Microwaves

Ok, so here’s a fairly serious question, does anybody actually use those “Smart” buttons on Microwaves? The one at work claims to be able to cook Mexican and Oriental meals with the push of a button. I’m fairly certain this wouldn’t work that great, there’s just too many different foods out there.

Then there’s the popcorn button. What the hell? I’ve never seen a bag of popcorn come out as pristine as when I manually enter a number. It either comes out barely popped or burnt. There’s also a button for “Frozen Dinners”. I can tell you that my frozen dinners take way different amount of time. Is this a possible appliation of RFID? Could the tag be embedded into the carton, and swiped past the microwave when you put it in? I often laugh at these “futuristic technologies”. There’s an article in a Wired magazine outside my office that claims that someday all our food will have RFID, and that there will me smart checkouts, and carts with displays on them. I say this will never happen. Vandalism to the carts, a way to disable/remove tags, etc will make for free food. That’s a huge cost right there, coupled with the cost of actually implementing (and maintaining such a system) would be equally huge.

For years they have toted at us these “great” and “wonderful” technologies. A lot of it is plausible, but I just don’t think will happen.

</rant>

Eclipse Shortcuts

As a student, I like to hang out with some friends over a few drinks. Well, on Saturday night, about 7 of us from IBM, or past IBM co-ops, got together in one room. The result? An hour and a half long discussion of Eclipse, and mainly it’s shortcuts.

Most everybody agreed that Ctrl+3 was the best shortcut. Personally, I exclusively use ctrl+shift+R. A couple of us have never even heard of ctrl+3. It was great fun, and I’m sure the Eclipse developers would be proud.

ZDLSharp 3.0.5.0

Tommorow night I should be releasing ZDLSharp 3.0.5.0, although no promises. While it’s been a week or so to do some minor fixes, it’s been a very busy week. I’m going to dedicate a large chunk of time tommorow to finishing of 3.0.5.0.

I’ve launched a new wiki website, at zdlsharp.vectec.net. Check it out, it has all kinds of interesting information, plus roadmaps. If you have any extra information to add, please feel free, or if you have any questions or suggestions, edit the talk/discussion pages.

I bought a $70 C# book a couple weeks ago. Unfortunatly I havn’t had a chance to look at it. Hopefully it’ll give me a few good tips on how to make ZDLSharp your favourite ZDoom program!

Tim Hortons

As I walked by a Tim Hortons today, I thought about getting a coffee. The only problem was that the line was almost out of the door (9:00 Tuesday morning downtown Ottawa, which consists mainly of office towers).

It occurred to me that it wasn’t in fact the price that deterred me most from Tims, or even Starbucks, it’s how long I have to wait. While I would have enjoyed to have a coffee on the bus on my way to work, I could not justify the 10-15 minutes standing in line. At Starbucks, I’ve had to wait that long as well, depending on the day. So where is the major bottleneck?

Space I think. If the area is not large enough, it’s hard for employees to work together, as they keep running into each other, and just in general do not mesh. The solution then is not more staff, but a larger space. The problem with the larger space, is during peak periods you may not be able to justify it. Being able to handle more customers simultaneously would be a big advantage to both the store and the customer. Say you have 15 people waiting in line initially, and one cash can serve 1 customers a minute. If the rate of people joining the line is 2 per minute, as long as the line is not longer than 20, you will see a positive amount of customers as long as you have at least 2 cashes. Say you can add 2 customers more per minute at line 15, 2 at 10, and 2 at 5. Very quickly, you attract the people that would have otherwise not purchased an item. In order to be ahead, you would have to have 8 cashes open just to keep up.

While this is not very realistic, I think I get my point across. Now excuse me while I drink my free work coffee with no lineups.

It’s Here, It’s Here!

I got my router today after work. I set it up, and it works pretty good (well except that the setup Linksys provides failed to work properly). I promptly installed DD-WRT onto it, and figure out how to control some of the LEDs. Right now, it displays the load average via a sequence of flashing LEDs. As I gaze over to the other side of the room, I see the gently flashing every second white LED, telling me I have a low load average.

I tried to set it up to DHCP forward all connecting clients. This ended up in disaster, and I had to reset the router. It was not pretty. Thanks though to kc32 to helped me through some of it.

Binary Crack

I’m pretty sure SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition is a computerized version of crack. I’m terribly addicted to it, even though it hates me (if I start doing too good, it closes the game on me.) I just can’t seem to put it down.

So I created a City called Sumo (creating city names is hard, shut up), and managed to get it to 100,000 people. By then, I was out of space to develop, and the hightech industrial sector wanted to be developed, so I started killing the dirty industry and putting down high tech industries. That went fairly well, until I killed off so much industry, that a lot of people didn’t have jobs. So what I did is I got rid of a bunch of buildings to streamline the traffic flow. That went pretty well, however, it put my income way down (I’m loosing money now). Basically I have to kill off some of my high tech industries and start getting people back in my city. With the population down, there just isn’t ehough people to support my transit/health/education network. In an attempt I created a city next to it and zone it almost all industrial with a rail connection to try and get people to move in. This largely hasn’t worked, and it really has only negatively affected my city.

Anyways, until tommorow night, I’ll have to try and figure out how to fix my problem.

Mail Server Move

Well, for the past couple years, my mail has been handled by the Yuckfou server, which forwarded it to my ISP’s e-mail. I just changed my MX records so that my mail goes to ASO, with a backup of Yuckfou. This means I can grant any user an e-mail address of their choice, or a forwarder. Anybody want one?

eBay Continued

Well, it seems that my package shipped yesterday morning, so maybe I’m finally going to get it. A mere 16 days after I ordered it.

Right now it’s in New York, so I expect to get it by the end of next week, but I’m not really sure. I’ll be finally happy to have it.

My Experience With eBay

Alrighty, so you may or may not know that I recently am in the process of buying a router off eBay. Listed as $66USD, almost $20 more than the one on NCIX ($47CND).

Anyways, by the time they charged me shipping and Ohio taxes, exchange, etc, I paid out a total of $92CND. I ordered the router on June 20th, attempted to contact the seller (who didn’t respond). On June 25th, they accepted they payment, and on July 2nd they notified USPS that they were going to be shipping. I have the tracking number, but it’s still not shipped. I don’t know how long it will take, but this is the second and last time I’m ordering something off eBay. I’m just not happy with it.

Not only that, but I also am going to have to pay duty on the router and all that Jazz. I actually was going to try and cancel my order with them. I called their sales department at 6:30PM (they said they closed at 6, but I wanted to try anyways). I just got an automated message. Later that night I got a message from eBay stating they accepted my payment. Drat!

An Evening at Home

This pretty much sums up an evening for me: