A carnival of technology

Well, I managed to bend the front fork on my bike again. The fact that the brakes weren’t doing so hot, forcing me to use a curb to stop, was my own fault, but the finger for the fact that this event rendered the bike unridable I point again at Trek.

I took my bicycle to work on Thursday, driving to Medical Center and riding MARTA to Mansell according to my original plan, but my return home was modified in the afternoon when blind Joe put up the bar signal. I’m not one to say no to beer and pizza, so I rode my bike to the ‘burb and, instead of Joe getting a ride from someone, he drove his 4Runner. I don’t really understand how it works, but the state of Georgia allows him to drive, mentioning his telescope thing as no more than the same corrective lens restriction I have on my license, but he doesn’t drive at night. As the other people joining us were either similarly semi-blind or driving a Mustang, it created a bit of an interesting problem for how I was going to get home. I ended up putting my bike in Joe’s SUV, driving him home, driving the SUV further to Dunwoody station (where I can park overnight), picking up my car from Medical Center’s 24 hour limit lot, and driving that home. I had planned to try riding from my apartment back to Medical Center to drive all the vehicles to one place, but I managed to mess up my bike going down the hill out of my apartment.

I got this bike 10 or so years ago as some sort of present (thanks Mom & Dad), and though I could have ridden it more frequently, I feel like I got some good use out of it in that time, and I’d like to have something that will survive if I do something stupid and have to run into a solid object in order to stop. This is the second time that the Trek has proven itself incapable, so my current plan is to wait about a week for my credit card statement to come in, pay for all the books and CDs in this month’s debt, and then start some fresh debt with a new bike. I thought about trying to pound the fork back out with a rubber mallet, but my heart’s just not in it anymore.

Today I did a dry run of my MARTA plan to make sure that no portion of it is too crazy and to avoid holding up people during rush hour fumbling with an unfamiliar bike rack. In all, it went pretty well. I work maybe a mile from the Mansell Park & Ride, so I didn’t even work up much of a sweat on the bicycle portion. I had originally planned to change clothes at the gym across the street, but since it’s still a good ways from the office, I suspect that I’d probably just sweat back whatever I might undo. I forget exactly how long it took, but most of the time was spent waiting on the Sunday schedule bus, so I don’t think that my commute will become a whole lot longer.

After ensuring that I could make the commute without dying, I took advantage of a couple 25¢ cokes and then headed south into the heart of Roswell. I stopped at the ‘burb on Alpharetta highway after riding around for a bit, had dinner and a few drinks, and then took route 87 back to North Springs from there. In all I probably rode around 5 miles today. It was about 95° and I went up and down a lot of hills, so, though I didn’t feel that same level of exhaustion I get when I try to ride from my apartment towards Target, I still feel like I did something.

My plan was to start taking MARTA tomorrow, but that was brought to a halt as I was leaving the Medical Center parking deck. That oddball tire I have from replacing the same flat twice went flat again. I bought road hazard insurance this time, so I’m hoping that it was a road hazard that took it out, and I plan to take it to the place I bought it in Alpharetta tomorrow, carefully driving a temporary spare up Roswell Road since I don’t think I’d make it very long on 400 at whatever the temporary’s max speed is. I figure I’ll still take the bike with me and ride to work from the tire place instead of the bus stop.

In other tire news, it turns out that the wider bicycle tire I ended up with a couple of weeks ago is a little too wide for the frame. I didn’t notice at first since it’s only really a problem in certain gears where I guess the position of the chain pushes it just far enough to rub against that part near the pedal. I’m not going to let those assholes at Cycleworks win this easily, so I plan tonight to swap my front and rear tires, since my front fork is a good bit wider. This ought to be fun.

Sandy Springs is trying to be a real city. The police department will take over on July 1st, which will almost certainly mean a return to police on 400 that care about speeding. I can hardly wait.

The weather’s been pretty nice the past few days, so I finally got around to replacing the rear tube on my bike, which has had a leak next to the valve stem since December. I’ve been thinking lately about switching to MARTA to get to work. Sure, I work outside of rail range, but I think that I could to work in a reasonable amount of time, especially now that buses can drive on the shoulder on 400 when traffic is slow. I might try driving to Medical Center to prevent me from dying, but once there I can take the train to North Springs (arrives every four minutes or so when everything’s working, 5 minutes to North Springs), from there take route 140 to the Mansell Park & Ride (bus departs every 15 minutes, 12 minutes to Mansell), and I can bike the remaining mile or two. This can totally work. Using a gas price of $3/gallon and 27 mi/gallon (probably low, since most of my drive is highway), I’ll only be saving about a buck a month, but I’ll hopefully get in better shape. Monthly passes are tied to a particular month instead of being valid for any 30 days, so I’ll take a shot at this at the beginning of next month, just in time to avoid the Sandy Springs speed traps.

dcantrell wrote a little while ago about Trader Joe’s and the politics of getting non-standard foods. I agree with his frustration, since I occasionally want to eat something goofy, but Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods don’t sell the non-goofy foods that I also want. However, I think that Publix could be the answer for such a store. They can get you Ostrich and Emu if you ask nicely, and they have all the organic hippie food that you’d expect, but what always set Publix apart from other stores in my mind is that, except for a couple of shelves with things like all-natural Cheetos and vegan Mac&Cheese, there is no hippie section: all the organic food is next to the normal food. Their Greenwise brand has done a lot to get me to buy hippie version of some foods. Since it’s a store brand, the prices usually come out to about the same or lower than the brand-name items adjacent.

One thing in particular I noticed on my last trip to Publix was Greenwise milk. Apparently Publix has started selling milk from cows that have not been treated with recombinant bovine somatotropin. I know from Ben & Jerry that those bovine growth hormones are bad news, but it’s a harder sell than kidney beans. Since no one cares if their milk jugs are yellow, the regular Publix brand milk is the big seller, and the extra 50¢ per half-gallon seems like a lot when it’s right there for easy comparison. Interestingly, the Greenwise milk does come in an opaque container.

Hey, everybody. There’ve been lots of changes recently, the big one being that new job thing. I now work for Autovin and had the pleasure of being hired right at the start of a fairly drastic reorganization. They had been chaffing a bit under the management of their parent company, Adesa, and Adesa just recently put the Autovin people back in power to, for now, at least, let them do their own thing. If things keep up like this, it’s good for the company, but it’s a bit confusing for the new guy trying to figure just what it is he’s doing. The person who hired me was one of those Adesa people that people didn’t particularly like and who is now back in Indianapolis, but the new-old lead computer hejaz person doesn’t seem to hate me too much, so I guess that’s good. I think I’ll enjoy it here: it has that laid-back small company feel, but they’re large enough and doing enough business that there isn’t that startup fear of going under next week.

A new job means a new commute. I don’t go as far as some of the people who live halfway to South Carolina, but taking 285 to 400 sucks a whole lot. To add to the fun, I got in a wreck on my first day. Hurray! I rear-ended an SUV, which didn’t do much damage to the SUV, of course, but it’s left me an inoperable hood and a headlight that kind of points off to the side. Though some might see this as a good excuse to get a new car, getting it fixed would cost fewer thousands of dollars that I don’t have, so I need to look into those options sometime soon.

I saw Matt today. He was in town for that Asterisk convention thing, apparently skipping school to give some talks and whatnot. Only one person from the Asterisk group asked me where to go and what to do in Atlanta, so I didn’t have to reveal to too many people that Atlanta doesn’t know what tourists do besides going to the World of Coke. I ended up with everyone’s extra MARTA tokens, since apparently no one wanted them as souvenirs and living in a county without MARTA service is closer to making them useful than living in a different state. If anyone needs a MARTA token, I sure don’t.

On the consumerist front, I finally broke down and purchased a copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. This will probably make me even more insufferable for a few weeks or so. I’ve mostly talked myself out of my original idea of keeping it on the back of the crapper, but I might slip it in there if people come over, just to see if anyone says anything. This plan to treat it like a normal book that I paid money for and care about may have detrimental effects, though; I purchased the book fully knowing that I don’t have a damn place to put it. After the removal of all my childhood books and knick-knacks and assimilation into my exciting new life, I appear to have once again outgrown my bookshelf. Some creative rearrangement could get the new books in there, but that doesn’t address the core problem. CDs, especially, are making the problem evident, since I’ve now filled up those two shelf things I bought from the Container Store. I need more space, but I’m not really sure what to do. I want to keep the current shelf, since sentimental value and all that, but I’m not quite sure what to do about an axillary shelf, either in appearance or placement. I think I could add a third 50-CD shelf thing to the current two, but I don’t think that it would look very good past that, and it might be better to just replace those two things entirely with a single, larger unit. We all know I’m going to buy more than 50 new CDs eventually. Hell, I bought another one today. I still haven’t collected all three Joy Division albums, but today my inner angsty teenager asserted himself and I got the only posthumous compilation worth mention, so it was sort of like a sideways step for progress. I should probably get something for DVDs, too, since they’re a different height and I now have more than can be counted on a single hand. Well, my single hands, at least. I guess some people can count them on one hand. Anyhow, furniture is hard.