A carnival of technology

I guess I should probably worry more about visibility when I’m on the bicycle. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve read The Art of Urban Cycling and liked it a lot, and the basic lesson therein is that your ass is your own problem. Even the drivers that aren’t driving like idiots are mainly looking for other cars, so invisibility is something that bikers just have to expect, and shiny plastic or blinking lights are not the panacea that everyone would like. Invisibility can sometimes even work to the advantage of an alert biker since in such a case a car will behave predictably rather than erratically reacting to an unexpected two-wheeled object. The fact that all of my spills have been a result of my own inattention to the road itself rather than cars hitting me doesn’t help to change my attitude that visibility isn’t much of a problem. However, I can see how it would help if people could actually see me once in a while.

My bicycle has several fewer reflectors than what is mandated by the CPSC for new bicycles. The reflector requirements are detailed in 16 CFR 1512.16 and enforced through the powers provided by 15 USC 1261-1278 (chapter 30 of that title), the Federal Hazardous Substances Act. This only applies to bicycles as they are manufactured and sold; it can’t be used to regulate how bicycles are used. Something about interstate commerce and all that. States have particular requirements for what a bicycle should have, and Georgia is one of the more lenient as far what needs to be on a bicycle riding at night. Georgia seems to have moved the online copy of their code into some goofy Lexis-Nexis thing that I can’t figure out how to use, but the relevant section is Official Code of Georgia Annotated 40-6-296 if you feel like looking it up yourself. It says that bicycles riding at night need a light on the front visible for some number of feet and a red reflector on the back visible for some number of feet. A red light on the back is allowed, but it does not satisfy the requirement for the reflector. I’ve removed all of the other reflectors, and I’m technically breaking the law when I ride at night since my rear reflector is blocked by the rear rack. I’ve been meaning to fix it, but I don’t think anyone really cares, and I’m not too worried about it.

The pedal reflectors were the first to go. I have clips on my pedals, and the extra bits of plastic get in the way of the little hooks provided for flipping the pedals over. I can think of ways that reflectors could be provided with pedals that overcome this problem, but my reflectors were tacked on as an afterthought in order to satisfy the letter of the law, and they’re way annoying, so out they go. The white reflector on the front was next. I won’t get into the arguments for or against the CPSC’s all-reflector system for bicycles, but I don’t think that the states that do so are unwise in mandating headlights. I don’t think I need a passive white light next to my active one, so it’s cut, too. The other reflectors that came with my bike were the ones on the wheels visible from the sides. These are the only ones that are actually dangerous to have—unbalancing a wheel is generally a bad idea—but I never did anything about them. They went in the trash along with my broken wheels back in January, and the new wheels didn’t come with reflectors. My new wheels have fewer spokes, so even if I did know where to get those reflectors, I don’t know if they’d even fit. I guess I’ll have to figure that out if I move to California or Massachusetts.

I bought a bunch of bike crap at REI this weekend, and the guy at the checkout mentioned some kind of reflective vest that I could buy and that he nearly gets run over every day while commuting to work. The latter statement confused me. I commute to work most days, and I can only think of a handful of incidents where I’d say a collision with a car was a risk. Maybe people expect too much of cars? I noticed a little placard at the REI bike shop summarizing the rules of the road for bicycles, and one of its points, directed at drivers, was that cars should give at least three feet of space to bicycles when passing. That’s a fine and dandy idea when there’s nice wide lanes and the bicycle is riding on the right edge line, but it’s just not feasible for all situations. Let’s take Roswell Road, for example. In the mornings, I putter uphill using a 26 tooth granny gear and somewhere around the middle cog, say 23 teeth. Math says I’m cruising at about 9mph if I maintain a 100rpm pedal rate, which I don’t. I’d be pretty pissed if I were forced to drive down Roswell Road at 9mph because of some jerk on a bicycle. Roswell Road has two lanes in that portion, but it’s not always possible to get over in the morning traffic, and the lanes are kind of narrow. I’m grateful if I get a full six inches. I don’t really mind that I could reach out and grab the cars that are passing me because that means that I don’t have angry people piling up behind me. I think the guy at REI just expects too much.

That little anecdote doesn’t have much to do with nighttime visibility, but I don’t think the full suite of reflectors would change much in the dark. I’m lit up from the front and back as required and recommended by law and common sense. Pedal reflectors would only add a tiny bit more as far as reflected light, and side reflectors would only help if I were going through an intersection where I should be paying more attention anyway. In the end, I can see the cars as long as they have their headlights on, and the little bit of light I scatter around me will hopefully be enough for the few surprises. The Art of Urban Cycling concludes that most nighttime bicycle fatalities are due to drunk drivers, which reflectors aren’t going to do much to help, so that offers some comfort. Chances are that I’m still my own worst enemy regardless of whether the sun is up.

Back to the buying crap topic, I finally replaced the remaining broken parts on my bike. For those of you keeping track, the original parts are now down to the frame, seat, drive train (minus the chain) and the cables I should replace sometime soon. I bent my handlebar a while back, before the January wreck, when I thought I knew what I was doing in the rain but really didn’t. I bought a new one from Roswell Bikes, and it turned out to be a surprisingly painless experience. I didn’t go with fancy carbon fiber or anything, just another piece of straight aluminum with a little rise, and Henry, the little dude, installed it right there. The whole thing took about twenty bucks and twenty minutes. The new handlebar came with a new reflector which I’ve since removed. The other casualty, this one caused by the January crash, was my panniers. In addition to that, I recently had some trouble with the rack. It turns out that I got what I paid for at Performance; one of welds holding the supports together snapped. Eh. This opened up an opportunity to get one of those racks with the little piece at the back to mount a reflector, so I guess this opens up a solution for my legal deficiencies, too.

I had planned to get the new rack at Roswell Bikes so I could use my 20% off coupon (using it on a cheap handlebar seemed like a waste, and a handlebar isn’t really an accessory), but the only one they had felt like it was made out of cast iron. No wonder it hasn’t sold yet. I instead ended up getting both the rack and a pair of panniers at REI, and I’m pretty happy with them, though it took me three tries to get it right. The rack I chose is pretty basic, but it was missing half of the mounting hardware. I ended up exchanging that for something similar that also has a height adjustment. The new one almost leaves a line of sight to the seatpost-mounted reflector, so I can continue to not care about that problem for a little while longer. As for the panniers, I bought a pair of the Novara Transfer something or another bags. They’re a lot larger than those Delta panniers I had, they have some external pockets, and it has a pretty cool mounting system. Instead of a series of clips to fiddle with, there are two plastic wedges that fit underneath the bar of the rack that are released with the push of a button. It’s pretty rad, but I broke one of the wedges on my first try putting the bag on. I’m going to hope that was a manufacturing defect instead of incredible incompetence on my part. I exchanged that bag for another one and got to have a nice conversation with the ladies at the returns desk in the meantime.

The bags seem pretty rad so far. The flaps covering the main compartments have pockets at the top, and I’m using those for the things I had stuffed into the side pockets of the trunk rack for the last few months: tools, a second spare tube and all of the junk I have in my pockets before getting on the bike. I was able to fit 30 pounds of food and food accessories into the bags, more than I would usually buy, without much trouble, and I can get them to sit far enough back that I don’t end up kicking them, a problem I often had with the Delta bags. I don’t yet know how they’ll handle weather. They claim some level of water resistance and also came with rain covers. I should probably try taking one of the covers out at some point to see how difficult it is to install. So far my only complaint is that the ends of the straps that hold the main flaps down are a bit long with light loads. I think I can live with that.

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.

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.

Man, bicycle brakes are annoying. Atlanta is hilly, and I’d rather not launch myself into a speed bump or stopped traffic while racing downhill at high speeds instead of, you know, doing those things, so I have a definite need for brakes that make me slow and even stop, and I use them a good bit. I wore through the stock brakes after three or four months, and I wore through the replacements I got from Roswell Bicycles a week or two ago. They were Avid, I think. It’s probably just as well that they didn’t last too long after the wheel replacement, since Avid seems to have a reputation for eating rims. Maybe this is more of an issue for people with ceramic rims; I don’t know. They did make some unpleasant grinding noises from time to time, and if that was indeed the sound of damage being done, I’m glad to be rid of them.

Brakes are complicated. Rather than the traditional bicycle part feature matrix of durability, lightness and cheapness (pick any two), brakes have a dozen other factors to consider, such as kindness to rims, stopping power, noise, and probably some other stuff. While I do have preferences on some bicycle parts (Vittoria has me sold on tires, since they’re reasonably light and I haven’t been able to puncture them with anything short of a nail), I’ve not formed any serious opinions on brakes, so I just bought two pairs of the ones that were on sale at Nashbar. They’re Aztec 2 pads, which I now guess are supposed to be pretty nice, but the problem I immediately encountered was that the front brakes scream like a banshee. Like a car, most stopping power comes from a bike’s front brakes, so this was kind of a problem. It’s embarassingly loud. Brake squeal is most commonly caused by improper toe-in, the technique of positioning pads so that the trailing edge with respect to rim direction (the edge nearest the front of the bike) hits first in order to pull the rest of the pad against the rim, but no amount of positioning, cleaning the rims and repositioning changed the noise in the least.

At this point I consulted the Internet for advice, and in this I learned two important lessons: firstly, I should probably check for reviews of parts before I buy them. I was somewhat upset to see reviews of Aztec pads at mtbr.com contain phrases like “they will probably stop you eventually.” Secondly, I should probably double check the brand before I go looking up reviews. Aztec 2 pads are different from regular Aztec, and Aztec is rated much higher, so much so that Aztec 2 is in the mtbr hall of fame, whereas Aztec pads are only .19 (out of five) points away from the hall of shame. So they’re good brakes or something, but they’re still noisy as all hell on my bike. I decided to try what I did last time for brakes: walk into Roswell Bicycles and see what they hand me. This completely ignores my first lesson, of course, but it worked ok last time. This time Roswell Bicycles handed me a pair of Koolmax Thinline pads, which are kind of weird and still kind of noisy. Maybe I should just have the shop put them on and see what they can do.

The Koolmax pads are weird in that they have an extra little chunk of rubber at the leading edge of the pad intended to make the pad work better in wet conditions. The idea is that this wedge will scrape water and mud and whatever else off the rim before it gets to the rest of the pad. That sounds like an ok idea, but it raises questions as to how the hell they’re supposed to go on. I’ve tried a variety of configurations, and though they’re less loud than the Aztec pads, I still can’t get that comfortable quiet hiss that I so crave. The Internet was of no help here. One guy suggested toeing them out. I found a post that Sheldon Brown made to some forum that suggested positioning them flat against the rim (and thus sort of toed-in, since the front and rear of the pad will be touching the rim, but not the back forward of the wedge) would be the most effective use of the squeegeeing power of the brakes. I went with this flat(ish) configuration, and for now I’m just living with a bit of noise. I guess the pads have a break-in period, so I’m hoping it’ll go away after a while. If not, I left one pair of pads unopened, so I can return half of my purchases if I decide the pads suck, and maybe I’ll get the shop to try to work some bike shop magic to reduce the noise.

In other news, I’m still playing Zelda II, but I’m not playing it very much. I’ve reached a somewhat frustrating point in the game. This iteration of Hyrule is separated into two large halves crossable through a short dungeon, and everything interesting at this point is in the second half. The hammer can be used to open up the road between the two halves, but I don’t think I get that for a while. To do anything in the game I first half to pass through the same annoying dungeon I’ve crossed a dozen times and then open myself up to annoying forest and swamp encounters before reaching the road again. The overworld monsters in the first Legend of Zelda were kind of neat in that you could ignore them if they weren’t blocking anything. In Zelda II, an encounter takes you out of the overworld entirely, and you have to fight your way back. In addition to that, the means of fighting is very different. Link is two sprites tall, and attacks can come high or low. Standing, you attack high and defend high, and ducking you attack low and defend low. So you have to pay attention to what’s coming at you and the vulnerabilities of your opponent. This is especially annoying on the enemies that can simultaneously attack and defend at different levels, and these seem to be the same ones where the full-health shooting sword is ineffective. The fighting is becoming annoying, and I’d like a return to a simpler system, or at least to overworld enemies that I can ignore while I walk to the levels.

I can’t use the Trek’s chainring on the Schwinn. The first problem, which I should have noticed from the start, is the shape: the Sakae chainring and crank from the Trek uses a five-point spider, whereas the one on the Schwinn is four-point. Secondly, I’m not sure that the Sakae chainring assembly comes apart. It appears to have rivets instead of bolts holding everything together. I guess it’s going to go on ebay instead.

I was able to get the cranks off the Trek, but it took a good number more tools. I needed a 14mm deep socket in order to get the bolts off. The socket set I currently have uses a 1/4? drive, and the largest metric 1/4? drive socket I was able to find anywhere is 13mm. I guess this is because the socket size has to be somewhere in the neighborhood of the size of the ratcheting part of the handle, but it was pretty annoying to need a size just outside of my range. I got that socket, a 3/8? drive handle, and while I was at it, I got a 22mm socket for the crank extractor since I was unable to find an appropriately sized wrench outside of a set. The socket works since I really only need it to get the nut part of the extractor into the crank.

The crank extractor seems kind of goofy, and apparently new cranks don’t need them anymore. With slightly older bicycles, like the Trek, you start things off by removing that 14mm bolt, but that’s not all. After that you need to screw the nut part of the crank extractor in and then screw the handle inside of that and keep pushing until everything pops off. Now that that’s over, I have a small pile of tools I probably won’t use again, one of which is pretty specialized. On the other hand, if anyone out there needs some bicycle work done, I can probably help you out. As for the Schwinn, I guess I’ll just live with it for now. I haven’t had any trouble while in the big chainring, so it’s probably not a big deal.

As for the current water situation, it’s escalated from “DON’T USE ANY WATER EVERYBODY PANIC” to “IF YOUR PRESSURE DROPS THE WATER CAN KILL YOU EVERYBODY PANIC.” Atlanta water had to call a utility locating company (in other news, there are companies you can call to find misplaced utilities) since they couldn’t figure out where the valve north of the broken valve is. I hope they had to dig through someone’s living room to get to it. The AJC says that they’ve found the upstream valve, though they don’t say where it was, but pressure dropped so bacteria something. News also said that the water being pumped upstream from the Moores Mill station might be “murky and discolored” but safe to drink since “water hates going upstream.” That totally explains everything. I’ve been drinking my hoarded water but still flushing and showering and everything else by the usual means, and I haven’t seen any drop in pressure. I hope this all gets worked out soon. Seeing Chick-fil-a closed on not-Sunday isn’t an experience I’d to repeat.

Screw that chain tool, too. They’re both worthless. I didn’t even make it up Roswell Road today before the chain started to lock up. I pulled over (and probably almost got run over a couple of times) and couldn’t find any stiff links or misaligned pins stuck in the usual places, but I didn’t make it another fifty feet up the hill before the chain broke again. This time the pin launched itself somewhere out into the road, but oh ho! I thought to myself. I have a chain tool! I’m prepared! Maybe that Boy Scout belt (it’s really a mighty fine belt) that I wear all the time is more than just symbolic. It didn’t work out.

The Topeak chain tool, besides apparently being maybe a little breaky, has a design flaw with regards to the pin that pushes against the chain links. The pin unscrews, which makes some sense, but the housing for the pin, the knurled part you can see on the picture for this entry, tends to get stuck on the cradle when you screw it all the way in, which you need to do for storage. In addition to that, the pin apparently isn’t really the right length. Once I got the tool back together, the pin would slide in and out, and I only had about half the length I needed to actually break a link. I think there was probably a ball bearing or something up inside there, and I think that bearing is now at the bottom of a storm drain somewhere. Why was the pin not long enough to begin with? I don’t know, but the tool sucks. I decided to just write the dumb thing off as a loss and admit failure in this particular chain repair endeavor. I fortunately didn’t have far to walk home. I hope that when I waved at Greg, the maintenance guy who lives beneath me and who helps me save a ton of cash on my heating bill, on the way back into the complex that he didn’t think I was brandishing a weapon with the chain in my hand. I don’t suppose I could do much more damage to a person with that narrow little thing than get grease on their face, but these are the kinds of things I think of when I’m walking a broken bike. Anyhow, the chain broke near the links from the Trek, so I probably screwed up replacing the pin or created a stiff link that I just couldn’t find, but I also realized today that since my large chain ring hit the ground, and I had the chain on the big ring when I wrecked, the chain probably hit, too, so that’s the story I’m going to go with for now. Both breaks have occurred in the granny gear, so I still don’t consider the bad teeth an emergency. My chain broke and needed replacement, and I threw out that crappy Topeak chain tool even though it did look kind of cool.

I drove to work today, and I bought a new chain and chain tool at Roswell Bikes. The chain tool is the Park Tool CT-5 mini tool, and, though it’s not as symmetrical, it’s smaller and lighter than that Topeak thing, and it doesn’t hurt my hands when I try to use it without gloves. This new chain tool also has a neat feature in that the distance you need to push the chain pin out is the same as the amount the tool will screw in, whereas the Topeak tool would push the pin all the way through the link and halfway to the moon if you let it. I won’t doubt you again, Park Tool, unless there’s something else that looks good that’s a whole lot cheaper. As for the chain itself, Roswell Bikes keeps things like chains and brakes and cables and whatnot in the back, and I didn’t care to argue, so I submitted myself to whims of the guy working the register today. The only chain factor I was aware of is the number of rear gears, since you need something with enough links and the right width. I asked for a nine-speed chain, and the dude asked me what kind of drive train I had. My drive drain is really a mishmash of whatever Schwinn could get their hands on, so I kind of sputtered and guessed Shimano for the rear derailleur. I guess that’s how I ended up with a Shimano chain. The derailleur is actually Sram, but I don’t think it really matters. I have a tool and a chain. The chain cost more than I expected, but it looks like a really nice chain.

I don’t know a whole lot about chain brands, but this Shimano thing seems pretty high class. One thing different about is that instead of the flat pins I was used to, the pins flare out against the walls of the outer links, providing more strength or something. The downside of this for you and me (mostly me) is that the flared part shears off when you break a link. Shimano’s solution for this is to provide special replacement pins: instead of just pushing the same pin the other way when you connect links, they provide a special pin that’s about twice as long and has a piece that breaks off. These pins have the flared part on one end, and once you’ve used it to poke the old pin the rest of the way out, the pilot piece breaks off to create a new kind-of flared end on the other side. It seems pretty neat, but these replacement pins cost about five bucks for a pack of three, and the new chain only came with one, so I was nervous for the rest of the day that the lone pin would fall out of the flimsy box and be lost forever. I have everything back together in spite of my fears, and I learned from Park Tool’s chain installation guide that the upper set of fins on the chain tool isn’t for different chain sizes but rather is provided as a tool to help loosen stiff links. I don’t know how this is supposed to help, but that’s what it’s there for, and I used it to loosen the connection point once I got the chain onto the bike. Whatever. I have a new fancy chain, I have a new light and sturdy chain tool, and I think I have everything back together and properly adjusted. I guess I’ll figure out how it all goes tomorrow morning.

All of these uphill bicycle failures are kind of making me feel fat. My metal replacement for that pedal that broke can probably hold up to whatever abuse I can give it, but I can’t do a whole lot about the chain.

I decided this weekend to avoid the Peachtree Dunwoody Publix by visiting the one on Abernathy instead of the one by Chastain Park. I guess part of this is because memories of it hurting to breathe still have me a little wary of Roswell Road. Abernathy scared the crap out of me even before the wreck, and my usual northward routes give out around Mount Vernon, but I was able to find a way up to the grocery store that didn’t use Roswell Road and only required me to coast down a hundred feet or so of sidewalk next to Abernathy. I had to cut through some residential streets, and they have a lot of traffic calming tools that I found kind of annoying. In addition to the speed humps placed on longer straight stretches, intersections are either implemented as tiny little roundabouts (not to be confused with traffic circles) or a four way stop with a speed hump island in the middle. The speed hump surfaces are all topped with cobblestones, and uneven rocks aren’t really pleasant on 25mm tires. It would be nice if there were a way for bikes to bypass the humps, but I guess that the residents don’t want me speeding down their quiet streets any more than they want cars doing the same. The humps outside of intersections don’t extend to the gutter, and I thought about trying those paths, but I don’t think I could have made it without eating a mailbox or two. In addition to all of this, the roads used another measure I hadn’t seen before: sometimes they’ll take away the lane you’re in and plant a tree in the middle of the damn road and then do the same thing about fifty feet down on the other side. I’m not sure how this is really supposed to help.

I made it through this obstacle course and arrived at Publix rattled but in one piece. The hills were steep but short, and there was no traffic, so I might end up taking this shortcut again. I wanted to shop at a full-sized Publix this weekend so that I could get some spinach. I’ve had vegetables on the brain lately for some reason, so I got this weekend’s dinner recipe from the kind of creepy but informative vegan website that I used the last time I needed to figure out what to bring to one of Moshe’s potluck dinners. My shopping was a pleasure, and I stuffed everything into my backpack (I still haven’t replaced my panniers, though I really hate carrying things in a backpack) and headed back home on the same route as before. I almost got back to Mount Vernon before my chain broke. I wasn’t pedaling particularly hard at the time, so I don’t really know what caused the failure. Atlanta is about 90% uphill, so I guess all the stress of dragging me around against the will of gravity was too much. The pin of the broken link was still intact; it looked like one of the plates just bent and popped off. Of course I didn’t pack my shiny new chain tool, so I had a couple mile walk back home. That’ll learn me.

I guess I should probably get a new chain at this point, but the current chain isn’t worn, so I’m just going to ride it for a while longer and keep a chain tool with me. I pulled a couple of extra links off of the Trek to get it back to the right length, and I got some good use out of that fancy workstand I got for Christmas (thanks mom and dad). I’m not really sure what is implied by the Trek’s chain being barely worn while I tore through the last one on the Schwinn in just three months. I also wasn’t quite able to use Sheldon Brown’s chain length guide—the only article I’ve ever seen on the topic—to full effect since I was half a link off. Oddly, this situation is illustrated in both of his “bad” pictures. I have no idea how you’re supposed to handle it. I handled it by going half a link short since I spend more time in the small-small combo than big-big. If I post in a couple months about replacing my rear derailleur, you’ll know why.

When the chain whipped its way off my bike it apparently did so with enough force to move the front derailleur. The cage wasn’t bent, just angled wrong. That was a pain to readjust, but at least I didn’t need to replace anything. While fixing this, though, I noticed that a tooth or two of the big chainring are messed up, probably from where they hit the road a month or so back. I have another broken bike, and it has chainrings, so I think I know the solution to this problem. I’m going to need some more tools.

I don’t know if I’ve just been forcing it or what, but, since this is America, I’ve up to now been servicing my bike with English Allen wrenches. The 3/16? size fits most every bolt on the bike, and the fenders and rack use a 5/32? wrench. The crank, however, uses an 8mm hexagonal hole, and I can’t fake that. I bought a metric Allen wrench set at Ace today which I hope will satisfy all of my metric wrenching needs. The 8mm wrench is (hopefully) enough for the Schwinn, but the Trek is a different beast. Where the Schwinn has one of those fancy self-removing cranksets (I think), the Trek has the kind with the weird size hex bolt. I have a deep socket set, but, again, they’re only English sizes, and 14mm is bigger than half an inch. Some book I have says that I’ll need a crank wrench and a crankset extractor. I’ve ordered the extractor online (along with new brakes, since I’m close to burning through another pair), but I decided not to get the wrench. Park Tool, who makes most of the bike tools I have, sells a wrench with a 14mm socket on one end and a 8mm Allen wrench on the other, but I already have the 8mm piece, and I don’t like having two tools to do the same thing. I’m going to try to find a deep 14mm socket instead and go from there. I hope I don’t need to buy a metric handle.

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.

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.