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 »