Stuart's Blog

It's good to be a Guru (Labs employee).

As a business traveller, I've learned that rental cars and the lottery have a lot in common. Although my office always reserves economy cars, about half the time I end up with something different because the agency overbooked. I've driven sedans, vans, SUVs and even a PT Cruiser. So far my favorites are the Dodge Charger, the PT Cruiser and the Chevy Cobalt LTZ I'm driving right now.

I've discovered I prefer small cars over SUVs, so it's not too surprising that I like my economy car this week. (The only time I've ever disliked a small car was the week I had an under-powered Kia to navigate the cloverleaves on the east coast.) Of course, my car this week doesn't have the standard package. It has a sun roof, a Pioneer sound system and either real leather seats or very convincing faux leather. It also has my favorite steering column layout: two buttons for the cruise and five for the radio, all on the steering wheel within easy reach of my thumbs.

I'm in Sacramento, CA this week and the temperatures have been consistently going above 100°. I enjoy the heat. I'm having fun driving around California with my sun roof open, my windows down, and my stereo unreasonably loud. There are few better ways to celebrate summer.

One perk of this job is eating at expensive restaurants regularily. However, I've discovered that there's a limit to how much steak one can eat before wanting a little variety. Last night as I was tooling around trying to find the radio station that made best use of my car's bass, I stumbled across a Trader Joe's and blew $20 buying dinner there. (Oh, how I wish Utah had a Trader Joe's! And a Fry's, and a Cheesecake Factory, and a J. Gilbert's, and a Legal Seafoods, and a World Market. Okay, technically Park City has a World Market, but that doesn't count.)

I suppose you could argue that's not a perk but a disadvantage. Working for Guru Labs I've discovered Utah doesn't have very many great restaurants, nor does it have some pretty cool stores.

Each training center I visit is unique. Some have special perks like fresh fruit or warm cookies in the afternoon. The training center in Kansas City has home cooked lunches. This training center has a slightly more unusual perk: free classic arcade games. During the breaks, I've been playing Arkanoid. Also among the arcade machines are such classics as Asteroids, Pole Position and Zaxxon. When I saw the Lethal Enforcers machine, I just had to take a picture:

Yes, that's Richard Dean Anderson sporting a gun and a killer mullet. It looks like he and I are both stylin' in California.

Posted by at 1:47 PM | Permalink

I've got a growing list of tips I ought to blog about, but just haven't gotten around to it. However, Hans' post has inspired me to at least mention a gxine wrapper script I use to avoid the screensaver launching while I'm watching a movie.

#!/bin/bash
gxine -S "$@" &
while pgrep gxine &>/dev/null ; do
  xscreensaver-command -deactivate &>/dev/null
  sleep 60
done

If anybody took up Hans' challenge to write a generic wrapper script, you know that the trickiest part is being able to pass an arbitrary number of arguments to the wrapped program. That's where the magical little "$@" comes in. Making this script even more generic is left as an exercise for the reader.

Update: 26 Aug 2006 I've just posted a much improved, generic version I call noblank.

Posted by at 9:02 AM | Permalink