Archive for January, 2010

Fresh and Easy – Oh it is!

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

So I have been hearing tons of commercials for Fresh and Easy and have been wanting to go for a while now. Well today I took it upon myself to go and have a look for myself what this store is about. I have to say that I really like the pre-packaged, just warm to eat deal they have with a lot of their food, as well as the vast selection of different foods. It is like bachelor heaven, or lazy guy does not want to cook dinner heaven. Me being the lazy guy of course…

Anyway so I purchased some random things I would like, such as Sweet & Sour Chicken with Rice, Fried Chicken Strips and others. The average cost per meal is between $3 and $4, which beats the hell out of my $10 lunch at Main Street Cafe (even though I love that Almond Chicken Wrap). So tomorrow I will be doing a taste-test on the Sweet & Sour Chicken and reporting back my experience. Oh and since it is a controlled portion, what you see is what you get, it is probably better for you because I could go and get a rice bowl from Flame Broiler which baseline has higher, worse for you, nutrition facts and add on top of that a shit load more sodium because I love their secret sauce.

So I am pretty excited to try this out. If it is good, I am sure I will be stocking up on this food for lunch, price-point wise it is half the cost of my normal lunch everyday, when I go out.

UPDATE (01-27-2010 9:58PM): I did not get a chance to try out the Sweet & Sour Chicken dish because we opted for trying out the hamburger meat with bacon bits and cheese inlaid. I have to say the color was a bit disturbing, a tinge of orange before cooking and a little yellow looking after cooking, but it was pretty good. I am shooting for tomorrow to try the chicken.

UPDATE (01-29-2010 3:38PM): So last night I was able to eat the dish and I think it was pretty good. There is actually a lean cuisine of the same name, and it is pretty much the same thing, but a this one from Fresh and Easy has a much better portion size; meaning I do not have to eat anything else and basically waste the whole point of eating the lean cuisine. I am sure I will be going back to try out their other meals.

Migration Complete, Now Feature Adding

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

So after weeks of test migrations, data integrity checks, and end-users testing functionality we finally went live with SugarCRM, replacing the Goldmine database the company was using for 9 years. Each time we did a test migration something changed drastically adding a bit more time to the actual conversion. It was riding right around 4 hours, not bad, but that decided to change on me at the last second. On the live migration everything decided to break, even though I had done it the same way four times before. It took me about 12 hours of my time last weekend to make it happen for the Monday launch. After stressing and getting some grey hair I fixed everything and got it done.

This week has been crazy though, because there were a lot of things the end-users did not catch the first couple times around, so we had to be creative to fix the import issues. In the end, everyone is fairly happy with the transition, though I have about 10 feature requests pending. At least that means I have work to do! Heh.

It was definitely a cool experience. It feels good to be congratulated by the owners when they were skeptical about the migration. I have learned a lot about how SugarCRM works, so that is great. I have learned to love portions of it, and hate others, which is a big change from hating it altogether.

Anyway, more work to do!

Happy (Late) New Year!

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

I was blessed with a fever for 3 days in a row, starting last Wednesday, so my New Year partying consisted of sleeping. I am glad that being sick did not go past a fever and bronchial cough, you know, no flu, threw up enough after partying too hard on my wedding day. ;) As of last night the fever finally passed after a grip of Tylenol, lots of water, and cough syrup. I am glad Cindy was here though, she took care of me like crazy, so that is awesome! Unfortunately, I missed out on a great deal of fun, so I heard. I guess I will just have to make up for it next time.

Now I have to finish up some work that needed to be done a week ago…