Clayton’s Weblog

I bought a three pod Aerogarden a while back, and I’ve been experimenting with growing my own seeds in it. I came up with an Omnigraffle template for the labels to go on the top of the seed pods. It’s a double sided template where one side is a label for you to write on and the other side is a cutting template. You can run it through in duplex mode if you have a printer that supports that, but I’ve found that depending on the printer you can get better alignment by running it through the printer twice.

Originally I had printed this on card stock, but in hindsight that was obviously a bad idea. It ended up waterlogged and started molding after about two weeks. I ended up ordering some Rite in the Rain waterproof paper which is supposed to be mold proof.

Here is a picture of the Rite in the Rain labels:

More photos: Flickr

I glue these on using rubber cement. I’m not 100% sure with that, because

Download Template: PDF | Graffle

I’ve been a Quicken Bill Pay customer for 5 years, probably closer 10.  Their product generally works pretty well, but it hasn’t changed much in the last 5 years, and the generally crummy UI led me to look around for something better.  This morning I signed up for Paytrust hoping it might be better since the web page looked slightly better and people seemed to give it decent reviews.  I quickly realized that it’s just another front end for Metavante like Quicken Bill Pay is.  In fact, they’re both owned by Intuit.  I immediately sent an email to support saying I wanted to cancel my account, and got the following and email containing this:

If you still wish to close your account after reviewing some benefits of our service which are listed below, we ask that you please contact us at 1-800-729-8787 so that we may maintain the security of your account throughout the closure process. Your feedback is important to us.

Their website is secure enough for me to be able to empty my bank account from, but not secure enough to cancel my account from?  I smell bullshit.

A friend of mine suggested a while back that we should have some law in place that says unless there is extenuating circumstances, you should be able to cancel any subscription service via the same medium you used to sign up for it.  Perhaps legislation is going overboard, but this “I think you’re too lazy to call us up and cancel” tact that many companies seem to take is really bad customer service.  You’d think they would realize that ultimately it just leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths about their company.  I can’t see companies ever doing this unless they’re required to.

So I think Metacritic’s game reviews are a great idea, but their RSS feeds only have the title of the game, and a very short sentence. That’s a not great, but the bigger problem is that they publish games to their RSS feed immediately, but don’t score games until there are at least 5 reviews.

To work around that, I’ve put together Atom feeds that you can use instead of the official feeds, which include the short blurb that Metacritic provides, but most importantly these feeds don’t publish review information until there is a critic score associated with the game.

Here is a list of the feeds that I’ve put together:

• Xbox 360
• PS3
• Wii
• Nintendo DS
• PSP
• PC

You can find the code that generates the Atom feeds at github here.

We’ve been doing architecture for geographically disperse, highly available systems at work for a few years now.  We have mostly been coming up with “things that work” without spending a lot of time on research.  I ran across Werner Vogel’s post on this sort of thing a month or two ago and thought it would be worth mentioning.  It really crystalized for me some ideas that intuitively made sense to me and it is something I can point other people to.  We were talking about the architecture of a new system today at lunch and I realized that I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone when I originally read it. 

Werner’s entire post is well worth reading, but a more succinct explanation of just the CAP Theorem can also be found here.

I took Paul to see Journey to the Center of the Earth this afternoon. I had forgotten it was in 3d until we were walking in and they handed us polarized 3d glasses. He seemed to really enjoy it, although I didn’t notice until the credits that he was dodging things coming out of the screen

I used Fluid to put together a site specific browser for Hiveminder, but the favicon scaled up was really ugly.  I hit Jesse up, and he sent me a SVG version of their logos, and I converted the Hiveminder bee to a high resolution PNG.  I promised him I’d post it, so here it is. 

It would be nice to use the Fluid javascript hooks to display the number of outstanding tasks, but I’m not sure if there is an easy way to get that information out of Hiveminder.  Let me know if you try this and have any problems.  I’ve not distributed anything as a DMG before, so it’s entirely possible I did something wrong.

You can download the DMG here.

And if you haven’t checked out Hiveminder before, you should!

Technorati Tags: gtd, hiveminder

The odd thing is that the tire didn’t actually lose pressure after I ran over this.  I only noticed because of the noise of it hitting the fender each time it went around.  This was a brand new tube too, and the first front flat I’ve had on this bike in a year.  I patched it, but looks like the patch isn’t holding.  The tire was only at 20ish PSI this morning, and was soft again when I went to ride home today. 

Technorati Tags: cycling

So I don’t use full screen Expose on my Mac very often, but I was looking for my Time Machine progress bar, and found this:

At first, I thought that the “Trust me…it’s super legit” was some value in the certificate, but it’s not.  The cert is apparently from the blue socket wifi gateway we have here from work.  I was puzzled as to where this came from, until I realized the icon here must be from the application, and that the icon over the lock is almost certainly the Plaxo icon.  I’m sure someone thinks they’re “super funny”, but this is pretty lame, and likely to freak out anyone that sees it at first glance.

I’m guessing some developer at Plaxo never imagined that their Mac client would get back an invalid certificate when making a request to the Plaxo servers, but again, this is pretty lame.  I’m guessing this is also a Cocoa dialog (or OS level dialog).  If so, this is pretty lame on Apple’s part to not force the application name into the dialog somewhere.

Here is a screenshot of the details view.  Click on it for a full resolution version.

Technorati Tags: plaxo, security

I was driving home on Wednesday and pulled up to the head of the line at the corner of Route 7100 and Foxmill Road near Herndon.  As I’m sitting there, I see this guy filter forward through traffic, and dismount off of his unicycle:

I was a little surprised to say the least.  However, I wasn’t completely shocked, as I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this same guy commuting on the bike path on 7100 once before, in even weirder circumstances.  I was looking forward to seeing him mount up, and ride across, but unfortunately (for me), he just walked the unicycle across.  I’m guessing that’s probably a lot safer, but unfortunately I didn’t really get to see him riding.

Unfortunately the quality of the picture is pretty bad, but you can click the photo to see the higher resolution version at Flickr.  I pulled my formerly trusty Canon S400 out of my bag, but it appears that the sensor has bitten the bullet.  Well, I’m not positive, but I do know that all the pictures on the LCD show up purplish, and really wavy/fuzzy.

I need to decide now whether or not I should buy another Digital Elph, or wait until the 3G iPhone comes out, and just use the camera that is on that.  I’m thinking I’d like a separate camera, since on multi-day bike trips it would be a lot easier to keep a camera charged than a phone

Technorati Tags: cycling

When I see license plates like this, I always wonder if they were thinking of the same acronym I am.