Author: mikal

This author has written 1340 articles

There is a reason Ikea is crowded on the weekends

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  • Post category:Travel

It only just occurred to me the other day, but I now know why Ikea is so crowded on the weekends. Sure, the cheap furniture is attractive, but I think it's also go something to do with: Free child care Free nappies and baby change facilities! Bathrooms which are actually designed to be the right height for kids Cheap food Even cheaper food for kids Basically it's just such a pleasure taking the kids there, and they have suck a good time, that I keep finding excuses to take them there. This time it was $6 worth of plastic buckets that I could just as easily got from Target down the road. Now, if only someone would open a similarly kid friendly cinema. I'm sure such a thing would make a killing too.

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They all use MySQL…

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  • Post category:Mysql

I was walking down Mountain View's Castro Street this afternoon, and noticed that meebo is advertising for developers and system admins. Interestingly, they seem to match the design pattern used by pretty much every web 2.0 company I have seen around here (except MySpace): linux, MySQL, and Ajax. So, there you go.

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Reactive economies?

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The other day while in Costco (for the foreigners, think Bunnings or some other hardware warehouse, but for food), I was graced with this conversation at the checkout, between two Costco employees: e1: Where the hell is e3? e2: Oh, we didn't meet our sales target yesterday, so they cut hours today. e1: So he's not coming in at all? e2: Nup Apparently Costco works out their staffing based on a "budget for the day" which takes into account todays sales target, expected customer load, and whatever they have to "make up" from previous missed targets. While there is nothing wrong with that, it must suck to be an employee in that environment. I can't imagine not knowing how much work I would have day to day. I used to be a casual, but our rosters were fairly static and worked out weeks in advance. I guess that Australia is headed down this path with the new industrial relations laws as well. That's not why I finally got around to writing this though. It occurred to me this morning that being able to lay off people instantly based on a micro assessment of the economy must also lead to very…

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Bloomberg: How to handle those annoyingly poor relatives at Christmas

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Resist the urge to impress family members with your purchasing power and instead give them only what they can afford to give you. Avoid luxury goods, for example, or other items redolent of leisure. Choose, instead, gifts that encourage productive labour. Hand tools, say, or cookbooks. Obviously your gift needs to say, ``I love you,'' but it also needs to say, ``The income gap within the family isn't going to be shrinking from my end.'' A funny look at how to handle poor relatives at Christmas. Or at least I hope it's meant as humour.

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Christmas morning

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  • Post category:Christmas

Our kids seem to have the Christmas thing under control -- I remember waking my folks up at 5am to open presents, but our kids let us sleep in today until nearly 8:30am. They liked their presents heaps, so if you got something for them, well done. I'll put some pictures online later when I get a chance. [btags:]

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