Author: jlick

You do what ya gotta do

Feeling much better than yesterday, but still hacking up a lung and my nose is running even after taking oxymetazoline spray which usually dries things right out for me. Tomorrow we’re going down to Tainan for Tomb Sweeping Day and come back on Sunday. We’re gonna take the bus down tomorrow and for some reason return by plane on Sunday. Actually Tomb Sweeping Day is not for more than a week, but we usually go early to avoid the crowds. I’m not looking forward to going with a bad cold, but unless I can’t get out of bed like yesterday, I’ll have to slog through. Also looks like we won’t be going through Kaohsiung this year, so no Fried Fish Soup from Liuhe Night Market. 🙁 I’ll have to try to get us to go to the one in Tainan, but my favorite is the one from Kaohsiung.

This sucks

Tuesday night I noticed I was getting a bit of a sore throat. Yesterday it got a bit worse and I was a bit tired. This morning feels like someone scraped off the inside of my throat plus I have a headache and achy all over. So far I’ve gotten off fairly easy with fairly minor illness this season, but looks like this one is gonna knock me on my ass for a few days. Was supposed to go look at commercial property rentals today. I stumbled out of bed to tell my wife I really didn’t think I could make it today. She told me my business partner called earlier and she’s too sick too, so just bagged those plans. Emily is also a bit sick as well. I think I’ll head back to bed again.

Beating around the bush

In case you don’t notice that little padlock icon, this is a friends-only post.

You may have noticed that I’ve been a bit circumspect in several of my posts about my new business. I don’t want to give out too much detail to just anyone who comes visiting. Most of you already know this, but for those who don’t, the new business is a donut shop and/or donut production shop in Taipei. I ask that you please be discrete about sharing this information and also in any comments you leave.

Watching paint dry

Yesterday my business partner and I went to go spy on our target competitor to count how many customers they have in a day. This involved getting there before 10:00am (the line forms an hour before opening time at 11:00am) and staying until they closed the line around 8:30pm. We took turns counting with a little hand counter which made things easier, but still dreadfully boring business. We noticed that there was also another spy hanging about and my business partner went up to chat and found out he is another potential competitor checking things out. We found out some good information though that should help with capacity planning and fleshing out the business plan, and also have a good idea how much they gross per month.

There’s a few other scattered competitors popping up here and there, and some other stores trying to compete. We’ve been checking them out as well, to see what else we are up against. So far in both our opinions and those of other people we’ve asked for feedback from, all the new competitors really really suck. The good news is that we can compete against pretty easily. The bad news is that the consumer will start to associate the product with all the bad copycats. For the latter, we’ll have to do something like give out lots of samples and generate word of mouth to counter the poor quality of other copycats.

Annoying things about Thunderbird’s junk filter

Before I went on my travels, my mail reader on my desktop at home was pretty good at correctly determining whether or not something is Junk. For some reason by the time I came back it either forgot something or all spamming techniques had suddenly changed over night. Or in other words, it was hardly ever calling anything spam. So the way to fix this seems to be to re-train it on spam in your collection, so I opened up a folder with a few hundred spam emails and hit ^a and then mark/as junk to flag it all as junk. For some reason, Thunderbird then proceeds to ignore the fact that you just told it everything in that folder is junk and goes and marks a bunch of it ‘not junk’. Lather, rinse, repeat. It would be nice if it actually believed me the first time when I clearly told it the mail was junk. We’ll see if it gets the idea now.

Not so GNU

When you download software, are you getting the latest version? If you use a GNU mirror, you probably aren’t.

GNU software is the core of most free Unix-like OSes, including Linux. The main site to download this software from is ftp://ftp.gnu.org/ but it is often overloaded and slow. GNU is nice enough to publish a list of mirror sites so that you can get software from a faster and closer site at http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html. Unfortunately, MOST (not some) of the mirrors are out of date. And I’m not talking a few hours or days. A few are out of date by a month, most are outdated by at least six months, and some are out of date by two years! I realize this is all free software, but I’d expect a little better than this.

My own tests: All California mirrors outdated except Mirror Monster. All Taiwan mirrors outdated except Providence University and National Sun Yat Sen University. In a break with other regions, all Japan mirrors are up to date. A random sampling of other mirrors shows this pattern extends across other regions.

Don’t believe me? Do your own tests. Click through on the mirrors on the above list and look for the most recent file/directory.