I don’t get this “caffeine keeps you awake” stuff I keep hearing. I just finished a nice warm cup of hot tea (Dunkin Donuts LARGE) which should be enough caffeine to keep one awake right? And yet all I want to do is take a nap. The same thing happened to me the other day.
I don’t drink coffee (yuck!!) but I drink cold beverages with caffeine and they never keep me awake either. Is this a myth or is my system just different?
One of my favorite Christmas presents this year was an AeroGarden. It’s basically a small hydroponics set up for growing plants indoors. There is a special light and a pump that pushes water and nutrients into the mini-planters. Right now I have lettuce planted. Sprouts showed up in about 2 days or so. They should be harvistable in about 3 weeks and last for another three months or so. I’m getting a kick out of watching them grow so far. I hope it works out.
One of the other things they offer is a special try for starting seedlings for outdoors. I am thinking that I would like to try that as well. It holds 70 plants and that would be plenty for me. I could start all the tomatoes, cucumbers and pepper plants I want. I might also try some corn and sunflowers as well. I’ve tried starting plants inside before but for some reason it never seems to work out. Perhaps with this system it will.
The other thing I am thinking about is getting a second device to keep in my office. I would grow something different there. Perhaps flowers. So far plant I have tried in my office has died. But honestly I think that has been a combination of not getting watered enough and not enough light. I travel a good bit and I need a good healthy light on a timer as well as a system that can go without me adding water every day. This should do that.
And it is a gadget too! What more could a geek want but a gadget that grows things.
As I found yet another take-out order gone wrong this week I started thinking about the problem of fast food restaurants and take-out windows. Part of the problem is the people who work these windows. You need someone smart enough to get the order right but not so smart that they get bored and quit right away. It seems like a lot of places skimp on the "smart enough to get the order right" part when they hire people.
So I was thinking that this is an area ripe for robots and computer controlled ordering. Voice recognition systems are getting better and seem like they might be as good as some people who work at these drive-through windows. The last time I was in a fast food restaurant where the people seemed really smart and spoke really good English I was in Norway. Lately in US places people seem to be having almost as much trouble understanding me as I do them.
Anyway. I could see a robot operation that took orders using either voice recognition or some sort of interactive display. The food could be cooked and assembled and presented to a person to hand through the window. I’m not sure we’re ready for a robot to hand out the food and collect the money yet. It might work with credit cards though.
I see two major problems. One is that we may need smarter customers to manage computer ordering. There is no way to make it completely idiot proof. There are some amazing idiots out there. The second is that there are already a shortage of jobs for the types of people who tend to take these jobs. High school students, mothers and seniors looking to fill time and pick up a few extra bucks, and people without more marketable skills. So that is a social issue.
We’d still need people to feed the equipment and handle screw ups. Hopefully there would be fewer screw ups in the preparation of the order but remember that a lot of people would be likely to mess up in what they order. But if you could get my with one or two people at times that now require three to five there would be some savings in payroll.
There is one other potential problem. Sometimes companies modify the product to fit production at the cost of quality of the product. I can’t see that being an issue at some fast food restaurants where quality is not so impressive as it is. Plus I think that a lot of semi-automation adjustment has already taken place. How much worse could it get?
I have a new favorite apple. For a long time I ate mostly Red Delicious apples. I liked the flavor. They are soft though and I didn’t like that. So I would regularly eat other types like Macs (no not the computer) that are more crisp. Well recently we visited an apple orchard and not surprisingly they had a large selection of apples. Most of them we’d seen in stores before but one was new to us. The friendly people at the orchard had one sliced for tasting and we tried it.
This type is called Honey Crisp and it’s fairly new but gaining popularity. It’s nice and sweet like the Red Delicious but crispy like the Macs. It lasts a couple of weeks in the refrigerator but we’ve been eating them all long before they go bad. I haven’t seen them in local stores yet so I am worried about getting them through the winter.
BTW while reading up on apples today I found out that they have a lot of real health benifits. Since they taste so much better then a lot of things that are not as healthy I think I’m going to be eating more of them. A little knife/cutting device that cores and slices apples makes that process so quick and easy I’m kicking myself that we didn’t buy one years ago. The seeds are mildly poisonous BTW so there is actually a good reason not to eat the core. It would take a lot of the seeds to really do damage but since they don’t taste good I’d just as soon avoid them. The skin on the other hand is good for you and adds fiber (which is apparently a good thing.) I always did like the skin.