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July 30, 2005
New Planet Found
Astronomers in the United States have announced the discovery of the 10th planet to orbit our Sun.
Read more here...
Posted by Alex at 02:47 PM | Comments (0)
July 18, 2005
Most Ingenious Marketing Campaign Ever
Tropicana has come up with the best marketing idea ever. After years of advertising their Orange Juice as the best there is and getting their name synonimous with Orange Juice that's Not From Concentrate and 100% OJ, they came up with a way to double their profits on the spot, without doing almost any advertisement. Here is how it works:
1. Spend millions for years convincing the general public that they have #1 product.
2. Realise that everyone is trying to lose some weight, since the 21st century is clearly rolling out to be the years of weightloss.
3. Design a new container that looks so familiar to the rest of the their juices that noone will even notice...
4. ...and here it comes, DILLUTE IT WITH WATER ABOUT 50%-50% and sell it for the same price as the full juice container.
And here is the best part: I tried to do the same with their regular juice by adding some water to it, and it tastes like crap. I tried Tropicana's 50% - 50% solution and it's awesome, it tastes better than the regular juices and its half the calories.
Posted by Alex at 10:50 AM | Comments (0)
Now looking at something cool:
Using the .NET framework once you are done writing your code and compiling it, you will always end up with the main .exe and some library .dll's, icons, config files, the whole shabang, and distributing it is really a pain. It used to be that for windows executables you could use something like UPX but for .NET, and especially C# I found that .NETZ
works the best.
Posted by Alex at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)
July 15, 2005
Bottoms Up!
I don't know how the Russian government is going to change the world opinion about Russia, which right now is basically vodka and chess after news like this:
Last year, a vodka-drinking contest in a southern Russia town ended in tragedy: the winner of the competition died, with several runners up in intensive care. The owner of the store holding the contest offered 10 liters of vodka to the competitor who could drink the most vodka in the shortest amount of time. Russian authorities charged the promoter of the contest with manslaughter.
“The competition lasted 30, perhaps 40 minutes and the winner downed three half-liter bottles. He was taken home by taxi but died within 20 minutes,” said a prosecutor investigating the case. For those of you who don’t feel like doing the math, that’s a handle of vodka in thirty minutes. Five of the survivors ended up in the hospital’s intensive care unit. Russians drink 15 liters of alcohol per annum and it has been estimated that nearly 15% of the population is alcoholic. After the death of the winner, prosecutors charged the organisers not only with involuntary homicide, but also with breaking a Russian law that forbids the staging of events promoting alcohol consumption. (via mosnews)
Quiet honestly, death of the competitors is a tragedy, but there is also a part of me that wants to give them "Hero of the USSR" medals, post mortem of course like most of Russia's top medals.
Posted by Alex at 04:05 PM | Comments (0)
July 13, 2005
VMWare tools
I've had a hard time with VMWare Workstation since everyone else at the company has ver.4 and I had to be special and get ver.5 (actually i was last to get VMWare, so thats the reason). If I tried to open a .vmx file that was created on ver.4, I would get an error message urging me to upgrade to ver.5. The upgrade called for hardware changes and reinstalling the hardware drivers would trigger win xp activation. So, if you just click "Cancel" and don't install the new drivers, the host does not ask for it again and you are safe from reactivating.
Now, if you are using Windows 2000, your resolution after upgrade will be 480x620 at 16 colors, so to fix that you definately have to install the VMWare tools that come with your workstation since ver.1.x. To do that, on ver.4, go to File > Install VMware Tools, Just to keep you on your toes, they changed the location in the last version. On ver.5 its VM -> Install VMware Tools.
Posted by Alex at 11:29 AM | Comments (0)
July 07, 2005
Now looking at something cool:
Posted by Alex at 03:14 PM | Comments (0)
July 03, 2005
IKEA in Atlanta
Well, it's official, Atlanta is now one of the lucky cities that has IKEA, the Swedish Wal-Mart of furniture, and of course Maria and I were there this Saturday. 
Posted by Alex at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)