All this heat here in Vancouver’s got me thinking… what about Japan?

In 2005, The Japanese Ministry of the Environment (MOE) began advocating the Cool Biz campaign as a means to help reduce electric consumption by limiting use of air conditioning. According to the Environment Ministry, central government ministries were to set air conditioner temperatures at 28°C until September… (more at Wikipedia, HERE.)

People in Japan were encouraged to wear moisture absorbent clothing and sweat it out!

Fast forward to 2009, someone’s figured out that there’s something really wrong with this. (Other than the stench of dead animal emanating from good ole Watanabe-san in the cubicle next door.)

From Terrie’s Take #527:

-> ‘Cool Biz’ hurts economy

A former economist for the Dai-ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo, fed up with having to work in an office whose air conditioning was set to a sweltering 28 degrees per the Cool Biz guidelines, has found that the high temperature in offices rather than helping the economy, is actually hurting it. The researcher found that high office temperatures are reducing office worker productivity nationally by about JPY653bn (US$6.9bn) a year, or 0.13% of the nation’s GDP. According to the researcher, the ideal temperature to save energy and yet suit the wearing of cool biz-type clothing, and which is used by the United Nations, is around 25 degrees. The researcher discovered that for each degree the air conditioning is set above 25, worker productivity drops by 1.9%. ***Ed: Cool biz ain’t so cool after all.** (Source: TT commentary from bloomberg.com, Jul 23, 2009)

Here’s the LINK to the full story and don’t forget to check out Terrie Lloyd, HERE. Oh yea, and stay thirsty, my friends.

Want free business advice? Listen to your customers! – or at least that’s what Richard Branson says.

Wish Nokia had done the same in the release of their most recent E-Series flagship, after all, isn’t the E-Series set of phones supposed to be made for efficiency? They did drop the ‘enterprise’ label for ‘efficiency’ recently but with the E75, they fall squarely on their face.

So, I’m three phones in now… the first E75 was smashed in frustration, the second and third, gifts from contacts that live in the dark underworld of mobile phones. Third time’s a charm, right? Well, I’ve certainly learned to cope, that’s for sure. (more after the jump)
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Man! What a conundrum! The other day I powered down my laptop (Windows 7 installed) in frustration and boom, upon rebooting, the poor thing decided that it needed to run chkdsk to fix parts of the hard drive.

Well, I guess the worst part is that a recent software package (in this case, likely a Windows update) seemed to be interfering with the install, so I got the following message:

Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is NTFS
Volume label is OS.

One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. You may cancel the disk check, but it is strongly reccomended that you continue.
Windows will now check the disk.
Cannot open volume for direct access.
Autochk cannot run due to an error caused by a recently installed software package.
Use the system restore feature from the control panel to restore the system to a point prior to the recent software package installation.
An unspecified error occurred (766f6c756d652e63 3f1)

SO… I tried using system restore but sadly it wouldn’t run due to a corrupt disk, so I was trapped in a circular issue.

At this point, I figured my options were limited – recover data off the hdd and reformat and/or try to use an offline version of chkdsk. I chose the later, since it presented the best opportunity for getting back to work.

RESOLUTION: I insterted the Windows 7 installation DVD and booted from it. Went through the repair system motions, opened up a command prompt and ran:

chkdsk /f /r c:

Five hours later (yup – a super slow process), the chkdsk completed and Windows was stable again. After that, I removed some of the most recent packages on the computer with system restore (just to be safe) and voila, I was back at it.