May 2008 Archives
Or that's what the segment should have been called.
Check out this news story that aired on WXYZ.com tonight. Seriously - watch the video on the right side of that page (apparently there hasn't been buy-in for embeddable video at this affiliate yet).
My comments:
- This guy drove 10,000 miles because it was his lifetime dream to visit the Ford plant in Flint? Maybe Disneyworld, I could see. Flint?
- Look at his website. Seriously, dig into it a little bit. Flash video. Sound effects. Sophisticated animations. Very high production values for an individual's web site.
- He drove his 1981 Ford Falcon 10,000 miles. What better way could there be to manage perceptions upward about the reliability and timelessness of a Ford?
- Where they say "Ford is like family." *GAG*
- They have a "feeling" for the people. I don't know if you understand. It's a very important company to the Argentine people. Message: Hey, that guy is just like us!!!
- In Peru, gas is even worse - it's near eight dollars. Message: "Stop bitching about gas you lazy Detroiters!"
- We have to return to work. That's the ugly thing, but we have to work. Reinforces "Hey, that guy is just like us," but also delivers the message, "Get back to work you lazy Detroit auto worker!"
- He and his family are Argentinian, which is like the whitest South America gets. Reinforces "Hey, that guy is just like us" for racist bigots. Don't believe me? Do you think they'd air this story if a Mexican dude drove up??
I'm sure that there were good tactical reasons Ford put this story into effect. And I appreciate the need for news outlets to occasionally (often?) broadcast bullshit feelgood manufactured PR stories like this, especially for a struggling city like Detroit. But come on guys - is a little bit of subtlety too much to ask?
It's fun to be cynical.
A suggestion to the marketing executives of Pizza Hut, Dominos Pizza, and the like.
I love pizza, but you know what? There's something about your products that makes me far less inclined these days to pick up the phone (or, these days, log on to your website) and order my usual thin crust with sausage, pineapple, and olives.
It has little to do with the pizza itself. It's the packaging that bums me out.
The problem is that it's difficult to throw away pizza boxes. It's hard to try and fold it so that it fits in the trash bag (and inevitably the trash breaks); on the other hand, if I just keep it separate from the trash bag and put it to the side, I get annoyed because I have to carry more boxes out - and the process of carrying a pile of flat boxes is a pain, not because they're heavy, but because they're bulky, and slide easily out of my arms (which are usually already carrying three or more other bags of trash).
I'm also a little bummed out - only slightly, but maybe indicative of an overall trend - when I think about the volume of waste I perceive present in your packaging. Now, my reasonable side says that maybe the packaging is in fact more efficient in that its corrugated structure keeps the pizza hotter longer. But experience tells me that that it's a wiser course of action for these company to first target my emotional side [first].
Many Japanese pizza joints - including Japanese Pizza Hut - have better, non-corrugated (but still well-insulating) packaging. In addition, there is an easy and intuitive way to fold empty Japanese pizza boxes into something that can easily fit in any trash can. The volume of waste from this folded pizza box is significantly less, too.
I think there's a big opportunity here for a fast-moving pizza company in the U.S. to capitalize on green, a la Brita. I think it's just a matter of time.
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Let me know whether you think the ads are cool or they suck.
Did you hear that there's a group of South American Indians that worship the number zero?http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/mapserver-users/2000-August/028416.htmlIs nothing sacred?
With a logo, decide if both a company and product logo are needed. Having two logos can be confusing. The idea of a logo is to give someone a graphical experience with which to associate a specific thing - either a company or a product. Repeated visual contact is key to maintaining desired associations. If there is both a company and product logo, the audience's minds are split, making the audience work twice as hard to achieve the mental connections.From Alyssa S. Dver's Software Product Management EssentialsColors can make a big difference too. If the logo is the same color as another competitor or partner, it may fail to stand out when the logo appears side by side with others. Take the opportunity to select colors and styles that really do stand out in the specific market. Beware that some color combinations can be offensive in different cultures so be sure to review the selections with as many people as possible, particularly those in or from other countries.
Heather just sprayed some raspberry vanilla room spray in the air (just purchased on a whim for $3 from Bath and Body Works), and is twirling around like an ecstatic ballerina. Of course, she's going to kill me when she reads this, I bet.
Anyway, H and I went to talk to the realtor today. Afterwards, we went to this excellent South Indian restaurant in Ann Arbor called Madras Masala. It is delicious - and so much food, but at very reasonable prices.
It was like a double-sized masala dabba, but of food. I mean, like a plate of food. It was awesome. If you're interested in trying some excellent South Indian food next time you're in Ann Arbor, give us a call. Seriously.
Heather has called it her new favorite restaurant in Ann Arbor.
"Before we know it, the next generation of kids will not know the word biscuit at all," he grumbles. "Whether it's fast food, TV chat-shows, or cookies, we must resist all that is American for the sake of our own souls."from 'Color of Wet Mud!' Oreos Invade England
Andrew sent me this. It is so cool!
Unfortunately, comment spam has become a real problem lately. I'm getting about a thousand each day, so I've decided to turn commenting off temporarily.
But I will post comments if you email them!
I got my car detailed yesterday. It looked really good when I got it. Particularly the interior - the smell of the freshly-shampooed carpeting gets me every time.
It was about time, too. I was starting to get embarrassed having conversations like this:
"OK, who's driving?"
"Uh, not me, because there are shards of broken glass in the back seat."
And there really were. You see, somebody left a Perrier bottle in the cup holder in my car in the middle of winter. Or maybe at the onset of winter. In any case, naturally it exploded. I cut my hands a couple times (not badly, mind you) trying to get at least the biggest pieces out.
Perrier - HAH! I guess it's better than Mountain Dew, or a Snapple.
Did you ever notice that "Evian" backwards is "Naive?"
So I came out of my apartment this morning, and I noticed that birds had already pooped on the trunk of the car.
Fortunately, it was a drizzly, at times rainy day, and so it washed away by the time lunch came around. It still put me in a bit of a bad mood this morning, though.
At least those carpets smelled good though! *SNNNIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIFFFFFFFF...* Ahhhhhhhhhhh...
Today at twilight I sat outside, on my balcony, on my corded, recumbent Ikea chair. It was refreshing to see the birds and insects flying around and around, dancing around each other - I hadn't seen that in a pretty long time. It finally feels like Winter is really over.
There is a pair of trees that are in bloom by the balcony window, near the artificial lake with its pretentious - yet pleasant-sounding - shooting fountain in the center. One tree is a bright yellow, and the other a sky blue, but in the weird twilit light the trees were a rich orange and a deep purple. For a moment I was tricked into thinking that it was Fall.
I caught this interesting show on The Style Channel called Peter Perfect yesterday with Heather. (video clip here)
OK, so it started out... inauspiciously. I walked in when Rocky Rhodes, the proprietor of the Rocky Roaster coffee shop, was getting his unibrow waxed.
"You should do that," Heather remarked to me.
The stylist, Peter Ishkhans, made over the employees and owners of the coffee shop so as to make the store more successful. He recast their appearance to make them more, well, approachable. It was a big improvement - and the stakeholders were happy. "I cannot wait to go to work tomorrow," remarked one employee. How often do you hear that, especially in the food service industry?
Peter also remade the store interior. Before the makeover, there was no underlying, unifying store theme. A chess table here, an old unattractive coffee hutch there, homemade shelves down there.... The colors and mismatched knickknacks made the store look... dowdy.
After Peter did his work, it was a whole different feel. The warm colors connoted friendliness and community. There was a large table in front so that people could sample the coffees. Everything was inviting.
Even the store sign change was dramatic. Here's the old logo (taken from http://www.rockyroaster.com/index.php:
Kind of looks like an old Waffle House or something, doesn't it? It doesn't suggest coffee shop at all.
The new sign:
Wow. What a difference. Nobody could mistake this for anything but a coffee shop now.
It's interesting - one of the changes that Peter (as well as the owner's wife) suggested was placing bags of coffee beans on display, so as to indicate to the customer that, hey, bags of coffee beans could also be purchased. Rocky was highly resistant to this, because he was staking his reputation on selling beans that were never more than three days old. The solution was to go ahead and display the bags of coffee beans, but then when a customer made an inquiry, the employee would say something like "you know what? Let me go get you some fresh coffee beans." More coffee was moved, and at the same time the customer felt like he or she was getting special treatment. Brilliant - I love it when incredible opportunities surface just by thinking about and addressing problems with even moderate creativity and sophistication.
Another thing that struck me was the profound resistance on the part of the owner to change. Case in point: he had this God-awful, colorful, damaged rooster statuette on display. Peter was trying to convince him to part with it, but Rocky was just so attached to it. I guess in the end Rocky gave it up, but it looks like it was a big, emotional struggle.
It makes me wonder about the ways in which I myself am resistant to change - change that probably is really good for me. So, friends, if you see me irrationally grasping for my rooster statuette, do me a favor and call me out on it, OK?
This episode of Peter Perfect is airing again on The Style Channel tonight at 9pm and midnight.
Email is a big problem. I get about 30-40 emails a day, on average, and I usually need to answer about half of them. I spend a lot of time reading and composing emails, and it eats into time I would like to allocate to other things.
Technologically speaking, email has scaled well. Functionally speaking, it has not - people are generating and consuming email in unprecedented ways. And we don't search for alternative solutions, I think, because having all your stuff in one place is still a big convenience.
But email as a technology has not changed for a very long time, and I've thought for a while that there's a lot of opportunity here - improving email.
Well, Heather turned me on to a new plugin for Outlook (free to download and install) called Xobni (that's Inbox backwards, BTW). Some of Xobni's cool features include:
- generating a social network based on doing natural language processing on your emails (e.g.: you emailed John Smith, who in turn replied and CC'ed to Jane Doe - so you are now linked to John and Jane - and you can see how your contacts are related)
- generating summary statistics about your email usage - including what people you email most, time-histograms of when you email them, a global usage histogram, and other very cool summary statistics
- GMail-style threaded conversations
- Being able to navigate ALL attachments with a given contact quickly
- Better and faster message searching capabilities
I'm still up in the air about installing Xobni. Currently I use AJAX clients for both personal use and work, simply because I like the flexibility of being able to effortlessly check my mail from any computer. But if I were using Outlook, I'd install it in a heartbeat. Also, rumor has it that Xobni is being developed for other platforms, as well... hopefully GMail is one of them (or maybe Google is making its own?).
In any case, I am really looking forward to when I can use a tool like Xobni.
So I got my Master's. Huh, I don't feel any different.
But I have learned a lot.
Last couple of emails to my Mom, I've been signing as Love, John Umbaugh, M.S.
The first time she replied, she congratulated me. The second time, she didn't say anything. I had expected her to call me out on my pretentiousness immediately!
And, I started my new job over at Zattoo. Half-time right now, as I wrap up the research project at Michigan. Things are going well; everyone is nice, and diligent. And smart.
I'm kind of in new-employee limbo right now, getting acclimated to the work environment and setting things up. This afternoon, I installed Microsoft Office 2007, as well as Microsoft Visio.
Just opening the box took me something like twenty minutes.
Seriously, it took a long time. It was like trying to solve a complex puzzle. I felt like an idiot. I mean, I was able to do other stuff in parallel with opening the packaging, but jeez, opening software should be a ten-second process, no?
Anyway, turns out loads of people have been having problems. Even Joel on Software commented about the terrible packaging.
It's pretty hilarious to see Microsoft's blog post about their packaging:
With Windows Vista and 2007 Office system, we didn't just redesign the software packages themselves, but are also introducing new packaging for the two products. The packaging has been completely revised and, we hope, foreshadows the great experience that awaits you once you open it.
Ouch.
The comments are pretty hilarious, too. The first few are really enthusiastic. Then there are a bunch of spam comments. And then come the caustically critical.
Anyway, old news. Almost a year old, in fact. But still newsworthy, perhaps, since Microsoft apparently hasn't done anything to correct it.
So I got a sweet new laptop at work. An IBM Thinkpad.
One thing about new computers, though, is the annoying shortcuts on the desktop. Some come pre-installed, and some are added when you install things like Office. For some reason, I feel guilty deleting them - perhaps I think that someday I'll regret deleting them (I never do) - so this time, what I did was make a folder called "shortcut_graveyard" and I stuck them all in there.
Isn't that stupid?
