Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Truly "Nature" Chicken

I just read a little blurb over on SlashFood that makes me very happy. The British supermarket chain Sainsbury's is going to plant 1 million trees on its chicken farms to allow its organic hens to live in a more nature setting. Since chickens are descended from jungle fowl, this is a great way to return the chicken farm to a more nature environment. I would be willing to bet that a side effect of this is healthier, not just happier chickens. Healthier chickens will lay more eggs, meaning more output, meaning more money for Sainsbury's. Hopefully this will be an example following by food producers worldwide.

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Tweaking Oblivion

If you have Oblivion, and like me would really like to see it run faster, Atomic has a great tweaking guide and of course there is TweakGuides, but they haven't released their guide yet.

Video Game Collection

Every once and a while I look at the collection of games stacked up in my home office and think that I really need to get rid of some of them. But it's hard to get rid of games that are favorites (past or current). How can I throw away Descent, Dune II or even Flight Simulator 2004? Any way, I no longer feel bad about my collection after finding this guy and his collection on digg.com.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Neat Trick...

If you are a developer, chances are at some point you’ve been handed an Excel worksheet and told to update the database of a given application with it. Now depending on what db you are working with, and what kind of access you have to it, there are many easy ways to do this. However, none of my normal methods could help me in the situation I found myself it this week. The db is Oracle and the access is extremely limited so I prepared myself for the horrible task of manually creating a bunch of update statements via cut-n-paste, putting all of that in a ColdFusion page and running it

Thankfully a co-worker stopped me and suggested that I use formulas in Excel. "Huh?" I said to him. After giving me a look that said very clearly said "how could you not know this," he explained that if the data in the spreadsheet is correctly separated in to cell, you can use a little formula magic to write all of your SQL statements for you. For example if you have your primary key in A and data to update in M your formula might look like this:

="UPDATE tableName SET fieldName = '" & M2 &"' WHERE primaryKey = " & A2

Then copy the formula and paste way to create an update statement pre row, which can be copied in to your db tool of choice or a CF file. Now I may, in fact, be the last developer to learn about this, but I had to share, in case there were other lost souls like me out there. ;-)

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

More Big Time Cuteness...

So, if you need a little cheering up, or just want to waste some time, I present Kitten War.

Friday, March 17, 2006

Happy St. Patricks Day

Being American-Irish and a Chicagoan, this is of course, a big day (although the city official festivities were last Saturday). We are doing anything too exciting this year, except, making this: Murphy's and Baileys Cheesecake. Its good to be Irish!

Happy St. Patricks Day!!!

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Inside Trader Joe's

Most people who know me, know that I love Trader Joe's. The NY Times is running an inside look at how the company operates. Its pretty cool to get some inside dirt on such a secretive operation - of course, it really isn't that inside, since Trader Joe's invited them...

Also, I think it is very interesting that NYC is just now getting a TJs. I guess they aren't always the trend setter! I wonder if 3 Buck-Chuck is going to go over well there and will it still only be $3?

So Wal-Mart Doesn't Completely Suck...

I guess everyone does something good once and awhile... Looks like Wal-Mart is going to offer more organic foods in the next couple of weeks. If that happens, the end result may be good. With the buying power and exposure to customers that Wal-Mart brings to the table - the market for Organics is sure to go up, and that should mean prices will go down (assuming basic economic principles still work). Who knows, maybe this and the Plan-B decision is a sign that Wal-Mart is going to attempt to be a good corporate citizen. Could it be?

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Friday, March 03, 2006

Extend Firefox Winners announced

The Extend Firefox contest has ended. The winner, a new extension called Reveal has, within moments of playing with it, become a 'must' for me. I expect IE 7 and some of the fancy features of Vista will offer a much 'prettier' version of this functionality, but until then, I expect I will come to rely on having Reveal on my systems.

Congrats on making such a slick extension!

Sad

How many Simpsons family members can you name? Ok, now, how many freedoms guaranteed by the 1st Amendment can you name? The results of this survey are very scary. No wonder the government gets away with so much crap, we the people don't even remember what it's job is...

Elder Scrolls 4

Well, any free time that I have at all right now is about to be completely sucked away. Bethesda has announced that Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion on March 20th. Morrowind was the best RPG I have ever played, beating out WoW, Ever Quest and many others. From what I have seen, this one will clearly be a similar experience.