How dumb are you?

I have this thing about packaging. Packaging can be an afterthought, and it’s rare that a company really engineers their packaging (Apple is a rarity here). I think poor packaging can be forgiven up to a point. Sure, there’s an expense involved in reengineering a package if there’s a problem, so it’s rare that a company is going to spend the time and energy to rework it.

Here’s the thing. Your package is your first impression. If it’s hard to get your product out of the package (or even worse, if you ruin the product), then you’re hurting your brand imaging. Packaging is advertising.

Maybe they should have used the rest of the chicken

Last night John, Justin, Theresa, Brian, Ben, and I went to Mohegan Sun to see Chickenfoot. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a fan of Hagar (and Michael Anthony too). Take Hagar and Anthony and throw in Chad Smith from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Joe Satriani and you should have an amazing band… at least that’s the idea. I bought the Chickenfoot album with high hopes, and although the album is decent, it’s not very memorable. I expected more out of a live concert.

The Wave

Simply buying a car can put you into a club with others owning the same car. I was thinking today, after getting a wave from a fellow WRX owner, what are the deciding factors that establish the need (or want) to wave to someone else. If you’ve bought a Corolla you’re not going to be waving to others that own Corollas.

So what makes a car “wavable”? I’ve driven three vehicles that were “wavable”:

• 1996 Jeep Wrangler
• 1997 Jeep Cherokee (normally not wavable, but mine is because it’s lifted)
• 2005 Impreza WRX (although the base model Impreza is not wavable)

Putting the word out

I’ve been doing a lot of research into my family, really the big mystery is my mother’s side of the family. My mother was adopted when she was four (and I know it’s uncouth to share an age, but this happened probably around 1951 or so). About a decade ago she was able to get a copy of her original birth certificate, and with that I’ve been trying to discover her past.

New MacBook

After my post complaining that I didn’t want to upgrade my machine because it still had a year of AppleCare on it, my MacBook died (it must have been listening to me). Luckily I had AppleCare on it, so the repair didn’t cost me anything (that repair alone certainly paid for the cost of AppleCare). In the meantime I kinda felt like that was a sign.

So I bought a new computer. As I mentioned earlier, the specs on the new machines aren’t tremendously better than what I already had, in fact I would say the greatest benefit is the 4x ceiling on the memory (although the new machine is also 64bit, so maybe with Snow Leopard I’ll see a performance bump).