A carnival of technology

After I got my bike fixed, a coworker asked me whether or not the people at the bike shop reacted to the total for the repair, whether there was some show of sympathy while they swiped my card or whether it was just a nonchalant triple-digit gesture with a deadpan stare. No one there said “wow, that’s a lot” at the time, but I guess I did get a little sympathy for spending a whole freaking lot. I just got a thank you card.

There a few things odd about the card. Firstly, they got my address right. For whatever reason (I guess this is the reason), Roswell Bicycles collects more information than Radio Shack when you buy something big, and I was too distracted by the fact that my bike was in pieces to protest or care. After I got the receipt, I noticed that they spelled that ridiculous pseudo-French part of my address as “Calybre,” but I forgot to correct it on subsequent visits. The address on the postcard is handwritten, so I don’t know if it’s fixed in the system or not, but at least someone there has it figured out well enough.

Secondly, the card reads, “Thank you for choosing Roswell Bicycles for your recent purchase of a bicycle.” I technically only bought half of a bicycle, but whatever. I don’t know if I crossed some kind of threshold in their computer system (I spent another $40 for a new set of fenders last week) or if it was just the level of repair that earned me a semi-appropriate thank you card. I hate to think that the people buying the two or three hundred dollar bikes don’t get thanked, so I guess this is manual process.

Lastly, beneath the printed thanks from the proprietor, Todd Kaib, there’s a handwritten signature from Henry. I couldn’t tell you the names of any of the people who worked on my bike, but I remember Henry: he’s the midget. The guy with the dark hair and the Indian looking guy seemed to handle most of the labor, and the tall skinny guy took the parts orders for both the fork and the fenders. The only time I even saw Henry during this ordeal was when I picked up the fenders last Thursday. I don’t know if he’s in charge of thank you notes or if he just sent it out since he was the last one to touch my record. Whatever the case, thanks Henry, and thanks Roswell Bicycles. This card gets me 20% off and free labor for the next thing I buy, so I guess I need to find a way to spend some more money.

Adventure games were a lot different before the Interweb. There was no collection of easily-accessible walkthroughs for games, so getting stuck in a game was a much more dramatic experience. If neither you nor your friend from down the street could get past a part of a game, there were basically three options. The first—the most similar to today’s walkthroughs—was to log on to the local BBS and hope that someone had posted a text file. We weren’t as well connected back then, though, so this depended on that weird guy who ran the computer shop being able to beat the game. Failing at this, there were two options from the game makers themselves, who were well aware that they were publishing impossible games: the 900-number hint line and the hint books. I rarely used the hint line, since I’m pretty sure my parents would have noticed it on the phone bill. The only times these numbers were called were when my dad also cared about the game being played and reached an appropriate level of frustration. This is probably why I never beat the first King’s Quest. The hint lines were a neat scam, but some games also had a more permanent option for those willing to spend an extra five or ten bucks on a good night’s sleep.

The hint books were pretty neat in their execution. These weren’t like the walkthroughs we know today; they didn’t touch on every aspect of the game, but rather answered a series of questions that the publisher felt constituted likely sticking points. In order to prevent a confused player from spoiling the game by flipping through the answers, there were two means of obfuscation: there were fake questions thrown in here and there, and all of the answers could only be revealed with a sort of invisible highlighter. I think that Infocom was the first to use this technique with their Invisiclues. The basic idea of the hint books was to flip through to find a question describing your situation, like “How do I open the door above the waterfall?”, reveal enough of the invisible ink hints to get you moving again, and hope that you remember the answers or finish the game before the thing dries into an illegible yellow blob. I thought that the invisible ink was pretty rad back then, but it really kind of sucked as far as durability and even initial readability. Kids these days don’t know how good they have it.

As far as my current situation goes, I reached a point in The Legend of Zelda where it became more frustrating than fun. I’ve spent the last week or so getting in killed in level 2. Level 2 is where the guy selling the blue ring used to be, and I ended up finding it because I was hoping the guy was still there and that I could spend the money I’d earned while walking around looking for where all the items and levels had moved to. I was maxed out on cash with nothing to spend it on, and I couldn’t get through level 2. It was really pretty annoying. Adventure games were a pretty new thing to Nintendo back in 1986, and this game wasn’t as puzzle heavy as its PC counterparts, so their offering to frustrated Zelda players was a bit different. In July 1988 the first issue of Nintendo Power, a magazine with shortened forms of the sorts of strategy guides that would later become commonplace, was published with an 11-page set of hints and maps for the second quest of Zelda. Rather than just looking for maps and walkthroughs and such on the Web, I managed to find a scan of the first issue of Nintendo Power, and I’m going to pretend I spent the $3.50 18 years ago (man, that’s a lot of years ago) and see how far I can get. I now have the blue ring, the second piece of the triforce and seven heart containers. I also learned that in this quest, if you try hard enough, sometimes you can walk through freaking solid walls. Having known bombs as the only passage through walls in the first quest, this was a bit of a shock. Maybe you could walk through walls before, and maybe that’s why I didn’t get the red ring, but I got pretty far without knowing that before, and I don’t think I would ever have made that discovery on my own.

Boris had a little bit of trouble recently, but he’s doing ok now. I first noticed him acting weird on Tuesday. He was sitting in a corner of the cage making some weird movements around his face on Tuesday night, but I just figured he was eating or cleaning or something and left him alone. On Wednesday morning, as I was heading out the door, I noticed him scurrying around excitedly, and I also noticed something weird coming out of his mouth that was clearly bothering him. It looked kind of like a rotten grape, but, not being a big grape fan, I’ve never fed him grapes. It was coming out of the side of his mouth and seemed to be cheek pouch related, and it wasn’t just stuck food. Time for a trip to the vet.

First of all, it’s kind of hard to find a vet that handles rodents. All these cat and dog people have their fancy vets, but hamsters are classified as “exotic pets” and not handled by these hoity-toity pet places. A pet-owning coworker suggested I go to the Hollyberry Animal Hospital, so off I went. It turned out that the problem was the pouch itself: it had prolapsed somehow, and, since apparently the obvious action of sticking it back in has little chance of success, the solution was to cut it off. I was pretty confused by this point: I had no idea that cheek pouches could pop out like that, and I didn’t know that hamsters could undergo surgery. It was either that or kill him, so I left Boris in the care of the kind Dr. Francis Fletcher Nicholson to be surgified. She prepared me for the worst while there, mentioning Boris’s somewhat grim odds and that I wouldn’t have to pay for the surgery (which was mercifully cheap since he’s not some fancy cat or dog) if he died. I guess hamster surgery is pretty infrequent; I think she just made up the price on the spot. The little fuzzball made it, though, and I took him home this morning short one pouch.

Boris is eating again, but since his mouth is stitched up on one side, I have to help him out a little for a while. The vet recommended augmenting the regular food with crushed up corn flakes, so I now have more corn flakes than I know what to do with. Sometime between my collegiate habit of eating Frosted Flakes with extra sugar and now I developed a dislike for cold cereal, and the smallest size I could find at Kroger’s (I spent an extra nickel or so without the card, but they’re the closest grocery store) was 18oz, and I really have no interest in eating for breakfast the 17.5oz I’ll have left over. If anyone lives around here and likes Kroger brand corn flakes, I can hook you up. Another thing that the vet nurse noted was that Boris is most likely a lady rather than a dude. Whoops. I’m not trying to breed hamsters or anything, and the sex really only mattered for choosing relevant names, so I don’t care too much and will still call her Boris. If I happen to get a male pet, I’ll name him Sue to make up for it. Boris seems to be getting along ok with just one cheek pouch. She went to sleep as soon as I got her home, and she’s eating again, so once she starts running in the wheel the full range of hamster activities will have been covered. I’m glad Boris is better now, and I guess now I know where to take any weird animals when they need surgery.

I beat the first quest in Legend of Zelda without using the emulator’s save and restore capabilities. It was definitely a different game played this way, and I think it was better. I made more use of the health potions, and, though I did ultimately restart every time I died, death created a difficult decision between starting somewhere convenient or maintaining the lie of a perfect score. The game is more difficult when you have to spend five minutes making the trek to level 9, and I think it’s better for it. The increased annoyance in retrying a part of the game forces a more cautious play, which, given the difficulty of the later monsters, can create a lot of tension and suspense. The game is never impossible, but it can be quite difficult, which meets the formula for fun.

I’ve only beaten the first quest, so I now get to play the second quest, colloquially known as “the same thing you just played but with everything moved around and harder monsters.” In my previous emulation attempts, I’ve lost interest around this time, but this time around I’m going to take a shot at it. I don’t want a game to get the better of me. As I’ve mentioned before, much of the difficulty in this Zelda game lies in the translation of the hints. The utterings of the annoying old man aren’t exactly Engrish, but they aren’t exactly great, either. The second quest moves the secrets around, restoring the tedious element of the first quest, but it doesn’t change the puzzles, putting the difficulty of the game in the monsters, where it’s intended. My success or failure at this second quest will determine whether I can really handle a Zelda game in all it’s fun but occasionally annoying glory.

I had a lot of fun playing Zelda in this exciting new way, using an appropriate controller and depending on the mechanisms of the game to save my progress. One things definitely missing, though, is a story. I’m not looking for a Final Fantasy overload on cutscenes or anything, but there’s really no development to the tale as you progress through the dungeons in the first game. All of the story is provided in the manual. There’s some junk in the manual about Gannon having the triforce of power and Zelda breaking up the triforce of wisdom (I sometimes wonder if “triforce” was another poor translation and whether the “tri” prefix, probably originally used to describe the triangular shape, produced the triforce of courage used in later games), but your drive is still just to kill stuff and defeat the dungeon bosses, and nothing in the game develops on this. I know that later games build more of a story—Link’s Awakening uses the NPCs to build a complicated world where you slowly realize that winning the game will destroy the island you’ve come to call home—but I don’t know where the shift from enlengthened arcade-style gameplay to story-driven games occurred. PCs had discovered this difference years before consoles: King’s Quest, a popular game that had graphics and a storyline, was released in 1984, two years before Zelda came to America. I’m not replaying the history of game development in general, but I am seeing how it unfolded as an inexpensive home appliance. Console and PC games live in essentially the same world today, but it’s still interesting to see how things moved from the arcade to the TV.

I got back on the bike today for some shopping. The thread-and-tape job I gave my blue jacket is holding up against the wind, but I’m not sure how it’ll handle rain. It failed the shower test, but I’m hoping that real rain will be a little less intense than my old-school water-wasting showerhead. One thing that I left off of yesterday’s list was the fenders: the front fender was destroyed, and I don’t know of any way to buy just a front fender, so I’ll need a new pair of those. The weather today was dry, so I’ll figure I’ll drive somewhere tomorrow to get new ones. As for the pannier, not surprisingly, superglue was unable to hold the two thin plastic points together against the twisting force of opening the latch. So long, Delta panniers; I hardly knew ye. New panniers are pricey, so for now I’m going to let my road bike handle like a road bike and kill my back, instead. I need to do some more looking around as far as panniers, too. The Delta panniers were waterproof but very small. I’d like something larger, and I think I could deal with something less impermeable that comes with a rain cover or something.

My first stop was at REI where I bought a new helmet and a pocket knife (I’ve been without a knife (again) for about a month now, and I couldn’t find it under the couch like last time). I got the knife with the corkscrew but not the scissors since the scissors are kind of silly. As for the helmet, I ended up just buying the black version of what I already had, Bell’s “Citi” helmet. Helmets, like every other part of my bike, fall into that narrow transportation-minded area between mountain bikers and racers, so my options were pretty slim. There was one helmet marked as “Mountain” that would have worked well but looked kind of goofy, and there was another “Life-styles” helmet, as Bell calls them, as the only other option with a visor. Maybe I should just get sunglasses. Anyhow, this other helmet, the “Metropolis” (I had Kraftwerk stuck in my head the entire time at the store, and I bet that now you do, too), is extremely similar to the Citi. It’s the same roundish shape and has the same number of vents. In fact, the only differences I could find are that the Metropolis has some weird metal screws in various points that I couldn’t figure out the purpose for (sharp metal bits next to my head seems like a bad idea), the Metropolis has a gummy plastic layer along the front of the bottom rim where the Citi has bare foam (I can live without the extra plastic), the Metropolis uses a three-size system where the Citi has a single universal size (Large had a maximum diameter of 63cm, which probably would have been nice over the Universal size’s 61), and the Metropolis costs $30 more. Not seeing $30 worth of benefit, I decided to save my hard-earned moneys and went with something I know mostly works. I guess that’s what capitalism is all about.

REI didn’t have the eyeglass-mounted Third Eye mirror for some reason, so I picked that up at Performance. The same guy who was working there last week was there today, and he commented on the progress of the wound like everyone else has. With that in mind, I might as well just answer everyone’s questions here. Yes, it looks a lot better now, but I think the quick-healing is mostly an illusion due to the blood and scabs and stitches that were present when everyone first saw the wound. I do not have any kind of mutant X gene that I’m aware of. I’ve not been putting anything on it because the doctors and nurses with fancy degrees say that I shouldn’t. As far as my other injuries, my elbows and arm are basically back to normal, my knee still looks funky but feels ok, and, despite the worries of one of my coworkers, I don’t believe that the pain in my ribcage is a sign of anything broken. It didn’t show up until day three, bones can bruise too, and the pain is annoying rather than excruciating. I didn’t go into that much detail at Performance, since I doubt the guy would care, but I did save four bucks using my Performance points. I guess that was from the tires I bought a while ago.

Besides having a heavy bag strapped to my back, the only annoyance I encountered on the way to Performance was being unable to see behind me. I’ve grown quite used to the mirror, and when wearing it I only turn my head as a means of informing drivers behind me that I can see what they’re doing there and I might be doing something myself, like trying to merge. I’m not really looking at anything when I do that; it’s just a signal. As a result, I’ve gotten really bad at looking back, so there were a couple surprises. They weren’t the dangerous kind of surprise, fortunately, just the sort where a particularly quiet car passed me without me realizing there was anything behind me. I’m used to knowing everything that goes on back there, so it was a bit unsettling at times. I have the mirror again, though, and thusly armed I went to the Publix on Hammond to buy my bike’s weight in groceries.

I don’t really like shopping at the Publix on Hammond since it’s smaller than the usual Publix, but it’s the nearest normal supermercado that isn’t Kroger. Unlike other mini-Publixes, they manage to stuff all of the usual services into this one (bakery, pharmacy, deli, Suntrust bank), but the produce section suffers a little. There are three items I occasionally want that I can’t find at this one despite my requests: Crystal hot sauce (disappeared after Katrina; I’m not sure if the hot sauce factory is running again, but it seems like every other Publix has plenty of the stuff), Blue Plate mayonnaise (they have Blue Plate light for some reason, but that stuff’s just gross) and, most recently, fresh spinach did not return after the E. Coli scare. Other than that, though, I guess the place is pretty alright. It at least has a certain level of familiarity, and it’s always fun talking to that one bagger with the Mike Tyson voice (his brother turns 35 today). I didn’t require any forbidden items, so everything turned out well. One of the things I got for Christmas was a Southern Living “Weeknight Meals” cookbook (thanks, Mom), and to kick off my use of that I’m going to try the slow-cooker potato soup for Monday. Also, one of the fans of my cookies at work recently let it leak that I bring cookies sometimes but hide them in my office since I think it’s really nasty how people paw through things in the break room, so I’m going to try to bake some this weekend lest the leakee think I’m playing favorites (which I guess I am, but whatevs). At least I’ll have something to do tomorrow that doesn’t involve spending money or playing Guitar Hero (confidential to Cantrell: I got 234944 on medium “Message in a Bottle”).

So biking consumed most of my day. I haven’t noticed any remarkable difference with the new wheels and hubs, but I was able today to ride the entire painfully uphill length of Sandy Springs Circle while only stopping once for under a minute at a red light at Hammond. I haven’t been able to make that stretch without resting even when I haven’t been off the bike for over a week. Maybe it was just the lack of panniers, but maybe it’s something in the wheels. I did stay off of the OTP portion of Roswell Road, but I rode on Abernathy between Mount Vernon and REI, which is probably even stupider traffic-wise, but short. When I put the rear rack back on today, I did notice that the metal strips that attach under the seat are bent, but I’m not sure if that’s from the wreck or just the way they are. There’s about a 30° drop from the line of the rack to the holes near the seat post, so these flexible metal strips already had to bend to connect, but I can’t remember how far they had to go. It’s not really a load-bearing point, so it’ll work either way; it just looked weird at first. Everything else is in good working order. The only things left to buy are fenders and, eventually, new panniers. It’s nice to be free of the car again.

My bike is back in one piece. I supported local business by taking it to Roswell Bikes, and they, while discussing the fate of my flattened front wheel, upsold me to a pair of fancy new wheels. The fork is a Ritchie something or another carbon fiber thing, and the wheels are Mavic’s Aksium Race. The rims don’t keep spinning when I stop or anything, but they seem pretty neat. The rear hub clicks louder, but that’s the only real difference I’ve found so far in the 50-foot coast from my car to the stairs. They have a low spoke count (20 front, 24 rear), but every review I’ve seen seems to indicate that these are the indestructible Cadillacs of bike wheels, and I also bought the two-year “no-fault insurance” (basically what other companies would call the extended warranty, but I like that they admit it’s more of a gamble than a guarantee), so even if I do manage to crush them, I can have them replaced. In all, I could have just bought a slightly less rad bike with what I spent on parts for this one, but the new stuff sure does look shiny and cool. I added a couple of new photos of the new stuff to go with the destruction and gore of the aftermath.

I didn’t go to Roswell Bikes at first; I first went to Performance, since they’re an authorized Schwinn dealer, but I couldn’t’ swindle a warranty replacement out of them, and their selection of forks kind of blows. I admit that I had odd requirements—I was looking for another carbon fiber fork (that stuff sure is light) with eyelets for a fender. Most carbon fiber stuff resides in that goofy upper end of bicycle parts, and triathlon riders tend to be less concerned about how much grit gets sprayed into their gears than they are about aerodynamics and goofy crap like that. Performance only had two forks of any sort in stock, both carbon fiber without the holes on the dropout, and the person working there wasn’t terribly helpful with finding things in the catalog. Roswell Bikes doesn’t have a crappy store brand to push, and they seem to have a much better grasp on the hell what they’re doing, so they were able to get what I wanted and explain things to where I felt I knew what I was buying. They also gave me a discount on the wheels (covered the insurance plus a few bucks extra) and didn’t charge for labor, so that was pretty nice. In all, I’m happy with what I got, and I can’t wait to get back on the bike again, but I still have some work to do to get things back to where they were. Here’s a catalog of the damages:

Missing Things

• One of the handlebar end caps. I don’t really care, but maybe I’ll spend
  a couple of bucks for a new pair at some point.
• That plastic ring behind the cassette that was already chipped and
  cracked anyway. I don’t even know what this was supposed to do, so I
  don’t know if there was a reason the bike repair people took it off (other
  than its brokenness). The pictures in the bike book I have don’t include
  such a thing, so I’m going to assume it was optional and dumb.
• That Third Eye rear-view mirror. I really liked that thing, so that’s
  another ten bucks this weekend.

Damaged things

• One of the panniers. A latch broke off, and this was not the one with
  the broken elastic bit, so I can’t really use it as an excuse to buy one
  new one. I’m going to see if Gorilla Glue holds it back together.
• My jacket. I don’t want to buy a new jacket just for a two-inch tear,
  so I’ll try out my sewing skills before going back to REI.
• My handlebar. This was actually already bent, so I plan to just live
  with it for a little bit more. I think I remember the brake levers being
  higher up, and the shifters don’t leave much space for fitting an allen
  wrench where it needs to go, but this shouldn’t be too bad to adjust.
• My helmet. I need to buy a new helmet, and I plan to get one this
  time that better fits my big dumb head (the last one had a max size of
  61cm, and my head is about 60cm, which made wearing even those thin bike
  hats uncomfortable), but I have a backup helmet until I get around to
  it.

So there I have it. It’s not really a plan, and I’ll probably drag my feet through most of it, but at least I have a working bike again.

I mentioned recently that my last car crisis inspired me to try to save a buck or two on my car insurance. Right now, I pay kind of a lot. I don’t own the car yet, so the bank requires me to carry a comprehensive policy, I’m under 25, I’m single, I’m male, and I rear-ended someone slightly less than three years ago, so all of these factors converge into a big bag of money that I need to pay to some jerks whom I suspect spend their days sitting in smoke-filled rooms sipping brandy and talking about the stock market while wearing top hats and monocles. They can certainly afford to. Anyhow, I decided to shop around a little bit to see if maybe the big-bag-of-money problem is more the fault of State Farm’s greed than my own uninsurability. I got some quotes from the one with the pot-smoking CEO and the one with the annoying gecko and the sort-of funny cavemen. Geico won with a quote that was about $400 less per six months than I currently pay.

Geico has also been the most persistent. Progressive did their thing where they gave me two other competing quotes, both from two different branches of Liberty Mutual and both about what I pay now, and they sent me an email, but that was about the end of it. Geico, on the other hand, started calling me a couple of days after I got the quote online trying to push me into switching already. I was sort of dragging my feet, so it seemed reasonable, but it’s still annoying when someone interrupts whatever I’m doing to talk about insurance. I finally gave the lady the hospital story—though without any details, so she probably thinks I lost a leg or something—which made the calls stop, and I got around to going through the process of buying insurance last night using their web page. This was the point where things got interesting.

Car insurance requires information on the car, of course, and I gave them all of that, along with the loan information, license information for two different states (I was surprised to find I still had documents with the Alabama stuff on it, and I kind of wonder what they would have done if I couldn’t) and all that other stuff. I had already told them about my driving record in the quote process, so I figured that I would set up payments and that would be the end of it; 15% or more savings would be mine. Rather than putting me on the road to savings, though, Geico pulled an old-fashioned bait-and-switch on me. I received an email late last night letting me know that, armed as they are now with my VIN and driver’s license number, it came to their attention that I had been in a rear-end collision that I already told them about. My rate increased by $220, which suddenly made it a lot less interesting. After adding in the savings I would lose on my State Farm renter’s policy and the difference in their charges for payment plans, I would only barely come out ahead. I already gave Geico my credit card info, but the email said that I needed to authorize the new amount, so I’m hoping that I can put the brakes on this whole thing without having to yell or start a chargeback.

I don’t know how much of a habit Geico makes of this practice, but searching for others’ experiences shows that there are at least other people who feel that they lowballed the quote and then came up with a bit of a surprise for the actual rate. I guess I’ll try Progressive now, since their quote was still a good bit less than I pay with State Farm (and lower than the new Geico rate), but I’ve really lost interest in the whole thing. State Farm overcharges me, but at least it’s never felt like I’m playing a shell game with them.

I have a confession to make: I’ve only ever beaten one Zelda game: Link’s Awakening. I really enjoy the Zelda series, but for a variety of reasons, this is the only one I’ve ever played all the way through.

Excepting a first-generation Game Boy (which I still have somewhere), the Playstation is the first console I’ve ever owned. I’ve played console games, of course—I spent probably too much time in college in front of Crazy Taxi or Super Smash Bros.—but the Playstation is the first that I’ve been able to play on my own schedule. There are other options, of course: I wouldn’t steal a car, but I would steal a video game, and I have a handful of NES ROMs that I occasionally run in an emulator. I don’t condone video game piracy, but the age of the NES allows me to rationalize all of the guilt away. I think of video game systems as falling into three categories, roughly demarcated by durability. The systems around when I was growing up, like the NES, Sega Genesis, Atari 2600 and Super Nintendo, I view as old and busted. These are like vinyl records: they were pretty rad for a while, and some people still swear by them (the triangle wave channel sounded more warm, man), but they’re basically dead, and there are serious issues with the life of the media. Especially with the Nintendo systems, there is a limit to the cartridge life due to the battery needed to maintain the read-write memory used to store save game information. The five-year life advertised by Nintendo was probably a little conservative, but it’s been 20 years. That golden Legend of Zelda cartridge in your parents’ attic is dead. The old games are making a comeback in new forms, but I figure emulation is the easiest way to play NES games in their original form without schnazier graphics or updated translations. Sure, we Americans had a hell of a time trying to find level 8, but the nonsensical utterings of that crazy old man are part of Zelda’s charm in the English-speaking world.

After this first tier are the now-obsolete systems I played in high school and college: the Dreamcast, the Nintendo 64 and the original Playstation. These are kind of like eight-tracks, except that my music analogy kind of breaks down at this point, so I won’t try to strain it any more. This generation of systems began using flash memory—or EEPROMs in Nintendo’s case— to store game information, so there are no more worries about your games wearing out in five years or whatever. However, the systems are obsolete but not old enough to be retro-cool, so even if you do find a system, having one makes it look like you’re living in the past. Fortunately, the transition to the current line of systems came at a time when people were more concerned about playing their old games on new systems. In Sony’s case, the Playstation 2 uses an original Playstation chip for the sound processor, so PS2s can handle Playstation games without too much trouble as long as you have one of the original memory cards. Nintendo decided to take a page from the record company handbook and released N64 games as Gamecube games with little or no modification; I guess that kind of sucked for all the people that had to buy their library again, but I didn’t invest anything in N64 media, so I don’t really care. I would miss the special experience of the three-handed N64 controller if I played Ocarina of Time on the Gamecube or Wii, but I think I can live with that. Emulating a Nintendo 64 is possible, but it’s something I would like to avoid unless there is no other option.

Back to emulation, I have completed the first quest of Legend of Zelda in an emulator, but playing NES games on a keyboard lacks a certain something. All of my keyboards have that delightful blank gap between Ctrl and Alt, so emulation works pretty well with Commander Keen controls (The first time I played an Apogee game with a windows keyboard was very traumatic. In case you’re wondering how I use windows, I map Caps Lock to LCTRL and LCTRL to the windows key. See Scan Code Mapper for Windows for how; left windows is E05B. No one uses the application key.), but it’s just not the same as holding a controller in your hands, allowing you to gesticulate wildly in reaction to the game and get blisters on your thumbs during those twenty-hour Final Fantasy runs. I fixed this problem last Wednesday by buying a USB game pad, so emulation is now good enough for me. The game pad is basically a PS2 controller with a Logitech logo on it: it has two analog sticks that can push down, a digital direction pad, four main buttons, two triggers on each side, start and select buttons (actually buttons 9 and 10, but whatever), a mode button to control the analog and digital direction behavior, and one other button that does something with the vibration feedback that I don’t care about. It’s a bit overkill for pretending to use a two-button Nintendo controller, but all of the extra buttons, besides preparing me for any future games I decide to play with the thing, let me map two NES game pads onto this single controller, a feature that’s hella useful for saving my game in Zelda.

One of the interesting things about the first Legend of Zelda is that, even though it arrived in a very experimental phase as far as game design was concerned, the game itself and many of the forms it created have endured into today. Up until around Super Mario Bros. in 1986, console games were basically arcade games that you played on your television: there was no end to the games, and the goal instead was to achieve high scores. Mario changed this by having a way to complete the game. There was still a score, but the primary goal was to toss Bowser into a lava river and rescue the princess from a whacked-out mushroom trip. Computers had been doing this for years with games like Zork and King’s Quest, but the idea that you could play through a story in your living room using an inexpensive appliance was novel. The Legend of Zelda built on this the next year by ditching the score altogether, adding a bigger dash of story and giving the player a freeform world to explore instead of a restricting side-scrolling path. Several aspects of the game, such as the overworld map, the variety of equipable items and the combination of a linear storyline with a freeform gameplay have since become familiar aspects of console RPGs like Final Fantasy and whatever else Squaresoft has made.

Some current RPG features were missing. This Zelda installment and most others didn’t have experience points, something I feel worked in its favor. Game play is only fun as long as it is challenging to the point of being difficult but not impossible and as long as it doesn’t require the player to do something that isn’t interesting. The Final Fantasy games often fall into the not-interesting trap with things like spending 37 hours breeding chocobos (a substitute for spending 37 hours trying to defeat the impossibly-hard boss), and gaining experience points only with the goal of leveling up is an uninteresting interrupting of gameplay. Link does gain new abilities and more health throughout the game, but this is accomplished by playing the game instead of spending your time looking for monsters or hitting “A” over and over to do pushups or whatever. The primary unfun action Zelda has is trying to find the various secrets, a goal that requires bombing every rock and burning every bush. To add to the pain, this wanton destruction often metes punishment instead of rewards, opening passages to characters that demand payment for their crushed rocks and burnt bushes instead of the old men handing out heart containers. Finding the secrets is not necessary to game play, but having 16 heart containers at the end sure is handy, so I may end up using someone else’s map at some point. I don’t know. Related to this problem, another thing the first Zelda game lacked was a freaking overworld map. Miyamoto has compared the unmapped overworld with the experience of exploring unknown wildernesses, and I guess I can buy that, but I suspect that the real reason was that there wasn’t enough space on the cartridge or they ran out of development time. Either way, I won’t go all Zork on this game and try to keep track of everything. The basic features of the overworld are fairly easy to remember, and I can accept forgetting which shop sells the cheap shield, adding to the painful frustration of discovering that a Like Like ate it, as an interesting aspect of the game. Careful use of frustration can affect the challenge of game and thus affect the level of fun.

Another way for long games to deliver or relieve frustration is the method used to save. Though the use of tools like save points were probably originally devised as a means of conserving space, they can also be an useful tool in controlling the way a player progresses through portions of a game. Having to replay certain portions of the game after every unacceptable performance adds to the difficulty and alters the strategy of passing through difficult points. The Legend of Zelda allows games to be saved at any time, but the game is always restored to specific points on the map and with partial health. This is similar to save points as far as how difficult segments are played, but it can also be used as a helpful escape method. When I’ve played through Zelda before, I’ve never actually used the game’s save system due to the difficulty of accessing it. One method of saving is to die, which really isn’t so great, and the other is to hit “A” and a direction on the second controller. The cynical part of me suspects that this was some kind of weird bug that the developers decided to add to the manual instead of fixing. Whatever the case, I now have an easy means of accessing the second controller thanks to my surplus of buttons, and using this save method creates a very different game from using the emulator to save and restore memory states. I’m going to try to play the game using the means available to the original system instead of effectively cheating by using the emulator to restore to any point.

So there’s my plan. I want to play Zelda, and I want to play it right. It’s a difficult game, in part due to the bizarre translations of messages that are supposed to provide hints but mostly because it’s easy to forget about the other dozen monsters on a screen while trying to kill one. I don’t know how long this will take, but I’m as well-armed as I could have been when I was eight. I’ll probably try taking on the next game after this one, which, though I don’t know this firsthand, is supposed to be the sucky one. I’ll probably have to buy another console at some point.

In The Art of Urban Cycling, Robert Hurst compiles and analyzes a handful of unfortunately spotty bicycle injury statistics to estimate that, on average, the frequent rider will have one wreck a year, with one in four of those being a major wreck. I can’t recall how he defines “major,” and my copy of the book is currently out on loan, but I think I may have just had one. This is the first crash I’ve had that both required medical attention and rendered my bicycle unridable, so I figure that’s at least a little major. As several people have reminded me, I could have died. I’m ok, though, so don’t worry, mom. I didn’t lose consciousness or even end up with a concussion, and the most major injury was a nasty gash over my left eyebrow.

So here’s how it happened. Last night I decided to take a somewhat different route home. I usually take MARTA to Medical Center, which puts me just inside the perimeter, and I ride Glenridge to Roswell Road and ride from there downhill to my apartment. Sometimes, though, I’ll start from farther north. The road to my apartment is at a local minimum, so if I get off at Sandy Springs and ride Mount Vernon to Roswell Road, I end up doing about the same amount of work. The Sandy Springs route gives me the opportunity to stop at the shops along Abernathy or at the Trader Joe’s on Mount Vernon. Last night I stopped at Circuit City to pick up a game pad with the idea of using it to play Zelda on an emulated NES. Once I actually get to Mount Vernon and Roswell Road, though, I have basically two choices: I can go straight across Roswell Road and weave my way through a lightly trafficked, mostly downhill route that has some uphill portions as well as one narrow two-lane stretch where cars can’t pass me, or I can take a left and make a mad dash down Roswell Road, a heavily trafficked four (plus suicide lane) road. I’ve taken each route dozens of times, and I usually base my decision on my load. If I have a lot of groceries from TJ’s, I’ll cross the road and take Sandy Springs Circle, but last night I didn’t have much besides my stupid-heavy lock and the game pad, so I decided to take a left from Mount Vernon (or Johnson Ferry or whatever that road is called through that horrible triangle). Roswell Road is more fun, since I can keep up with the speeding traffic going downhill, which is a hell of rush.

One aspect of Roswell Road that I usually don’t consider until I’m already on it is the drain grates. The grates are perpendicular to the road (thanks, Fulton County), but a handful of them are sunken pretty far into the road (maybe you should fix that, Sandy Springs). Last night, while I was booking it like a librarian down the hill, I didn’t get out of the way of one of these grates fast enough and caught the lip at a pretty gnarly speed. I broke my fancy carbon fiber fork, and I did an endo into the road. I was wearing a helmet, but I don’t know how much of the crash it caught. I had the visor on, so it hit first and snapped off, and I think that pushed my helmet up a little bit. I ended up with a laceration over my right eyebrow, just under the helmet, along with some scrapes on my elbows, a bit of road rash on my right knee, and a chunk of skin missing from the back of my right hand. I have some pictures of my bike and of myself if you want to gross yourself out. The car directly behind me stopped and asked if I needed help while I was dragging the wreckage from the road, but I waved them off since I didn’t break any bones and I figured I could just stagger home if I needed to. Some guy rushed out of the Starbucks to help, and another guy on the road in an SUV stopped and wasn’t so easy to wave off. SUV guy, Harry Wood, is a cyclist himself, and he offered to put my broken bike in the back of his vehicle and drive me to the hospital to get my head stitched up. I think I managed to avoid bleeding on his fancy leather interior, but I figure I should get him a car detailing gift card just in case.

Northside hospital, after making me wait for a couple hours, as is their wont, stitched me up, wrapped my head like a lobotomy patient and sent me home with a prescription for some kind of antibiotic. I turned down the offer for painkillers since that Lortab stuff doesn’t do anything for me, I wasn’t in a whole lot of pain, and I figure that a few days worth of aches will do more to help knock some of the stupid out of me. I got a ride home from Sean, and I’ve been fine since other than the aches from the bruises I discovered this morning. Harry, who runs the local Van Michael Salon and is a really nice dude, hung on to my bike for the night and gave me a coupon for a free haircut—an appointment for which I have for Tuesday—when I picked it up. Though I’ve never cared about my hair enough to be better than a little wary of hair salons, Van Michael was packed full of hotties when I went, so I might end up making a habit of the place.

In all, I made it out mostly intact, and I’ll have a funky scar good for some stories, but this was a very expensive wreck. The fork, since I doubt that I can lie my way into cashing in on Schwinn’s lifetime warranty, is going to cost me two or three hundred to replace; the front wheel, though surprisingly round (the guy who trued it last must have been some kind of damn magician), may need replacement if the little dent I picked up won’t come out; my jacket is torn up; my right glove has holes in both sides (I guess it’s a good thing I have another three pairs); I’ll need a new helmet (I’d been wanting to get a bigger one anyway, so I guess that works in my favor), and, perhaps most annoyingly, my new glasses and the attached Third-Eye mirror were run over before I could fetch them from the road. I’m glad I didn’t break any bones or die, and I hope to be back on the bike in another week or two. I have a feeling I won’t be riding that section of Roswell Road quite so frequently, or at least not at night.

Before I start complaining about everything, I’m going to start on a positive note. I’ve come another step closer to justifying that ridiculous DVD player I bought a while back. You’re probably familiar with Flash Gordon, the comic strip from the 30’s and competitor to Buck Rogers that heavily influenced what we think of pulp science fiction. The comic strip has been adapted to television and film several times, but the pinnacle was reached in 1980. The 1980 movie is about the most ridiculous thing ever: the entire thing looks like a truckload of 80’s glam exploded over the bridge of 50’s sci-fi, and, unlike that awkward metaphor, it kind of works. It knows when to take itself seriously (which is very little), and, since the special effects take a back seat to the costumes and sets, it doesn’t date itself by using cutting-edge technology. The main clue that it’s an 80’s film is the Queen soundtrack. Anyhow, the DVD is apparently unavailable in the US, but Britishland had a 25th anniversary special edition that, after shipping, came out to about what I would expect to pay for a DVD over here. Thanks, the United Kingdom! You’re the best.

In other buying things news, I got a Playstation 2 and Guitar Hero II. Finding the PS2 was actually kind of hard. Apparently everyone tried to buy a PS3 for Christmas, but they were sold out, so they bought PS2s instead. When I tried to buy the system this week, I found piles of PS3 systems but not 2’s. Weird. I only have Guitar Hero right now, but I’m sure more games will eventually follow. I figure as long as I stay away from any of the Final Fantasies I should be doing alright.

And now for the angrier part. I took my big pile of rolling debt in for service this weekend, and boy did that ever cost a lot. Toyota has major service points at 30 and 60 kilomiles, and this service was a sort of 45k checkup in the middle. However, somewhere in all of that not-driving, I managed to totally screw up my front brakes. I knew I was having some problems, but I didn’t take action as soon as I should have since I don’t drive very much. I guess that’ll learn me.

What upsets me most about this is that I really don’t feel like I’m getting my money’s worth out of the car. Besides paying to keep the thing street legal and running smoothly, the big bags of money I give to Bank of America and State Farm every month are pretty significant. I’m going to try to reduce one of those this week by saving 15% or more on my car insurance. I’ve wanted to pay less for car insurance for a while now, but the last time I got a set of quotes I had a pair of speeding tickets and a wreck on my record which made everyone’s amounts about the same. Those moving violations have started fading into the past, so the differences among the various companies are a bit greater now. My primary obstacle to switching is now just that I hate dealing with all of this crap.

As for the payments, I’m not really sure what to do. A part of me wants to get rid of the car altogether, but I’m not sure if I’m really ready to do that. I know that I could by without a car, but having a car sure is convenient. It’s also annoying to think that even if I were to sell it, I’d still be paying for it a little while longer. I hate this stupid thing.

On transportation, I’ve started riding the bike again. I drove to work last week since I wasn’t yet sure that my guts were back to 100%. I rode to the grocery one night, but the first real ride I’ve done this year was this weekend. I took the bike along with me to the car place and rode back today to pick it up. Getting to the car place sure was a lot harder than leaving it. To give you an idea of the layout of the area, here’s an approximate map of the altitudes involved:

It also rained today, so I had a chance to try out those fancy Gore-tex rain pants I got for Christmas. They’re pretty nice, and I kind of wish I had a jacket made out of the stuff. Despite REI’s claims for their store-brand jacket, that thing doesn’t breathe for crap. It’s a good thing I don’t mind spending big piles of money on the bike.