Then I heard a noise that was extremely unsettling - the distinct sound of crinkling insulation coming from the attic directly above our bedroom. Something was up there.

Immediately I thought of the venting holes under the eaves of the roof. Sometime during the winter, two caps had fallen out of them, leaving a hole right up into the attic. I saw a bird fly into there last week and who knows what else could be settling into our attic.

I got out of bed and went upstairs. I quickly noticed that the small door that led from the finished part of the 3rd floor to the attic was ajar. So whatever was in the attic could also now be in our house. Wonderful.

In the attic I turned on the light and crept towards the area where I heard the noise. There was nothing. Everything was quiet. Then, as I got closer, a huge animal suddenly darted across the attic in a blur of gray fur. It took me a second to process what I just saw. It was our cat.

I have no idea what he was doing up there, but I guess the door to the attic came open and he decided to explore. I wasn’t sure where he went, but he was heading towards the door into the house, so I closed it behind me and went back to bed.

In the morning I told Anne about the incident and went to work. As we were eating dinner that evening, I asked her if she had seen the cat. She said no. I immediately went up to the attic and opened the door. Sure enough, the dumb cat was still in there. He didn’t run out like I thought he had. He sheepishly wandered out and I jammed the door shut.

I still need to get those caps replaced.

I hate Quiznos
I’ve never really liked Quiznos. They always seem to do something weird to the sandwiches and I end up regretting going there. Last week I went to Quiznos and found out they were giving away 1 million free subs. Hooray! I want back and filled out the form, giving them all my valuable data, and printed out my form.

Yesterday, seeing it expired that day I went back to get my free sub. It was a cold day and Quiznos is a bit further than our usual lunch places, but I went anyway, alone. I got there, the sandwich lady yelled at me for my order (which she always does) and then told me they didn’t take the free sub coupons anymore because they were no longer a “participating location”. So you can be a participating location one day and not the next? I paid for my sub, feeling duped.

Congratulations Quiznos, your brilliant promotional plan failed. I used to have only a mild dislike for your stores. Now I hate you and will never go back.

But it’s a dry heat
We’ve been looking at getting a humidification system installed in our house. After months of heating, the wood floors are separating, the paint is cracking and the static is enough to make one spontaneously combust.

You would think that in this economy, heating and cooling installers would be desperate to get our business. We’ve had four companies come to the house and in a week, only one has bothered to get back to us with an estimate, and he did it right there.

Even more disturbing is that none of them seem to agree on what we need. Some say we need multiple units, others say one. I know nothing about humidifier systems and I have no idea who to trust. Sigh.

UPnP is a PITA
I’ve spent way too many hours recently trying to set up my parents’ Slingbox. It worked fine inside their network, but you could not get to it from the outside, despite the setup assistant saying it was working. Through some strange series of reboots, I was able to get it to work, but not in any deterministic way.

What I was relying on was Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), which is a system by which the Slingbox can tell the router “Hey, let anybody on the outside talk to me if they talk on these channels.” What seemed to be happening is that UPnP is not persistent and the router would forget that it was supposed to let outside machines talk to the Slingbox. The solution? Don’t use UPnP. I set the Slingbox to use a static IP and set the router to forward port 5001 to it. Works beautifully.

While I can’t help with LAUNCHcast, I can assure you that all the ratings will be preserved on Yahoo! Music. Better yet, I now have a way for you to download all your ratings.

Now I don’t know if downloading these ratings are actually useful because I don’t know of any service where you can import them, but at least you’ll have them in case such a service does become available.

Anyway, have at it. I hope you find it useful.

And thanks for all the kind words left in the comments about how you loved LAUNCHcast. Me too.

If you appreciate this tool, or enjoyed LAUNCHcast, please consider donating to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. My wife is running a marathon to raise money!

1. Inflated the tires on the jogging stroller
2. Moved a very heavy treadmill from the 3rd floor to the basement - at midnight, no less.
3. Assembled an elliptical machine without instructions (they were missing).
4. Installed Linux about 4 times, finally settling on Mythbuntu
5. Installed a rather large mirror in the living room
6. Moved a lot of stuff around in the basement
7. Wired up my Wiimote charging stations and Wii component output
8. Fixed a couple of loose doorknobs
9. Unpacked and set up two new lamps for the bedroom
10. Went to music class with Audrey
11. Tried out a new rug for the kitchen. (It’s going back.)
12. Fixed my parents’ email
13. Tried to fix my parents’ printer.
14. Tried and mostly failed at getting Audrey to nap in her crib in the afternoons.
15. Chopped up most of the remaining ice on the driveway
16. Reposted some furniture on craigslist
17. Took advantage of an awesome sale on Amazon and bought Audrey a new carseat
18. Watched the SuperBowl, mostly for the commercials (Hulu’s was the best), but it turned out to be a pretty good game, even if you didn’t care who wins.
19. Actually updated my blog.

On one hand, my life seems to have become incredibly boring. On the other hand, it was nice to stay home and get things done.

I learned a hell of a lot from my years at LAUNCH and I never worked harder. LAUNCHcast built up quite a following, especially after we were bought by Yahoo!.

From literally day one of the service, the music industry tried to kill LAUNCHcast. I went to court to defend it. Well, they finally won by raising the rates services like LAUNCHcast pay to play music to an amount that makes no financial sense. Every online radio site will now lose money. As a result, Yahoo!, decided to get out of online radio, instead sending users off to CBS Radio. There will no longer be any customized radio.

Nice job, music industry. Instead of collecting money from these services, you’ve shut down any chance of revenue. Nobody buys CDs anymore and Apple is in control of all your music distribution. Way to go.

Farewell, LAUNCHcast. You introduced me to so much music and many friends along the way.

If you enjoyed LAUNCHcast, please consider donating to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. My wife is running a marathon to raise money for this worthy charity!

Before I watched it, I thought “A Pixar movie about robots in space? What could be cooler than that? This should be great!”. I was disappointed.

Usually Pixar movies are so mind-blowingly creative that I don’t care if the plot doesn’t quite make sense. I own almost all of them. While Wall-E had some cute parts, it was dull in others and I couldn’t overlook all the holes in the plot.

• If the Axiom had been in space 700 years, how could they have been throwing out huge blocks of garbage? Where did they get the material to replace it?
• The captain made the comment that they never had a probe come back positive before. If they had been sending probes to earth for 700 years, wouldn’t Wall-E have seen these all the time?
• What was the point of building skyscrapers of trash? Who was going to pick them up?
• What happened to all the other Wall-E units? If he was the only one, then how could he have possibly cleaned earth up enough to make it livable again?
• There weren’t nearly enough captains on the wall to cover 700 years.
• If EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator)’s mission was to find plants, why the heck did she need a huge gun to blow stuff up?
• They made a big deal of the couple who met and went in the pool, like people didn’t interact at all. But there was a whole nursery of babies and the human race had survived 700 years, so clearly not everyone was anti-social.
• There’s no way people who’ve been laying down their whole lives would suddenly get up and start walking around.
• When the ship tips over, everyone slides to one side. That only makes sense is gravity is directly below them, but there’s no gravity in space.
• The plant would have died instantly (exploded and frozen, really) when exposed to space.
• Why was the BnL CEO live action whereas everyone else a cartoon?
• What did the movie that Wall-E watched over and over again have to do with anything?
• How were people going to live on Earth with those dust storms and no water and still trash everywhere?

As far I was concerned, Pixar was 8 for 8 in their previous films. Wall-E was a disappointment. Hopefully things are back to par with Up next year.

We’re not sure what happened to him in the last few years, but he got increasingly agitated and territorial. When he would see another cat outside, he would freak out and yowl loudly, scaring everyone else in the house. We would constantly find places in the house where he sprayed to mark his turf.

We brought him to the vet several times, trying pheremones, drugs and even aluminum foil to get him to stop marking. Nothing worked. We spent thousands of dollars on checkups and tests to make sure there was nothing else wrong with him. He’s ruined furniture. When we left California, our former landlord had to take more money off our deposit to clean the rugs a second time because the new tenants complained of the smell.

With a new house and toddler (soon) running around, we couldn’t let this go on. We considered giving him up in California, but our hope was that a change of scenery would also change his attitude. For a few weeks, it seemed to. Then we found a spot where he peed. Then another. Since then, both cats have been confined to the basement, where everything we care about is in plastic boxes. Hopefully there aren’t any more spots upstairs we haven’t discovered yet. It’s terrorizing when you don’t know when you’ll find the next marking.

Anne did a lot of work to find a shelter that wasn’t full and wouldn’t euthanize him. I hope someone will take him, though it can be hard to place a 10-year old cat. We couldn’t convince any of our friends or family to take him and we didn’t think letting him outside would help.

He was a smart cat, able to fetch his favorite toys when he wanted. He would come when called. He didn’t shed a lot and he didn’t claw the furniture. He knew how to communicate with us when he needed food, water or attention. He would wait at the end of our bed as I got in at night so he could lie on my chest for a while. If I didn’t give him enough attention, he’d paw at my face.

It was sad to have to give him up, but it didn’t seem like there was any other choice. He’s not happy in the basement even though we visit him a couple times a day. He cries at the top of the stairs. It’s also not fair to the other cat to be locked in the basement, but it would be worse to keep them without companionship.

I had a hard time cornering him this morning; I think he knew something was up. The surrendering process at the Animal Rescue League in Dedham was painless and we visited the cages where he’d be kept. There were a couple of 13 year-old cats there, so he wouldn’t be the oldest, and his cage was in the top center, so he had a good spot. We donated $100 and his carrier to the shelter, mostly to assuage our own guilt.

I hope someone takes him home, hopefully adults in an upper-floor apartment where he won’t be able to see other cats close by.

It was a good run, Pixel. We hope you find a home where you can be happy again.

On Tuesday, Apple introduced redesigned MacBooks and MacBook Pros. They have a fancy new trackpad and are made using a new manufacturing process which I frankly don’t care about. I’m not sure why anyone would.

Anyway, once they came out, it was time to make a decision. Go for an older model at a discount or get the new one?

So I put together a spreadsheet that compares the features of each.

Based on the price, she’s getting the older MacBook (Black). Between Amazon’s discount, rebates and cash back from my Amazon Visa, it’s a pretty good deal, even better than an educational discount.

I wish I had data on the new machines’ performance with their new video cards, but the 2.4 Ghz machine should do her well for some time. Hopefully Barefeats will get their hands on them soon.

Update: Early benchmarks show nearly no difference in processor performance over the old models. Of course the processors haven’t changed, just the memory and bus speed, so this is expected. The graphics are where we’ll see the most difference and even more when OS X 10.6 comes out and offloads more work to the graphics processor. My mom’s not a big gamer though so I think her web pages and email will load just fine.

Update 2: MacWorld has published their Speedmark test results. The new graphic cards help for sure, putting the 2.0 Ghz new MacBook at the same level as the older 2.4 Ghz MacBook. Note that the tests are heavy on GPU processing though, testing Quake and Photoshop and MP3 encoding. My Mom doesn’t do any of these intensively. I’d like to see a benchmark that tests the speed of web page rendering and sending email!

Shopping Blind

When we started looking, I was shocked at the prices. $3000 for a mattress? What the heck are these things made of? Knowing very little, we went shopping for a mattress and other things on a Saturday morning. The first place, we stopped, Sleepy’s, seemed nice enough. We laid on a few and honed in on the one that we both felt most comfortable in. Meanwhile, Audrey discovered the fun of letting herself fall backwards onto mattresses and did it all over the store. She was giggling and the whole store couldn’t help but look and smile at her. Unfortunately, we soon stopped smiling.

When we found something we liked, the seemingly helpful salesman started to get more aggressive. He asked how much we were looking at paying and I made up a number on the spot, something way below the listed price on the bed. The said he would “talk with his manager” and see if he could get us that price. Then he started asking us if we could commit and have it delivered tomorrow. Anne had walked outside to give Audrey a break by that point, so I said I had to go out and talk with her about it. We talked about it for a bit, then decided we didn’t like the high-pressure sales pitch, so we got ready to leave.

I had the car started up when the salesman came out and approached the car window. He then said that he had “talked to his manager” and he could give us the price we wanted AND a free “platinum package”. I said we would talk about it and let him know. We again decided this was sketchy, but to make good on my promise, I went in and gave him my phone number and left.

Later that day we went to Jordan’s Furniture, generally known to be a reputable place with reasonable places. The salespeople there were nice and NOT high-pressure. Prices were generally lower, but strangely, we couldn’t find the mattress we found at Sleepy’s. They had Sertas, but not the one we liked.

Being indecisive, we left with a couple new names of ones we liked. Later, we went to Mattress Discounters. The woman there was not pushy and told us about the BBB complaints that Sleepy’s (a 700-store chain) had gotten. We decided to think some more and head home.

At home, I did some research online and I found something strange - I couldn’t find much of anything on the mattresses we saw that we liked. I found some mattresses, many of the same brand, but not the same models.

One Big Scam

I later came to find out that this was completely intentional. The mattress industry is one big scam. There is no way to make an objective decision on a mattress using actual facts.

Here’s a few things that the mattress industry does to get you:

1. They mark up their prices 100% to 200%!! No wonder the first guy was able to get his “manager” to give me such a steep discount. They were probably still going to make hundreds of dollars of profits on it.

2. They give the same mattresses different names in different stores or they set up exclusivity agreements by mattress line in certain stores. This makes it impossible to comparison shop because…

3. They make it really had to get actual facts about the mattresses. Stuff like coil counts, materials, overall construction are shrouded in secrecy. But that doesn’t really matter because…

4. There’s no objective measure of mattress quality. Consumer Reports won’t rate them because they can’t get the data and there’s no testing that actually says higher coil counts are better or the number of wires in the coils makes a difference in any way. You’re left to deciding how much you believe the marketing. Is a pillow top made of alpaca hair any better than one made of cotton? Your guess is as good as mine.

5. There’s very little online reviews of mattresses, probably because the model names are so fractured. The ones I did find looked more like content-free sites designed to attract referral credits.

Cracking the Code

With some more research, I found out that it was somewhat possible to compare mattresses models from different places. It turns out that they really only make one hardness variation in each line. So you can assume that a Plush Firm mattress in the “Classic” line, is the same as another Plush Firm in the Classic line, even if they have different names.

US-mattress.com was very helpful in figuring this out. We were able to understand which mattresses we saw and how they related to each other. For example, the mattress we liked at Jordan’s was a product line better than the one we saw at Mattress Discounters, even though they came out to the same price! Clearly Jordan’s had the better deal, but US-Mattress had an even better deal.

So I did something I never thought I could do, buy a mattress over the internet. I’m pretty sure it’s the same one we saw in the store and the free delivery and frame were a good deal. I’m sure that even if I’m getting it at half the price I saw it listed at elsewhere, they’re still making a decent profit on it.

Anne and I agree that buying a mattress is worse than buying a car. While both have sketchy salespeople, when you buy a car, you can compare them on MPG, size, features, etc. Multiple dealers have the same models so you can compare prices and make an informed decision based on their invoice prices. There’s none of that when buying a mattress.

Our mattress should arrive in a few weeks. Hopefully we’ll just find it comfortable enough to have to avoid going through buying a mattress again for at least another 11 years.

UPDATE: The mattress arrived quickly and in good condition. We’ve been sleeping on it for several nights and while it feels comfy, I’ve had some upper back soreness which seems to be related to the new mattress. I’m going to keep trying it for a few more weeks and see if my body adjusts as the US-mattress.com website suggests. Hopefully it will go away. Otherwise, we’ll have to find another one and do a $100 exchange I guess.

While I have a Garmin GPS, it’s more for hiking than for driving, so I started looking at GPS receivers more appropriate for the car. The one that immediately appealed to me was the Dash Express, a GPS infused with
wireless connectivity to the Internet. This opens up a whole lot of interesting things you could do with it. For one, you can get real-time traffic. You can send addresses to the GPS from your computer without connecting the GPS up with a cable. It appealed enough to my geek lust that I had to get one. I ordered it from Amazon and it arrived in a few days.

(Sidenote: It was $310 when I bought it, but the price dropped twice on Amazon to $289. I emailed Amazon and they refunded me the difference. I love Amazon.)

I set it up, turned it on and connected it to the Wifi network. It managed to get a GPS signal inside, which was a good sign. It soon called home and realized there were updates to the software available, so it downloaded them and installed them. Strangely, it did this 3 times, each requiring a lengthy reboot process.

The internet connectivity requires a monthly subscription and there’s mention of a free trial, but I wasn’t sure how it worked. While I had to register the device, I didn’t have to provide a credit card or anything. It turns out that the 3 month free trial starts automatically when you register it. That’s nice, it just wasn’t obvious that I had the internet service even though it appeared to be working.

The real-time traffic is pretty cool. Solid lines show recent road speeds from other Dash units, while dashed lines are based on data from traditional traffic services and historical data. Sometimes I saw solid lines and didn’t believe that someone else with a Dash had really just been through the area, but I guess it was true.

When you want to route to a place, it looks at the distance and traffic and provides you at least 2 different routes if there are multiple reasonable ways to get there. In some cases it presented routes which were not reasonable, but they’re pretty obvious and hopefully they will fix these. The downside of this is that it takes a while from when you request a route to when you an actually select one and go. It’s a 3-step process instead of the 1-step process on most other GPS units that don’t give you such choices.

The mini-applications you can install are pretty cool and are really what makes this GPS a lot different from others. One application allows you to browse all the local radio stations and see what’s currently playing on them. Others are just shortcuts to local searches.

The unit is rather big compared to other GPS units these days. That doesn’t really matter when it’s mounted on the dash, but it is annoying when you have to carry it around. GPSes are very common targets of thieves, and I don’t want to leave a $300 device in plain sight, so I take it in with me when I get to work. Unfortunately, its size means you can’t just slip it into your pocket or purse. It does come with a little carrying case which I found unnecessarily tight and difficult to shove the Dash into.

The Send2Car feature is really nice. If you’re going somewhere new, you just use the form on Dash website to send it to your Dash GPS and it picks it up next time you turn it on, assuming you can connect to a Wifi network or GPRS signal. It’s somewhat unfortunate that they chose GPRS as their wireless technology since at least where I live, CDMA (Verizon and Sprint) have much better coverage. That said, it generally hasn’t been a problem for me.

While I appreciate the device overall, there are definitely some other problems I haven’t already mentioned:

• I find the search interface confusing. Clicking a bar on the top of the search allows you to browse categories, but also acts as a filter for what you’re searching. I just didn’t get it.
• The database of locations built into the unit is not great. I couldn’t find a lot of stuff when I couldn’t connect to the internet. I suppose that’s offset by the gigantic, continuously updated of locations retrieved from Yahoo Local when connected to the internet.
• One day I thought I saw something fall out of the back of my Dash. A few days later I definitely saw something fall out. Fumbling around the floor of my car, I found two screws for securing the mount plate to the cradle. The remaining two screws were loose. It only took a screwdriver to get them back in, but it was strange that they fell out by themselves and I suspect it will happen again.
• The Twitter application is cool to let people know where you are, but it shouldn’t be something you have to do manually. It should continuously update automatically. If that worked, it would eliminate a whole class of calls from my wife asking when I’ll be home.
• To switch between 2D and 3D views, you click the compass icon. While that’s convenient, it’s not very intuitive.
• One day all my apps disappeared. I set up another one and suddenly they all came back. Weird.
• I installed the weather alerts application and it annoyed me all the time with fake “Send2Car addresses” that were really severe weather alerts.
• Every application is a “search”. For example, when you want to send your location to Twitter, it asks you if you want to send your current location or a location somewhere else. Huh? It always gets a list of results back from the search, which is completely unnecessary when you’re just sending data.

There’s a few more things I’d really like to see in future devices:

• Bluetooth handsfree. It seems that most other units at this price have this now and I’d rather not need yet another device.
• Given a route, tell me how long it will take to get there based on the time I leave. This would be killer. I can leave for work at 8 or 9, but which one will mean I spend less time waiting in traffic? Google Maps allows you to see historical traffic, but not travel time for a route with that traffic data.
• You should be able to have more than 1 page of favorites. Right now you’re limited to 8 total.

What’s really interesting about the Dash is that it seems to be the first of new generation of general computing devices for the car. It’s not just a GPS, it’s a weather information service, a web browser and “who knows what else” in the future. The only problem with this is that it’s not really part of the car. It doesn’t integrate with the radio, the air conditioning or the car’s internal computer. It’s yet another device to maintain and worse, something I have to carry around for fear of it getting stolen.

Cars are getting their own built-in systems for GPS these days, but they tend to be sub-par. What I really want is a platform for cars where you can customize the software to your needs - dare I say - Windows for your car. It should provide the hardware interfaces into the car (with safety controls of course) and storage and internet access. Let me install whatever I want for the rest of the software. I want to have something that I know and has all my data in any car I drive, not whatever is (or is not) built-in to the car I happen to be using.

The Dash Express is a cool device and I have high hopes that will get ever better over time as more people get them, contribute to the traffic data, and the Dash software is updated to fix many of the flaws that exist today. Please buy one, especially if you live in Boston and do a lot of driving!