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A timeless lesson on how consultants can make a difference for an organization.

Last week, we took some friends out to a new restaurant, and noticed that the waiter who took our order carried a spoon in his shirt pocket. It seemed a little strange.

When the busboy brought our water and utensils, I noticed he also had a spoon in his shirt pocket. Then I looked around saw that all the staff had spoons in their pockets.

When the waiter came back to serve our soup I asked,”Why the spoon?”

“Well,” he explained, “The restaurant’s owners hired Andersen Consulting to revamp all our processes. After several months of analysis, they concluded that the spoon was the most frequently dropped utensil. It represents a drop frequency of approximately 3 spoons per table per hour. If our personnel are better prepared, we can reduce the number of trips back to the kitchen and save 15 man-hours per shift.”

As luck would have it, I dropped my spoon and he was able to replace it with his spare.

“I’ll get another spoon next time I go to the kitchen instead of making an extra trip to get it right now.”

I was impressed. I also noticed that there was a string hanging out of the waiter’s fly. Looking around, I noticed that all the waiters had the same string hanging from their flies.

So before he walked off, I asked the waiter, “Excuse me, but can you tell me why you have that string right there?”

“Oh, yes!” Then he lowered his voice. “Not everyone is so observant. That consulting firm I mentioned also found out that we can save time in the restroom. By tying this string to the tip of you know what, we can pull it out without touching it and eliminate the need to wash our hands, shortening the time spent in the restroom by 76.39 percent.”

“After you get it out, how do you put it back?”

“Well,” he whispered, “I don’t know about the others, but I use the spoon.”

As the title of the post says, I had to recently address an incident whereby somebody had accidentally deleted files permanently by mistake from her computer. And by her and somebody I mean Rozanna. Her Recycle Bin was full and in the process of “cleaning up” her My Pictures folder had by mistake sent over 3894 photos into the greatest depths of hell.

If WinXP calculates that your Recycle Bin would be more than full after deleting the said files/folders, a popup will emerge asking for permission for the files to be permanently deleted. Thing is, the warning looks just about the same as any other irritating WinXP popup. Go figure. There is also the innocent Shift-Del which also bypasses the Recycle Bin in addition to deleting files via the Command Prompt (typing cmd on Start > Run).

Sacrificing watching a beautiful 0-2 win by United over Newcastle at St. James’ Park, I offer you two solutions should you ever encounter this problem. The number one rule of thumb though, is to NOT DO ANYTHING i.e. rebooting your computer, defrag.

First up is Restoration ver 2.5.14 at time of writing. Its small, unobtrusive and can be run from a USB key independantly. Its only 4 files in size and can be found here. Additional great utility freeware can be found here. Restoration works exactly the way it says on the tin and I can testify to it functioning the way it should. As an added bonus you can even ensure that the deleted files are irrecoverable – perfect for covering up confidential or embarassing documents/files. My only grouse is that there is no way to Shift-Select a range of files or even Ctrl-A select a selection for reversing the delete function. Restoring files is a one-by-one file-by-file affair; perhaps an apt reminder to not be careless in the future.

Because restoring 3000+ files this way was NOT AT ALL practical, I managed to find another freeware solution which is PC Inspector File Recovery 4.0 which can be downloaded from here. Its bigger than Restoration as it requires itself to be installed beforehand, but it works like a charm. You can browse entire directory trees and files that are deleted and you can restore them to a different drive or location according to your choice. It’s not as intuitive to use than Restoration but IMHO its the perfect solution for cases of accidental multiple file deleting.

Both programs get my 5/5 stars.

Random photos to look at when you’re bored

Flickr – Photos of anything and everything. Limited only by how many tag names you can come up with.

FoundPhotos – This guy was bored enough to post pictures found on p2p networks, not only that, he even had the time to filter them, sigh…

Google Images – Search away, it’s fun, really.

Howdy ho… welcome to the blog where postings are sporadic and the content is dull. What fun eh ?

I just found out my hols are a week longer than I thought. Which translates into me feeling more annoyed that I have to try harder to keep the boredom at bay before I crack. I envy you people sometimes, having such a zest for life, a drive and purpose that I will never understand let alone emulate. How do you do it ? Living so purposefully and finding meaning in the things you do. I know I should turn down a notch on the whole ‘I don’t care’ theme but alas, that is not to be. So here I am wondering how I’m gonna survive some 6 weeks of uninhibited boredom.

My closest friends are all dating, which doesn’t really help with the situation. It was suggested that I get a girlfriend. Those closest to me would probably find this amusing, and those who know of my history of rather immature relationships would probably have better advice to give me. It’s a shame really, me carrying around all the unnecessary baggage but what am I to do, the future is too far away and the present doesn’t last quite long enough, so I make do with the past.

6 more weeks… maybe I’ll lighten the blog up with a movie review or two, hehe. Yes I can hear you groaning about it already. I’ve already resorted to watching rather silly movies like Lilo & Stitch 2. Maybe there’s a quality movie to be found in the huge stack of DVDs that now litter the floor downstairs. And now that the school holidays are over ( not completely sure, would help if someone could confirm it ) , the malls should be safe enough from large crowds to be a little more appealing.

Oh, one last thing, you know that song they play during the digi powerpack ad in cinemas ? I still can’t find out the title/author, maybe one of you might be able to help. Think I like the song cause of lyrics like ‘hopelessly’ and ‘lost’, typical me no ?

Another day, another few movies.

Ah Sou – Ok ok movie. Could use with more character development, but then again the movie was already pretty slow. Would’ve like it if it were longer, ending was a bit rushed. More of a pak tuo movie than a gangster movie.

Stealth – Umm… your average action movie, but this one with planes flying about. Only thing I didn’t like was how quick it was to bring EDI back to the good side. Suspense would’ve greater if EDI had a nuke or something, instead we had to be content with them saving the cun babe who was something like 5 miles from the border.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Family movie. One thing was annoying tho… you get people in the cinema randomly laughing at the er.. oompa-loompas, not really sure if they got the humour behind the lyrics of the songs. Will need to read the book, I’m pretty sure that’s more enjoyable.

Running out of movies to watch now. Not good.

Weather is good today. Nice and cloudy, plus it’s a Sunday, so everything has that subdued feeling. Makes you just wanna sit there and stare into space.

What to do, what to do ? Reading The Brothers’ War for the Nth time. Or maybe I should practice a bit of dota, so I won’t be such a burden to my team mates next time. I’m getting too used to waking up to an empty house, walking to ABC, coming back still wondering what the hell to do with the rest of the day. Someday I’m gonna cross the line and actually look foward and consciously make an effort to be alone.

Feeling extra lazy today, don’t know how that’s possible.

Everyday’s a Sunday. Heh.

Everybody seems to be busy these days. We don’t hang out as much as before. Can’t blame them really, they have their lives, plus everybody’s working now. It’s a shame really, my life here isn’t that much different from when I was in UK. I’m not complaining, life back here is definitely better than back there. It’s just that I was expecting more…

Anyway, I’ll now bore you with the list of what I have been doing for the past 3 weeks since I got back.

I’ve watched :-

I think our thoughts are capable of crossing the time-space barrier. Assuming thoughts as some from of energy, we release it everytime we think of something. And what better why to pick it all up than with your own brain ? Since our own brain will probably resonate best with itself. And what better time to pick up the thoughts than while we sleep ? Since that’s when the brain has the least distractions. So that’s why I think we sometimes get deja vu and dream of future events.

Post was inspired after watching Taken non-stop last week and me having deja vu constantly while I was at Pulau Redang.

When you are counting objects, you go “0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D…”.

When asked about a bus schedule, you wonder if it is 16 or 32 bits.

When your wife says “If you don’t turn off that darn machine and come to bed,then I am going to divorce you!”, and you chastise her for for omitting the else clause.

When you are reading a book and look for the space bar to get to the next page.

When you look for your car keys using: “grep keys /dev/pockets”

When after fooling around all day with routers etc, you pick up the phone and start dialing an IP number.

When you get in the elevator and double-press the button for the floor you want.

When not only do you check your email more often than your paper mail, but you remember your {network address} faster than your postal one.

When you go to balance your checkbook and discover that you’re doing the math in octal.

When you dream in 256 pallettes of 256 colors.

via digg.com

Its here! Winning Eleven 9 is released today as of 4.8.2005

SUBARASHI SPEEEEDDDOOOOO… SHOOTTTOOOOO… KEEPA KACHI KACHI!