A carnival of technology

I don’t even know what page I’m really on anymore. I read the appendix, the censored ninth chapter of Part Two, so I guess I’m at 458 plus the thirty some extra. There are about 200 hundred pages left to go.

With the new variations in this second part, I’ve figured out some of the aspects of the book that I don’t enjoy. Pretty much every passage that was fun to read was one where the narrator was not involved. This book is effectively written from the view of an omniscent third party, so it seems like the book would be better if Fyodor Michaelovich wasn’t pretending that his all-seeing eye is also a character. Watching Pyotor Stepanovich and Nikolai Vsevolodovich, both nearly insane but in different ways, can be fascinating, but that G?v joker could take the fun out of a circus on the moon. I like it when the narrator disappears; the story becomes at those points more about the characters and less about tediously overt reactions to the characters.

The book is also fun when people go totally off their rockers, but, like Krusty taught us, it’s only funny if the sap’s got dignity. Anything that Stepan Trofimovich does is annoying and dull. Nikolai Vsevolodovich’s confession was interesting, and Pyotor Stepanovich’s breakdown after the meeting was riveting. Even the governor’s breakdown was fun to read, but then Mr. Narrator came back in and drug the whole rest of that last chapter back into dullsville. Yulia Mikhailovna’s entourage seems like it could be interesting—it’s a bunch of spoiled rich youth on the path to anarchy—but the narrator seems to view them as little more than spoiled youth.

No one’s died yet, and only a couple of the chapters in this section seemed to be moving the plot towards that eventual climax. Most of my curiosity at this point about Part Three is what’s going to happen to eat up all of those pages. I hope it’s not all taken up by that stupid fête.

Does anyone know of an ISP that doesn’t require a voice line and that maybe doesn’t contract with Covad?

Outage history:

• 22 June: 6 hours, Covad dispatched, reprovisioned circuit
• 4 September: 2 hours, service outage in area
• 4 October: 9 days, Covad dispatched, wiggled card at CO
• 13 October: 4 days, Covad dispatched, replaced card at CO
• 22 November: 12 hours, service outage in area, reprovisioned circuit after
  everything fixed at CO

I’m probably forgetting a couple of area-wide outages that didn’t have tickets opened.

I have fifty some pages left in part two. When I started the book, I set for myself a similar goal to the one I had with Gravity’s Rainbow— about thirty pages a day, or in the case of Demons rounded up to a chapter—but as I fell more and more behind and found more excuses to leave the book unopened for days at a time, I stopped really caring about goals. I’ll finish the book, but I don’t care when. I learned a new word today, “shigalyovism,” which I’ll have to remember if I ever find myself talking about solutions to social problems.

This book seems most interesting when people stop talking and start doing things, but that doesn’t happen very often, and the things they do either don’t amount to anything, like the duel, or don’t seem to have any meaning at all, like the visit to Semyon Yakovlevich. Sure, I guess each has each has meaning—the duel established some character, and the visit to the holy fool introduced the idea of inspired religious madness than be seen and contrasted in other characters—but as events they were meaningless. The plot itself is spread thinly across an expanse of endless paper blackened with empty words. I think I have a new metaphor for how Vegemite is supposed to be spread.

People have finally started talking about the murder, mostly in terms of the use of a murder with purely political motives. An angry mob is starting to form, though it’s not yet clear where their anger is going to be directed. I suppose I could just read the foreword to gain that bit of perspective, but I don’t care that much. The malice resonating within the group of conspirators seems to be pointing to that small handful of characters I sort of like, the sons of the annoying couple from the beginning and Shatov, the serf turned pamphleteer. I like those characters above any of the others since they seem the only ones able to look at this ridiculous mess with apathy.

Today was my first day playing in traffic again. I found aspects of it terrifying to consider, but probably not the aspects I should really worry about. Riding uphill in heavy traffic doesn’t worry me hardly a bit; it’s going downhill that I find concerning. I get going pretty fast when gravity’s on my side. I could get hurt! I made it pretty alright, though, and zooming downhill through traffic is actually quite exhilarating. While actually on the bike, there were a few spots with a lot of cars turning that had me worried at spots, but that was about it.

I took on that stupid hill northward on Sandy Springs Circle on Sunday, and I made it up to the Kroger, about the ? point before just completely giving up and stopping for lunch at some new Italian place. Apparently it’s some local chain that started in Norcross. They have more pictures of celebrities riding Vespas than I have ever seen in one place. They also have two actual Vespas parked out front, though I don’t know what they plan to do with them. They make a pretty good calzone. The stretch of Roswell Road between my green valley and Glenridge isn’t that bad, but I still ended up using some gears I didn’t know that I had. Oddly enough endurance doesn’t seem like too big an issue?I wasn’t huffing and puffing nearly as bad as when I originally started this crazy habit, and I didn’t have to stop completely at the top of the hill like I used to—I just can’t push as hard. Not pissing off the traffic that I’m blocking behind me is a big concern when I’m riding, so falling short of my old speeds is a bit distressing. Also, I can’t keep as straight at lower speeds, so there’s the worry that I’ll veer off into someone’s fender. I hope that this gets better soon, but I seem to be pretty quickly becoming reacquainted with all of the old feelings. I’ve even started dragging my shoes to make up for my shitty brakes without even thinking about it. I really should have bought cheaper shoes.

The MARTA ride went off without any unusual bumps. The Breeze gates are still as crappy as ever. It took three taps in the morning to get into the station, and on the way home I helped tap someone through at North Springs whose gate didn’t open because he was standing in the way of the beam like you would think you’re supposed to. The buses have replaced the card readers, or at least the face plate on the card readers, with fancy looking blue things in the three or four months I’ve been gone. The new readers have a grey rectangle on either side of the card target, and I’m not sure if they’re buttons or if they’re just hiding bolts. It still took my card without me having to do anything extra, so I didn’t ask. I didn’t see anyone today without a Breeze card, so I guess the transition went pretty ok. I still think it’s dumb that you need a Breeze card to transfer to rail but can’t buy one on a bus. Someone pointed out on a mailing list that Amtrak, about the only way into the city that doesn’t have a MARTA rail station, is especially troublesome. I would say that no one uses Amtrak, but my own Amtrak experience seemed crowded enough. So everyone gets to pay an extra $2.25 as a reward for using an inconvenient means of transportation. I don’t really like the Breeze cards.

I don’t like my domain name. I picked the name back in 2000 when it became time for me to register a name, but it’s kind of stupid and lame. It’s based on event back in high school that I barely remember and doesn’t even make a very good story. It’s no rrrrthats5rs.com, but it’s still hard to say and requires a couple repetitions to get the name across. So I registered a new domain.

My AIM screenname at least earns a chuckle every now and then, so I registered reallylongword.org. Email addresses and links are forever, so gophernet.org will continue to point to the exact same place, but now I have something new that I give to strangers who want my email address. Enjoy.

I bought a new pair of shoes. Payless only had like two in my size, and they both sucked, so I ended up following Baseball Mike’s recommendation and going to Fleet Feet, which I think is part of the same chain as that running shoe store my mom goes to. It seemed like a good idea; they at least pretend to know what they’re doing as far as fitting shoes, so I figured I could walk in and give them the big pile of shoe requirements from my therapist and see what comes out.

Dang these shoes were expensive. I guess I’m used to buying the cheapest pieces of worthless junk I can find as far shoes go, so a three-digit price was a bit of a surprise. Oh well, at least they feel pretty nice. They’re New Balance. They don’t have that curve that most shoes do, so they look very large. They are also very shiny. Besides the reflective surfaces, all of the white parts look like they could glow in the dark. I wonder how long that’ll last. The laces are kind of weird. They’re lumpy, which is supposed to help keep them tied by forcing the knot into the grooves. You can kind of see how they look in this picture. They also have those two straps going through the ‘N’ in the side logos that attach to the middle lace loops. They’re supposed to stabilize my foot or something, but after relacing them for bike riding and wearing them super-loose, I don’t think it’s going to do me any good. Wearing a shoe on my right foot is one of the stranger sensations I’ve ever felt, but it’s starting to go away. I think that if that stupid boot weren’t five pounds or so, it’d make a really comfortable shoe.

I rode the bike today from that Publix next to the Silver Comet to the Paulding county line. The normal trail part is about 13 miles through that segment, plus another three-quarters of a mile or so of that extension up to the Publix and a little more for where I kept going into Paulding county, looking for a bench where I could eat lunch, so in all it was a little under thirty miles round trip. It’s a lot harder than I remember. I figure I’ll try challenging that awful hill on Sandy Springs Circle tomorrow.

Ok, so I tried the horn while taking out the trash. It’s not quite what I expected, but it’s pretty respectable. The tone it generates is relatively high pitched, a little under 2600 Hz. This is a bit higher than a car horn, and I guess I was hoping for something big and deep, like a train whistle. The high pitch makes it sound a little weak, but it does have enough volume to get someone’s attention. Now I just hope I won’t need to.

One of the more minor problems faced by bicyclers is how to keep pant legs and shoelaces out of the chain. Chain guards are decidedly uncool and have a non-zero mass, so without those everything’s just kind of swinging around down there right next to the drive train. For shoelaces I use one of the creative lacing methods at Ian’s Shoelace Site that leaves the bow on the outside of the shoes. It has the extra benefit of making the laces nearly impossible to trip over when untied, which is a frequent problem because I wear my laces too loose. It’s too bad that all the velcro shoes are either sized for kids or really ugly. For the pant legs there are several solutions. The simplest, the scene kid rollup, is simply rolling up one pant leg to keep it out of the chain. You can also tuck your pant leg into your sock, wear a rubber band, or even wear a fancy reflective strip specially designed for pants leg holding that you can find at a bike shop near you. Like so many things I do, my solution is the one that hardly anyone even remembers anymore.

My mom gave me a pair of clips when I started riding while at home one summer, and I’ve been wearing them since. I lost the original pair—I really don’t know what happened to them; they’re probably in a gutter somewhere—but I managed to find someone on ebay selling a bunch of junk a bike shop found in the back, among the items a few pairs of “Terry trouser bands.” I haven’t been able to find anything about this mysterious Terry. I don’t know if they even exist anymore. All of the clips I’ve been able to find are goofy reflective things that repel bears and make your coffee, and I don’t want any of that. They seem very inelegant; I just want to keep my pants out of the chain. I don’t have the legs for those goofy shorts. My pair of clips or trouser bands or whatever has been sitting on the coffee table for over three months now. I hope to use them again soon.

I bought a horn. I don’t even know if it’s legal to use. I bought it from some website in Hong Kong, and though it looked like a perfectly legit site and they exchanged my cash monies for a product without any difficulty, I can only assume that they’re up to something sketchy. I guess all of those bootleg DVD stories have made me a xenophobe. Did you know that the Hong Kong Currency is the dollar (HKD)? I didn’t. I guess I assumed they’d be on the yuan now, and maybe the pound or something before that. I was a little surprised when my $3 shipping charge turned into $23.50 worth of stamps. The Honk Kong dollar is worth about .077 USD, so I still came out on top according to the Internet, just not by quite such a shocking margin. And it’s good to know that it doesn’t really cost over $20 to ship a pound of whatever between here and Hong Kong.

Anyhow, I have a horn. It runs on 9V batteries and it claims to have a volume of 115dB. That’s 5 dB short of a jet engine and 15 dB short of a Manowar concert. I haven’t tried it out yet, both because I didn’t have a charged 9V battery handy and because I don’t want to upset my neighbors too much. The website I’m pulling these made up numbers from puts a car horn at 110dB, so it’s probably not shockingly loud apart from being honked by a bike. I hope it works.

To recap, my last doctor visit showed that my foot is still kind of broken but not very broken, so I can walk on it now. The schedule the doctor gave me was two weeks at 50% weight (boot plus one crutch), two weeks with just the boot and two weeks in a sneaker before I get x-rayed again, but, since he knows I had already been cheating, he said I might as well skip the first step. Today marks the end of week two walking around in the boot with no crutches, and the therapist suggests I wait another week before switching to sneakers again. I figure I’m close enough and I’m going to try getting back on the bike this weekend and see how far I can go. Bikes don’t use much of the heel, and I’m getting impatient. If anyone wants to join me, I’ll be on the Silver Comet; I’ll race you to the county line.

I didn’t read on Friday, so I’m only two chapters in. I set a chapter a day as a sort of goal, but I don’t know if I’ll bother to catch up on Sunday.

My thoughts on the book so far basically mirror Chris’s, so I won’t repeat all of that. Instead I’ve been trying to figure out why I find this book so dull. I enjoy a lot of Victorian literature; I even took a class in it and I don’t think I had to, French took care of most of my humanities credits. Victorian novels share a lot of the same features—idle rich sitting around getting offended and catching the vapors or whatever—but at least stuff happens once in a while in them. A vampire will come crashing in or someone undergoes some emotional development or at least someone will have the courtesy to die and give everyone else something to legitimately lament. Nothing at all has happened in these two chapters. The characters are boring and unlikeable and nothing is happening. It’s like I’m reading one of those awful soap opera comic strips out of a 150 year old newspaper. Demons wasn’t the title used in the original translation of this book, and I’m starting to think it was really called Apartment 3-?.

The dust jacket tells me there will be a murder, there will be something involving revolutionaries. I hope things start going in that direction soon. I’m still only two chapters in, so I’m still hoping that I’m in the middle of a very long-winded setup.

The death pact is now open. Chris set up a fancy feed aggregator with all of our blags and the flickr pool so we can go all web 2.0 on this.

I am on page 40/773. I’m reading a hardcover edition—Borders happened to have a copy for four or five bucks more than the paperback, and it comes with a little red ribbon bookmark, so hey, why not—of the translation made by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which seems to be the authoritative version. The first seven pages were consumed by the title and section title and a short poem and a Bible verse, and the last nineteen pages are notes explaining details of allusions and historical figures and things like that. I’m at the end of the first chapter, which, despite its name, was basically a big introduction, establishing the characters and probably how the group of liberal-minded misfits was established. I don’t actually know where it’s going with this; I didn’t bother reading the introduction.

Dostoevsky’s style reminds me a lot of Victorian literature: it rambles a lot and you have to wade through that flood of words carefully in case it ends up saying something. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, just that it’s slow and indirect. “Slow” may not be the best word, either, since that one chapter covered most of Stepan’s life. It paused and examined a handful of moments, themselves spread across a great amount of time, in careful detail and then jumped to the next thought. Based on the title, “Instead of an Introduction,” I suspect that this style is unique to the chapter.

I’m not really sure what to make yet of Demons. I feel a bit overwhelmed by everything presented so far, and yet nothing’s really happened yet. I now know a little bit about the character and history of, presumably, the main players, and through some of the narrator’s asides I’m starting to get a sense of Dostoevsky’s own disdain for this revolutionary liberalism. I suspect it’s more complicated than that, though, since Dostoevsky himself was involved in some revolutionary groups. This first chapter wasn’t very satisfying, but I expect a shift, in pace if nothing else, as I continue, so I’ll just see how it goes from here.