatever) over the course of a year. That’s a pretty safe bet. I got the Performance Bike card since the discount provided with buying a bicycle was more than the cost of the card. REI membership and provides a yearly dividend, and I can pretend to care about the economics of sporting equipment by being a coöp member. The Borders Rewards card is the most confusing that I currently have. I think I signed up for the (free) program because the cashier that offered it to me looked kind of hot, but I don’t even know what it does. I get emails once in a while, and sometimes the receipt says I got a discount. Looking at the Blockbuster page, it seems like their customer loyalty program is the worst of all of these options. It costs money, and there are bizarre rules as to what you can get and when. I’m not sure if I want to be a part of that.

I’ve been playing around with the MARTA map again trying to add in some of the bus routes. I’ve been working my way North to South and have a few added, but one thing I noticed pretty quickly is that adding a lot of polylines to the google map slows it way down. Ajax is pretty damn slow to begin with, so this just won’t do. One workaround I found was to use an undocumented tile overlay feature. Google maps allows for custom tile overlays to be created, and since these are just a set of PNGs like the rest of the map data, it doesn’t tax the browser any more than displaying all the streets and stuff. There’s also a trick you can use to get Google to make the tiles for you based on a KML file, similar to how you can put a KML URL into the Google Maps search box and see it displayed on the web. I’ve switched the rail and bus routes to KML, but I’m not sure how long this will work.

One of the bigger backend changes I made when I copied David’s map was to put the data in an XML file. I’m not a huge fan of XML and all it stands for, but it makes more sense to have the data in XML than to encode it in Javascript, and I expanded on that to create a big ridiculous schema so I can pursue hopeless dreams of creating route searches, kind of like Google Transit. This decision allowed me to generate KML from this source data file, but I still use the original XML for marker placement since the KML overlay doesn’t allow as much flexibility as far as information formatting, and I need to make my own marker objects in order to provide that station search form. That soure file is pretty big and unweildy, though, so I’m thinking of creating more compact XML files from this source file containing just the data needed for the map.

One of the limitations of the KML overlay, besides it being undocumented, unsupported and possibly a violation of the terms of use, is that KML files are limited 1MB. That’s a pretty good number of bytes, but I’m already at 84k with only eight routes. I may end up having to generate my own tiles yet.

Lunch today was an odd convergence of synchronicity and annoyance. I rode the bike today despite the rain, because I’m an idiot, and this limits my mobility, making the already difficult decision of where to eat lunch even more of a chore. I’ve become jaded about pretty much everything around the office, so it takes me a good while to decide where to eat. Today I got hungry long before I made this choice, so I suited up and started off on the bike before actually making a decision. I originally intended to get takeout, since I like to avoid riding on a full stomach, but the choice I ended up making was to go to an Italian place, Al Capri, which is in the spot once occupied by Port City Java. Supporting local business gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, and it’s close enough that I could eat in the restaurant without puking on the way back, so I made a slow, casual coast through the parking lot across the street in order to turn around and retrieve that big heavy lock that I left at the office. The shopping center for Al Capri is hard to see from the road, so it’s a little bit low rent. There’s a paint store, a halal meat market (which actually sounds kind of interesting; I should go in there some time), a skate shop and a military recruiting post. The recruiting center, of course, makes me the most wary: one time when passing by the spot on foot on the way back from Roswell Bikes, I was harangued by a young man who basically accused me of being unamerican for not wanting to join up and get shipped off to Iraq. I don’t want to have any part in the military. Regardless of the war going on right now, I have at times a problem with authority, and I doubt I could even pass the physical. The military’s great and all, and I’ll keep supporting our troops by donating to the USO now and then, but I can’t see myself being a part of the military.

As I stopped in front of the office building and started to dismount from the bike, a black sedan with US government plates pulled up into the parking lot and rolled down the windows. I vaguely recall some kind of shouted words just before this, and, though I’m usually able to track the positions of all the cars around me as a part of my goal of not getting run over, I can’t recall if the car pulled in off the street or if it was circling the adjacent parking lot. Anyhow, the car was full of Marines, and one of them in the back, Sergeant Isenhower, wanted to have some words with me. It’s probably worthwhile to note at this point that I don’t think too clearly after getting of the bike. I was already pretty hungry, and there’s no direct metabolic path from fat to glucose, so my brain kind of suffers. The bike makes me dumb. One time that punk at Performance Bicycles decided to quiz me on the amount of change I should receive, and, after hemming and hawing for a good while, I got it wrong by a dime. So there I was, my body searching for the right muscles to destroy in order to think, and Sergeant Isenhower wanted me to join up with the Marines. I told him flat out that I didn’t want to, and he thanked me for my honesty and drove off after handing me a business card. I honestly can’t figure out any reason they chose me as a target other than that recruiting centers are getting desperate and are scraping the bottom of the barrel.

The Marines saw me on the bike, so there are several possibilities that they may have inferred from this. There are several reasons to use a bicycle as transportation, and rainy weekday bikers might fall into one or more of the following groups: the poor, those unable to drive (license suspended due to DUI, maybe), and the pinko commie environmental liberal pigdogs like myself. Poverty is a good target for military recruitment, but a casual look at my bike—skinny tires, prominently displayed logos from fancy parts—should disprove this hypothesis in my case. I’m not obviously a yuppie racer, though, and I don’t know how observant the Marines are with regards to bicycles, so they may have made a mistake on this count. Non-felony criminal records shouldn’t have an effect on recruitment, and environmentalists are probably bad targets. An assumption that I can’t afford a car is, as far as I can tell, is the only good thing for them that can be determined from a bicycle, except perhaps that it also makes me easier to catch. I have a young face, so this could also have been the reason they decided to pursue me. Bicycles also imply physical fitness, but I’m not exactly the paragon of health. I wear baggy clothing, though, so maybe this was also a factor. In all, I found the experience confusing and unnerving. I also found it interesting the Marines apparently don’t have the money to print new business cards. The card I got had whiteout over pretty much everything except “U.S. Marine Corps” and “Sergeant” (the previous cardholder was a Gunner Sergeant, so the spacing didn’t come out too well), and Isenhower’s name was written in by hand. Maybe they’re not out of money and just trying to be thrifty. Maybe we shouldn’t have tried to combine a troop surge with tax cuts.

The thing that upset me the most about this experience is that I didn’t want to change my mind about my lunch location, but I would have to go next to the recruiting center in order to eat by my plan. I’m beginning to strongly dislike those recruiters, and that’s sadly becoming a factor in my lunch decisions. I stuck with it anyways and ended up eating a meatball sub. Those meatballs were seriously the most delicious meatballs I have ever eaten. I’ve seen the recruiters eating here on some occasions, but I’ve still yet to see the restaurant crowded. Al Capri apparently started doing delivery (which was handled by the waiter, leaving the owner to both cook the food and wait tables), so maybe that’ll help them out. I hope that the recruiters at least have enough money left to leave a decent tip.

If you follow this blog through an RSS reader, you may have noticed a lot of old entries suddenly reappearing. I recently changed the archive handling from entries being archived in a big list of posts for the month to individual pages for each entry. This changed the RSS guids on everything, and I apologize for that, but I think that this system will better serve the people who find this site through their weird-ass google searches. The old month-based permalinks will still work, but the entry-based ones are now preferred. Once google reindexes everything, this will allow people searching for things like “Tim Berners-Lee is an asshole” (I’m the currently the second hit on that one, which makes me feel like I’m doing something right) won’t have to search their way through a month worth’s of entries to find the vitriol they so crave. Although I have been a mad posting fool this month (though not even scratching the surface of September 2001’s record in frequent, but short, entries), I didn’t really just make a dozen posts or so, so you can just mark everything as read and move on with life. The next time you search for information on Conecuh Ridge whiskey or how to cook corned beef in a crock pot, I’m sure you’ll thank me.

I’ve finally taken another step into the 20th century: I rented a movie.

Most of the time when I want to watch a movie at home, I buy it. This isn’t very economical, of course, but it has its advantages. I don’t have to worry about watching the movie on time or taking it back, it gives me a healthy supply of crap should friends come over wanting to watch movies, and, most importantly, I just plain feel like a better person than you because I own The Maltese Falcon and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. I used to be able to mitigate these costs by selling movies at the Movie Trading Company, but they’re no more, and I don’t know of any other convenient way to get rid of the things I don’t want anymore. I guess renting kind of makes sense.

All the cool kids are using Netflix these days, but I don’t want to jump that far into the future just yet. Allegations that Netflix gives queue priority to newer customers over older ones along with that class action lawsuit to similar affect make me a bit wary of joining Netflix or any other mail rental service. Brick and mortar rental stores still exist, of course, and they’re still handy, but the pricing of DVDs has made them much less necessary. VHS tapes used to be split into two categories based on the retail price: those priced to own and those priced to rent. I guess movie publishers have decided that there’s more money to be made from home theater enthusiasts if everything is instead priced in the range of the end user, so you don’t see many triple-digit DVD prices. VHS and these inflated prices are as dead as the 45s in your basement, so, while it’s still handy to be able to rent a movie for some fraction of the purchase price, it’s no longer the only reasonable way to see certain movies.

I got a Blockbuster card. I don’t have any particular love for Blockbuster; they’re just the first place I was able to find. I could have sworn that there was a Hollywood video next to that Publix on Hammond, but I was sadly mistaken. I signed up at the Blockbuster on Abernathy, which is an annoying uphill, heavily trafficked mile or so out of my way. I guess I still won’t be able to watch The Last Temptation of Christ, but whatever. I kicked off my new movie renting abilities with a different God movie: Jesus Camp, which is about evangelical Christian kids being indoctrinated into the culture war that the Christian right insists is being fought against them.

Documentaries seem to be coming more into vogue lately rather than simply being stuck in the back of the store next to Jacques Cousteau and a bunch of other nature films. Jesus Camp is a bit different from its contemporaries in that it doesn’t try to inject the filmmakers’ opinion. Michael Moore isn’t there telling you what’s good or bad, Morgan Freeman isn’t anthropomorphizing penguins, it just documents. The back of the box says that the movie appeals to two main groups of people: evangelical Christians who think that it’s a great documentation of their beliefs and way of life, and people like me who find their lifestyle terrifying.

As a bit of background on my own religious and political views, my parents raised me a good Catholic—I was an altar boy, I was confirmed under the patronage of St. Declan, all that stuff—and I tend to lean left politically. I’m not really as active in the church as my upbringing tells me I should be, but Catholicism still makes the most sense to me theologically, since the doctrine seems to have a firm grounding in both history (admittedly, a lot of the history was hastily assimilated from pagans during the first millennium or so of the church’s existence) and philosophy, and I at least know where to go to church on Easter. The born-again revival mentality throws away much of the philosophical background of Christianity, which I find disappointing but can understand as part of their effort to form a new church out of what they perceive as something gripped in decay, but the most striking difference is in the form of the church services. Catholic mass is one big ritual, a parade of symbols and reminders of God’s presence in the world with a sermon in the middle. The idea to me, besides the expression of community, is to get you pumped up enough about God to live out the rest of the week in a Christian way, and you get a little lesson to take home, too. These newer Christian services are instead more of a freeform ecstatic release of the ego. I think that some aspects, like glossolalia, are a misinterpretation of the events in Acts, but hey, whatever. I also find it interesting that while some Christian sects ignore several centuries worth of recent history, they make powerful use of ecstatic trance, which predates monotheism, but hey, whatever gets you going, right? I don’t agree with it, but I don’t have a problem with it.

In Alabama I grew up around Pentecostals and foot-washing Baptists and the like, so I don’t know that I found the movie “startling” like the New York Times, but I did find it a bit unsettling. The demonstrations of kids speaking in tongues or handing out Chick tracts at the bowling alley are strange from my viewpoint, certainly, but it’s not anything I haven’t seen in person. What really got me about the movie was the attack on rationality. There were several scenes in the movie of children being home-schooled, and the education provided demonstrated a willful ignorance and twisting of fact to fit preconceived notions, whether biblically inspired or simply politically expedient. Abortion was a central issue in the movie, but I can understand the stance on that one. Certain interpretations of life, including the Catholic one, hold that abortion is murder, and murder is pretty universally bad, therefore abortion is bad. I think the issue has been oversimplified by everyone in recent times—St. Thomas Aquinas wrote of a doctrine of delayed ensoulment which seems to be ignored nowadays—but I understand the viewpoint and agree with parts of it. Evolution, of course, was another big issue, and one I’m not as willing to ignore. The fundamentalist mindset does not allow the luxury that Catholics and other Protestants have to interpret parts of the Old Testament as parable and allow that science is God’s language for the universe, but the attacks on science still make no rational sense to me. If evolution is wrong then either we are sorely mistaken about certain fundamental aspects of geology and biology, a revelation that I feel would best be made by further pursuit of these theories, or we are living under the power of Descartes’ worst fear, a trickster God. That these Christians can seemingly so readily accept the latter proposition is both boggling and horrifying. This particular religious viewpoint emphasizes a literal devotion to the Bible with critical thinking and a quest for knowledge becoming lost in the fray. This is what I think makes this type of religion both incorrect and dangerous. The children in this film are learning to become obedient to modes of thought that are brand new relative to the history of religious dogma, and they never understand why. They are given blinders to the wonders of the world and told to wear them in the name of God. I pity these children. Global warming also made a brief appearance, and that’s an issue for which I really can’t understand any opposition except from those who have something to gain from unencumbered industry. Worst case if we do something to fix it is that there’s no man-made global warming after all, but we get cleaner air. Pollution is still bad, right?

It wasn’t the religious indoctrination of the children that upset me, but rather the political indoctrination. These kids are being taught to take their religious fights into the public arena, that moral righteousness trumps our essential freedom of (and from) religion, and they are being given not the seeds of doubt essential to scientific discovery but instead a solid grounding in blind obedience. Jesus Camp documented the creation of a new generation of ignorant, irrational people who will someday take part in shaping this nation. I found it all very sad and frightening.

I returned Jesus Camp today (I’m really starting to hate Mount Vernon Woods. I need to find a better route.) and got a copy of Thank You for Smoking. I hear it’s pretty funny.

I can’t use the Trek’s chainring on the Schwinn. The first problem, which I should have noticed from the start, is the shape: the Sakae chainring and crank from the Trek uses a five-point spider, whereas the one on the Schwinn is four-point. Secondly, I’m not sure that the Sakae chainring assembly comes apart. It appears to have rivets instead of bolts holding everything together. I guess it’s going to go on ebay instead.

I was able to get the cranks off the Trek, but it took a good number more tools. I needed a 14mm deep socket in order to get the bolts off. The socket set I currently have uses a 1/4? drive, and the largest metric 1/4? drive socket I was able to find anywhere is 13mm. I guess this is because the socket size has to be somewhere in the neighborhood of the size of the ratcheting part of the handle, but it was pretty annoying to need a size just outside of my range. I got that socket, a 3/8? drive handle, and while I was at it, I got a 22mm socket for the crank extractor since I was unable to find an appropriately sized wrench outside of a set. The socket works since I really only need it to get the nut part of the extractor into the crank.

The crank extractor seems kind of goofy, and apparently new cranks don’t need them anymore. With slightly older bicycles, like the Trek, you start things off by removing that 14mm bolt, but that’s not all. After that you need to screw the nut part of the crank extractor in and then screw the handle inside of that and keep pushing until everything pops off. Now that that’s over, I have a small pile of tools I probably won’t use again, one of which is pretty specialized. On the other hand, if anyone out there needs some bicycle work done, I can probably help you out. As for the Schwinn, I guess I’ll just live with it for now. I haven’t had any trouble while in the big chainring, so it’s probably not a big deal.

As for the current water situation, it’s escalated from “DON’T USE ANY WATER EVERYBODY PANIC” to “IF YOUR PRESSURE DROPS THE WATER CAN KILL YOU EVERYBODY PANIC.” Atlanta water had to call a utility locating company (in other news, there are companies you can call to find misplaced utilities) since they couldn’t figure out where the valve north of the broken valve is. I hope they had to dig through someone’s living room to get to it. The AJC says that they’ve found the upstream valve, though they don’t say where it was, but pressure dropped so bacteria something. News also said that the water being pumped upstream from the Moores Mill station might be “murky and discolored” but safe to drink since “water hates going upstream.” That totally explains everything. I’ve been drinking my hoarded water but still flushing and showering and everything else by the usual means, and I haven’t seen any drop in pressure. I hope this all gets worked out soon. Seeing Chick-fil-a closed on not-Sunday isn’t an experience I’d to repeat.

One of the weirder aspects of citying up every piece of land in sight is the handling of water. Water is one of the services listed in Article IX, Section II, Paragraph III of the Georgia Constitution that a municipal corporation can (and in some cases must) provide, but water isn’t as suited to such hyperlocalization as things like police and fire protection (which I also think aren’t suited to it, but that’s a different argument). Water is a utility, and as such the pipes and whatnot are going to cross city or county lines in order to transport the water from the source to homes. But unlike power or natural gas, it’s a publicly owned utility, and Georgia puts the ownership at the local level. Some cities may set up their own water infrastructure or buy it from whoever was there before incorporation and then purchase water from some upstream provider, but the way things are handled in Fulton county is that the City of Atlanta Department of Watershed Management takes care of all the water stuff and bills water consumers regardless of whether they’re inside the city limits or not. This probably really pisses off that lady who wrote the mayor after the Post Office crossed off “Sandy Springs” and wrote in “Atlanta” on one of her letters, but most people don’t care.

Atlanta has three 48-inch water mains coming into the city. I don’t know where the other two are, but I now know that one of them comes in from the north, presumably from Lake Lanier, and crosses Holcomb Bridge in Roswell somewhere close to 400. There’s construction going on in that area to build a new live-work-party community or something like that, and they constructed their way right into that giant pipe. This happened sometime on Thursday, and Friday was basically a continuous barrage of conflicting information as to just what the hell everyone is supposed to do about water.

Any time there’s a drop in water pressure past a certain level, a boil advisory is issued as a precaution against contaminants getting into the water supply, and it stays in effect at least 24 hours after pressure has been restored. My main sources of information on this water thing have been the Department of Watershed Management, who are slow to update their site, the Sandy Springs website, which provides about the same information in a slightly different form, local news outlets, which color the information with their own misunderstanding and speculation, and some signs around my apartment complex which I think were misinterpreted from Fox 5’s 12 o’clock news.

The first problem was figuring out whether I’m actually in the affected area. The primary chunk of land affected is between the ‘hooch and 285, in which I am not, but then a bonus area inside the perimeter was added. I’m in that, as this handy map from Sandy Springs shows:

So I’m in the affected area, and here’s where the advice gets a little weird. I’m supposed to “use water wisely,” but I’m also supposed to hoard it. One of the things suggested by the Atlanta water people was to fill a bathtub. I hope they don’t expect me to drink out of my tub. I don’t know if a Brita filter can remove the taste of the two powerful deodorants of Irish Spring, and I don’t care to find out. I did not fill my tub, but I did fill a few pots and Erlenmeyer flasks and whatever else was lying around. I then stuck them in the fridge, so I have enough cold, drinkable water to make it for a while.

I stuffed everything I could into the refrigerator door to make room for the pots, so I do have more in there just water and condiments, I promise. As for whether I actually need all that water, I don’t know. The pressure never dropped here, and I’m not entirely sure whether a boil advisory was issued or not. I think that the original plan was to begin repairing the main at 7pm last night, which includes digging down to it, with the advisory expected to kick in at 3am. My apartment complex told people that there would be no water between 7 and 3. The news told everyone to panic with some saying there’s a boil advisory already and some saying there’s not but it’s coming. The best I can make of the current state of all this information is that the main was repaired without the pressure dropping below the critical point, but they broke a valve when they turned everything back on, and there’s still a threat of water becoming messed up as they fix that. So nothing’s changed as far as the water, but I should expect the unexpected and probably not do any more loads of laundry in the meantime. Great.

The Breeze Bus visited the North Springs MARTA station today. It was a MARTA bus with a Breeze ad on the side in place and the front seats replaced with desks and stuff on the inside. There were several people at the gates into the bus bays hawking the breeze cards and getting people to step inside the bus to sign up and be educated as to just what this Breeze thing is all about. I think this is a good idea, since there’s a lot of confusion as to just how the Breeze cards are going to work and what they will cost, and I think bus riders are going to be hit the hardest with the new problems this system creates.

I’ve listed some of my gripes before, and I’m going to begin by reiterating one of those. It’s my understanding that Breeze cards will eventually be required for bus to rail transfers since otherwise MARTA would not be able to eliminate the magnetic card readers at the stations. Maybe the deployment of this Breeze Bus at the train stations will be enough to get a free card to everyone who needs one, but it won’t be perfect. Cards will be lost or forgotten, new people will start riding MARTA unaware of any of this Breeze stuff, and they’re going to have to pay 50¢ for a paper card when they board the bus. The buses don’t give change, and the fare is $1.75 to start with, so this is going to end up as three dollars for a lot of people. If the cards were just 25¢ I wouldn’t mind the idea nearly as much.

Besides the cost, Breeze cards just don’t work nearly as well in the bus as at the train stations. The card reader is being shaken around all day, which has often been a problem for the magnetic card readers, but the magnetic cards at least said what they were on the front. You could just show the card to the driver and avoid swiping it in a broken reader, but the Breeze cards can hold anything. Besides the rough environment the card reader lives in, it has to maintain some kind of connection to whatever databases hold the card information (I’m pretty sure that these cards just have an RFID chip and don’t hold any actual information as I don’t believe the technology exists for a system like this to write to a card through the air), and since the buses are going to be spending their time speeding through the middle of nowhere, that connection isn’t going to stay up all the time. I’ve had several problems myself with the bus being unable to read my card, but so far I haven’t run into a driver cared. That can’t last forever.

In all, Breeze really doesn’t benefit bus riders. If it’s ever required to tap your Breeze card to exit a train station, there’s at least some hope that MARTA will use this data to make appropriate scheduling decisions and not run four-car trains during rush hour, but bus riders are basically untracked unless they end their trip at a station.

Speaking of tapping to exit, there was another change at the North Springs station tonight: the gates between the bus bay and the train station were closed. Unless they really are starting to track rider movements, I have no idea why. The bus bay at North Springs is inside the fare gates, so it usually makes sense to have the bus gates open to facilitate easy movement when a rush people coming off a train or a bus tries to squeeze through. I don’t know if tapping the cards was actually required or people were just trying out the new cards they got from the Breeze Bus, but there was a bit of a backup at the gates as people were running into another problem with Breeze—the first reaction is more often to try swiping the card through the familiar magnetic readers than tapping it against the Breeze logo—and the Breeze attendants were all busy handing out new cards and unable to guide people through the gates. I don’t know if this will be solved by the removal of the magnetic readers or if people will just be completely lost. However it eventually turns out, tonight was pretty annoying.

Lastly, there are some privacy concerns with tapping to exit. MARTA no longer wants anonymous riders, and, though I guess this isn’t a huge concern for someone who pays for lunch with a credit card, I’d at least like to know exactly what data MARTA stores from the Breeze card system and for how long.

Screw that chain tool, too. They’re both worthless. I didn’t even make it up Roswell Road today before the chain started to lock up. I pulled over (and probably almost got run over a couple of times) and couldn’t find any stiff links or misaligned pins stuck in the usual places, but I didn’t make it another fifty feet up the hill before the chain broke again. This time the pin launched itself somewhere out into the road, but oh ho! I thought to myself. I have a chain tool! I’m prepared! Maybe that Boy Scout belt (it’s really a mighty fine belt) that I wear all the time is more than just symbolic. It didn’t work out.

The Topeak chain tool, besides apparently being maybe a little breaky, has a design flaw with regards to the pin that pushes against the chain links. The pin unscrews, which makes some sense, but the housing for the pin, the knurled part you can see on the picture for this entry, tends to get stuck on the cradle when you screw it all the way in, which you need to do for storage. In addition to that, the pin apparently isn’t really the right length. Once I got the tool back together, the pin would slide in and out, and I only had about half the length I needed to actually break a link. I think there was probably a ball bearing or something up inside there, and I think that bearing is now at the bottom of a storm drain somewhere. Why was the pin not long enough to begin with? I don’t know, but the tool sucks. I decided to just write the dumb thing off as a loss and admit failure in this particular chain repair endeavor. I fortunately didn’t have far to walk home. I hope that when I waved at Greg, the maintenance guy who lives beneath me and who helps me save a ton of cash on my heating bill, on the way back into the complex that he didn’t think I was brandishing a weapon with the chain in my hand. I don’t suppose I could do much more damage to a person with that narrow little thing than get grease on their face, but these are the kinds of things I think of when I’m walking a broken bike. Anyhow, the chain broke near the links from the Trek, so I probably screwed up replacing the pin or created a stiff link that I just couldn’t find, but I also realized today that since my large chain ring hit the ground, and I had the chain on the big ring when I wrecked, the chain probably hit, too, so that’s the story I’m going to go with for now. Both breaks have occurred in the granny gear, so I still don’t consider the bad teeth an emergency. My chain broke and needed replacement, and I threw out that crappy Topeak chain tool even though it did look kind of cool.

I drove to work today, and I bought a new chain and chain tool at Roswell Bikes. The chain tool is the Park Tool CT-5 mini tool, and, though it’s not as symmetrical, it’s smaller and lighter than that Topeak thing, and it doesn’t hurt my hands when I try to use it without gloves. This new chain tool also has a neat feature in that the distance you need to push the chain pin out is the same as the amount the tool will screw in, whereas the Topeak tool would push the pin all the way through the link and halfway to the moon if you let it. I won’t doubt you again, Park Tool, unless there’s something else that looks good that’s a whole lot cheaper. As for the chain itself, Roswell Bikes keeps things like chains and brakes and cables and whatnot in the back, and I didn’t care to argue, so I submitted myself to whims of the guy working the register today. The only chain factor I was aware of is the number of rear gears, since you need something with enough links and the right width. I asked for a nine-speed chain, and the dude asked me what kind of drive train I had. My drive drain is really a mishmash of whatever Schwinn could get their hands on, so I kind of sputtered and guessed Shimano for the rear derailleur. I guess that’s how I ended up with a Shimano chain. The derailleur is actually Sram, but I don’t think it really matters. I have a tool and a chain. The chain cost more than I expected, but it looks like a really nice chain.

I don’t know a whole lot about chain brands, but this Shimano thing seems pretty high class. One thing different about is that instead of the flat pins I was used to, the pins flare out against the walls of the outer links, providing more strength or something. The downside of this for you and me (mostly me) is that the flared part shears off when you break a link. Shimano’s solution for this is to provide special replacement pins: instead of just pushing the same pin the other way when you connect links, they provide a special pin that’s about twice as long and has a piece that breaks off. These pins have the flared part on one end, and once you’ve used it to poke the old pin the rest of the way out, the pilot piece breaks off to create a new kind-of flared end on the other side. It seems pretty neat, but these replacement pins cost about five bucks for a pack of three, and the new chain only came with one, so I was nervous for the rest of the day that the lone pin would fall out of the flimsy box and be lost forever. I have everything back together in spite of my fears, and I learned from Park Tool’s chain installation guide that the upper set of fins on the chain tool isn’t for different chain sizes but rather is provided as a tool to help loosen stiff links. I don’t know how this is supposed to help, but that’s what it’s there for, and I used it to loosen the connection point once I got the chain onto the bike. Whatever. I have a new fancy chain, I have a new light and sturdy chain tool, and I think I have everything back together and properly adjusted. I guess I’ll figure out how it all goes tomorrow morning.