Amazon is now selling groceries... how cool is that? I went up and ordered a ton of stuff -- the prices are great. It's a bulk-sale concept --most of the items come in four-packs, six-packs, twelve-packs, etc. But what's nice is that instead of humongous packages (like Sam's Club and Costco), the packages are smaller size, which is easier to store, take to work, picnic, etc.
In addition, since I signed up for Amazon Prime, all two-day shipping is free. (See my earlier post on Amazon Prime.)
I returned the next day to find that they also have a personalized "shopping list." One of the reasons this online venture is so exciting to is that I was thinking about it in the early 90's... even prior to the Webvan debacle. With Amazon joining in a sensible, sustainable, usable way, online grocery shopping may be about to hit its prime.
Amazon Grocery beta:
http://www.amazon.com/b/103-5521853-8669441?ie=UTF8&node=16310101
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Sharpening the Saw
Today was the day to tackle computer hardware issues.
My trusty power-forward Dell PowerEdge 400SC would hang on a normal boot and would require manual intervention to boot, using the "Boot Logging" option under WS2003. Then Google KeyHole (the earth viewing software) complained about OpenGL (advanced graphics stuff) not being enabled (makes everything faster). This wasn't a big problem, as the system has been rock-solid stable, and I never have to restart unless a new software app requires it.
But I had installed a pretty capable graphics card -- an ATI RADEON 9600 Pro 256 MB -- and I suspected the display driver. I uninstalled all ATI and Omega drivers, then installed only the ATI display driver (not the Catalyst management package). This worked great -- but now the Dell was freezing occasionally after loading the LSI Logic SCSI driver. Hmmm... not especially good.
I investigated the LSI Logic MPT IS BIOS... not especially clear on their web site, but there was a warning about "IS" BIOS: get your upgrades from your vendor (Dell in my case). A search of the Dell site yielded little. But I checked the PowerEdge 400SC downloads and noticed that the current bios (version A05) was out of date (newest is A10). A system BIOS issue could cause any number of boot issues, so I downloaded the update. Trying to install (flash) the new bios, I received the error "Flash access denied". I will save you the gory details, but I had to burn a bootable DOS CD to be able to run the update... thanks to Nero, it was easy. I also installed a new "backplane driver" from Dell that seemed to be out of date.
The result... Success! The PowerEdge is back to booting normally, and the system is taking full advantage of the power of the ATI graphics card. A very satisfying result for that much playing with drivers: usually the going is a lot rougher.
My trusty power-forward Dell PowerEdge 400SC would hang on a normal boot and would require manual intervention to boot, using the "Boot Logging" option under WS2003. Then Google KeyHole (the earth viewing software) complained about OpenGL (advanced graphics stuff) not being enabled (makes everything faster). This wasn't a big problem, as the system has been rock-solid stable, and I never have to restart unless a new software app requires it.
But I had installed a pretty capable graphics card -- an ATI RADEON 9600 Pro 256 MB -- and I suspected the display driver. I uninstalled all ATI and Omega drivers, then installed only the ATI display driver (not the Catalyst management package). This worked great -- but now the Dell was freezing occasionally after loading the LSI Logic SCSI driver. Hmmm... not especially good.
I investigated the LSI Logic MPT IS BIOS... not especially clear on their web site, but there was a warning about "IS" BIOS: get your upgrades from your vendor (Dell in my case). A search of the Dell site yielded little. But I checked the PowerEdge 400SC downloads and noticed that the current bios (version A05) was out of date (newest is A10). A system BIOS issue could cause any number of boot issues, so I downloaded the update. Trying to install (flash) the new bios, I received the error "Flash access denied". I will save you the gory details, but I had to burn a bootable DOS CD to be able to run the update... thanks to Nero, it was easy. I also installed a new "backplane driver" from Dell that seemed to be out of date.
The result... Success! The PowerEdge is back to booting normally, and the system is taking full advantage of the power of the ATI graphics card. A very satisfying result for that much playing with drivers: usually the going is a lot rougher.
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