A carnival of technology

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.