Category Archives: Uncategorized

Online shopping done wrong?

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So I saw a bag (Laptop Bag not Hand bag) I really like at a Woolworths store in Cavendish Square, its part of the “Country Road” section of Woolworths (a new “up market” section of the store.) My problem is I didn’t buy it at the time because it was towards the end of my Christmas shopping and I was rather broke.

So this weekend I go online to Woolworths site with the crazy idea that I could perhaps buy it online… unfortunately I can’t. I can buy food, womens clothing and kids clothes but not this bag. Which makes me wonder if there is not something very wrong with the way we do online retailing here in South Africa. I would buy the bag if it didn’t envolve me going out of my way back to Cavendish and standing in long queues and paying a fortune for parking. I would guess that Woolworths already has all the info needed to put this item online in there various databases, I just wonder why they won’t put it online? Surely it doesn’t cost more to put these items online? I don’t think they would loose customers who suddenly don’t want to go into the store either, they might actually get a few new customers via the online store.

So they’ve pretty much lost a possible sale, unless of course I wonder back into that store sometime and they have stock and I have money.

Debugging Crashes and Hangs using Visual Studio

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Found this via the “Start Page” in Visual Studio 2008, its a rather interesting blog post by one of the Visual Studio IDE QA Guys.

It goes into a lot of detail on how to debug application crashes and the same process can be used for hanging applications. For me the most interesting part was the “Load from Microsoft Symbol Servers” option when loading symbols, I didn’t know it was possible to get the symbols for Microsoft applications like that.

I’m not sure how often I’m going to need to debug other people’s applications, but it may come in handy next time I get a weird application hang or crash.

Robot’s taking over the world?

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1st Generation RoombaIf you watch Oprah or spend anytime online then I’m sure you must’ve heard of the Roomba made by a company called iRobot. The’yre fancy little floor cleaning robots that you can buy and when they where first launched a few years ago they sold like crazy. I remember seeing one a few times on Oprah (no I don’t watch the show.).

What on earth made me write about them now? Well I was doing my normal browsing around when I read something about a robot called Looj – Gutter Cleaning Robot by iRobot.

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Did you see it coming?

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It’s interesting reading about all the people who are saying they saw the current economic crisis coming long before anyone else did. Anyone who says ‘They saw it coming’, I generally on principle don’t believe. Unless they were smart enough to squirrel away there money and turned some kind of profit or at least made no loss as everything else crashed and burned.

But that said, this little quote from Sony caught my eye.

Sony knew the economy was going to hell back in February. How? Camcorder sales fell like a rock. Camcorders are the proverbial canary in the coal mine, plunging before everything else. (All of their vast historical data over the last few recessions back this up.) It?s because, Vandenbree says, there?s ?nothing more discretionary than camcorders,? so it?s the first to go when consumers feel a crunch, making it an early warning sign.

? Gizmodo quoting Jay Vandenbree, president of Sony Electronics Consumer Sales
I have to wonder how true this is? Doesn’t that quote imply that we (well the American’s anyway) knew it was coming but just didn’t realise it? or believe it? I’m trying to remember what I was doing in February last year, and in hindsight I was probably spending more money than I should’ve. I’m not really an “investor” and I didn’t pay the markets much attention in the past but I must admit that I’ve started too.

Maxlife and Kaplan & Hull Christmas Party

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img_0021I almost never post anything about the place I work, I try keep my work life separate from my online life, but I decided that this time around I’ll break my rule and post something. I share offices with a few other companies (one of whom I do a lot of development work for)… anyway Yesterday (Wednesday 18th December 2008) was the office Christmas party.

We went up to the Restaurant at Rhodes Memorial for lunch, we had good food, awesome view and great company. It was nice to spend a few hours with the people I see everyday and not talk about work, and instead tell jokes, laugh and catch up on each others lives.

PS: The guy without the shirt doesn’t work with us… Continue reading →

WordPress 2.7

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Today I upgraded Stuff.za.net’s wordpress install to the latest release.

This new release is awesome, the admin system is unbelievably cool, looks really nice. I haven’t found tons of new features, but everything has been nicely improved. I haven’t found any major problems, as usual I updated the K2 theme I use. I’ve also installed and enabled the Akismet plugin so that I can hopefully stop all my spam comments, 8000+ spam comments since I launched this website. Continue reading →