Kind of a duh article about how difficult packaging is to open, but perhaps a small element of zeitgeist.

Mona Doyle recently filmed people attempting to open bags of pre-cut lettuce. The tape plays like a bit from the television show “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Everybody uses force and torque that would otherwise be reserved for the gym. Either the bag opens suddenly and sprays lettuce all over the floor, or defeat is conceded and scissors or knives are employed.

When Doyle, whose Philadelphia company does research about food and beverage packaging, showed the tape to an audience of produce packers, they chuckled. But Doyle says that belligerent packaging is making consumers spitting mad. They use words “hate” and “difficult” to describe products that seem to be welded shut.

…

Doyle has no solid statistics on injuries caused by our hassles with packaging, but they do exist in England. One study there shows that ‘wrap rage,’ as it is called by the Brits, has been the cause of more than 60,000 injuries. These often occur when consumers resort to knives and scissors to deal with stubborn packages, according to a 2003 report in the Daily Telegraph.

(That said, here’s a paradox: Hard-to-open bags don’t seem to be stopping us from buying pre-cut lettuce, considered the biggest marketing phenomenon in the history of produce. Sales of the convenience item are soaring. The Produce Marketing Association reports that sales hit $2.6 billion in 1994, then $8.8 billion in 2003. The numbers are expected to zip up to $10.5 billion in 2005. Obviously, cutting our own lettuce into bite-size pieces irritates us even more than cutting open a bag.)

Doyle says American consumers’ demands for ease and convenience have evolved over decades and, once given an easier way, we demand even easier ways. In plain language, we are spoiled.

The about, with & for conference website is was up.

Now in it’s fourth year, AWF is a collaborative forum offered by the graduate students of the Institute of Design to address issues within design research. It is targeted at professionals and academics who develop ideas based on insights into people’s behaviors, perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes. Within this forum, we explore a range of methods to uncover insights and translate them into meaningful systems, products, organizations, services and communications.

This cracks me up in a sad way. First, a really cheesy Photoshop job with the fake arm and the tilted head. Second, it’s totally out of character, turning Chewbacca into Scooby-Doo! Of course there is humor in the Star Wars characters, but this misses the point. It’s off-message, but selling freakin’ breakfast cereal is clearly enough to give them license (literally) to do whatever they want.

Of course, they already had the Darth Tater Mr. Potato Head and the M&M so maybe this is no worse. Just sad to look at during breakfast every day.

As part of a unique partnership, AIGA SF and Apple Computer, Inc. have teamed up to give AIGA members the opportunity to show the business community the power of graphic design.
JULY 20: STONE YAMASHITA PARTNERS

I’m way interested in SYP and what they are about, so I’ll be heading to this. Anyone else?

Sex-Lexis (great name – assuming you get the reference to Lexis-Nexis) is a dictionary of sexual terms. The link above is to the page C – hilarious just to see the list of terms they recognize.

Back in my younger days of television watching, this was Richard Hatch on Battlestar Galactica.

But now this is who they mean by Richard Hatch.

And this is what they mean by Battlestar Galactica.

I’m sure there’s something clever and French I could cite here (la plus ca change, etc.). Isn’t cultural reverse engineering a lonely game?

(see similar recycling icons as well as what they mean here)

My hair gel comes in a plastic container that doesn’t have any such logo; rather it has a circle with the letters PET in it. For some reason, they aren’t using the standard symbols, and so I really don’t know if I can recycle it. Beauty product/consumer product companies are usually pretty responsive, so I sent an email describing the logo on the package, and the logos that I expect to find, and my concern about being able to recycle their product.

Here’s what they sent back

Thank you for visiting Garnier on the Web.

We do not have prepared information to send you in answer to your specific questions.

We want to assure you that we are committed to the protection and respect of the environment. If you are interested in learning about the significant efforts made by our company, we invite you to consult our website at www.loreal.com. You will find details on our environmental policy under About L’Oreal. The “loreal.com” website is the corporate site of the L’Oreal group of companies worldwide.

I was honestly expecting some info that I could use. Does anyone know the PET-in-a-circle icon? I don’t want to assume and ruin the batch or whatever happens if you send something non-recyclable through the system (and gee aren’t there a lot of mythologies and confused perceptions around what actually happens to stuff we put in the recycling boxes?).

Ah well.

Recent search engine queries leading people to AllThisChiattahChattah

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‘robert Limbrick’
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stan smits pilkington
Cooter is warning Dukes fans to stay away from the new movie, saying it’s sleazy. ”
Peel-O-Matic
“clydesdales across america”
bicycle racers urination
delorean portland
wellsfargo.com/mortgagepay

I received this spam today

From: [email protected]
To: steve@
Subject: Announcing GIANT SQUID world event survey

Hi

Spirit Quest is a collection of professionals who can succeed in surveying the Giant Squid for the very first time alive and in its own natural habitat.

During surveys other unknown creatures and undiscovered artifacts are likely to be found. This will be seen worldwide on sattelite tv.

I seek now museums and supporting parties to join in sponsorship and other ways for this very important set of expeditions.

The advanced subsea vehicles are designed and tested, ready in storage for final fittings and installation.

I propose the procurement of two 24m sailing ships as each expedition is a duration of 7 months at sea without coming to port. Together these vessels will operate silently 24/7 in all weathers and the subsea vehicles will launch to the great depths required. Both ships will be broadcasting live to the internet as well as documenting evidence for later broadcast.

I look forward to your positive involvement and association with this world class event.

All the best

Roy Dymond MD Principle Spirit Quest

Media Partners www.reverieproductions.com

From Cooter’s Place

THE DUKES MOVIE:
DON’T GO UNLESS THEY CLEAN IT UP!

Hey Y’all,

I thought this would be a good time to let everybody know my feelings about the upcoming ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ feature film, since if it weren’t for the ‘Dukes’ fans, our show would have been long since ‘put out to pasture.’ The folks who love our show have kept it alive and well, despite the lack of respect it has been shown by ‘Hollywood.’

Websites like ours have been an extraordinary means of communication for the ‘Dukes’ community. The power of the internet has enabled us to not only keep the show viable, but to help make it a hit show all over again. CMT is getting record ratings and the kids of America think it is a new show. In our business, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Like our fans, those of us who worked on the show have a special affection for it. For over 25 years we have cared about it, nourished it, and fought for it. And it seems to me that it is time for us to have our voices heard again. From all I have seen and heard, the ‘Dukes’ movie is a sleazy insult to all of us who have cared about the ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ for so long.

You probably know that the creators of this film wanted absolutely nothing to do with the original members of the cast. Doesn’t that seem strange to you, given how popular our show is right now, and how popular our cast still is? After all, our huge success for so many years is the reason they are making the film, and the film, after all, is about us.

In the last few years I reckon I’ve done many hundreds of interviews around the country on radio and television and for dozens of newspapers. I always tell them that ours is a classic family show with positive values, great action, wonderful slapstick comedy, mighty fine country music, and a very gifted cast who had great chemistry. America could tell that we were clearly enjoying what we were doing and for that hour folks could forget their troubles and just have fun along with us. It is exactly the kind of entertainment that families crave right now.

Lately most of the interviewers want to know my opinion of the ‘movie’ version that is coming out in August. I’ve always tried to be candid with my opinions, and when it comes to this film, I think it would be a mistake for me to pull the punches. Like you, I haven’t seen the film, but I have read the script, I’ve talked to a lot of people who worked on the set, and I’ve seen the raunchy t.v. commercial. Frankly, I think the whole project shows an arrogant disrespect for our show, for our cast, for America’s families, and for the sensibilities of the heartland of our country.

Unless they clean it up before the August 5th release date I would strongly recommend that true blue Dukes fans hold their noses and pass this one up. And whatever you do, don’t take any youngsters to see it. As plain as I can put it, the only thing this movie shares with our show is the title. Oh, they do have the General Lee flying through the air, although according to the New York Times, they didn’t even use stunt drivers.

Sure it bothers me that they wanted nothing to do with the cast of our show, but what bothers me much more is the profanity laced script with blatant sexual situations that mocks the good clean family values of our series. Now, anybody who knows me knows that I’m not a prude. But this kind of toilet humor has no place in Hazzard County. Rather than honoring our legendary show, they have chosen to degrade it.

When CMT brought our series back on the air in February of this year, 23 million viewers tuned in on that first weekend. Very few, if any, movies have ever matched those kind of numbers for an opening weekend. Our show is a hit right now! Very young children have fallen in love with the ‘Dukes’ on CMT, just as their parents did 25 years ago. They love the positive values of our show, its wholesome friendliness, and the fact that Bo and Luke are heroes who always make the right moral choice. How can the producers of this film be so cynical, so jaded, so out of touch with America’s heartland as to trash a great family show in this way?

Well, there may not be much we can do, but we have to do all we can. Let’s send them a message: ‘If you don’t clean it up, we’re not going to see it.’ Maybe a kick in their pocketbook will get their attention.

Also check out the events

Fri July15 – Sun July 24-Rick Hurst,”Deputy Cletus Hogg” will be appearing at Cooter’s Place in Gatlinburg,Tn.

Sat July 16 – Sun July 17- Ben Jones “Cooter” and Cooter’s Garage Band and the General Lee will be appearing at The Eastern Connecticut Car Show in Norwich, Conn.

Fri July 22 – Ben Jones, “Cooter” and The General Lee and Cooter’s Garage Band will be appearing at Constants Wharf Park in Suffolk,Va.at 6:30pm

Sat July 23 – Ben Jones “Cooter” and The General Lee and Cooter’s Garage Band will be appearing at The Orange County Fair in Orange County,Va at 3pm

Sat July30 – Cooter’s Garage Band will be performing at Pickin’ by the Pond at Toms Creek Farm and Nursery in Farmer, NC. Come see the The General Lee and take a picture with Ben “Cooter” Jones. (The appearance will be in the evening)

And finally

DUKESFEST 2005 LARGEST FAN GATHERING EVER

Hey Y’all! Miss Alma and I owe a humungous “Thank You!!” to everyone who came to DukesFest 2005 and made it the biggest gathering of fans for any television show ever. It was amazing. Some estimates said that about 40,000 folks spent those two hot days in “Hazzard County”. So thanks to everybody who made the trip, and thanks also to the folks who worked to make the event special, to CMT for bringing the show back on and for helping us get the word out about DukesFest, to all our other sponsors, to our vendors, to the crew at Bristol Motor Speedway and Dragway who hosted the event, to the really fine musicians who played, to the amazing stunt drivers, to our great cast, to everyone who brought General Lees and other “Hazzardous” vehicles, and to the Confederate General Lee Fan Club and the Arkansas Special Olympics. And let’s hear it one more time for the Hazzard County Stunt Team. The stunt show was the culmination of months of work from some very dedicated friends of our show from Charlotte, North Carolina.

Above all, the credit belongs to all of you who have kept the “Dukes”, America’s great family show, alive and well for all these years. Y’all are the best.

As you know, when that many folks congregate there are going to be frustrations and inconveniences. For whatever problems there may have been we promise to learn from them and we thank you for your patience. It seems to me that the Good Lord blessed our event as He has blessed our show and for this we are very thankful

What’s wrong with Six Feet Under? In May 2001, Tad Friend had a long article in The New Yorker (not that I can find online anywhere) about the impending premiere of this show. Alan Ball talked about all the typical TV-writing tropes and how they would stay away from them. I’m pretty sure he mentioned the example of an elderly black or Asian man projecting wisdom, and I’m sure there were others. The point of the writing, he stressed, was to move away from that, into something that was not television. That is the HBO slogan, isn’t it?

Now we watch this week’s episode. A separated wife hires a nanny, and emphasizes that she plans for her to carry in the bottles of water. The nanny arrives and instructed by the wife that the bottles are indeed too heavy for her, so if the nanny could please bring them in when they arrive. Naturally, the nanny doesn’t work out, but the estranged husband appears on the doorstep to drop off the kids, and he’s dutifully carrying the bottled water.

We’ve known these supporting characters for several seasons, through the ups and downs of their relationship (mental illness, meddling siblings, financial struggles, infidelity, lying, etc.) and this particular need – the bottled water – has never been mentioned. It was introduced in the episode purely so it could be wrapped up by the end of the episode. Indeed, the need that the bottled water symbolized was pretty much out of left field as well. Now this kind of lame trickery is exactly what Hollywood is good at. Tell you how to feel, set it up, deliver it. Bang, boom, payoff, done.

Hey, elsewhere in the episode a group of grieving/celebrating women chanted anti-men slogans, but then began to sing. One woman began to sing first, in a quavery and not-very-musical voice. But then others picked up the song, and it gathered strength, musically, as more women joined in, their voices joining together in a lovely and uplifting moment. The voices got better, the initially-quavery singer begins a call-and-response, the camera circles around their candle-lit and Womanly Faces as the song grows.

I think there’s nothing more Hollywood-in-the-past-10-years than that scene.

It seems that they created some founding principles, or a mission/values statement, but they chose not to stick to them. They might have done well to have read Built to Last, a now-classic management book that explains how other business efforts stayed successful, and if I recall, that values statement was part of the common thread.

Quote from an article about pressure being placed on Craiglist to restrict pet ads

“Backyard breeding certainly existed long before Craig, but he’s brought down the barrier of entry to where anyone can (advertise) for free, and it’s having tragic results,” said East Bay SPCA spokeswoman Kirsten Park.

It’s interesting that the SPCA, in opposing the actions of Craigslist, chooses to refer to Craig himself, rather than the similarly-named institution he symbolizes. It seems to be a form of rhetoric that doesn’t quite survive the journey from interview to story to reader. Perhaps it’s that insulting formality one may use…If Mr. Newmark feels that he’s doing this community a service…sort of haughty and bitchy?

Craig is often quoted in articles about Craigslist, but in this case, they talked to someone else at the organization, so the only mention of Craig-the-man was the above quote.

Something about this branding/perception/commnication challenge resonated with me, since I offer a professional service that shares my name. Mine is less tangible that Craig’s, so the confusion or blending is probably more common with me. Yeah, Steve Portigal, the guy that started Steve Portigal! Doesn’t happen too often.

I had previously blogged about how a kind soul at AOL saw my frustrations with ending the torrent of antiSpam messages. Today, another kind soul wrote me. They had seen the complaint, they had investigated on their own and thought that things were worked out, but wanted to check back with me.

I’m so pleased when this happens; I imagine for one of these two folks, if not both, handling this problem when I contacted them through official channels fell within the scope of their job, and I don’t understand why it wasn’t solvable that way, but again I must salute the proactive surfers who are contacting people on their own and troubleshooting outside the system.

Who is handling safety/quality at NASA these days? This just brings to mind a painful-to-watch Simpsons episode involving ironic and painful crashing, cracking, breaking, and hurting.

full story

With the countdown for Discovery in its final hours, NASA was dealt a setback Tuesday when a window cover fell off the shuttle and damaged thermal tiles near the tail.

The plastic-and-foam cover on one of Discovery’s cockpit windows fell at the launch pad and struck a bulge in the fuselage that houses an orbital-maneuvering engine.

No workers were nearby when the window cover fell off and dropped about 60 feet, the space agency said. It was not immediately clear why the cover – which was held by tape – came loose.

Here’s an article about NPUC 2005 at IBM (the second part is here.) I attended part of the event, never having been before. Professionally, I think it’s good for me to spend time at different types of conferences. In the past few years I’ve gone to events for advertising, licensing, design, and of course user research folk. The method of discourse is so different at each of these, the values of the community so blatantly different, that I often find it so disquieting that it’s hard to engage sufficiently to learn something about the content. I keep trying, I keep attending, but I’m honestly not sure if the returns are worth the effort.

Yesterday was dramatically academic, with people from the various R&D institutions (PARC, FX/Pal, IBM Almaden, Ricoh etc.) having PhD level discussions of what technology could provide. And these are the user-centered technologists! Yet there’s no focus on the demand side, only on technological or interactive innovations that could solve known problems. Maybe some of those problems aren’t real (a whole discussion about how we need to move 5G of our own data around seemed strangely decoupled from the reality of ordinary people), or maybe they are real, or maybe that’s not even the point – that you let the big brains focus on big problems that don’t affect typical people but eventually those solutions trickle down or can be applied as needed.

My fave quote from the first article above

Smith asked how many people know about Dodgeball? Three souls raised their hands. It’s an SMS app that lets you check in and see if your friends are nearby. Googled recently bought the startup. It has 15,000 users, mostly centered in New York (and a bit of San Francisco), with about 1,500 users a day in NYC. ‘It’s too early to know how sticky it will be.”

Maybe people were just being shy (doubtful) but how they could not know about Dodgeball? Ah, because it’s something new in the marketplace, not in the technologyspace and I guess this group doesn’t care about that. It was a pretty disconnecting (ironically) experience, although nice to run into a few friends. I had serious flashbacks to my earlier days as an interaction guy, attending CHI conferences back in grad school/undergrad, because I ran into a few people I hadn’t seen in 15 years or so, although there was not an opportunity to say “hey.”

I showed up late, and I left early, but I got a bit of flavor, and a chance to reflect a bit on where I need to be focusing or diverging my own techo/culture scrounging.

The London Bombing story

seems to be evolving crazily, with so much information being revised. First, the bombers were amateurs. Then CNN’s timeline of the explosions was radically revised from the original stories. But timers were used not suicide bombers. Then we were told the bombers were experts, given the quality of the bombs themselves. Then we hear that some people were arrested. Then that is denied, but we hear that the bombers did kill themselves aboard the trains and bus.

I’m sure this post will be out of date before you read it.

Obviously there’s a balance between keeping the public informed and getting the story straight. Personally, I find the shifting facts and emotions that those facts engender to be unsettling, leading to more of a feeling of being out of control – that the authorities are out of control and that we the public are increasingly helpless. Others may take a Law-and-Order like comfort from the narrowing in onto the truth.

Collision Course is a ridiculous movie starring Jay Leno as a slick cop in a convertible. Imagine seeing him act? Yikes. About as horrible as Bill Maher as a hero-in-the-future cop.

NPR’s Marketplace does a feature on ethnography. It’s the new reality TV, I guess. A market research trend, they say. It’s kind of a snide piece, isn’t it weird that people use products this way and they tell us? Eyeew!

I found this page about the main ethnographer they profile

david grzelak
Columbus OH: Advertising agency Ten United recruits David Grzelak for the unusual position of director of ethnography. Previously marketing research manager at Hallmark and a consultant, Grzelak heads a newly formed Behavioral Insights Group that works with clients to gain a deeper understanding of their respective target markets. His degrees are in anthropology and business anthropology from Wayne State and Purdue, respectively. Ten United has roughly $185 million in billings for clients like Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Limited Brands, OhioHealth, Perkins Restaurants, Time-Warners Communications, Hoover and Prestige Brands including Murine, Comet and Prell.

As usual (this is one of my frequent comments) the press will focus on either advertising or product development, but won’t acknowledge both. This one is about advertising.

Today I was at the library, and so I picked up The Dark Tower, the 7th book in Stephen King’s long-running series. A 770 page tome.

I’ve chewed up the previous books quite happily, as they’ve grown longer I’ve managed to make quick work of ’em, even. I have memories of reading this series going back many years (I could tell you when the first book came out, but I see that Amazon lists the 2003 edition so if they are going to make it tough for me – whatever – suffice to say it was probably in the 80s).

The amount of complexity and jargon jammed into the first 30 pages was overwhelming and hard to take seriously. And of course I remember very little from the last book in the series from about 2 years ago. Anyway, I see that Mr. King himself is a character in the book.

I put it down. No thanks. Not only is there an attempt to combine dozens of mythologies from previous books into this super-story, but the author himself is appearing? How daring! How circular! How post-modern! How poorly executed and frankly…annoying. And you sir are no Charlie Kaufman. Heinlein did something like this when he was well past writing anything good but was still marketable. Blecch.

It’s a drag that I won’t have the sense of completion that I imagine could come from having “read ’em all” – but I guess life’s too short to put the time into this. There’s certainly no shortage of stuff that I’m more eager to read.

Have you seen this trick?

When using a website to report a problem (in my case, there was a new feature in Blogger that wasn’t working properly), you are asked to enter all your information (name, email, system used, description of problem), and then will receive an automated email almost immediately.

Sometimes those emails are simply acknowledgements. We’ve got your request; it’s in our system, a real person will get back to you ASAP once we’ve had a chance to look at it. Have you looked at our FAQ? But more often I’m seeing a little phrase stuck in at that bottom warning casually that if you STILL need help you have to do something (click on a link, hit reply, etc.). It’s very easy to skip over that warning since it’s buried and not part of the standard dialogue, in which case your request for help will be discarded.

I went through that with Blogger (or “Google” as they are also known) and many days later they posted on their status page that the problem was fixed (in fact, the problem had been in existence for several days but this hadn’t appeared on their status page, the fix announcement referred to the issue appearing briefly which was rather optimistic of ’em). Several days after that, they send me a generic email in response to my support request, suggesting that the problem may be fixed, or it may be solved by a fix listed at a website they point me to (not relevant to my problem), and if it’s still a problem, I should just submit a help request again!

Wow. I mean, really the problem has been solved and that’s great, but to suggest I start all over again when it feels like I have to jump through so many hoops to get them to even acknowledge my request – yikes. Talk about frustration.

I acknowledge that Blogger is free for most, and there are some millions of blogger pages, and when a piece of the service goes down they are likely to get an incredible number of support requests, and so the logistics of actually providing support are tremendously demanding for them. Fair enough. But – just looking at the customer side of it, the chipper tone in the email doesn’t really help when it doesn’t feel like they are listening to me.

For Blogger support, I’ve mostly been using a third-party site – a community of Blogger users and experts and enthusiasts called BloggerForum – if nothing else, this allowed me to determine that my problem was widespread enough that others were experiencing it, and that eased my concerns significantly – I figured they are probably working fixing it if it’s a bigger problem than just me. But I couldn’t get that reassurance from Blogger (though if they had posted the problem on their status page immediately and not 3 days later, that could have helped), and that’s too bad.

Pretzels are out on US Airways. Besides the bad press this constant nickel-and-diming is creating, there’s the usual corporate press release, where they remind us that they conducted customer research in support of their action

Amy Kudwa, a US Airways spokeswoman, said the airline decided to end the pretzel giveaway after meeting with the carrier’s focus groups.

Amazing this one didn’t include the standard “our consumers tell us that…” line. I’m amazed at how often this appears in press release-driven news stories.

Here’s a nice toy – your very own cuddly facehugger from the Alien movies. I’m sure you remember how it wrapped around the guy’s face and laid an egg in his stomach and then the egg hatched and burst through his chest.

Now you can get your very own.

I saw this in a toy store in Toronto and have been meaning to post it here, but was finally spurred to do so when I saw it on we make money not art via this blog (who points out there is a chest-burster toy as well. Nice.)

But what I’ve got special for you is the warning label on the package.

Choking hazard!

I have previously blogged about my troubles with AOL sending me THOUSANDS of bounce messages intended for my ISP’s admin folk, and how they would not take me off their list despite my calling and emailing and following all their rules, etc.

I guess that blog got noticed by someone at AOL AntiSpam Operations who wrote me directly and offered to help. He told me that he’s taken me off the distribution list for the bounces (and I believe that’s correct) and apologized for my frustration. It’s terrible when the normal channels break down but it’s great there are proactive individuals out there who obviously care about how their systems are running and how they are impacting people and are willing to reach out and solve a problem.

Thanks to the individual who took time and care to resolve this, and boo to AOL for not having a proper infrastructure to allow their staff to take care of these things in the normal course of their work.

Dove

has been making a big splash with its recent advertising campaign based on showing Real Women with all their flaws (i.e., a range of body tapes and ages that aren’t typical hair/skin care models), so it’s not surprising that a recent ad for Dove used the aesthetic of ethnographic interviews. This has been done a zillion times, especially in the last few years as ethnography becomes a more common touch point in our culture (and as the producer and the consumer collapse further). I’ve written about this many times, but I’m still struck whenever I see an ad doing this.

The Dove ad involved women being interviewed while they were bathing, and it cut between lower-quality video clips of several different women, with half of the clips being about the product, and half being about the process of being interviewed: “Oh, I’m in the tub, isn’t this a bit awkward?!”; “You’re all up in my armpit now.” were two examples.

I know a fair amount of research does get done in seemingly impossible settings such as the bathroom, but I’ve never been directly involved in such a study myself. I did see a Whirlpool presentation many years ago about how they did such a study (i.e., people wear bathing suits) but overall it sounds pretty fun just for the added challenges of establishing a comfortable rapport in such a socially awkward setting.

The New York Times writes about $1 DVDs, which are not bootlegs but simply films which have lapsed into the public domain for one reason or another.

Digiview actually paid for the rights to ‘American Vampire,’ a kind of ‘Beach Blanket Beowulf’ starring Carmen Electra of ‘Baywatch.’ Whether anyone will pay for the DVD is unclear. ‘Just because it’s a dollar doesn’t mean people want it,’ said Mr. Rosenberg, of Home Media Retailing. Indeed, a nickel might be too much for a DVD of Raymond Burr in ‘Bride of the Gorilla.’

Mr. Rosenberg said the novelty of dollar DVD’s would soon fade. ‘There’s a great danger of overdistribution,’ he said. ‘This is a business without much room for profit – either in the making or the selling. A year from now, most cheap DVD’s will be gone from stores.’ One ‘Killer Shrew’ alumnus hopes to cash in while the cheapness lasts. ‘This craze could build an audience for the sequel I’m writing,’ said Mr. Best, who played the stuttering Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane on ‘The Dukes of Hazzard.’

He has nearly finished a first draft of ‘Killer Shrews II.’ The plot is fiendishly simple. ‘I return to Shrew Island to rescue a bunch of teenagers,’ he reported. ‘A new mad scientist has turned herself into a human shrew that not only chews, but swims.'”

NYT piece compares and contrasts the feminist cultural issues at play in two TV series’ – Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie

Where ‘Bewitched,’ with its tales of a housewife who doesn’t exercise her full talents, seemed attuned to Betty Friedan’s landmark 1963 book, ‘The Feminine Mystique,’ ‘Jeannie’ came straight from the orbit of Hugh Hefner. Set in the world of swinging bachelor pilots on Florida’s Cape Kennedy beaches, the show seemed like a 14-year-old male’s fantasy: a scantily clad girl-woman, played by Barbara Eden, who calls our hero ‘master’ and can be shrunk to doll size, placed in a phallic bottle and stashed next to the hi-fi.

Unlike Samantha’s brand of benignly empowered womanhood, Jeannie’s magic was capricious, often performed in fits of childish pique. Samantha cast spells with an adorable nose-twitching marimba trill, but Jeannie’s petulant arms-folded nod came with an accompanying ‘sproing’ that was only a tad less audibly priapic than the ‘schwing’ from ‘Wayne’s World.’ Jeannie represented wife as plaything, harpy and sexual menace.

Yet Samantha and Jeannie had something important in common: both came under the thumbs of not just men, but pointedly poor specimens of manhood. The implication was clear: even the most powerful woman comes in second to a marginal man, who dominates the household solely through patriarchal privilege. That genie bottle has a glass ceiling.

‘Here were women with enormous powers – zapping Major Nelson to Antarctica or turning Darrin into a parakeet,’ said Susan J. Douglas, author of ‘Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media’ and a professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan. ‘But what was important was that at the end of the episode, Samantha was standing there in her little shirtwaist dress, holding a martini for Darrin.”

The photo is definitely quaint but still matches our iconic image of how trading (whatever that is; most of us have little understanding of the mechanics of markets or the activity of trading). Maybe we picture men in jackets with numbers on ’em, holding phones and throwing pieces of paper and yelling and yelling. But that era has disappeared as technology has eliminated the need for a central place. Trading takes place in distributed facilities, owned and operated by “banks” (including Morgan Stanley et al) not in centralized facilities owned and operated by exchanges. The Chron today considers the history of the exchange in San Francisco, now a gym.

A 1999 article in The Chronicle reported that only about 5 percent of the 17.5 million shares traded daily there involved personal interaction on the exchange floor.

The romance was ending. Warren Langley, president and chief operating officer of the exchange from 1996 to 1999, wrote in an e-mail that those who had devoted their lives to the exchange “really were in pain as the world of technology and telecommunications made floor-based exchanges obsolete (and made the value of their jobs go away).”

In 2001, the exchange announced a merger with the electronic marketplace corporation Archipelago, eliminating the need for brokers to interact face to face, and sold the trading floor in 2002.

If you attended the 2002 IDSA conference, you may have seen architect Bruce Tomb talk about his experience with his others in his community graffiti-ing or removing graffiti from his building, and how he essentially turned it into an ongoing art project. I wrote about it here (six boxes down, in blue) and today the SF Chron has an in-depth piece about Tomb and his building.

The posters are bright, papered over each other and peeling. A public gallery of outrage and passion on a former police station that once housed drug dealers, gang members and drunks in its holding cells, the dozens of radical statements plastered on this wall at 23rd and Valencia streets make up what may be the most outspoken site in the country.

Unbeknownst to most passers-by who stop to stare, behind the poster wall lives a quiet man who furiously defends its aesthetic. With his hair slicked neatly back and black Dickies pants that match the sturdy frames of his glasses, Bruce Tomb does not look like a fighter. But for the past seven years, he has fiercely protected the 25-foot square front wall of his home, the former Mission Police Station.

Tomb, an architect, views the 1950s-style industrial building, in which he lives with his family and operates his business, as a beautiful piece of modern architecture and a valuable part of city history. Some of his neighbors disagree, seeing the boxy structure vacated by police in 1994 for a larger precinct house at 17th, six blocks down Valencia Street, as an eyesore.

Jeez! Maybe I’m being uptight or something, but wow – that’s just not so funny, it’s kinda dark.

This is pretty crazy – you can take any online image and turn it into a Polaroid. Now of course, a Polaroid has many attributes – in the taking, the developing, the texture, the quality, oh and the little spot to write on. This doesn’t really offer all of this, but it still someone qualifies (in someone’s mind) as Polaroid-ness. No doubt this is infringing on something?

These two signs were on adjacent buildings, mere feet apart and somehow the combination amused me; both seemed to have too many words and create a level of officialdom and importance that seemed out of scale for the idea itself, let alone the physical unimposingness of the locations.

Hey, what am I doing standing here on the corner of West 8th Street and the 6th Avenue and…
Ah, skip it.
Nothing. Keith! Watcha, watcha doing? (whistle)
Oh, I think the time has come to get out, get out
Get up, get out, get into something new

We had a really nice lunch at a fancy-type of Italian restaurant in Midtown yesterday. I just spent 3 minutes on Google maps to see if I could find the name if I knew where it was, but really, it’s too much of a chore and if anyone really cares, they can write me and we’ll figure it out. At any rate, here are the appetizers and the freebie dessert plate. Looked and tasted great! No entrees because maybe we were too hungry when they came?

I participate in several online forums about design. I’ve spent my whole career working with designers and hearing a lot of bullshit about what design is and what it can do. There’s increasing awareness of global issues and a desire to understand the rest of the world and less of the posturing about how design can save the world etc. but today someone posted this gem: To me, industrial Designs and their instructors are the true leaders of a culture.

Choke. Cough. Splutter.

Gve me a break!

That anyone can write that with a straight face tells you some of the problems facing that industry.

Edited from this story

With Taiwanese youngsters increasingly drawn to Western hamburgers and fries, government researchers are trying to lure them back with something more traditional – sort of: rainbow-colored rice.

Yellow rice gets its hue from curcumin, an herb that’s a spice in curries and is believed by some to be an antioxidant that may help prevent cancer. Green rice comes from the nutritious bitter gourd, often used in Asian soups and stir-fried dishes. Pink comes from tomato, and purple from a mixture of vegetables.

The colored rice will likely cost about twice as much as plain rice.

Besides the obligatory “wow aren’t they weird in Asia” reaction (which is ridiculous, because didn’t green ketchup start in the US, after all?), it seems like the story is equal parts science and technology, culture, marketing, fashion, and of course economics (2x for healthy rice? nice price!).

Here’s what I’ve seen outside an Au Bon Pain store in Manhattan on two separate nights – a huge amount of food being discarded. Easily noticeable is dozens of bagels; no doubt other stuff as well.

Does Manhattan no longer have a hunger or homeless problem? Where is the food rescue organizations to pick this up and deliver it to someone who can use it? I’m not picking on Au Bon Pain specifically, it’s just what I’ve seen casually walking about. No doubt the problem/opportunity is more widespread than simply one store that I observed personally.

I ate dinner in Chinatown last night (despite picking a Chowhound etc. fave, I wasn’t that impressed, I’ve had better in SF and environs easily), and had quite a bit left over. I took it to go, even though being in a hotel there was no way to eat it. But the homeless dude I saw on the way in had packed up, and I couldn’t find anyone in Midtown either. But there are these buildings with atrium (atria? I dunno – they each only have one) that are designated public space (is this a tax thing or what?) and open til 10pm. I walked by one and there were many people playing chess. It wasn’t clear to me if these people had homes or money or were just chess enthusiasts, or if it was a mixture. I saw a lot of backpacks that seemed fairly full. I walked in nonchalantly past the security guard, and just left my food on an empty table. It’ll probably get thrown out, but if those people are in need, maybe someone will take it.

And just for some extra context – I don’t give money to people on the street. Ever. I rarely look or acknowledge, etc. I’m not boasting about what I did yesterday, or defending what I do normally, it’s just who I am and how I’ve chosen for now to handle these things.

What does motivate me more than any sense of “charity” or “giving” as an abhorrence of waste. My leftovers and the Au Bon Pain bounty are waste that could be leveraged. That appeals to something in me. One thing I’ve done is start a local freecycle group that allows people to exchange unwanted goods instead of tossing ’em out.

Electric Lady Studios has now become a video store. I think this is fairly recent, but I’m not 100%. Kinda depressing; the studio has been there for a long long time.

Oops. See comments.

If they spend all this money to advertise a show and then a disaster happens and the show isn’t going to go on, wouldn’t they ante up with the budget to remove those ads? It’s almost a month old, which is bad, and of course the show never premiered. It just seems sloppy and embarrassing. Won’t the MTA take them down themselves?

Another prop to occupy their minds.

Saw this in a building today. To gain entry, you had to walk up to a machine – a video camera on a podium with a small screen – and state your name and who you were there to see. It wasn’t quite like some Star-Wars-esque door or anything; the machine stood in the middle of a open area, with straps-on-posts to guide you to the right place. Further, there was a security attendant/hostess who stood sat many feet behind the podium at her own desk and sort of offered guidance/instructions on how to proceed. I didn’t feel comfortable taking pictures of it, unfortunately. The machine was covered with signage made out of the same red plastic with white letters – there were several signs visible to address various interactions and warnings. Very kludgey, and since no one checked ID or called up to the floor you were planning to visit, it didn’t feel very secure, even if they had me on tape.

BTW – I guess there’s something new called Blogger Images whereby you can upload images to a Blogger blog. I only found out about it because there was some problem with it and the Blogger Status feed I subscribe to had info. I actually couldn’t’ find any sort of announcement about it. Thanks for nothing, Blogger.

Yesterday I was selected for secondary screening while going through airport security at SFO. It started off rather typically, with no explanation from the person who checks ID and boarding passes, only an instruction to follow a certain path. It’d be nice at that point if they told you what was going on. I follow the path I was directed to – a long and narrow corridor between the wall and those straps-on-poles (were that I was hip enough to name those by brand!) – a long and twisting path that eventually reached a dead-end. I was confused, so I turned around only to find a security person was ducking under the straps to join me.

He was exceedingly polite, and extremely patient while I did as he requested, provided boarding pass, unloaded my laptop, took off my shoes. He made suggestions gently (“I’ll get you a container for you to put your bag and your shoes in”). And he told me what was going to happen next (“If you could come with me, sir, we’ll just stand here and wait to go through”).

Instead of treating me like a presumed criminal, I actually felt a bit of privilege. Partly by singled out, but partly because of a certain experience of access. My bags were put through the X-ray machine ahead of others, with somebody carrying them for me and getting the nod to lay them on the belt as soon as possible. Meanwhile, I was able to stand out of the line, in a space in the middle where no one else could stand (since they had to remain in line). I went through the metal detector myself and was directed to a little holding area. After a call of “male, secondary” went out, I encountered a man waiting there for me told me immediately (calling me sir) where I could go next, pointing to an area that required me to pass the end of the X-ray machine, and go around behind. And then I was “free” to traipse over there myself, crossing several zones and lines that the normal passenger wouldn’t go through.

Two different people greeted me there, one of whom smiled nervously (the nervous smile of youth and introversion, simply) at me with a mouth full of braces. He dealt with my bag, and another did the search. They weren’t extroverted, they weren’t bossy, they were comfortable and friendly. Stand like an airplane, palms up. Face this way, so you can see your bags being searched. I never felt manhandled. The warned me my wallet and keys would be re-X-rayed.

I have been to the hairdresser (oops, I mean barber) and been treated more like a piece of meat than today. Or that all-too-familiar experience (like last week at Ross Dress For Less) when the cashier was engaged in a phone conversation for the entire duration of my transaction. Or the flight attendant on yesterday’s flight who walked through the cabin distributing the “snack” (Oreo, cheese spread, cracker-wafer-thing, world’s-smallest-box-of-raisins) with an amazing lack of interpersonal energy – no eye contact, no words, just place the snacks on the trays and move along.

Anyway, while traveling, all of my clothes and toiletries were in checked baggage, so I’m sure that reduced the sense of violation of having stuff opened, touched, looked at.

Two interactions felt more like cooperation than victimization, and they were small but significant. In one part of the search of my b, the wanded the button that closes my jeans – and of course it beeped. They asked me to twist it over (a gesture that is difficult to describe but is akin to walking around with your collar up, rather than any kind of underwear-proximal violation) and he said “good enough” in response. Secondly, when my bags were finished being searched, the bag-handling guy put a lot of hole punches into the boarding pass. When the wanding guy returned with my re-x-rayed wallet and keys, he asked me if the other agent had punched my boarding pass.

I suppose those may be signals of lax security, but I’m only talking about it from my perspective, the traveler. I think I finished up before anyone who entered the regular line before I did, and I got “special” treatment that didn’t make me feel bad or weird. And I wasn’t in a rush so I wasn’t worried about that, either.

Overall, it was an incredibly powerful reframe – from being a suspect to receiving valet service. Some minor cues (with a different mindset behind them, no doubt) changed the perspective of an ordinary experience about 180 degrees.

Potted Meat Museum

John Fiedler, voice of Piglet, dies at 80 while Paul Winchell, voice of Tigger dies at 82

I’ll always remember Fiedler for his appearance on Star Trek as Jack the Ripper (or the evil space entity that has taken on many forms throughout history including Jack the Ripper and the various spacey aliases they give him) – “kill you all….kill you all!”

Here’s an interesting brand extension story

The John Deere name will be featured on the entrance sign for the subdivision with homes ranging from roughly $375,000 to $500,000. The purchase price includes a choice of landscape designs prepared and installed by Deere. Thousands of dollars worth of riding lawnmowers, leaf-blowers and other equipment will fill one of the three garage bays.

St. Lawrence Homes vice president Rick Ohmann says the John Deere link should amount to a stamp of approval for people who care about having a beautifully landscaped yard from the day they move in.

It was that promise, not the John Deere name, that attracted Joseph Crayton to sign a contract this month to build a 3,100 square foot house. ‘It wasn’t my primary decision-driver, but it was great to have,’ Crayton, 37, said of the Deere name associated with his new home. ‘A lot of us are brand conscious.’

John Deere officials look for the strategy to help broaden their products’ appeal among people who may associate the name strictly with tractors and lawnmowers.

‘The ultimate message is to have homeowners consider John Deere as the place they can turn for all of the things they need to take care of their yard. Right now, we might only be considered as a place to buy equipment,’ said Tosh Brinkerhoff with Deere & Co.’s consumer equipment division in nearby Cary. ‘We feel like this community is a way that we can showcase our abilities.’

Read the full story

Not the first time, incidentally, that John Deere has sought an unusual co-brand. Videogames?

A new film, Me & Mickey D, is by a filmmaker who ate at McDonald’s for 30 days and lost weight.

NRO: Would you recommend anyone eat McDonald’s for 30 days?

Whaley: Actually I think a lot of people do, at least for a few meals a week. Tens of millions of people eat there every day without ill effect. As for a 30-day diet to lose weight? That’s up to the individual. This was not intended to promote a McDonald’s diet for losing weight, it was meant to demonstrate that some of our current belief systems are incorrect.
…
NRO: Besides the obvious, Super-Size-Me-is-wrong/be responsible/McDonald’s-can’t-make-you-fat,-only-the- choices-you-make-can message, what is the overall point of your documentary?

Whaley: Simply to encourage people to take more responsibility for their own lives and to appreciate the concept of freedom of choice that we have in the U.S. I also hope to inspire people to get out and move around more. Forget about ‘exercising,’ just get out there and celebrate your life by staying busy and productive. ‘Eat to live, don’t live to eat.’ – Moliere

Amazing that my Licensing Show experience was an entire year ago. Times flies. Read about last year’s experience in a previous FreshMeat and check out this NYT story about this year’s event.

At the Licensing 2005 show, which runs through today at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, other cartoon and real-life characters are also in search of comebacks, including Richie Rich, Casper the Friendly Ghost and Liberace.

“Nostalgia is a hit,” said Mike Alic, general manager of the show, as he stood under a depiction of Superman stopping an 18-wheeler from falling off a bridge. “The people running the licensing business had these brands in their childhood, and they appreciate the decreased risk of going with already proven track records.”

Necco, one of the country’s oldest candy companies, is pushing its flagship wafers and Clark bar icons to apparel makers. “There’s comfort with the familiar,” said Ross Misher, president of Brand Central LLC, the Los Angeles-based licensing agency representing Necco.

Kellogg is a partner with 20 licensees to produce products including Norman Rockwell-printed ceramic cereal bowls. The company is drawing from its own century-old archive of more than a million pieces of art that includes works by Rockwell, J. C. Leyendecker and Andrew Loomis, and has a domestic deal for a 1960’s style Tony the Tiger bikini that is already a hit in Japan.

The cereal maker has signed off on licensed stationery and puzzles to help it reintroduce the original Snap! Crackle! and Pop! characters from its Rice Krispies brand, as well as Sugar Pops Pete and Smaxey the seal, the long-retired spokescritter for Sugar Smacks. (Now known as Honey Smacks, and touted by Dig’Em frog.)

Throwback marketing is also being used for toys, with the Care Bears, My Little Pony and the Cabbage Patch Kid characters displayed prominently at the show.

Hasbro is heavily promoting Transformers, the toy robots that first hit the big time during the Reagan era. Interest in the brand had been declining until 2002, when the toymaker joined with the Cartoon Network to introduce three new generations of characters. Hasbro is currently working with DreamWorks and Paramount for a Transformers movie, and exploring deals with licensees to support the movie’s release with apparel, video games and even Transformer bandages.

“We’re bringing it back in a way that dads can relive their childhoods with their children,” said Bryony Bouyer, a senior vice president at Hasbro.

In addition to Underdog, Classic Media is promoting Richie Rich, Peter Cottontail and Mr. Peabody, the time-traveling, bespectacled genius dog. Classic has sought deals to get these and other classic animation and children’s programming back into the mainstream, including making Mr. Magoo a co-star with Tiger Woods in an American Express ad, and having Lassie scare off a cougar in a commercial for General Electric.

Classic Media is also promoting Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties, Roger Ramjet and Gerald McBoing Boing , which will have a new series on the Cartoon Network.

“These characters have an emotional tug that sticks around,” said Leslie Levine, Classic’s head of worldwide licensing.

I Love Liberace, a Las Vegas-based company that secured exclusive worldwide licensing rights from Liberace’s estate, has a booth with towels, bags and clothing featuring Liberace kicking like a Rockette. In addition to having trademarked the phrase “Mr. Showmanship,” the company aims to roll out Liberace barbecue sauce, complete with edible glitter.

Much of the old imagery is being revised with the help of new technology.

After a 19-year hiatus, Superman is expected to hit movie theaters next year with a healthy helping of computer-generated imagery. And the jingle “Everyone knows it’s Slinky” is now available as a cellphone ring tone.

TV Guide is offering 1960’s-era TV theme songs over cellphones, with wireless trivia games as well.

Full story

A disc jockey at a top Ottawa rock station has been booted off the air for playing Stompin’ Tom Connors — and nothing but Stompin’ Tom — to protest the singer’s exclusion from the Live 8 concert lineup.

But what remains unclear today is whether Jeff Brown, who says he has not been fired from his job at CHEZ 106.1, has his tongue tucked firmly in his cheek.

Mr. Brown, program director at the station, began playing Stompin’ Tom tunes Tuesday afternoon during his drive-home show, which airs from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.

After hearing the lineup of Canada’s version of Live 8, Mr. Brown said, he ‘went on a rant about how we have Celine Dion representing Canada via satellite from Las Vegas, and how true Canadian icons were being overlooked, namely Stompin’ Tom,’ Mr. Brown explained yesterday in an e-mail to a Citizen reporter.

‘At this point I vowed to play nothing but Stompin’ Tom on my show until (Live 8 organizers) Bob Geldof and Michael Cohl recognized the influence that this true icon has in this country and add him to the bill.’

…

While Stompin’ Tom has a devoted following in Canada, it is unlikely Bob Geldof has ever heard Bud The Spud or other Stompin’ Tom-penned tunes about everyday life in Canada’s small towns and cities.

On Tuesday’s show, Mr. Brown played Stompin’ Tom’s Big Joe Mufferaw continuously for about a half an hour.

Mr. Brown said reaction to his Stompin’ Tom binge was immediate.

‘The moment we started playing Stompin’ Tom, the phones went insane (like I have never seen in 15 years of radio) … 99 per cent of people were in support that we needed to get Stompin Tom on the Live 8 bill.

‘It just shows you how like no other artist this man transcends all boundaries and truly speaks for the country.”

Another random email comes my way

Hi Steve:

I am hoping to get a picture of a UPS truck/driver delivering packages to horses in a corral. One of the horses needs to have a big pencil in his mouth – like he’s signing for his packages.
This is for a PowerPoint presentation to be used one time. UPS wanted tons of red tape to make this happen. I need it by 6/27/05
Any thoughts?

I did recently blog a photo of a UPS truck

, but still, why would someone ask me this? I sought some explanation

sorry. I am searching for UPS pictures and I ran across yours. You seemed like a very creative type. thought you might have some interesting ideas.
Nothing ventured…nothing gained.

Interesting how people use the Internet. As Tom sez It would be perfect to show a monkey clinging for dear life to the antenna of a fast-moving 1972 Nova. Can we get that? Somebody write to that Portigal guy

This type of rule may be largely symbolic, but the issue at question does deal with the meaning and usage of symbols, so perhaps it’s appropriate. It’s interesting to see a stand taken for effective communication and creating a smoother more usable “interface” to an organization. Organizations – the more bureaucratic, the better – become very focused on their insides, and not their outsides, thinking about their own processes and nomenclature and expecting their customers to adapt to their systems. It’s unfriendly, takes more effort, frustrating, distancing, and ultimately requires more work on their part to actually clarify or correct mistakes.

Contra Costa County supervisors who use certain dirty words during weekly meetings will have to cough up $1 fines. Under a new policy unanimously adopted Tuesday, bureaucratic acronyms like EIR, LAFCO, ABAG and RFP will be verboten in the board chambers in Martinez, not just from the supervisors’ podium but also in all written materials for board meetings.

‘We throw them around all the time,” said Supervisor John Gioia of Richmond, who proposed making Contra Costa the first county in California to adopt the anti-acronym stand. Politicians and bureaucrats there now must use phrases instead — environmental impact report, the Local Agency Formation Commission, the Association of Bay Area Governments and Request for Proposals.

He asserted that the public, whether sitting in the chambers or watching on television, can be confused when government officials engage in alphabet-soup discussions of programs.

Link

Just last week I received a letter from the Canadian passport office. It was a piece of paper with 2 dozen check boxes available, each indicating a different type of problem. The problem with my form was checked, a couple of words appended, and a pointer to a code (“see PPT 0S1” – although was that 0 or O was unclear) – but no indication of what that code was, how to find the information in that code, and ultimately what to do with the information and card they sent me. No return envelope or instructions about where to mail it. I filled out the attached card and went to the web and found the mailing address and put it in the mail. When it arrives, will they be able to link this supplement with the information they have on file? I never found PPT 0S1. Really crappy experience for something as crucial as a passport. And this is, of course, typical. Especially for governmental agencies.

So, kudos to Contra Costa County for a SITRD! (step in the right direction)

In a previous post I reviewed Tiger Power, a new breakfast cereal from Kellogg’s. I just came across kind of a funny and slightly more attitude-filled review here.

In a previous entry I wrote about being approached by a PR firm (ineptly, at that) to blog about their new product. I still haven’t got mine yet, so I haven’t been able to blog about ’em. But meanwhile I found someone else’s experience/reaction in being approached with the same spiel

. A good discussion ensues. However, I’m miffed no one asked me to discuss Glad Press’n Seal here on All This ChittahChattah. Hmm.

From Garrick Van Buren’s Work Better Weblog

One of my current projects has a major survey component. The survey ends with:

If you’d be open to follow up questions, enter your email address below.

There’s about a 60 / 40 split on responses with emails and those without. The responses without email addresses have skipped questions, irrelevant answers, and are generally unusable. This is so much the case, that I’ve found it a better use of time to check for an email address first – then read the response.

It’s interesting that people comfortable with being contacted give useful answers, while those providing non-useful responses don’t provide a way to be contacted.

Conventional wisdom on requiring accountability has it backward. Accountable people want to be responsible for their actions. Those that aren’t don’t. Forcing it doesn’t change anything.

This is purely anecdotal of course, and may not generalize to other surveys about other topics, but nonetheless seemed an interesting data point.

NPUC 2005

– The future of portable computing.

July 11. I’m going. Anyone else?

In a previous post I told a story about receiving mistaken invoices from my online backup service. It was a LOT of money and I made the mistake of reading my email during a bit of insomnia, and of course, my adrenalin surged unhappily even though I convinced myself it was probably a mistake (but it was tricky; the first review I read about this service, Data Deposit Box, explained how if your software creates temp files in the target directory, you may find yourself uploading HUGE HUGE files to their system and being charged for it – and at least once in that previous month I found that my DVD software had put some several gigabyte file down without telling me, etc. etc. so I had some rational basis for concern), and eventually they let us all know that they had sent these three invoices out by mistake.

So I blogged the story, because, hey, I’ve got a blog and I’m going to use it.

But the company I blogged about wasn’t too happy.

From: “Peter Carroll”
To:
Subject: The Data Deposit Box problem
Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 09:43:07 -0400

Steve,

We are again very sorry for the error that caused you to receive those emails. It was an embarrassing mistake that will never happen again.

I read your blog on the topic with horror this morning. We have all worked hard to communicate with our customers and clean up the mess this caused. These were only internal reminder emails for our accounting people to manually bill a couple of our very large clients. No customers were billed.

Clearly this was a dark day in our history that we would all like to put behind us. Unfortunately, with your blog showing up in Google I fear we will be reliving it over and over for months or years to come.

Would you consider removing your post in exchange for 3 months of free Data Deposit Box service? I assume you are otherwise happy with our service. This gesture would be greatly appreciated by everyone at Data Deposit Box.

Sincerely

Peter Carroll, CTO

This really threw me for a loop. I’m supposed to feel bad for them? I guess I do, but what about me? My monthly bill is about $20.00, so they’re asking me to basically censor myself in support of their corporate goals, for about $60.00. I don’t want to go off on a major integrity high-horse type of deal, but really? $60? Maybe they should offer me the three free months as a gesture of good will in apology for the upset. But not make it contigent upon me zipping my mouth.

Further, there’s an element of quiet coercion here, and really, isn’t a backup company’s core offering involving trust? I don’t feel they are behaving in a trustworthy fashion. And what if I refuse to take the posting down? Will that mean that maybe my data might (oops! We are SOOOO sorry) go away? Probably not, but even the fact that this exchange has raised the spectre of data loss suggests their approach to me was a wrong one.

I’m not out to change the world with this blog, and I’m still getting used to the fact (after nearly 4 years) that this blog can have some impact, but I stand by what I wrote.

I didn’t bother to share with people, by the way, my “icon” experience. Here’s a support request I sent in

Admittedly, this is a low-priority request, but I wanted at least to request it…

Every once in a while the icon in the system tray disappears and then reappears. This causes all the task bar entries to shift rapidly back and forth – in other words, it’s a fair amount of motion along the bottom of the screen. It’s VERY distracting. It’d be great if that didn’t happen, if it just stayed live all the time, or I’d be willing to disable the icon if that meant I could avoid this problem. I’ve seen this happen with other programs (I think PopFile had it with a recent version) and it cosmetic, but it’s also impacting concentration and productivity, so it is important in that way.

They responded nicely, and quickly

We had a problem with our icon in that it would disappear and we were unable to determine why it was happening. We decided to destroy and recreate the icon periodically to stop this from happening.

I will add a registry setting to the client application to allow you to disable this. The option will not appear in our options program, but will be only available via registry changes.

I will let you know once this is ready and send you instructions on the name of the key.

I’m no programmer, but a tech friend of mine was aghast at the problem and also the kludgey solution. Didn’t give him faith in their technical chops. Anyway, shortly thereafter they sent the registry key instructions. Playing with the Windows registry is sort of a dangerous manipulation of the secret guts of how things work. One typo can ruin stuff. Anyway, they told me what kind of key to create and what to put in it. And there was a typo in their instructions.

Under Software/Acpana/Backup/username please add a ERG_SZ value with the name DoIconRefresh and set the value to 0

ERG_SZ should be REG_SZ. I didn’t know that, but I figured it out. Still doesn’t give you the best confidence in them.

Anyway, back to the issue at hand – the blog entry. I wrote them back

Peter, I’m awfully surprised that you’d ask a customer to delete a posting they made about your product! And further that you’d offer me roughly $60 to do so!

Moreover, this sort of thing really impacts the feeling of trust between me and Data Deposit Box – if I refuse, what will happen to my data? For a service that provides backup, I would suggest that the trust is pretty important and this exchange kind of threatens that trust.

Steve

and heard back

If you refuse, nothing will happen to your data. I only ask that you please consider removing your post because of the ongoing negative impact it will have on our company.

As you point out, trust is a very fragile thing. Nobody understands that more than we do. There was nothing malicious in our action. It was an honest mistake and we have worked very hard to repair the damage it caused. My fear is that your post will continue to show up in Google and new damage will continue to happen.

Expression of individual opinion is very important right. But please consider what the effect is when they are amplified by Google. IÔø?m sure you do not intend to cause us ongoing damage to our reputation. If you did, I am sure you would no longer be a customer. But negative comments are may times more powerful than positive.

I offered you some free service only as a gesture of good faith. I had no other intentions. If you are not comfortable with that I understand. Was our response to our customers not sufficient or appropriate in you mind? Is there anything more you feel we should do?

I truly hope you can forgive us for this mishap. If not, I apologize again and wish you all the best.

I don’t want to be a villain, or hurt this poor company. Discussions of forgiveness and malice and all this seem very emotional and very personal. Perhaps I need to be more judicious of my stories of bad service or bad experiences. I don’t think I’m using this a bully pulpit, though. Even though they won’t be happy to see their exchange with me also blogged, I feel it’s important. Look, this isn’t Disney sending a cease-and-desist letter or anything dramatic like that, but it’s a request to stop saying something bad about a company, because an honest experience (and really, that was NOT a screed, I’ve written screeds, that was mostly sharing an experience and sharing my own horror at it) is just that. What happened to me. My truth.

I’m still a customer of Data Deposit Box. They offer a unique pricing advantage (you pay what you backup, not by choosing from a variety of sizes that you think you need to store) and a unique backup process (you backup files pretty much all the time not on a schedule). They claim to offer multiple copies of files (versions 1 2 and 3) that change over time, but I haven’t figured that out. It may be working, or may not. I don’t know yet.

And, I’ve had a frightening billing mistake with them, and I’ve had a somewhat slapdash if effective and rapid support for something very cosmetic. I’m laying it out there for you to decide for yourself.

I’ve excerpted the best bits, but feel free to read the full story

British potato farmers demonstrated outside Parliament on Monday to publicize their bid to remove the term ‘couch potato’ from the Oxford English Dictionary, arguing that the description of slothful TV addicts harms the vegetable’s image.

The group of about 30 farmers carried signs that read ‘couch potato out’ and ‘ban the term couch potato.’ A similar rally took place in Oxford, central England.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term ‘couch potato’ as ‘a person who spends leisure time passively or idly sitting around, especially watching television or video tapes.’

The British Potato Council says the phrase makes the vegetable seem unhealthy. It wants the expression stripped from the dictionary and replaced in everyday speech with the term ‘couch slouch.’

‘The potato industry are fed up with the disservice that ‘couch potato’ does to our product when we have an inherently healthy product,’ said Kathryn Race, head of marketing at the British Potato Council, a body set up by the government to run advertising campaigns promoting potato consumption and research issues linked to the vegetable.

‘Potatoes have been around for many, many years, but increasingly, with all the coverage that dieting & healthy eating gets in general, we need to make sure that potatoes remain a popular food,’ Race said.”

It’s hard to tell how serious they are. The article makes them sound very serious. Perhaps if I lived in Britain I’d understand the tone a bit better. As a PR stunt, it’s brilliant. It will raise awareness or whatever. As a piece of consumer education, it’s obviously ridiculous. You can’t angrily protest to get people to stop thinking something or making an association. Genie is out of the bottle, right? I’m going to quietly hope it’s the former.

My friend Alan has a blog

that I’ve just been checking out. It’s kinda funny on several levels. Each post is a strange or disturbing comedic observation, most of them rather terse. You might compare to Steven Wright but I’m sure any serious student of late 20th Century comedy could explain why that presumption is incorrect.

What amuses me is that each entry is several days apart, and when one reads through the various entries it almost begs the question of how it took Alan so long to make yet another pithy observation.

Alan, of course, is much funnier than his blog. Even though he may make the same kind of comments, the flat tone of the blog is completely different than his intense delivery. And the minimalist tone of the blog isn’t as funny as his detailed storytelling.

Somehow I should also mention that he has a talking vagina animation on his website.

Back when I was a kid I liked the idea that you could fill out a form in a magazine etc. and have mail sent to whatever name you gave – they would pretty much use anything. I signed up to get philatelic announcements sent to Worklkg Glapiztorknyo, Grand Poo-bah. I got that for years. Years after I had moved out of my mom’s house, they were still coming. Hi-larious.

My roommates and I (well, it was mostly me) during the undergrad years, used to play little jokes on each other by coming up with clever names (now that we were more mature). We had
Dr. Enest Q. Schliepenfelder-Jones
Flaughean O’Penulean-Jones
James T. Picasso-Jones
Christopolis Vertinsky, and beyond.

We cracked ourselves up pretty majorly.

Flash to many years later when spammers are using whatever tricks they can to get past filters. One of them is coming up with sender names that are composed of other words or phrases:

Unmannerly O. Tester
Unconsidered M. Rutherford
Motherfucking K. Regulation
Juliette J. Chlorinates
Infections F. Paeans
Impends R. Joel
Featureless C. Mortimer
Disunity P. Qingdao
Disqualifies U. Helios
Debt D. Gable
Boltzmann E. Schoolchildren
Birthmark L. Cather
Biblical K. Chat
Winnipeg H. Chatterbox

Amusing similarity in weirdness. I may have missed my calling.

I flew JetBlue yesterday out of JFK and had a chance to wander next door to the shuttered TWA terminal, one of my favorite buildings. I flew out of there many years ago, just once, and it was pretty neat. See the whole set of pictures.

hat a scam. This Retro Flip Clock at EQ3 is about $40.00 or something (no prices on their website – hmmm). They weren’t that much when they first came out, were they? And back then, they included a radio and an alarm clock as well. I’m all for hip and retro (maybe not, I like to think I am) but you just know this cost about $1.35 to make, and wasn’t that great a product the first time around. Do you remember adjusting the time on those things – one direction only so if you went over a minute you had to circle around 23 hours and 59 minutes – not too fast or you’d go over again. They’d click and make a loud noise when they’d flip the numbers over, etc. I’m drawn to it, but not at a price premium; that’s the part that seems outrageous.

I run a few mailing lists, the most active being Undercover, a Rolling Stones discussion group that goes back to 1992. In this era of spam and spam counter-measures, there are lots of problems in getting email through (I had a client, for example, that couldn’t get email from me at all; fortunately they were able to figure that out and not assume I was just ignoring them!). A discussion group that can generate dozens of messages in a short period of time is easily flagged by automated software as a spambot of some sort.

Say what you want about the discussions on Undercover, they aren’t spam. But they were getting flagged as spam (we didn’t know that; we just started seeing hours and hours of delays, sometimes messages being held for 20 hours before being delivered), as our ISP suggested (it is hard to track down email problems – is it between the sender and the mailing list host, or the mailing host and the sender? Or elsewhere)?

The ISP suggested I whitelist Undercover – go through some administrivia to get AOL to recognize it is a valid sender so that it wouldn’t get auto-flagged as spam. I filled out a bunch of forms, including agreeing to have certain types of bounce messages sent back to me. I didn’t follow all of it; it was speaking a language best understood by someone that operates an ISP and has access to the email software that UNIX etc. systems are using. I’m just a customer with a web-interface, I’m not a sys-admin. So I signed up and was approved.

The email delays (to AOL, at least) stopped.

The bounce messages started coming. TONS and TONS. And what I realized was that I had signed up as the whitelist contact for the entire ISP. Not just www.under-cover.net and the Undercover email, but anyone who is hosted at my ISP that sends something to AOL – I was the guy they were going to let know about it. In fact what I think is happening that anytime there is spam sent from anyone at my ISP, every single AOL customer who flags it as spam in their account, well that comes back to me.

You can’t believe how much of this I received.

I asked my ISP. No answer – I was starting to realize that I had taken on the whitelist responsibility that THEY should have, for the entire ISP.

Finally after months and several thousand messages, I contacted AOL. I emailed them – they have a lot of info on their support pages for people at other sites trying to email or run approved lists, etc. They always want you to email them at [email protected]. No response. No response. Finally I called and got right through. No problem, they told me, your ISP should be the whitelist contact definitely not you. Email us and say X, y, and Z, and they’ll take you off within 24 to 72 hours.

I’ve emailed them 5 times over a month, and it’s not working. I’m still getting these messages.

What has happened is that my ISP has finally (after numerous requests from me) fixed whatever was enabling one single user to be the source for all this spam. It was obvious – you could see on every single bounce message from AOL what user was causing the problem. It was all from the same customer of the ISP. So plugging that hole did reduce drastically the number of warnings I was getting.

Until today – someone else is spamming AOL customers and every one of them is flagging it as spam and every one of those is coming back to me. In a four hour period I have received 453 of these messages and as I type this, more are coming in.

Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope. Seriously, I don’t know what to do. AOL won’t take me off the list – when I email they ignore me and when I phone they tell me to email. It’s not really bothering anyone at my ISP and they won’t take any action. And this has been going on for months now.

I [hate] AOL. I also [hate] my ISP (meanwhile it’s almost time to renew my hosting account there for portigal.com)

Update: 6 hours later it’s now more than 3000 messages that have been bounced back to me

Update: I’m sure it totally more than 4000 messages. My ISP claims that they have signed on as the whitelist contact for AOL, and I finally discover (with their suggestion) that I can filter unwanted emails directly at the ISP so they don’t come through – yeah, they are still being sent by AOL but they won’t ever be delivered to me.

Rise Lord Vader has become a catchphrase for the last Star Wars film, appearing in ads, and reportedly even in the trailer. But the scene where he is commanded to RISE doesn’t use that line. Kind of a drag, since the PR machine has got us waiting for it.

Vague spoiler in terse review. It was alternately cool and cheesy. When Anakin becomes Darth Vader, with the black helmet sliding into place, and you hear the mechanized breathing, it was pretty spine-touching cool. But moments later the actor in the suit stands up (and yes, he’s just had surgery etc. so will be wobbly but still) and moves in no way that resembles the Vader we know. It just looked…wrong. Moments later he is told something that causes him to scream “Nooooooooooooooooooooo!!!” (and I’d swear the camera pulled far back and up at that time) – something that the Simpsons have rendered into an absolutely ludicrous cliche and only a moron would try to get away with that in a movie we’re supposed to take seriously.

The International Herald Tribune reports on a cultural study of mobile phone use in Europe.

“Europe is looked at as a broadly similar market,” Lasén said. “But in studying mobile phones you can see details in each country can change enormously.”

For her research, Lasén combined individual interviews with street-level observations in each city in both 2002 and 2004. Interview questions ranged from mobile phone habits to people’s relationship with the device. Her observation centers were a major train station, a commercial area and a business district in each city.

I thought everyone did a study like this in 1999 – 2000, but I guess they are continuing (not that there’s not more to be learned; just that these sort of things are sometimes fashionable, if you will). I was involved in a fascinating comparison of French and Japanese mobile phone usage and attitude.

Via Future Now

Cingular is in favor of banning cell phone usage on airplanes

“‘We believe there is a time and a place for wireless phone conversations, and seldom does that include the confines of an airplane flight,’ Cingular wrote in a June 8 letter to the FAA…’Cingular will encourage passengers to ‘tap, not talk’ – that is, to use discreet services such as text messaging and e-mail as opposed to voice communications in flight,’ the carrier wrote.”

Surprising but pleasing occurrence! For more analysis on this issue, check out my recent FreshMeat “Push to Talk.”

Here’s an email I just received; presumably in response to my Museum of Foreign Groceries, but of course not someone who pays very close attention.

Subject: my cv
To: steve at portigal dot com

Hi I have 8 years experience in potato chips processing with Heat and
Control,Kiremko,H&H,FMC equipments.Also in frying oil formulation and
potato chips flavor fomulation.If you need some one with this experience
please E mail me.I am food processing technology engineer.I willbe waitting for your E mail.

Reminds me of similar weird and inappropriate contacts received before (here and here)

This story in the New York Times describes how companies are looking at what customers have to say online, and are indeed turning that into an opportunity to understand and connect. No mention this article of companies trying to suppress or remove negative comments made by their customers.

Early in April, Continental Airlines played host at a gathering in Houston for members of FlyerTalk.com, a travel Web site best known for its message boards where travelers discuss, dissect and often complain about pretty much anything related to travel, but mostly airlines and their frequent-flier programs.

…

Not that it was all warm and fuzzy, Mr. Burri acknowledged. The dinner guests “didn’t necessarily like all the answers they got” to questions about the removal of first-class seats from some aircraft, the challenge of qualifying for elite status and the difficulty of redeeming frequent-flier miles for free tickets and upgrades.

…

In fact, blogs may be grabbing all the media headlines, but online communities like FlyerTalk are wielding a different kind of influence in the corporate world, providing instant feedback from those critics who marketers have called influencers. Just by logging on, companies can study, learn from and even respond to the cacophony of opinions about what they are doing wrong and what they are doing right without spending a dime on focus groups or market research.

…

Some travel companies have even assigned employees to act as authorized representatives in monitoring FlyerTalk’s message boards and answering questions, reporting back about hot topics and occasionally putting out fires – ideally without sounding like a corporate mouthpiece or disrupting the Web site’s natural give and take

Although Continental does not have anyone participating in the FlyerTalk fray in an official capacity, “Lots of us will go to FlyerTalk and pull up our forum and see what our customers are talking about,” said Mark Bergsrud, Continental’s vice president for marketing programs, who attended the Houston event.

“When we see something that’s factually incorrect,” Mr. Bergsrud said, “we’ll work with the moderator, but we don’t like to put our own posts on there. We’d have to be real careful about how we word everything.”

That said, Continental has responded to suggestions that have bubbled up through the FlyerTalk forums, Mr. Bergsrud added, like creating a customer service desk exclusively for its elite fliers, changing the format of frequent-flier statements and tweaking some of the tools on continental.com.

One company that has assigned an official representative to FlyerTalk is Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, owner of the St. Regis, Westin, Sheraton, W and other chains. William Sanders, better known to FlyerTalk regulars as “Starwood Lurker,” says he spends six or eight hours on Mondays getting caught up on all the posts and messages that have come in over the weekend, but four hours a day is closer to normal.

Figuring out how, and how much, to participate has been a learning process, Mr. Sanders said. “I used to respond to everything I knew an answer to, and then I figured out they’ll often answer it for you.” He said he now tried to observe the delicate balance between being helpful and disrupting the exchange of ideas the site was meant to foster.

From Canadian Press

Peterborough, Ont. Canadian journalist and author Scott Young has died at the age of 87. Mr. Young, father of pop music icon Neil Young, died Sunday in Kingston, Ont.

He travelled the world covering the Second World War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and nearly every major sporting event in North America.

“He was someone who preferred to be at home,” Margaret Hogan, his wife of 25 years, said Monday from Kingston.

Mr. Young began his journalism career as a sports reporter at the Winnipeg Free Press. He moved to The Canadian Press in Toronto at the age of 23 after the paper refused to give him a raise. Mr. Young told CP in 1994 that Free Press managing editor George Ferguson told him, “You will never be worth more than $25 a week to the Winnipeg Free Press.”

Mr. Young covered both news and sports for CP, and covered the Second World War from London. In 1957, Mr. Young joined The Globe and Mail as a sports columnist.

He covered Grey Cups, World Series, Stanley Cups, the Olympics and even appeared on Hockey Night in Canada broadcasts. Mr. Young also worked for Maclean’s magazine and the Toronto Telegram. He gave up newspapers in 1980.

Apart from his accomplished newspaper career, he also wrote 45 books. His novels and non-fiction work included The Flood, the two Arctic thrillers Murder in a Cold Climate and The Shaman’s Knife, and 1984’s Neil and Me, about his relationship with his famous rock ‘n’ roll son.

Ms. Hogan said her husband hadn’t written anything in years. Peterborough Mayor Sylvia Sutherland said Mr. Young, who owned a farm in nearby Cavan, left a void in the landscape of Canadian journalism.

“He was one of the outstanding journalists of his time,” she said. “He had an incisive intelligence. He knew how to get a good story. I love Scott. I miss him a lot, everybody will. He’s one of the great legends of Canadian journalism and it’s a loss to those of us who love journalism.”

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse is a website that monitors Cease and Desist letters that bloggers and website creators may receive. One can submit such a letter and have it hosted there as well. The EFF offers legal liability guidance for bloggers as well.

Both these sites caught my eye today. I’ll probably write more about this later, but I was asked this morning to remove a posting from my blog. I don’t intend to do so, and I do intend to blog about the request. Soon.

Looks like I’ll be back in NYC later this week. My second trip in 2 (or 3?) weeks – sometimes it’s years between opportunities to visit New York, now my cup runneth over. I’m pretty excited!

The New York Times reports on a grassroots taxi redesign effort: A nonprofit group called the Design Trust for Public Space plans to ‘define the ideal taxi and taxi system of the future.’ At a workshop on May 24, designers, architects, city officials and representatives of taxi owners and drivers sketched out an array of ideas. Matthew W. Daus, the chairman of the Taxi and Limousine Commission, has given cautious support to the effort. “This is a good exercise to get the perspectives of consumers and passengers, and also of architects and designers who are not involved in the day-to-day business of cabs.”

Yet the perspective of consumers and passengers is not included in the process! This seems like a fantastic opportunity to try to understand the needs of the users of the system from another point of view, rather than as users of the system who presumably arrive at these workshops already ready to solve the problems they’ve defined. Let’s take a step back and try to understand what isn’t working for someone else. Ethnographic study of the cab-riding experience, anyone?

I created a flickr tag “autophagia” for any signs of animals preparing to serve and/or eat themselves in the name of cuisine.

I’ve started things off with the Chick -N – Coop Hof Brau sign in Daly City, CA, depicting a chicken in an egg-cup serving up a platter of chicken. Mmm, mmm, tasty!

You can read all details in this story but basically

palmOne, Inc. has announced an agreement with PalmSource, Inc. for palmOne to acquire full rights to the brand name Palm. The brand had been co-owned by the two companies since the October 2003 spin-off of PalmSource from Palm, Inc. palmOne will pay PalmSource US$30 million for PalmSource’s 55 percent share of the Palm Trademark Holding Company. Payment will be made in installments over 3.5 years. palmOne will change its company name to Palm, Inc. later this year.

Yeah, that’s clear. Because they’ve had such great success in the past with their names. I think people still refer to the entire category as the Palm Pilot (which could be a success, except that they dropped the Pilot name about 6 years ago), but then it became Palm, but then the company split into PalmOne and PalmSource (although I guess Palm was still an umbrella organization) – but really I was never able to tell which one was which, and mostly that just meant that the email addresses of contacts who were employees of Palm were suddenly no longer usable. Now, they are switching again.

And me, I’ve still got my Handspring Visor Edge, a spin-off from the Palm empire that they got brought back in and then dropped. I don’t think they make any Handspring products any more, let alone a Visor model, let alone the rare Edge sub-model category.

One would need a PDA to organize all of this information!

It’s now about one year since we adopted Brody, a golden retriever. Not quite an anniversary, not quite a birthday, but worth reflecting upon. It continues to be an interesting journey and learning process, but most relevant to this blog perhaps is how fascinating it is to observe and interact with a creature who operates without any social norms or cultural rules, whereas we do and say almost nothing without hearkening back to those same constraints.

I find myself constantly observing him and remarking to myself with surprise or bemusement how he can do something that I want desperately to attach human meaning to. His body language, his lack of body language, his sighs and facial expressions, what and where he licks or sniffs, his reactions to stimuli (other dogs, strangers, cats, alpacas, trucks, food, water), on and on – all are driven by a completely different set of motivations, yet like most dog owners, I do nothing but project upon him.

It’s a reminder to me as an ethnographer that so much of what we do ourselves, or what I observe in others, is constructed through the rules of our culture.

(and sure, there are millions of PhD theses about nature vs. nurture, about sociobiology, about culture-in-animals, no doubt, but really, I hope you take my point for what it is).

I should have known better.

I just wrote an extensive bug report to Yahoo, and filled out a detailed form about my account and my system and all that, and after submitting it, find out that Sorry, but we’re experiencing temporary technical trouble. Please wait a few minutes, then try to send your inquiry again.

And my form is gone. The Back button trashes it, they haven’t saved it.

Isn’t this a problem that was solved years ago?

First of all, why is Yahoo so lame that they can’t fix this? Second of all, how can they have problems that prevent them from receiving bug reports? Because this is exactly what happened last time I had a problem.

Forget who is more innovative, Yahoo or Google, let’s think about who is more basically reliable?

Bottom Feeder is a gonzo food review blog. They find interesting grocery products, taste ’em, and write ’em up. Something I’ve been doing, too (Tofu2Go, Tiger Power, Grapple, and Bumblebee Entre Style Tuna.

CoVisp‘s About Us page offers a (now offline) link to their Business Code of Ethics but the entire page is obviously copied-and-pasted from corporate text at XO.COM.

Welcome

While other companies are talking about making telecommunications simple, XO actually delivers simplicity without compromising the level of service that business customers expect. XO is able to cut through the clutter in the telecom space and offer businesses what they need: a reliable, end-to-end source for telecom services with a broad product suite backed by trustworthy, dependable customer service. XO offers new customers a no-risk satisfaction guarantee on standard products and services for the first three months after installation.

Everything You Want. Exactly What You Need.

Company Information
See why businesses just like yours have found a happy ending with the XO story.
* Proven Leadership and Innovation
* Network AssetsCustomer Centric
* Extensive Product Portfolio

Investors Center
View the latest financial information through a comprehensive listing of all XOÔø? Annual Reports, Quarterly Earnings Statements, and other pertinent financial news.

Business Code of Ethics
This document contains the XO Policy and Ethics for all XO employees, as required for posting by the SEC.

Careers
Interested in a career with a truly unique telecommunications company? Explore our career center for the latest job postings and company information. If you find the perfect listing, submit your resume online.

The COVISP Network
XO has a unique ability to serve customers from premise-to-premise over XO facilities, ultimately ensuring the highest levels of performance and reliability. See what makes our network unique.

See the full list at Snark Hunting – anonymous names (such as John Doe in the US) from around the world
Australia Fred Nurk, Joe Farnarkle
Austria Hans Meier, Hans Maier, Hans Mayer, Herr und Frau Osterreicher
Belgium Jan Janssen, Piet Pietersen
Brazil Beltrano, Ciclano, Fulano, Ze ninguem, Joao da Silva, Ze da Silva, Joao Ninguem, Maria Ninguem
Canada G. Raymond

I received the following today from someone who was in the process of subscribing to FreshMeat

Hello Steve

I am a consumer of the drink Rev. I’ve tried both the blue and the red and was wondering if this was the official site in order for me to get a hold of you. Please contact me back.

I can only figure they saw my Foreign Grocery Museum

Kind of horrifying follow-up to my recent experience with captive advertising on Contintental is in today’s WaPo

On a recent Alaska Airlines flight, passengers were told to remain buckled and seated for the last 30 minutes before landing at Reagan National Airport. It was a standard security measure for flights heading into restricted airspace over Washington.

It also turned a planeful of passengers into captive customers who were then pitched a Bank of America Visa card — with little chance of tuning it out. Over the intercom, a flight attendant encouraged passengers to sign up for the Bank of America credit card. Then other flight attendants went down the aisle handing out applications.

Marketing now follows potential customers into the skies. In the airline industry’s newest way to drum up revenue, carriers have become aggressive pitchmen for a range of products to passengers at 30,000 feet. The airlines say the ad revenue helps in these tough financial times. But some passengers liken the pitches to ads in a movie theater before the main feature.

“It’s worse than the idea of cell phones in flights,” said frequent flier Sylvia Caras of Santa Cruz, Calif.

Advertising in the air is nothing new. Most airlines run some commercials during their in-flight entertainment. And most in-flight magazines carry ads.

But until now, passengers could simply look away from the screen or turn the magazine page.

For Alexander Velaj, a Stamford, Conn., insurance agent, the latest trend in on-board salesmanship is another reason for “purchasing the Bose noise-canceling headphones.”

But Montgomery College English professor Chet Pryor said he accepts the in-flight product pitches as the trade-off for lower fares. “They’re simply something that must be endured,” he said.

Alaska Airlines spokeswoman Amanda Tobin said passengers had expressed an interest in learning more about applying for Visa credit cards and that the airline’s flight attendants share “basic” information.

(that last bit just kills me – I have a fantasy blog entry where I’d just take count of every ridiculous corporate behavior that is justified with that false marketingspeak about how their customers told them that they wanted this)

Campbell’s Seeds (in Japan) is produced by a third party, Tokyo-based World Flower Service. Inside is a choice of seeds to grow miniature tomatoes, miniature pumpkins or green peas. The idea of a more labor-intensive Campbell’s came to mind from an interior design magazine that showed the can immortalized by Andy Warhol being used to grow herbs in the kitchen.

I’m doing an online chat with a customer support agent at Intuit about a problem wtih getting a refund for buggy software. At the end of the session, I get this

550 Ernie : You will be asked to complete a survey after this chat. One of the questions asks if I have completely resolved your issue today. Can we agree that the solution I’m providing will accomplish this for you?

In fact, all they’ve done is have me tell them AGAIN about my problem (after all the software problems, they agreed to issue a refund, but then don’t, and so I follow up by email and they tell me to call or chat and I have to go through the story again and so they’ve opened up a case with a case number and presumably in 8 weeks I should have my refund. Who knows?).

550 Ernie : I am very sorry to interrupt you. I am awaiting your response, Steve.

Obviously they need to game the system and try some social engineering to get me to agree to fill out the survey properly. I’m sure there’s documented evidence that if I agree to say something there’s a higher likelihood I’ll grade them higher. From some customer research into this sort of metric, I realized that the score is more important than the actual problem solving. As long as numbers can demonstrate adequate performance, people keep their jobs. I don’t mean Ernie, I mean someone who manages 1000 Ernies.

Intro
Pete’s Tofu2Go is a series of products that attempts to create new, appealing, and useful applications for tofu.

This includes Snackable in four flavors, with dipping sauces
* Sesame Ginger with Jazzed Ginger Soy Sauce
* Thai Tango with Mango Wasabi Sauce
* Lemon Pepper with Mango Chipotle Sauce (U.S. only)
* Santa Fe Sizzle with Pineapple Mango Fusion Sauce (U.S. only)

as well as Marinated Cubes in Tequila Lime and Sesame Sizzle (for cooking or snacking), and dessert.

The Package
We tried two flavors of dessert tofu, Very Berry, and Caramel. Looks pretty good on the package; bright colors, familiar flavors (i.e., yogurt, or pudding).

Look at the tiny little spoon they come with! Kinda cute, if somewhat less than optimally functional.

Here’s everything. Each package contains two substantial containers. and two baby spoons.

The packages break apart – with some effort – for individual consumption, and I guess packing in lunches, etc. We tried it at home.

Serving
In order to open it, one must grasp the clear thin plastic layer at one corner and pull back. It’s fairly well attached, and so one must steady the hand against a surface in order to pull. Of course, at the beginning of the opening process, the only thing to steady against is the tofu itself. This caused the strawberry version to bulge rather sickly through the opening, a large layer heaving with eagerness to depart.

When I finally got the plastic off, the excess liquid in the container gathered on top of the tofu, presenting a wet, glistening, slightly pink and almost alive surface. It wasn’t so appetizing.

But things went from bad to really bad when I opened the caramel. Some difference in the texture of the dessert lead to a completely different bulging behavior. With the caramel, the pressure of my hand on the plastic caused the tofu to flood sickeningly and rapidly out the opening.

It was the first time I wished I was a videoblogger, because the video would be much better than these pictures. The quick and dramatic depature of the tofu slurry looked for all the world like an exploding zit. Not good.

Eating
I really was hoping for the best. But it was inedible. The water in each spoonful created multiple textures, a weakly-flavored water with a gelatinous pile of glop in the middle. With no yogurt or pudding taste, but something like medicine, a Robitussin or other medication that makes ya shiver.

And even though the package says “serving suggestion” – I really did think the caramel was going to have some drizzled caramel sauce or a layer of topping in the container somewhere. I figured the phrase referred to the nice berries on the side but not the lack of a topping. I felt grossed out, but also scammed.

This is a product to avoid.

Note: This is the fourth in an occasional series of reviews of new grocery (and other) products that strike me as interesting or unusual. See also Tiger Power, Grapple, and Bumblebee Entre Style Tuna.

In this Wired piece on Beck Steve Silberman writes “If you feel like you’ve been hearing about Beck’s new album everywhere lately, you probably have. Like most major-label hits, Guero’s ubiquity is the result of a carefully calibrated PR campaign that began long before the CD’s street date. But Beck and his label, Interscope, went way beyond the norm, supplementing the usual onslaught of TV, radio, and print marketing with a cross-platform blitz of iTunes exclusives, downloadable videos, and releases catering to digital consumers. This includes a deluxe CD/DVD-Audio package featuring a 5.1-surround mix and visuals you can control with your DVD player’s remote.”

Seems like he’s confusing PR with marketing and with product. PR is what got this piece written. We’re hearing about Beck right as we read the article. In a print publication. There’ll probably be a piece in the New Yorker, next weekend’s Sunday NYT, something on NPR, and of course Rolling Stone magazine and beyond. That doesn’t happen because of marketing – marketing helps create consumer awareness. The articles appear not because the journos are savvy and are tracking what’s hot, but because PR flack calls or emails or faxes to the right people at the publication and “sells” them on the idea of writing about it.

And Silberman knows that; he’s a professional journalist (ipso facto; he’s being published in Wired), so why this disingenous reporting on the technological innovation in product delivery and marketing under the label of PR? I guess it positions Wired as being immune to the machincations of the companies for whom they (and all of the media, including the “public” or “indie” media) willingly shills; rather we imagine Wired as investigative and cutting-edge. Which is of course, bullshit.

From Boing Boing “Penn and Teller’s Penn Jillette has named his new baby daughter ‘Moxie CrimeFighter.’ With an incap on the ‘F’ in CrimeFighter. This man is my hero”

Hero?

Cory needs to get some perspective. Isn’t it slightly less cool/leet/w00t when this sort of thing is inflicted upon a child? Sheesh.

This seemed like a nifty innovation, small, yet simple. This UPS truck was parked in Manhattan, presumably the driver might be away from the truck for several minutes, meanwhile, it serves as a convenient drop-box for passerby. I mean, the truck is there, you might as well make use of it, right?

I don’t know, perhaps others do, if they are leaving these trucks in fixed locations for predictable times, serving as reliable-if-temporary drop boxes?

I’ve been using this online backup service called Data Deposit Box for a couple of months now. It’s a piece of software that watches the folders you specify and pretty much is running all the time to upload the latest version of your documents. You get billed based on how much you store. Last week I got my first bill (the first month was free) for $19.17, for a month.

And then last night I got three emails from them

To: Steve Portigal
Subject: System – Partner Billing

Name: Interbaun
Systems: 39
Storage: 40.33 GB
Start: 2005-05-01
End: 2005-05-31
Total: 186.82

and

To: Steve Portigal
Subject: System – Partner Billing

Name: Magma
Systems: 193
Storage: 414.33 GB
Start: 2005-05-01
End: 2005-05-31
Total: 1094.02

and

To: Steve Portigal
Subject: System – Partner Billing

Name: Primus Resi
Systems: 2
Storage: 38.54 MB
Start: 2005-05-01
End: 2005-05-31
Total: 4.44

Argh, nearly $1300 was billed to me overnight? I just about flipped. I googled the Magma and Primus names and saw them listed as ISP customers of DDB, and was relieved. I sent in an urgent support request and did receive this back

I?m very sorry you received the other 3 emails. You recieved them in error. I can assure you that your credit card was not charge for these amounts and never will be.

A small problem with our email server caused these emails to go to the wrong list. The problem has been fixed and will not happen again.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

and then this broadcast email

To: Steve Portigal
Subject: Important Information regarding incorrect Invoice Emails

Dear Data Deposit Box Subscriber,

Due to an error in our system last evening you may have received three Data Deposit Box invoice emails by mistake.

Please disregard these emails as they were not intended for you.

This error was due to a mistake on our part and was not a result of any security breach.

Your credit card has not been charged.

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

Now THAT is an email error you don’t want to make? They sent all their individual customers the bills from some big clients? Oops!

Wanna buy a watch?

The worst kind, isn’t it?

Gorgeous new bakery on 9th ave in Manhattan, with an example of what I guess is a food trend – the Fwinkie, as they call it, an example of what a Twinkie would be if it was made by a baker and not a processed synthetic food shmechhghh company. They had regular, and chocolate (dipped in chocolate) – which is what this is. It was pretty good. Not freak-out good, but pretty good. Looked better than it tasted, I’d say.

Getting a credit report for those in the US is probably a good thing to do. That site allows you to get a free report from each agency every 12 months. You can do all three at once, or one of each every 4 months. I finally did it after it having been available in California since December. Better late than never.

Interesting to see what’s there:
the name ” STEVE L PORTILTOGEL”

the address “1139 AMARILLO APARTM
MILLBRAE, CA 94030-” when I once lived at “1139 AMARILLO AVE APT3
PALO ALTO, CA 94303-3710″ (i.e., same address but different city)

and a reference to ” ENGINEERING-MANAGEMENT SERVICE: PO BOX 370252, MONTARA, CA, 94037″ (our current PO Box)

I called them up and in a few minutes they changed the first two items, although it can take 30 to 45 days to process it and they’ll send me an email.

Obviously, none of these are bad errors, but it seems easier to keep it clean and prevent something weird in the future.

Update: The next day they updated it. They cleaned up the variations on 1139 Amarillo in Palo Alto (there had been two, one that said Apartment 3 and one that said APART and stopped there) and took out the variations in Millbrae. They got rid of the strange verison of my last name, and they deleted the Engineering-Management Service, with this note

As a part of our fraud protection efforts, we evaluate address information. The notice, “this is a non-residential address,” indicates that perhaps at one time business mail was accepted at this address, or the address was used as a mail drop, or a delivery service. It only advises a potential creditor to assure that this is your home address. The notice is about the address, not you.

It seems that they dropped the area codes on a bunch of my old phone numbers, but that hardly matters.

I’m registered for EPIC 2005

, I’m going to Redmond in November.

The conference is designed for people who have trained for and are practicing ethnography in business contexts. This could include, but is not limited to, people who specialize in qualitative methods from disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, semiotics, art history, and linguistics.

I’m thinking hard about the categories in the Call for Participation and what I might be able to submit. Any ideas? The theme is sociality, so anyone looking to collaborate?

This one really surprises me – I thought AAA was (among other things) an advocacy group for consumers, at least related to road and car and travel issues. I guess that doesn’t preclude them from being spamming scum as well? Seems out of their brand image to me. Maybe someone acting locally doesn’t have to be accountable to the corporate parental unit?

Roll Over Beethoven is a collection of classical music for pets and the people who love them.

This compact disc of classical music includes selections to inspire pets, as well as ones that truly were inspired by a composer’s love for a pet. “Initially, it may sound a little unconventional, but a lot of thought went into creating a classical music CD for pets,” Greg Davis, WRR general manager said. First, people love their pets and they are continually looking for ways to improve their pets’ quality of life. What better way than with classical music! Secondly, research shows that animals, especially dogs, respond very favorably to classical music. According to a study conducted by Queen’s University in Belfast, dogs that listen to classical music are more relaxed and well behaved than when listening to other types of music, such as heavy metal.

Many first-hand accounts from our listeners support this research. We hear from folks who put their radio on WRR when they take their pet to the vet, or they leave WRR on while they’re at work or away from home. One listener said that her tortoise stands in front of the stereo speaker as long as WRR is on. Another important factor in releasing a pet CD is the opportunity to help two outstanding organizations that work tirelessly to assist abandoned and/or abused animals. A portion of CD proceeds will be donated to Operation Kindness and SPCA of Texas.

tracklisting

1. Beethoven – Symphony No. 7: Presto
2. Haydn – Piano Concerto No. 4: Adagio cantabile
3. Bach – Brandenburg Concerto No. 6: Finale
4. Mozart – Violin Concerto No. 3: Adagio
5. Dvorak – Legend: Allegro giusto
6. Debussy – The Girl with the Flaxen Hair
7. Toch – Spiel: Idyll
8. Copland – Rodeo: Hoe-down
9. Elgar – Enigma Variations: Variation 11
10. Tucker – Whiskers, a Kitty Walk* (World Premiere Recording)
11. Respighi – The Birds: Prelude
12. Satie – Preludes flasques: Flabby Preludes
13-14. Faure – Dolly Suite: Mi-a-ou and Kitty Valse
15. Hovhaness – Piano Sonata: Fred the Cat
16. Gershwin – Walking the Dog (Theme from WRR’s “A Night on the Town”)
17-19. Saint-Saens – Carnival of the Animals: The Birds, The Aquarium and Finale

(thanks Amy)

Fast Company gives props to our blog at Core77, although they describe us as “A random group of industrial designers and design fans” (random? us?) but refer to the content as “The quick-hit, often photo-laden entries offer a comprehensive view of what’s hot and hip.” which frankly disappoints me because I think if you spend more than 30 seconds on the site, you’ll see it’s about something a little deeper.

Though I did find a lot of the content of the special issue on design to be rather glib, at least in tone, if not in fact (as this example is).

You’ll probably need to click on this picture to make it large enough to read it. It’s a detail of the invoice from my recent stay at a Hilton. As usual, they encourage the rapid check-out where you leave the keys in the room, take this document with you, and don’t even bother to stop at the front desk.
In this case, however, they’ve added a “violator” – a gold sticker with a bunch of extra info. Looks like they are planning to send out mail surveys, and it’s opt-out, not opt-in. To opt-out, I’d have to stop by the front desk on my way out, exactly what the Zip-Out Check-Out (R) is designed to avoid.
I did not bother, and I guess maybe I’ll actually complete the survey since that will be my chance to tell them i) how crappy the room was (the desk lamp was broken – I mean badly broken, with the bulb-assembly bent over at 90 degrees, the power plug didn’t work)
ii) how crappy the food was (my chicken wrap was made with chicken that was grilled, then frozen, then thawed to assemble the sandwhich – partially thawed – nothing like chicken icicles in your dinner
iii) how crappy the service was (what kind of business hotel – and this place was in an office park, business accomodation is the only reason is exists – doesn’t offer a breakfast-room-service-hang-tag deal where you can order your breakfast before you go to bed and it’ll arrive at the time you specify)

As far as i) I guess I get some lame points myself for not telling them about it, so the next visitor will have the same discovery. When you arrive at 9:15 pm and you have to eat and get work done, it’s not like you want to be dealing with workers in your work or the frustration of the whole repair/request process. Clearly they don’t check out stuff that is broken that badly and they (ineffectively) rely on the guests to take care of the notification.

Two articles in today’s NYT deal with attempts to rethink minor but impactful elements of the travelling experience – the hotel check-in kiosk and the middle seat on a commuter train. Seems that they can’t build/install/maintain a working kiosk (more a comment on industry culture than technology) and that we may see more trains without the (socially) uncomfortable middle seat.

This article

will no doubt be heavily blogged because it describes some innovative electronic acoustic privacy technology, but I thought the latter half of the piece, dealing with the relationship between innovative consultant and innovative manufacturer was extremely provocative.

Herman Miller has a long history of exploring the leading edges of office furniture and computer technology. The company worked with the computer scientist Douglas C. Engelbart during the 1960’s to design furniture and office systems that would help workers collaborate more effectively.

In fact, a walk through Applied Minds’ warehouses reveals many projects that seem to adopt the Engelbart approach of looking for ways to harness machines to augment human intelligence. With Northrop Grumman, the design firm is experimenting with teleconferencing, looking for ways to build systems that are useful for colleagues who work far apart from one another.

Mr. Ferren is particularly interested in finding novel solutions to design problems. All the bookshelves in the company’s offices, for example, are tilted 15 degrees to one side as a way to keep books neatly stacked.

In forming an alliance with Herman Miller, Mr. Hillis proposed a yearlong experiment period, which would allow the two companies to work together on broad ideas. After that, they could either commit to a product development project or go separate ways.

Fast Company, always more of an idea than an actual magazine, is probably gone for good warns this column about the shifting, and indeed fading, fortunes of business magazines. Interesting timing, given the increasing focus on design in these magazines

(links ripped from LukeW)

The colloquial definition is absolutely Not Safe For Work (NSFW), but “Indeed, bukkake is more commonly used in Japan to describe a type of dish where the toppings are poured on top of noodles, as in bukkake-udon and bukkake-soba.”

I certainly was surprised to go to a noodle house in Mountain View recently (on Castro St. – some relatively new place) and see that on the menu, having only heard the term used in the pr0n sense. Imagine trying to explain your reaction to a dining companion who wasn’t familiar with the term!

Game controller family tree via Waxy

The Evolution of the American Front Porch
In recent times, new emphasis has been given to the cultural history and significance of the American front porch. In an effort to complement and to elaborate this emphasis, this project will attempt to define and distinguish the American front porch as an American cultural object. By exploring its evolution, from its origins to its decline, this project will not merely tell the story of the porch, but will also tell a limited story of America itself. While to many the front porch is unfamiliar, to the rest it must bring to mind a memory, experience, or actual place. This project may help to connect these cultural memories of the front porch to an understanding of the important role it has played in the national experience.

via MeFi

Haven’t we had 1-hour photo service for a very very long time? How is this a useful name? Or a useful offering? Now, slower than ever!

Two experiences of note with audio

i) Continental Airlines shows ads on their flights, before they begin the in-flight programming. In other words, through the regular audio system, not the headphone systems. The ads are very very loud. Painfully loud. You’re strapped into your seat and you can’t get away. The screens drop down, the audio starts. You have nowhere else to look and even with my fingers in my ears I could hear every damn noise in the Verizon and Are We There Yet? ads. Blecchgh.

ii) Walking through Midtown Manhattan this morning, I saw the all-too-familiar emergency-vehicle-gridlock scenario. An ambulance or fire truck is rushing somewhere, sirens wailing, but there’s nowhere for them to go – the lanes in front of them are blocked, so they sound the air horn, over and over again, to very little avail. Only this time it was slightly different – the ambulance in question had a modified type of siren, akin to the “wheep-WHEEP” they sometimes use as a honk, but it was almost verbal in its wide range of fluctuations. There was a large “vocabulary” if you will, and it seemed to convey more urgency, rather than rote pressure. I’m sure there is a human-factors alarm attendance specialist who designed this stuff (or at least who has written about it somewhere), but I’d never heard of it or heard it. I’m sure that eventually people will become used to it and tune it out, but since it was new to me, it caught my attention.

A variety of 3D portraits, made from bent wire, in a restaurant window (Sushi Ann) in NYC. They are about the size of a sheet of paper. Nice stuff.

Here’s a picture I snapped in the Newark airport earlier this week. Perhaps this woman likes looking like a cyborg; I find it strange, but that’s maybe just me being judgemental.

Today I received this email

From: “Nichole Asher” nichole.xxx at xxx.com
To: steve at portigal dot com
Subject: Hefty Serve ‘n Store blog media outreach!

Hi Steve,

Let me start off by saying that I work for an agency that works for Pactiv, the maker of the new Hefty Serve ‘n Store interlocking plates & bowls. We are doing online outreach for the product through influential folks like yourself and would like to know if you’d be interested in participating in the product launch.

The company I work for is one of the world’s largest PR firms, called MS&L; we’re a subsidiary in Ann Arbor, MI called Hass MS&L. My full contact information is at the bottom of this e-mail.

I understand if you are skeptical, so I’m offering to send you links to web sites of other product launches that we’ve done and the responses showing this is legit. In fact, if you search Google using my company name (Hass MS&L) and the name of one of my co-workers ([email protected]) you’ll find reviews of similar product
launches where these names are referenced.

So let me cut to the chase: Noise Between Stations is *the* place to hear about new products and such, and I think your readers would find the technology behind the interlocking plates interesting. I’m wondering if I can send you information and a sample so you can try the Hefty Serve ‘n Store products. They’re not on the market yet, but I have an order coming in pre-launch.

The plates and bowls are absolutely free, and in return the only thing my client has asked is that you post a review of the product on your blog.

Please let me know if this is something you’re interested in and I will add your name to the fulfillment list today.

Thanks,
Nichole

[contact info deleted]

Now what was that? “Noise Between Stations is *the* place to hear about new products and such” – but this isn’t Noise Between Stations, it’s my blog, All This ChittahChattah. Pretty hilarious – she could have written “…is a great source of good information” or anything more general, but she had to say that it was “*the* place” – of course, then she was caught sending obvious form letters to different people, and oops, forgetting to change the contact info. We’ve all sent out dozens of resumes or whatever and we always hope that we make sure to change the info in our form letter, right? It would be a pleasure to work with you at MICROSOFT CORPORATION in REDMOND, WA. Etc.

But this person has it as their job, and they are trying to win over cynical bloggers (hey, by assuming that we’re already cynical, right?) so you’d think they’d be able to do a little better than that?

I called her on it and got this

apologize for that, I was reading the wrong blog name due to having multiple windows, so this was actually meant for you @ All This Chittah-Chattah if you are interested.

Anyway, I’m not proud. I’ll take the damn Hefty-whatsit and I’ll write about it. But I thought the poor PR effort was also blogworthy.

Here are some of the recent search phrases that led people to this blog:

free daily short SMS collection
brian rossiter
Keith Richards T-shirts
cell phone glue clip
steve portigal
torrentspycom
rejection hotlines in texas
oan nationwide conn
cellphones under 20.00 dollars
EMAIL ABOUT HUSBAND TYPING PENIS FOR PASS WORD
ipod rhinestones
Stereotypes Canadians
Message T-shirts, rhinestones
www.ebpp.wellsfargo.com/mortgagepay
truth behind the gates of Auschwitz
rhinestones on phones
where to send latino short stories to be published
vw beetle toddler bed
check invisible status skype
chattah
nasalguard blog
comcast autopay

I’m off to New Jersey/New York this week. I’ll be doing some meetings in NJ to kick off an exciting new project, and then hanging for a couple of days in NYC (staying at the W Hotel) to see some friends

. It’s been nearly a year since I’ve been out there; looking forward to it!

Doesn’t the core of Lego’s brand reside in the physical meatspace interaction with the bricks themselves? The tactile, the auditory snik? But this Star Wars Videogame recasts Lego as an aesthetic (granted, something the underground has done for many years), a style of animation, and a proxy for kid-friendly. Sure, it’ll sell a jillion units (as will anything Anakin-tastic these days) but is this good for Lego in the long, long run?

I survive a violent assault

Forty-five minutes ago I was fortunate to survive a violent, deliberate attempt to cause me harm. I took the dog for a walk, and just around the corner – less than 3 minutes from our house, on foot – a man in a pickup truck drove directly at me.

There are no sidewalks in Montara. Pedestrians must walk on the road. The road in this case was more than wide enough for two vehicles. There was no car behind us. It was full daylight out, but not bright enough to be shining the driver’s eyes.

This was not a deserted area; in my walk I saw probably 15 other dogs (with many people), kids being dropped off, joggers, etc.

I was not invisible – I was wearing light jeans, a bright red shirt, white shoes.

There’s just no way to explain away the other person’s behavior except to identify it as vicious, deliberate, and hurtful.

The older white Mazda pickup came towards us at fairly high speed. He was driving close to the edge of the road (unusual when the whole road is open). I stopped walking and looked up at him, as if to make eye contact. He did not waver. I did the only thing I could do, I jumped off the road into the grass/ditch, at the last moment. He didn’t waver; I saw his fairly young face and sunglasses as he sped past.

In some ways, thank goodness the only choice I had was to get out of the way. Had I been holding a gun, or been ensonced in my own shell of steel and rubber, I might have given into the anger and indignation than this intent-to-harm engendered. As it is, I’m shocked and hurt, and helpless. But safe.

The SFChron reports on the man who provided the chili fingertip. The whole affair has been handled by the press about as lamely as you’d expect (hype, sensationalization, etc.) – probably not as bad as Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, et. al, but still pretty bad. But the Chron takes it way into yellow journalism, like something out of 40s-era scandal sheets about Hollywood starts caught in love-nests, etc. Here’s some of the story that seemed most egregious (and let’s start with the photo, above), making the dude out to be as much of a low-life as they can. For no reason, except, hey, it sells papers. This was a front-page story today, BTW.

Las Vegas — After days of hiding, the man whose infamous fingertip ended up in the middle of the Wendy’s chili scandal said Thursday night that his life had been thrown into a tailspin by the case.

“It’s been hell — you don’t even know!” Brian Rossiter, 36, bellowed from behind the door to his apartment at Thrift Suites, where residents pay by the week. He slammed his fists on the door and yelled obscenities as two reporters stood outside.

Rossiter said he had done nothing wrong but refused to discuss the case. He also said he was tired of the media attention and at one point shoved a television reporter before retreating behind the door.

…

Although Rossiter was terse Thursday night, he held court the day before at his favorite watering hole, the Sporting Chance Saloon, where his bar buddies refer to him by his nickname, “Fudge.”

Rossiter showed off his mangled hand, patrons said Thursday, and asked people if they wanted “to shake the most famous hand in America.”

Bar buddies bought him shots of his favorite drink, a cinnamon-flavored schnapps with gold flecks called Goldschlager.

Bartenders said he had gotten belligerent and then cursed his mother, who lives in Pennsylvania and told The Chronicle on Tuesday that her son had given away his fingertip to get out of a $50 gambling debt he had with Plascencia. A friend at the bar had to drive Rossiter home, about 5 miles away.

Ira Byrd, who lives in an apartment below Rossiter, saw him come home around 4 p.m. Wednesday. Rossiter confided in Byrd that he was having a bad day.

“I asked him why his day was bad, and he asked me if I had heard the Wendy’s chili story,” Byrd said. “Then he held up his hand and showed me it was him.”

Rick Fuller, a maintenance worker at Thrift Suites, said he believed that Rossiter would sell his fingertip for money. Rossiter was three days behind in his $175 weekly rent Thursday, said Thrift Suites chief engineer Alan Sneddon.

“Most people come in here with a story, like they lost their wallet,” Fuller said. “Rossiter just said he spent his paycheck gambling. At least he told the truth — that’s unusual around here.”
…

A simple DIY ring

Here’s an easy DIY ring that looks cool and takes seconds to make. In this era of ReadyMade magazine and being green and beauty is where you find it, why not, I ask you? Why not, indeed?

Take an ordinary unopened carton of some beverage. We used Chocolate Silk because it’s made with Real Soy and therefore must be good for you. Open up the screw-top lid.

The freshness seal is what you want. There’s our quarry!

Take the freshness seal off. You just might want to drink some of the soymilk at this point.

Voila!

Lovely. Oops, time for a manicure!

(click on pic to enlarge)
Here’s an interesting one – spam that uses the Amazon look to lend an air of legitimacy. I hadn’t seen this before.

Skype status overload

Skype is a computer program that enables voice conversation through the Internet. It works somewhat like a Instant Message program where you have a list of contacts (i.e., buddies) and you can see if they are around or available in case you want to chat with them (in fact, Skype also has a text chat capability). It’s interesting to think about the telephone with enhanced privacy controls and status information – you know before you try to reach someone what is going on with them. I don’t know if it’s my introverted aversion to the phone or if it’s a general thing, but the lack of information before dialing (what are they doing? is it a good time to talk? can’t we pre-negotiate the conversation?) is something I don’t like about POTS (Plain Old Telephone System).

Skype has offered up way too many choices, though. I imagine they have functional differences, and those may even be documented somewhere, but on their face, they are totally confusing, especially if you build on the IM model that has offline, online, online (but invisible), online (but away).

What is the difference between Online and SkypeMe?
What is the difference between Not Available, Do Not Disturb, and Away?

It’d be very interesting to find out how people understand and use these status indicators – both as explicit choices that people make about their own status, and of course on the other end, how other people interpret the status indicators about their contacts and how they interpret that.

I’ve noted that I can still receive chat messages in some states, and it is a surprise to me, since I’m sort of hoping to be left alone when I set that state. But I haven’t figured out all the variations and all the differences within those. I’m sure it’s been analyzed somewhere, but a quick Google search didn’t help me out very much.

Epson tolerates grey market goods

I recently tried to order some replacement ink for my printer (an Epson 820). I placed an order online with the same place I had used before, DataBazaar. Here’s a picture of what I have always ordered, ink refill part # T026201

Here’s a picture of what they sent me, ink refill part # T026. Notice that absolutely does not say my printer model number on the package.

I contacted Epson support by email and explained what I ordered and what I got, and asked “Is there a difference in spec between the two inks? Will this work with my printer?”

First response

Thank you for contacting the Epson Connection.

Epson recommends that you use only genuine Epson ink cartridges which have
been manufactured by Epson using the most advanced quality processes and
inks specifically formulated for your Epson printer. The use of non-Epson
ink cartridges or ink refill may cause damage to your printer. These
products may also reduce the quality of your printer output.

Which of course is no answer at all. What I got was an actual Epson product. But a foreign package that conspicuously omits my printer’s model number. I asked again and was told

There should be no spec. difference. Most packaging will not have the full serial number for the cartridges. Thank you for your patience.

Isn’t that totally ridiculous? What does that mean that they don’t have the full serial number? This person is just making up answers.

DataBazaar is selling grey market ink. And Epson’s support is too lame to understand or care.

I contacted DataBazaar via their “24/7” email contact, but 48 hours later they have yet to respond. I then called them and they claim never to have received my email because of some “spam blocking.” Further, they told me the ink was fine, and when I explained that it did NOT have my printer model number on it, they explained that there wasn’t enough room on the packaging to list all the model numbers.

Okay, so I’m aggravated because I am dealing with a range of people that communicate badly, that cause extra work on my end, and that basically lie to me, but if I could step away from myself (believe me, it’s hard) and think about this from the manufacturer’s point of view – this is terrible for them. Printers and ink is a complete mess – there are so many different kinds of ink, so many supported printer models, lack of clarity around the quality issues of branded ink, paper, refillable stuff, and even more issues about hardware lockouts of generic ink without proprietary chips to enable them, etc. etc. Customers are not comfortable with the purchase, with so much mythology and misinformation flying. Shouldn’t buying new ink be as easy as filling up your car with gas? Annoyingly expensive, but pretty damn easy in terms of compatability.

And now, the manufacturer and the retailer themselves – the ones that sell the Epson product – are creating confusion and mistrust. It’s bad enough to fend off misinformation from the competition, but even your own supply chain is filled with crap.

I feel bad for Epson.

Update: I opened the package and the actual product itself looked identical to North American version I took out of the printer.

’88 Dodge Aries is a fake TV ad for what was my first car. I can’t remember what year it was, but I bought it used. It had a really really awful smell in it, like an animal had died in it, but it took 3 months for the dealership perfume to wear off and for me to notice the smell. It needed a new radiator, but I had no idea; I just knew that even with the heat off, in the dead of winter, I couldn’t wear a jacket while I drove on the highway or I’d be just too hot.

I put a lot of miles on it, and then eventually it died – I think right around the time we traded it in for something else.

The finger that a woman said she found in a bowl of Wendy’s chili came from an associate of her husband who lost the digit in an industrial accident, police said Friday.

The man is from Nevada and lost a part of his finger in an accident last December, Davis said. His identity was traced through a tip made to Wendy’s hot line, he said. He said authorities ‘positively confirmed that this subject was in fact the source of the fingertip.’

And now we know.

Yahoo is the latest incompetent organization for support.

I’m having very frustrating problems with my Yahoo email account – not the free stuff some people have; SBCGlobal/Yahoo is my ISP, I pay for ’em.

I really only use that account for Undercover

, the Rolling Stones mailing list I run. The problems became much clearer when list traffic picked up dramatically over the last few days. Email from sbcglobal.net members – myself included – was taking hours to get to the distribution list. I went through a process to “whitelist” under-cover.net with Yahoo, but they rejected us, since it’s a mailing list, not an ISP (or something? I don’t quite understand what the problem was – they want it all to trace back to a unique IP address – ironically I’m having almost the opposte problem with AOL, but that’s a separate post).

Here’s what they told me

Since your emails are not sent from a dedicated IP address used solely for your mailings, we cannot systematically exempt your email from our SpamGuard technology.

Please be aware that Yahoo! Mail users are able to set their own preferences for the manner in which they receive your mailings. If the recipients of your messages want to ensure they receive your emails in their Inbox, you may want to ask them to set up a filter in Yahoo! Mail specifically for your emails, or have them add your email address(es) to their Yahoo! Address Book.

The problem goes back; I actually had problems with all the admin messages the list software generates being tagged as “bulk” by Yahoo and no matter how many times I tagged them as “not spam” they’d still end up as bulk. I finally gave up on their filtering software and had them just deliver all the bulk email to me. I couldn’t override their insistence that it was all bulk. Nothing like having something like that out of your own control.

But anyway now my own messages are ending up in the bulk folder. When I post to my own list, it ends up as bulk, and all the other SBCglobal.net subscribers are finding the same thing.

I put my own address in my Yahoo address book. Which makes no sense, but okay. When I send email from my client software (i.e., I use Eudora, but the same idea as using Outlook) it ends up as Bulk. When I sent it from their web interface, it doesn’t. That seems totally weird.

I responded to the whitelist rejection with this info. Today I got this response.

Subject: Re: Customer Support Request Site Change
From: [email protected]

Dear SBC Internet Customer,
Our Support Request site has recently changed.
Please submit your question or comment via our new online form available at
>.
Thank you for contacting SBC Yahoo!

Why the heck am I getting email from Ameritech, a company I’ve never done business with? I clicked on their link and am given an opportunity to contact support. And then it asks for my password. I get really nervous – isn’t this a standard phishing technique? I spend a few minutes convincing myself the site is legit, and go through the process of entering all my contact info and then typing up the problem in detail, and I hit submit.

“We’re sorry; there’s been a techincal problem. Please wait a few minutes and try again.”

!!!

And when I hit “back” on the browser, all the data I’ve typed in is gone.

This is so incredibly frustrating. Really hair-tearing out stuff. Argh. Yahoo, you sux!

Update: Maybe they did process my response (after that billing@ameritech message telling me they didn’t) because I just received this

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

We appreciate the information you have provided and are looking into the
delivery issue you reported. Please be assured that we’re continuing to
take steps to make Yahoo! Mail the best email service on the planet.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

Update: Seems that my emails getting flagged as spam may have stopped as of May 16, 3 days after I first posted this? I never heard back about any resolution, but I notice that was the point at which the symptoms ceased. Who knows?

Here’s what I need – a good search engine for blogs (and technorati and blogdex are useless, so don’t even go there) – I have this happen all the time: I’m in a conversation or a meeting and an issue comes up where I know that I just saw a definitive article on the latest trends linked in someone’s blog. I have about 200 things in my RSS reader, with no good searching there or anywhere else. Maybe a better RSS reader would give better searching. If I go into Google I’m now going back years instead of days, and millions of blogs instead of 200. I want to search on a concept, not a keyword, and really, for this particular situation, it seems pretty hosed.

Grr.

The Whizzinator is a realistic-looking prosthetic with a hidden pouch that can be loaded up with clean urine. Implies that when providing a drug taste sample one is (closely) observed. Really?

Link above has pictures of the product for men (choose your skin color – white, tan, latino, brown, or black. Be thankful pictures aren’t posted here!

There is a product for women, but no clue what it looks like (instead, we see a Crumb-like character).

TV commercial (“World Gone Pretty”) for Levi’s that is a very clever, funny, make-you-laff/make-you-think comment on evolving male stereotypes and the associated consumption, with Levi’s being the honest, back-to-basics, simple (or “uncomplicated” as the ad offers) remedy. Nice. Business Week’s take is here

. Via Musings of A Social Architect

.

IBM Design Consulting Services offers strategic design, product design and customer experience design. Read the press release

IBM said today it will launch a new service that allows companies to tap into IBM’s award-winning product design and usability expertise, creating breakthrough products for other companies that offer more impact and user satisfaction in everything from consumer electronics to medical devices, like those that transmit data from pulse rate, heart rate and glucose level monitors over cellular networks.
With this new service, IBM design experts will consult directly with clients who want deep insight into how their consumers or business customers might interact with future products or services. IBM experts will also assist companies with the building blocks needed to move from design concepts to actual offerings.

Karl Long points out that this is competing directly with IDEO.

The New Mile-High Club is a piece about the business and technical issues surrounding the use of cell phones on airplanes. A really excellent companion piece to my recent FreshMeat

on the same topic.

Rolling Stones press relese

Fans, along with hundreds of members of the U.S. and international media gathered at Lincoln Center, were treated to the ultimate surprise performance by the Rolling Stones. As the famous opening notes of ‘Start Me Up’ blared across the plaza, a giant banner with eye-popping signature tongue logos dropped revealing the band performing on the balcony-turned-stage of the 100 year old conservatory, Juilliard. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood played three songs for an ecstatic crowd, including ‘Oh No Not You Again,’ a new track off their upcoming CD along with their classic hit ‘Brown Sugar.’

This release came out several hours before the performance was scheduled. Written in the past tense but written and released ahead of time. Obviously, this isn’t journalism, but still seems unethical. Reminds me of the Mitch Alborn scandal recently.

Wired goes all journalistic on our blog-readin’ asses

In April, we assigned journalism professor and Wired News columnist Adam Penenberg to review recent articles written by Delio for Wired News. Penenberg and his staff of graduate students at New York University reviewed 160 articles, largely from 2004, but some earlier stories were also checked. Penenberg provided Wired News with a list of 24 stories that contained sources he could not confirm (links are included at the end of this story)

I’m getting a lot of hits to this blog from Yahoo searches for “www.ebpp.wellsfargo.com/mortgagepay” where the only hit is my entry Wells Fargo Usability Nightmare – why is anyone searching for that exact string? Unless it’s some robot from Wells Fargo themselves trying to create some referrer spam or something? I guess some people could be trying to enter that URL manually into their address bar and type it into their Yahoo search bar by mistake, but how many times can that happen? I see it several times a day and have for a while now, I think.

I think they are spammers, or search engine optimizers or whatever. Nice.

This SF Chron article was heavily blogged when the CEO of Verizon Wireless said some rather customer-unfriendly things

Seidenberg, for instance, said people often complain about mobile phone service because they have unrealistic expectations about a wireless service working everywhere. Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Verizon and Vodafone, is the state’s largest mobile phone provider.

‘Why in the world would you think your (cell) phone would work in your house?’ he said. ‘The customer has come to expect so much. They want it to work in the elevator; they want it to work in the basement.’

Seidenberg said it’s not Verizon’s responsibility to correct the misconception by giving out statistics on how often Verizon’s service works inside homes or by distributing more detailed coverage maps, showing all the possible dead zones. He pointed out that there are five major wireless networks, none of which works perfectly everywhere.

while a recently published letter to the editor from a Regional President at Verizon backpedals quite a bit.

Increasingly, users do expect wireless service to work wherever they are, including at their homes and even underground.

That’s why Verizon Wireless spends roughly a billion dollars every 90 days to enhance the capacity, capabilities and coverage area of its network — downtown, along major roads, at airports, in residential areas and even in subways and tunnels across the nation.

We allow new customers to try our service for 15 days and return the phone and exit their contract if they’re not satisfied with how the service performs where they make calls.

Of course, it is impossible to make enhancements without installing new equipment, and in San Francisco residential areas, for example, it has proven to be especially challenging to gain community acceptance of new cell sites.

Nevertheless, Verizon Wireless is committed to maintaining its best, most reliable network reputation in the Bay Area and to expand its capabilities in all the places San Franciscans want to make calls.

Wired story about Apple using its muscle to prevent leaks about its products
In January, when bloggers from an enthusiast site stood outside San Francisco’s Moscone Center and photographed Life Is Random posters 48 hours before the phrase was to become the iPod shuffle’s ubiquitous tagline, an Apple crew rushed outside and forced them to delete their photos.

That’s kind of staggering. Is that really true? With what authority did they do that? Why did the bloggers comply? I’m curious about this one.

click to enlarge picture

Work on Devil’s Slide has officially begun and someone put up a banner adjacent to the Gray Whale Cove parking lot.

Here are several totally neat customer comments (and store responses) from a retail store in Japan. One example below:

From customer:
I hardly go to other town these days. Everyday I go shopping to your store. I want to change something to be better than now.

From store:
Thank you for your daily use. It must be tough for you to go shopping everyday! The rainy season and the hot summer are coming right now. Please take care of your health. We are waiting for your next post.

This is pretty exciting – SFist published my thoughts about the new film Palindromes. Cool!

Earthlink is running a promotion now where you the customer (or prospective customer) can decide which of their employees deserves a $1,000 bonus. Of course, the two employees represent key benefits of Earthlink that they are trying to highlight – virus-fighting and spam-blocking.

The site [no longer active] offers you the chance to look at their desks and see how hard they are working, etc. It’s a weird sort of sales effort, perhaps bringing in the American Idol-esque participation all the while promoting these benefits of their service.

It seems that the more innovative companies are focusing their story around co-creation (an emerging buzzword) – where the customers are involved in stuff about the company, but in stuff that is relevant to them (i.e., what type of products or services are offered) – contrast this promotion with the recent AOL ads in which customers appeared at HQ to demand services they wanted. Earthlink is taking a step way back here, asking us to get involved with and care about the workaday lives of their employees, and their compensation? I don’t want a job at Earthlink and I don’t want to have to think about it. I want Earthlink to think about me and what I want and need. They’re getting at that here, but in a completely roundabout way that seems out of step with the times.

Of course, for every trend there is a counter-trend. The counter-trend that Earthlink is latching onto is participation. Going to Costco lets you feel a bit like a stockboy, open kitchens in restaurants involve you in the cooking process, etc. But in those cases, the participation supports a value (low warehouse-direct prices, freshness and quality), not simply participation for its own sake.

Here’s a story from the SF Chronicle about a naming consultant.

In working with his clients, Cecil adopts the persona of ‘Ranger Steve’ and takes turns with various hats while giving his in-person presentations. The 6-foot-4, 270-pound master of neology (a newly invented word or phrase) said that his work is akin to being a docent in leading corporate clients to a better understanding of words and meaning.

‘I wear different hats, like the Nike hat, and tell great fable-like stories,’ Cecil said. ‘We explore where good names come from. There are one, or two, of 40 different ways to name things. There are alphanumeric names and products that are named after people. Starbucks came from the book ‘Moby Dick. ‘ Listerine was named after (founder) Joseph Lister. You couldn’t name a product with your own names these days.’

Cecil said that companies often come to him with a narrow idea, and they want him to be more descriptive.

‘The namer is a verbal chemist,’ Cecil said. ‘We combine and recombine words — looking for just the right nuance, or glancing blow. I do this in real time — and sometimes I talk the group into a cul-de-sac.’

I find the idea of a goofy-ass guy as namer to stand in marked contrast to the larger naming firms who are often positioned on language-as-science (a la the “chemist” spin here) but with more rigor than creativity. This entry on a Snark Hunting, a naming blog illustrates some of the other companies (we all know Landor, right?) and what they’ve done.
(See all naming process posts on Snark Hunting here

including a NYT article about big clients and boutique (naming) agencies

So here’s a category of service that is not design or innovation but is right next door in the branding and marketing world, and here’s at least one example where making the choice between a small provider and a larger provider is presumably going to offer a very different type of relationship, service, and presumably result. Maybe that’s not true and maybe I’m just recycling the biases against small businesses that don’t seem “professional” along more traditional terms.

What do you think? Is this a goofy, cheaper alternative, or am I biased based on some semiotics of competency that I haven’t articulated yet?

Wired has a nice history of Samsung

In his 1996 New Year’s address, Lee proclaimed the Year of Design Revolution. He was referring to design in the broadest sense – not just styling but consumer research and marketing as well. Engineers had once defined new products and decided what features to give them; now specialists in everything from industrial design to cognitive science would take that role. When Lee issued his decree, ‘most of us didn’t understand what he was talking about, ‘ says Kook-hyun Chung, the senior vice president who heads the Corporate Design Center in Seoul. ‘Now we understand that we have a new, bigger, broader responsibility.

Virginia Postrel in the NYT

on the promise of wireless technology, selling the story of wireless, and the glum reality of a tethered techno life:
That, of course, is also the promise of wireless technology – to cut the ties that literally bind us to our desks, our homes, our mundane existences. Marketers take that promise and try to distill it into glamorous images that will inspire us to take the wireless plunge. It isn’t an easy task.

Here’s a brilliant rant about the supermarket shopping experience

Is Safeway Sucking Your Soul?

We are surrounded. We are immersed. American consumer culture is teeming with so many neon-colored, overprocessed, semicomestible, demon-spawn products we can no longer even recognize how bad it is, how it is all meant to drive us slowly insane, so slowly we forget to keep asking why we feel so sick all the time, and we just shut the hell up and buy more giant tubs of Country Crock to go with our liquefied reconstituted pork tubes because we think this is the only way.

The Egg Cream Racket is a richly detailed history of the Egg Cream. Empahsis on detailed. It’s a long piece. Nice implication that the thing of nostalgia may be more for its nostalgia than it was as an original artifact…

SF Chron story about an architect calling for a boycott on designing prisons

So the 31-year-old San Francisco architect changed course — and issued a call to action to the drafting crowd that has made national waves. Sperry wants architects — and their brethren engineers, designers and planners — to refuse to design prisons.

He realizes that a boycott is a drastic measure for a profession whose forays into collective activism have been few. Its radicalism tends to be confined to ‘green’ solutions for buildings, such as the Healdsburg winery that Sperry worked on that was constructed out of straw bales.

With earnest sincerity, Sperry sees his boycott as a way to start a conversation about prison reform with an audience largely unfamiliar with the issue.

“Prisons are so often associated with their buildings, so I thought this would be a way for architects to connect the issue with their work, with something they could do about it,” said Sperry.

========================================================
FreshMeat #24 from Steve Portigal

               (__)
               (oo) Fresh
                \\/  Meat 

Last night I dreamt I read FreshMeat again
=========================================================
Telephone line, give me some time
=========================================================

The cell phone continues to be a surprisingly
prominent item in our public discourse. The idea of the
phone exists on multiple simultaneous fronts:

– a technology platform for multimedia (i.e., camera
phones and text messaging)

– an economic booster (ringtones, just the latest flavor
in mobile merchandising are big bucks, perhaps even a
legit solution to the problem of music sharing)

– a designed accessory that displays economic and social
status (or at least aspirations thereof) – check out
Bling Kit for cell phones, including Swarovski
crystals, the rhinestones of the new millennium

– a performance item to either facilitate or impede
social interaction (just when we were beginning to get
used to the handsfree users who appear to walk around
talking to no one, the New York Times reports on a
supposedly emerging behavior where people use their
phones to avoid face-to-face interactions, making
like they are talking to someone – but are really
talking to no one)

– a challenge to unstated but powerful social norms (in
one of many examples, a man got out of his car and
punched another driver who was talking on his phone
instead of moving when the light turned green)

This last area is seeing an unusual amount of activity
recently, as the powers-that-be are exploring the
possibility of using cell phones on airplanes. The
airplane is a space that has had strict controls on cell
phone usage, and as changes to those controls are slowly
being considered, the debate is growing. This is fairly
unique in the history of the cell phone – it wasn’t until
they began appearing (and ringing) in hospitals and
movie theaters and concert halls and libraries and
trains and restaurants and classrooms and places of
worship and banks that rules intended to control use
began to appear. Belatedly, signs are posted, threats
are made, and consideration of others is urged. But I
think most of us have given up on reliably avoiding
annoying or disruptive ringing and talking.

Virgin territory – using your cell phone on an
airplane – has now appeared, and the battle lines are
being drawn. If you’ve heard about this issue, you’ve
probably heard some strong opinions being expressed.
If not, when you first consider the possibility of
in-flight cell phone usage, what comes to mind? Being
reachable throughout your trip, or the horrifyingly
likely possibility of a loud-mouthed doofus bellowing
details of his root canal all the way to JFK? I’ll bet
that it’s the latter; the careful balance begins to tilt
between i) the benefit to us for access to the phone and
ii) the cost to us for others having access to their
phones.

Of course, there are more players involved than just us
and the doofus in the middle seat. Technologies/products
are part of larger systems, and any changes are going to
impact each element of that system in a different way.
Careful consideration of the different players is
essential to fully understand the drivers for change,
the barriers, and the potential impacts. For this issue,
let’s take a look at who’s who:

A. passengers making and/or receiving calls
B. passengers who are not making or receiving calls
C. flight attendants
D. airlines
E. airplane manufacturers
F. wireless carriers (i.e., Verizon, Cingular)
G. infrastructure players (i.e., whoever enables this
new technological capability)
H. handset manufacturers
I. government

Let’s look at each of them in turn:

A. passengers making and/or receiving calls

There are already phones on board the plane. People can
make calls while flying. Using cell phones would
enable passengers to receive calls. All the features
of the handset (i.e., phone book) would be available.
These are both powerful symbols of greater personal
control. The travel experience often entails a
significant surrender of control, even of the most
basic functions (time and choices of food, sleep
schedules, access to a bathroom), so whatever people
can do to reassert that control will have some appeal.

A parallel example might be the payphone; in
metropolitan areas payphones were ubiquitous, yet cell
phone adoption grew enormously and the payphone
continues to fade away. Individual control over the
device itself triumphed “good enough” access.

The ability to make and receive calls (even if these
passengers seldom or never take advantage of that
ability) is a big win for these folks, although there
has not been a lot of impassioned demand for this from
the public.

Conclusion: benefit of new capability

B. passengers who are not making or receiving calls

The loss of control we experience while traveling comes
not only from the circumstances of travel, but also the
intrusion of other people – who we can not control –
into our lives, spaces, and faces. “The screaming baby,”
“the drunken boor,” and “the snoring fat guy” are well-
established archetypes for comedy routines and reality
shows.

A tangible manifestation of the control issue was
obvious in last year’s Knee Defender, a product that
would enable you to prevent the person in front of you
from leaning their seat back into “your” space. The
suggestion here was that you could physically over-ride
the conventions of the airplane (you may lean; you may
also be leaned into) and that was okay. More power to
you, for taking whatever control you could, even at the
expense of others.

Our experiences with others who use their cell phones
around us (during our non-travel times) are poorly
regarded. Anyone reading this can probably come up with
their most recent horror story in less than 5 seconds.
Giving other people the power to further disrespect our
personal space and surrender control over our environment
while traveling seems to be a potential for even more
unhappy traveling (even though there is significant
overlap between group A and group B), and the amount of
public grumbling about this potential bears witness to
that.

Conclusion: cost of annoyance

C. flight attendants

No doubt that any new regulations would require some
sort of new monitoring role by the flight attendants.
Passengers that can do more with more devices now are
more independent and need more attention, i.e., making
sure that cell phones are only on during certain
portions of the flight, making sure that passengers talk
at a reasonable volume or set their ringers to vibrate.
Whatever it is, it’s going to require more work from
them. Perhaps they may benefit from access to their
phones during breaks, but the increase in their work
makes this mostly a loss for them.

Conclusion: cost of extra work

D. airlines

Current airplane phones add two inches to the thickness
of the seatback. Removing those phones would allow more
seats to be installed, or perhaps make room for
entertainment equipment such as the TV screens that
JetBlue offers as standard amenities.

One would also expect that whatever technology enables
on-board cell phone usage would be something they could
charge an extra fee for. It may even be a feature of how
the technology is developed, to provide a fee-for-access
gateway (just like WiFi access at some coffee shops).

The existing phones may remain on board; as long he
boarding process. Already the rules begin to be changed.
Once you get to the seatback card (labeled a “guide to
how to make the world a better place…one flight at a
time.”) you may begin to consider the flight experience
differently. The card reads “Be nice. Attitude is
everything on JetBlue. Kindness, respect and
consideration are the way to a nice flight.” Amusing
graphics that evoke traditional flight safety cards
depict passengers creating a common experience, for
example introducing themselves to each other. Sure, many
of us do that on a plane, but JetBlue takes some
ownership of it, and encourages it, with just enough
humor. Other graphics discourage people from bringing
their own smelly fish on board, or sleeping on the
shoulder of their neighbor, or removing their shoes when
their feet are too pungent.

JetBlue (and some of the other newer, more innovative,
and interestingly cheaper airlines) are rethinking the
entire experience they are creating for passengers. A
fresh look at air travel won’t eliminate turbulence, of
course, but they could easily extend this to help people
manage their behavior. Rather than a turf war over
knees, shoulders, ears, and mouths, creating a common
experience could encourage cooperation, establish new
social norms (and social sanctions rather than punitive
ones) that would allow for polite cell phone usage.
Sure, I’m skeptical too. Adding some verbiage to the
pre-flight announcement and posting a few stickers isn’t
going to do it. A new approach to creating a
relationship between the passengers and the airline, and
between the passengers themselves is the key. The
dinosaur airlines aren’t capable of this (i.e., United’s
Ted is a cheaper United, with better graphic design;
it’s not a re-think of the flight experience the way
JetBlue is).

Two thoughts by way of conclusion here: first, with any
new offering, if we fail to understand the differing
concerns of the larger set of stakeholders, we run the
risk of limiting our success; second, if there is a way
to encourage desired behavior rather than enforce
restrictions on undesired behavior, that may be the way
to greater success. We’re trying this strategy with our
dog, in fact.

—

This discussion is all about voice. Other work is being
done to enable WiFi on airplanes; presumably the cell
network could also transmit data to allow email or
Internet surfing, but that seems peripheral to the
issues at hand. Laptop users on board airplanes with
high-speed Internet access can now do VOIP (voice-over-
IP, or Internet telephony) but right now that’s a
smaller, bleeding-edge type of user unlikely to have the
type of impact we’re considering.

—

Is it actually dangerous to use today’s phones on
today’s planes? This is one report that documents
the effects of mobile phones on avionic (isn’t
that a great word?) gear. But other studies have
said it’s not a problem. Hence the complicated
governmental role – between communications (FCC)
and aviation (FAA). Sure, there’s reason to be
skeptical, compare the supposed danger of using
a cell phone at a gas station, which even led to
proposed legislation in some US states.

—

See Don Norman’s recent essay Minimizing the annoyance
of the mobile phone – The Annoyance, Irritation, and
Frustration of The Mobile Phone — A Design Challenge

Excerpt: "We are in real danger of a consumer backlash
against annoying technologies. We already have seen the
growth of mobile-phone free zones, of prohibition
against phone use, camera use, camera phones, in all
sort of public and private places. The mobile phone has
been shown to be a dangerous distraction to the driver
of an automobile, whether hands-free or not. If we do
nothing to overcome these problems, then the benefits
these technologies bring may very well be denied us
because the social costs are simply too great."

30 must-have PC skills

Here’s the top 10, just to make the point

1. Move and copy files
2. Navigate using keyboard shortcuts
3. Use shortcuts in Word
4. Install and remove new hardware
5. Send image files as attachments
6. Search your hard disk
7. Hard disk maintenance (including disk cleanup and defragmenter)
8. System restore and backup
9. Update software online
10. Create desktop shortcuts

How many can you do? To me, this list suggests how daunting a lot of this stuff is. I know several PC users that don’t understand file systems – where files are stored when you download them or save them. To ask them to attach something, say, by finding it somewhere on the vast structure of files and folders, yikes. They’ve managed to use apps without building that level of knowledge. So doing these tasks, I dunno, it’s pretty challenging without getting a sense of the underlying model of the system that these tasks all require.

I’d opt for things like “cleaning up the desktop” “knowing what the start menu is” “choosing a printer” – some real fundamental stuff that you can build on to get to these skills.

But anyway, the fact that the 30 things they picked are actually pretty hard just confirms my sense that computers are still too hard to understand/use.

Update: A reasonable-looking intro/tutorial on Windows XP can be found here

.

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Nappers
via

1. Announce your nap to yourself and if possible to your family, friends or colleagues.

For many people this has been the key step to guilt free, productive napping. In order to feel comfortable psychologically when napping, you have to know that by napping you are doing yourself and your significant others a favor. By ‘announcing’ your nap to yourself you are reinforcing and reminding yourself of the productivity and health benefits of napping.

2. Gather your napnomic devices

This much we know is true–nappers have certain devices that make their nap more pleasurable. We call these napnomic devices, i. e., things that assist you to nap. When you were a toddler, perhaps you had a teddy bear, a favorite blanket, a pacifier. Now that you are an adult napper you have put away your childish things, and have other napnomic devices. These might be certain pillows, your favorite bed, soft music, cool bed sheets, workout clothes, etc.

3. Insure a method for on-time awakening

Many expert nappers do not worry about awakening from their nap. They just do. They can tell themselves how long they wish to nap and they awaken at that time. Concern about on time awakening can ruin a good nap. Nappers who are apprehensive about waking up on time use wristwatches, clock or radio alarms to awaken successfully. When napping at a hotel the wakeup service can be used.

4. Insure control of your nap environment, including a plan to avoid nappus interruptus

Nappers need to feel secure in their nap, knowing not only that they have a method to wake up, but also that they will not be awakened prematurely, i. e., experience nappus interruptus. Common strategies are to shut off the phone, hold calls, and/or find an out-of-the way or secretive napping spot. Hotel nappers can use the doorknob sign asking for privacy.

5. Revel in the nap

Enjoy! No relevant suggestions here if you master the other six habits.

6. Deal with sleep inertia, if necessary

Sleep inertia is that groggy and slightly disorienting feeling that some nappers experience when awakening from a nap. Some people believe that if you nap about 40-60 minutes you will be waking up from a deep sleep and are more apt to experience sleep inertia. To combat sleep inertia they recommend naps of shorter duration (20-30 minutes). Overcoming sleep inertia is not rocket science. For the most part all the things you need are readily available: water, coffee, a bathroom, and a good nattitude (i. e., napping attitude).

7. Begin to plan your next nap as you awaken from this nap

Even accomplished nappers often miss this step. But it is important to make napping opportunities a traditional part of your daily planning, even if you don’t always use the opportunity.

The New York Times reports on the results of a project I was involved in last year.

And Rodale has signed a deal with the Westin lodging chain with a lengthy list of unconventional elements.

For example, editors of a Rodale magazine, Runner’s World, are training employees of Westin hotels to be ‘running concierges,’ helping guests navigate local streets or parks with customized maps bearing the Westin and Runner’s World brands.

Westin will become the sponsor of Runner’s World races around the world.

Also, Westin guests will find in their rooms free copies of Rodale magazines and copies of Rodale books available for purchase like bathrobes.

Also in the rooms will be offers for discounts on Rodale books like ‘Lance Armstrong: Images of a Champion’ and ‘Eat Smart, Play Hard,’ as well as discount offers for subscriptions to Rodale magazines like Best Life, Bicycling, Men’s Health and Women’s Health along with Runner’s World. (Rodale employees are also being offered discounts on rooms at Westin hotels.)

Interestingly, the client was neither of these companies; the client was an technology firm looking to help Starwood (the parent of Westin) improve the gym experience for their guests. As part of their offering to Starwood, this IT company brought in a user-centered/innovation/design-y/ethnographic (etc.) methodology that led to a number of recomendations, not all of which would make use of the IT that the client wanted to develop/sell. The focus was on the overall experience.

As so often happens, since my consulting work takes place in the very early stages, it’s hard to find out what happened with a project, and here I happened to stumble upon this story in the newspaper.

In a previous post I related my experience at AD:TECH. While there I picked up some trade rags, including DIRECT: Direct Marketing Business Intelligence. Thought it was interesting to look at some of the marketing lists now available:

Nasalguard
This is a postal list of 10,000 consumers who requested a free tube of Nasalguard, a topical gel for allergy and asthma sufferers. Buyers’ names are included as well. The average unit of sale was $10. The Internet is the source.
Selections: Hotlines, gender, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $116/M

More than 3.2 million individuals who entered a sweepstakes and contributed to one or more charities are named here. Most are married women, median age 48, who earn $37,000 a year. Sixty percent of those listed are homeowners and about half have children. The file was assembled from mail order buyer, survey and transaction data.
Selections: Gender, age, income, homeowners, children, gift buyers, book buyers, magazine subscribers, donors by type, Internet connected, bank cardholders, mail order buyer category, golfers, travelers, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $65/M

Those who spent $1 million or more within the last 12 months on luxury homes are named on Million Dollar Homeowners, a file derived from recorded mortgage deeds. Some 133,000 records are available. Forty-one percent of these properties are in California. Other states with large counts are New York, Florida, Connecticut and Illinois. A third of these real estate buyers paid cash.
Selections: Gender, type of dwelling, purchase price, equity, type of mortgage, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $110/M

TTK Data Services, the operator of Web site Healthguides2005.com, has a list of men and women who expressed interest in laser eye surgery. TTK gathers information through online surveys. There are 473,529 e-mail and 387,222 postal records available. Prior to release to the broader market, this file was used by retail laser centers for targeted direct mail campaigns.
Selections: Hotline, behavior, income, presence of children, homeowners, gender, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $125/M (postal or e-mail records)

More than 1.7 million donors are identified on a recently assembled file called I Give to Religious Causes. This file was built from direct mail data that’s been overlaid with mail order buyer, demographic and lifestyle enhancements.
Selections: Age, income, gender, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $75/M

Men and women who purchased the Ogoplex digestive supplement are named on this postal file. The last-12-month count is 131,456. The unit of sale is $28. Direct mail and space advertising are the sources.
Selections: Hotlines, age, credit card, gender, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $100/M

Online publisher and conference producer Robotics Trends Inc. offers postal and e-mail lists with 6,000 postal and 5,570 e-mail records, including subscribers and attendees.
Selections: None offered
Price: $275/M (postal or e-mail file)

A combination of direct mail data generated from surveys, catalogs/subscriptions and public records was gathered to build Lifestyle’s Hispanic Females in Charge, a postal list. Some 417,049 women who head households are named. They paid for direct mail purchases with a credit card. E-mail addresses accompany 60,179 records.
Selections: Hotlines, household income, age, presence of children, length of residence, occupation, mail responsive, religion, interests and hobbies, telephone numbers, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $85/M (postal file); $125/M (e-mail file)

Thrill seekers who made purchases from various catalogs or subscribed to sports publications are identified on the Extreme Outdoor Sports Adventurists file. There are 729,443 postal records available.
Selections: BMX biking, bungee jumping, all-terrain-vehicle riding, kneeboarding, lacrosse, mountain biking, parachuting, paragliding, water skiing, windsurfing, white-water rafting, skateboarding, snowboarding, mountain climbing, rock climbing, surfing, inline skating, trail running, age, gender, home/business address, income, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $80/M

Excellent piece from 37signals about features, innovation, and connecting with the customer in meaningful (more than functional) ways

The salesman made a big deal about a feature I’d heard a lot about already: the bud vase mounted in the middle of the dashboard. That, I thought at the time, has got to be the stupidest feature I’ve ever seen in a product. Who has time to keep fresh-cut flowers in their car? Do you really want your car smelling like dead daisies?

Twenty-Five Years of Post-it Notes is a fantastic essay covering the innovation, technology, inspiration, invention, manufacturing, marketing and ultimately the cultural impact of the little, yellow, and different semi-sticky pages.

Post-it Notes, on the other hand, were dynamic, customizable, business casual. They inspired spontaneity, rapid ideation, free association. You could link one seemingly unrelated idea to another without worrying about any logical cohesion of ideas; that’s what the glue was for. After all, the digital drudgery of Office Space and Dilbert didn’t tell the full story of office life in the eighties and nineties. It was also the era of Wired and Fast Company, the rebel businessman, thinking outside the box.

This Fast Company piece is presented as a consideration of individuals who have their own brands, but I didn’t quite get that out of it. It’s mostly individual stories of people who are the faces on businesses. Martha Stewart is the classic person-as-persona-as-brand but the examples here are all over the place and the article doesn’t work as an investigation of that. It is an interesting set of quickie stories from prominent/famous business leaders, however.

Todd Oldham

It makes no difference to me whether my name’s on something or not.
I just like to design stuff. My style is an amalgam of inspirations that come from spending part of my childhood in Tehran, where I strolled the colorful bazaars, mixed with a cowboy culture from Texas, where I was born. Somehow, my designs come out in a way that has become a signature. But I never forget that the appropriateness of the end product is as important as the design.

(via Agenda)

What a freakin’ scam…this just happened to me. This company called OAN (aka Nationwide Conn.) somehow submits fraudulent bills for collect calls that never happened. They don’t bill you directly, they add it to your local bill (Qwest, Verizon, or in my case, SBC). For me, it was $5.41. It took me noticiing it, doing a websearch, then making a couple of calls and spending time on hold (!) to get this taken care of (assuming that it is indeed taken care of). It’s hardly worth it, and yet this company (and others presumably) continue to “cram” – to knowingly bill falsely through the carriers, knowing that most people won’t notice it or have the comfort to dispute it. Which is just so shockingly immoral…the web page I link to shows a huge number of people who have also been scammed and realized it, many who report it to the government.

How come this is allowed to continue? SBC told me they are legally required to pass these charges along.

Shudder.

In this Slate article by Dan Crane the fancy-delancy salts and their poor-as-peter siblings are put through their taste-test paces.

Although sodium chloride is the primary component of all salt, the texture and shape of the crystals must also be considered, as those qualities fundamentally impact salt’s taste and how it interacts with food. Does it provide satisfying crunch, dissolve nicely when it should? How well does it season food? How well does it stand alone?

Three tests were performed on nine salts (from each of the four salt varieties) by eight tasters in New York City: the finger dip (self-explanatory), salt atop a slice of fresh cucumber, and salt used in pasta sauce made with unsalted canned tomatoes. (I made Marcella Hazan’s classic tomato sauce.)

While the East Coast results were interesting, I felt they were inconclusive. Thus, I embarked on Round 2, which took place in Los Angeles at one of my favorite neighborhood restaurants, the Edendale Grill in Silverlake. The restaurant kindly agreed to cook French fries and steaks for a group of eight testers, using each of the same nine salts.

In both rounds, testers were asked to blindly rate the salt from 1 to 10 and comment on its taste. The scores from all five rounds were averaged together for one final ‘taste’ score. Salts were also assigned an aesthetic rating based on the packaging and the look of the salt itself, since appearance is often as important as taste.

(click on any picture to enlarge it)

Today I spent a little bit of time at AD:TECH. To set the frame of reference here – this (interactive technology for advertising) isn’t my field; I went out of curiosity and a chance to meet a friend for lunch. I attended the opening keynote and looked around the exhibit hall. There are several days of presentations and seminars that I didn’t experience.

The opening keynote featured John Costello, Executive Vice President, Merchandising & Marketing, The Home Depot, and Mary Meeker, who watches Internet and advertising for Morgan Stanley (I seem to remember a detailed New Yorker profile of her a few years back; perhaps before the bubble burst).

John Costello (all quotes approximate): “I am often asked how many brand managers do we have? The answer is 325,000 – the number of associates we have.” He went on to stress how all the touchpoints for the customer need to work together. You may see a great ad on TV but if you go to the website and it’s difficult to use, it’s no good. This isn’t so trite because as much as it’s a good idea, it’s just not practiced that way. Home Depot certainly isn’t living up to Costello’s idea. My bad experience with their “clinics” here and see here for their non-response when I tried to resolve it.

Mary gave a really dense presentation, but reassured us that the slides were online. They are, and for now you can read ’em here. I’ll excerpt a few slides that I really liked; I’m not sure what to make out of any of it, just a bunch of factoids that seem provocative and worthy of filing.

Here’s the top five Internet companies (I didn’t know that was the list; interesting) – this slide shows what they were worth before 2000, before they went public, what they were worth at the highest point in the market, what they were worth at the lowest point (and kinda interesting to be reminded of those dates; 3/10/00 and 10/9/02) and here’s what they are worth now – so there is more worth there now than before the crash. It’s one of many angles on ‘recovery’ in the tech sector (hey it feels cool to say “the tech sector”).

These two slides are just some data points to consider when thinking about the various online, mobile, phone, data, wireless, etc. markets around the world. Here’s who the analysts are watching and what they are thinking about…

You’ll need to click on this one to make it bigger in order to see the details; the point here is looking at the number of different services or products (depending on your perspective) that Yahoo has launched in 2003, 2004, and so far in 2005. You can see just by the shape that this year already is as many products as in 2004. This was all under the category of User Experience, but she used that phrase interchangably with other phrases like User Interface, so it wasn’t always clear what exactly she meant. But the slide seemed interesting anyway.

This took a bit of thinking about, looking at different countries, how many PCs do they have and how many mobile phones, and the ratio of the two. The U.S. has the lowest ratio, China has the higest. So the relative prominence of phone vs. PC as platforms for daily info-living, and as opportunities for innovation, etc. are extremely different in these different markets.

Mary, an avid golfer, recounted the recent Tiger Woods dramatic shot at the 16th hole in Augusta, and considered a scenario where someone missed it and wanted to watch it – they’d willingly watch an ad for it, or pay to see it (she suggested $1.00 is what people would pay to see it, but that’s ridiculous). But if you go into Google and Yahoo, you can’t find it. Even if you look in their video search, you can’t find it. You can find it on a blog, where it was turned it into a hypothetical Nike ad. Somehow in this story Mary seemed to imply that it wasn’t really available in that case. She seems to deny blogs (or anything that comes from the consumer side of the equation) as an invalid source of content not to be taken seriously. Yes, there were no rights clearances, but of course, the information gets out anyway. Hello, BitTorrent?! The fact that the only way she could show us this clip was to use the file she found on this blog (and then put into her presentation) seemed to be ignored, since the real problem was that Google and Yahoo didn’t have the clip in their systems. I don’t get that.

In the Q&A there was some emphasis on the future successful companies being those that place the premium on customer service – citing Amazon Prime as an example, but then both speakers seemed to flip between customer service and customer experience. She cited, but couldn’t remember the specifics, a recent book by a professor (Jeff?) in Pennsylvania? who makes the case for the last great competitive advantage being user interface, and she went on to suggest the web is the best user interface, better than an in-store Starbucks experience. Clearly we see why Mary is an online person because her contention, if I understood it, is just silly. I’d be interested in finding out what book she’s referring to, so if you have any ideas, let me know.

The trade show itself was the usual – booths with people in matching t-shirts being extremely extroverted. But it was working – the place was noisy and jam-packed and people were shaking hands and swapping business cards and just being business people in deal-making mode, I guess. There were the usual trinkets – things that flashed, bent, bounced, squeezed, etc. and lots of iPod giveaways. It wasn’t very intersting to me; it was companies with names like AdBrite, AdDrive, AdDynamix, adInterax, Adknowledge, adMarketplace, Adteractive or AdTools; Blowsearch.com and Eyeblaster; Search Engine Optimization, Search For It, SearchAdNetwork, Searchfeed.com, SearchForce.com, SearchIgnite, SearchRev, Findology.com and FindWhat.com; as well as companies that I recognized because they serve the annoying pop-up ads on websites I visit: ZEDO and Undertone.

There were a few of the usual booth babes, and all you really see in this picture is some nice blonde hair, but some women manning booths were obviously models, at least one wore a t-shirt with a slogan across her chest that was something about looking up top. Hmm.

I found this variation quite unusual

A gymnast? Or, a slinky woman in skintight lyrca, twisting her body in interesting ways. Oh, and how’d you like to buy some advertising services?

Looks like she’s in need of some advertising services herself. Cheese!

Attendees engaged in some sort of SMS swordfight.

Google’s booth. Is that a real George Nelson Marshmallow Sofa?

SF Chron review

of Mount Appetite, a new book by Bill Gaston

What’s with the Canadians these days? It seems to have started a few years ago when Michael Moore turned a spotlight on our northern neighbors in ‘Bowling for Columbine,’ proving that they love their guns but don’t shoot people (nor do they lock their doors). Then during the past year or two amazing Canadian bands, the likes of Broken Social Scene and the Arcade Fire, have been showing up in music stores. And now, all of this great Canadian literature keeps landing here, from Derek McCormack to Michael Turner, and most recently, Bill Gaston’s latest collection of short stories, ‘Mount Appetite.’

Yes, just when some of us Americans had settled into the idea that Canadian cultural exports are only good for a laugh (Second City, ‘Kids in the Hall,’ Celine Dion, Bryan Adams), we are forced to think again.

I find this annoying, yes, but also somewhat offensive. Where has the article’s author been? Never heard of Margaret Atwood, to pick one very obvious example?

Dreyer’s is going to jam as many attributes into one packaging label as possible. If your mouth gets tired while saying it, you may have a design and branding problem.

Dreyer’s
Slow Churned
(Rich & Creamy)
Light
Vanilla

And the one at the link above (the image was too small to post here) also includes
New!
Vanilla Bean (with Real Bean Specks)

Meh. I’m exhausted. Too many subcategories of features and benefits and attributes and brand. Why is this so hard?

I didn’t know about this, but according this story, this slow-churning technology (with no props to John Hiatt, I guess) makes lower fat ice cream taste like it’s full-fat. Hmm.

Via Stay Free! Daily comes EVOLUTION BY MARGARITA a new bra that is “designed to create a natural cosmetically enhanced look.”

As part of the David H. Liu Memorial Lecture Series at Stanford, Paul Saffo from the Institute for the Future

spoke briefly last night, in a talk entitled The case of the blind venetians; reflections on innovation and what makes Silicon Valley tick

Saffo is a great speaker, lots of anecdotes and metaphors and implications and sidebars, so any attempt to summarize is going to be incredibly flat. Nevertheless, it was a simplistic story he told: in essence that Silicon Valley is a specialized version of the California myth, which is a distillation of the American Dream (that’s my synthesis, as you’ll see, he didn’t quite say that)

Loose notes:

In the history of Silicon Valley there have been so many innovations. We lurch from failure to failure, we know how to fail. The death of the Interactive TV industry had programmers and technologies just waiting, so the Web industry was able to move right into the same place.

Bad management is good for innovation (looking at all the famous Silicon Valley companies that are badly managed, i.e., Steve Jobs). Good management kills innovative ideas. Don’t read management books.

What does the culture of this area (Silicon Valley) offer up in terms of how we accept failure? We permit failure, unlike Seattle, France, or Sweden, where one failure can tar a reputation forever, going bankrupt can bring shame. There are consequences to failure here, but they aren’t lethal.

But why here? Why does it keep repeating?

California is a place that is fueled by dreams, against all odds. Consider the meme of California even going back to Spanish literature of 1500s – originally envisioned as an island, but despite multiple proofs that it was indeed part of the mainland, the idea that it is an island continued to appear on maps for many years – decades and more.

As trite as it sounds, California is still a place where dreams are believed to come true. From the Gold Rush, Hollywood, early aviation – many of which started elsewhere in the US but took strongest root in California, and despite the fact that success came to very few of those who tried, the story of the dream persists.

For innovators, you have to kid yourself, because if you looked at things realistically, you’d give up. Keep the dream alive.

Okay, I feel hip now. We bought our first product from Woot! last night, a mostly-techy sale website that has a single deal each day, until it sells out, which it usually does. Of course, we got a lemonade maker, not exactly streaming whole home audio or anything, but whatever. It may be one of those appliances that we never use, but opportunistic consumerism grabbed us and we were off.

Not as good a deal at $20.00 (for two of the same appliance) as the $8 wafflemaker (shipping included) I got from Target about 6 months ago.

(click to view bigger)

This is an email from USAirways with my monthly mileage balance. Nice. The link they tell me click in order to stop receiving this email (which I never opted-in to receive) isn’t really a link, it’s just static text. Lame!

I’ve finally found the website for THE DOG – the iconic fisheye-lens big-nosed pooch brand that is Big In Japan. It’s the kind of thing that is damn hard to find in Google when the name is “The Dog” – believe me, I’ve tried.

Blogging it here so I’ll know where it is. Now you do too!

Here’s one of those store locator interfaces that maybe you’ve seen before. You can type a city into that field at the bottom and pull down a state, or you can click directly on the map. Those little pink/red dots are so target-like, and it’s easier to click than type, so my instinct was to just click on my area. Here’s what I get:

It’s extremely precise; I somehow clicked 38 miles north of San Francisco, though I was just thinking “in and around San Francisco” when I aimed (and there are indeed so many little dots that it’s pretty hard to aim for a really tight region). But the results are assuming you meant to click EXACTLY where you clicked. Try again and you might end up 11 miles south of San Francisco and a totally different list of stores.

Clicking ends up being useless. The map is too small and expects more-than-human precision, at least given the enormous density of stores in many regions. Entering the city name is the only way to go for my situation.

It’s further hampered by the ridiculous results – it seems that any store that has any type of product from the Sanrio people anywhere on their shelves qualifies for this list. They sell a lot of stuff, but not all of these stores are going to carry similar ranges of inventory, so you’re going to have to do some more legwork – either visit many, or phone (yuck) many and ask, or simply give up.

In an interesting reversal, or simply greasy transparency, KFC opened a new store they are calling “Kentucky Fried Chicken.” KFC’s online press releases don’t say anything about it, in fact they haven’t been updated since July 21, 2004. Parent company Yum Brands has press releases as recently as January 28, 2005, but of course they don’t deal with this latest story. Annoyingly, that page has a tool that lets you choose press releases by year or by brand (YUM owns KFC, A&W, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and Long John Silver’s) but instead of actually filtering the press releases you already see, it dumps you on the appropriate sub-brand page. So instead of being able to limit the YUM press releases to just KFC news, it takes me back to that page that hasn’t been updated in nearly a year.

Anyway, the news stort is pretty interesting. A new hometown (Louisville, KY) store with the original name, drawing on its southern routes, and a slimmed-down Colonel. I couldn’t find any images of said svelte poultry purveyor, but let me know if you see anything. Can’t be worse than those hip-hop Colonels from a couple of years back.

Update: found the Colonel images I was hoping for

The California Supreme Court denied review of a dismissed suit from PETA, claiming that consumers were being misled with the California Milk Producers ads claiming that happy cows come from California, when in fact, PETA points out, the cows couldn’t be very happy since they live in dirt, are repeatedly impregnated, milked while pregnant and then slaughtered.

Jeez. I mean, it turns out Mayor McCheese wasn’t really the mayor, either. Plus, he was eventually going to be eaten, which I believe violated the second element of the Charter of Office.

A full page ad is running in daily newspapers today, incredibly pretentious and self-righteous. I can reproduce the text (below) but it will definitely be missing something without the blurry ALL CAPS type. I missed the whole Superbowl ad and other promotions they have done along the lines of “here’s to the heroes” but somehow the horses aspect here just seems goofy. The photo of the old-timey Clydesdale delivery wagon with the yellow ribbon magnet on the back is cheese-o-rama.

Clydesdales Across America
The Clydesdales Across America Tour will be appearing at SBC Park for a special Heroes’ Night tribute before and after San Francisco Giants games. Come visit from 6:00 to 6:45 on Friday, April 22nd at Willie Mays Plaza and on Saturday, April 23rd in parking lot A.

Don’t miss the chance to meet these great American icons [ed: this refers to the horses, I think] and send a message to our troops overseas.

The Clydesdales Across America: Here’s To The Heroes Tour is more than an amazing journey, it’s a chance to pay tribute to America’s everyday heroes who put their lives on the line to make our country safer, better and stronger.

Don’t miss the chance to visit with these great American icons, and to thank our troops overseas with a video message of your own. The messages will be aired on the Armed Forces Radio and Television Services (AFRTS) Network and transmitted to 177 countries around the world.

The Clydesdales Across America Tour. It’s a show of support for America’s Heroes that stretches clear across the country.

Today I received an email “newsletter” with the subject line Philippe Starck Newsletter – the entire “newsletter” is reproduced below – I think it’s hilarious – new products are available? That’s all they’ve got to tell me? Certainly an interesting and minimal interaction….

Independence Air (Update: now defunct) is a new low-fare airline that will be flying out of SFO in two weeks.

For some reason I’m intrigued by the Oddly Enough news from Reuters. In my RSS reader I get an endless stream of ridiculous story titles, evoking an old era of news where tabloid and mainstream were maybe closer together?

Today the following stories appeared in a row – there was something lovely and sick about the resultant rhythm

• Man Barred from Making Slavery Tax Claims
• Man Catches Fire During Surgery
• Woman to Give Birth in Art Gallery
• Indians ‘Marry’ Sacred Trees to Ward Off Evil Eye

Description of a BitTorrent download
The Truth Behind The Gates of Auschwitz
Documentary. mpg. 60 mins. English.

This controversial documentary centers around Revisionist’s theories concerning the accuracy of the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp.

WARNING: Filmmaker/Narrator has an extremely annoying voice.

Snapple-a-Day is a meal replacement beverage from Snapple, leveraging the brand of Snapple in a very weird way. It’s like they are distant cousins, there seems to be no direct relationship between the regular ol’ Snapple and this stuff (on the same grocery shelves with the various MetRx bars and other science-y kind of non-food foods).

Idea for a cover band – Mr. Buggle would play the music of The Buggles in the style of Mr. Bungle.

Inspired by, I guess, Beatallica

.

There’s obviously some packaging scam going on here that I can’t quite sort out. Breakfast cereal seems to come in two sizes, say 16 oz and 21 oz. Visually, the two are almost equivalent, perhaps the larger size will be less than an inch taller and not visisbly wider when looking at the retail shelf. The price for the larger size can be very small; yesterday I saw a 20c increase for the larger size. Why would anyone, therefore, buy the smaller size?

If you ignore promotions (half price, 2 for 1) on either size, what is the purpose of the two sizes in the line? Is it a tactic to gain more shelf space by offering more product choices? That’s my best guess, but that just seems to ridiculous, I don’t want to believe it’s true. Any insights, please leave a comment!

Nabisco 100 Calorie Packs

are a brilliantly simple packaging and branding innovation. Give people more control over what they eat by packaging a fixed calorie amount.
100 calories seems like a harmless enough amount to snack on and it’s an easy number to help tally your daily intake. Portion control is a complex aspect of dieting, with endless confusion about what is a portion? What is a serving?
The 100 Calorie brand takes precedence over the ingredient brand (although some of those such as Oreo Thin Crisp are special-to-this-product-line extensions, with presumably lower-cal reformulations).

Click picture to see it larger.

I received an announcement from Meetup, a service I have never really used. It included the following:

To unsubscribe from ALL your Meetup Groups and the Meetup.com
service as a whole, click here:
http://www.meetup.com/account/remove/

I decided to do that – close the account. First thing that link takes me to is a login page. Entering email and password. A bit weird, given that I just told them by clicking that I want OUT, but anyway. The next page, however, wants all sorts of other information, thanks to an updated TOS (“terms of service”)
My name.
A new user ID
My country and zip
My email preferences
My agreement to the new TOS

Once I completed all THAT, then I could close down my whole account. Weird.

Why, sometimes, does the BlogThis toolbar button in Firefox instead function as a “back” button? Note that this will make no sense unless you’ve had this exact problem happen to you.

This video is a mini-user-interface nightmare, done for comic effect, pushing on some social norms and auditory alerts.

full op-ed from NYT about the evolution of Do It Yourself (Instead of the Staff)

It began in the 1970’s. Or at least that’s when I became conscious of it. People began cleaning up after themselves in fast-food restaurants. I had been living abroad and didn’t know about such things, but my children, faster to pick up on American cultural expectations, made sure I took back my tray and put my trash in the appropriate bin.

Cleverly, the restaurants made this choice not only easy but gratifying. Customers were given the sense of being good citizens or helping out the teenage minimum-wage workers who wiped off the tables.

[snip]

Consumers were found to be more medically skilled than anyone had given them credit for. They could take their own blood pressure, give themselves injections and enemas, and starve themselves before surgery. Then they could find someone to drive them to the hospital at 6 a.m., wait, and then take their tottering bodies, still exhaling anesthesia, back to their beds at home where another friend could care for them. In short, they could do what nurses had once done, allowing hospitals to concentrate on investing more heavily in machines to do what doctors once did.

But the greatest labor transfer was yet to come. It began, as no one needs reminding, with the invention of the touch-tone phone and the subsequent, tauntingly named “voice mail” system, in which a voice is the thing precisely never heard. Consumers became the unpaid receptionists for business everywhere, traversing the unfamiliar and mysterious territory of multiple inappropriate choices as their time slipped away and their blood pressure mounted. Now we have robots that promise to listen closely, and to which we find ourselves speaking slowly and carefully in third-grade sentences only to hear: “I couldn’t understand you. Will you repeat the message?”

What on earth are we doing and who’s making us do it? I can’t be the only one who feels like a fool talking to a machine.

So where does this leave us economically? A good part of the increase in productivity during the past two decades can be credited to the Great Labor Transfer. We’ve taken on more than anyone thought possible. But it can’t last.

The house two doors down burned tonight. It took a long time for the fire trucks to arrive; people stood in the street watching the flames get higher and thicker, hearing windows break. It felt ghoulish to watch, but it felt irresponsible to go inside, as if standing on the street was somehow the right way to lend support, all the while thinking “Thank God it wasn’t us” (and maybe hating ourselves for thinking that). A neighbor took pictures – explaining apologetically that it was for his insurance. I thought of taking pictures – because it was something that was happening – but couldn’t make myself do it; but I felt terrible that somehow my neighbor had the impulse to explain himself to me.

The man with the camera case and SLR camera arrived, walking on our driveways to get a better vantage point. The local blogger arrived much later, striding officiously to the center of the scene, camera and notebook in hand. Wait, it’s our neighbor, this is our territory, get away!

Ironically, I actually now know something about the people that live there; their history, their family, their recent tragedies, their remodeling. What, if anything, can we do to help them now?

This is the third in an occasional series of reviews of new grocery (and other) products that strike me as interesting or unusual. See also Tiger Power and Grapple.

Intro
Bumblebee Entree-Style Tuna is one of the latest Home Meal Replacement products arriving in the grocery store. Home Meal Replacement, a lovely industry term usually abbreviated as HMR (which always sounds a little too close to HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) for me).

The idea is to help busy families get a traditional-type meal on the table quickly, through some innovations in packaging and distribution and food design. And maybe getting people to think a bit differently about what actually is necessary to constitute a meal.

The Package
The product comes in three flavors – we tried two of them: Lemon and Cracked Pepper, and Ginger and Soy. The third was Mesquite Grilled (not so appealing for tuna). Although check out the nutritional info – maybe we made the wrong choice because that Ginger & Soy has triple the sodium of the others – 43% of your RDA. Didn’t they use to salt fish to preserve it?

The packages are the latest foil envelope gizmo, the printing technology has come along since the early days of boil-and-bag. Bumblebee of course is a company known for tinned tuna (I’d call it canned tuna, but that doesn’t ring as well, does it?), but small type indicates this is gourmet wild tuna, which presumably means that it was caught, not farmed. I didn’t know that tuna was farmed, anyway, and I also assume that you can label anything as gourmet without challenge.

The back of the pouch shows the three easy steps (1 – Tear, 2 – Heat, 3 – Enjoy), with some helpful and encouraging requests such as “Notice the firm texture and seasoning!” and pointers to the “Convenient Preparation Options – The results are all Fabulous…” (and yeah, they did capitalize just Fabulous in that sentence – does that mean we need to have a Fabulous voice in our head when we read it? Fabulous!)

Preparation
Couldn’t be easier. Tear it open:

and put it on a plate (or baking dish, or skillet) – it can be heated in the oven or microwave, or on the stove-top. We opted for the toaster oven.

Whoops. A bit more goo comes flowing out of the pouch than one would expect. The picture on the back of the envelope is goo-free, and shows a much larger, thicker, and pinker looking steak than we got. And look how different the two flavors are. The Ginger and Soy (on the right) does have little sticks of ginger on top. I’m not sure what that is on the top of the other one. Let’s just say that’s spices, okay?

The instructions said a preheated-350-oven for 10 minutes. We used a toaster oven, and it wasn’t pre-heated, so I went for 11 minutes.

Eating
Cooked…

and served…

It wasn’t good. It wasn’t flaky, it was dry. It wasn’t enough food – look at those portions – that’s two halves on one plate (that way everyone got to try each flavor!). The rice was essential to mix in to each bit to try and stave off some of the dry tuna taste/texture.

Perhaps my 11-minute improvisation was disastrous to the end-product; I’d not expect that, but who knows how carefully they time these things in development.

Conclusion
Not such a good execution. Certainly, a compelling idea. Reasonably healthy and easy to prepare, just steps to a “real meal” – that definitely appeals to me. But if you are going to compromise at meal-time (and certainly that is almost inevitable) don’t set the expectations so high? At least in a new product category, if you want to survive, don’t set the expectations so high. This was not like eating fresh tuna, or even freshly prepared tuna. It was just over-flavored dry…something.

Taxi cab riders in S.F. to get smart ‘passenger’ in back

Starting next week, the first of 200 taxis will hit the road with computer screens offering riders news and listings for restaurants, bars, movie theaters and museums.
The touch-screen terminals are intended to be a convenience. Use is free of charge.
“You can be in the back of a cab and say, ‘Hey, where can we go to dinner?’ ” said John Lazar, president of Luxor Cabs.

Huh? So people get in cabs without a destination in mind, and then they’ll use this system to figure out where they want to go, while the cab is doing what? Idling? Just driving? Sounds like the scenario isn’t well understood by the customer.

Finally an explanation of what the heck those colored sections of water around the SF Bay are – every time I fly in I wonder what it is and how I could find out…

I mentioned to Andy that when you drive around the Silicon Valley you see shallow areas of the San Francisco bay evaporating down to salts and he showed me this cool section of the bay. Now this is a bit different, the red and green colors appear to be due to algae blooms, and since they appear to be in contained areas, they’re purposefully there in order to help ‘scrub’ fertilizers from agricultural runoff heading into the bay. When runoff high in nitrogen or phosphorus hits these ponds, blooms form and the algae consume the nutrients, leaving cleaner water to pass back into the bay. Without this kind of cheap natural wastewater management, the blooms would happen in the main areas of the bay, choking out oxygen and often leading to fish kills and other problems. Red and green algae bloom in response to varying levels of nutrient load and temperature, so I’m not sure if the green algae blooms are in deeper pools or less nutrient rich ones, but that’s my guess as to why the big colored pools are there.

In a world of Make and ReadyMade

comes Design without Reach. Let’s see how long the site stays up, but we can hope that the folks at the original are tolerant of this clever homage/parody/tribute/rip by Thwart.

Watched a bunch of movies in the last week or so.

Out of five stars

Oldboy ****
The 39 Steps (Hitchcock’s version of course) ****
Picnic at Hanging Rock *
Appleseed *
Soylent Green (it’s people, did you know?) **
Infernal Affairs ***

One of the most incisive and hilarious parodies I’ve ever seen is Boring Boring: A Directory of Dull Things

PetEsthe (try saying that without spitting), a trademark of Merry Do Beauty Products, offers crazy exciting colors for your pet. Substance of Style, anyone?
(via Tokyo Times)

Paul Graham on Writing, Briefly

here’s the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; cut out everything unneccessary; write in a conversational tone; develop a nose for bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours; imitate writers you like; if you can’t get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said; expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong; be confident enough to cut; have friends you trust read your stuff and tell you which bits are confusing or drag; don’t (always) make detailed outlines; mull ideas over for a few days before writing; carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you; start writing when you think of the first sentence; if a deadline forces you to start before that, just say the most important sentence first; write about stuff you like; don’t try to sound impressive; don’t hesitate to change the topic on the fly; use footnotes to contain digressions; use anaphora to knit sentences together; read your essays out loud to see (a) where you stumble over awkward phrases and (b) which bits are boring (the paragraphs you dread reading); try to tell the reader something new and useful; work in fairly big quanta of time; when you restart, begin by rereading what you have so far; when you finish, leave yourself something easy to start with; accumulate notes for topics you plan to cover at the bottom of the file; don’t feel obliged to cover any of them; write for a reader who won’t read the essay as carefully as you do, just as pop songs are designed to sound ok on crappy car radios; if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately; ask friends which sentence you’ll regret most; go back and tone down harsh remarks; publish stuff online, because an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more ideas; print out drafts instead of just looking at them on the screen; use simple, germanic words; learn to distinguish surprises from digressions; learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it.

Gah. George Lucas has led the way in movie merchandising, but why does this specifically turn my stomach so? Enough to make me consider skipping the film (I blew off Shrek 2 when the image became inescapable leading up to the movie opening) – there’s so many of us out there that have seen our childhood legacy destroyed with crappy film making (Ep I and II, specifically) – this seems to cross a line for me. Great job on the candy side, but really. Just annoyingly silly. See a well done trailer here.

I don’t know about the business model or likelihood of success behind Ron Jeremy’s mobile phone service, but you’ve gotta love the logo.

Here’s a new take on collecting. Someone has put up a torrent of the complete collection of the Garage Pail Kids stickers. So now you can own digital files that are scans of something physical that people would collect. It’s interesting to see it presented as a collection in the way that a hockey card collector or someone would assemble lovingly a complete series.

SFist writes about a party I was at! Adaptive Path’s Fourth Anniversary Party…I feel so incredibly cool.

Brody (who is a dog) alerted us last night to a visitor in our backyard. Mere feet from our hot tub was this fairly large possum. I’ve never seen one before.

In the final edition of Circuits the New York Times publishes an astonishing article informing us that airline travellers prefer e-tickets over paper tickets which are becoming increasingly rare.

We decided to try a bunch of apples and make notes about what we found. There are easily 10 varieties of apples for sale even at the tiny Safeway grocery in Half Moon Bay, and yet we didn’t feel we knew very much about them, often eating apples without paying much attention, so it seemed like a fun experiment to be more explicit and attentive to the process.

Here are our thoughts:

Fuji
bright
crunchy
no sour bite
non-descript flavor

Rome
sour
dry
mealy
don’t seem good for eating – maybe for cooking

Gala
crisp
similar to McIntosh?
bright
slightly sour

Braeburn
sour
fibre-y
crisp

Jonagold
not crisp, slightly mealy
not sour
gently sweet – almost dry

Pink Lady
perfume-y
crisp
dry
sweet & sour
not bright

Obviously this was not very scientific – we didn’t know what terms we would use to describe them until we started. Interesting to see what kind of vocabulary is needed to describe and categorize a the more subtle aspects of a sensory experience. We didn’t develop any idea of shadings of an adjective, such as sour – how sour? Relative to another apple, or absolutely?
We also only dealt with one sample of each apple type, so perhaps we weren’t eating a variety at its peak.

Fun to try, regardless.

Snipped from original story

Experts who reviewed the lower-sugar versions of six major brands of sweetened cereals at the request of The Associated Press found they have no significant nutritional advantages over their full-sugar counterparts.

Nutrition scientists at five universities found that while the new cereals do have less sugar, the calories, carbohydrates, fat, fiber and other nutrients are almost identical to the full-sugar cereals. That’s because the cereal makers have replaced sugar with refined carbohydrates to preserve the crunch.

Officials at General Mills, Kellogg’s and Post were unable to explain why the new cereals are a better choice, but noted they give consumers more options about how much sugar they eat.

Company officials said they were responding to parents’ demands for products with less sugar and that they aren’t claiming these cereals are any healthier than the originals.

That may not be obvious to consumers.

On some boxes, the lower-sugar claim is printed nearly as large as the product’s name, and only by carefully comparing the nutrition labels of both versions of a cereal would a shopper know there is little difference between them.

“You’re supposed to think it’s healthy,” said Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University and author of a book critical of the food industry’s influence on public health. “This is about marketing. It is about nothing else. It is not about kids’ health.”

Only one cereal, General Mills’ Cinnamon Toast Crunch, saw a true calorie reduction, dropping from 130 calories to 120 per three-fourths cup serving.

The reduced-sugar versions of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops; General Mills’ Cocoa Puffs and Trix; and Post’s Fruity Pebbles all have the same number of calories per serving.

Blame the calorie woes on crunch. To preserve cereals’ taste and texture, sugar is replaced with other carbs that have the same calories as sugar and are no better for you.

Today I received this email

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Disk Usage Warning (critical)
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 05:51:58 -0800

The account with the username ‘stevep’, is running out of disk space.
Please remove some files from this account, or ask the administrator to increase your disk quota.
You have currently used 90.85% of your disk space.

Talk about useless! It’s autogenerated from myself, to myself. It doesn’t make any reference to what organization, site, company, or anything, except for stevep – you can imagine that I’ve got many accounts using the name stevep. I eventually ran an nslookup on the IP address in the header (yeah, that’s what I did and for most people what I just wrote is complete nonsense) to see that it came from my ISP. But I have two domains registered with that ISP! They don’t tell me which one, they expect me to map the login to the domain? Even their support person couldn’t tell me what domain this account name referred to; he suggested I tell him all my domains and then he could tell me which one this was? I happen only to have two, but what if I had 30? Or 300? I’m sure that’s not unusual.

Very very crappy error messages, and of course, the usual technical-oriented support that doesn’t feel this is really a problem they need to address.

The parents of a 23-year-old activist killed while trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home have sued Caterpillar Inc., the company that made the bulldozer that ran over her.

Just out on a walk with the dog. As we passed a house, with a somewhat inclined driveway, I hear a metallic creak. We paused and the noise came again. It sounded like it was coming from one of the cars parked in the driveway. A bit concerned, I watched, and the noise happened a third time, only this time the car inched backwards very slightly.

We went to the door (I did not want to do this, by the way) and knocked. Taking a dog up a strange walk to a strange front door is a bit nerve-wracking.

No answer. Even though there were two cars parked in the driveway.

I then looked across the street. There was a car parked there directly across from the creaking car. I went up to their door (I really did not want to do this, by the way) and rang the bell. No answer. There were two cars parked there. And shoes outside the door.

Do people in our little town just not answer the door to men with dogs? I have no idea.

Do cars just settle into their parking brake? Or do they only creak when, Hollywood-style, the cables are fraying? I have no idea.

What to do? How much effort and annoying of people does one do, based on a concern or suspicion?

We kept walking.

A much-anticipated stage musical based on ‘The Lord of the Rings’ will have its world premiere in Toronto next year. The Cdn$27 million (U.S. $22 million) show will open in March 2006 at the Princess of Wales Theatre with a largely Canadian cast…”We have not attempted to pull the novel towards the standard conventions of Musical Theatre, but rather to expand those conventions so that they will accommodate Tolkien’s material.”

Meh. The Simpsons did it with Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want To Get Off!

This New York Times article about coping with life’s little annoyances warmed my heart. Some people send back the magazine insert cards, since they are prepaid, why not make the advertisers pay for them? An interesting little consideration of the relief of passive-agressive reactions when you are mostly powerless. And includes this ironic tidbit

In 2002, Harris Interactive, a market research group based in Rochester, conducted a phone survey called the Daily Hassle Scale that asked 1,010 people to rank the aggravations they faced in a typical day. The survey found that poor people and African-Americans suffer the most stress from the everyday annoyances such as noisy neighbors, telemarketers and pressure at work, but it did not explain why.

Bruce Nussbaum writes in Business Week that core77 is one of the coolest, most informative design sites around.
I’ll take that as affirmation, being an active contributor and all.

BATMAN: NEW TIMES is a student film starring (among others) Adam West (the actor from the TV series) as Batman. Another example of technology enabling the blurring of consumer and producer.

What is Scrumpy?

The first scented bowling balls from Storm Products – green apple and citrus – came out in the spring of 2000. Since then, the company has produced about 40 scents. The current scents are black cherry, chocolate, lemonade, plum, blueberry, grape, banana, cinnamon, orange, amaretto and cherry.

Zigbee is a wireless technology with some of advantages over previous technologies. Zogby is an icononclastic pollster.

Petitions!

The Stop Ashlee Simpson
Bring U2 To Winnipeg
Protect Property Rights In Animals
Bring U2 to Calgary
End the Hate
Save Arrested Development!!
Impeach Judge George W. Greer of Florida’s Sixth Judicial Circuit
Keeping a classic alive in the G.I. Joe toyline
Knights of the Old Republic 2: Restore the Ending to What it Should Be
Horse beating, dragging and abandonment
Autism Project Funding Support
Get The Backstreet Boys on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

A horrific Comcast tale; resolved

An interesting thread about bad customer service on BrandShift. The parts contributed by me are excerpted with edits below:

I had Comcast billing me for someone else’s cable service (it’s complex – it involves me moving and the old account not being properly closed out), and blowing off my first request for help (a few days later I got a phone message with no callback number from someone that says “we understand you are reporting illegal use of your credit card [I was not] – contact your credit card company.”

I finally called again, and contacted Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo was able to stop payment on the most recent charge – but have a response to anything more than six months old (some of this was – yes, I do NOT fine-tooth-comb my bank statement – at least I didn’t). Comcast did finally acknowledge this was an issue, but has not followed up. When I contacted them by email they said they had information but they wouldn’t give it to me until I call.

It has been many many months and they’ve done nothing except stop the erroneous withdrawals. Isn’t this identity theft or fraud or some other horrible buzzword? I don’t know; Comcast isn’t saying much.

I am honestly so stressed out by this – it’s so incredibly frustrating to have a company taking money out of your bank [without permission – I MOVED and signed up for a new billing service at my new address and told them I was moving and they dealt with my old account – just not the autopay] and then neither them nor the bank takes it seriously enough to resolve.

If you make a complaint and are told that they need time to investigate and resolve, wouldn’t it be great if they actually followed up with you?

Anyway, the stress and frustration have led me to avoid calling.

I haven’t even written about it; it reveals too much of my own powerlessness to feel safe in retelling

—

After posting my tale of woe (the abbreviated version) on BrandShift, intermediary parties brought my message to the attention of a regional Comcast VP who contacted the the credit department.

I had some idea this might have happened but wasn’t sure at all what the deal was until today I got a call from a lively knowledgable Comcast employee who called to let me know he was working on it and would get back to me later today! He knew the whole story, he understood what had happened and why from their side of things such a mistake was made. He called back about 4 hours later and arranged to credit my account for the missing money.

I asked him about how to resolve this more easily in the future – he gave me his direct number and explained how and why the regular 800 number folks wouldn’t be able to handle such a request.

I certainly can’t hold him responsible for the overall company problems, and it’s great that I have a channel to resolve any of my future problems, but in general, what are their customers supposed to do?

I’m struck by the power of high-profile forums like this one to attract the attention of corporate folks who can intervene to politely, intelligently, sincerely and honestly resolve ordinary customer service problems. But how long will this be an effective way of doing it?

Hey, I’m thrilled to have this resolved; it was one of the most stressful customer service problems I’ve experienced in recent years, but the system is still broken.

This is obviously a bigger thought, but anyway, wanted to share the positive results.

This WMV link is a funny and ironic what-if about the “strangeness” of foreign customs. What if they were just having us on?

Nice commentary before the actual article, giving some perspective on who does or doesn’t use technologies that we may tend to think of as ubiquitous.

This is the second in an occasional series of reviews of new grocery (and other) products that strike me as interesting or unusual. Also see a previous entry, Tiger Power.

Intro
Reminding me of an article from BoingBoing last year (about genetically engineered bananas with othe fruit flavors embedded), Grapples (the a is long, like “grape” – it doesn’t rhyme with Snapple) are Fuji apples that have been dipped in water and Concord grape flavor; no added sugar or calories.

The positioning seems to be that kids are sick of apples and like the taste of grapes better. Personally, I’m kinda weirded by things that look like one thing and taste like something else. Many years ago I was on a backpacking trip through Europe, and got used to having many meals by going into a grocery store and picking up a few things that I would then sit on a bench and eat. In Amsterdam, I picked up some meat, and cheese, and a chocolate milk. It was in the familiar pint carton, with a picture of a brown cow in a field, and some Dutch word like Chokomilkenblurgen or something. After finishing my main course, I opened up the carton, and tilted my head back and to take a big slug of sweet and refreshing chocolate milk.

But it was pudding.

Oh boy. The texture was a big unpleasant surprise. My brain was ready for one thing (based on the cues available) and my senses told me something else.

Grapple is grappling with the same sensory challenge; but I bet their target (young children) aren’t going to care.

The Package

Here’s the package:

The package is minimal, as it should be. The product lives in the produce section and wants to look as much like regular produce as possible. Clear packaging, highlighting the fruit itself. It’s a poly-plastic hinged deal that snaps closed, with four compartments for the apples. The uniformity of apple size required to fit into a plastic molded container is a bit startling, obviously there are sorting processes in place to get produce distributors the size of fruit/veg they want, but we still think of these as natural products with lots of natural variation – the idea that they could be uniform enough to stack in a plastic container seems slightly odd. It does, however, suit the sci-fi notion of Apples That Taste Like Grapes, so there ya go.

The package opens us like so:

Eating
As with any fruit, wash before eating. Okay, wash, and…umm, this is an apple? Yeah, the expected flavor explosion, the grapeness di tutti grapey did not materialize. It tasted like an apple. A Fuji apple. A little tasteless in spots, in fact. If you were aware of the grape factor and gave it whiff, you might believe there was grapeliness imbued therein, but if you picked it up and chomped on it thinking it was an apple, you would finish not realizing you had done anything different. A $1/unit, that seems a bit silly.

I guess we could have done the blind study and asked people how they liked them apples, but really, trust me, I couldn’t taste anything.

Caveat considor: if their demographic is little kids, we know they have amazingly sensitive taste buds. Back in my grade 8 days, I did a Science Fair experiment where we gave people Smarties (for Americans, this is a candy that resembles M&Ms) blindfolded and asked them to identify the color. It was a surprising experiment to many because they didn’t even think there was a difference to be noted. But very young kids could identify the color of the Smartie by taste within a second.

Conclusion
For an adult, this is an expensive and fruitless offering. But has anyone given one of these apples to a little kid? Did they notice a difference? I’d be curious to hear if there’s any there, there.

Read more about Grapple here

.

Alanis Morissette Reworks ‘Jagged Little Pill’
It’ss been 10 years since Alanis Morissette kick started the angry-female-with-guitar movement with her “Jagged Little Pill” album, and the songstress is going to celebrate the event in a very logical way; dropping the angry and upping the guitars. Along with original Jagged producer/songwriter Glen Ballard, Morissette has been in the recording studio working on an entirely acoustic version of her classic 1995 album.

How crappy is this? Amazon lets you look inside the book, and here’s a classic kids book – the Five Chinese Brothers – where they’ve stripped the hell out of the pages (“Some images in this book are not displayed”) – basically denuded it – to protect? some sort of ripoff? I have no idea. If you are going to go to the trouble of putting a service like this up, why bother if it’s not even a proper image of the book? Lame, lame, lame.

Shopdropping is

an exhibition that both catalogues and instigates the insertion of art into public places of commerce (specifically, conglomerate retail stores). The artwork–ranging from social sculptures to gentle gestures of gift-leaving-is presented in the exhibition in the form of multiples/duplicates or audio/photo/video documentation. Using beauty, humor, and intimate address to invite shoppers’ self-reflection and second glance, the works eschew a reductivist commodity critique in favor of complex strategies that detourne situations, present alternatives to normative systems of exchange, and graft together alternate economic regimes.

More: Rapper Pez, The Wal-Mart Project.

The New York Times – Correction

Published: March 6, 2005

The Night Out column last Sunday, about the actor Javier Bardem, misspelled the name of the lead singer of the band Pearl Jam, whose CD played in Mr. Bardem’s limousine. He is Eddie Vedder, not Edie Veder.

Yesterday we went to the San Jose Museum of Art to see the a special opening event for the exhibit BLOBJECTS & BEYOND, curated by Steven Skov Holt and Mara Holt Skov (where blobjects refers to the curvy designs seen in products over the past few years). The event featured the curators moderating a conversation with Karim Rashid and Harmut Esslinger.

As we arrived at the museum there was some pre-event tour of the exhibit happening, with I imagine press folks and patrons of the museum. We were escorted very deliberately into the cafe so as to not overlap or sully the high-powered scene taking place mere feet from us. Welcome to high culture.

And the extent of this high culture (and high class, indeed) could be felt if not seen when the host for the evening did the usual round of introductions. One woman who contributed a great deal to the organizing of the event and/or the exhibit was out of the room at the time, and implying that she was in the restroom, the suit-wearing genteel host offered that “perhaps she was making some blobjects of her own.” Nice.

Things did get better from there, however. Onstage, the speakers and the moderators embodied massive accomplishment; they have each done so much and had such an impact. That alone made the time spent listening worthwhile. Both Karim and Hartmut had projected slideshows of images associated with them or their work, the breadth and wealth of the imagery made for a stimulating backdrop while actually sitting in the same room with these fantastic talents.

The format was a risky one; “a conversation with” is usually better than prepared remarks, presentations, panels, all the usual stiff and non-interactive content, but it’s without-a-net, and anything can happen. Unfortunately, I was mostly reminded of an episode of Geraldo or Oprah, where an important issue is presented, experts brought forward to offer sound-bites, and pretty soon it’s a commercial break and then the credits roll, and we’ve never really made it anywhere. The level of conversation was poor; questions were asked but not responded to, comments made by one guest were not responded to by the other guest, despite remarks being prefaced with “I’d like to respond to that by saying…”

There were indeed moments of brilliance, fantastic ideas, provocative expressions of passion, insights into the personalities, history, stories, but it took a lot of work and my brain just go so tired from trying to hold it all together. It was like watching a bunch of good musicians jam; most of the time it’s going to sound like crap, every once in a while you’ll hear a little piece that excited you, and then it’s gone.

I’m not blaming the format; I am blaming the guests. They aren’t good listeners. They have a lot to say but they were unable to focus and interact. The event reached its peak when there was some actual debate on a specific topic: the value of the slow manual tactile process of model making; working with a material versus the power, speed, and rapid prototyping afforded by digital tools.

But these moments were all-too-rare in the 90 minutes. We heard a lot of stories, somewhat in response to Steven Skov Holt’s line of inquiry around how they each chose to pursue design in the way they did. But once we got to a fever pitch of prognostication and pronouncement I was thinking about tearing my hair out. It was sadly reminiscent of so many conversations I’ve had with designers in my career; hearing them predict the future from their stance as a designer, with little understanding of the market, of human nature, or of history. Rashid told a story about seeing an exhibit of a gray room with a gray motorcycle when he was very young; the exhibit was a consideration of how we might all become nomads and live in extraordinarily plain environments. It was a good story; artistic explorations of how a future might unfold and what the implications might be on products, technology, lifestyle and beyond are absolutely fascinating, but when you begin to restate those hypothetical considerations as certainties and then offer up the solutions as necessities, my bullshit detector starts a-ringin’.

My biggest criticism is about a slide that Karim showed – it featured his face surrounded by a bunch of his words – Digitalia, Indus-trial design, Organomics and others too painful to recall. Perhaps these are names of projects, but whatever. For someone who understands so well the process of working with materials to create sensual beauty, it’s appalling to see how badly he works with the material of words; creating awkward, ham-fisted cacophonous artifacts that evoke a teenage boy’s litany of synonyms for “fart” more than some brilliantly insightful NuArgot. Please, stop!

The best moment came during the Q&A. Virginia Postrel asked how blobjects do or don’t deal with the past or nostalgia, since she observes in these items so much of what Thomas Hine describes as Populuxe, a 50s-esque optimistic style. Steven Skov Holt pointed out that today, both the past and the future are resident in our artifacts (he said it much better than I can recall) – in that moment it was clear how much thinking and analysis had gone into the planning and curating of the exhibit.

We had a brief period in the exhibit after the speakers were finished – it’s always disconcerting to me to see “designed” items – products intended for use – in a museum setting. Invariably there is a chair that you can’t sit on, or a lusciously textured product that you must not touch. This exhibit featured a touching station with brightly colored rubbery shapes, giving a valve to that common need. Another moment of dissonance came from seeing very recent product designs appearing in a retrospective collection of a movement – in this case those blobby Phillips appliances. I guess if VH1 can have a 90s flashback, we can do the same thing in our museums.

Without a lot of time, it’s hard to say very much about the exhibit, but it did seem very thoughtful and considered, sections on color as well as form, and motorcycles and cars that may not come to mind immediately as blobjects, but in the context of the exhibit make the concept of the blobject clearer and broader.

Despite my criticisms, I had a great time, I’m totally glad I went. I always learn something, even if it’s a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of talented and famous people.

Why would someone shop at a place called Fingerhut? If you get donuts at Donut Shack what do you get at Fingerhut?

Deadprogrammer’s Cafe has some great stuff about weird food adventures, including a very very unhealthy vending machine honey bun.

Techdirt

writes about Evite, citing a Chicago Tribune article. The issue at hand is the efficacy of Evite. I think Techdirt is one of the smartest sites out there, although a frequent “we told you so” and “this problem isn’t really a problem” tone can wear thin.

The timing is ironic, since a group of us were discussing Evite and effectiveness-across-cultures at an Evite-organized event yesterday.

For reasons I don’t understand, many people don’t respond to Evite in the way I would expect them to. If I organize an event, the Evite communications are my proxy, and I assume people will interact with them the way they would interact with me. I.e., read the messages, visit the site to see the details of the event, let me know if they are coming, etc. Many many people do not even read the email, let alone indicate their response. As an organizer, if I’m interested in that information in order to plan for a certain number of guests, then it’s the wrong tool. The last time I did this I was astounded. We got one email two weeks after the party with an “oh sorry I didn’t even look at the message.” Many other reminders ended up in spam filters.

But worse than that is something more subtle – the anonymity of the Evite I suspect makes people less inclined to treat it like a real invitation, the e-formalization (HTML graphics in an email, logos, hot links to maps) doesn’t add weight to the invitation, it subtracts from the impact. It doesn’t feel like it comes from STEVE, it comes from Evite.com, your invitation and socialization e-partner. Meh.

Now obviously this depends on who you are dealing with. For a technically literate group who adopt new services easily and will IM each other (or who know what IM is, let’s put it that way), sure. But not everyone is like that. Evite is available to anyone with an email address (and it expects you to have a browser available, but even without that you could still receive the Evite). Chances are that most people’s social circles exceeds just individuals who know what RSS and podcasting are about; who have their own blog, who installed the latest version of MT, and who have IM accounts on Y! and AIM. In my case, that’s absolutely true.

For these normal folks, it’s just not a standard way to interact around an event.

I think it’s great for blast-announcing large events where you don’t care who comes. If you get an Evite and you don’t read it, then hey, your loss, you miss out on the event. If I am having a dinner party and want guests to come to my house, I pretty much need people to read it and respond. In that case, I’m not bothering with Evite.

Techdirt minimizes any technical or interaction problems as described in the article, but the Evite event I’ve been invited to later in the week is overwhelmed with them. The body of the invite and the header of the invite refer to different dates. That was corrected (with a reported problem of the Evite system not accepting the organizer’s input), and then the same thing occurred with the time of the event. Meanwhile, even though I’m registered with Evite and they have my name and email address, the organizer somehow managed to spell our names wrong; sure we got invited but we can’t get the correct info listed. I do not enjoy being listed as Portigul – it’s oversensitivity from a lifetime of having my name mangled, but I can’t correct it.

Extraordinary Ordinary Guy In Japan offers up a pithy and provocative example of imitation/originality in Japan. Not explicitly applied to design, but the implication is clear.

Some lovely musical samples from Richard Herd who you may remember from Seinfeld as George’s boss.

The thrust of this emerging meme seems to be Wow look at all this guy’s crap, but my reaction is Wow look at how he’s got his home set up.

From today’s SF Chronicle

Canada rebuffs Bush on missile defense plan
Premier is seen as waffling on decision

Clifford Krauss, New York Times

Thursday, February 24, 2005

Toronto — The Canadian government has refused to take part in a planned North America missile defense system despite lobbying by President Bush in November, U.S. officials said Wednesday. The long-awaited decision from Prime Minister Paul Martin was a symbolic setback for the Bush administration at a time when it is trying to heal rifts with allies that emerged from the invasion of Iraq.

[etc.]

The NYT is fine; but the headline writer for the SF paper is an idiot. The leader of Canada in the article is the Prime Minister, not the Premier. Seems like they should know that; seems like an editor should have caught it. Lame! I sent in feedback, we’ll see what I hear back.

I blogged previously about our ridiculous experience in showing up at Home Depot for one of their advertised clinics, only to find that our local store lamely opted-out of the class (but not advertising the class). I contacted Home Depot corporate and got back this response

Dear Steve Portigal,

Thank you for contacting The Home Depot Customer Care.

We appreciate you taking the time to forward your concerns regarding the
clinic. We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced.
Please know that the feedback you have provided will be taken very
seriously and will be used in the overall evaluation of our services.

If you would like to speak with a Customer Care professional, please
call us at 1-800-553-3199 (U.S.) or 1-800-668-2266 (Canada). We would
be happy to assist you.

Sincerely,

Tamika
Customer Care Department
homedepot.com

Burt P. Flickinger III, managing director of Strategic Resources Group in New York, said Tuesday he doubts Winn-Dixie will be able to succeed under Chapter 11 reorganization and may eventually be forced into a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which calls for liquidation of the company and its assets.

Looks like they are using Creature Comforts as the blueprint for new TV ads for Tiger Power cereal (recently blogged about here)

This page

is probably just one example of people doing this; it’s the review of Wondercon by the folks at SFist. It features some info about appearances by Elisha Cuthbert, Christian Bale, and Joel Silver. If you look at the file names they used for those images, they are elisha_cuthbert_naked.jpg, elisha_cutherbert_nude.jpg, christian_bale_naked.jpg, etc.

If you are just reading the page normally, you won’t see that. But I guess if you are a search engine, you are going to collect that info and of course rank the page higher. Kinda cynical thing for a supposedly legit site to do. Maybe it’s standard practice.

My WonderCon (San Francisco’s comic book convention) photos are here.

A Pair Of Funnies On “The Gates” is really excellent. I saw it when it was broadcast and have been hoping that Lisa would post it to her blog. If you didn’t see it, and you enjoy The Daily Show, absolutely check it out.

Home Depot runs special workshops on a variety of home renovation topics. They’ve simplified the scheduling by setting up a national roster of clinics that run at every store at the same time every week. So, every Thursday at 7 in Feb would be a flooring installation seminar.

From a roll-out point of view, it’s brilliant. No registration, just show up – at any store, wherever is convenient for you.

We tried it yesterday.

No dice. The store we went to decided not to run the clinic. Despite the local advertising circular and the website encouraging customers to come into that store at that time “We do one on Saturday” was the message we got.

It’s really great and all for the corporation to set up a program, but if the local stores can’t act on it, it’s worthless.

It was a pretty big waste of time to hustle over to Home Depot midweek, on their schedule. I’m not sure I’m willing to try again; my trust for the organization to actually deliver on the class is zero.

Very disappointing; the potential is great, the execution is crappy.

I’ll be moderating this panel discussion in Palo Alto on 3/31

7:00 pm to 9:30 pm
Hewlett Packard Corporate Auditorium
Building 20, 3000 Hanover Street
Palo Alto CA 94304
(at the southwest corner of Hanover and Page Mill Road, 3 blocks west of El Camino).

Starting in school, designers are typically taught to use their problem solving and conceptualization skills to serve others. They rarely consider using these skills for creating and developing their own enterprises. The panel members will discuss what it takes to start and run a design-centric business and how designers’ skills can be applied towards being an entrepreneur.

Robert Forbes, Design Within Reach
Mark Dwight, Timbuk2 Designs
Kiersten Muenchinger, Parapluie

IDSA Student Members: $5
IDSA Members: $15
Non-Members: $20
Tickets will be available at the door.

The Pacifier

Vin Diesel in the story of an undercover agent who, after failing to protect an important government scientist, learns the man’s family is in danger. In an effort to redeem himself, he agrees to take care of the man’s children only to discover that child care is his toughest mission yet.

Yeah, I think I saw that last time it was out, when it was called Kindergarten Cop.

John Kimble is a tough city cop who’s been on the trail of drug dealer Cullen Crisp for years. He finally tracks Crisp down but it seems the only person that can testify against him is his ex-wife. The problem is she’s disappeared and all Kimble knows is the name of the school in Oregon where her son attends. When things don’t quite go to plan, Kimble finds he has to go undercover on his toughest assignment yet – Kindergarten teacher!

(note: plot summaries written by regular film fans on imdb)

In a long and detailed piece the SFChron food writers try out the 2005 dietary guidelines (new!) for two weeks. Check out the whole article for the journey, and I’ll snip their conclusions here

Quantity: Dieters know this, but keeping track of what you eat can prove surprising and a big incentive to change. Most of us thought we ate less overall than we actually did, and also thought we consumed more vegetables and fruits than was true.

Protein: It was harder than we expected to limit our protein. If you drink all the milk called for in the guidelines, you don’t need more than the 5.5 ounces of meat/chicken/beans recommended — which is less than most people eat just at dinner. Go for meals that combine small amounts of protein with piles of vegetables — stir fries, for example. And eat meatless meals more often, especially for dinner if you’ve had a meaty sandwich at lunch, or eggs for breakfast.

Vegetables: Work them into both lunch and dinner or you won’t make it to 2 1/2 cups a day. Another bonus: If your kids see you trying new vegetables, they’re more likely to try them, too.

Grains: Three daily servings of refined grains is easy to get — they’re everywhere — but three servings of whole grains requires more of an effort. Breakfast foods tend to contain whole grains, so try to squeeze two servings in there. That’s two slices of whole wheat toast, a cup of oatmeal, or a bowl of cereal and one slice of toast. Don’t forget about corn tortillas, which are generally whole-grain.

Dairy: The guidelines promote milk for its protein, potassium and other nutrients as well as calcium. The three servings don’t have to mean three glasses of milk a day. Some people can’t drink milk, but if you can a non-fat latte or a midmorning yogurt can account for a serving or two. Tara Duggan liked lowfat hot chocolate or soymilk before bed.

Exercise: This is key, and it takes time — but you’d be surprised how much you can work into your routine, 15 minutes here or there. Walk to the bus, walk to work, walk your child (or the stroller) to day care or school. Short of joining a gym, it’s an easy way to get your body moving.

Eating out. Order what you like, but eat only enough to satisfy you. Bring an extra friend who likes to share, or take leftovers home for a meal the next day.

Treats. Sweets, alcohol and rich foods like cheese and butter aren’t forbidden, but their extra calories are considered discretionary. That means if you have calories left over after all the nutritious foods, you can use them as you like. But practically, if you eat all the recommended foods you won’t have many calories left for fun stuff. You have to ration the fun foods — or exercise more to burn them off.

Nazi-influenced ads for Abercrombie+Fitch seen in a window in San Francisco. Fakes? Or clever wannabe fakes? Plans within plans within plans. With the increasing post-modern-street-cred-cool of advertising co-opting culture and culture co-opting advertising, can we tell anymore? And do we care?

Update: it was fake, and the pictures have been taken offline (read more here and here)

Tim Goodman writes in the SFChron about shows staying on TV past their prime. He’s obviously, as a TV critic, completely over the strange attachment we feel to characters and their lives, dismissing our desire to cry and even mourn their depature, regardless of how overdue it is. He presents an interesting perspective on what TV programming could/should be like.

It’s not enough to be liked. It’s not enough to be a successful place- holder. There should be an attempt to uphold standards. Be as good as your best episode — regularly. You shouldn’t get a free pass just to tell ongoing stories to a nation afraid of change.

OK, so rolling out new shows is often an exercise in failure. A network wants to hold onto a proven commodity and the viewer, presumably, has tired through the years of watching 44 shows in September in hopes of keeping five. It’s easier not to break up than to break out.

But without change, you don’t get growth. You don’t get ‘Desperate Housewives’ or ‘Lost’ or … or … even something that’s merely good, not quantifiably great. Isn’t good better than stale? Isn’t stale greatness bad? Yes, as a matter of fact it is, Mr. Don’t Touch My Calcified Favorites.

Television needs to be more fluid. It shouldn’t be about gold watches and sad farewells. You want a never-ending story? Watch the daytime soaps.”

An attorney has filed the latest in a series of civil lawsuits against twin physician brothers, accusing them of impersonating one another and sexually assaulting female patients in an obstetric-gynecology practice. Six female patients of Charles Momah said they were sometimes deceived into being seen, examined, operated on and sexually fondled by his twin, Dennis Momah, a general practitioner who is not certified in obstetrics and gynecology.

On some occasions the doctor they believed to be Charles Momah was jovial and talkative with little accent. He bore certain scars and other physical characteristics. On other visits, the man they believed to be Charles Momah stuttered, had a heavy accent, and even appeared to be a different weight.

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the Canadian flag
Canadians unfurling their Maple Leaf should bear in mind some simple flag-handling rules:

* Canada’s national flag must always fly on its own flagpole,
* When the flag is raised, lowered, or paraded, all those present must face the flag in silence,
* If flown from a vehicle, it must be attached to a flagpole on the right side of the chassis,
* The flag may not be written on, marked or modified,
* It should not be used as a table or seat cover, masking for boxes or as a barrier on a platform

This is the first in an occasional series of reviews of new grocery (and other) products that strike me as interesting or unusual.

Intro
Tiger Power is a new breakfast cereal from Kellogg’s. It seems to speak very well to the mom-child dichotomy that conventional marketing wisdom suggests must be faced with every cereal, snack, or other consumable that the kids are going to have on their own…in other words, the kid must find it appealing, but the mother must be okay with letting their kid eat it.

I do believe at some basic level this is accurate; but having done a couple of ethnographic studies of the morning-time rituals in families, I’m not totally sure that this is the crux of the matter. The challenges with feeding kids in the morning goes beyond the positioning of existing categories of food; it is a situation rife with opportunity for the companies that can rethink existing categories food to begin to address the larger problems: individualized tastes, individualized schedules; blurring boundaries between meal and snack, the stretching of breakfast from a single-time-period (a “meal”) to a series of things eaten over time and over space.

A number of years ago we did research on this category; as a result our client General Mills launched the enormously successful Go-Gurt.

The Package
But anyway, back to Tiger Power. Here’s the package:

We see Tony the Tiger, hero of the sugar-loaded Frosted Flakes (weren’t they once known as Sugar Frosted Flakes?) – although they are now selling a reduced-sugar version. Tony’s here, so it’s gotta be good for kids. And yet he’s got his paternal arm around a young girl (another package shows a young boy), and she’s smiling a contented smirk; looking confident and ready to face the day.

The package stays away from the high-energy bulging eyeballs and hyper perspective with characters leaning way outa the box to pull us in, it’s pretty calm, but still kinda designy. Tiger pawprints (each with a TM) lightly fill the whitespace of the package. The logo is jauntily skewed, but not too much. Tiger Power suggests energy more than a sugar rush spinning into hyper-kinetic ADHD. The tail of the “g” is a tiger tail, with a bit of a visual homage to putting a Tiger in your tank. The tail is gentle and appealing to all.

Prominent next to the word “Tiger” is the emphasized “Whole Grain” – the new spin on breakfast cereal these days – General Mills is billboarding most of their packaging front real estate with the phrase, and here Kellogg’s is getting it in as well.

The slogan here is “Gr-r-eat for Growth!” – Tony language, but not aimed at the kids.

A few years ago Kellogg’s ran these amazing post-modern ads where adult fans were following Tony around trying to see him as he came out of buildings; the fans sat on lawn chairs and would show people their photographs of their efforts to date. It rang incredibly true as a characterization of fan culture (and having spent some time in the Rolling Stones trufan subculture, I can attest to that), and seemed to suggest that there was a big nostalgia play with Tony – adults grew up with him and why not have them continue to consume his product. So maybe there’s an angle there – the Tony presence is a way to remind the parents (or “moms” as the marketing folks would say) that this is a product for their kids, more than it might actually speak to the kids themselves.

The back of the package is all about calcium, fiber, and protein (the magic ingredients listed on the front), but it’s a fresh open design with gentle colors. More adult that child, for sure, but not Adult – not the staid layout of a Product 19 or a Plus 4 or a Special K or whatever-the-heck we’ve got nowadays for the serious fitness buff.

Eating

Opening ’em up and pouring ’em in a bowl – here they are close up:

Perhaps they are meant to resemble the trademarked tiger-paw-print on the front of the box? The actual cereal pieces are more circular in aspect ratio than foot shaped, but the visual connection is there.

They are small! Yes, the front of the box reminds us that the image is enlarged to show texture, but they are little guys. Cheerio-sized. Maybe better for little hands and mouths.

The milk goes on and the eating begins. They don’t seem sweet like a “sugar cereal” might. There is a fleeting sugar taste; almost frustrating in that as soon as your taste bads grab onto it, it’s gone. Your primate brain keeps seeking sweet taste but the masticating causes confusion as different tastes flow and emerge. The “wheat” taste of cereal replaces the sweetness, and then the sweetness is back.

It’s good. No doubt.

In terms of form factor, you get the problem of bowl escapees:

They are small and light enough that one’s efforts to spoon ’em up (as the level in the bowl declines) serve to simply push many of them to the edge of the bowl, and eventually over the edge, onto your lap, newspaper, floor, or dog. They don’t float as easily as other cereal, so getting your spoon directly underneath becomes more difficult. A beveled edge on the cereal piece might help here. Otherwise, the fingers of the other hand can be used in a daring pincer movement with the spoon to ensure all gets eaten.

Or, use more-than-needed milk to ensure that there’s always floating going on. It’s obviousy a matter of taste. Me, I can’t stand wasting the milk, and I often have concerns that too much milk may lead to premature sogginess.

As far as that goes, in the time it took to eat a small bowl, hungrily, they were starting to soften. No mushiness at all, but certainly not the original crispiness. A dawdling child who didn’t want to finish would probably end up with cereal pieces losing integrity and becoming seriously mushy.

Post-Bowl
A few minutes later and I’m having a minor sugar buzz. Extremely pleasant, just what you want from a morning cereal – maybe you’re awake, but maybe you could go back to sleep with that slight jitter behind your eyeballs. Bit of an unpleasant aftertaste, nothing a slug of OJ wouldn’t wash away.

Conclusion
This one is a fringe play, it’s got an interesting story, but there doesn’t seem to be anything serious behind it. It has to live on the shelves next to everything else; we found it on an end-cap and it jumped out there, but how will it survive? Again, it’s founded on some closely-held beliefs about the mom-child purchase process, but those may not be accurate enough to generate the kind of sales that will keep this product on the market.

Crayola food?

DNA Confirms Parents of ‘Baby 81’
Jenita Jeyarajah said that as soon as she regains custody of her son, she will fulfill vows to smash 100 coconuts at a temple of the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesh, offer sweet rice to the warrior god Murugan and kill a rooster for the goddess Kali.
‘Then, we’ll decide what to do next,’ her husband said.

Boy, hyuk, aren’t foreign people endearingly GOOFY?! (this is sarcasm, btw)

I found this review

of a new Sony digital camera/camcorder called the M1. I was quite excited to see a couple of features included that were part of the set of concepts we delivered to Sony’s Digital Imaging group in a user research and innovation project about five years ago.

Two unusual operating modes related to the camera’s movie functionality that bear a little further description are accessed via switches on the rear of the camera. Even though the M1 is capable of recording movie clips for as long as there is memory space and battery life available, the ‘5SEC’ switch enables a mode where movie clips are limited to five seconds in length. Should you decide when already recording a movie that five seconds is not sufficient, you can press the Movie shutter button again to reset the counter and give yourself another five seconds of recording time. There is no way to stop the movie from recording before the most recent five second counter runs out. The idea of this, according to Sony, is to emphasise the fact that the M1 is not intended to replace a camcorder, and is better suited to taking short video clips.

Even more unusual is the Hybrid mode, accessed via a Hybrid switch. Whenever the camera is operating in Hybrid mode, it is recording video from the CCD to the camera’s internal buffer. At any time, there will be up to five seconds of video stored in the buffer, and anything older is discarded. When you press the Photo shutter button, the most recent five seconds of video is saved to the Memory Stick PRO Duo card. The camera then captures a still image, then (if enabled in the setup menu) records a further three second video clip. This is in a way reminiscent of the still image burst mode in some cameras, in that it allows the camera to help you in capturing unexpected action that happened before you pressed the shutter button.

In an SFChron article about Fox yanking the GoDaddy.com ad in the second half of the Superbowl – what hopefully is a misquote, or a quote taken out of context:
“Why is it when you try to defend the First Amendment you always find yourself supporting something sophomoric or worse? Like the Nazi march through Skokie,” said Millie Olson, a co-founder of Amazon Advertising in San Francisco.

Okay, I just started listening to the Grey Album and I had to stop. Guess what? I don’t like rap, and I don’t much like the Beatles. A mashup of the two may be really clever, but it doesn’t add up to something I would like. I just decided to stop listening. Ah well.

If you were going to sell a USB device specifically for air travel, why would you make it look like a knife?

Today, Mantra Entertainment announced that this coming Monday, Feb. 7, 2005, the notorious Girls Gone Wild (GGW) crew will be crossing the border on their huge tour bus to begin a month long search for the hottest girls Canada has to offer.

The young women captured on film by Girls Gone Wild will appear in future GGW titles. This first date on the Girls Gone Wild Canada Tour will be held at the Press Room (150 Skinner Street) in Nanaimo, British Columbia.

Other stops on the Girls Gone Wild Canada Tour include New Westminster, BC; Panticton, BC; Calgary, Edmonton, Red Deer, AB; South Lethbridge, AB; Medicine Hat, AB; the Guvernment in Toronto (Feb. 18); Dome in Montreal (Feb. 19); and the tour will wrap with a week of shoots in Quebec.

story

Ticketmaster Canada confirmed Friday it is shutting its only unionized call centre in Toronto, along with centres in Vancouver, Calgary and Red Deer, Alta.

I worked at Ticketmaster’s Toronto office (not sure if it’s the same actual office – probably not) as a Night Run Operator back as an undergrad, I think it was 1987 or so.

I would go in on Friday nights and sit there with the computers in an empty office doing homework or listening to the radio. I would wait until all the box offices had closed – around midnight, and then run a bunch of “scripts” and get printouts and move these enormous cake-box sized disc packs from one VAX drive (about the size of a small dishwasher) to another. I had no idea how any of it worked so when something broke in the scripts I had to start paging the regular IT staff who were always drunk and wouldn’t call back forever.

I don’t know why I took this job; it seemed cool. I knew other people that worked there, both doing what I did, or even answering the phones. I got second-dibs on tickets, before they went on sale, and I think that’s how I got 4th row Rush and 12th row Yes or something like that – at Maple Leaf Gardens.

The drives looked something like this
DELETED
and the discs themselves were
DELETED

You had to rotate that handle a number of times and then pull it straight up. Sealed inside were many platters of magnetic media that gave the whole assembly it’s capacity. They had two systems running that recorded each purchase transaction, and I would run a backup from A->B and something else, every night.

One guy I worked with had figured out how to purchase General Admission tickets – for free – in between one of the backup stages and then would overwrite any record of it during the backup stages. Since there were no seat assignments, it wouldn’t be very detectable – yeah the overall ticket count sold versus number of arriving guests would be off, but it was GA, so who’d notice? I was horrified at the dishonesty, actually.

And I think we had, in the computer room, these DECwriter terminals.
DELETED
They weren’t for regular operations but if something went wrong, that was what you had to use to interact with them – but mostly they spat out many pages of transactions – you could see, on paper, every ticket purchased that day. If you worked on a day when a big show sold out (i.e., Floyd) then you would be there a long time while it generated output for each purchase. Name, address, credit card info, etc. And it could take a long time for the credit transaction to be verified – it didn’t happen in real time, so the transaction could go through but you wouldn’t get your tickets sent out in the mail because it would turn out that your credit was no good. I think they had someone who would call you up and talk to you in that case.

Chris Harding is a pretty cool animator – check out the whole site if you like but this page of Sundry stuff was the most fun – quite a range of silly quick bits.

Just had a great customer support encounter with TurboTax for the Web. I went back the other day to start my return, and of course it takes a minute to remember a password you haven’t used for a year. I thought I’d try the password reminder and the reminder was going to be sent to an address I haven’t used for several years, back when I was with a2i as my ISP.

First of all, nice that they tell you WHERE they will be sending it, before they send it!

Anyway, I try sending an email to that account and it bounces back. See, it’s still forwarded, but it’s forwarded to my old ISP, Mindspring. Now I use SBCGlobal and I have closed that account.

I sent Rahul a message asking if they would be able to update it. I got a personal message telling me no (I suspect it was personal because it had a typo in it!) – I could pay $5/month for the cheapest account, or for $15 they would update the bounce message or something. They aren’t able to support an old account – of course it took as much time to tell me “no.”

I’m not worried about people finding me – I get Googled all the time (I can see from my weblogs)…I’d like not to have email bouncing if I can help it.

But I’m cheap, I’m not paying for it.

Anyway, I did manage to remember my password and log in, but then I thought I’d want to make sure to update my email address. I was SURE I had done this before because I get my confirmations and everything when I file my taxes, so how could it still be going to that old address.

Nowhere to change my address. The help pages send me to a set of controls that don’t exist. The online forums for TurboTax are all about the application not the website.

I send an email in describing the problem. They tell me I’ll get an immediate confirmation. I don’t. I figure that’s it – I’ll never hear from them and I’ll never be able to change the address….I went through hell when I moved a little over a year ago trying to get every instance of my old physical address or phone number changed in every data base I’m a customer of and found lots of situations where they’ll change it on the billing statement but it won’t show up in the mailing address or crap like that. I’m pretty pessimistic.

I just got an email explaining how to do it – the controls I need are available from the login screen BEFORE you login and only there. The email was very clear – I went and did it – there’s my old address, updated it, got a confirmation. All done. And then a minute later the phone rings – someone else from Intuit following up to make sure everything is okay. Hey, I’d rather be taken care of twice than never.

Pretty cool! The right answer, with about a 36 hour wait, and double service.

Forbes has an article about using consumer input in the product development process, a range of methodologies described and the results on their businesses explained. Nice!
General Motors, under pressure to create a midprice blockbuster sport utility with the look of a macho Hummer, relied on input from 481 people summoned to a building on an empty fairground in southern California in June 2001. Visitors were asked to critique six early renderings of the SUV. They came in five groups over three days. As they reacted to sketches of the exterior and interior, four GM designers listened from behind a curtain, scrawling changes on paper. ‘We wanted to see how much we could stretch our design,’ says Jon B. Albert, a design manager at GM.

This story lists a few groundhogs-of-note that I was not previously acquainted with…Shubenacadie Sam, Wiarton Willie (him I knew about), and Balzac Billy. Other pages mention Brandon Bob, and Staten Island Chuck and Gary the Groundhog. The man with two watches never knows what time it is?

Seriously it’s turning into one of those painted-cow-things that every city has to do now. Yuck.

As seen on Experience Manifesto
56% of consumers could not recall a single new product launched in 2004 (despite an increase in advertising)
Top 10 new product launches recalled by consumers (without regard for whether or not they liked the product) were: Glad Press’n Seal (26%), Coca-Cola C2 (24%), Clorox ToiletWand (23%), Apple Mini iPo (21%), Swiffer Sweep Vac (21%.), Gillette’s M3Power Razor (20%), Hershey’s Swoops (19%), Oral-B Brush-Ups (18%), Pepsi? Edge (17%) and Febreze Scentstories (16%)

Nothing here about the influence of actually experiencing the product on the ability to recall, one of the points of my FreshMeat on recalling stuff from the year gone by.

Catalog stores are fascinating for examples of products that acknowledge but do not solve new problems. Dress-a-vac is a case-in-point, a costume to dress up your vacuum cleaner as a Bear, Bunny, Cat or (ironically) Maid. One of these things is not like the other! The implication here is that our closets are so filled with other crap that there’s no room to keep the vacuum clear, so it needs to be kept out (I’ve seen this happen in user research; perhaps because it was just handier to leave it out anyway); but then you have this backstage-looking machine sitting in your lovely frontstage. Their solution is to transform it into something else – a hideous dress-up doll. Requiring many steps; guaranteeing that once it’s dressed, you’ll never vacuum again, and once you vacuum, you’ll never bother with this again. But, interesting. Spotted on Boingboing.

Via JoshRubin: Cool Hunting, this mug collection comes in a range of shades of brown, allowing you to identify and specify your preferred amount of whitening. When the tea (perhaps this would work with coffee as well?) matches the vessel, all is good.

Here’s part of the body of a spam I got today. Bela Lugosi is not dead, and he is sending me spam? Or it some huckstering cow? I have no idea. Weird, and funny. The latest technology in getting past spam filters, no doubt (didn’t work, in my case).

In creeeease your quality of life through Huumaan Grooowth Hoormoooone and Test osssterooone The raapy.

We have fulllly liicenseed m ediicaaal faciiiiliities, all ooordwwwrs are fillled by US Phaaaa rmaciieeees, ffffDaa Apppproveed, and reviiiiewed by Boooard Certiiified Dooooctoraaaa.

Don’t be foooooled by imiiitatiooon prooducts out on the maaaarket. Our prooograms are cliinicallly proven to reeeeduuuuce booody faaaat, increease s eeexuaal perform aaance and reeeduce the efffffects of agiiinnnng. These are not proooducts you can puuuurchase in the stoores, they are only admiinisterrred by liiicenseed doooc Tor’s and p haaaarm aciiiies.

Each of our cllllients willll be in contact with our liiiicensed phyysiicians to determine the best proooogram for them. To receiive more in formaation on our prooograms and theeeeraaaapy please filll out our shooort foooorm and we willll contact you back as soon as we get a chance to reviiiew your suuubmisssion foorm

Somebody pass this along to the folks at Wired’s Jargon Watch.

Google Pause: that momentary shift in context while writing a message when a thought or a question can be expanded upon or answered if you’d just shift to Google for 30 seconds.

Example:

Max, that sounds like a great season ticket package, I’m sure you guys will have fun. I hope it wasn’t too expensive – oh, Google pause. Wow! That’s cheap!

I dunno – it just concerned me that this was the first Frequently Asked Question
Question I’m used to finding my favorite Hungry Jack Pancake Mix based on the color of the box. I’ve noticed the boxes are now all red. How can I find my favorite color?
Answer We’ve updated our graphics to unify the look of our Hungry Jack products. All Hungry Jack products are now in a red box. The colors of the boxes that you are used to seeing are still there. They can now be found in the background color behind the flavor name.

* Orange = Buttermilk Just Add Water
* Yellow = Extra Light & Fluffy Just Add Water
* Red = Buttermilk Add Milk, Oil & Eggs
* Light Blue = Extra Light & Fluffy Add Milk, Oil & Eggs
* Dark Blue = Original Add Milk, Oil & Eggs

Question Has the product formula or quality changed since the packaging is different?
Answer Hungry Jack Pancake Mixes still have the same great taste and quality you’ve come to expect. Addtionally, Hungry Jack Pancake Mixes are now fortified with Calcium & 6 vitamins plus iron.

In Dec ’04 Wired put out a detailed article about revolutionary thinking in traffic engineering:

Hans Monderman is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. Oh, he can put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign – literally – that a road designer somewhere hasn’t done his job. ‘The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there’s a problem with a road, they always try to add something,’ Monderman says. ‘To my mind, it’s much better to remove things.’

Today, the NYT writes about the same guy..

This story, blogged here on Jan 13

described the reaction to a Valentine’s Day bear that is in a straitjacket. The NYT does their article on it, 9 days later. Nice.

HoustonChronicle.com

has a well-written, appropriately tongue-in-cheek article about Norwegians reacting to Jenna Bush’s seeming-devil-invoking hand gesture that was really a Texas Longhorns sign. The coverage of this has been really lame; pointing out that the gesture is similar to a heavy-metal sign in Norway. But even the SF paper ran a picture of a rock concert in San Francisco where people were using the same gesture. But it was an AP story; they left the story unedited, making no reference to the fact that it’s something that happens at every rock concert in this part of the world as well. Yes, the Norwegian press reacted, based on their metal-esque interpretation of the gesture, but the story doesn’t have to have this wild-eyed “in NORWAY, heavy metal fans made this gesture when they enjoyed their loud rock music” as if we’ve never heard of that fascinating and exotic foreign fact.

The SF Chronicle points out that IKEA stands for shoddy cheap crap to get when you can’t afford to purchase real furniture. At least in Sweden that’s what it stands for. According to the author, it’s a cheap way to look sophisticated. Perhaps true, but a little short of the more complex truth (but hey, it’s only a quick newspaper column, and this is an even quicker blog entry). But it does tap into this design/style/cost issue that the NYT wrote about earlier this week

.

read more from On The House
Thought that your new low-profile, side-by-side fridge with ice and water in the door was as good as it gets? You apparently haven’t seen the refrigerator with a built-in computer monitor. Now, while you’re waiting and filling your glass with ice and water you can check your e-mail or surf the Net. You also can scan your groceries to create a shopping list, order online and have them delivered to your home.

Hel-lo? This has been a concept, and eventually a (poorly-conceived) product for at least seven years. How can these columnists review it as something new?

‘Assault on Precinct 13’ rivals the best police thrillers of the ’70s
‘Assault on Precinct 13’ has the feel, the look and the energy of a really strong crime thriller from the 1970s. This is easy to say, as it’s a remake of a 1976 John Carpenter film of the same name. But this observation comes to you unsullied, from someone who saw it before knowing it’s a remake or seeing the original picture.

This blows me away. How could someone whose is to write about movies not know that this is a remake? Nowhere in the article does he elaborate on this statement. Just seems very very lame.

Titan Probe Drops Into ‘Creme Brulee’-Like Surface
Data sent back by the Huygens space probe from the Saturnian moon Titan show a frozen, orange world shrouded in a methane-rich haze with dark ice rocks dotting a riverbed-like surface the consistency of wet sand, scientists said on Saturday.

Yum?

Abu Ghraib scandal suspect was just “following orders”

The lawyer for a soldier court-martialed for abusing detainees at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison said Friday his client was just following orders, and that his superiors are those who should be tried. “Our defense is that Specialist (Charles) Graner was following orders,” said Guy Womack, the military policeman’s civilian attorney in the court martial proceedings that started at the Fort Hood army base in Texas Friday.
Critics have pointed out that his defense bore similarities to that of Nazis tried at the Nueremberg war trials, many of whom claimed they were only following orders.

It’s interesting to note that the lawyer said his client was “following orders” but the press have inserted the “just” in a way that makes it appear that Graner or the lawyer used that word.

“I was following orders”
and
“I was just following orders”
are certainly similar, but the latter is one step closer to Nuremberg. It’s amazing what the press can and does do with one simple word.

A friend has a testimonial on his website from someone whose title is Director of Entertainment and Male Action Packaging

Has anyone ever got anything useful from choosing Similar Pages in Google?

The vending machine trade association is launching an anti-obesity campaign to encourage healthful food choices, hoping to fend off efforts to remove machines from schools and improve the industry’s image as concerns grow about the fattening of America.

The program, ‘Balanced for Life,’ is being unveiled Thursday at an event featuring pro football Hall of Famer Lynn Swann.

The effort by the National Automatic Merchandising Association includes a color-coded rating system for food sold in vending machines, indicating healthful choices and those that should be eaten in moderation.

Doesn’t this seem like something out of the Simpsons? A vending machine that refuses to vend something because you’re too fat?

Crazy for you bear’ angers mental health advocates. Apparently it comes with its own commitment papers. Insert “fear of commitment” joke here?

NYT story about the people and firms that monitor those customer service calls. Surprising (but upon reflection, maybe not) to read that they monitor the call when you are on hold and (tee hee) hear all the things you say behind the scenes. Ridiculous (to me) that they are making the case in this story that companies are striving for higher quality more empathic listening-type of service in order to differentiate themselves. That’s an angle of the story, sure, to support the presence of these monitoring firms, but really, does anyone think that’s what is going on?

This page is totally cool – upload a picture of yourself and transform it to a male/female/old/young/racial/manga style.

The “save” feature is problematic or I’d be attaching a sample right here!

Subject: An important message about your Rebate from PETCO.com
To: [email protected]

_________________________

A message from PETCO.com
_________________________

Dear Steve,
You received an email from us on January 7, 2005 with your 5% Rebate Reward. However, due to a calculation error, your Rebate Reward dollar amount was incorrect.
Your correct Rebate Reward is $1.78 and is properly reflected in your PETCO.com account. Your rebate is awarded in PETCO.com Dollars and is ready to use with no minimum purchase required.
Your $1.78 in PETCO.com Dollars will be automatically deducted from your next online order. Click here to enjoy your 5% rebate today!
Thank you for choosing PETCO.com for your pet supply needs. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you, and we look forward to serving you in the future.

in my email I get this

Awesome! I have $178 in credit at PETCO! I’ll be logging in and shopping away. I love rebates! Amazing! Woo hoo!

but when I log into my account

D’oh. $1.78, not $178. That’s a little different. Never mind.

A prison escapee who was apprehended in Charlotte this week had been living in a Toys “R” Us and vacant Circuit City building for months, eating baby food and watching DVDs, police said Thursday. He lived off the bounty of Toys “R” Us, police said. He decorated his secret room with posters and model toys, played hoops with a mini-basketball net and watched “Spider-Man 2.” He routed water from Toys “R” Us to his new home, police said, and even installed a smoke detector.

(check out the full story for all the devious details)

Seems like a Richard Pryor plot, rewritten by William Gibson…

full story
eBay has formed a coalition to help consumers get rid of used and obsolete computers, with one option of selling them on eBay.
Disposing of old computers has become a huge problem for the computer industry, and it is causing problems in the environment. Some companies ship boatloads of old computers to Asia, where the PCs are taken apart for their lead, gold and other valuable metals. The plastic is sometimes burned, and the whole process can dump harmful chemicals such as lead, cadmium, chromium, mercury and toxic fumes into the air and water. The San Jose company said U.S. users replace about 133,000 personal computers a day. CEO Meg Whitman said that with the help of Intel of Santa Clara, she was able to get major players in the industry to support the program, called the Rethink Initiative. Apple Computer, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and reseller Ingram Micro are all participating in the effort. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, United Parcel Service and the U.S. Postal Service also are participating.

STARBUCKING is what we have to look forward to in a post-Super Size Me world. Lots of “interesting” docs about people and their interests/obsessions/consumption of a branded product.

Sigh.

A flushable toilet brush that warns users, “Do not use for personal hygiene” has been identified as the nation’s wackiest warning label in an annual contest sponsored by a consumer watchdog group. Other winners include a label on a popular scooter for children that warns: “This product moves when used.”; a warning on a digital thermometer that can be used to take a person’s temperature several different ways: “Once used rectally, the thermometer should not be used orally.”; a label on an electric hand blender promoted for use in blending, whipping, chopping and dicing that warns: “Never remove food or other items from the blades while the product is operating.”; and a label on a nine-by-three-inch bag of air used as packing material. It carries this warning: “Do not use this product as a toy, pillow, or flotation device.”

read the article

My goodness – here’s a typographic abomination – clever movie title conventions crammed into every letter. And it’s a trademark, to boot!

Gah.

========================================================
FreshMeat #23 from Steve Portigal

               (__)
               (oo) Fresh
                \\/  Meat

FreshMeat is kicking it old school. Don’t you think?
=========================================================
We can remember it for you, wholesale
=========================================================
It’s a common exercise in December to reflect back on the
about-to-expire year, but it can be particularly
challenging to identify the highlights in any category.
Sure, cultural critics produce a raft of best-of lists,
but how easy is it for the rest of us to look back?

We are all exposed to media (or information, or stories,
or whatever you’d like to call it) at an enormous quantity
and at a staggering rate, receiving content from TV,
magazines, newspapers, advertising, blogs, music (radio,
CDs, and MP3s), email and more. So, it shouldn’t be hard
for me to come up with some 2004 list of something, right?
After all, I read two daily papers, more than 125 blog
feeds, and about 10 magazines. I manage two mailing
lists (one about the Rolling Stones and one about user
research), participate in several others, as well as
online discussion forums. I contribute to three
different blogs. I’ve got a handle on the zeitgeist,
right?

Wrong. I can’t remember a damn thing.

What the heck happened in 2004? I can remember the front-
page stuff (crimes, war, politics) but little else. So I
decided to do an experiment: I went to several online
sources – BoingBoing, MetaFilter and Core77 –
and skimmed their archives of two random 2004 months,
February and April. I used these sites as triggers for
stories that seemed cool when they broke but eluded my
memory by the time December rolled around.

Just those two months amounted to over 150,000 words-and
many, many stories. Most I recognized with a hockey-card
collector’s nod – “seen it; seen it; seen it;” some I didn’t
notice at all at the time (or if I did notice, made so
little impact that I didn’t recognize them months later);
and a few still seemed new and cool. But a bunch of others
stood out as important, had personal resonance for me, and
seemed, somehow, to be representative of the year. So here
we go:

February, 2004:

The Grey Album – the highest-profile mashup, created by DJ
Danger Mouse from Jay-Z’s The Black Album and the Beatles’
White Album

Gay weddings at City Hall in San Francisco

Cingular buys AT+T Wireless

Scientists discover M&Ms randomly dumped into a bowl pack
together much more densely than spheres

Amazon writers caught reviewing their own books positively

Flickr launches

The Dynamap – bringing the power of layered online data to
a printed medium

Howard Stern dumped by Clear Channel

Brian Wilson performs his lost classic Smile, 37 years
later

Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ released – it does very
very well

Janet Jackson’s breast becomes the most searched-for image
in Lycos

A BBC poll named Apple designer Jonathan Ive as the most
influential person in British culture

Glare from Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall heats
up neighbor buildings

April, 2004:

Porn stars get HIV

BBC launches TV programs for pets

Roboticist develops swarming traffic-cones

Adbusters launches “Black Spot” sneakers

Legoland starts tracking kiddie visitors with WiFi and
RFID

Scary pics of an overweight guy designing his own Tron
costume

Retro 1850s and 1950s appliances

Google launches Gmail

Campbell’s sells Warhole-esque cans of soup as a tribute
to Andy

Burger King’s subservient chicken ad

IKEA founder, Ingvar Kamprad, has overtaken Bill Gates as
the world’s richest man

Academic conference about Wal-Mart

Sony launches a premium brand, Qualia

These are stories about design, technology, culture,
politics, media, and entertainment, all jammed together –
stories that are probably familiar, but that most of us
couldn’t have listed on our own without going back over
some kind of archive. Anyone who took Psychology 101 (not
me) will know that there are different types of memory. In
this case we’re contrasting the memory of recall with the
memory of recognition. We might not be able recall the
names of all our high school teachers, but we could
probably recognize most of them by name or photo. (Of
course, there are some teachers who we’ve blocked from
both recall and recognition due to excessive trauma – but I
digress.)

Perhaps some of the items listed above provided a frisson
of recognition, a surprise of a forgotten incident, the
pleasure of an interesting experience from the past or a
splash of perspective gained from just a few months’
distance. And you could do your own lists, using the
filter of what tripped your fancy or tickled your funny
bone, and that list might provide some fun for others
around you, but the parlor game would still hold; in this
time of information overload, we seem to need the stimulus
to have the response.

Why, if we’re consuming so many cultural stories, is it so
hard to recall them? Again, those Psych 101 students
will know about the Recency Effect – our inclination to add
weight to the more recent items. (Film studios plan
release dates for award-likely movies based on this
phenomenon; Sideways, released in the fall, seems to have
won a conspicuous number of film awards.)

And the Recency Effect is markedly intense when we try to
sum up the cultural experiences of a large period of time,
say a year. We’ve spent that time primarily consuming
information-not accumulating knowledge – the zeitgeist
database rapidly building, each fresh item reshaping the
slag heap, with the older pieces buried ever deeper below.
Try it yourself: you can probably recall last month’s
cover of ID Magazine (or a similarly relevant industry
journal), but not the one before it.

The notion of consuming media, in a period of history that
serves up so many choices, was recently addressed by Peter
Merholz in his thoughts about “media obesity”. (Indeed,
when does anyone have the time to listen to 40G of music?)
Of course, the tag-team of marketing and technology are
adding ever-more options, increasing the challenge of
ever-keeping up: If you enjoyed Seinfeld when it was
originally on television, and then again when it was in
reruns, you can now own it, so that you are able to watch
at least once more. Oh, and then one more time after that
with the commentary. So in addition to all the new media
experiences being generated from this moment forward,
there are re-released and enhanced versions of media
experiences from last year, from 5 years ago, or from 30
years ago. We’re at a single point in time with a stream
of media bearing steadily down upon us like a NASCAR final
lap, while if we’re not careful we’re going to get pounded
by the reverse commute of yesterday’s content.

And if we consider design, specifically, we have to ask
ourselves whether our contribution to this congestion is
unique in any way, or simply more of the same. Designers
are certainly in the consumption business, and while
design both creates and reflects the cultural stories
we’re considering here, the work is typically tangible.
Sure, “the iPod” sits in the zeitgeist somewhere near
“Janet Jackson’s breast,” but Lindsay Lohan’s iPod is a
concrete, physical, experience-able, designed artifact –
especially for Lindsay herself. And maybe “design
stories” – or “personal experiences with design” – are
a kind of story that is more memorable precisely because
it’s tied to an artifact. These kinds of stories may be
richer, individualized, or recall-able on other levels
(tactile, olfactory), making rapid and effective
connections with memories, emotions and experiences in
ways that that are palpable – indeed, literally physical
– and have an upper hand in providing effective tour guides to
both our collective and individual stories.

So here’s the corollary experiment: I was easily able to
generate (mostly from recall, with little need for
stimulus-recognition) a list of my own design-y
experiences from this past year – experiences that
affected me emotionally and intellectually (either
positively or negatively):

Touching the Bean at Millennium Park in Chicago

Rem Koolhaas student center (McCormick Tribune Campus Center) at IIT

Ontario College of Art and Design’s new Sharp Centre

Cornerstone Festival of Gardens

TomTom GO GPS

Bruce Sterling’s opening keynote at the IDSA Western
Region conference

It looks like design can impact an individual’s stories,
pushing past the Recency Effect, lodging in whatever
cranial fissures house the items available for recall. And
what a nice thought that is, looking back at all we’ve
been through and ahead at what’s still to come. Dylan
wrote, “She’s an artist, she don’t look back”, but he also
wrote, “Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go.”

—

A similar version of this article appears on the Core77
Industrial Design Supersite. Check it out, with pictures
and everything, here.

Pro sports’ game plan to win over ethnic fans

Zhang came to America from mainland China in 2000. Despite having watched only about a dozen National Football League games on television at that point, he arrived in the Bay Area a ‘die-hard’ Raiders fan with an appetite to learn more about American football.
He is now a Raiders employee. Zhang writes a weekly article in the Mandarin language for the team’s Web site, exposing the Silver and Black to a whole new audience.
Sports franchises, including those in the Bay Area, are targeting previously untapped ethnic groups to expand their fan bases. The Internet, the recent influx of foreign players into leagues dominated by Americans and the global appeal of athletes allow teams to pursue new fans locally and internationally. Bay Area teams have the added luxury of playing for a diverse population that includes 1.3 million Hispanics and 1.2 million Asians, including about 520,000 Chinese Americans, according to the 2000 census.

I loved this Rolling Stone interview with Dylan
This is how I see it: You fly to Italy, hang out with beautiful women, make a little scratch and next thing you’re in a Victoria’s Secret commercial.
Yeah. Was I not supposed to do that?

I enjoyed it.
I wish I would have seen it. Maybe I’d have something to say about it. I don’t see that kind of stuff. That’s all for other people to see and make up what they will.

[Image taken offline]

A spam ad for..spamming…which is a recursive concept, uses an image of a man looking at the image of the ad that you are looking at! Whoah! A flurry of blows to the cerebral cortex!

full story

For women who prefer minimalist men’s clothing styles over stereotypically feminine, frilly garb, the pickings are slim. Women’s clothing departments leave them cold. The men’s clothes they tend to buy rarely fit properly. Clothes shopping is often torture.
This barren sartorial landscape was brightened last week when Aisha Pew and Breonna Cole of Oakland launched Studded, a label billing itself as the first line of clothes made expressly for butch lesbians, studs, transgender men and bois — all au courant terms for people who lean masculine in their presentation or identity. The clothes look like what you might find in a men’s department, but the design slyly accounts for the fact that women are curvier than men.

This workshop – Making Sense of Sensemaking – sounds pretty fascinating.

Making sense of the world is a common activity – it happens whenever people confront a new, complex problem. Sensemaking can be a core professional task in itself, as it is for researchers, designers, or intelligence analysts. It often begins with a process of collecting and organizing data. Sometimes the information can be organized into a fairly simple structure, one that helps to solve the problem. But the process can also be ill-defined, iterative and complex: information retrieval, organization and task re-definition all interact in sometimes subtle ways.

This 2-day workshop aims to bring together a diverse community of researchers working on understanding sensemaking activities and on technology to support them. We hope to establish a dialogue between various researchers, enrich our understanding by laying out the space of varieties of sensemaking and articulating their commonalities and differences, and draw design implications for better sensemaking tools, systems and aids.

Why is The New York Times publishing such a smug and snarky article about fan reactions to Dimebag Darrell’s death? It’s okay to make fun of how badly people write online (if you are the NYT, of course) especially if those people are horrible loser heavy-metal people that are worthy of mocking, even in their grief/anger/confusion.

Then the drinking commenced. “This beer is for you, Dimebag.” one writer proposed. “Everyone, raise your beer.” Another fan objected: “No offense to the departed, but a beer before noon sounds like an A.A. problem. Tonight we’ll have a kegger.”

“Hey, I work for A.A.,” another post said, as if that had anything to do with anything.

By early morning, metal fans were waxing philosophical in between expletives. “R.I.P., Dimebag, what a cruel way to leave this life. Thanks, Dimebag, for riffs that will live longer than anyone of us.”

When the killer’s identity was revealed – Nathan M. Gale, a Pantera fan – a vein of spleen was tapped. There was talk of revenge beyond the grave. And plenty of bile was left over for one of Pantera’s members, Phil Anselmo, who, apparently, initiated Pantera’s breakup.

One Dimebag fan promised he would be visiting a grave soon – not that of Dimebag, but of his killer. The reason? To urinate on his headstone and defecate on the grass near his head. “I bet I won’t be the first person there,” he predicted. Another fan intimated that Mr. Gale’s mother should have tried oral sex instead of intercourse.

That opened up debate about Mr. Gale’s mother, until one post pleaded for respect. “I’m sure she’s just as cut up about his death as we are about Dime!! and she was probably not such a good mum (otherwise he may not have done what he did) but I’m sure she loved him and is upset, too.”

And what about Mr. Anselmo, formerly of Pantera and currently of Superjoint Ritual? Fans were feeling cranky toward him. “Happy now, Phil?” one fan wrote. Another writer said, “Guarantee it comes out that the shooter was obsessed with Phil Anselmo and thought by killing Dimebag he would be doing his idol Phil’s bidding.”

It was all the way back in April when it was quietly announced that Nike dropping the ‘Goddess’ moniker – the special Nike stores now being relaunched as Nikewomen.
I didn’t know that!

Two hundred and fifty Leisurama houses were built in Montauk, Long Island by a developer called All-State Properties. Macy’s stocked each house with furniture, dishes, towels – all necessary furnishings. The owner just had to show up at his new house with the clothes on his back – everything else was included in the package.
Leisurama houses were all about summer, family, the beach, and parties. Posters advertising the houses showed people having a grand time in the sand. The ‘Leisurama’ logo was in funky type, with a smiling sun dotting the ‘i’.
The Leisurama story is one of ambition, creative marketing, and a desire to leave the daily grind behind and escape to a fun, playful utopia. It is a story about a post-war nation searching for peace and diversion on the home front. It is a story about the clash of ideologies. It is a story about suntans, fishing, and outdoor barbecues. [The documentary] will be told by on camera interviews of original and current house owners, the architect, builder, and historians [and] will be scored with early 1960s style pop music, a perfect compliment [sic] to the carefree lifestyle promoted by the Leisurama brand.

things magazine asks “Anyone out there collect things obsessively? We hope so. Do you live in North America? Are you female? If so, might you be interested in having your picture taken for a glossy magazine article? Suitable candidates should drop us a line.”

I saw this graffiti in Toronto recently and I had no idea what it was…according to this

however, it’s the promotion for a Toronto band. Interesting!

The NYT reports that The Simon Property Group, the owner of shopping malls in North America, said yesterday that it would stop running a print advertisement for its Simon Malls division that pictured the Statue of Liberty next to these words: ‘Very inspiring. Now, where’s the mall?’
Les Morris, a spokesman at Simon in Indianapolis, confirmed a report of the decision that appeared on ODwyerpr.com, the Web site of the J. R. O’Dwyer Company, the publisher of a newsletter about public relations. ‘This ad is one in a tourism series, using familiar landmarks in the area and playing off of the idea that visitors to any city tend to rank shopping as their No. 1 vacation pastime,’ Mr. Morris said. ‘We meant no disrespect to this national icon of freedom.’ The campaign was created by the Indianapolis office of Publicis Worldwide, part of the Publicis Groupe”

I couldn’t find anything on the web about it when I blogged it, but some think people like me don’t have a sense of humor

(but hey, they used my picture)

Unbalance is the celebrity restaurant owned by champion sumo wrestler Konishiki, who like his colleagues bulk up by eating chanko.

Funny and brilliant cartoon about Life Before the Internet.

Amazon’s other products by Freud, including a Super Dado Set with Anti-Kickback Design.

Simon Malls shows amazing chutzpah with this Black Friday ad, placing the viewing of the Statue of Liberty in horrific context. “Very inspring. Now, where’s the mall?”

I’m intrigued by this campaign, especially because it has received little buzz. The product itself will let you “tell better stories” because the product is an experience, an experience that can be shared.

Target is selling an Anal Massage, and it’s 10% off. Presumably a pissed-off website dronemonkey is acting out. Funny, but not so good, maybe.

I blogged about our experience at the Cornerstone Festival of Gardens at Total Experience

Ralston Foods makes a cereal called Crispy Hexagons.

while the same product name is used by Flavorite

and Schnuck’s

Originally spotted here.

full story

The Amazing Kreskin, who bills himself as ‘the world’s foremost mentalist,’ wants to help his home state of New Jersey stem the tide of shady practices in government, a problem U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie has called widespread. Kreskin sent a letter to acting Gov. Richard J. Codey offering his nonpartisan services to help ferret out those who come to government with ulterior motives. Kreskin, who lives in northern New Jersey, said he would monitor government meetings with a mind’s eye toward keeping things above board.

Man – it’s just crying out for some Leno-esque punchline!

http://www.iwantmyweddingatdunkindonuts.com/ – perhaps a response to the fad for Krispy Kreme wedding cakes

Goldman & Associates is running a teeny ad in the SF Chron

Want a better life?
MOVE TO CANADA

Goldman & Associates
for help contact
blah blah blah

It’s been widely reported that Best Buy has created personas for their most profitable customers and taken steps to focus their efforts on attracting and keeping those customers and indeed rejecting other customers. Perhaps an effective strategy, but questionable PR.

Dell goes on the attack today, with a full-page ad that reads, in part

At Dell We Love All Customers. Even the Ones Best Buy Doesn’t.

On November 8, The Wall Street Journal reported that Best Buy is planning to shun up to 20% of its current customer base.

You read that correctly. Shun. As in actively resist. They’ve reportedly decided that as many as 100 million of its 500 million store visits each year are “undesirable.” To quote a Best Buy exectutive as reported in the article: “They can wreak enormous economic havoc.” Well, we would like to officially welcome each and everyone on of those customers to Dell. All of you. Come to Dell.com right now and we’ll give you…[etc.]

Pauly Shore Is Dead (2003)

One user review is:
I went to this movie expecting to witness definitive and documentary evidence that the titular star, former MTV shill, freelance toady and erstwhile least funny man on the planet, had in fact met the end of his mortal coil. The disappointment I felt when I found out that this was not the case was so deep and soul wrenching that it caused thoughts of such intense vehement bitterness to ravage my brain that no Internet carny site on the web would dare publish if I were to properly describe it. In my darkest moments I was persevered by the thought that this emetic onanism fest would cause an ego bubble to expand exponentially in the head of our auteur, leading to an implosive aneurysm that would reduce his frontal lobe to the consistency of tapioca pudding. Sadly, this did not happen. But I still hold out hope that one day he, and everyone associated with this Promethean exercise in shoddy solipsism, would be relegated to doing bit parts in training videos for Popeye’s Chicken. I still believe that there is such a thing as justice in this world.

On Sunday’s episode of The Simpsons, Marge said “BFD” and they muted the “F.” Puhleeze. You can’t say F?

Composer John Balance, co-founder of Coil and member of seminal industrial music groups Psychic TV, 23 Skidoo, and Current 93 died on Saturday. Under the influence of alcohol at home, Balance fell from his first floor landing. He was rushed to the hospital and passed away soon after.
link

Ironic, non?

eBay is running this nauseating new ad campaign called The Power of All of Us

(read more here). They are pointing, somehow, towards the trust and community building that eBay has definitely created, but somehow equating their “trading platform” with more familiar good deeds (picking up trash, waving hello, bringing meals to the home-bound, moving a snow-stuck car, adopting a child) is arrogant and naive. “By our count” reads one of the ads “they’ve done the right thing more than 2.3 billion times.” So selling on eBay is doing the right thing, when the ad is defining “doing the right thing” by the examples listed above? eBay is about commerce. It’s about making money, getting shit you want cheap, and it’s about their own enormous profits. Trying to reposition it as some sort of heal-the-world effort is just complete and utter bullshit.

I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Been there, done that. That’s the song I sing.

The liberal-Americans-will-move-to-Canada meme just got a notch more hyped with this SF Chron piece on the front page of the real estate section, analyzing the prices, value, and taxes of the Canadian (specifically BC) real estate market. Wild.

Elevator Pitch Essentials is a really nice resource for…elevator pitches. Nice collection of links including articles about Hollywood pitching.

Rather funny clip from an old British TV show where cheery humans, costumed creatures and puppets entertain the girls and boys, only this time what they have to say is rather, ahem, naughty. Despite the claim that this was broadcast, the truth appears to be described here, that this was created for an outtake-only thing within the industry and perhaps broadcast later in that context specifically.

Damn funny, however.

From eBay forums:
Soiled Depends being used for shipping.. What do I do?

Every time I read the stream of Yahoo News headlines, I think of this, proving once again that life imitates comedy.

The death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco during the first season of Saturday Night Live in 1975 served as the source of one of the first catch phrases from SNL to enter the general lexicon.

Franco lingered near death for weeks before dying. On slow news days, United States network television news casters sometimes noted that Franco was still alive, or not yet dead. The imminent death of Franco was a headline story on the NBC news for a number of weeks prior to his death on November 20.

After Franco’s death, Chevy Chase, reader of the news on Saturday Night Live’s comedic news segment Weekend Update, announced the dictator’s death…From that point on, Chase made it clear that SNL would get the last laugh at Franco’s expense. ‘This breaking news just in’, Chase would announce– ‘Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!’ The top story of the news segment for several weeks running was that Generalisimo Francisco Franco was still dead. Chase would repeat the story at the end of the news segment.

Terry Gross interviews Gary Austin, founder of the Groundlings, and Cheryl Hines. Having done improv, and even given a recent presentation about it, it was gratifying to hear some folks at the top of this game express some of the same points that I had learned and passed along myself.

Some blogs on Blogger (where this blog is hosted – see the “blogspot”?) have a “navbar” feature along the top where you can search for other blogs, or there’s a “next blog” button you can (I turned off my navbar because hey, it’s all about the Steve).

I tried that “next blog” doodad and it seemed to indicate that about half of the blogs here on blogger are what you might call spam blogs. They aren’t real blogs run people, they are simply lists of links that I imagine are advertising. World Series Quest for example is some sort of link to collectible purchases. Here’s all the links posted on another spam blog today and yesterday.

carrington-dental-plan
dental-office-floor-plan
colorado-dental-plan
broker-dental-plan
senior-dental-plan
dental-patriot-plan
dental-michigan-plan
dental-georgia-plan
dental-indemnity-plan
dental-plan-vision
supplemental-dental-plan
national-dental-plan
dental-payment-plan
concordia-dental-plan-united
canada-dental-plan
dental-employee-federal-plan
small-business-dental-plan
louisiana-dental-plan
best-dental-plan
arizona-dental-plan
dental-plan-principal
dental-discount-plan-broker
ameriplan-dental-plan
discount-dental-plan-member
tricare-dental-plan
blue-cross-dental-plan
careington-dental-plan
dental-plan-safeguard
canadian-dental-plan
aarp-dental-plan
dental-plan-washington
dental-fortis-plan
dental-insurance-plan-provider
blue-blue-cross-dental-plan-shield
ppo-dental-plan
dental-northeast-plan
aetna-dental-plan
dental-plan-signature
dental-group-plan
dental-life-met-plan
dental-guardian-plan
cigna-dental-plan
cost-dental-low-plan

and each of those goes to a page at dentalplanquest.com.

I guess these pages are setup to generate higher rankings in Google as the blog pages are indexed?

Very weird.

The maker of cables and other electronics accessories has filed lawsuits and trademark infringement claims against dozens of companies for using ‘monster” in names, products or services. The TV series ‘Monster Garage” and the Monster Seats above Fenway Park’s left field wall have been targeted in what Monster Cable officials say is an aggressive legal strategy to protect the firm’s good name. Monster Cable legal counsel David Tognotti said it has registered more than 50 trademarks covering a wide range of products, including furniture, food and clothing. Tognotti is preparing for a trial against the Discovery Channel over the popular TV series ‘Monster Garage,” which he claims uses images of ‘provocative women” and an iron cross logo that could tarnish Monster Cable’s image.
full story

San Francisco Chronicle

Steve Portigal was on the way to the gym in his Miata, looking for an AC/DC fix on his car radio, when he drove smack into the changing face of California.
The dial was tuned to 92.3 FM, but instead of the screaming hard-rock guitars that have blared from KSJO for 36 years to the delight of Bay Area listeners, what Portigal heard were accordion-tinged Mexican oldies.
‘I was confused and surprised,’ said Portigal, 36, of Montara. ‘I could almost always press that button and an AC/DC song would be playing.’
With no notice other than its final song — Wall of Voodoo’s ‘Mexican Radio’ — radio giant Clear Channel switched KSJO to a Spanish-language format of Mexican favorites on Oct. 28, giving a nod to the region’s burgeoning Latino population and pulling the plug on a Bay Area rock institution.

TV AD MUSIC.CO.UK is a British site (duh) that features songs from current television (Brit) commercials, including a top 20 list. It’s not clear if they’ve actually got the music, but they’ve got a listing of the top 20.

Perhaps something like that is available for the US or elsewhere, but I happened to find what I was looking for (The Sonics doing Have Love Will Travel for a Land Rover ad) and then could actually get the SONG online elsewhere.

My latest post to Total Experience is about rock and roll, improv, and robot cats. Check it out!

Here is the first trailer I’ve seen for Episode III. It’s easy to start overthinking whether or not it’ll be good, so I’ll just post it for anyone who cares, and let it go at that.

On West Wing they are trying to create an international coalition of peacekeepers to send to the middle east. CJ says something to the effect of “Canada? What kind of military do they have, anyway? Are they going to throw bottles of maple syrup?”

Very lame, for a few reasons. Wouldn’t CJ be a bit more informed, or is the fact that it’s Canada actually excuse an American official from having to be informed – when slagging off Canada will suffice? And of course, extra ironically lame because Canada has made an enormous contribution to peacekeeping, perhaps even larger in scale given the small military capability that Canada has.

And really, it was just offensive, and unnecessary.

It took just under two days to get information about how to ask for help. Nice job, Macy’s.

Dear Valued Customer,

Thank you for your recent e-mail. We appreciate you taking the time to
contact us.

Our corporate office is located at:
170 O’Farrell Street
San Francisco, CA 94102

All Customer Service inquiries should be sent to the following address:
Macys.com Customer Service
P.O. Box 8215
Mason, OH 45040

If you have any further questions, please e-mail us at
[email protected] or call us at 1-800-289-6229. Our office hours
are Monday through Saturday 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM and Sunday 11:00 AM to
7:00 PM.

Sincerely,

Matthew Moorefield
Internet Customer Service

Macy*s does not want to hear from you. There is no “contact us” link on their site. There is a link you can click at the very bottom where the trademark info is listed:
If you would like to request our corporate name and address by email click here.

That takes you to almost the exact version of the same page, with an extra box at the bottom that says
Please enter you email address and we’ll email you our Corporate Address.
and filling that out gets you this acknowledgement

Your message has been sent to our Customer Service team. A macys.com representative will respond to your message as quickly and completely as possible. Thank you for shopping at macys.com.
First Name:
Last Name:
Your Email: [email protected]
Subject: Site/General questions
A Question Regarding: Request our Corporate Address
Here is the message you sent:

Which is rather disconcerting since they didn’t give you a chance to enter anything other than your email address, and yet they are showing the results of a whole form you filled out.

So to contact them, you have to submit a request that a human being will process? That seems really crappy to me.

Note: picture deleted

Just testing out photoblogging from flickr. Many options abound, which is of course overwhelming.

I’ve got all the pics on my hard drive – well, once I move them off the memory stick), and then I can upload some – but not all (storage space restrictions) to flickr – where they can be browsed and viewed and shared in more ways than I can imagine – and then some of them – or all of them, I guess – can be posted to the blog, like this.

Just trying this for the first time today, so I guess at some point I’ll figure out what pictures go where, but really, it mostly just feels overwhelming.

TheSimpsons.com has the world’s lamest game up on their site. Zombie Shootout. Go ahead, try it. Shoot 10 zombies in this first-person shooter (see how down I am with hard-core gaming?) and the game ends. Congrats.

It is nice to see Zombie Shakespeare from many years ago, but really, this was a lame use of 3 minutes of my life.

And the music alone could drive some people insane.

No guarantees how long this game will actually still be up.

They’ve posted a nice writeup of my recent CHIFOO talk Whose Line is It Anyway.

RoboMaid is obviously a piece-of-crap product, but hey, it’s only $10 – but what I really like about the TV commercial is that they offer you that price only if you agree to tell someone else about it. Obviously, that’s not enforceable, but the idea of including worth-of-mouth in the purchase process itself is pretty interesting.

LukeW posts a really nice summary of my talk at eBay here.

Metafilter has an item about wacky food items in Hawaii. I link to the MeFi site rather than the article directly because the comments are thoughtful and funny, as usual.

If you use the Bill Pay feature on Wells Fargo, they ask that you give at least FIVE BUSINESS DAYS – this is even for a payment from a Wells Fargo account to pay off a Wells Fargo credit account. Does it really take this long to transfer funds electronically? One could write a check and mail it 2 days before and never have to worry.

The promised benefit of doing these bill pay things is not simply saving the money for a stamp, it’s also planning ahead and scheduling it all at once, but the ridiculous calculation (at least if they told you when to schedule it in order to guarantee payment by a due date, that would help) and poor service seems to limit the value.

Bah.

Nice article

about the pumpkin harvest and pie-baking/tasting QA that they do. I enjoyed this description:

Ackerman sows his crop about mid-May, usually after the rich, silky clay soil thaws from the last freeze. As the months pass, the plants creep across the ground, their thick vines twisting and climbing into open crevices. Flat leaves, the size of a man’s head and shaped like a palm, cover the fields in a wash of green as they hide the pumpkins.
‘They get into the ditches, the roads, everywhere,’ said Yvette Ackerman, John’s wife.
By the time the pumpkins ripen, the leaves have wilted, and the vines, once several inches thick, have shrunk to near-empty husks. Hundreds of thousands of pale-gold pumpkins cover the ground. At this point, Libby’s takes over.

It reminds me of our local Half Moon Bay pumpkin scene

– where previously empty fields are filled with semi-evenly spaced pumpkins to suggest that you can pick ’em up and take ’em home right from where they grew. It’s a bit of theater – but then with petting zoos and garish decorations and ridiculous insane traffic, the whole pumpkin season is a bit absurd, so there ya go.

I get a really nice mention in this post on SFist

, regarding my search (and now theirs) for an old SF ‘zine called big Whoop!

A elderly Romanian man mistook his penis for a chicken’s neck, cut it off and his dog rushed up and ate it, the state Rompres news agency said Monday.
It said 67 year-old Constantin Mocanu, from a village near the southeastern town of Galati, rushed out into his yard in his underwear to kill a noisy chicken keeping him awake at night.
‘I confused it with the chicken’s neck,’ Mocanu, who was admitted to the emergency hospital in Galati, was quoted as saying. ‘I cut it … and the dog rushed and ate it.’
Doctors said the man, who was brought in by an ambulance bleeding heavily, was now out of danger.

Restless Legs Syndrome is an overwhelming urge to move the legs usually caused by uncomfortable or unpleasant sensations in the legs.

Why not adopt a Wild Horse or Burro?

Modern Drunkard Magazine . Yep, it’s a real thing.

Here is a link to a very strange PoMo experience – a “new” video to the Von Bondies “C’mon C’mon” performed by video game characters (and we’re not talking about Pacman here – this looks damn realistic)…

The about, with and for schedule (which I’ll be speaking at, with Tom Mulhern) has been posted.

Full Cream Puff Story here

Amazingly, it turns out that there are so many kinds of cream puffs — commonly called shukurimu (chou cream), from the French, chou a la creme — in terms of shape, flavor and types of crust. And they’re a sweet treat loved by all, regardless of age and sex.
‘People like chou creams so much that we could call them a national dessert,’ Ishizuka says. ‘So why not have a theme park where you can try and compare the different flavors of cream puffs from across the country?’
In a shop called Cream Puff Museum at the theme park, visitors can feast their eyes and taste buds on popular cream puffs from around 100 shops nationwide — and some not so regular ones, like natto cream puffs (that contain fermented soy beans in the cream) and takoyaki cream puffs (that are made to look like the deep-fried octopus dumplings, but fortunately do not taste like the real thing).
What really takes the biscuit for many visitors to Chou Cream Field, though, is the fairy-tale design of this ‘town’ of chou cream.
Covering 1,023-sq. meters of the floor space, the company has created an Italianesque alley, complete with chou cream trees and cream puff-shaped lanterns. As you stroll through this winding wonderland, the sweet and cheerful sound of ‘The Chou Cream Song’ fills the air — along with the aroma of baking cream puffs wafting from six specially selected shops from Hokkaido, Chiba, Tokyo, Hyogo, Fukuoka and Nagasaki prefectures.
To buy fresh-baked cream puffs from some of the nation’s most popular shops, take a seat at a table under a cream-puff tree festooned with the fancies, and soak up the sugary sounds in the Tokyo Chou Cream Field is about as near to cream-puff heaven as you’re ever likely to get.

The latest newsletter from the IDSA has an obituary as follows:

Ron Guttenberg, one-time IDSA member, dided May 20, 2004. In 1991, he retired as the corporate design consultant for Sears, Robebuck and Co. in Chicago. Prior to that, he worked for GVO, Inc. in Palo Alto, CA, as well as a number of firms in Chicago…

I worked at GVO from 1995 on. I don’t think I ever heard of Ron, but GVO was founded in 1966, so that’s 20 years of history I have no clue about. If he RETIRED in ’91 from his job post-GVO, he could have left GVO anytime. 1970? 1980? Who knows.

Anyway, the information people have shared for distribution about their post-GVO employment can be found here at my GVO Alumni page.

This band just seems, well, not very good, but perhaps bad in a good way?

My foreign grocery museum has been included in a teacher’s guide to Action Activities for International Business

Maybe this is an SP2 issue, but my XP system just got auto-updated, and the downloading-update icon in the system tray no longer had the “pause” feature. The update took over my system while I was trying to do something, spun everything pretty hard, and I couldn’t stop it. Bad Microsoft.

What’s messed up beyond that is that went to 37% or something and then disappeared. No update dialog, nothing. So wha’ happa?

Update: in fact, what the damn thing was downloading was SP2. It took several attempts for the download to complete, and then it installed SP2. I had checked the Microsoft updates page a few times, being told I didn’t need any more updates, so I assumed I had already DONE SP2, so this was a surprise. Everything is working okay, but Microsoft definitely pisses me off. After the update, they’ve put Windows Media Player in my quick-launch toolbar at the bottom (or whatever it’s called) – I didn’t ask for that, so why do they need to do it? Despite confirming my auto-update settings (download the updates, but don’t install them until I say it’s okay) before completing the SP2 install, they reset them to something different after completing the install, and the fact that I have a separate virus checker seems to crash the special program that launches right after you do the first reboot. We’ll see what happens, but they just annoy me – what can I say.

One of Japan’s favorite desserts, the humble pudding, has long been available as a canned shake for those who want to enjoy the taste everywhere possible. It has been a best seller since 1991. Now, the pudding shake comes in a 275 ml can with a big spigot. That means bigger dollops for you to lap up.

My upcoming talk at CHIFOO in Portland, OR, is now on-deck. A nice PDF flyer is here

Airing 9/10 on ABC Family. “Wait until his family finds out…”

I’ve only got one post up, but I am now blogging here as well.

Butt Rub.com

I’m not 100%, but I believe that this is one of the signs of the coming apocalypse…

Sugar Ray singer Mark McGrath has signed on as permanent co-host of the TV entertainment show ‘Extra,’ producers said Thursday. McGrath plans to continue working with the band, which has a greatest-hits CD in the works, and will fit performances and tours into his TV schedule.

The New York Times reports that

Warner Brothers has decided not to distribute the director David O. Russell’s new antiwar documentary when it re-releases his 1999 Gulf War movie, ‘Three Kings,’ this fall, judging it ‘totally inappropriate’ to do so in a political season, a studio spokeswoman said.
‘This came out to be a documentary that condemns, basically, war

,’ said the spokeswoman, Barbara Brogliatti. ‘This is supposed to be a special edition of ‘Three Kings,’ not a polemic about war.’

Warner Brothers doesn’t want to be seen as being against war? I thought our culture had a basic assumption that war, hatred, violence and all that stuff is bad, pure and simple. It doesn’t mean we don’t do it, that it isn’t necessary – that seems to me to be the part that is subject to interpretation, but who the hell is pro-war? We may support a specific war, but is anyone pro-war?

I’m soon to be a co-author on this blog.

Why are we supposed to suddenly care so much about the MTV Video Music Awards? It seems to be everywhere this week, appearing on blogs, ridiculous presence in the Yahoo! News Top Stories< and more, I'm sure. Amazing PR or something more specific?

In this article about protesters headed for NYC for the RNC next week, the Times offers this interesting description, “For Mr. Gibson, 24, a part-time college student who sometimes works as a test subject for pharmaceutical research, the trip had many unknowns.”

So, being a test subject is “work?” The Times is willing to put that as the man’s occupation? I’d describe panhandling as work before I’d describe “test subject” as work. I don’t know if that’s sloppiness or some kind of pro-slacker bias, or some too-subtle winking. Mostly, it’s just poor editing, IMHO.

This guy is a shining example of crappity-ass businesses like we seem to find here on the Coastside, where mediocrity is more than tolerable. His print ad mentions Golf Club Regripping and Internet Web Site Design. Nice combination? Anyway, check out the site – if you didn’t know what it was for, you would have no idea from the site, which was obviously done using some template in some program, with missing files, no explanation, errors, and just general rampant stupidity.

I was hoping to be charmed, based on the idiosyncratic notion of the print ad, but bleggh. Lame.

Update: the site has been redesigned to focus more clearly on golf stuff.

The new boombox style HP Instant Cinema Digital Projector ep9010: front projection box with built-in DVD, 2.1 speakers (20W stereo speakers facing front and rear, plus 30W subwoofer) with every input and output imaginable…Available September 04 for around $2499.

I did some of the upfront strategic user research on first prototypes they developed for this. Neat to see it hit the market.

Small toys showing an airplane flying into the World Trade Center were packed inside more than 14,000 bags of candy and sent to small groceries around the country before being recalled.
more

It’s an interesting example of the limitations of globalism – we always hear stories about what happens when the West exports its culture outwards without understanding the local destination. Oh, you’ve got product names, colors, symbols etc. that somehow are offensive. Well, here’s the opposite, and it brings home a major truth – that elsewhere in the world – these toys are acceptable. This is an error of distribution, not of design.

“The classic band Queen, fronted by gay icon Freddie Mercury, has become the first rock act to receive an official seal of approval in ayatollah-strong Iran. Western music is strictly censored in the Islamic republic, where being gay is considered a crime.
Mercury, who died in 1991, was proud of his Iranian ancestry, and illegal bootleg albums and singles made Queen one of the most popular bands in Iran.

Anyone else have a binding error in their Aug 23 New Yorker magazine? I didn’t get all the pages, so no fiction for me this issue. Weird – haven’t seen that in a magazine that I can ever remember…

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist who revolutionized the way the world looks at terminally ill patients with her book “On Death and Dying” and later as a pioneer for hospice care, has died. She was 78.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist who revolutionized the way the world looks at terminally ill patients with her book “On Death and Dying” and later as a pioneer for hospice care, has died. She was 78.

…sigh…
🙁

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist who revolutionized the way the world looks at terminally ill patients with her book “On Death and Dying” and later as a pioneer for hospice care, has died. She was 78.

Isn’t there anything we can do?

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist who revolutionized the way the world looks at terminally ill patients with her book “On Death and Dying” and later as a pioneer for hospice care, has died. She was 78.

Damn!

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist who revolutionized the way the world looks at terminally ill patients with her book “On Death and Dying” and later as a pioneer for hospice care, has died. She was 78.

No way!

NPR had a bit today about the NEA report on reading that came out earlier this summer.

New York, N.Y. – Literary reading is in dramatic decline with fewer than half of American adults now reading literature, according to a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) survey released today. Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America reports drops in all groups studied, with the steepest rate of decline – 28 percent – occurring in the youngest age groups.
…
Reading also affects lifestyle, the study shows. Literary readers are much more likely to be involved in cultural, sports and volunteer activities than are non-readers. For example, literary readers are nearly three times as likely to attend a performing arts event, almost four times as likely to visit an art museum, more than two-and-a-half times as likely to do volunteer or charity work, and over one-and-a-half times as likely to attend or participate in sports activities.

The way it was being spun on the radio was a little nervy – implying that people who read did more volunteer work BECAUSE they read – there’s nothing in their findings that offers any evidence of causality, but somehow it makes for good sound bites. Note that it wasn’t the NPR people who were making this claim but the poet dude that now heads the NEA who was being the doctor of spin.

I just got a warning that Ofoto would delete all my photos in October if I don’t make a purchase. I’ve had pictures up there for years, and never encountered this (although I think they did lose some of my pictures in a crash at some point. I read their Terms of Service that reads in part:

22. Storage Policy. Ofoto provides free online storage of images to its members for an initial period of 12 months from the date you first upload an image to your Ofoto account. To maintain free storage, you need to make a purchase from Ofoto at least once every 12 months The 12 month period will restart with each purchase. If you do not purchase any product or service from Ofoto for a period of 12 months Ofoto may delete the images stored in your account. In addition, if your account becomes inactive for a period of 60 months, Ofoto may, at its option, terminate access to the account altogether including deletion of any account information held by Ofoto%. Ofoto may change this policy at any time, upon reasonable notice to you.

It is reasonable, but it’s a bummer, and of course I’ve never been notified, that I’m aware, of any of the changes to the policy.

Guess I’ll be ordering something as a way to “pay” for the use of their storage.

I guess when they launched that navigation bar, it was optional for some of us (ie, if you don’t have an ad up there already) but they defaulted to turning it “on” – I just turned it off. So I’m sure most people who are reading this didn’t even see it the first time.

Kinda lame.

The Bill Dulmage Radio & Television Archive is a pretty cool site with lots of info about radio and TV in the Southern Ontario area (or at least the broadcast area, including Toronto, Buffalo, and beyond). Lists of the various on-air staff over time, and images from various radio stations as well. Neat bit of nostalgia for me, since I spent many years living in that area and listening to rock radio.

Blogger/Google started putting this damn ad bar on the top of their blogs – including this one, I noticed just yesterday, that cover up all sorts of content – what is this Tripod/Geocities crap all about?

I’ve only read lauding plaudits for this thing, so I’m not sure why no one is bitching about the lame implementation that covers up your blog!

Yuck.

A Malaysian woman is trying to reclaim the world record for the longest stay in a room full of scorpions, news reports said Sunday.

Isn’t the key word here “reclaim”???

This piece from the NYT was a nice bit of cultural anthropology, but the writing style confused the hell out of me – there are some awfully square references in an article about hipsters, it made me wonder if I was just so un-hip that I didn’t realize how hip being square actually is, or if the journalist is like someone’s grandpa trying to use the term “Daddy-O”

What do you think?

—
Todd Fatjo has moved out, and Williamsburg may never be the same.

New York neighborhoods do not announce their sea changes. There is no news release or banner draped across the street. Sometimes there is just a certain guy, and a thing that guy does, and before you know it the neighborhood has made one of those subtle shifts, the sort that keep New York City fascinating.

Remember when Bill Clinton opened an office in Harlem? Or when Miguel Algarin founded the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on the Lower East Side? Or when Harvey Lichtenstein started spreading the Brooklyn Academy of Music facilities around Fort Greene?

Todd Fatjo is no former president or renowned poet, but for Williamsburg he is a tiny bellwether. In this neighborhood, bohemianism begat or gave way to hipsterism in the blink of a decade, and Mr. Fatjo was right there.

One moment, there were industrial lofts illegally housing art students who spent days at the L Cafe. The next, there was not one but two cavernous Thai restaurants, and the neighborhood kept them both busy.

And there was Mr. Fatjo, in an expansive loft far from the main drag, Bedford Avenue, knee-deep in the hoopla. He had a job at a record store, gigs as a D.J., an untamed Afro and three roommates. They held five parties during their tenancy that Mr. Fatjo would later describe as major, defined as involving three separate sound systems blaring away in different parts of the apartment.

“It was just insane,” Mr. Fatjo said.

The telltale sign that the party was ending came in the hipster equivalent of semaphore: a flier on a wall. Inside the shopping mall on Bedford Avenue, below the flier for the dance band seeking a musician, Mr. Fatjo posted notice earlier this summer that the party-ing-est loft in all of Williamsburg was on the market.

He wrote with a simple yet passionate eloquence, speaking directly to his peers in a parlance that showed him to be of the place and moment.

“If you’ve ever been to my duplex loft you know how truly dope it is,” Mr. Fatjo began. He listed some conventional real estate amenities, such as wood floors, 14-foot ceilings and skylights for a monthly rent of $2,400, then moved on to recount others that only a steeped Williamsburg hipster could appreciate:

“Popeye’s and Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner, about four 24hr bodegas on the corner, 2 Chinese food places next to both entrances, and it’s above and across from two $.99 stores,” he wrote.

If you have to ask why proximity to multiple 99-cent stores might be an advantage, you will never know. Mr. Fatjo’s truly dope duplex loft is not in the gentrified Williamsburg of investment bankers and corporate media types. Those 24-hour bodegas he mentioned have bulletproof glass, and one sells Marlboros with Virginia tax stickers. This is the Williamsburg where a spoonful of party helps the squalor go down.

There are other things you will never know if you did not live in Williamsburg through the heydays of bohemians and hipsters, and Mr. Fatjo invoked that secret knowledge in his flier.

“Every party we’ve had was one for the books,” he wrote. “If you’ve been to one, you know, if not you missed out.”

Again signaling his connection to the heart and soul of modern Williamsburg, Mr. Fatjo concluded his flier with a tone of solemn inconsequence, of utter detachment from the whole matter.

“So I guess if anyone is interested leave a message or call me,” he wrote, adding his cellphone number and e-mail address.

Lest the neighborhood be left in confusion and suspense, Mr. Fatjo tacked on a postscript hinting at what the future might hold for the young and insufferably hip.

“BTW:” Mr. Fatjo wrote, abbreviating by the way, “The only reason I’m leaving is because my girlfriend and myself want to get a place to ourselves and this place is too big.”

Love is a funny thing. It can spin a cynical hipster around like a record (baby, right round, round, round), and it has done a number on Mr. Fatjo, who is 28. He quit the music store this year and took a job showing apartments in Manhattan. He is working toward a broker’s license, and this month he had the Afro shorn to a nice, respectable wave.

Mr. Fatjo and his girlfriend took up residence in the South Bronx, but despite all the changes in his own life, he was surprised to find that the party seems to be ending for his generation of Williamsburg hipsters. He had written the flier to help find a new tenant because he was fond of the landlord, but the hipsters he had expected never showed interest.

“I was trying to get some friends in here who were D.J.’s or artists, because you can do whatever,” Mr. Fatjo said. “The demand for it wasn’t what I thought it would be.”

Last week, the landlord rented the loft to a tenant from another apartment in the same building, a man who had never joined the hipster parties.

“He’s just some guy who has a job,” Mr. Fatjo said.

The fate of the truly dope duplex loft may be a sign that the hipster scene is fading in Williamsburg, or who knows? Some new generation could reinvigorate the neighborhood with its own brand of cool. As for Mr. Fatjo, who is fast becoming just some guy who has a job, the end of the party is bittersweet.

“It really kills me to leave Brooklyn, especially this place,” he said, dwelling on a last look around the empty loft. “But doing something with my lady, that’s good.”

And as for the Williamsburg hipsters, whose messages are expressed in pop culture references just as surely as they are immortalized on fliers, some might say the moral is that getting older is like skateboarding: it is not a crime. Others might just say we built this city on rock ‘n’ roll

I quite enjoyed the negative review of the latest Exorcist prequel from today’s NYT.

—

Spinning heads, cascades of pea soup and your mother’s Army boots are nowhere to be found in “Exorcist: The Beginning,” but lovers of the ridiculous may be delighted to know that the specter of little Linda Blair a-twitch and a-tremble is not entirely forgotten. A prequel to “The Exorcist,” William Friedkin’s 1973 shocker in which Ms. Blair played a child hijacked by Beelzebub, this new film comes gussied up with some fine talent and its very own bag of cheap tricks. But when push comes to demonic shove, hell apparently hath no fury like a woman in green pancake makeup just as surely as some producers have no shame.

“Exorcist: The Beginning,” which opened nationwide yesterday and given its doleful prospects may soon be known as “Exorcist: The End,” is the third feature film to be squeezed from the pulpy remains of Mr. Friedkin’s original. (That film spawned two less-acclaimed sequels, and four years ago it was re-released in theaters with some padding and tweaks.) Based on the William Peter Blatty best seller, the first “Exorcist” mostly entails the efforts of two priests trying to beat the devil out of Ms. Blair’s 12-year-old with the aid of pop metaphysics and some exceedingly dated special effects. A monster hit and very effective for a certain teenager who must remain nameless, Mr. Friedkin’s film has not held up well, but compared with this latest effort does vaguely resemble the classic of 1970’s cinema its fans tout it as.

“Exorcist: The Beginning” was directed by Renny Harlin, whose previous efforts include a solid “Nightmare on Elm Street” sequel, a bad “Die Hard” sequel and the diverting thriller “The Long Kiss Goodnight.” Slick and devoid of any obvious personal signature, Mr. Harlin’s directorial style is serviceable enough for a movie like “Exorcist: The Beginning,” which exists solely to rake in cash during its opening weekend and settle into a long shelf-life in the DVD hereafter.

As it happens, the DVD release will be more interesting than the theatrical one if, as floated in Variety, it includes the version of this prequel shot by the director Paul Schrader. Mr. Schrader was fired from the project on grounds that his prequel was not scary. Mr. Schrader, in turn, had replaced the film’s initial director, John Frankenheimer, who died during preproduction.

All this background noise, alas, turns out to be more interesting than what has managed to finally make it on to the screen. Written by Alexi Hawley, who was brought in to revamp William Wisher and Caleb Carr’s earlier screenplay, “Exorcist: The Beginning” opens centuries ago with a priest stumbling through a landscape littered with bloodied corpses and the writhing bodies of the soon to be dead. From there it’s a fast cut to Cairo circa 1949, where amid the putatively exotic third-world sights and sounds the Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard sits in a bar wearing the rumpled white suit and anomie of a B-movie hero. This world-weary traveler is, of course, Merrin, the same character played by the Swedish actor Max von Sydow in “The Exorcist,” but now without the sanctity of the priestly collar.

What ensues essentially conforms to the movie horror manual, though the production does benefit from the talents of the Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who has given the film a nice nicotine-stain patina. Wrapped in this burnished orange glow, Merrin, having taken a mysterious assignment, creases his brow and tries to discover what a Catholic church is doing buried in the sand in northern Kenya (actually Italy’s CinecittÔø? Studios), which is where most of the film’s 117 draggy minutes play out. Along for the ride are the usual movie suspects, including a beautiful doctor with peek-a-boo dÔø?colletage and a fondness for late-night showering (Izabella Scorupco), a young priest straight from the Vatican (James D’Arcy), a helpful local with a bull’s-eye fixed to his forehead (Andrew French) and various other sacrificial lambs, including children, all of whom are lovingly skewered with graphic detail.

Despite the body count and Mr. Harlin’s reliance on shock cuts and loud noises, “Exorcist: The Beginning” singularly fails to deliver any palpable shivers. Perhaps more expectedly, given the torturous production history and the unceremonious introduction of the movie (the studio didn’t screen the film for critics until the night before it opened), it does afford the occasional and presumably unintended laugh. Still, despite the risible dialogue, the bulging eyeballs, the heaving bosoms, the digitally rendered hyenas and squirming maggots, the movie fails to achieve the status of the instant camp classic. That’s partly because the vibe of the film is too torpid. It simply doesn’t have the buoyancy of camp, but mostly because it’s deeply unpleasant to watch children, even fictional children, murdered on the altar of greed. Thrills rarely get cheaper or more loathsome.

”Exorcist: The Beginning” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for graphic bloody violence, including images of young children being shot and torn apart by animals.

Yu Zhenhuan’s claim to fame for now is that he is the hairiest man in all of China. Hair covers 96 percent of Yu’s body. The 26-year-old Yu is candid and unembarrassed about a condition that has made him a phenomenon in China since he was born.
A stringy black fuzz mats every inch of his lanky frame, save for the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet. And Yu has chosen to make use of his unique physical appearance, placing photos of himself on his Web site www.maohai.com — or Hairboy.com — as part of a drive to land a recording contract and become China’s newest rock star. He recuperated in a hospital ward from ear surgery. He had the operation in Shanghai recently to remove hair that was impeding his hearing, doctors said.

more

Is there some recent change to Blogger’s software? Yesterday and today all the text I’m quoting seems to be filled with characters like %3F %2F %0D%0A for spaces, commas, quotes, etc. Annoying!

In Nanaimo bars are superstars — who knew the San Francisco Chronicle presents dramatic evidence of the impact of globalization.

Some requests seem like a long shot but we give them a try anyway. That’s what we thought about a recent message seeking a recipe for Nanaimo Bars. We were wrong — very wrong. By e-mail and snail mail recipes and anecdotes started pouring in almost as soon as The Exchange ran two weeks ago. It seems that this cookie created in the pretty port city that is the gateway — by ferry or air — to Vancouver Island off the west coast of British Columbia has become a Canadian icon. We received about four dozen recipes. Not bad for a long shot. All the recipes from various sources are similar though some involve uncooked eggs which some cooks don’t like to use. So we are going with the recipe from a Canadian cookbook. The Complete Canadian Living Cookbook – Random House, which Judith Miller copied for The Exchange. Thanks to her and all the other contributors — including one who copied a recipe printed on a souvenir dish towel.

I got my most recent Verizon Wireless bill – it covered a period where I was travelling in Vancouver, and so there were so roaming charges. All I saw was a total – no info about how many calls, when, to whom, etc. I was quite surprised since the last time I had any actual usage charges on my bill (i.e., since before I signed up for one of those plans that is nationwide long-distance all inclusive etc.) there was a lot of detail available just for verification, etc.

I knew I could get that info via the website, but man, it takes a long time to go to the computer, find the site, remember your password, get the bill, go to the detailed page. Versus just looking quickly while you have the bill in your hand? A pain! I decided to write Verizon – this shouldn’t surprise anyone, I guess. I figured if they get enough complaints, they might think about changing it back.

I could not be more surprised by the response:
The wireless phone number referenced does not currently have Detailed Billing. With this feature you will have the ability to view information about each call. Once this feature is added, this information will be available on the paper copy of your bill.

Detailed Billing costs $1.99 monthly per line with your calling plan.

Wow! Verizon wants to charge me $1.99 PER MONTH to get information about what it is they are billing me for? So, I have to pay for the services and then I have to pay extra for the info about the services I’ve paid for? As if anyone really thinks they could spin “billing” into a value-add. It was rather disheartening to read that response – the sheer chutzpah of a company asking me to pay extra for information in the bill – information, incidentially, that they used to provide for free. I imagine the prime target is people who need to bill the detailed info for the calls back to their clients or employer and so it’s a business expense. But they’ve manufactured a product-to-charge-for out of something that is just basic customer service.

I guess it really reveals something about where companies like Verizon are at – despite their reputation as the best coverage and customer service, they really are operating like greedy bastards who know they have the power.

The Unofficial Borat Homepage – NICE! I like!

Calbee has relaunched its Sweet Potato and Red Bean Granola with a new package after good results from last year’s campaign. The new cereal includes roasted brown rice, oats, sweet potato, red beans and pumpkin seeds that contain a lot of fiber and iron. It goes well with either hot or cold milk.

In a recent post I described some problems I was having with getting into various Wells Fargo online sites for our mortgage account. So today when someone wrote me with a question about that site, I wondered if it came from that posting, but they indicated they got my info when they tried to log on.

I’d read (but can not find any of the articles) a few months back about university registration websites revealing data from previous users when new people would come to the site – the fields you’d be filling in would actually be already filled in with someone else’s data. Is this happening to me, now?

From: [email protected]
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2004 17:06:57 EDT
Subject: i tried too (lol)
To: [email protected]

I just wanna know where do you get started to set up your account to pay your bill each month? Can you help? I’m getting kinda teed off now, and bill is due. I’m about ready to pay the $20.00 fee for telephone payment now.

Thanks for help
Elizabeth

Ps i got your info.from trying to get into EBPP.WellsFargo.Com/MortgagePay

I wrote back
I don’t understand – did you find my entry on chittachattah.blogspot.com or did you find something else?

and this disturbing response
From: [email protected]
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2004 18:33:01 EDT
Subject: Re: i tried too (lol)
To: [email protected]

i found it on wells fargo site. i’m in now. thanks for responding though.

I’m in disbelief, but also frustrated at the AOLish response – not too much info, not particularly good at communicating the specifics of a complex situation by email.
I followed up:

Sorry to bug you – but you found MY info on the Wells Fargo site? How did that work? Is my info coming up when you try to log in?

and they responded
From: [email protected]
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2004 18:38:24 EDT

Yes, it comes right up. Funny huh

Well, it’s not funny at all.

I found a computer security forum and post the story here

, but the only response is from someone who doesn’t seem to have dealt with the situation very well and then turns into a cranky complaint about mortgage rates.

I’ve written Wells Fargo, but not heard back. I’m fairly certain I’m going to get a brainless response explaining how to log onto their site or something. I’ve written a local columnist who follows privacy and security issues at local companies. Any other ideas?

In an earlier post I vented spleen about a gross ad; today Stuart Elliot responds to a reader with a similar reaction…

A Reader Asks: Has anyone other than me written to you to voice his or her gastric horror over the new Pepto-Bismol commercial? It shows five office workers doing a “macarena-esque” dance while moving their hands to act out the five body maladies that Pepto allegedly helps, including diarrhea.

Unlike the product itself, the spot is stunningly tasteless. But in a perverse way, it may actually help sell the product, as it upsets my stomach every time I see it.

Two words: Pepto-Abysmal.

Stuart Elliott: Dear reader, you are the first to weigh in on the television commercial, which was created for the maker of Pepto-Bismol, Procter & Gamble, by Publicis Worldwide in New York, part of the Publicis Groupe. The spot, in which the five dancers act out the symptoms the product is meant to treat – diarrhea, heartburn, indigestion, nausea and upset stomach – is called “Lineup,” and promotes a new cherry flavor of Pepto-Bismol.

And as you deduced, dear reader, the commercial may indeed be actually helping to sell the product. The trade publication Advertising Age reports that Procter believes a recent increase in dollar sales for Pepto-Bismol is largely a result of the commercial, which began appearing in January. There are even plans to create radio versions of the TV spot, featuring the hip hop artist known as Biz Markie

(full story offline)

In Kagoshima Prefecture, a hot spring famous for its unusual green color was revealed to be the result of dissolving household ‘Bath-Clean’ bath salts into the water. Further claims of ‘fake onsens’ have been surfacing continuously over the country. However, ministry officials are reluctant to act quickly against the problem on grounds that they do not possess the right to act in a matter they still consider as private.

I finally contacted SBC about the problem I’d been having with my voice mail. The person who took my call was very helpful – tried calling me while I held on the line to see if they could replicate the problem, of course they couldn’t, but then they passed it along to a tech. He called me within a few hours (sooner than they could promise) and confirmed that they had found the problem – not enough trunk lines (though perhaps not in the obvious place) – and that it would have been producing exactly the symptoms I described – my line ringing and not going to voice mail AND busy signals at the call-in number.

He indicated it would be fixed by today, if not sooner. He was very apologetic, and he took time with me to talk through the problem and the solution.

It hasn’t recurred since then, but with any intermittent problem, one never knows. But I’m very hopeful that it’s all fixed and very pleased with how nice the SBC people both were – how they were willing to listen and also take time to make sure I was comfortable.

At the same time, I asked them to check if my Caller-ID was working – they said it was, but I get VERY few numbers coming through – it’s less than 10% of my calls. Even the tech who called back with the update on my problem report didn’t have a number come through. Bummer….

Isn’t it weird that while Team America (from Matt and Trey of South Park) features marionettes, the film version of Thunderbirds features humans?

Thunderbirds

Team America

SFO Airport Identity Program

Occasionally items other than those shown in these guidelines need to be produced using the SFO identity. Please review the inventory of these items before proceeding on any new projects.
– euismod tincidunt ut laoreet
– tincidunt ut laoreet dolore
– consectetuer adipiscing
– aliquam erat volutpat

Nice, the site ships with the default Greek text still in place

Update: nice, still up two years later!

I’ve got a program (PopFile) that I use to filter all the email to steve portigal com – over the last 37,000 messages (since March 10), 69% have been spam, about 26,000.

This is the creepy theme of the new Best Buy ads. In order to show the diversity of musical tastes that their customers have, they have the names of genres written all over their faces. Yikes. It’s a little hard to see at this size, but believe me, it’s not very appealing, just kinda uncomfortable.

This is the character for Fukigen (a look of displeasure, perhaps?), a Japanese beverage from Asahi. Not created by the other artist, but definitely evocative. We just referred to it for the longest time as "Angry Boy" because we couldn't read what it said on the bottle!

========================================================
FreshMeat #22 from Steve Portigal
=========================================================

               (__)
               (oo) Fresh
                \\/  Meat

Can’t have any pudding if you don’t read FreshMeat!
=========================================================
We make no mention of the huge bottle of Yoo-hoo beverage
=========================================================
Last month I flew to New York to attend the Licensing
International tradeshow. If SpongeBob is going to end up
on a box of cereal in the next two years, this is where
that deal is likely to go down.

I had been interested in attending this tradeshow simply
because I saw it on a morning news program (Today, Good
Morning America, etc.) a few years back. I don’t think I
even caught the name of the show, I just remember being
awestruck by the visual impact of the show itself. It was
a colorful chaotic jungle of familiar brands promoting
themselves, with guys in KISS costumes and Strawberry
Shortcake outfits wandering around. I decided to someday
attend this magical event. Eventually I figured out what
the show (and the business itself) was called – licensing!
Expecting a new and fascinating facet of culture, product
development, business, and marketing, I arranged to attend
as a speaker, organizing and moderating a panel on
consumer trends.

With a bit of ethnographic curiosity, I set out to learn
more of what this community/practice/business is all
about. Typically, my work starts with products, with the
cultural aspects moving to encompass issues of brand. I
was prepared for a shift in focus, with this show starting
with the brand, but I was surprised to discover that in
licensing one doesn’t even deal with “brands,” but rather
“properties.” I’m sure some brand theorist could explain
the difference and we’d be enlightened, but let’s just
marvel for a moment at the lingo. I think culturally we’ve
internalized the distance between the marketing word
“brand” and the cowboy word “brand” because it is a bit of
an uncomfortable connection. But now the entities in
question are actual things that can be exchanged (or
licensed) rather than simply labels that are burned into
flesh to signify ownership. Fair enough.

The tradeshow was interesting, to put it mildly.
Immediately you see that everything imaginable is
available for licensing. I thought I was prepared for
this, I mean if one more person tells me that Martha
Stewart and Ralph Lauren are brands, I’m going to shriek.
Okay, got it. But the licensing business takes it further.
Did you know that John Wayne and Andrew Weil (the bearded
purveyor of wellness) are both brands, er, properties? I’m
not talking about a conceptual sense of property-ness, I
mean they are owned, managed, marketed and ready for
licensing. Other brands/people/products that are also
properties include: Andy Warhol, Antiques Roadshow, Buzz
Aldrin, Chicken Soup for the Soul, CSI: Miami, Dairy
Queen, National Enquirer, NYPD, Siegfried and Roy, Bozo
the Clown, Village People, Terminator 2, Rocky, and
Shrek 3 (yeah, 3).

And so the tradeshow is overflowing with displays that
showcase known and unknown properties. In some cases the
company themselves will be in attendance (i.e., Nickelodeon
with SpongeBob) and in other cases there are holding
companies and agents with boring neutral names (i.e.,
Equity Management Inc. or IMC Licensing) some of whom have
an amusing combination of properties making up their palette
(Zippo, Mr. Clean, Crayola, Andrew Weil, and Pennzoil in
one case; Midway Games, Terminator 2, Village People,
Musicland Band and U.S. Secret Service in another) and
others with quite obvious specialties (IMC had a booth
touting Jello-O, Kool-Aid, Planters, Oscar Mayer, Kraft,
Tabasco, Manischewitz and others – although it appears
they also manage other licenses, such as the science-
fiction show “Red Dwarf”). And in other cases there are
up-and-coming (hopefully) properties that most of us
haven’t heard of.

It gets more complicated. For example, American Greetings
(the card company) hired the consumer products division of
Nickelodeon (the TV channel) to handle Holly Hobbie for
them. Nick is part of Viacom, a huge conglomerate, and
they have enough horsepower that they can take on business
handling other properties for other groups. It seems like
there was business going in every direction. Property
owners looking to sign up a licensor, agents repping their
portfolios, licensees with products looking for
distributors, and every possible permutation.

But it’s hard to see the dealflow – mostly you just see
people in suits and costumes, and a countless number of
booths. Check out my photos from the show (including scans
of some of the artifacts I picked up) here.
I spent several hours walking the floors with my
colleagues, looking at as much as we could, until we
reached total property burnout. Although this was an
industry show, the tactic was to seduce us as consumers. I
posed for pictures with SpongeBob and Patrick, and Mr.
Peanut, and the Care Bears, and more. I sampled the Krispy
Kremes covered in candy fish-shaped sprinkles (for some
to-be-released film). I grabbed free manga, stickers,
postcards, and peered at the current Lassie. After all
that, here are some of my observations.

It seems that many previously dormant properties are back!
Or at least, that’s a common phrase. Holly Hobbie is back!
Trollz are back! Although, in fact, Trollz are an update
of Troll dolls (small toys with long stiff brightly
colored hair), so strictly speaking they may not really be
back. Fido Dido (mostly known for 7-Up ads in the 90s)
appears to be back, and so are Davey and Goliath, those
earnest clay purveyors of biblical insight.

One surprising pattern was a variety of properties or
artifacts that showed a large number of different
feelings, moods, or attitudes. Sesame Street had a single-
sheet magnet featuring 12 different Muppets with
associated moods – Oscar as “crabby”, Elmo as “ticklish”,
Cookie Monster as “hungry”, Guy Smiley as “smiley”, etc.
and a separate magnet, reading “I’m feeling” that can be
used as a frame to be placed on top of the characters to
display your mood to the world. This was very similar to
the “feelings poster” sometimes used in therapy.

Anther example was Mood Frog who appears without labels,
but has a range of facial expressions suggesting anger,
boredom, nausea, confusion, etc. The Fear’s are, as you
might imagine, afraid of very specific things: dirt,
germs, cooking, flat hair, and veggies. Another line of
products featured a grid of baby faces with a variety of
moods: cranky, quiet, sleepy, happy, poopy, and so on. One
property featured cartoon girls with different attitudes
(I don’t have the specifics, but something like “The Shy
Thinker” “The Clever Go-getter” etc.) that presumably
tapped into something that the target audience could
identify with. I guess “The Breakfast Club” (a film that
segmented high school kinds into tidy parcels like The
Jock, The Nerd, The Criminal, The Princess, and The
Basketcase) lives on in one form or another.

Choosing a mood is already a mode in current products and
features, especially online. For example, Moods on
LiveJournal.com (a blogging site popular with the younger
crowd) offers the following default set of choices
(inviting you to add more as needed): accomplished,
aggravated, amused, angry, annoyed, anxious, apathetic,
artistic, awake, bitchy, blah, blank, bored, bouncy, busy,
calm, cheerful, chipper, cold, complacent, confused,
contemplative, content, cranky, crappy, crazy, creative,
crushed, curious, cynical, depressed, determined, devious,
dirty, disappointed, discontent, distressed, ditzy, dorky,
drained, drunk, ecstatic, embarrassed, energetic, enraged,
enthralled, envious, excited, exhausted,
flirty, frustrated, full, geeky, giddy, giggly, gloomy,
good, grateful, groggy, grumpy, guilty, happy, high,
hopeful, horny, hot, hungry, hyper, impressed,
indescribable, indifferent, infuriated, intimidated,
irate, irritated, jealous, jubilant, lazy, lethargic,
listless, lonely, loved, melancholy, mellow, mischievous,
moody, morose, naughty, nauseated, nerdy, nervous,
nostalgic, numb, okay, optimistic, peaceful, pensive,
pessimistic, pissed off, pleased, predatory, productive,
quixotic, recumbent, refreshed, rejected, rejuvenated,
relaxed, relieved, restless, rushed, sad, satisfied,
scared, shocked, sick, silly, sleepy, sore, stressed,
surprised, sympathetic, thankful, thirsty, thoughtful,
tired, touched, uncomfortable, weird, working, and
worried.

Similarly, IM (instant messenger) and web forums both
offer a huge set of smileys (or emoticons) as this
screenshot from the IM program Trillian suggests:

The thrust of this multiple-mood approach seems to be two-
fold: first, just like a line of toothpaste with multiple
flavors and features, we can find the one that suits us
best, and second, the display of so many different
feelings at once appeals to a certain vain sense of our
own emotional complexity.

Elsewhere at the show, girls with attitude were prominent.
This movement got a lot of press earlier this year when
David & Goliath (not the churchgoing boy and dog, but a
clothing company) caused controversy with a clothing
displaying slogans such as “Boys are Stupid – Throw
Rocks At Them” (read more here)

We saw attitude (the very cute Dog of Glee encouraging
you to “have a nice day buttface”) and mean girls galore.
“Angry Little Asian Girl” and “Emily the Strange” were two of
my favorites (probably because I had the opportunity to talk with the
artists and creators of the property, get a sense of who
they were and what their characters were about for them).

A lot of characters involved cats. Some were swanky
princess type cats, skinny, with a Parisian posture,
perhaps with a tiara. Some were emotional (“Sad Kitty
speaks for everyone who has ever experienced heartbreak,
disappointment, and the general hardships of life. Sad
Kitty cries the tears of all mankind!”) while some
companies offered a huge range of cat properties to suit a
variety of moods and attitudes (The Grinning Cat, Blue
Mood Cats, Tribal Cat, Three Hip Kittens, Flower Cat, Rain
Poodle, Art Cat, The Guitar Cat, Tropical Kitty, Dead
Kitty, and Lucky Cat all come from a San Francisco company
called Tokyo Bay).

The aesthetic of Japanese anime is a powerful influence,
with many different animated characters that typically
have flared legs, short bodies, big heads, big eyes, and
sometimes rather adult physical development. Homies and
Mijos come from da ‘hood. Previously infantile Troll dolls
are now sexed-up Trollz. Petz includes Catz and Dogz. And
there’s something called “Rock Hard Fairies” which claims
that “Fairies Just Got Cool!!”

Another tactic was to anthropomorphize whatever hadn’t
previously been given the breath of life (or big cartoony
eyes). We saw an elevator car and Doggy Poo, to name but
two.

And finally, some properties were cool and funny simply
because they were foreign and literally didn’t quite
translate. A whole segment of the floor was operated by
the Korean Culture and Content Agency featuring Big Ear
Rabbit (“The Fundamental Concepts is the adventurous
travel by the boys with complex in their individual
surrounding with Big Ear Rabbit, Roy who is centered with
them and the boys are finding out their good point rather
than their own demerit. This is the story telling method
to be estimated by the boys themselves in the process of
hearing the story clearly, but is different from the
direct story telling method that the esteemed fathers told
their children the instructions.”), Ayap (“Dews in the
cave gathered into the magic bead for a thousand years,
and he was born there…He is good and pure. When he drinks
dews collected in the magic bead, his power rises a lot so
that he can help other people who are at a crisis. He
likes diverse kinds of sports. His is a sport-mania.”) and
JaJa (“She is the girl who always goes on a diet. We’re
trying to develop ‘A diet characters’ mainly for the ages
between 17 to 30, young females who strongly want to be
healthy and beauty. Providing a pleasant infotainment
contents throughout funny diet stories.”).

It’s not clear what lessons there are to be learned here –
no matter how many interesting, creative, and resonant
properties I encountered, I left the tradeshow muttering
about “too much crap.” It was overwhelming. Perhaps the
lessons could be found by looking at patterns over time:
what properties survive, what clever licensing deals get
struck (will there be John Wayne pet food? Or Homies
tampons?), and how do the established brands like Sesame
Street and SpongeBob evolve over time to stay current. In
order to assess those types of things, I may have to go
back next year!

—

My photos (including scans of handouts) from the Licensing
show are here.

I wonder where this started, or what other examples there are – it’s the oft-used film/TV cliche based on an understated need for more of something to address the current situation the characters face.

Jaws – “You’re going to need a bigger boat.” (to get that big-ass shark – probably the originator of this line?)
Ally McBeal – “I might need a touch more clay” (to appropriate sculpt the large penis of the artist’s model)
Calendar Girls – “Lawrence, we’re going to need considerably bigger buns” (I think this was to conceal the breasts of a woman posing for a fund-raising calendar)
Split Second – “We’re going to need bigger guns”
Godzilla 98 – “We’re going to need bigger guns” (these last two from this discussion here
Batman film with Clooney – Alfred: “We’re going to need a bigger cave…”
Dinosaurs (that weird animated ABC TV show) – “We’re gonna need another Timmy!”

In an earlier post I described our experience seeing the film “Festival Express.” Today the Globe and Mail has a profile of Ken Walker, the person who put the who concert experience together back in 1970, and who has had a troubled but very interesting life.

These experiences include, in no particular order, jail time in the United States for allegedly facilitating gun smuggling into South America; a personal lecture from Jerry Garcia (Jerry Garcia!) on the dangers of drugs; speculation in pork bellies, sulphur, gold and wheat; buying up singer Nana Mouskouri’s North American contract; a bust for illegal possession of narcotics in 1971; and organizing one of the most glorious failures in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, 1970’s trans-Canada Festival Express.

Somewhere in there — in the fall of 1998, to be precise — Walker tried to kill himself by jamming a Second World War-vintage .38-calibre pistol owned by his jeweller father into his mouth, and pulling the trigger as two astonished police constables watched. The bullet blew through the top of his skull and into the ceiling of the basement family room of what was then his Richmond Hill, Ont., home.

Amazingly, it didn’t kill him. It put him in a coma for a month, removed a chunk from the right side of his brain, and left a still-noticeable dent in the skin of his skull. But it didn’t kill him. And that is why, when his seizures are in abeyance, and the 17 pills he takes every 24 hours are working just fine, Walker is able to spend some of his days reminiscing about his pivotal role in Festival Express, the memories fuelled by seemingly bottomless cups of coffee and one Player’s Light after another held between stubby, nicotine-stained fingers.

It’s a role that is going to get renewed scrutiny with the release of the much-delayed documentary chronicling the legendary high times, also called Festival Express. “I fooled them all,” says Walker with a mordant chuckle as he settles into a booth in the dark smoking room of a restaurant, near his cramped north Toronto apartment, that he visits several times a week.

Nice post

(spotted on WebWord about how to make sure products launched in Japan (originating elsewhere) will succeed. Gratifying to see the similarities between what I’ve told my clients in previous projects.

Attention to detail. Do not ever launch a product in Japan if you think you have even a 1% chance of product problems.
Functionality is important, but not without aesthetics. Presentation is everything. Even a $4 bowl of noodles is served in great style at a roadside noodle shop in the middle of nowhere in Japan.
Customer is KING. And I mean it. Being in Japan even for a week will spoil you. No matter how small the business is, the service is impeccable at all times.
Never say NO to the customer. Even when it is impossible, the Japanese believe in trying one more time when a customer says so. By the way, that is also how innovation happens. I was surprised myself how many times we came up with solutions when challenged by our customers (while the technical folks back home continued to complain that it couldn’t be done).
Do your homework. If you think that you can simply sell what you have on the shelves in Japan too, forget it. You will need to understand the unique characteristics of the Japanese market vis-a-vis your products, test your products, customize/localize it, and demonstrate that you are committed to Japan by translating all documents into Japanese, providing customer support in Japanese, and having a full-fledged office in Japan or a Japanese partner.

This is genius. Spelling out naughty words using the letters from corporate logos.

Joan and Melissa Rivers’ move from E! Entertainment Television to TV Guide Channel may keep them off the red carpet at September’s Emmy Awards…The Rivers reportedly received a hefty three-year contract, worth up to $8 million, to join the TV Guide Channel.

TV Guide Channel? $8 Million or not, what’s the next bus stop on their tragic ride to complete and utter irrelevance? The SpectraVision channel? It’s like that episode of Family Guy where Joan Rivers is standing on the red carpet making comments about passerby, when someone points out that her microphone isn’t even plugged in, that she’s just standing around doing the commentary with no camera (and no contract) and she wails “But I have noplace to go!”

full story

Jim Cara thought the ‘NOTAG’ plate he got for his Suzuki motorcycle would give people a laugh. Instead, he found that the laugh – along with more than 200 parking violations – was on him. The new tag arrived in the mail Saturday, along with an avalanche of Wilmington parking violations. ‘All the traffic tickets say, ‘Notice of violation. License number: no tag,” Cara explained. Officials said city computers linked to state Division of Motor Vehicles computers finally found an address for ticketed vehicles that lacked license tags: Cara’s home in Elsmere.

John Rago, spokesman for Wilmington Mayor James Baker, said an incorrect computer code used by the contractor that processes the city’s parking violations helped land the tickets in Cara’s mail. City officials plan to have it corrected, he said.

The New York Times claws away at Catwoman
The character of Catwoman, definitively embodied by Eartha Kitt in the old ‘Batman’ television series and dutifully updated by Michelle Pfeiffer in Tim Burton’s ‘Batman Returns,’ has always been a camp dominatrix, a persona not entirely suited to Ms. Berry’s soft, eager demeanor. She overacts Patience’s flaky timidity and then, to compensate, overdoes catwoman’s suave self-confidence, swinging her hips and pushing out her lips as if she were trying to attract the amorous attentions of Pepe le Pew.

(testing “Hello” software that seems like it’ll handle easily blogging photos – it’s several steps, but it’s presumably easier than any other way of doing it)

In an , I pointed out how you could “buy diahrrea online” at drugstore.com. I submitted that link to Doh, The Humanity which is a pretty funny site.

See who people named Kerry gave their political contributions to versus people named Bush.

Recently I purchased a Black and Decker Hedgehog 24″ Dual Action Trimmer. When I got it home, I saw that the trimmer was in the box, fully assembled, etc.
There was nothing else in the box – no manual, warranty card, or other documentation. The outside of the box promised a free extension cord would be included, and that was not in the box either.

It worked wonderfully.

On the Monday, I called Black and Decker to sort this out. I worked through the phone maze, and then was told that they were too busy, call back later, and they hung up on me.

I went online, did all the crap required to send in a customer service request.

As far as the documentation goes, they won’t send me anything, but they want me to go to another website and go through a registration process so I can download the information. No warranty card, obviously, would be available that way.

Turns out the free extension cord is a mail-in offer. But the box has a sticker that says “Free Extension Cord Included” – doesn’t included mean it’s IN THE BOX? There was no information about sending away to get it. That’s just crap, IMHO. Anyway, their email response suggested I use the attached form to send in for the cord. But they attached no form.

Finally, the email response gave me a “click here” link if the response was satisfactory, otherwise asked me to click the button below to send a followup. There was no button below.

Simple problem that they won’t make right. Deceptive and misleading packaging. Sloppy customer support.

Bah!

Yo, Robot is the title of “I, Robot” in Spain.

Don’t know if anyone from Montara sees this blog, but I’m having a problem with SBC voice mail (“The Message Center”) and I was curious if others in the area have the same problem, since it’s possibly a capacity issue.

Frequently, but intermittently
– my phone rings many times and the voice mail never picks up
– calling the local number they have for us (728-3704) gives a busy signal (often these two things are related)
– occasional voice messages where I never heard the phone ring in the first place

I had The Message Center before moving to Montara, and it works slightly different here – here you call that number and need to press * to get to the login interface – until recently it was a non-standard greeting before you pressed * – this makes me think that we’re on some old equipment here that can’t handle the capacity – too many calls come in and it just stops picking them up.

I’m specifically interested in hearing from other folks who have experienced something similar in the local area, and if there have been any attempts to work with SBC for a resolution, etc. etc. I’d like to coordinate any steps I take with others if possible.

There’s a ridiculous cross-promotion running in Loews theaters right now. They try hard to encourage good behavior with those “trailers” than run. Don’t talk on your cellphone, don’t pirate movies, and of course, clean up after yourself.

This particular spot shows a moviegoer leaving a mess behind, claiming it’s not his, but then the hosts of Forensic Files (a show on Court TV) appear and pick up all the crap he’s left behind and test it to prove that it’s his. Or something like that. Very over the top and silly.

What’s wrong is that the rude patron is really really fat (and unkmept) and has eaten an enormous amount of food – much of which is scattered on him and the area around him. So, you go to the movies and sit through all these ads and persuasion to eat! drink! buy! and then you see an ad where the person who enthusiastically did so is presented as a failure, because they ate a lot and are fat and physically unappealing and violate social norms by being messy.

Why isn’t the messy person a thin attractive moderate consumer? Because that doesn’t bring enough moral bluster to their sanctioning. The hypocrisy is disgusting – at one point the forensic scientists pull some tell-tale trash from the ground and prominently display it to the camera – it’s a bag from M&Ms. So even within this ad we have product placement encouraging us to buy and consume candy, all the while making us feel repulsion for the fat slob who indugles his physical desires and as a consequence behaves unacceptably.

In our theater this ad was shown shortly after a hyperkinetic employee wheeled a concession cart in and prevented any pre-film conversation among friends by shouting an aggressive corny sales pitch that made me cringe (but left other patrons applauding). In my physical-limitation-equals-personality-flaw bigotry I’ll point out that he had a very very slight speech impediment that rendered his over-the-top blustering somewhat twisted.

For some reason HBO sent me a survey link by email yesterday, as a followup to Sunday’s debut of Entourage (which I watched, and enjoyed). I took the survey (hey, a chance to win $10.00 from Amazon – why the hell not) and did not enjoy it. All the usual stuff about whether you watched it, how did you hear about it, do you get HBO, and then the part where they clearly want to get some REAL INSIGHT as to the appeal of the show. Yeccghhhh.

Using a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 means Poor and 5 means Excellent, how would you rate the following aspects of ENTOURAGE?
The humor
The drama
The characters
The idea for the series
The dialogue
The music in the show
The locations
The relationships between the characters
The story
The action
The uniqueness
The pace
The ending
The beginning
The title, ENTOURAGE
The look of the show
The realism
The inside look at a Hollywood lifestyle

I think after about 6 aspects, it starts getting ridiculous. As if you can slice your reaction to the show that precisely? The title? Who gives a crap what the title is? Obviously, they do, but then, how is that information useful? Are they going to relaunch under a new title?

Now we’d like you to rate the characters on ENTOURAGE. For each character, tell us how much he/she adds or detracts from your enjoyment of the show.

This was also five choices:

Adds a lot Adds a little Detracts a little Detracts a lot Not sure
VINCE, who slips easily into stardom
ERIC, who is learning the rules of Hollywood as he tries to help Vince make the right choices
DRAMA, Vince’s half-brother whose own acting aspirations have been eclipsed by Vince’s success
TURTLE, the least experienced of the group who’s always up for a good time
ARI, Vince’s high-powered agent who clashes with Eric over his client’s decisions