I’ve been very busy this week helping my friend Will get his brand-spanking-new WillYaki mobile eatery business on the road. It’s come a long way since those days when we used to sell octopus balls from a cardboard stall outside the union, using a borrowed BBQ set.

There’s now two sides to the business: preparation of sushi / Japanese lunch boxes for sale in the university shop, and the WillYaki trailer, making octopus balls and so forth every day on Portobello Street.

The official opening

The logistics involved with getting that trailer to-and-from the trading site are pretty complex. In order for the business to work efficiently we need to be able to make this a one-man-job, but it weighs an absolute ton, and maneuvering in has proved to be quite tricky. It’s been a fabulous process of Kaizen (continuous improvement), as day by day we think of little adjustments that can be made to the process to make it a bit more manageable. Things like parking it at a certain angle to help with hitching up in the morning, using a car jack to support it when trying to swing the jockey wheel around so that it doesn’t hit the road when driving, moving it very early in the morning to avoid the wear on the clutch that would incurred after 8am!

It’s the same inside the trailer as well. What system works best for taking orders? How can preparation time be minimised, and health and hygiene issues be effectively addressed? It’s great fun experimenting in real life with systems that I’ve been studying in the classroom.

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Time. Where does it go?

Ah, yes, it goes into painting oneself white for a halloween parties. Here’s some of the other costumes.

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Macbreak – those who have a life, switch off now.

So, I finally got my mac back. I received a call 20 minutes before the store closed Sunday. You should have seen me run after that tram (I missed it, and caught a taxi. When I arrived at the Apple Store the doors were locked. I begged through the glass, they let me in).

It’s had over £530 pounds worth of work done on it, including a new optical drive, new keyboard, new screen, new OS, double the amount of RAM it had before, two new application suites.

Good thing was, I had to pay for very little of that. Hurrah for Apple Care!

I tell you what, it’s like having a new computer. It is soooooooooo fast. OK, so the RAM upgrade would have helped, but I think Leopard has a big part to play in it. You should see the speed with which it deals with Dreamweaver and Photoshop, unreal. I love it.

Of course, being an early adopter there’s a few issues (Like Skype only starting up once. A computer restart or Skype re-installation is required if you wish to open the app again!). Super Duper is not yet supported. LightRoom has limited functionality.

But overall, it’s a real case of WOWness. Spotlight is actually useable now, as is the finder, a big improvement although I wish they’d included a Pathfinder-esque drop-stack.

The word on the street is we won’t really appreciate just what a revolution Leopard is until next year when 3rd party developers have got to grips with Core animation, and the technology that makes Time Machine possible.

So, it’s exciting stuff! There never was a better time to buy a Mac!