William Sylvester

The grand opening of the new Wegman’s grocery store near the house opened yesterday. The anticipation had been growing as the store had been under construction for some time… and early November was always far far away. The opening day finally arrived, November 8, 2009. It was mostly a non-event, until I realized Sunday morning that I needed to run out. The normal trek would have led me to a local grocery store if I was in a hurry (Giant or Harris Teeter), but more typically Target or Costco. Then I remembered; Wegman’s opened today, why not go check it out.

I arrived to the surpise of massive traffic jams getting into the parking lot. The first entrance was blocked by police. Routed around the corner I had what appeared to be angry Loudoun County Police officers very authoritatively pointing to move into alternate lanes. This took me around the back of the shopping center to the public parking… (this is where I would park if I was going anywhere but Wegman’s.. still the mini-town center is vacant at the moment). This is where things got interesting… despite the police and traffic routing… I found a parking place fairly quickly… as I walked toward the store I followed the loose line headed for the front. On my way I noticed a courtesey shuttle taking some of the older customers by van.. but it was a beautiful day — I opted to walk.

Approaching the door I passed a builder collecting personal data for a lead list offering up a chance to win a $500 gift card, I almost took my chances till they accosted me with questions like how much does my household make, and what price range of a home do I want to buy… i kept my partially completed entry form and worked my way to the door. At the door I was greeted by a couple of wireless terminals where the store employees happily scanned my Virginia license apparently getting enough information to allow me to "easily" cash checks in their store.. I declined on this feature and instead took my new customer affinity card and headed into the main entrance.

Simply put, it was a zoo. People packed in like sardines. That said this is the biggest store of it’s kind I think I have ever seen. Even more impressive than the Wegman’s on the other end of town. I grabbed the super small cart and found it easy to navigate through traffic, since I had to carry what I bought back to the car… I was on the light load… but I did have my Wegman’s coupon mailer that had free butter and flour… and figured that would be my first items to track down.

So the store was packed, but it was still interesting figuring the layout. This layout was sort of backwards from the other Wegman’s in the area which made it confusing at first to figure out. The people didnt help with the navigation either. Passing through the fresh produce… the auto-watering shelves were cool. The wine and seafood bar was pretty cool… especially as it was packed with people drinking white wine as their seafood was prepared. The indoor and outdoor seating was huge. I found the wine section to be more impressive …

I also noticed the price comparisons. Now there is something to note, I could not go five feet without hearing other customers on the phone saying how great all the prices were. I assume this was promotional and by design to establish a new customer relationship. Regardless, 12-pack soda was $2… they couldnt keep the shelves full. I also started to notice price comparison tags on select products… this product is cheaper than the same product at Costco, Harris Teeter, etc..

The the cheesy jazz band started to play behind the wine bar.. all in all it was an adventure. I spent two hours roaming the store… (and working through the crowds) … check out was seamless other than my new affinity card was not tied to my phone number yet..

All in all it was a great experience, and I will go back. What was most impressive was the attention to every detail and the preparations to drive people into the store and how hard they worked to establish that initial relationship… I applaud Wegman’s for the effort and wish them the best… which from overhearing some employees talking… the numbers for Sunday’s launch were well above projections…

About seven years ago after getting yet another speeding ticket, I sat across the table from my attorney at breakfast meeting one morning. I was inquiring to see if he knew anyone in a remote part of the country that could assist me with my legal traffic woes. It was in that moment he said, "you want my advice? get a Valentine1!" So I did. Granted, it was expensive compared to the other brands out there. It's selling points were pretty clear. Well designed, detects pretty much anything they can throw at you, and was fairly invisible to the K40 radar detector detectors. After some seven plus years, covering hundreds of thousands of miles on the road-- The Valentine1 has been flawless. ...until last week, it suddenly started to see ghosts.. signals from everywhere around ever turn. Immediately, I checked for support on the website, which led me to believe I did in fact have a problem. I called the customer support line who reiterated what the website confirmed. Something was amiss. Some $12 later, I had shipped the unit back to Ohio for repair. Feeling separated from a trusted part of the family. I waited for word... ...a week went by and FedEx arrived.. returned my Valentine1 returned to perfect function. Despite being loved for many years... and well used... the repairs were made at no cost and return shipping paid. I must say that, I was fully prepared to pay the $45 diagnostic fee and reasonable repair charges, and had all been hopeless I would have found a way to buy a new one. But instead, Valentine1 exceeding all my expectations did the right thing to maintain their position in the marketplace as the high quality radar detector. Thank you Valentine1 not only for an exceptional product but also for providing exceptional customer service!

Ran into the annoying mach-o problem for compiled rubygem extensions on a few gems (mainly RedCloth and CSVScan). First pass at Google rendered a few people who had experienced similar problems but no real solutions. Finally broke down and figured out how to fix it.

First, what is the problem; in the land of OSX you have many architectures this includes the old PowerPC world, 32-bit (i386), and 64-bit (x86_64). In the old world everything was always 32-bit and nobody was the wiser, but with Snow Leopard the world changed and suddenly you could run things in 64-bit. So here’s the rub, 64-bit and 32-bit dont play nicely together. They are consider different architectures and even as Apple has done a great job to provide 32-bit emulation when you have a 64-bit app that tries to access a 32-bit library or vs versa things stop working.

The fix is pretty simple, figure out what architecture your primary application is, then re-compile the library to comply. This error pops up usually as a “mach-o, but wrong architecture” error. And this is true across all languages but in this case I will explain how I fixed my rubygems that had incompatible bundle files.

Step 1: Identify which architecture you need. This goes both ways, if you have a 32-bit app with a 64-bit library you need a 32-bit library to run. If you have a 64-bit app with a 32-bit library you need a 64-bit library. Easiest way is to use the “file” command. If you dont mind larger executables you can compile all architectures in, but this wastes space. Below see a few examples.

prompt$ file /usr/local/bin/ruby
/usr/local/bin/ruby: Mach-O executable i386

or

$ file /bin/ls
/bin/ls: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
/bin/ls (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
/bin/ls (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386

In the case of RedCloth, removed the 64-bit bundle;
$ sudo /bin/rm /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/i686-darwin9.5.0/redcloth_scan.bundle

then
$ cd /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/RedCloth-4.2.2/ext/redcloth_scan/

Now you can edit your Makefile to include the ‘-arch i386’ or ‘-arch x86_64’, once again you can add one or both. For some reason most of the gem builds scripts don’t account for what version of ruby you run and default to 64-bit which is where the problem originates.

Edit your CFLAGS and ldflags or archflag and just add ‘-arch i386’ or ‘-arch x86_64’ to the lines. Run a make clean; make … then go back to the root of your gem and run the ruby setup.rb install. Make sure you dont re-run config as this will overwrite your Makefile changes. This will install your new bundle and you should be ready to go.

I came to a small realization this weekend; this is big, traditional media is dead!

Gone the way of the dinosaurs. Twitter is breaking more news these days than CNN or the Wall Street Journal. The news papers or bleeding life. Subscriptions are down. Pew Internet studies state that younger generations are going online to get their news and dont read traditional publications. Here's the rub, social web and social media still lack a proven business model.

Rumors of last night are that Google is close to acquiring Twitter... see Techcrunch if this rumor matters to you. I opened my TweetDeck late last night (as I often do). And saw acquire as a trending topic. I clicked on the term... some 30 minutes old... and watched it grow over the next couple of hours before the country went to bed (when traffic tailed off).The social trifecta is very much alive...

My Blackberry Pearl was recently out of Warranty, I was considering using it for future international travel. I called ATT and told them I was planning International travel and needed to unlock my phone. They placed me on hold and eventually came back and had the code.

The process they described on the phone was slightly flawed, I wanted to share the correct process;

1. Turn off the Radio

2. Navigate the menu Options -> Advanced Options -> SIM Card This should say something like ID: (long number)

3. Press M E O O D (no spaces) This will display a new list of options on the phone's SIM Card menu. Personalization: SIM Disabled Network Enabled Network Subset Disabled Service Provider Disabled Corporate Disabled

4. Press M E O O 2 (On the Pearl this requires Alt-T = 2, once again no spaces) At this point you should be looking at a box asking for a code. Note: You are typically limited to 10 tries, don't mess this up. If you don't have a code don't even try this.

5. Enter the code ATT (or other provider gave you), click the pearl to select Now where before the list said "Network Enabled" should now say "Network Disabled" and you are good to go.

This is my attempt to actually get my blog off the ground… there is so much to say and do…