I got the yardwork done two weekends ago, but between inopportunely parked cars and a few rainy days, didn’t get a chance to take any photos until last weekend.
Here’s how it looked originally.
Monthly Archives: April 2008
Corporate Cluelessness
Wow. I thought it was really pathetic 18 months ago when Radio Shack decided to do a mass layoff via email. It turns out that Target is even more bereft of clues.
OK, I can sort of understand the policy that says only certain people (presumably with special training) are allowed to confront shoplifters, but this one makes no sense. All of the “trusted people” were off work and a security guard sees a 16-year-old girl stealing a bottle of tequila. So he stopped her. Quietly. And he called her parents, who were grateful.
So how does Target react? They fired him! Doesn’t exactly give me the warm fuzzies about the company, y’know?
So here’s my suggestion:
1) Print out the newspaper column
2) Stick it in an envelope and mail to:
Target Corp.
Attn: Mr. Robert J. Ulrich, CEO
1000 Nicollet Mall
Minneapolis, MN 55403
Perhaps include a cover letter. Perhaps something along the lines of:
Dear Mr. Ulrich,
As you can see from the enclosed newspaper column, it would appear that some of your stores are being run by people who are woefully short of common sense. You might want to do something about that. A very public apology might be a good starting point.
In the meantime, I’ll be taking my business elsewhere.
It’ll cost you nothing more than a stamp and who knows? Perhaps they’ll decide to do the right thing.
Girls Love the Fuzzy Guy
I’ve been reminded a few times in the past several days that Wylie is a rock star.
Oh sure, it’s hardly news that he was lead vocalist for the legendary rock group, Wylie and the Coyotes. And who could ever forget the sweet melody of their number one hit, “Chasing Cars” from the multi-platinum album of the same name? But when you get to know a dog on a day-to-day basis, it’s easy to forget the legend and just think of him as the good-natured, lovable guy he is.
And then you have days like this past Friday and Saturday when you realize you’re in the presence of a living legend. Both days while we were out for our afternoon walk Wylie found himself surrounded by adoring girls. For example, on Saturday afternoon as we were walking through the park, the girl up the street and one of her friends saw us coming. As soon as they saw us, they stopped what they were doing and immediately ran toward us, screaming “Wylieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” and when they reached us, they immediately threw their arms around Wylie and spent the next several minutes stroking his back, skritching him behind the ears and telling him how much they’d missed him.
I don’t mind that Wylie has so much starpower. Attracting girls is part of his job after all. I just wish he’d attract a few who were perhaps 25-30 years older.
Kung Fu and Honky Tonk
Apparently AJ’s employer is requiring everyone in the company to learn Karate. (I can’t help thinking that this sounds a little like the early 90s when instead of improving their products and services, companies instead tried to boost productivity and revenues by slavishly imitating any fad that originated in Japan. How many US companies launched morning calisthenic programs because they’d heard Japanese companies had them?) Unfortunately for me, AJ’s post was titled “Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting” and as a result, I’ve spent most of the past week trying to get that infernal song out of my head.
Finally on Thursday I got a different song stuck in my head.
But that’s OK, Brooks & Dunn have lots of fun songs.
Naming Conventions
Admittedly, I’m not very good at coming up with names for things. If it were left up to me, the street in front of my house would simply be called, “The Street” and the street over by my friend Jeff’s would (at best) be called, “Jeff’s Street.” (It’s also quite possible that this other street would be called “The Other Street.”) But in some odd way, it’s still good to know that I’m better at names than some people.
For the longest time, my standard for poor naming conventions was a set of classes for managing the transitions between modules in a web application. The classes were named, “TransitionType1”, “TransitionType2” and “TransitionType3” which didn’t really convey much information about how they differed from one another. (The same developer was responsible for a set of login functions named “LoginType1”, “LoginType2” and so on up to “LoginType6.” By a not-so-amazing coincidece, that was also the order of the different types in the requirements, so it was slightly better, but still not particularly descriptive.)
Today I encountered the Holy Grail of interesting names. The names were completely descriptive, but still caused me to do a doubletake.
A blogging package I’ve been evaluating exposes a set of events you can capture for specialized processing as a user edits a post. You can’t capture the update event itself, but before and after the update, you can capture the delightfully named PrePostUpdate and PostPostUpdate events.
I’d love to be that creative with my own confusing names.
Old Computers
Technology is one of those things where for the most part, things don’t improve with age. The main exception to this rule seems to be the old-fashioned division by hand versus trusting certain bits of silicon. (Thus leading to the expression/warning, “Don’t Divide, Intel Inside.”)
A couple years ago, an acquaintance gave me a notebook PC. It was in working condition, it just didn’t have a hard drive. (The original drive had failed and he’d decided to replace the entire thing with an Apple Power Book.) I tried to get a new drive from Dell, but eventually discovered they were no longer available. So the computer sat in my guest room, just gathering dust.
I think the correct term here might be “pack rat.”
A friend gave me a talking-to the other day and I resolved to do a bit more follow-through on my plans to Disenclutter™ the place.
So this morning I sat down and typed up a description of the notebook computer, making it clear that there was no hard drive.
This is an older (6 years?) Dell Inspiron 3000 notebook.
The specs are:
- 233MHz Pentium MMX
- 143 MB RAM
- Swappable CD and Floppy drives (plus a cable allowing whichever isn’t plugged in to be connected to the parallel port)
- PCMCIA Network and modem cards
- Power supply
There is one catch: This computer has no hard drive. The original drive (3.2 GB, 2.5″ form factor) is no longer available from Dell and I haven’t had the time/energy/need to track one down elsewhere. The computer is otherwise in working order; you probably won’t be running Vista on it, but it should be fine for most word-processing or email tasks.
I then posted that description to the local Freecycle group.
The item was posted at 8:03 AM. Given the age of the computer, I didn’t expect there would be too many takers. In fact, I was a little worried some might accuse of me using the list as a means of getting rid of trash.
How’s that saying go? “One person’s trash is another’s treasure”? By 8:13 AM there were already seven people asking for the computer. Thinking that perhaps some had seen the word “computer” without reading the part about “no hard drive” I wrote back to the first one (for this stuff I figure it’s first come, first served) to make sure she understood that part. Yep, she’d understood that all along.
Evidently that computer still has some life ahead of it.
A Splash of Color
So it seems that Deutsche Telekom (the parent company of T-Mobile) has sent a “Cease & Desist” order to Engadget Mobile (a technology blog which reviews all sorts of mobile gadgets).
So what did Engadget do to incur the wrath of the phone company? Well, apparently T-Mobile feels they’re the only ones allowed to use the color Magenta.
Sheesh! What a bunch of Maroons!
The image below comes from Engadget Editor Ryan Block and if you feel so inclined, the hex color code is #ed008c.
And yes, it’s possible that despite all claims to the contrary this is all a hoax. If so, I’m not alone in being fooled. But I can’t help thinking that this goes perfectly with my own brightly colored antics.
(Evidently T-Mobile has claimed ownership of the color magenta in the past.)
Happy Holidays!
I think April Fools Day is my favorite holiday. Granted, it’s not a day that you get off from work (unless it happens to fall on your day off), but it is a day when people tend to take things a little less seriously.
For the past several years, my personal celebration of April Fools Day has involved some minor edits to the web site for the Shore Leave convention. For example, this year, Shore Leave is announcing the appointment of a new Web Maven, Ms. Sai Cadowlic.
I’d originally planned that particular modification for last year. April 1 fell on a Sunday that year and would have corresponded with the STAT club’s monthly meeting and given me a chance to see reactions on the day of the hack. Sadly, I instead spent that weekend at my aunt’s funeral and just wasn’t really in the mood to play the prank.
The original plan was to change the colors and add the background image of a certain hotel’s carpets. Giving the update another year to ferment allowed me to come up with the text announcing Sai and add the in-joke about her background as an interior designer for the hotel industry. (Said joke is a minor dig at what some consider to be the world’s ugliest hotel update.)
It’s not as clever as the time I announced Shore Leave was moving onto the Battlestar Galactica, but I doubt anyone’s going to be expecting such a broad palette of colors.
So what surprised me about it? It’s hard to make a web page look that bad.