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

Technorati: parody, boingboing

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)

Technorati: dog, pet, color, deisgn, style

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.

Technorati: writing, process

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 flim (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 filmmaking (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.

Technorati: star+wars, candy, merchandising, crass

Andrew Susser, head of Bank of America�s high yield research group, was fired after a report was sent to clients with Mr. Susser�s head superimposed on a woman�s body. The report, entitled �Checking In�, included on its front page a doctored picture of Mr. Susser in women�s clothing being carried through the threshold of a hotel suite by another man.

Technorati: Photoshop, scandal, corporate+America

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.

Technorati: logo, design, Ron+Jeremy

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.

Technorati: garbage+pail+kids, collecting, BitTorrent

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

Technorati: Adaptive+Path, blogging, San+Francisco, SFist

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.

Technorati: duh, NYT, Circuits, travel

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.

Technorati: apples, review, flavor, taste+test

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.

Technorati: cereal, sugar, nutrition, packaging

Today I received this email

To: steve_portigal@sbcglobal.net
From: steve_portigal@sbcglobal.net
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.

Technorati: usability, error+message, ISP

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.

Technorati: lawsuit, caterpillar, protest, Israel

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.

Technorati: Montara, community, car

Lord of Rings - The Musical

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!

Technorati: musical, Lord+Of+The+Rings, Tolkien, Simpsons

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 acknowledgement 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

Technorati: comcast, customer+service, horror, resolution