CLEARly Disappointed

Since I had plenty of time (>1 hour) before my flight to Vegas this afternoon I decided to try out my new CLEAR card. There were probably 30 people in the normal security line, no one in the premier lane and two people in the CLEAR lane.

Here's how it went down:

  1. Wait while the CLEAR attendant deals with an angry customer in front of me who has a broken card.
    Time: 3 minutes
  2. Listen while the angry customer curses and whines about how she should have used her Northwest Platinum status. She loudly says "Northwest Platinum" 11 times during her rant in case anyone within 20 feet has any doubt that she's a really obnoxious bitch.
    Time: 2 minutes
  3. Present my ID, boarding pass and CLEAR card to the attendant, who looks at them and hands them back to me, and then tells me how she just watched 21 and it was great, and hey, am I going to gamble?
    Time: 2 minutes
  4. Insert my CLEAR pass into one of only two kiosks, scan my fingerprint.
    Time: 30 seconds
  5. The attendant asks for my boarding pass and ID back and hands them to a screener. The screener asks me if I'm going to Vegas to gamble.
    Time: 45 seconds
  6. The second CLEAR attendant (leaving only one attendant for two kiosks) walks me to a table to load my carry-on items into a bin. She picks them up and walks me over to the security lines.
    Time: 1 minute
  7. We both stand there awkwardly while she looks for someone who looks like they've had a lifetime of abuse and torment.
    Time: 2 minutes
  8. She steps in front of a doleful looking fellow and informs him that a Registered Traveler will be stepping in front of him.
    Time: 30 seconds
  9. I apologize to him, explain how this was just an experiment. We talk about CLEAR, it comes up I'm flying to Vegas, the passenger behind him asks me if I'm going to gamble.
    Time: 1 minute
  10. At this point it's the normal wait where I go through the metal detector and wait for my bags. Another TSA attendant starts talking to me, asks me where I'm flying to, asks if I've seen the movie 21 and suggests I gamble like the math geniuses and then give him a couple thousand dollars.

Total time: About 12 minutes, 45 seconds. Questioned three times about gambling, twice about seeing 21.

Verdict

Total waste as long as I have status. Typically it's less than 10 minutes from the moment I enter the airport until I arrive at my gate. And while the CLEAR attendant who chatted me up was friendly, I really didn't want to talk. While I'm traveling and between destinations I don't want pleasantries, I want pure cold efficiency. In other words, I'm happy to talk while I wait, but I don't want to wait while I talk.

Two kiosks is also not enough, nor is two attendants. Also if you're going to have a dedicated line it should include a dedicated metal detector so I don't have to apologize for cutting in front of someone - Steve was also uncomfortable with this as I suspect most everyone would be (except the charming lady with Northwest Platinum status).

And the next person to ask me if I'm going to Vegas to gamble is going to get kicked in the knee.

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Posted in Personal, Technology on April 13th, 2008 at 01:04pm

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5 Internet phrases or concepts I've missed

FTW - Not an anti-establishment chant of Fuck The World as I originally thought, this is actually an abbreviated way of saying For The Win. Which makes a lot more sense considering the context I've usually seen it in - "Fresh cookies FTW!"
Reference: Urban Dictionary

I Drink Your Milkshake. This sounded like some depraved sex act and seeing Jason Calcanis constantly squealing on twitter about drinking someone's milkshake only reinforced this. It's actually a scene from the movie There will Be Blood.
Reference: YouTube.

Locats/I Can Haz - I guess I get it, but I don't understand the fascination.
Reference: http://icanhascheezburger.com/

FAIL - Same general idea as I Can Haz, take a picture that's already funny, throw FAIL on it, laugh, repeat. Or find an idea or event that you'd like to discuss in a thoughtful matter, summarize it in about 135 characters, append FAIL, chortle, call your parents to brag about conquering the internet, repeat.
Reference: The FAIL Blog.

First - The combination of having nothing useful to say and no meaningful existence that drives someone to constantly refresh the homepage of a highly trafficked site and post a comment containing only FIRST11!!!! as soon as a new article is posted. This is usually followed by 2 or 3 more comments also saying FRSIT! or some variant thereof, and then half a dozen other people condemning them for being idiots.
Reference: PerezHilton
See Also: eBay Feedback

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Posted in Personal on April 12th, 2008 at 11:04am

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WordPress Upgrade, New Design

When I first installed WordPress about 10 months ago I had no clue how to build a theme for it. Instead I mucked around with the default Kubrick theme and came up with something that looked fairly ugly. No images, shades of blue and gray, messy CSS.

With the release of WordPress 2.5 (and the experience I gained from the SHARP Network site) I decided it was time for a newer, hopefully better look.

Compare the old design:

With the new design (you can browse to coreygilmore.com to see it also):

I'm definitely not a designer so if anyone has any feedback I'd be glad to hear it.

Goals

One of the biggest issues with my original installation was that I'd hacked the Kubrick theme and all of my plugins and theme files were interspersed throughout the WordPress installation directory. Using a trick I learned from Alex and Eric at CrowdFavorite I've separated my files from the WordPress core, moved them into SVN and am now pulling the latest version of WordPress from SVN as well.

My new directory structure looks something like this:

.
|-- fix_symlinks.php
|-- images
|-- plugins
|-- themes
|-- uploads
|-- wp
`-- wp-config.php

Now all of coreygilmore.com is managed by WordPress so I can easily create new pages from within a CMS. Previously only the blog subdirectory was. In Apache my docroot is the wp directory (which is an svn:externals), and everything else is symlinked accordingly. fix_symlinks.php is a script I use to manage all of my symlinks; it will create, update, remove and prune stale symlinks in the appropriate places, which lets me easily keep development and production sites in sync. It's also intelligent enough to use fsutil/junction on Windows and ln on linux.

I rewrote my all of my plugin and theme functions, and encapsulated them in classes. Everything is invoked as a static method which as close to namespacing as you can get with PHP 5. A pleasant side effect of that is that it eliminates the need for global variables.

Snags

My biggest concern was the integrity of my existing links. A few Apache Redirect directives took care of almost everything:

Redirect permanent /blog/wp-content http://coreygilmore.com/wp-content
Redirect permanent /blog/wp-admin http://coreygilmore.com/wp-admin
Redirect permanent /blog/feed http://coreygilmore.com/feed
Redirect permanent /blog/comments/feed http://coreygilmore.com/comments/feed

Unfortunately I wasn't able to use an Apache directive to redirect / to /blog/ without breaking WordPress' preview functionality, but the Page Redirect plugin by Dave Stewart did the trick.

Concerns

I always wince when I pop open Firebug and see that the page is 400kb, and one of my goals was to keep my page size down and receive an A or B from YSlow. Much of your grade is based upon the number of external files (CSS, JS, images) and the appropriate use of headers and ETags. Once I'm satisfied with the design I'll use CSS sprites to consolidate my images and work out a deployment routine to publish minified (not packed) and combined CSS and JS.

Page size is another issue. I'd love to be able to defer loading advertisements until after the page has fully loaded, and only load one copy of the script. A shining example of this is show_ads.js from Google's Adsense. It's ~20kb/7kb compressed/uncompressed. You can have up to three ad-units per page which is a wasted 14kb and 2 extra HTTP requests.

Now that I have a more maintainable site I'm going to begin working on some WP plugins to make my life a bit easier. Look for a Projects section soon :)

Posted in Development, Personal on April 2nd, 2008 at 08:04pm

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A conversation on the chairlift today

While riding up a 6-person chair with my girlfriend and some lady and her child.

Me: Mind if I put the bar down?
Mother: Can we not? She's been having fun with it up.

Fun? That's the most asinine response imaginable. Give the kid something shiny and let me have my footrest.

Posted in Personal on March 23rd, 2008 at 07:03pm

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