Category Archives: Uncategorized

Battery $1, $1, $1

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I noticed the other day that I no longer see any of the battery mexicans or the squeaky toy chinese ladies. Where did they go? It may be that I am spending less time on the subway, but I expressed my worries to my friend in SC. She had some theories:

As far as the price of batteries going up is concerned I’m not sure that’s the

problem. At Home Depot, here in Columbia, you can get a 24 pack of AA

energizer batteries for 11.22 after taxes which would yield a profit of 3

cents a battery but at Sam’s Club a 24 pack of generic AA batteries is 12.47

giving you a loss of 2 cents a battery if you are selling 2 for a dollar. I

can only imagine, prices being what they are up there, that there might be an

even greater loss. On the other hand… if you order batteries from

CheapBatteries.com you can get them for 21 cents each and I’m not sure how

much the shipping might be but it can’t add that much to each battery, less

than a cent really because I think you get something like 1500.00 batteries.

Therefore, my guess is that, because of rising internet connection prices,

those people selling the batteries have had to drop their connections or

memberships to the cafes and cannot order their batteries online, making the

profit margin drop and causing them to turn to other occupations.

OR

Because the threat level has risen in NYC, they aren’t allowed to bring large

quantities of them on trains because they could use them as some sort of

explosive.

OR OR

Nobody uses disposable batteries anymore because of the recharable types.

OR OR OR

The heat caused all the batteries to leak and everyone selling them is in the

hospital from acid burns.

Hope that helps.

jme

Another hair brained idea

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I stumbled on upon mame while shutting down for the evening today and have merged 2 of my fantasies.

When I have a non-NYC place to live, I want to create a decent fileserver/NAS for my home computers. I now also want to build my own arcade box. And why not have either the arcade machine be the fileserver or have the arcade machine look to the NAS for its ROMS?

As powerful as really cheap machines are these days, there’s no reason not to have one box fulfill both functions.

The MSI project

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I’ve been working on automating all the installations for my team. I went in with high hopes, thinking that I could quickly finish the project and move on to more fun and exciting things.

How wrong I was. The difficulties are numerous:

  • I do not have any of the domain knowledge for the project – Other people know how these things work and what they do, but not I. So I have no idea what is crucial and what isn’t.
  • I did not have any idea how MSI packages work – while not crippling, it has delayed me, causing me to take a long long time to figure out how to do a simple thing.
  • I have to rely on other people to test my work – finding out if I solved a problem or not is always dependant on someone else’s schedule.

I’ve learned from this to make sure that I identify and collaborate with those who have domain knowledge early in the project. Request specific expectations of the project and the timeline. Prepare myself better for deployment by requesting a way to test my own success.

On the upside, I’ve written my first app that will actually get used by anyone here. It sets up files to get deployed and logs it.

I’m so excited!