Simple question.  What is the McDonalds policy for telling someone at the drive through to pull ahead and wait?

This morning I ordered breakfast (my turn to cook) and with only one car behind me, who order basically the same thing as me, I was told to pull forward and wait.

A minute later the manager came out and brought the food, no one else was in the drive through.

I asked him why I was asked to pull ahead and why the person behind me got their food before me.  He just stood there, no answer.

I am guessing McDonalds has a policy to move cars through the drive through at a specific rate.  Moving a car ahead doesn't count as a wait at the window.  So he pushed me through, gave parts of my order to the car behind me and met his quota (or at least caught up).

Moral of the story, don't ignore your customers and treat them equal. It's McDonalds, and he probably isn't making a lot, but still he shouldn't cheat the numbers at the expense of the customer.

Oh well, I'd love to find out what McDonalds policy is for moving a car to the waiting area.  Anyone ever say no?

Letter to the Industry: “Don’t Print” isn’t “Going Green”

Charlie Corr, Chief Strategist at Mimeo.com published this open letter to the Industry highlighting the “issues” we see with the challenges the printing industry is facing with people not printing things, and somehow thinking that not printing is saving the environment.

Mr. Corr makes some good points about paper in general and it’s environmental impact.  However he fails to address the key fact that technology has replaced the need to print and archive documents.  Especially unimportant documents, such as email or web pages.

Certainly, printing out billing statements, contracts and other important documents aren’t in question (well, maybe billing statements) but the generation of workers who’s first reaction to email is to print it out needs to change.

He also doesn’t address the cost and labor associated with the safe and secure storage of the billions of pieces of paper printed each year.  In industries link insurance and health care, there are many reasons other then the environment to reduce the amount of paper printed.

Overall, the challenge the printing industry is facing is self induced.  The industry predicted such a dramatic growth of printed pages due to digital print technologies.  However, they failed to see the convenience factor of not having to print or carry around printed materials with the adoption of PDA’s, cell phones and ipods.  it wasn’t the environmental movement that caused the printing industry its problems, it was the failure of the printing industry to adapt to the changing market and the adaption of non-printing technologies, such as the internet and email, text-messages, instant messages and blogs.

Let’s face it, I could have written this blog post out on a piece of paper, using a ballpoint pen, then had someone type it, then send it off to a printer to be typeset once again, then proofs made, approved, plates made, printed 10,000 copies (to get the cheapest price / piece) and then mailed it out or stood on a street corner somewhere and handed them out.  But I didn’t.  Why? because this post cost me nothing but my time.

Paper isn’t going away, but the use of paper, especially in printing and distributing a message is changing dramatically.

So, please for Mr. Corr and the entire print industry, please print this post.  Ironically, Mr. Corr could have printed and mailed out his article as well, yet he choose to use the “new” technologies to get his message out. 

FYI, I have made it easy for you to print this, at the bottom of this post, you will find a “Printer Friendly” link to format this page for printing. Oh the irony…

The Pilot (a fellow Purdue Grad) is a true American Hero.  He was unbelievably calm and collected and the fact he landed the plane squarely and smoothly in the Hudson is amazing. 

If you have ever been to NYC and specifically the Intrepid, where he landed the plane near, and look across the river, you know how narrow it is there.  Plus landing between the bridges and not hitting any ferries or ships.  Absolutely amazing.

A true American Hero, along with the entire crew of Flight 1549.

These are the new glasses I got.  After almost seven years with my current pair, I decided do buy two new pair.  The one one the left is an invisible type metal frame and the one on the right is a black plastic frame.  I like the invisible one better for everyday use, but the plastic frame is nice to use when I need to focus on a task and get things done.  Sounds strange but it seems to work for me.

XML Notepad 2007 is now my favorite XML editor.  This thing is so simple but so cool.  Makes editing and viewing the hierarchy  of an XML file so easy.

Even has find and replace, full namespace support, and even XML Diff support.

The killer feature, if anyone has used Visual Studio…  Intellisense based on expected elements and attributes.  No more guessing the required schema, it enforces it.

I’ve thrown some large XML files at it and it loads in seconds.  This is cool!

Best of all, its free. So if you work with XML, go download this now!