Month: June 2014 | Perspective

I’m beginning to think there may be something to this reputation Monday has after all …

Since I usually work weekends, Monday is not the first day of my week. For the store, Saturday is the first day of the weekly schedule, but if you go by days off I guess Friday is the first day of my work week (I tend to be off Wednesday and Thursday). So Monday is just another day – I suppose you could call it “My Thursday”.

But last week, I come to work and see all the coolers covered in plastic, then notice all the emergency lights beeping. I had arrived less than half an hour after the end of some sort of power outage – the regular lights were on, but the batteries on the emergency lights were depleted. Apparently the construction crew (they are widening the road that goes by the store) had knocked out the power, and it was somewhat over an hour before they got it back on. I get to help remove all the plastic, re-fill the meat wall (they’d pulled all the fresh meats and put them in the cooler to keep them cold), then we have to throw away all the lunchmeat because it got too warm. Most definitely not a fun day. We’ve had worse – that wind storm a year or so ago knocked out power for 3 days, or then there was the time the refrigeration unit broke down and nobody even noticed for about 8 hours (that time, we had to throw away ALL the refrigerated items … fortunately the freezer is a separate system). Fortunately the replacement truck – the one with all the lunchmeat to replace the stuff we lost – must have been on my day off; one headache I diidn’t have to deal with.

This week was another story – though actually, this one was scheduled. Tuesday is our annual inventory – not sure why they moved it up a month, it always used to be in July – so today was spent making sure everything was properly binned and counted. Believe me, counting stuff in the freezer (0F/-18C) is not much fun, but it’s easier if you’re dressed for it. You can’t show up dressed for that when it’s 83F/28C outside. Of course I get to do the ice cream freezer, which is -10F – but I do keep my thermal underwear in my locker just in case. Or maybe they know that, and that’s why it got assigned to me? Well, whatever … it has to be done, and I’m the frozen food guy, so you know they’d assign it to me anyway.

But thinking back, it occurs to me that really cold day earlier this year was also a Monday (see “The week that was”) … so maybe there’s something to this Monday stuff after all?

Question: How long does it take to install all “recommended” updates to a 2-year-old computer? Most obvious answer is 2 years, if you have a time machine.

We got our quarterly bonus last week. Normally I spend my bonuses on pistols, but didn’t see anything I wanted in my price range. So instead I found this Vizio Windows 7 Ultrabook on clearance in the store. The “ultrabook” was the PC world’s answer to the Macbook Air – powerful, light weight (well, somewhat) and thin, typically with a solid state disk and a metal case. (Hard to be really light with a metal case.) Looking at the inventory tags, this particular unit arrived in the store at the end of June in 2012 – two years ago. Original list price was $898, clearance was $440. Given that I tend to buy cheap computers, it is easily the fastest computer I own, has the most memory – though the 120 GB SSD is smaller than the hard drives of the other computers.

Of course, first thing it did was tell me Microsoft Security Essentials was 2 years out of date – imagine that. No interest in that anyway, I hooked it up to the network and downloaded a real security program. Then I tried to update Windows. Everything downloaded – eventually, took several hours – but when I rebooted it said it was unable to configure updates and was reverting. Tried that maybe a dozen times over the next several days, always the same result. Of course, I could always install an up-to-date OS (Mageia Linux) and be done with it, but I don’t give up that easily. Mind you, I don’t know where the Delorean is (or should that be “when”), so the other obvious answer is out. But I’ll try to work it out myself for a while before going for the alternative OS.

But for the record, this thing has a 14″ (diagonal) screen with a resolution of 1600×900 (not quite 1080p – 1920×1080 – but if you can’t see the individual dots then I don’t care), 1.8 GHz Intel Core i3-3217U processor (not completely sure what that means, but much faster than the Atom-based machines … seems to be quad core), 4 GB RAM, 7 hour battery life (claimed – not yet tested), 2 USB 3.0 ports. So I’ll keep it, even if I eventually switch it over to Linux.

Let me see … SQRT(1600²+900²) = 1835.76, divided by 14 = 131.125 DPI – okay, not actually as HD as my netbook (140 DPI), but viewed at a comfortable distance both are quite good,