Friday, May 30, 2008

Question

How do you hold an idiot blog reader in suspense?

Rant: Rule Governing Arrival Time.

I find it odd that the greater the complexity governing arrival, the closer the actual time of arrival tends to be to the planned time. For example:

1. Send a spacecraft from Earth to Mars (~10 months travel time, Spaceship) and it touches down to the second;
2. Fly from San Jose to Seattle (2 hours, Jet) and the flight arrives within 5 minutes of scheduled arrival;
3. Ask for a Pacific Gas and Electric employee to visit your house (5 minutes, car) and the best they can do is to provide a four hour window.....

Now, I'm sure we can all think of many exceptions to this rule. But it still pisses me off that PG&E scheduling is so crap. Get a day planner!

(4. If your significant other is asked to do a job and has zero distance to travel and zero complexity associated with getting to the site of the intended work (e.g. bathroom to fix a leaky faucet), the work will never get done).

Saturday, May 17, 2008

Cool App: Brand Tags


Brand Tags is described as a collective experiment in brand perception. Site visitor are presented with brand names and are asked to enter the first thing that pops into their head. Results are presented similar to 'tag clouds' the size of the font employed for each user entry is proportional to the number of times that entry is made. Fun exercise is to browse the tag clouds trying to guess the brand from just the tags - it's eerily easy to do in the vast majority of case. And boy, do people have a negative brand perception of Microsoft... Amazon does well.

Sunday, May 04, 2008

Amazon - "In their own words"



Finished work on editing the Website Platform entry for the Amazon video contest. I've created a cut-down version here with just the animation and staff shots. Enjoy.