I just got an email telling me, among other things, that:

“Making a refund?

Refunds are quick and easy. Learn more”

On the “learn more” page, you get this info:

Hmm . . . seems like an awful lot of steps to me. This is one area where PayPal falls really short. Especially in comparison to a true merchant account or Google Checkout, they make refunds really time consuming. Far, far, from easy.

Saul Hansell has an article in the New York Times blog about Google driving away Postini resellers. Fair point – offer a service to the end-user cheaper than through a middleman, and you get rid of the middleman. It’s the old ‘disintermediation’ that the internet has been know for since the beginning.

I wrote about my switch to Postini earlier. I wouldn’t have done it if Google hadn’t started offering the service directly – partly for cost reasons, and partly because I didn’t need anyone in the middle of my relationship with Google.

A friend recently told me about a new book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. The idea behind the book is to use some new techniques to make great bread at home that has some of the flavor depths of traditional aged, fermented dough. Bread made by just mixing ingredients and baking really doesn’t have the complex flavors of flavor made of either aged starter (like sourdoughs) or at least fermented dough (letting the dough sit for a while to evolve and brew its own flavors).

My friend was making bread in the mornings for her kids to take to school, and easily popping out fresh loaves. I thought I should give it a try. So I bought the book, and mixed up a batch of dough.

Mixing the dough was easy. I just put the ingredients in the KitchenAid and mixed. Then I put the dough in a plastic tub, let it sit for a few hours, and put it in the fridge, as instructed.

I made my first bread the next day.

I’ve got to say, it looked great. Nice smells, good looking crust. Very artisanal. But it really had no flavor. Not to say we didn’t gobble it down before it had a chance to cool – nothing is better than warm bread from the oven, and we had some President butter on hand. But there was really nothing special about the bread beyond it being homemade and hot.

So I let the dough sit. The authors tell you that the dough gets better with age, up to two weeks. And that stands to reason. So on day four, I pulled out another batch of dough, made my “gluten cloak” (you have to read the book to get that). And I baked. But this time I didn’t get enough rise at all – despite letting it rise for the prescribed 40 minutes.

Better flavor this time, but with very little rise, it was pretty dense. This wasn’t really working for slicing for sandwiches, which was the dinner plan, but doughy slices spread with pesto worked out pretty well.

Given the lack of rise but the good crust of the last version, on day 6 I made smaller, flat loaves. We had eaten at a restaurant in Paris last year called Cosi that made flat loaves for sandwiches. Great concept: less bread, but good fresh bread, with more filling. And since the bread was largely crust, it really held the sandwiches together. The bread was close in shape and form to a pita, but with a great flavor, and a bit tougher and having more bite than pita.

So I aimed for that, and I got pretty close:

I basically sliced these around the edges for three-quarters of the circumference, and stuffed them with the favorite fillings for each family member.

Now, tonight, two weeks after I first mixed up the dough, I wanted some flatbreads with toppings. I made four. I added a cup of whole wheat flour to what was left of the dough, and some more water. I kneaded a bit, and let the dough rise for about an hour in four parts. Then I rolled each out flat.

The kids basically turned into pretty traditional pizzas. The adults got bacon, gruyere, frisee, and eggs. After they came out of the oven, they needed some serious salt, but this was definitely the best meal from the dough.

More?

Yes, I’m definitely going to go for another round. I’ll use most or all whole wheat dough next time. and I won’t even try a bread on the second day – not enough flavor. I need to figure out if maybe my yeast was bad; something was wrong with the rising of the dough on days after the first. So I’ll probably get a new jar.

But this method definitely has potential. If I can get this to work, it’ll be much less work than a sourdough starter (which has always intimidated me).

The authors have more information on their website.

I know that spam is a fact of life, but it’s a fact I hate. I’m lucky enough to have a great email address ([email protected]) but the problem is, I’ve used it on the web, and scrapers have picked it up, and it’s been entered in a zillion databases. In fact, people use those databases to try to sell me those very databases, among many, many (often unmentionable) other items.

So I first installed SpamAssassin both on my home Mac and I had our support person do it at work on our Linux box. I must say, SpamAssassin works pretty well, it’s open source, it’s free, and it’s close to impossible to install on a Mac. But it really did the trick for a while. Then, for some reason, it became less effective.

I spent a bunch of time digging around to see why SpamAssassin had lost its edge. I updated the software, tweaked the rules, added plug-ins, etc. Then I went on a campaign to ‘train’ it with the spam I was receiving – not very easy to do considering where our spam was going at work and how I had to ‘teach’ SpamAssassin.

I had looked at using Postini based on a friend/computer-consultant’s recommendation. But the problem is that Postini was only being sold through resellers to companies my size, and the resellers were nightmares. I tried to get through to the trial stage with two of them, but they didn’t understand the technical issues, they constantly misspelled my domain name (granted, it’s easy to misspell, but it’s vital that it be correct here) and their websites were just full of errors and inconsistencies. So I held off.

Then one morning I woke up to read the Google (who owns Postini) was beginning to sell the Postini services directly to the public. Yay! No more nonsense reseller business! No more middleman! And, wow, an aggressive price: $3/user/year.

I signed up my personal email address as a test run, and all was great. I signed up the office – great also. The interface is a bit cumbersome, but it works. There is really no support during setup. And you do need access to your domain name’s MX records to set Postini to intercept your mail. But for all mail that you don’t want filtered, Postini will forward it right along to your regular mailserver. I haven’t seen so much as a hiccup.

Strangely, the list of mail in my quarantine is far, far shorter than the spam they must be really intercepting. I suspect that they have essentially two levels of spam: mail that is so clearly malformed or sent to millions or otherwise just obvious spam that they discard immediately, and the other mail that could be spam or not, that gets compared to your filters and patterns.

It’s only been a few weeks, but I highly recommend Postini through Google. The filtering is amazing – my spam is 99% gone. I rarely even check my quarantine since it’s so accurate. And the price is right!

I actually had the thought that, with solutions like this, at a price like this, maybe spam would fade away. I doubt this will happen – everyone won’t bother to get a good filter, and those who don’t will continue to encourage spammers by patronizing them – but if I don’t have to deal with it, that’s progress enough.

I hadn’t realized how easy it is now to make custom iPhone ringtones on a Mac. Last I did this, I had a hacked iPhone. But now, with my back-to-stock iPhone, adding ringtones as cuts from existing MP3s is ridiculously easy. On a Mac, anyway, which is all that matters.

Open GarageBand (you need 4.1.1 or later). Add the track to the current composition, and click the loop icon:

Then position the loop where you want the selection cut:

Then pop it over to iTunes:

You probably will want to rename it in iTunes, then just sync your iPhone.

More info on this from Apple is here.

(Note: This post was moved from my older blog – I’m trying to get everything over to here . . .)

I was given a Timex Data Recorder 2 with a Timex GPS/watch/heartrate setup as a gift. I only use Macs at home, so I needed a way to make this work. Fortunately, there’s software called LoadMyTracks that can download the data from the recorder to my Mac. It seems to crash if I try to use KML, but I can get GPX out of it, and then have a website translate that to KML if that’s what I want. And I can upload to Google Earth or MapMyRun.

The one problem I had was that without the Timex PC software, there was no way to clear the recorder. But a helpful guy at Timex tech support passed on the way to do this with just the recorder itself, so I’m posting it here in that hopes that if you need the info, Google will bring you to it.

From Timex Tech Support:

Clearing the Memory Manually
NOTE: The following procedure should only be performed if you are
absolutely sure that you don’t want to keep any of the workouts that are
stored in the Data Recorder. If there is any data that you wish to keep,
make sure that it is transferred to the PC BEFORE you clear the memory.
Start with the Data Recorder powered off. Then, press and hold the push
button for 5 seconds. When the LED flashes amber, release the push
button and then quickly press and release the button again while the LED
is flashing. If you did it correctly, the LED will change to a solid
green color for a moment, then go out to indicate that the memory has
been cleared. You can now turn the Data Recorder on normally and use it
to record the data from your workout.

(Final note: I’ve since sold this unit and moved on – more on that soon)

Here are the pictures I took from my first delivery from Tierra Miguel farms. More info about my organic CSA delivery is on my earlier blog post. So far, so good!

OK – my fourth post on my blog, and the pet peeves start coming out.

I’m really sick of the amount of noise these Infinitis make. These two models (the G35 and FX35 in particular) make a really loud rumble, especially with acceleration. Considering that these cars could make almost no noise with current technology, Infiniti clearly engineered this rumble. But for whom? The owners? For those of us who live on busy streets or who like to walk, these cars are a real nuisance. They may not be as loud as Porsches, but there are a lot more of them out there.

And here’s how I know I’m a real kook: I dug around for other people complaining about the noise of these cars, and I just can’t find anything. Anyone see anything? Anyone agree?

I guess all I can do is to vote with my wallet; I’ll never buy an Infiniti.

OK – now, granted, I was in Orange County for this one (yes, the OC). So maybe I have to recalibrate a bit. And, furthermore, this truck is an out-of-state-mobile – Nevada plates. But it does have that NB sticker on there for Newport Beach; I’m assuming the driver hauls all these tons of energy efficient metal back and forth across the Mojave on a regular basis.

Further, I understand that driving has a smaller carbon footprint that flying. So maybe this guy really is an environmentalist. But, seriously? Environmentalists for Barack on a Cadillac Escalade? Somehow getting 12 miles per gallon gives you a ticket into that club? This road beast makes a Jeep look like a Prius.

WWOD? (that’s what would Obama drive?)