This has to be the best invention for parents since disposable diapers. A few months ago we had problems with Grant waking up at 2am and going down in the basement to play Legos. He didn't get the concept of time nor how to read a clock. I then found the Teach Me Time! Clock. This clock will glow an orange, green or no glow at all. I have it set to go from the off state to the "orange glow" at 6:30pm. We put the kids to bed about 7:30pm so it also doubles as a nightlight. It stays orange all night and then turns green at 6:00am and then turns to the off state at 7:30am. So with Grant and Anna we told them that they can not get up until the clock turned green. I have to say that this has been an absolute life saver. If your children can't tell time this device is well worth the $40 for a good night sleep.

Here is a picture of the clock glowing green.

In my last post I described how getting all the kids iPods saved me over $1000. We gave Grant one a while ago and Anna is getting one for her birthday here in a couple of weeks. Rusty now being 7 we thought it would be a good opportunity for him to learn the lesson of working for what we want in life.

Joni and I sat down and talked to him about getting an iPod and he would have to work for it. He agreed that he would do extra jobs around the house and earn it. The next morning I had printed out a list with 100 places where he could write down the extra things we asked him to do. The next morning he was 110% self motivated to start earning his iPod. He spent the next 2 weeks doing whatever he could to earn lines toward his reward. From pulling weeds to cleaning 1600 sq ft basement of toys up by himself. He worked so hard.

In the end Rusty did understand the lesson we had set out and we were so proud of him!

Here is a picture of Rusty when he got the iPod.

About 5 years ago we purchased a custom in car entertainment system for our mini van. We had 7" screens installed in the headrests, a DVD player installed between the two front seats and a remote start also installed. I want to say that the system cost about $1500 to do. Over the years the technology has improved but the price has stayed about the same. We found that dealing with the DVDs in the car was a huge pain in the butt. The disks would get scratched up and getting them started was a huge pain. You can't see the screen while driving so you would end up memorizing the menus to get a movie started. A little over a year ago I saw that you could play movies on an iPod. I purchased an iPod classic and started ripping all of our movies to it. It was perfect! We could plug in the iPod and get a movie started for the kids in 10 seconds flat all while doing 75mph down the interstate.

Now come about 2 months ago we decided that it was time to get rid of the van and get something with 4WD now that we live in Colorado. So off I went on the perfect solution for in car entertainment. I was disappointed to see that the cost was still about the same and the technology still relied on using DVDs. Then came the moment of falling off the toilet and figuring out the flux capacitor. The iPod works like a charm for a movie jukebox so why don't we just get each kid their own iPod. I found that you can get a refurbished iPod Nano for $100 on apple.com. Then you can pick up the 2 year apple care for $39. So for 3 kids it was $417 for them to watch their own movies. That is saving of about $1000 and we don't have to deal with the hassle of DVDs. From a parent's perspective this is fantastic!
The kids can put on whatever movie they want to and not fight over what to watch
We don't have to hear the movie that they are watching either!

The past couple of days I attended a conference that my employer put on for our clients. As I was walking through the parking lot I noticed a car that was covered in dust. Not a little amount either. Months and months of dust had settled on the car. I walked over to read some of the writing on the windows and was surprised to see that the car clearly belonged to someone who was no longer with us. The car windows had been inscribed with messages by the hotel employees to their former coworker.

Some called this morbid and wrong. But in a way I was glad to see this. While it is just a dirty car in a garage. I am sure that it serves as a reminder to the hotel employees about their coworker and about how precious life is.

I have released a little tag that I have used for a couple of years now that persists the session information to the database. It has worked like a charm and has little impact on performance. SessionSwap

Only $149 Register now! The cost for this event is $149, which expires 3/31/09; after that it will be $199.

It will be held at the Denver Athletic Club on April 6th.

We will have coffee, snacks, lunch, and lots of free stuff. Including a CF8 tag poster for everyone. Lots of prizes and software to give away. Even a free ticket to CFUnited. More speakers will be announced soon. So far we have Patrick Quinn, Nate Nelson, Mike Brunt, RJ Owen, and Rob Rusher. Stay tuned!

REMEMBER, when you register at an express event you can use 100% of your registration as a discount towards CFUnited's main event in August.

Register now!

Recently I have been diving into user experience design at work. We have an ever evolving and improving product that needed some UX attention. In this I have found a couple of things I wanted to share.

• I found it difficult for myself to deal with designing the new user interface while also prototyping new functionality. Once I was able to first prototype the existing functionality it was easier to come up with the new design. The key here was to come up with a design to handle existing that was flexible enough to handle anything new that the business may want to add.
• Start with sketches. I went out and purchased Balsamiq. I tried working with this at first to prototype quickly but I found that there is nothing better than a pencil and paper for initial creativity. In the future I am going to start with pencil sketches then move them into Balsamiq to show the business before moving them into comps.
• I have been programming for over 10 years now and in the past 4 months my wrists have started to break down when I use a mouse. So I have ended up buying a bunch of different keyboards, mice and track pads to alleviate the pain. The problem here is that creating comps in Photoshop is difficult to do without the use of a precision input devise like a mouse. I ended up doing very little design work in Photoshop and decided to skip that step and move directly into HTML and CSS. While I am not able to produce the comps as fast as just dragging some layers around in Photoshop. I was able to create a HTML template that we can pick up at the end of the UX process to use in the application. I am not sure if this is a time saver in the long run; but it sure makes my wrists feel a lot better.

For this venture I have used the following resources.

1. Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
2. Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design
3. Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action
4. Designing the Moment DVD (Perfect 1hr DVD-ROM for the business to understand user interface)

I am happy to announce that cf_googleMap has been released into beta 2. The latest version can be downloaded here. There are still a few bugs left before I can call this one a full release candidate.

Overall this has been a huge release and there are so many new features that I have to test the heck out of it.

Well after a couple of years of the old design I decided to take a few minutes and update the site with a new template that seemed to match more of the colors that we use in our home.

A few years ago I came up with a monster hack of automating the decryption of a PGP file with GnuPG. There are a bunch of limitations with CFEXECUTE so I turned to a VBS file and ADO to get the job done. The monster hack ran fine for a long time and just recently died when we upgraded to MSSQL 2005. After I was not able to fix the ADO connection properly I turned to some different solutions. What ended up working perfectly was using Java to execute a command line directly and just completely bypassing the CFEXECUTE. I stumbled upon System Command from Kevan Stannard and it worked perfectly. The same command line calls that I made to GnuPG now worked through CF using the System Command to do the execution. The trick to getting it to work is that GnuPG stores the PGP keys in relation to your user profile on the computer. So I ended up scripting out a batch file that added the keys into GnuPG, logging into the server as the same user that the ColdFusion service runs as and running the batch file to add the keys. After that the PGP decryption process has worked flawlessly.

In theory you could import the keys into the local system user but we already had a user for CF setup.