Over this last weekend I mentioned at a family get together that I had drunk a real, full calorie Coke and how good it was after drinking nothing but Diet Coke for months. I lamented that it was extremely difficult to go back to drinking Diet Coke after getting a taste of the “Real Thing” in my system.

My sister asked if I had tried the new Coke Zero to which I said, “Why no I haven’t! What the heck is Coke Zero?”

She said it was a zero-calorie Coke that tasted, “Just like the real Coke, but with no calories! She said she was hooked and advised me to give it a go.

Cut to Sunday afternoon - I’m standing in the checkout line at the store and they have cooler-endcaps with drinks at the registers. I look into the case and see some cold bottles of Coke Zero. So I decided to give it a try and see if was on the level.

I wasn’t sure what to expect with the first sip. I let the carbonated liquid wash my tounge. It had that “bite” that Coke has. I slowly swished it around my mouth and swallowed. The flavor was reasonably “Cokeish”. So far so good…

Then came the aftertaste. That bastard aspartame had struck again, leaving my mouth stinging with that “fake sugar” aftertaste that I hate. It wasn’t as bad a Diet Coke, but it wasn’t Coke either. It was almost like a photocopy of Coke - a vague shadow of the “Real Thing”, but not quite right.

It’s definetely not Diet Coke either. It has an all together different flavor than Diet Coke. I have grown to like (okay, I’ve grown to accept) the flavor of Diet Coke. Coke Zero is a shell of what Coke might be in it’s later years; a hint of what made it great, yet you see the tragic end near.

Will Coke Zero find a niche? Maybe. I’ll probably stick with Diet (better the devil you know than the devil you don’t) and maybe go 50/50 every once in a while for my sugar fix.

Hey, Coke, here’s an idea; why don’t you make “Coke-20″? Give me something with enough sugar I know it’s really Coke, but only a handful of calories. I can rationalize sitting down and having a couple of 20 calorie Cokes with lunch, I can’t rationalize sitting down and having a couple of 200 calorie Cokes with lunch.

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls.

He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.

So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between golf balls.

He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else.

He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with a unanimous “yes.”

The professor then produced two cans of beer from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.

“Now,” said the professor, as the laughter subsided, “I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things–your family, your children, your health, your friends, your favorite passions–things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.

“The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, your car.

The sand is everything else–the small stuff.

“If you put the sand into the jar first,” he continued, “there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your partner out to dinner. Play another 18. There will always be time to clean the house, and fix the disposal.

“Take care of the golf balls first, the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.”

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the beer represented.

The professor smiled. “I’m glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of beers.”

Friday night, as I was preparing to leave, Mike came to my desk and asked if I was staying to help in the warehouse. I had no idea what he was talking about and told him as much. He said that some people were going over to our nearby warehouse to help get some emergency orders out the door for a large client, and asked if I could help out.

I said, “okay…” thinking it might take an hour or two. When we actually arrived at the warehouse and saw the amount of orders and product we needed to get out the door I was dumbfounded! It wasn’t an hour or two we ended up putting in, but seven hours and forty-five minutes of work!

Yes, you read that right! We worked from 5pm until 12:45pm picking, staging and loading orders onto the trucks to get the orders out of the warehouse. And we were green in the warehouse – we’re a bunch of desk jockeys; we had no real idea what we were doing – but we were doing it anyway!

It was interesting to see the progress we made from the beginning of the evening to the end of the evening; the first order we staged looked just terrible. The pallets were stacked all “wonky” and they really varied in their height and consistency. By the end of the night we were doing much better though. Our pallets looked better and the consistency and quality of the pallets were much better.

I also learned I have a hidden talent – something that I can fall back on in case I.T. ever runs dry. I can drive a fork lift. Granted it’s not a terribly difficult task, but I seemed a natural at it, and I spent much of the night zipping among the racks, grabbing pallets with wild abandon and whisking them to where they were needed, waiting for new product to be added and then whisking them to the staging area for the final count. Then I would load the trucks, a delicate affair, taking care not to damage the product, the pallets or the trailer.

It was also very interesting to get a very personal view of the warehouse side of operations. I knew what happened in the warehouse from a very high level; orders are sent down and pick plans generated, the warehouse staff picks the orders and stages the items to be loaded onto trucks. Finally the orders are loaded on trucks and rushed out to enter the great American supply chain. Neat and simple.

Well it’s not really all that neat and simple. First off, you really have to know what the heck you’re doing in the warehouse. You have to be able to decipher the pick plan, you have to be able to figure out the item conversions (which proved difficult several times over during the night). You have to know where your product is in the warehouse – and in a one hundred thousand square foot warehouse there are a lot of places product can be hiding! You have to have a good plan for staging your orders and you need to have some skill at building a solid and consistent pallet (in terms of items, weight and size). You need to know how to load a truck, how to position the weight and how to do it all without breaking anything. You also have to be efficient and quick to get all the orders out of the warehouse on time, each and every day.

This doesn’t even take into consideration the arrival of goods and the unpacking and receiving that is happening (usually at the same time). And when you’re finally finished you get to go home and look forward to coming in and doing the exact same thing day after day – there’s not much variation in your day.

So while I’m not sure I would want to work in the warehouse all night every Friday (especially after working all day in the office) it turned out to be a very interesting experience and one that helps me understand a very important function of the business better.

At first I was frustration and a little put out that I had to sacrifice my Friday night to pull orders. But since I’m not the kind of person who just says “no” when help is needed I put on my best attitude and launched into the task at hand. At the end of the evening I realized I learned quite a bit about the business, had some fun doing it, and came away with a much greater appreciation for the job our warehouse staff really does.

I think everyone should trade places once in a while to help them understand all the processes that keep a business ticking.

I’ve decided that I need to take better care of myself and this includes watching more carefully the food I eat. This is probably the least fun part of eating out every meal for lunch (hey, we have to get out of the office for a little each day or we’ll go crazy).

Well today Arby’s was suggested. Now, I like Arby’s and I figured that with their “Market Fresh” sandwitches I could find something that wasn’t terrible for me to put into my body.

So off to Arby’s we went!

I ordered up a Southwest Chicken Wrap and was a bit surprized at how small it looked. Compared to the roast beef sandwitches it was positivly tiny! But I decided I was being good for me so if I was still hungry later in the day I would hunt down some fruit.

Back at the office I ventured onto Arby’s web site to see exactly how good I had been! I was shocked to find out that my meager little wrap contained 550 Calories and 30 grams of fat (with 9 grams coming from saturated fat)!

As I scanned the nutrition page I found I could have had a Giant Roast Beef for only 450 Calories and 19 grams of fat (9 grams saturated fat). I will say, in its defense, the Southwest Chicken Wrap is the “healthiest” of the wraps.

Now I know that fast food isn’t “good” for you, but Arby’s has done a good job promoting these sandwitches as “fresh” and “just like you make at home” which in my mind would translate into a sandwitch that isn’t nutritionally terrible for you.

Those marketing scalawags have won again, equating “fresh” with “healthy” when it really is neither.

I should know better - you almost never can have your cake and eat it too…

Mmmmmm…cake……

Tonight the house across the street from us caught fire (thankfully no one was hurt). But we were out front right from when the first fire truck rolled up and we were able to watch the firefighters gear up and enter the house.

And you know what? It was pretty unnerving. I’ve always been a touch of a pyro. I used to make hair-spray torches when I was in grade school, and I graduated to home made film canister “fireworks” in high school - I’ve always liked fire. I always thought that it would be no big deal to enter a buring building and put out a fire.

That is, until I actually saw a house fire close up. When the trucks pulled up, there was a little black “soot” around the top of the garage door. In the five minutes it took the fire fighters to put on their gear and start their entry, the smoke was just rolling out of the garage and from the eaves of the house! By the time they actually started ripping the garage door down the smoke was just boiling out of the garage. All of the fire fighters were running full oxygen systems just so they could breath in the house. As they came through the garage, you could just barely see their flash lights through the smoke.

It was not something I think I could just go “do” (like I previously thought I could). My hat is off to the people who do this every day. It’s probably something that you would eventually get used to, but seeing it, literally in my front yard, made me realize just how dangerous fires really are.

I’ve been enamoured with VoIP and its integration with Asterisk the last few days. Specifically I’m running Asterisk@Home and interfacing it to a BroadVoice Voice over IP (VoIP) account.

It took quite a bit of fiddling with the configuration files to get everything working the way I wanted it to work. My biggest problem was pulling together all the information I needed in one place - I couldn’t find a complete guide. So I decided to write one.

I am happy to present my article: Configuring Asterisk@Home to use BroadVoice’s VoIP Services.

Hopefully if you’re interested in Asterisk@Home and its integration with VoIP providers (well, really just BroadVoice) you’ll find this article of some use. If so, drop me a note and let me know if it was helpful!

Zeitgeist. It seems like I can’t turn on the radio without hearing a commentator - likely trying to sound more intelligent - using the word zeitgeist. It this a self fulfilling meme?

Am I adding to the zeitgeit by posting this log entry? Am I aiding and abetting an existing meme, or is this the birth of a new meme? (I also like saying “meme”. Meme, meme, meme.)

Further, what is the purpose of this particular addition to the…um, zeitgeist? Granted it’s a good word - worthy of a page in your word-of-the-day calendar - but why the sudden appearance? The egoist in me concludes it’s because the speaker wants to sound intelligent (or is that the cynic in me?) but maybe it’s just an example of a lingual mind virus run amok.

Today someone sent me a “ha-ha funny” list of illogical sayings. One of them was:

If the temperature is zero outside today and it’s going to be twice as cold tomorrow, how cold will it be?

And I thought, “That’s not really such a bad question, just an ambiguous question.”

Here was my reply:

This is an ambiguous question because the answer depends on your reference point. I will assume for a moment the question references degrees Fahrenheit since we’re in North America and not Canadian.

0 F = -17.7 C

So twice as cold would be -17.7 C * 2 = -35.4 C. Convert back to Fahrenheit and you get -31.7 F.

So twice a cold a zero degrees Fahrenheit is -31.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

If however we started with Celsius it’s a bit trickier. A better way to make the statement is, “half the temperature on the Kelvin scale.” which, by this definition, “twice as cold as 0 C” is half of 273.15 K.

Follow me so far? One half of 273.15 K is 136.57 K. Convert it back to Celsius and we get -136.58 C. If you want to know how cold that is (_very_ cold) in Fahrenheit we convert again and get -230 F.

If we were to start a 0 degrees Kelvin we would be in serious trouble because that’s “Absolute Zero” and the temperature which atomic movement ceases and matter just sort of falls apart. In theory it can’t be twice as cold as that because that’s as cold as it gets! How cold is absolute zero? It’s -460 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s so unimaginably cold you can’t…well you can’t even imagine how cold it is! Let’s just say, don’t lick a metal pole when it’s -460 degrees Fahrenheit out because the pole, and you, will cease to exist!

Trivia:
Wacky but true; Celsius and Fahrenheit are calibrated such that -40 Celsius equals -40 Fahrenheit

Formulas used:
Celsius to Fahrenheit formula: F = (C * 1.8) + 32
Fahrenheit to Celsius formula: C = (F - 32) * 0.5555
Celsius to Kelvin formula: K = C + 273.15
Kelvin to Celsius formula: C = K - 273.15