I originally wasn't thrilled with the registered traveler program Clear, but as they worked out the kinks (and my free-month Clear referrals grew) I began to enjoy the convenience of having someone else carry all my crap to the x-ray machines for me.
And then on Monday night at 8PM PST I received an email from Clear Customer Service.
Subject: Clear to Cease Operations
At 11:00 p.m. PST today, Clear will cease operations. Clear's parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc. has been unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations.
After today, Clear lanes will be unavailable.
3 hours notice that a company is closing? Forget the fact that I had free service through October, 2011 (which Nick suggested may be part of the problem), 4 days earlier Clear was pushing the card as a gift for Father's Day, with a $30 Brooks Brothers gift certificate in return.
On their website Clear claims they aren't currently issuing refunds.
Will I receive a refund for membership in Clear?
At the present time, because of its financial condition, Verified Identity Pass, Inc. cannot issue refunds.
I wonder if those Brooks Brothers gift certificates will ever arrive? Based on their email marketing you would never have suspected anything was awry.
Any true fan of Steven Seagal movies1, will recognize Out For Justice as one of the classics. Seagal was still on the cusp of nearly almost being in fighting trim, and his character was usually a tough NYC cop instead of a former black-ops superstar turned janitor/nanny/chef. I highly recommend anything from Seagal's illustrious career that was released between 1988 and 1992.
Check out the Wikipedia article. Read it, really take it in. Or just glance at it. There are 6 paragraphs, 697 words laid out in the the oddly fractured writing style of a young ESL student using a thesaurus to sound more intelligent.
Now take a look at the links within the article. There are 6 people mentioned, all with links to the actors pages. Two places – Brooklyn and… a neighborhood in Brooklyn. One reverse definition, Omerta. 2 The final 4 links in the article are to things: NYPD, crack, Chevy Caprice. And corkscrew. As in the tool used to remove corks from bottles.
To recap: We have an action packed movie about a cop cleaning up Brooklyn and avenging his partner's death. He takes on the mob, the institution and NYC-Italian stereotypes. And the relevant links are deemed to be the neighborhood the movie takes place in, the main character's employer, the car he drives, the drug the antagonist likes, and the corkscrew that Seagal uses to kill the villain.
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Background
This post has been rotting in my drafts folder for a couple months (I wonder why?), and then Dan Previte posted a link to the most amazing Seagal animated gif ever.
It's a 3MB animated GIF, so be patient waiting for the magic.
Prior to his transition to straight-to-DVD releases [back]
Seagal liked to be seen as a tough neighborhood Italian guy (his mother was Irish and his father Jewish), so they crammed as many stereotypical Italian references into the movies as possible. [back]
I cleaned up some wiring in my house this weekend as part of my quest to eliminate all 802.11g devices. The only 802.11g devices I had were my old PowerBook which serves as a media server, my iPhone and an old Linksys WRT54G serving as a wireless bridge for everything in my office (Tandberg T150, workstation and printer).
I wire everything to the T56B standard because as any professional will tell you, T56A is so ghetto and outdated. Also that was the first one I memorized. I use the modular Leviton Quickport for all my wiring because they match all of the other plates in my house (I have an odd obsession with Leviton), and the modular system is awesome. You can get plugs for just about anything including RCA, BNC, 6-wire RJ-11, RJ-45, F-connectors, etc.
All of my networking gear is slowly moving to a shelf beneath my basement staircase, which is where I started to run into problems. I was running from a RJ-45 modular connector (female) in different rooms down to my router, where I'd terminate it with a RJ-45 plug (male). I started running into some weird networking issues; my upstairs ReplayTV worked fine and could see the downstairs one, but the downstairs ReplayTV couldn't retrieve the guide from the upstairs one. My cable testers were also complaining about the connection between upstairs and downstairs, but it wasn't clear why.
It turns out that you shouldn't have a cable run with a 110-type (punch down) connection on one end, and a modular RJ-45 plug on the other. The 110 Punchdown guide on CablesToGo claims this violates the EIA Cat 5 wiring standards, but there's no way in hell I'm going to read those so I can't confirm this is true. I threw together a few short patch cables, punched down some connectors and my networking problems went away.
The new wiring was also a success. I've got 1Gbit running everywhere I need it, both ReplayTV's work and the WRT54G can eventually become a dedicated 802.11g access point. Right now things look like this:
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It's not important how I arrived there, but I stumbled across an entry on Joshua Topolsky's personal site (as opposed to Engadget) titled "
