Steven's Weblog

I hope Swheat Scoop is ready to quadruple their sales overnight, because I’m endorsing their product.

I mentioned in a previous post how I love clumping litter, right? But the clay-based stuff I used had some annoying properties. It had a great tendency to stick to kitty’s paws, and then slowly drop out later. Little bits of litter ended up on most of the furniture and all the major areas of the floor. Little poky bits that hurt bare feet and scratched hardwood floors. The little bits that didn’t end up on the floor ended up matted into paw hair and/or ingested by my very clean cat.

One can talk about the environmental benefits of wheat litter, and those _are_ good, but it’s the improvement in the tracking properties that really sells me on the stuff. It sticks less, so that it doesn’t get spread around as much in the first place. If it does get spread around, it’s a lot less annoying on the feet and less damaging to the floor. If she does ingest some of the litter during cleaning, I’m not nearly as worried about the toxic effects on the kitty. It clumps just as well and has less overall mass when discarded.

The only bad thing is that the stuff is harder to sweep up with my sweeper (this fairly cool thing), because the grains are very light and are more likely to just get kicked away before they’re swept up than the heavier gravel grains. Well, and you might complain about the price. I haven’t done any actual tracking of how long a pound lasts, but when you look at it in the store, it definitely costs more per pound than a lot of the other stuff. If you’re the type of person that says “$0.50 a day? For a cat!? Outrageous!”, then you may be wary. I should try to figure out how much it really does cost per day; I’ll tell you if I do…

You know, we’re near the point where technology can provide us with crap-canceling headphones. You combine three existing technologies:

• noise-canceling
• automatic song identification
• ubiquitous WiFi or cellular data streaming

and make headphones that can automatically recognize crappy songs playing near you (say, on the radio at a restaurant), download the song, and play a complement waveform to cancel out the song without canceling things like the conversation you’re trying to have. Don’t be surprised if you discover subliminal advertisements this way, either.

For the approximately 0 readers of this blog who live around here and who haven’t already heard about this from me: go use Delivery on Demand Iowa. It’s a nice little delivery service to get stuff from places that don’t otherwise deliver. In my case, I got a bunch of cat litter delivered quickly and easily.

They’re just getting started, so give ’em some business to encourage them to continue.

I wonder if the term ‘exception’ in computer programming should be renamed. Both the name, and the way that exceptions are treated in typical programming languages, seem to relegate exception handling to a lower status. But really, in a lot of cases, good systems can become great ones via well-designed exception handling.

I recently moved. Long before I did, I placed a pre-order on Amazon. When it came about time to ship the item, Amazon sent me a mail saying “The address on this order is no longer in your address book, are you sure you want to ship it there, or do you want to use another address?”.

Having sorta implemented an e-commerce system, and having pondered them to varying degrees over the years, I never really thought of the “customer moved between when the order was placed and when it shipped” case. I’d be willing to bet that many e-commerce solutions out there don’t very adequately handle that ‘exception’. But I’m glad Amazon’s does.

Oh man, how I hate it when people use the word ‘intuitive’ when describing user interface design elements…

Well, I dunno, maybe it’s not so much the word as the fact that people often seem to use it to wallpaper over big lumps of imprecise thinking and unexpressed assumptions. I guess in that sense, it’s useful as a conversation-stopper, which is a necessary tool when you’ve got too many people talking at once in a big meeting. Which reminds me of how I hate big meetings…

Can I get a “hells yeah!” for the inventor of clumping cat litter?

I wonder to what other human (or feline) endeavors clumpitation can be applied?

I’ve been thinking about packaging lately… not sure why, exactly, but I think it’s a side-effect of my move, where I’m dealing with a lot of boxes and also buying new things for the new place that come in, well, packaging.

I just bought some cookies, and when I got ’em home I realized they have the super-cheap plastic packaging that you can’t reseal. The cookies are pretty good, but I’d go with another brand just to get a resealable package, because when I eat cookies, I eat a few, put ’em away for a day, eat a few more, etc. They’re around for a week or more, and I want them to have a chance of staying fresh.

This is either public documentation of the fact that I coined this usage, or a call to prove that it’s already been coined :-). But, according to a quick search of the web with Google, which, as I understand it, contains all phrases that anyone’s ever said, and hence all phrases that have ever been coined, nobody’s said this before. It kinda surprises me.

Anyway, what I’m trying to convey with ‘mixin brand’ is that kind of brand that doesn’t encompass the whole product or service, but only some characteristics of it. For example, you don’t buy a Microban keyboard, you buy a Fellowes keyboard with Microban microbial protection. You don’t buy Thinsulate mittens, you buy L-Bow mittens with Thinsulate insulation. If you’re the sort of person who buys mittens, ya know.

I often think that I’ve coined something and immediately find thousands of uses of it on the web, so it’s sorta cool that this one is at least not quite as obviously already out there…

This all came from pondering a mixin brand that I think would have some sales potential, if done right. Maybe I’ll blog about it at some point, but right now it’s just a baby in my brain.

I dig campusfood.com; they enable internet orders from some places that otherwise wouldn’t do it, have a nice interface and all that… But, there’s this weird little quirk I just noticed. If you type parenthesis or quotes in the ‘notes’ field of an order item, they get scrubbed out. I’m guessing that’s some lame way to prevent SQL injection attacks… Given the overall quality of the site, you’d think they could be more sophisticated about that. Also, you’d think I’d have something better to do right now than complain about such a dumb thing on my blog for no reason. Just goes to show that anyone can be wrong…

(Not, like, this, though.)

I’ve recently become a Mediacom cable-modem user (in my new apartment, where it’s ‘free’). And my modem and router are talking to each other non-stop. Needless to say if you already knew it, I had to find out what the noise was about. Turns out the network is making about 20 ARP requests per second.

Ah, yeah, I remember this from the days when my DSL was in bridging mode rather than routing mode; gettin’ ARP requests for the whole damn city or something.

I guess it’s not a big deal, but it’s weird and annoying. I think I would have a network architecture that allowed me to filter these out before they went down the wrong pipe…