Archive for October, 2006

10-06-2006

Bizarre McDonald’s Rebuilding Strategy

After reading Fast Food Nation and watching Supersize Me, I’m no big fan of the fast food industry. Lately, I’ve noticed a new trend that bugs me. McDonald’s is tearing down what apprear to be perfectly good buildings and then rebuilding new ones in their place. I’ve seen this happen to two Austin locations recently and my mom mentioned that the same thing was being done in Gallup, New Mexico while she was there visiting.

I did some research today and found that it’s happening all over the place. It’s apparently a corporate strategy that’s even losing them some franchisees. To me, it seems like a waste of resources and a bad environmental move to completely demolish and rebuild a strcture that’s solidly built and only 20 years old. Why not let the buildings learn?

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Posted by Matt in Austin, business | 1 Comment »

10-02-2006

Excellent Freeware Text Editor for Windows

I’ve been using the Windows text editor NoteTab Light for years and I’ve always been impressed by its feature set. It’s one of the few programs that when I start to think, “I wonder if it does X?” it usually has the feature I’m looking for. However, there are a few features missing from the free version that I’ve been wanting more and more lately, namely: line numbering, search and replace in files, and multi-level undo. You can get those features in the shareware versions, but I prefer to stick with freeware when I can.

On that note, I ran across an article on DonationCoder.com recently comparing various freeware and shareware text editors. I happened to be on the lookout for a tool capable of doing multi-file search and replace and the review highlighted that feature of PSPad. I gave it a try and it is one of the best tools I’ve seen for text replacement in multiple files (and I’ve looked at quite a few). And that’s just one of its many features.

PSPad also does what I was looking for in the shareware versions of NoteTab: multi-level undo and line numbering. Plus, it has many of the features of NoteTab Light that I’ve come to expect in a text editor: sorting, word count, tabbed interface, extensive documentation, and regular expression support.

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Posted by Matt in tech, writing | No Comments »