I put together a release of my comments system. It’s not pretty, and it’s probably not complete, but I think it’s easier to manage than NBCom, and it’s certainly a lot nicer as far as keeping with the Nanoblogger appearance. I hope this helps, world.
I like 80’s music. My highschool years were during the 90’s, and, like seemingly so many others, my musical nostalgia reaches instead into the decade before. I hate music from the 90’s. I’m not going to go into the reasons, since I probably don’t have any, but for whatever cause, likely my age, I think that 80’s new wave is pretty rad.
When I first brought a car to Atlanta and started listening to the radio in 2001, there was a station on 105.3, WMAX, that broadcast 80’s music. I thought that was pretty neat, and several of my friends who grew up in the 90’s also thought it was pretty neat. I think the failure of WMAX was due to a poor understanding of their demographic. The ads, which included things about home mortgages and how freezing your family’s DNA is the only way to be safe, were mostly targetted to people in their 30’s, people who probably hated 80’s music because they had to listen to that crap all through high school. The 80’s station didn’t last very long, and sometime while I was still at Tech it switched to a talk format.
I don’t understand why anyone at Clearchannel thought that starting another talk radio station was a good idea. Morning shows are obnoxious enough, and for people who want more crap like that and less music, there’s already an entire world of AM radio to fill their needs. Talk radio does not benefit from being broadcast in stereo. The talk radio station didn’t stick around very long, and I remember that after a while it started to play 80’s music at night, even using the same promo recording as with the earlier format, but this eventually died away as Clearchannel stopped caring about the station at all and the 80’s gave way to whatever music they could license, mostly 90’s alternative, which slowly took over the talk shows before another format change.
In 2004, 105.3 FM switched to musica Latina, and a little while after that changed their letters to WVWA. It wasn’t the polka-sounding Mexican music that already fills some stations around here, and I remember hearing from dcantrell that his Colombian then-boss was excited that there was finally some non-Mexican Latino music in the area. I had, of course, stopped listening to the station long before then, but I kept the frequency on one my radio’s memory buttons both out of the hope that they’d eventually switch back to being an 80’s station and the entertainment of all the frequent format changes. WVWA didn’t disappoint as far as the latter.
A couple of years ago, WVWA moved to 105.7 MHz, which had previously been occupied by a 60’s and 70’s channel I remember being advertised on the old 80’s channel. 105.3 was taken by WBZY, “The Buzz,” an alternative rock station competing with the Susquehanna-owned WNNX. WBZY was previously broadcast on 96.7 MHz, which I guess was a lower powered station or something. I found the new format pretty uninteresting, so I continued not to follow it.
Recently, 105.3 changed formats yet again. This time it’s Mexican. All tubas and trumpets. I wonder how long it’ll last.
I actually have two sound cards in my main computer: the builtin Intel something or another, and an old SB Live! that I’ve been dragging around for a while. I use the Live since I know that it works, and I don’t want to bother setting up anything else. It was the sound card, not the speakers, that went out. I plugged into the other jack and I have two channels again. Eh.
My access to the empirical data of the universe is probably more limited than most. Most obviously, I’m nearsighted. I wear spectacles. I’m not sure how strong they are—I’d share my prescription, and I just recently had an eye exam, so it’s accurate, but I honestly can’t read it; For Eyes may have an amusing name, but that optometrist sure does write like a doctor,—but the gist is that I can’t see much without them. My hearing’s not the greatest, either. I had a nasty ear infection as a kid, so, though I can still hear that annoying high-pitched mosquito repelling device (which I don’t think really works) better than my parents, I’ve probably lost some high-end frequencies. My other senses haven’t made up for this: I’m not a supertaster, and I don’t have the relative strength of a spider or anything, so, compared to the average person, I’m stumbling around in a muffled blur. My condition has never really upset me. I’ll never pay $500 for a wooden knob, and I took physics too many times to think of the extreme end of audiophiles as anything but retarded. Regardless of people fooling themselves into believing that the dust on vinyl records makes a better sound, though, I enjoy music, and I enjoy movies. Sight and sound are pretty cool. However, the equipment I use to enjoy these things is, by current standards, pretty lame.
I don’t have cable, so my TV watching is limited to the couple of channels I can pick up on rabbit ears and the DVDs I own. Even though the local TV stations broadcast terrestrial HD signals, I’m far enough away from all but the Christian station transmitters that the occasional TV show I watch on my cheap 20? television with builtin speakers comes through about the same as it would on a high-definition screen with surround sound. DVDs, however, are a different matter. Though most of the discs I own are of movies from the era of Super Panavision and, at best, stereo sound, I do have a handful of movies and shows that use the full extent of the 5.1 channels provided by AAC format and perhaps beyond with DTS. I’ve occasionally thought of buying a surround-sound system, but I’ve never looked heavily into it since I don’t really like spending money. My current thinking is that I’ll probably wait for the new year, after I’ve paid off my Christmas debt, and buy seven or eight speakers on some kind of 0% interest until whenever deal. I don’t really care about video for now. I don’t know where this TV came from, but I don’t watch it very much, so I can’t see myself spending a couple grand just to watch old TV shows that someone converted from old Betamax tapes. A new sound system would greatly improve both my music and movie experiences, so I can justify that.
One other possibility opened by a new sound system is an improvement to the sounds coming from my computer. My computer is where most of my music comes from now; besides having all of the mp3s, it also has my only real CD player. I guess my fancy region-free DVD player can play audio CDs, but it kind of sucks at it. My computer has had the same two-satellite-and-subwoofer setup for about as long as I can recall now, at least since I started college, so it’s at least six or seven years old. It’s a cheap Labtec system, and it’s been pretty alright. I remember paying around $30 for the set, and, though it’s not the greatest, it can make some pretty sweet noise. I made one modification some years ago to the wiring: the original configuration was computer to right speaker (through a potentiometer to control the volume) to subwoofer back to right and left speakers. The first of those wires gave out, so I just took a straight male-to-male 3.5mm wire and bypassed the volume control, and I’ve been living with only software volume control for a few years now. I haven’t thought much about the speakers since then, but today my left speaker decided that it doesn’t much want to speak anymore. I set the balance control to pump everything out of the right speaker for now, but being limited to one aural direction is kind of annoying. I’ve been replaying Grim Fandango (perhaps the last great adventure game) recently, which is where I first noticed the problem, and having two directions of sound really contributes to the immersion into the game world. It’s not the kind of game where things sneak up behind you, so I don’t care about rear speakers. CDs are stereo, and my morning habit of the WREK classics show is in stereo (they probably paid a lot for that stereo exciter), so I’d really kind of like to have my left channel back.
I need more speakers. I’m just not sure how many.
Like many a young child, I spent most of my Saturday mornings eating tooth-rotting cereal and watching cartoons. I can’t even remember what cartoons I watched, but I think there were some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and some Gummi Bears and that sort of thing involved. The premiere of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers in 1993 was the beginning of the end of cartoons for me. I was eleven then, and this ridiculous live-action intrusion on my whimsical animated mornings was enough to push me out of the world of children’s morning television. The cartoons before that point were awful shows, too, but they were entertaining. The local Fox affiliate, WZDX Huntsville, took up a good portion of my attention in the late 80’s and early 90’s. I remember that the station had a Fox mascot, it’s name some kind of arrangement of the station’s letters, Zeedee or something like that. I don’t remember much more about my experiences watching Fox at an early age, like the shows or the news team or anything like that, but I do remember one particular PSA that frequently played on Saturday mornings.
My first exposure to Barenaked Ladies was a Fox Saturday morning PSA about the evils of racism. Among the commercials for Transformers toys and that furniture store with the Scotsman in the logo, Fox would play a ninety-second music video with a bunch of wacky-looking people dancing wackily while a green-faced alien sang about his persecution and the benefits of looking beyond skin color. The song was very catchy, and even a decade and a half later, I often find myself humming the tune and a handful of the words, especially the list of alien skin variations at the end of the song after “It don’t matter if you’re black or white.” That particular lyric caused me to sometimes associate the song with Michael Jackson’s “Black or White,” but Michael didn’t have a crazy green alien in his video. Maybe I learned some kind of social lesson from the video on Fox, but one thing I did pick up from the repetition of this piece was the odd band name displayed at the beginning, and some years later I sought out the music of Barenaked Ladies and mostly forgot about the video, thinking that perhaps I imagined it.
While avoiding work today, I happened to come across this video from my childhood. It’s “The Ballad of Gordon,” and someone dug up a tape and posted a video on Youtube. My childhood really did exist. Also, I think this means that I liked Barenaked Ladies way before they became popular.
I’ve been running this website for some number for years in some form or another, and, though it really doesn’t cost me anything since it just runs on whatever Internet service I would have anyway, I’ve at times made attempts to make a buck off it. I offer no goods nor services, but isn’t that what the Internet is all about? Besides the photos that no one ever tries to buy (possibly because they’re not very good photos), the most persistent attempts have been a Paypal donation link and Google ads. The Paypal link was probably a bad idea, since it got me some worried messages about whether I was broke or shutting down the website (but no donations), whereas the Google ads, though less intrusive in that they ask nothing of the reader, have been a smashing failure. Besides the fact that I have no control over the ads and am effectively stuck with whatever some advertiser buys for random words that I might use, this is a fairly low-traffic site, so it’s not likely that I’ll ever make enough to get paid. Google pays when accounts hit $100, and I so far have $14.03. I’ve effectively made fourteen bucks or so for Google to keep.
I’m trying something new now as far as ads. I’ve signed up for Project Wonderful, which has some neat ideas behind it. I’m not sure yet how well it will work with trickles of traffic like mine, but I guess I’ll see. The idea behind Project Wonderful is, rather being paid when people click a content-based ad, I sell space per-day to the highest bidder. I have control over what ads I accept, and advertisers buy space based on traffic and the descriptions I’ve provided for the site. Right now all the spaces are filled with $0 bids, but maybe it won’t stay that way. If you have something you’ve wanted to advertise here, now’s a good time to get in on it. It’s cheap.
In other news, Matt, my best friend for about as long as I can remember, went and got hitched. The wedding itself was in an LDS temple, thus Gentiles (I meant that jokingly, but the webnet says that that’s actually what the LDS church uses to refer to non-members. Huh. Maybe I should have used “English”) like me were unable to attend, which is probably for the better, since I don’t own a suit. I did make the trek back to Alabama this weekend for the reception, though, where I was able to wear a Hawaiian shirt with dark slacks without anyone complaining. I have some pictures, mostly of the vandalization done to Matt’s car. I hope that Matt and Clarissa have many happy years together.
In other Decatur (AL) news, the local newspaper provided some entertainment during my stay. The front page story on Friday was about the hat ban at high school basketball games. The stated goal of the ban is to prevent gang activity (NB: there are no gangs in Decatur). I might be jaded from living in the big city, but there are no streets in Decatur where I would be the slightest bit nervous walking at night, and the city has an average of one murder per year. I’m not sure if my usual Atlanta method of applying racism as the underlying motive works in this case, but whether the administrators are attempting to stop kids from looking too “urban” or if just bowing to the pressure of an imagined crime wave, there is no discernible gang activity to stop. Anyhow, the people upset about the ban are the over-60 crowd. Old people like to wear hats, coming from a time where everyone wore hats and an onion on their belt, and they’re pissed that they can’t dress the way they want when they see their grandkids play some b-ball. I find this hilarious.
Another thing I find amusing yet frequently forget about Decatur’s newspaper is one of their columnists, Franklin Harris. Mr. Harris’s writing always makes me think of the comic book guy from The Simpsons. He writes about various things happening in comic books, anime, and science fiction, none of which really relates to things happening in Decatur. His column this week was about the Library of America releasing a volume of Philip K. Dick’s work, perhaps opening the doors for science fiction to become a legitimate part of literature. It is kind of a big deal, since with Phillip K. Dick the Library of America is jumping straight into the crazy end of science fiction, bypassing the more gradual routes they could have taken with authors like Bradbury, already a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s award for distinguished contribution to American letters, or Vonnegut, who has in the past lamented his categorization in this genre that “critics mistake…for a urinal.” Back to the column, though, that’s the kind of thing that Mr. Harris writes about: things that interest people that go to science fiction conventions and hang out in comic shops, people that thing Robbie the Robot is pretty rad, people that have an opinion in the Kirk vs. Picard debate. I guess it takes a city of fifty thousand to fill that particular niche.
The temperature dropped back below freezing here in the thirteenth American colony, and damn were my hands cold today. I actually stopped at one point to warm my fingers back up since they kind of hurt a lot. I don’t know a lot about physiology, but I figure that pain and numbness is probably bad. I managed to make it to the MARTA station (where I was unable to catch a train, but that’s a story for a couple paragraphs down) without losing any digits, but my hands were pretty uncomfortable. I know the solution to this problem, though: new gloves!
This time, rather than seeing what REI has on sale this week, I decided to support local business and went to Roswell Bicycles. They have a clothing shop above the main store in what I guess used to be the “Sprockets Cafe.” I never knew the restaurant, but a part of me is kind of sad to see the death of a bike-oriented restaurant. Clothing is nice, though, and there’s only so much space available, so I guess this is better for the store or something. This disconnected upstairs clothing section was pretty small, which I don’t mind. They’re a bike shop, not a costume shop. The selection of gloves was a little disappointing, but I think that this is because I’m starting to exhaust my options. They had several varieties of the linerless shells in an assortment of shapes and waterproofness, much like I have, but the only things they had as far as insulation were big puffy ski-gloves and a few glove liners. I ended up buying a pair of liners in the only variety they had with sizes that fit me, and they’re ok. My hands were still kind of cold going home, but not to the point where I was worried about frostbite. To anyone looking to buy me something for Christmas, I’d kind of like a pair of warm gloves that can protect me from asphalt and allow me to use my fingers.
And now for MARTA: HOLY CRAP A TRAIN DERAILED. I rolled into Medical Center around 9am, as is my wont, but today something was different. The fire trucks that preceded me were the first clue that something was wrong, and the big crowd of people shivering outside in the tiny bus bay was the second. From what I’ve been able to piece together from news reports and press releases, the mess all started with a train that started having mechanical difficulties (they didn’t say which variety, but I’d suspect one of those breaky Bredas is the culprit). It went out of service north of Medical Center and the rest of the system started single-tracking around it. I don’t know for sure if there were passengers aboard at this time, but, judging from the number of ambulances, I suspect that there were. So the train is being operated manually at this point, the switches are set to bypass the broken train, and apparently someone screwed up somewhere, since the broken train hit a switch that was going the wrong way and went off the track. No one was hurt, but it sure did mess up MARTA service for a good while.
While at Medical Center I was told by MARTA employees that northbound train service was not running from that station and that I should take a bus. There were at least a hundred people waiting for buses, and I already had some means of transportation, so I decided to just ride up to Dunwoody station. At Dunwoody, another MARTA employee explained that there were significant delays for both north and southbound trains, no one really knows when the next train is going to arrive, and I probably should take one of the buses up to Sandy Springs. Fortunately, one of the northbound trains (operating on the southbound platform) came by before I got into the elevator, so I managed to catch that to North Springs. Once there, I found where all those extra bus routes between stations were coming from.
I usually get to North Springs with plenty of time to catch the 140 bus that leaves at 9:30. I could catch the 9:00 if everything works out, but I dawdle while leaving the apartment, so I bring a book and wait. Today I arrived at 9:40 or so, in time to see an overcrowded bus pull out onto 400. One of the people I recognize from the usual trip, who I saw talking to the driver before I got up to the bus, told me that the northbound bus service isn’t running anymore while shrugging a lot. I think he just decided to take the day off. I probably should have done the same, but I instead called a coworker with a pickup truck to pick me up at the station. The MARTA website during the day had information on the train delays and bus options around it, but it never really explained how this affected the bus routes. I saw another 140 bus do some crazy manœvres between the two halves of the bus bay (North Springs is split between routes that exit onto 400 North and routes that exit onto Peachtree-Dunwoody), picking up passengers before finally exiting on the ground roads, while waiting for a ride, so it seems like the buses heading north of North Springs were instead pulled into these emergency bus bridges. The 85 was still running as far as I could tell, but that bus takes the scenic route through Roswell, and I didn’t want to wait for that.
The thing that upsets me most about the whole ordeal, besides the fact that derailments really shouldn’t happen, is that bus service was sacrificed to supplement a train service that was, though crippled, still running. Only one platform was inaccessible the whole time, and northbound trains were able to use the southbound line between Medical Center and Dunwoody. The buses were only used to mitigate the 30+ minute delays for trains. I can understand why they did this: the trains are what most people think of when they think about MARTA, and the train is the fastest and most fun way to use Atlanta’s public transportation. My problem is with the 140 route being taken out of service. The 140 goes from the North Springs station to the Mansell Park & Ride lot, tools around Alpharetta for a little bit and then goes to the Windward Park & Ride lot. Its intent is basically to provide bus service beyond the end of the rail line to bus stations beyond the reach of the MARTA rail system. Both the Mansell and Windward lots should be rail stations.
Public transportation is expensive. Having a public transportation system not run at loss is impossible, since if fares were high enough to cover all costs, no one would use it. MARTA receives its funding from fares and a 1% sales tax in Fulton County, DeKalb County and they city of Atlanta. There is no state or federal funding, despite the economical benefits that a robust transportation system in the state’s capital would provide to the state as a whole. Opposition to MARTA, to overgeneralize a bit, comes from both local and distant sources: people in metro counties like Cobb and Gwinnett have voted against MARTA expansion mostly out of fear that black people would ride it to their suburban utopias and steal their big-screen TVs, whereas people in Georgia outside of Atlanta often view Atlanta as a kind of tumor on their rural state, sucking away some uncertain amount of resources while providing no obvious benefit. The Cobb County commissioners recently voted to allow MARTA to extend its Route 12 service beyond the county line up to the Cumberland transfer center, so it’s possible that the metro counties could eventually join the transportation club, but there’s still the problem of state funding. The MARTA tax districts voted not to extend the sales tax beyond 2032 in an effort to force the state to provide funding, but in the meantime this means that MARTA can’t issue the 30-year bonds it would need to make rail extensions, so, though they are currently eying a site either in Roswell or Alpharetta for a new station, they will not likely be able to extend rail service farther north for some time. The only concessions that the state has made so far are to allow variations in their absurd control of the MARTA budget to permit more of the sales tax revenue to be used for operational expenses. The current 55-45 split between operations and capital improvements, I believe, expires in 2009.
What I’m trying to say here is that my morning was ruined by some asshole from Tifton. Thanks a lot, Georgia Assembly.
I changed the comments system. It requires some styesheet changes, so you might have to do some kind of cache clearing before it works. The system I used before was NBCom, which has the advantage of being easy to get started and being linked from the Nanoblogger website. It has some pretty heinous shortcomings: it mangles the comments while removing HTML and often leaving an unrecognizable mess in its wake; the login system, simple though it may be, is too much of a hassle for anyone to use, and the code itself manage to make using PHP worse than it would normally be, eschewing the templating nature of the language—the only thing it does well—in favor of a series of writes to stdout, making it look kind of like a perl script. The last problem made it hard to edit, so I just made my own thing. I have a habit of abandoning projects half-finished, so moving things over to the front page now is both good and bad: it means that I can start using my work before I wrap things into a nice neat release for other people to use, but it also means that I may now never get around to making that release. Oh well.
I made the new comments page look like the rest of the site, but I also tried to keep the behavior similar to that of nbcom. I kept the spam-prevention image for one, since, though it is pretty easy to circumvent, it has done a good job of preventing spam, and the choices for the random word list are kind of funny. It looks like the author likes both Dune and Lord of the Rings, and I can respect that. I’ve gotten rid of the login system in favor of TypeKey since it’s easier to hand off account management to someone else. Anonymous posts are still allowed, but if you want to post with a name, use the typekey link. I allow HTML now, but the validator still have a couple of bugs. If you start out a post with an HTML tag, that whole thing better be HTML, because it’s not going to work otherwise. I do something with the linebreaks now, though, so feel free to hit Enter and expect something to come out on the other end.
I put together an XML schema to validate the posts to keep people from screwing everything up when they forget to close an <i> tag or something, and, even though I now think that XHTML is more of a mess than I did yesterday after spending most of today wading through a bunch of schema files, I think my way of doing things is more elegant and rad than the other people’s ways I could find, so maybe I should release that part before I lose interest.
So there you have it. A letter opener. Let me know if you have any trouble.
I tend to get two questions from people who know that I ride a bicycle a lot. First, how much weight have I lost, and second, what do I do when it rains. The first of those questions I find a bit unsettling, since it just reminds me that I’m kind of fat. I have been casually tracking my weight; I realize that I gained a lot after college when I could afford food again, but I don’t like to admit it. I’m down about fifteen or twenty pounds since I started biking most everywhere. I still eat just as crappily as before, so I figure that’s not too bad. As for what I do when it rains: I get wet.
The Southern winters I’ve grown up with are usually characterized by wide temperature shifts. As some would say, Georgia has two seasons: one that can melt a brass doorknob, and one that just makes it a little mushy, and this isn’t far from the truth. The trouble for me, the crazy guy riding around without a heated metal bubble, is that, though the afternoons in winter still tend to warm up enough to soften doorknobs, nights, and by corollary, mornings, get damned cold. I only have about 27L of space to work with on the bike, so I can’t well stuff a winter coat into my bags for the ride home after work. Also, on the couple of days I have found reason to wear my heavy coat, the difference in air resistance is very noticeable. It feels like I’m dragging a freaking parachute behind me. Usually I wear my tracksuit-looking blue jacket and just suffer through the little bit of extra cold. I’m not on my bicycle for more than half-an-hour or so at a time, so it’s not too bad. The blue jacket is basically a thin windbreaker, and it has a builtin stuff sack, so it’s really nice for biking. I warm up enough from huffing and puffing up hills that the cold isn’t a huge deal, but it’s still more of annoyance than the rain.
I ride in the rain. Some people have suggested that this is kind of a dumb idea, and they have their points. The first leg home from the office to the park-and-ride is especially dangerous since I have a bad habit of splitting lanes through the backed up traffic (but if I can’t do that on a bike, what’s the point?) while coasting downhill, and I did take a spill on Mansell that one time I locked my brakes, but as far as general wetness, it’s not so bad. I spent a lot of money and time installing fenders and getting waterproof clothing (neoprene socks and the aforementioned blue jacket), so as long as I remember that I have no braking power, I don’t think that accidents or pneumonia are big worries. My jeans do get wet, but I still find packing an extra pair a better solution to spending a big sack of money on rain pants suitable for biking. Other than the pants, the only parts of me that can still get wet are my face (I don’t think there’s a solution for this, so I’ll just have to live with the occasional wad of wet road gunk flying up at me), my shoes (expensive to fix and not a huge deal since the socks keep my feet from getting wet), and my hands.
One of the good habits I picked up after reading The Art of Urban Cycling (Robert Hurst, ISBN 0762727837) is that I always wear gloves. Besides protection from certain types of weather, they give me something to land on. Gel-filled gloves are pretty popular, but I try to avoid those, since I don’t find enough shocks on an everyday ride to justify something so pricily absorbent. I think that for the everyday rider gel gloves are just as ridiculous as those goofy lycra shorts. The idea of gloves in general, though, unlike the shorts, is not ridiculous, since road rash really sucks. The first pair I bought back in August was the REI-brand half-finger gloves. They’re pretty alright. I’ve noticed since then, though, that every time the weather changes enough to warrant another pair of gloves, the ones I want are on sale on a rack in front of all the bicycle components. The half-finger gloves became too cold after a little while, and suddenly, hey look! The full fingered version of the same thing is five bucks off! Those worked pretty well for a little while, but recently the wind and rain was enough to make my fingers numb by the time I made it to MARTA in the mornings, and wow! Something similar but wind and water resistant is on sale! What a coincidence! I wonder how long it’ll be until I need another pair. Hopefully by then I’ll have my dividend back from the other three pairs.