A carnival of technology

It’s really damn polleny out there. The record pollen count for Atlanta is 6,013 particles per cubic meter air set on April 12th of 1999, and Monday was heading in that direction with 5,499/m³. Everything is yellow from those freaking pine trees. I park my bike outside during the day, and after just an hour or two it’s coated with a thick coating of yellow dust. I’m fortunately not allergic to anything I know of, but I figure that I probably go through a few cubic meters of air in a day, and breathing in 5,499 particles of junk for each one seems probably unhealthy. I hope it rains soon or something.

I got a flat tire today, which isn’t terribly unusual, but this one was a little sobering. Since I last replaced my tires after the nail incident, I’ve had the attitude that my tires are basically invincible, held together by some kind of Italian black magic. I’ve had so many incidents where my thinking while on the bike followed “Shit! I ran over a beer bottle! Sweet! I’m still rolling!” that I perhaps expected too much of them. I couldn’t find the hole in the tube at first, and my examination of the tire revealed several gouges and small holes. I ended up just stuffing a dollar into what looked like the nastiest (which turned out to be correct) (aside: if you want a quick buck, you can steal one out of my rear tire), and hopefully that’ll hold for a while. I also apparently managed to pump the new tube up to 110psi with that wimpy little hand pump, which I thought was pretty impressive. Maybe I had a bunch of adrenaline running through me from being so pissed. I still have a lot of faith in Vittoria, but I need to keep in mind that every sharp rock and broken bottle carries a material cost.

The storage facility that was recently built behind the Home Depot on Peachtree Dunwoody is now open. I’ve felt that this building was pretty odd from the start, since it’s in a pretty nice area, and it has a fancy-looking brick façade. I saw a sign out front today advertising wine storage, so I guess they’re trying to be an upscale storage facility, suitable for all of your high class, semi-urban storage needs. I wonder how well it’ll work.

I still haven’t purchased new panniers for my bike, and I think it’s about time I did. It’s getting pretty hot now, so wearing a backpack means more than just the discomfort of carrying something on my body instead of the bike: I get some kind of serious sweaty. I’ve been able to live out of just my tiny rack trunk for a good while this past week or two, but today I needed to bring the pack in order to buy food, and the back of my shirt felt pretty gross. Something like a messenger bag could probably alleviate this problem to some extent, but to me down that path lies the way of the hipster. A messenger bag still has the problems of putting the weight on your body, and I don’t share the needs of a bike courier, so I’d rather go the old-school route and attach some big bags to the back of my bike. I haven’t looked very hard yet for new ones, and I wonder if I’ll be able to find something that doesn’t look too much like I’m out for a week long tour without being too small. Even with those crappy Delta panniers, I met one guy who seemed convinced that I was doing a fancy job of being homeless.

I now know what Cracker Barrel plans to do when they exhaust the world’s finite supply of old junk to put on their walls: cut it with whatever newish junk they can find. I recently saw a clarinet hanging from the wall of a Cracker Barrel, and it didn’t look banged up or tarnished or anything. It was real wood, too, so it’s likely worth two or three hundred at least. It seemed really out of place nestled among the metal signs advertising Danny McHejaz’s nickel restoratives.

I’m a sucker for bargain bin DVDs, even if they aren’t really a bargain. I went to a Borders recently and got caught by the ? (mostly equal to) $10 bin. I somehow ended up with copies of Twelve Angry Men (I remember seeing part of it in some social sciences class in high school, but I don’t remember why or how much of it we watched), some Western that also stars Henry Fonda, and The Neverending Story. Maybe I should stick to renting.

Tomorrow morning I plan to create another batch of my crock-pot chicken chili blanco, whose fire is legendary. The recipe’s no secret—it’s actually one that came with the crock pot—but I always make a substitution of fresh peppers for the canned chilies recommended by the little white book, and I believe this is one of the secrets to deliciousness. There is some bit of masochist in me that loves that special heat from the fresh peppers, and it’s going to be awesome. I shopped today for my missing ingredients, mainly the beans and the peppers, at Whole Foods, and I have a couple of things to say about that experience.

Firstly, I don’t think that anyone actually knows the PLU for habanero peppers. I’m not even sure that there is one. This punchy little pepper carries what seems like a pretty hefty price tag compared to other vegetables, usually around $6/lb, but, when you consider that most of that weight is from the plastic bag, they don’t cost very much. Still, I’ve yet to see them actually rung up as what they are. I even had one cashier at Publix, a Mexican lady, comment that I was crazy for buying them while she rang them up as something else. The cashier at Whole Foods rang up my two or three peppers as .04 pounds of jalapeño, even after correctly registering the actual jalapeños I also bought. I think I may have inadvertently cheated Whole Foods out of a dime or so.

Secondly, I’m just not sure that I can agree with the Whole Foods philosophy on groceries. I shop there once in a while mostly because they’re nearby, but their attitude towards living might be more than I can take. Their stance on food is clear enough simply from the name—the current popular agricultural model is broken and can be remedied by an avoidance of artificial chemical treatments to crops and livestock—but I’ve mostly only viewed it as a place where people who like spending more money than usual on food are given that opportunity. They have a few mighty fine items there, and I suppose that not abusing antibiotics and growth hormones in beef and dairy cows is probably a good idea, so whatever. They’re a specialty food store with an underlying agenda that I can comfortably ignore. That agenda came out for me today, however, when I visited that other section of the store, the one with the hardwood floor and rows of various supplements and tonics.

I needed some more deodorant, and the only deodorant I’ve found to adequately overcome the powerful stink I create while on the bike is the long-lasting variety of Tom’s of Maine. I don’t care to drown myself in Aqua Velva or anything like that, so I’m fine with this solution. Tom’s of Maine is kind of a hippie brand, so I figured Whole Foods would probably carry it (which they do), but on the way to the deodorant aisle I noticed a sign for one of the categories nestled among the vitamins and natural shampoos that I found offensive enough to make me reconsider my Whole Foods patronage: homeopathics.

In most cases, I consider the use of “natural” or “organic” products to be a symptom of a righteous pretension with which I often disagree, but I’m ok with it. If you want your wheat and soy beans fertilized strictly with horse manure and seaweed and your shampoo made only from spring wather and plant squeezings, that’s alright; it’s not hurting anyone. If it tastes or works better, I’m all for it, too. I’m unable, however, to consider homeopathy on the same plane, since this is phony medicine and it really does hurt people if they expect it to cure anything outside of the healing powers of the placebo affect. Whole Foods’ sale of sugar pills and water under the label of medicine is something that I find deeply troubling. I don’t know if they do it out of greed (sugar pills and water are pretty cheap to produce, whether there’s some mystical dance attached to them or not) or a genuine belief in their validity, perhaps through the postmodern rejection of scientific evidence that has made them popular, but I don’t know that I can handle the knowledge that my organic onions are supporting a store that so openly espouses the validity of these fallacious remedies.

Q: How can you tell that you have an Irish boomerang?
A: It never comes back, but it won’t stop singing about it.

I’m not terribly interested in genealogy. I’m basically a European grab-bag, and my family is far enough removed from the old countries that I care more about where I am than whence I came. I’m American, and I’m just fine with that. However, I still feel that there’s something special about names, and my own patronymic line back to the other side of the Atlantic is easy enough to trace that I hold some interest in it.

My surname marks me as a descendant of Seaghdha, a man who was either a complete fabrication or a chieftain of Corcu Duibne sometime in the 7th century. He probably fought some Braveheart-style battles and stuff, and he may have looked something like this:

I find it funny that the Anglization of his name didn’t add any phonetic clarity by the usual English notions of it, but whatever; a few of those dark beers and the name comes out just fine. Being the descendant of some sort of ruler isn’t really anything terribly special—nearly anyone with blood ties to Ireland has some king of something or another in their family tree, and the density of Sheas in some parts seems to indicate that they weren’t shy about making kids—but it does impart some information relevant to the point that I’m avoiding: my ancestors were converted to Christianity well over a thousand years ago, maybe even some by the words and deeds of St. Patrick himself; my ancestors mostly ended up in County Kerry, as far south and west as you can go on the island without getting your feet wet, and sometime in the latter half of the 19th century John Shea, my great-great grandfather, left Cahircaveen and hopped on a ship to sail off to the new world.

St. Patrick is obviously a big deal to Ireland. He was born a Scot, but everyone gives him a pass on that one since he spent most of his life being Irish. As you almost certainly know, the day of St. Patrick’s feast was this past Saturday, and, agree with the church or not, preaching to an island of people ranging from apathetic to hostile takes some serious patience and huevos, and Ireland could certainly do worse for a patron. My own family becomes Irish enough this once a year, and I have fond memories of corned beef and cabbage and The Quiet Man playing on TBS whenever this day came around. We don’t treat it like a more serious holiday, like Thanksgiving or Christmas, but there’s still a certain level of ritual and reflection involved. Since leaving home I’ve celebrated the day myself by cooking the Americanized version of the traditional meal (thanks, Jews, for the corned beef) and playing some rowdy drinking songs on the stereo. I didn’t do any of that this year.

On early Saturday morn’, Xochitl (a coworker) and I got in a car and drove to Savannah. I don’t know what it is about Savannah that made it a St. Patrick’s location, but it is, and it’s one hell of a party. The only numbers I’ve seen made an a priori estimate of around 700,000 revelers, and I don’t think they were far off. I took some photos of the event if you’d like to see what I look like wearing a green plastic hat or are curious about Kat’s roommate’s cats. It didn’t show up in the pictures, but I also chose to rep’ the ATL (throw the peace sign up then upside down) and the emerald isle with a pimp-sized “ST. PAT’S” medallion from Walmart. I’m not a huge fan of crowds, since crowds are likely to puke on my shoes and act as an obstacle between me and more beer, but I had a great time in it. I can’t think of any other situation where it would be possible or appropriate to dive into the middle of a roving band of bagpipes and drums and start dancing. Many thanks to Kat for letting me crash at her place at the end of the night.

We lost Xochitl sometime in the night since she wanted to meet up with some of her friends and then join them back to Atlanta at some crazy early hour on Sunday. Once the crowded bars lost their appeal, Kat, John and I went back and watched The Quiet Man, perhaps the best cinematic expression of Irish-Americaness there ever was. I had great fun and went home on Sunday just in time to get caught in traffic starting around McDonough that may have been related to NASCAR.

I still have a bit of a craving for some corned beef, so I got to thinking once back home: there should be some serious post holiday sales going on about now. I went grocery shopping tonight for some corned beef and cabbage, and I plan to toss it in the crock pot tomorrow morning. I always have way too much, so if you feel like a St. Patrick’s meal a few days late, come on over tomorrow evening. I decided to start at Trader Joe’s just to see what they had, and what they had was corned beef for $4.79/lb and none of the appropriate vegetables. I felt like I’d been flipped off by a grocery store. Publix, thankfully, did not disappoint. I bought a Murphy & David corned beef brisket (spice pack included), a brand I’ve bought before and one that makes no effort to disguise its origins in a cold, heartless meat factory, soaking in brine and sodium nitrite while Rocky punches some cow carcasses in the background. I can appreciate that. Publix was selling it for $2.79/lb (regular price is close to four bucks). Cabbage was half price, and I also picked up a six pack of Smithwick’s discounted seventy cents (which probably only put it at the non-holiday price). Potatoes were regular price, but that wasn’t terribly surprising. I did the crock pot meal last year and it came out pretty nice, but I think I’ll try putting a piece or two of the cabbage under the meat this year to see how it comes out. It’s not quite the same as boiling everything until it all has a consistent flavor and texture, but it’s close enough, and it’s delicious. I can hardly wait.

I used to read a lot. I spent a lot of my high school years filling my head with silly sci-fi junk among other things, with visions of worlds finding creative ways to drive themselves mad. Maybe that’s how I came out such a mopey kid. My reading trailed off drastically in college where I was unwilling to make time for reading among the usual college activities of playing Final Fantasy and binge drinking. I’ve picked up a few books here and there since then, and my efforts to fill all of the dead time I now have waiting for buses has given me a new passion to read.

My discovery of Vonnegut was, like so many things in my life, a part of an effort to get on someone’s nerves. In high school I took several advanced placement courses, AP, which was a special program where high school students took allegedly more difficult courses followed by a test at the end of the year intended to prove to college admissions staffs that the taker should be given some free college credit for being so gosh-darned good at taking tests. My high school, like many others, employed the absurd practice of inflating the grades of AP students in an effort to make people who took the smart-people courses look better than the people who took the normal-people courses. An A in an AP class counted as a 5 in GPA calculation, a B counted as a 4, and so on. I graduated high school with a GPA meaninglessly greather than 4.0. I graduated college with a 2.7. I received no college credit for my efforts in AP literature.

I think that the name of my senior year AP literature teacher was Mrs. Bagget, so I’ll call her that. I can’t remember the name of the substitute we had during the winter, so I’ll call her Mrs. Retired. Mrs. Bagget had to take a leave of absence during the winter months of the school year for medical reasons, and in her place a recently former English teacher from the same high school taught the course. Mrs. Bagget and Mrs. Retired had a friendly rivalry going while they were both teaching, one point of which was Mrs. Bagget’s obsession with Billy Budd, an intensely dull novel by Herman Melville that centers around a sailor cum messiah figure. I’ve been wrong in the past about books I read in high school—I revisited Great Expectations a little while ago, a Dickens novel I despised and never actually finished in my first year of high school, and consumed anew through a fresh lens of greater patience and (I hope) maturity, I really enjoyed it,—but I can’t see anything good coming out of Billy Budd. Mrs. Retired agreed. One of the things we were supposed to do under our substitute’s tenure was choose a novel on which to base a term paper and begin writing about it. There was a list of acceptable novels as a part of the guidelines for the way the course should be taught, and one of the books on the list was Slaughterhouse-5. I was, as is my wont, indecisive, and Mrs. Retired suggested I choose Slaughterhouse-5 since Mrs. Bagget hated anything resembling science fiction.

Choosing reading material for the bus has been difficult due to the level of distraction that must be endured. I tried one of those ridiculous English gothic novels I have, but I found myself unable to keep up with the flowery verbiage and long, descriptive passages among the din of transportation and interruptions of arrival. I put that aside and turned to non-fiction, reading Are There Really Neutrinos? for a little while, a book that defends the value of science and attacks postmodernist thinking by way of documenting the experiments, failures and discoveries regarding a confusing extra bit of energy involved when an atom decides to emit a rather large electron and what turned out to be a rather small something else. The book itself made a delightfully awkward conversation piece with my fellow passengers, but I quickly found myself similarly lost among formulæ and graphs that I had no hope of fully understanding and no hope of deciphering at all on a bus. I got a B in electromagnetism, but it took me two tries, and the last couple of tenths of a percentage point in my grade actually came from the largesse of my professor rather than my own knowledge and understanding of the material. Not having learned my lesson, I put the science aside and grabbed another thick, difficult book from my shelf: V.

V was the first novel of Thomas Pynchon, an author I knew primarily as the creator of the famously dense and incomprehensible Gravity’s Rainbow. If I remember correctly, the Borders on Cobb Parkway put this book in the philosophy section, away from works of fiction with more dignity and clarity. All I knew about V was that the review written by George Plimpton for the New York Times Review of Books is itself a fascinating, vague and moody description of a novel with similar qualities. Things went pretty well until chapter 11 when the interspersed flashbacks took the form of an apologia pro vita sua of a Maltese poet. Unlike the preceding chapters, there were no subheadings provided at intervals of ten or fifteen pages or so, and the nature of the content was such that I felt it would make no sense unless I tackled all fifty pages of boggling symbolism in one sitting. The bus did not allow for this luxury, so I took a break for a week or so and finished the book over a weekend. In all, it wasn’t so bad. Pynchon perhaps felt mercy on his poor readers around the last third of the book or so and started elaborating on the connections and meanings behind various elements in his patchwork of stories. It was definitely an interesting read. I don’t know that I’m ready for Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon’s latest novel was described in the Christian Science Monitor as follows:

His new novel, Against the Day, represents one of the few cases in which I’d recommend judging a book by its cover. A casual examination will reveal that (a) it’s massive (1,085 pages) and (b) if you stare at the blurry title for more than a second, it makes you feel dizzy and your head starts to hurt.

The most recent book I chose to occupy myself on the bus was a Vonnegut novel: Breakfast of Champions. It was a very easy read. The breaks between chapters and the subdivisions that come between every couple of paragraphs may or may not actually be logical separations, but the train of thought is written such that it can be interrupted without much difficulty at nearly any point, and the delicately sparse words are decorated frequently with crude drawings of everything from roadside signs to wide open beavers. It’s also the best autobiography I think any author could hope for.

I need another book for bus reading now, so I’ve come again to this dilemma of compromise. I’m thinking of going back to the shelf for another Dickens.

MARTA’s new Breeze implementation has become kind of annoying. MARTA users are now required to tap a card at every turn, even if payment of a fare is already evident, and the fare gates between the rail stations and bus bays leave a lot of chance for error. The way it’s supposed to work now is that I tap the card to get into a train station, ride to another station, tap my card to exit the station into the bus bay to get a transfer, and then tap again when I get on the bus. One of the problems here is that the gates to the bus bay are configured like the gates at the station’s exit: you need to tap or swipe or whatever to get from the bus bay into the main area, but you can just walk out into the bus area without doing anything. I saw some guy on Thursday probably lose $1.75 by not having a transfer. The change in bus policy (boarding a bus at stations with an attached bus bay didn’t require any kind of transfer before last month) presents new problems in enforcement. Before, the bus drivers would park the bus in the route’s spot, leave the bus open and idling while they went to take a break, and then return and drive off at the route’s departure time. I’ve so far seen three ways that the drivers enforce the new transfer requirement. Some drivers stay in the bus the whole time, which probably sucks for them. Some drivers lock the bus and leave people waiting outside in the wind and weather, which sucks for us. And some drivers leave the bus and demand transfers from all boarded passengers when they return, creating a brief rush on the card reader, which is kind of goofy. I hope that MARTA is getting something out of this other than confused and annoyed riders.

Some kids just offered to take out my trash for a buck or two. I guess it’s kind of hard for kids to find a way to earn money in an apartment complex—I have no lawn to mow or leaves to rake or anything like that?so I applaud their creativity and effort. Unfortunately, I took my trash out last night. Sorry, kids.

Georgia’s three-tier alcohol distribution system can make for some interesting scenarios. While buying my goofy yuppie beers last weekend, I noticed Trader Joe’s branded three-buck chuck on sale right there in the middle of the store. Maybe that’s why Trader Joe’s is now selling it for $2.50.

My bike brakes still squeak like crazy, but it seems to take heavier braking before they make noise now. Oddly enough, they didn’t make any noise in the rain. They didn’t work so great, either, but that wasn’t much of a surprise. I don’t think that Koolmax squeegee bit really does anything.

I beat Guitar Hero II on hard yesterday. I only have three stars on most of the songs, so I’m far from done with this difficultly level, but it’s nice to think that I’m maybe getting somewhere. I guess I should probably get another PS2 game at some point.

So that Daylight Saving Time thing is tomorrow. I think this practice is ridiculous, but my main concern was that my computer wouldn’t know what time it is. I haven’t updated anything since 2005 or so, before the new DST law was passed, so I dug up some new timezone data files today and tried to remember how to use zic. I hope this works.

I’ve noticed that Google has lately been encouraging me to create KML copies of any (warning, buzzwords ahead) “mashups” I’ve created and add the KML to my sitemap.xml file. The encouragement of using KML is interesting, and hopefully indicitave of being able to more easily overlay KML through the Google Maps API, but I was more interested in this sitemap.xml thing. What is it? Am I supposed to have one? What does it do?

Sitemaps is a site run by Google that describes this file, which is basically just a list of all the URLs for a site encoded in an XML format. The idea makes some sense. In the current web crawling model, if a crawler bot wants to fetch every page for a site, it must start at the root and build a graph of internal links, assuming that every available page is even linked at all. The sitemap provides a single entry point into the entire site which makes things at least conceptually cleaner. However, I see several problems with this file right off the bat:

There is no specification or recommendation for handling repeated or dynamic content. For dynamic content, I have a CVSWeb view into a handful of projects, and listing each and every possible link beneath that would be both absurd and unfeasible. However, what entry points should I provide? Only the top-level? One per project? It’s not clear just how search engines intend to use the sitemap data, so I don’t know what the best decision would be. As for repeated content, every post on this site spends a little time on the front page, but they are also archived and indexed through the individual entry pages, the monthly archives and the category indices. Do I include each in the sitemap or only the permanent link, which would likely be more useful to search engines? I suppose including them all is the idea behind the priority tag: I could give the permalink pages a higher priority than the monthly and category pages, thus making everything avaialble and providing a hint as to the more useful page.

This file is going to get big quick. This modest blog would have over 700 entries indexing entries and archives alone, and web crawlers are going to have to download the entire file every time. Partial XML files don’t make sense, and there’s no mechanism I can see for indicating the prescence of new pages other than generating a new sitemap every time. Google does provide an additional file format, the sitemap index, allowing sites to separate sitemaps that won’t change into different files. The sitemap index can also point to Atom and RSS files, which is kind of neat in that it those that already have these alternative index files can just point to them instead of generating new files, but it seems like sitemap indices should be able to point to additional indices to allow more flexibility. That could create a cycle, but finding a cycle in a graph isn’t terribly hard.

Lastly, and most importantly, no search engine has ever attempted to fetch sitemap.xml from my site. After poking through their FAQ, I found how Google expects sitemaps to be handled: you need to tell them about it before it does you any good. I thought that submitting your site to every search engine was one of the things that Google made obsolete with their fancy new crawler they showed the world back in 1999. I guess I was wrong.

Q: Can I handle a 30 mile or so ride?
A: Yeah, just barely

I followed the Green Tour “Advanced” bicycle route today for the hell of it, and man am I tired. I made a few deviations from the standard route: the Green Tour route starts at Mount Vernon and Sandy Springs circle, heads south on Mount Vernon to Long Island and Northside and all that stuff and comes back via Powers Ferry, after which it heads the other way on Mount Vernon, then north on Glenridge and around Spalding. Once I got up to Mount Vernon, I started with the Spalding loop and then came back and did the second loop backwards. I don’t know if the direction was carefully chosen to balance the various grades of the roads, but I suspect that the decision was more to avoid a bunch of left turns. Once I got up to Abernathy on my rebelliously counterclockwise loop, I headed back towards Roswell Road to return my movies and then doubled back to return to the route. I also stopped at a Publix on Powers Ferry that happened to be on the route. I slapped together a KML file for the sake of figuring out distances and whatnot (which turned out to be harder than I expected, more on that below), which you can see here run through google maps. The prescribed path is in green (haha, get it?) and my actual path is in blue.

I wanted to figure out the actual distance I traveled, including the distance to the starting point and my detours, and I figured having a series of lat/long points would be the easiest way to do that. That was before I remembered that longitude lines aren’t parallel. I ended up using the Haversine formula, which is supposed to be better at calculating small distances than just regular spherical trigonometry. It was actually just the first formula I found after plugging some words into google since I really didn’t feel like deriving all that crap. In case you’re curious, here’s some math:

That looks hideous, but I don’t know what I’m doing with MathML, so whatever. Also, arctan should actually be atan2, but I don’t know how to do that, either. R is the radius of the earth (I used 3959 miles), and all coordinates are in radians. For the ride itself, I started at 2:10 and ended at 5:45 with a half-hour total spent in Blockbuster and Publix. So, from that data, here are some totals for the ride:

• Length: 35mi (56km)
• Average speed (not including stops in the time): 11mph
• Times I pulled over to catch my breath: a bunch
• Times I pulled over to clean up after spitting into an ill-timed gust:
  1
• Times I crossed into DeKalb county: 2
• Times the road itself was the border for DeKalb county: 1
• Stop signs I just blew through without even slowing down: about a
  dozen
• Stop signs where some jerk ignored the usual timing algorithm and
  tried to run me over: 1 (seriously lady, what in the hell?)
• Wind speed: 15mph with 25mph gusts
• Wind direction: never in the direction I was traveling
• Average hilliness: I could have sworn the mountains were farther
  north
• Times I wondered what in the hell I was doing: 5

In all, it was a fun ride, but I’m really not in good enough shape to be doing this sort of thing. I stopped twice to rest on the way up Sandy Springs circle, which isn’t unusual and is probably more because I don’t warm up or stretch or anything when I ride. I wasn’t out of breath so much as just uncomfortable. After that I did pretty well, only stopping away from traffic lights a couple of times along Spalding and Dunwoody Club Dr, meaning I made it ten or so miles up those gnarly hills before they got to me, but the second loop just didn’t agree with me at all. By that time my legs were tired, I was out of breath, and in all I had no interest in climbing the rest of the seemingly endless hills around Long Island Dr in order to get back home. I started stopping halfway through each new climb to catch my breath and hope that my legs would start working again. I eventually made it, but I felt pretty rough afterwards.

Another thing that I probably should have planned better was food and water. I only filled a pair of 24oz bottles to take with me, and those ran out by the time I got to Blockbuster. Also, I usually just have coffee for breakfast in the mornings, and, since I wake up around noon on the weekends, all I had in me by the 2:00 departure was that liquid meal. I probably could have done better on that. I ended up buying a couple of bottles of water and a Snickers bar at Blockbuster, and, though I was out of water again by the time I got home, that seemed to work pretty well.

Overall I figure that the ride was a good thing, but I probably don’t need to be repeating anything of that length in that kind of terrain anytime soon. I should probably try to work my way up to that level a little more slowly.

There’s a restaurant near where I work called Off the Grill. They’re apparently a Tennessee-based chain, and I’ve been a little pessimistic about the place due to the location. The shopping center where they’re located is brand new and filled with stores catering to affluent office workers in the area whom may not even exist. There’s a Caribou Coffee in this strip mall, which I guess is ok, and I was at one point in the habit of spending a good bit there, but I certainly don’t go there for the food. The only other restaurant is called Justix, a place that sells meat on a stick. That seems like a good idea, but the meat isn’t that great, the array of sauces is overwhelming, and the whole experience really isn’t worth the seven or eight bucks they expect for a skimpy meal. There used to be an Arby’s Marketfresh whatever next to it, an experiment Arby’s is making in trying to turn their brand into an upscale quick-serve deli, but I thought that was kind of goofy and they went of business after only a few months. Off the Grill serves steak. I like steak, but fast-food steak seems kind of weird. Off the Grill also delivers, which I also think is kind of weird. My Alabama readers may recall Steak Out, a steak takeout restaurant, and Off the Grill reminds me a bit of that place. I don’t recall ever actually eating Steak Out’s food, but the whole idea seems strange to me.

The last time I ate at Off the Grill I had a grilled chicken sandwich and a baked potato. The sandwich was ok, but I think that Chick-fil-a does grilled chicken better (and certainly cheaper), so I didn’t think much of it. What really stuck in my mind was the potato. I feel that I know my way around a potato, and the thing that they served me really sucked. Off the Grill somehow found a way to bake a potato into a featureless, tasteless mush; it was really horrible. The potato was enough to turn my otherwise pretty alright experience into a culinary horror, and I didn’t eat there again until today.

Today, while pondering the list of restaurants I’ve eaten at dozens of times, I decided to give Off the Grill another chance. Steak is their thing, and I hadn’t actually tried that. The sirloin tips on the menu had an asterisk next to it, so I ordered that along with a salad and some vegetables as my two sides. The first thing that struck me was the confrontation with the cashier. Ordering cow requires a specification of cookedness, of course, and I ordered medium-rate, as is my wont. I usually take the attitude that redder is better, but I don’t trust many places to get rare right, and I’m not even sure how tips are supposed to work. “Medium-rare” is a fairly well established point in the five levels of grilling, so I didn’t think much of it until the cashier insisted on referring to it as “mid-rare.” I wasn’t expecting this bizarre, foreign response, so I assumed he hadn’t heard me and repeated myself, for which I was met again with this abbreviated blurt of a steak specification. The receipt agreed with me with “medium rare,” so I really don’t get why he was treating me like the cook. The whole exchange seemed to me like a series of fast talking nonsense, and, since I’m from the South, I wasn’t mentally prepared for this linguistic assault. I picked the vegetables off the menu without much trouble, but I got stuck trying to pick a second side that didn’t involve potatoes, at which point the cashier rattled off a list of things that were not up on the big board. I picked the salad since it was the first word I understood. Off the Grill needs to give their people some speech lessons or something.

As for the meal, the salad was nothing to write home about. There was some lettuce, a cherry tomato or two, a layer of Kraft shredded cheese, and a little container of “lite” ranch dressing. I don’t know if the dressing is just the default they have for ranch or if the cashier was trying to say that I’m fat, but I didn’t like it. The vegetables suffered the same fate as the potato: they were mushy and unpleasant. The steak tips were pretty good, though. If this restaurant were any good at sides I’d want to go back there, but as it is, I don’t look forward to any repetitions of this experience.

And now, cycling. Cristina, my officemate who is more of a dirty hippie than me, sent me a link to the Georgia Capitol Ride, an annual event where bikers ride downtown as part of some kind of transportation statement I guess. I had heard about this event—while out on a ride once with blind Joe, some lady came up to us at Riverside park and talked about the ways Roswell does bike stuff, such as this ride and some criterium they have once in a while—but I had no idea when this ride occurred. It seems pretty neat, but I don’t plan to participate. Firstly, it’s a ride in a big group, and I don’t think I’d do well in that environment. I’m a bad cyclist. I will split lanes, ride on sidewalks, cut people off and weave through whatever traffic I think I can get away with in my effort to get from point A to point B. Just this past Thursday, the day it was raining like crazy, I weaved around one of those big white vans that I felt was making a left turn a bit too slowly. I flipped the driver off in response to his honking; I was in the wrong and knew it, but I had to defend my actions regardless, and I then proceeded to outrun him and about five other cars while continuing down Peachtree Dunwoody to the MARTA station. I don’t think that this is really the best face to put on bicycle advocacy.

Secondly, this ride has a helmet requirement. I wear a helmet myself, but I think that this particular aspect of the ride contributes to the misconception that a helmet is a magical shield against deadly injury. I recommend that all of you read the section on helmets in The Art of Urban Cycling by Robert Hurst. It starts on page 169, and it’s short enough that you can read it in the store without anyone yelling at you. Helmets have several pros and cons, and I think that wearing them should be a personal choice. Georgia only requires helmets for riders under the age of 16, and I agree with that policy. So boo on you Georgia Bikes for their misplaced safety statemets.

Thirdly, the pamphlet for the ride states that bicycles must follow the rules of the road (e.g., stop signs). This is great and all, but the ride to the capitol has a freaking police escort. To me, police escort mean running some damn red lights. What’s the point otherwise?

Lastly, the ride is really long. I’m on the path for the Roswell ride which starts at Roswell City Hall and is 21 miles. If I were to make this ride, I’d probably start at my Roswell Road intersection just inside the perimeter instead of riding or driving up to Roswell, but that’s still a pretty good ways, and I’m aware from my morning commute that the road is both hella trafficy and some kind of crazy hilly. The website says that the Roswell Road route will ride at 12mph, which I guess is an average, but I can’t help but think that I’d be expected to make it up that hill at 12mph. I’m lucky to make it up that way at all. I drop into the granny gear as soon as I turn right onto Roswell and thank my lucky stars for that unused turn lane just before Glenridge as an opportunity to catch my breath. I’m just not sure that I’m sufficiently hardcore for this crowd.

I’m not going to do this goofy political ride, but it got me thinking. Just how far can I go? There’s a Sandy Spring bicycle organization, The Green Tour, that has several routes through Sandy Springs laid out, and I’m thinking of trying one tomorrow. I have no interest in racing, so I’m not going to look for any of their Tour de Jerkass events (I swear, those punks don’t even wave at me), but maybe their choice of roads will be interesting. I think I’ll start with the double-diamond level, which seems stupid on the surface, but, taking into account how much I ride, it maybe isn’t. The route circles through some residential streets around Mount Vernon and Heards Ferry and makes a second loop through the Dunwoody panhandle, where I’ve never actually been. I need to return my Blockbuster rentals by Monday, so I figure I’ll try to work that in. I’ll probably start with my usual route, taking Lake Forest to Allen Road to Sandy Spring Circle, go from there to the bike route, circle around Dunwoody, cut across Abernathy instead of returning on Glenridge in order to stop by Blockbuster, and then circle around all those roads by the river. Wish me luck.