Posted: March 12th, 2007 | Author: saldarji | Filed under: business, stuff | 1 Comment »
Today I had to make a run to the Wal-Mart Supercenter here in Bentonville, Arkansas. I think that there are three within town limits here, which is overkill in my opinion. I guess you have to dominate the home market and have a few stores to test products in.
The store we went to is massive and very close to the Wal-Mart home offices. It is really clean and has a very different “feeling” than the stores in Minneapolis. First, the store was very organized and everything was stocked very neatly. Second, there was a LOT of helpful associates walking around. And lastly, the aisles didn’t feel as “cluttered” as the Minneapolis stores.
I was in there to buy socks. I just needed one pair of athletic socks since I left mine at home, and I want to work out. My choice: buy 12/16 pairs of thin white socks for $5 or buy 3 pairs of regular white socks for $5. I guess I’m not used to buying in bulk. I opted for 3 pairs and a reduced carbon footprint.
Alejandro used his first manual checkout machine. The checkout attendant had to check on him twice. Also, he set off the alarm on the way out, so that was another minor inconvenience. I always have the same issues. Note to self: Self-checkout is way more stressful than assisted checkout.
Posted: March 12th, 2007 | Author: saldarji | Filed under: travel | 1 Comment »
I travelled back to Arkansas tonight. It looks like I have three options for travel here on Sundays. The first option is to leave early and fly through Dallas on AA. The second option is to fly through Chicago on AA. And the last is a late direct flight with NWA.
According to the shuttle service, the Dallas flight is the best option because the Chicago flight is always late and the direct flight can leave you stranded without a ride if it gets in late.
Unfortunately, I’m on the Chicago flight next week.
Posted: March 10th, 2007 | Author: saldarji | Filed under: stuff | 1 Comment »
Last night, I woke up to the sound of an emergency siren that was putting out about 20k decibels. I didn’t open my window, but it sounded like it was coming from down the block. I looked around but I didn’t see any bombs falling or any other catastrophe that would kill me. I think I read somewhere that hackers have figured out how to set them off using radio waves. So, I went back to sleep.
About 4 hours later, someone set off our building’s fire alarm. This happens a few times a week in my building. Usually, this happens around dinnertime, when someone burns their food. My guess is that someone woke up at 5 AM to make toast. So, I ignored that and went to sleep.
Of course, I forgot to turn off the alarm on my Blackberry. So, that woke me up at 7 AM. Needless to say, I am not fully rested.
And don’t forget, tomorrow the DST goes into effect. I’m sure everyone knows this, since people have been working harder to adjust for it. In fact, some guys were in our Minneapolis office yesterday for 4 hours trying to adjust the internal timing mechanism on our door locks.
Posted: March 8th, 2007 | Author: saldarji | Filed under: technology | 3 Comments »
I’ve spent much of the week here at the client site talking about slick things like Endianness. When I was in meetings, I kept thinking that they were talking about Big Indian, Little Indian. Being Indian, I was really confused. Of course, they were saying “Big Endian, Little Endian.”
The etymology is interesting:
The choice of big-endian vs. little endian has been the subject of flame wars. The very term big-endian comes from Jonathan Swift’s satiric novel Gulliver’s Travels, where tensions are described in Lilliput and Blefuscu because a faction called the Big-endians prefer to crack open their soft-boiled eggs from the big end, contrary to Lilliputian royal edict. The terms little-endian and endianness have a similar ironic intent. – wikipedia
Looks like I have 18 more weeks of tech-speak in front of me. The project is actually pretty interesting, despite being completely unrelated to my past experience/strengths.
I’m flying back today, through Dallas, since XNA is the hardest airport to fly into in America.
Posted: March 6th, 2007 | Author: saldarji | Filed under: stuff | 1 Comment »
My hotel had some issues with one of their boilers this morning, and I had to take a cold shower. It was a terrible way to start the day.
I’m at a work site that is very consciously moving towards greener offices. The real reason behind this is probably not to conserve energy but to conserve money. Even if it isn’t completely altruistic, it is still a good thing they are on that path.
Because of this green focus, it made me think about “Geysers“. Geysers, atleast in India, are electric water heaters that are mounted in the bathroom to provide hot water on an as-needed basis. The bathroom I used while in Paris had one.
I wonder if they are more or less efficient than traditional boilers. Greanpeace seems to think that they are extremely inefficient, and recommends solar power. However, there is another type of geyser that provides instantaneously heated water.
Demand (or instantaneous) water heaters eliminate the storage tank by heating water directly when there is a call for hot water. These units are growing in popularity in the U.S. The energy consumption of these units is generally lower since standby losses from the storage tank are eliminated. Demand water heaters with enough capacity to meet household needs are gas- or propane-fired. They have three significant drawbacks for some applications: Large simultaneous uses (two showers and the clothes washer, for example) may challenge their capacity, particularly in winter,when the inlet water is coldest. They will not turn on unless the hot water flow is ½ – 3/4 gallon/minutes. Retrofit installation can be very expensive. Finally, because the efficiency tests were not developed with these designs being considered, it is not known if the “EF” accurately estimates energy consumption. If you choose a tankless unit, look for one eligible for 2006-2007 federal tax credits (EF levels). – Link
Doing some additional research, I found some tankless water heaters
for sale online. I wonder what the
ROI is with installation, tax credits, lower power consumption, etc. (Yes, I’m a business geek.)
Posted: March 5th, 2007 | Author: saldarji | Filed under: technology | 1 Comment »
So today was a nice day in Arkansas. I traveled from my hotel to the client site, back to the hotel, and went out to dinner at PF Changs. I’m probably too picky, but the food there is either too salty or too sweet.
It was mostly an unremarkable day of meetings. However, I did create my first shell script! It is very simple, but I’m proud of it. Who knows, if I keep up at this pace maybe I’ll actually contribute something of value to Open Source, rather than being a freeloader.
I set it up so that it is a button on my toolbar. I click on it, and it will remove the directory I have specified. I could probably set it up as a startup item as well. I’ve pasted the code below…
#!/bin/bash
#
# Authored by Sal Darji
# Monday, March 05 2007
# Script removes a directory when run
# Use with caution – at your own risk, no warranties
#
clear
echo “Do you want to remove the directory? (y)”
read answer
if [ $answer = y ]
then
rm -rf {path to directory}
echo “Directory removed”
else
echo “Removal aborted”
fi
sleep 5s
Posted: March 4th, 2007 | Author: saldarji | Filed under: travel | 3 Comments »
The Bon Savants show last night was great. I’d highly recommend going to see them if they are playing a show in your town.
Today, I am traveling to Arkansas for my next project. There are no good direct flights there, so I will be going through Dallas on American Airlines.
While I was in Belgium, Tracey insisted on doing a photo documentary of me drinking beer out of a vending machine. Yes, you read that correctly…there are no open container laws, and it is perfectly ordinary to pick up a cold brew in the middle of the day.
So here I am in front of the vending machine. I decide to go for a Jupiler (the only beer in there). Jupiler is very similar to Budweiser, in my non-beer-expert opinion.
I believe the beer was about 2 euros. It came out ice-cold, and it was very refreshing. I drank the rest of it on the SCNF train back to Paris. Noone was arrested, I didn’t turn into an alcoholic, and I didn’t suddenly find myself roasting in Hell.
Labels: Music, Travel
Posted: March 3rd, 2007 | Author: saldarji | Filed under: technology | No Comments »
I signed up for Skype earlier this year and I’ve been using it fairly often. The two main gripes I have about Skype is that the Linux version needs to be updated and that the DTMF tones are way too short. This makes it a pain in the butt to call into voicemail or join a conference call. There are a few hacks for Windows/Vista, but when you’re running Linux, you’re pretty much SOL.
Well, my brother was nice enough to give me a Bluetooth Headset, the Motorola H700. It took me about 2 mins to get it paired with my BlackBerry. Unfortunately, I’ve spent the last two hours trying to get the right packages installed and to get it working with OpenSUSE and Skype. Even with a handy tutorial, I am running across some issues.
At first glance, I thought it would be easy – my IBM Thinkpad T41p has Bluetooth, so I don’t need a dongle. Also, I noticed that there are configuration settings in Yast. But to get it working, I need to install btsco and compile it. When I run ./configure, it errors out with “configure: error: Sufficiently new version of libasound not found.”
libasound is a module that is provided with Alsa and the Alsa plugins. Alsa is up to date, and I can’t find a newer version anywhere. So, I’m assuming it must be a problem with the btsco configuration script. If I was more of a techie, and less of a finance person, I’m sure I’d be able to figure it out 
The store we went to is massive and very close to the Wal-Mart home offices. It is really clean and has a very different “feeling” than the stores in Minneapolis. First, the store was very organized and everything was stocked very neatly. Second, there was a LOT of helpful associates walking around. And lastly, the aisles didn’t feel as “cluttered” as the Minneapolis stores.
