Flying Fish moving…

While I was out driving around today, I went past where one of my favorite seafood restaurants was in town. Unfortunately their sign was gone, and a different one was there. One for an Italian restaurant (Oliverio’s). To me it seemed as though Flying Fish had went out of business. Which was sad as they always had the freshest fish in town. When I got home I started looking at the Glasshouse Grille’s web page (since they are the owners of the Flying Fish & Co) and saw this:

A new home for Flying fish and Company is now under construction

in the Seneca Center on Beechurst Avenue, right across the hall

from our parent restaurant, The Glasshouse Grille.

Our new store will feature most of the same great seafood, soups, and salads

folks have enjoyed since we started in 2002. Fresh fish fillets cut to order

and a variety of shellfish will be waiting for the cook-at-home gourmets!

This was so cool. Not only is it moving closer to where I live but it has not gone away forever….

Fun at Best Buy again

As I was walking around Best Buy today, I noticed something getting more and more familiar. The employees using big technical terms to get unsuspecting buyers to buy crap they really don’t need. Case in point, I was walking near the TV section and the sales person was holding on to some gold plated monster cables (I think they were monster, not totally sure, but they were expensive). He then proceeded to tell the family that if they did not buy those then the huge tv they just bought would not get the proper HD signal and they would not see the channels in HD. I just sort of laughed to my self as he went on to explain why they needed this expensive gold plated cables, and how they were so much better than the cables that came with the tv. He kept going by saying, since you are paying for the installation and $500 calibration for the TV in your house, why would you want to use crappy $2 cables to have to pay to have the TV recalibrated all the time. (Like a cable is some how going to change the settings on the tv to show a crappy picture.)

The next one was near the camera isle. The guy was trying to push the biggest and most expensive SD cards onto the customers who looked to be buying a little point and shoot camera. The card was probably 1/3 the cost of the camera they were getting. He then started walking them around to get all the “accessories” they would need to use the camera.

The best one was back to the first guy, who after talking about the cables for a while, then went over to the proper cleaning of their new TV. He told them they had to buy “their” special cleaning fluid as normal household cleaning items would severely damage the new tv they were buying. He told them not to use anything with alcohol in it (which I bet the stuff he was selling them did). When I was walking away he was telling them they could use water on the screen to clean it.

I would like to go in there some day and just play stupid and see what all they would tell me I needed for what ever I was buying.

wp-cache and wordpress 2.5

Tried to enable wp-cache on word press tonight. Seems that the option to disable the gzip compression is missing from the settings/misc page. So to disable it (so you can enable wp-cache), I had to do the following:

1. Find the option number of the gzipcompression option in your wordpress table:

select * from wp_options where option_name='gzipcompression';

2. Update the option value to 0 (it is probably 1 now), use the option_id number you got from the first command:

update wp_options set optionvalue='0' where option_id='41';

Your gzipcompression should be disabled now and you should be able to enable wp-cache.

Weird survey

Tonight I got a survey from E-Rewards. Started taking it and it delt mostly with Cable tv. Then all of the sudden this question pops up:

Not sure what this had to do with cable television, but when I checked all of the items in the first column, it then said I was not eligible to finish the survey.. Guess they only wanted smelly people?

How to calculate yesterday

I was working on a shell script last night and needed to calculate the value for yesterday. I did not have access to GNU date, so using that is out of the question. All I could use was what was available to me in a default install of Solaris 10. So I decided to use Perl as such (note that the YESTERDAY should all be on one line):


#!/bin/bash
YESTERDAY=$(perl -e '@y=localtime(time()-86400);
printf "%04d%02d%02d",$y[5]+1900,$y[4]+1,$y[3];$y[3];')

What this will do is store the value of yesterday in a shell variable called YESTERDAY
Now I have not done perl in a long while so here is an explanation of what it does:
1. Runs the perl function time which will find the current time, then subtract 86400 from it (24 hours).
2. Next it is run through the localtime function which creates an array that has the following values:

Array Element Value
0 Seconds
1 Minutes
2 Hour
3 Day of Month
4 Month of year (0=January)
5 Year (starting at 1900)
6 Day of week (0=sunday)
7 Day of Year (0..364 or 0..365 if leap)
8 Is Daylight savings time active

So in my little script above, we are looking for fields 5, 4 and 3. I add 1900 to the value of 5 (in this case 5 = 108). I add 1 to the value of 4 to get the current month (3+1 = 4 = April). The values are then pushed through printf so that we have a 4 digit year with leading 0’s, a 2 digit month with leading 0’s and a 2 digit day with leading 0’s. So the value of my YESTERDAY variable will now show 20080418.

Hope this helps some one else.