Awesome! Today one of my projects was selected as the #2 featured projects selected by the editors of Instructables.com. I have a few other ones you may want to check out.

Posted on Jun 24.08 to Life | No Comments »  

So, the local Pizza King has recently entered the early 1990s by making come changes. Some of them are great ans some of them are…not so much. For those of you who are not familiar, here is how it used to work:

You go in. You sit down. You order from a P.A. at your table. While you wait, you can pay 25¢/15min to watch TV or play video games right there in your booth. They bring you your drinks and appetizers. They call you on your P.A. when your main order is ready so you can pick it up and pay cash, and return to your booth to eat.

Now, they take debit and credit cards. Yes, as recently as last year (2007), this pizza joint was a cash only operation. That has changed and that one is for the better. The driving force behind that change is simple: people don’t carry cash much anymore. Hell, you can use a card at fast food places for Christ’s sake. Compete or die. Easy.

The next change is that, while the video game consoles have disappeared completely, (leaving holes in the tables from where the controllers were bolted down — only to now be filled with miscellaneous garbage and disgusting food-stuffs), the TVs have remained and is free to turn on and off as you please. The fact that they offered TVs int he first place set them apart from their competition, but the mechanism was old and when it wasn’t being defeated by metal slugs, they were broken or bypassed all together. On these broken units, you could turn them on with no quarter, and I’ve seen people wait for these booths while others are empty so they didn’t have to pay to watch TV. Now, they just made all of them free to watch. Fine. Good call.

Next, they made refills free and spun the fountain beverage machine around from the kitchen side to the dining side. Sounds cool, I mean who doesn’t like free refills, right? I wondered when restaurants would catch on to this…as consumers we know that fountain beverages are cheap; you can get a horse trough full of coke at a gas station for like 66 cents. Why, then, are they like $1.75 at a restaurant? But now? Free refills, so it’s worth the extra price.

Where they screwed up was allowing it to disrupt the flow of business by bringing you an empty cup, lid, and straw. Now you have to get up twice. The first time to get your own drink, the second to get your food. So you go fill your cup, but now you’re stuck with the straw wrapper, because while they turned the fountain beverage machine around, they didn’t bother to move the trash cans any closer. So, most folks take the wrapper back to their booth and stick it in the video game controller holes that I mentioned earlier, creating a more messy dining area. And, since you take credit cards as payment, less customers are carrying cash and are therefore less likely to tip to compensate for making more of a mess.

Now, the hired help probably gets mad because they’re doing more cleaning. Oh well, at least they aren’t filling cups for refills, amirite?

From what I can tell, (and I’m obviously no Industrial Engineer) they can make both the customers and employees happier by spending $20. $5 for a small trashcan for straw wrappers, and $15 for some epoxy to plug the video game controller holes in the table. Sure, the problem of getting up twice is not solved, but you could always have the service staff fill up the cups for the customer the first time when they bring the drinks to the table. I mean, they always filled them before, so why not?

Posted on Jun 17.08 to Life | No Comments »  

Quintin Riis dot com

Quintin is a blogger. At least, a hell of a lot closer to one than I’ll ever be. He’s also a professional geek in one of the truest senses of the word. By that, I mean, he is one of the few who actually know what the hell they’re talking about. Sure, he’s probably thirty-something and plays video games all the time, but am I not just a year or two away from being that same person? I have been fragged on his EBSF server more times than I’d care to admit.

Here is why you care, dear reader: His blog post about hand-held devices inspired my Dell Axim X5’s re-introduction into the work world. Sure, I don’t even bother to sync it to my Outlook inbox, but that’s beside the point. I mostly use it for reading e-books and listening to mp3s, and that’s enough for me. The nice part? You can sneak it in your pocket when you head to take a dump and no one is the wiser. It’s a hell of a lot less conspicuous than a newspaper rolled up and tucked under your arm.

Here is another reason to care: He’s giving way free stuff. Most notably, a kick ass monitor of such a ridiculous resolution that it’s hard to believe. He says he even has more on the way from his Dell contact, which is either a) a lie, or b) the coolest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. If pitty is a factor, this monitor would be replacing a 15 inch Kogi brand (yea, I’ve never heard of them either…).

I shall now begin praying to Gods of Random Numbers that my day has finally come…until then, I’ll continue to cry myself to sleep thinking about my tiny monitor.

Posted on Jun 04.08 to Technology | No Comments »  

I know, I know, nobody likes to hear about other people’s dreams, but bear with me a moment…

Last night I had a dream that I quit my current job and took a new one as a marketing designer. I worked exclusively on projects related to generic corn chip bags and snack-sized packs of cracker sandwiches (not the box that the individual packs come in, just the cellophane that wraps the 6 cracker sandwiches together). My group did this personification of a dancing corn chip in a sombrero and we won an award. Our boss threw us a party and instead of cake or a plaque or a framed certificate, he gave us each a fully functional glow-in-the dark automatic rifle made of that white PVC plastic tubing and a gift card for 200 WiiPoints. Then I woke up.

Ok people: WTF does this mean?

Posted on May 21.08 to Life | 3 Comments »  

Number of kegs dominated: 1
Number of dollars I won playing poker on Friday: 13
Number of grills left open for longer than Dave wanted: 1
Number of females wearing short skirts with no underwear at the game: 1 (at least).

Went up th Chitown on Friday night and the construction is in full effect. I finally got there at around dinner time and we proceeded to work the keg over a bit and start a cash game. Met some of Dave’s buddies from school as well as the usual band of merry men. Woke up Saturday and went to the rooftop to watch the game and to spectate any random vag that happen to be hanging out. Lucky for us there happened to be one. Also, there was this douchebag who had toilet paper hanging out of his pants until the middle of the 6th. One of those things was much more awesome than the other, but it’s up to you to decide which. After the game, we went to the Dugout and tried our damnedest to get kicked out, but failed. Seriously, wtf do you have to do to get kicked out of a Chicago bar? We tried nearly everything. There was throwing of things. There was punching. There was putting shit in people’s drinks. There was inappropriate behavior all over the place. Still nothing. Anyway, the description of the rest of Saturday night is hidden away under lock and key.

Sunday was ok, got up, drank coffee, drove home. We did go out that afternoon and get the girls new booster seats, which they were pretty darn excited about.

Also, Cousin Annalyse started working at the girls’ school this morning, which is great for us and really awesome for her.

Now, I’m back to work and the f’ing garage door still doesn’t work. I’ll have to recruit another adult to help me crank the spring because it’s damn-near impossible to do by yourself. I’m not sure when I’ll have a chance, since he works late on Monday’s and I’m having a forced but moderately-welcomed daddy/daughter solo parenting day on Tuesday. I guess it’ll be parking in the driveway for another few days.

Posted on May 19.08 to Life | 1 Comment »  

Wow, this past weekend sucked really bad.

Friday wasn’t so bad, I left work early and went to go see Forgetting Sarah Marshall with the Wife, which was really fun. Then we went out to eat at Pepe’s. I had to go home early because my mother-in-law was watching the girls and she had to get home. Oh, and also, because I had to get up on Saturday at 3am.

Saturday sucked, I got to work before 4am because that’s when we were told be here to begin programming for the software upgrade. We didn’t get to start until almost 7am, so we played cards in my office for a few hours. I finished in time, then went to support some users at a local site. The system went down due to some ignorance (not my own), but things were kosher by 2:00 which is when I headed back home. I got called back 2 times that afternoon/evening.

On Sunday, we had a party, but I missed most of it because I was on call and got paged. I did get some really great loot though, and it was really fun to have everyone over.

Monday, it was back to business as usual and I was out supporting more sites with more ignorance raining down around me like hail-stones from the heavens…and it hurts just as much.

Anyway, the new Cure album is out, so I’ve got that going for me.

Posted on May 14.08 to Life | No Comments »  

No, not what you think. I finally got my messenger bag from ebags.com, and it happens to be made of hemp. The first one they sent me was a purse. Seriously. Yes. A purse. No kidding. I mean, come on. I’m self conscious enough about having to carry a bag for all of my stuff, and now they send me a damn purse?!?. Well, I’ve got it all set up and I’m pretty happy about it.

After a pretty fun weekend, we had a rough night last night, but I’m doing ok despite the lack of sleep.

We got Mario Kart this weekend too, which is awesome. I think I might go home at lunch today to play it.

Let’s see, what else? Oh, Flyers won this weekend too. That’ll make a Pennsylvania-only Eastern Conference Finals with Pittsburgh; with DoubleDs in the West with Dallas and Detroit.

Finally got to hang out with SuperCraigers too, which was awesome. Missed out on mowing the lawn, but…I wouldn’t exactly say I missed it.

Sorry so cobbled and coppy. Sleep-deprived and busy.

Posted on May 05.08 to Life | No Comments »  

So, it’s almost my birthday and I had a hard time deciding if I really wanted to put a Kindle on my tada list. I ended up putting it on there, even thought it’s not likely that I’ll get it (it’s $399!). I also found out that you can’t gift a game to someone’s steam account without actually having the app installed, which sucks, because I want Rainbow 6 Vegas 2. Oh well, there are a lot of Wii games on there, but I can’t really think of anything in a decent price range to tell people to buy me. I’ll have to send it to everyone pretty soon, so I’d better find some $20 items pretty quick or I’ll look like a greedy bastard, which isn’t true at all. If you feel like you need to get me a birthday gift, feel free to make it a email card or something. There isn’t much that I just have to have right now.

Posted on Apr 29.08 to Life | 1 Comment »