Santa Maria Rio Grande Salsa is currently my favorite TexMex salsa available in Sweden. It’s far superior to other TexMex reddish sauces you can buy here. And we have been buying it since we first found it a couple of years ago. But to my horror (relatively speaking), a few weeks back when I went shopping I could not find it in any of the stores where I usually go. I even asked shop attendants about it, and nobody knew.
So I finally sent an email to Santa Maria customer services asking about what happened, if the product was out of production. Turned out it was not. The nice person I was in contact with actually checked with their sales team for Uppsala to see what was going on. Impressive. Even more impressive was that she actually phoned me up to tell me where I could buy it — turned out that the cheapskates at Ica Kvantum did not carry it anymore since it was not selling well enough. But Coop Forum still does. Thanks! And thanks to Santa Maria for an unusually efficient and good customer service.
By the way, Santa Maria is (absurdly enough for a company from nowhere near Mexico or Texas) the world’s biggest exporter of TexMex foods. Or so I heard in some report a while ago, cannot find concrete confirmation of this right now.
Now the ESC SV 2008 is over. I really enjoyed going to the show this year, and presenting on simulation for embedded systems. The topic has to be heating up, I had some fifty people listen to the talk, which is really very good. Hope that they learnt how to build good transaction-level hardware models, and have some idea on how to apply this to their own projects. Hopefully, I can come back next year for the ESC 2009 (update: this did not happen) and do it again (even though 
I am sitting at the Hyatt close to SFO writing this, hoping that my flight home will work today. I was booked on a Lufthansa flight to München yesterday which was cancelled. And the next available flight was the very same flight today. It is the late evening flight out of SFO to München, which I used since it gives a full day of work over here in the Silicon Valley without an extra hotel night. The obvious disadvantage is the lack of later backup flights in case something goes wrong. So here I am, at least 24 hours delayed. At least they put me up in a nice hotel, but only 30 USD as food compensation does go overly far here in airport land. Visited the Burlingame area, small bonus. Well, at least it is not as bad as the story 
… “there is no better way to fly”. Yes there is, and it is called actually flying and not canceling.
Power.org publishes a quarterly newsletter over at 
There was an interesting little note at the 
I have 
In the book “
Sun buys Montalvo
Sun just bought Montalvo whose hardware I blogged about some while ago. And just like the Apple acquisition of PA Semi, the question of “why” appears. Some analysts blame the simple fact that both Montalvo and PA Semi simply needed to be acquired, since their venture capitalists did not want to put in the next 100 million USD needed to go to silicon (Montalvo) or really expand on the opportunity already at hand (PA Semi). Here is my crazy guess.
Read More →