Once in a while, Sibylle and I will order take out from the nearby steakhouse and eat at home. By ordering out we get to avoid the crush of people waiting 30 to 45" minutes for a table, and we save some money too. Neither of us needs or wants to eat an entire 9 ounce steak, so we split one, with a couple of side dishes, to make a perfect meal at home.
There are some problems with the process at LongHorn, however. The call into the restaurant is answered by the hostess station. She doesn’t take phone-in orders, so she passes you off to one of the bartenders. The bar is easily the noisiest place in the restaurant, so it is very had for the bartender to hear you, and vice-versa. Once you get to the restaurant, the problems continue.
Again the hostess can’t help you. You have to go fight through the crowd of people sandwiched up against the bar, and attract the attention of the two over-worked people behind it to get your food. I watched my food sit on the counter for several minutes last night before the bartender had a free moment to gather it up and collect my payment.
Some restaurants recognize some people want to get take out and have adapted their processes. Outback Steakhouse, for example, has “curbside takeaway.” When you place your order, they inquire about the type of car that will be used to pick up the food. When you arrive, and pull into one of the designated takeaway parking spaces, they come out to collect your payment and deliver your food.
Increasingly I am aware of businesses that are more responsive to the changing landscape of customer service. That the brand new, just finished construction a month ago, LongHorn doesn’t have a dedicated takeout process tells me that they either don’t experience much takeout business, or they don’t care to attend to that segment of their customer base. Interesting.
We like their food offerings and will continue to patronize them, but I would be very curious to know why their business model doesn’t address carry out customers.
After a long time on my current host, I am finally ready to switch to a new host. I’ve got nothing against <ahref=“http://pair.com” title=“Pair.com”>Pair.com, except that I can get the same hosting package for far less at any number of other established providers. If my site were heavily visited I might reconsider my move, but since zanshin.net exists far out on the long tail of the Internet’s power curve, i am satisfied to save some money.
There are actually three major facets to this migration:
Each of these major pieces breaks down into several smaller steps, which I hope to capture and detail here as I go. As it is the static of the two domains I already host, I’ll be moving And If You Did Know first.
Thanks to Sibylle’s research for a web host for a project of hers, I was able to choose a new hosting provider with relatively little effort. I am going to move to Blue Host.
Over the coming days and weeks I’ll be chronicling my progress, and detailing the steps I take here. Stay tuned, nerdliness ahead.
I am happy to report that the nail on the finger I accidentally shut in a car door back in July, nearly re-grown now. There is perhaps a mm of growth left before it is the same length as its opposite number on my other hand. The new nail is, ah, featured; with two major ripples that span the width of the nail, and far more side-to-side curvature than it had before. I don’t know that it will ever be the same as it was before, but at least it is starting to look normal again.
My body weight has been consistent throughout the summer and into this autumn. I am usually between 194 and 196 in the mornings when I get on the scale. Without a regular, strenuous exercise, and with some daily snacking, I have found an equilibrium point, weight-wise. While a part of me would like to lose a few more pounds, I am very happy that I have lost 55 pounds and kept that weight off.
This entry, and whatever I post tomorrow, will be the last two entries for National Blog Posting Month 2007. It has been an interesting month, trying to post something everyday. In the beginning I was having two or three good ideas a day, and I carefully doled those out. In the last few days I’ve really been scraping the bottom of the barrel idea-wise. Hence a posting like this one, that really isn’t about anything at all.
Hopefully inspiration will strike tomorrow and I can end the month on a high note.
Like all jobs (or most, anyway) mine came with a set of benefits, including two shiny floating holidays. The parent company observes all the banking holidays each year, while my employer observes all but two. To balance this inequity, we get two floating holidays each year.
I used one of mine way back last spring. My vacation time was used in one chunk this year for our trip to see Genesis and visit Gemany. Leaving me with just holidays and one floating holiday for time off.
We are down to the final weeks of the year, a holiday rich portion of the calendar. Now it is time to carefully use my long hoarded floating holiday. Should I extend the four-day weekend for Christmas to five days? Or use it on the last possible day of the year, making the New Year holiday another four-day weekend? Or take a random day off, just for fun?
Decisions, decisions.
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Or 41.75 %. Ask me the state capitals. Those I can name.
I had read about MIT’s OpenCourseWare some time ago, but I had never followed up on the knowledge. Last night, in a fit of inspiration, I did a Google search and then started browsing the course offerings. After just a few minutes I settled on MIT 6.092, which is an introduction to Java Programming.
Although I have been involved in object-oriented programming, as well as object-orient analysis and design, for the past ten years, I am not a proficient Java developer. I get by, but I don’t consider myself a Java coder. I want to change that. So, MIT 6.092, to be followed by 6.170. And maybe <a href=http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-171Fall2003/CourseHome/index.htm" title=“Software Engineering for Web Applications”>6.171.
You are never too old to learn new tricks.
A year ago when I signed up for the NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) I saw a surge in site visits. A typical month for me sees about 525 page views and maybe 350 visitors. November last year had more than 850 page views, largely due to the NaBloPoMo. This year I have seen no difference in my site visits or page views. In fact, November maybe lagging a tiny bit behind the average.
I suspect that there are far more participants in the month of blogging this time around, so that my site is lost in a bigger field of possibilities. I also fully understand the idea of a power curve, and recognize the zanshin.net is way out on the thin part of the curve.
All the articles I’ve read about creating a site that will generate visitors center around the idea of a theme for the site. Not a visual theme, but rather a contextual one. Sites that focus on some specific topic or genre collect a following and that following starts to attract links from other sites. My site has been, and will continue to be, a place for me to explore topics that interest me. I guess you could say that the genre here is Mark.
So to those of you who are regulars here, I say thanks.
Recently I’ve been up to:
This morning, in a lightly falling snow, I took the Jimmy over to the nearest GMC dealer to have the flickering lights diagnosed. On the way, just to reenforce that the Jimmy needed attention, all the lights and gauges not only flickered, they went on and off several times.
When the service coordinator tried to start the car it wouldn’t. It was dead. They jumped the car and took it around to the service bay and I went into the lounge to be bombarded with obnoxious television commercials and overly perky newspeople gushing about an upcoming football game and the weather.
After a while the service coordinator came in and told me that the battery needed to be replaced as it was corroded and leak acid. When I asked how much a replacement was, and he said $185, I about fell off my chair. One-hundred-eighty-five dollars? Yikes.
Sibylle and I talked about it on the phone, and after she did a quick Google search to see what other people were charging, we agreed that his price was reasonable. This being the end of the month, a near $200 charge isn’t really feasible, but we need the Jimmy, so we’ll find the money somewhere.
Update: The service department just called, other than the battery everything is fine with the Jimmy. Whew! $196.06 to get it back, but we get it back whole and healthy.