Kiger's Notebook

Black Friday starts in a big way @ Toys R Us

"The things we do for our kids."

That sentiment from Mary Rydman, who was about 10 or 15 people back in the line in front of Toys 'R' Us at midnight, was echoed by most of the estimated 300 people shivering in the cold early morning air behind her.

When Chris Jessen, the manager of Toys 'R' Us, opened the doors the line of bargin hunters streamed from the store all the way to the stop sign by Arby's and around the corner toward McDonald's.

Black Friday shopping was officially underway in Rochester.

Josh Clappier of Rochester was the first shopper through the doors. He'd arrived in the toy store parking lot about 8 p.m.

And what brought him to a dark lot parking at a time when many people were still washing Thanksgiving dishes?

The North Pole Radio Control Train set. From midnight to 1 a.m., it was selling for $29.99 compared to the usual $49.99.

Many others in the front of the line, like Rydman, were there for this year's Christmas toy craze, Zhu Zhu Pet Hamsters. The first 100 people in line who wanted the little robotic critter were given vouchers to make sure they got one.

After waiting in the cold for two or three hours, many of the early Black Friday zealots had changed their minds about what they wanted most. They still wanted gifts like thre Three Musketeer Barbie or iPods, but something else has become more urgent.

A bathroom.

For Toys 'R' Us manager Jessen who was playing ring master and line monitor, the whole experience was educational.

The line of shoppers erupted in laughter when he jokingly announced, "I've decided that when I retire, I will never go out shopping this early."

Chinese food cooking again in Stewartville

Jacky Dong is extending the reach of his Chinese food beyond Rochester with a planned opening of a third restaurant.

Dong, who with his family owns Hunan Garden and Kingdom Buffet in Rochester, is gearing up to open New Hunan in Stewartville. He hopes to open the doors at 106 First St. by mid-December.

“We have a lot of customers from Stewartville. They talked to me and asked me for it,” he says.

The Stewartville eatery will offer take-out and dine-in service from the same menu as Hunan Garden. He expects to have about four people on staff to start.

The deal was brokered by Darci Fenske of Paramark Real Estate.

The work in Stewartville follows a renovation project earlier this month in Rochester that added windows to the exterior wall of the 26-year-old Hunan Garden in the Northgate Shopping Center, 1120 Seventh St. N.W.

“Customers are coming in and saying it looks totally different. It is a lot brighter in there now,” Dong says.

He plans to also replace the carpet and tile in that restaurant in the spring.

Home Fed Bank sells building, keeps branch

Home Federal Bank sold its building at 3900 55th St. N.W., which houses one of its branches.

Les Nelson of Clear Lake, Iowa, who owns many commercial buildings in the Med City, bought it for more than $2 million in mid-October.Home Federal built the 9,800-square-foot building in 2002.

The bank branch will remain open and will lease 700-square-feet of space from Nelson.

A U.S Veterans Administration clinic leases the rest of the building.

“We’re looking for efficiencies, and it had become more challenging to find tenants,” says bank president Brad Krehbiel. “This was a timely opportunity. We were made a fair offer.”A staff of about five work in the 55th Street branch.

Miracle Mile store closing/ closed?

Word is that a store in Rochester's Miracle Mile Shopping Center is going or has gone out of business.

I'm checking on this one.

What are your Black Friday shopping tips?

As usual, I'm looking for help.

I'd love to hear your Black Friday shopping tips.

"I don't shop on Black Friday. I stay home and sleep" does not count as a "tip." I know you people. Heh.

I'm looking for advice from the strategic, serious shoppers out there.

How do you deal with the crowds, lines and general chaos to get great deals and maybe even the free stuff being handed out for the first people in line.

I am planning on compiling this for print. If you want to give your name, I'll say where the sage shopping advice came from.Thanks for any help you might be able to give me.

You can post the tips as a comment here or e-mail me at jkiger@postbulletin.com. If Twitter is your thing, my Twitter account is @whereskiger.

Big money biotech guru to speak @ RAEDI meeting

This is interesting (to me, anyway).

G. Steven Burrill, one of the top biotechnology evangelists in the U.S. and a backer of the Elk Run bio park by Pine Island, is headlining the annual meeting of the Rochester Area Economic Development entity.

The event is Feb. 12, 2010 at the Rochester International Event Center. Here's some from an editorial by Burrill that I read in the Nov. 1 issue of the Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News:

There are 328 biotechs that are publicly traded on major U.S. markets (down 7.8% year-to-date), and at the end of September the group of public biotech companies had an aggregate market cap of $352 billion (up 10.4% for the quarter).

In addition, there are 51 companies that have market caps greater than $1 billion (up 4% year-to-date); 36 companies that have market caps between $500 and $999 million (up 38% year-to-date); and 136 public biotech companies (41%) that have a market cap below $100 million.

While the data is encouraging, we don’t yet believe biotech is fully back on track, as many companies are still struggling to find the necessary funding to maintain their operations.

Almost half of U.S. public biotechs have market caps below $100 million and we are seeing companies still consistently turning off their lights for the last time.

It is important to remind ourselves that the biotech industry is undergoing a major transition, a process that will likely continue for at least another two quarters.

This is because we do not yet know how President Obama’s proposal for healthcare reform will fully impact the biotechnology industry, and the status of biosimiliars legislation (follow-on biologics) is also still unresolved.

There are fears that these issues will drive the prices of innovative drugs lower and eat away at biotech company profits. Despite the market uncertainties, we will likely see the industry build on the momentum it has gained over the past several months.

Downtown university housing project back in mix

Here's some from my piece on the revived university housing/ mixed use complex slated to be built in the 300 block of First Avenue Southwest. The full piece is at http://www.postbulletin.com/newsmanager/templates/localnews_story.asp?z=2&a=425653:

A proposed university housing project slated for downtown Rochester is back in gear after it was first proposed about two years ago.

Monday night, the Rochester City Council amended the development and purchase agreements it had previously made with the local developer.

The development agreement was first approved by the council back in July 2007.

“We’ve been making pretty significant progress lately,” said Rochester developer and architect Hal Henderson, of the delay caused by the economic downturn.

GH Holdings, led by Henderson and Grant Michalitz, is developing the mixed-used building with nine floors as well as an underground level in the 300 block of First Avenue Southwest.

The University of Minnesota Rochester has committed to leasing space in the GH Holdings building for classrooms, student life areas and reserving a number of the apartments. Final details in the lease need to be completed with UMR, such as how many apartments it needs, before GH can get its financing started, Henderson said.

Portions of the project have changed since the original plans for the building were drawn up in March 2007 and the city approved a tax-increment financing district.

Evidence of Walgreens impending opening in Roch.

Well, following my highly attuned instincts and heightened journalistic senses, I dug up the fact that Rochester's new Walgreens drug store along south Broadway is slated to open at 8 a.m.Thursday.

Uh…OK… I just read comments made by readers on this blog and read the big, flashing sign with red lights in front of the shiny new store.

Anyway, many people seem giddy about this, while others see it just as another retail opening. However, any openings these days are notable

Action in Dodge Center

A new antique and gift shop — Cottage Treasures — opened its doors in Dodge Center about a week ago.

This makes the third business for owners Theresa and Lyle Hoaglund. They already own Center Auto, which is in the same building that houses Cottage Treasures, and Mantorville Gifts in Mantorville.Expect a selection of antiques, cards, crafts and gifts in the store at 210 Highway Street West similar to that in Mantorville Gifts.

It is across the street from where a new Subway restaurant is preparing to open.Beside enjoying working with people, Lyle Hoaglund says this store made sense for many reasons.

“The space was available. A tenant (Ed’s Auto Repair) moved out of this building,” he said. “We had plenty of inventory. So we decided to remodel a bit and open a shop.

”Right now the Hoaglunds are staffing the store as well as Center Auto, but Lyle says they may add an employee or two in the future.

Cray's Jaguar tops IBM's Roadrunner as fast computer in world

IBM's Roadrunner is no longer the fastest computer in the world.Cray's Jaguar has pulled off a stunning victory, kind of like Wile E. Coyote catching that other roadrunner.

Here's some from the announcement by the bi-annual Top500 Conference. I should have more on this later:

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In its third run to knock the IBM supercomputer nicknamed “Roadrunner” off the top perch on the TOP500 list of supercomputers, the Cray XT5 supercomputer known as Jaguar finally claimed the top spot on the 34th edition of the closely watched list.

The newest version of the TOP500 list, which is issued twice yearly, will be formally presented on Tuesday, Nov. 17, at the SC09 Conference to be held at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland.

Jaguar, which is located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and was upgraded earlier this year, posted a 1.75 petaflop/s performance speed running the Linpack benchmark.

When the Roadrunner system at Los Alamos first appeared at the top of the June 2008 TOP500 list, it was the world’s first petaflop/s supercomputer. This time around, Roadrunner recorded a performance of 1.04 petaflops, dropping from 1.105 petaflop/s in June 2009 due to a repartitioning of the system.

Kraken, another upgraded Cray XT5 system at the National Institute for Computational Sciences/University of Tennessee, claimed the No. 3 position with a performance of 832 teraflop/s (trillions of calculations per second).

At No. 4 is the most powerful system outside the U.S. -- an IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer located at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) in Germany. It achieved 825.5 teraflop/s on the Linpack benchmark and was No. 3 in June 2009.

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• IBM and Hewlett-Packard continue to sell the bulk of systems at all performance levels of the TOP500. HP kept a narrow lead in systems with 210 systems (42 percent) over IBM with 186 systems (37.2 percent). HP had 212 systems (42.4 percent) six months ago, compared to IBM with 188 systems (37.6 percent). In the system category, Cray, SGI, and Dell follow with 3.8 percent, 3.8 percent and 3.2 percent respectively.
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• IBM remains the clear leader in the TOP500 list in performance with 35.1 percent of installed total performance (down from 39.4 percent), compared to HP with 23.0 percent (down from 25.1 percent). In the performance category, the manufacturers with more than 5 percent are: Cray (15.9 percent of performance) and SGI (6.6 percent), each of which benefits from large systems in the TOP10.