Most ridiculous co-branding example of the week.

I could do a whole blog on the stupid shit I see at the grocery store. Who thinks up this shit? What marketing moron actually came up with the idea to print Trivial Pursuit questions in the frosting of Pop-Tarts? How can such a retarded concept be born? Sure dual-branding is epidemic. There is Scope in my Crest, Downey in my Tide, and every kind of trade-marked cookie and candy bar imaginable in my ice cream. It's just the next step in the conspiracy to stretch the toothpaste aisle (or in this case, the toaster pastry aisle) another 10 feet. But who the fuck is going to buy a package of Part-Tarts in order to get in a quick game of trivia at the breakfast table.

As I've said before: All marketing people are idiots. As several commenters previously pointed out: Brand managers are a few steps dumber.

Lost in the Hallmark store

Shopping for a Valentines or other card for the wife is just excruciating. I pick up one card after another & they just all suck. Mushy ones with full page poems are enough to make you puke. Funny ones are even worse. It's all pablum. I just stand there and reject each one the instant I pick it up. Now being a supposedly creative guy, I should just make something up myself, but I have a real hard time being creative in my spare time (possibly because I have no spare time!) so a day before V-Day I'm at the mercy of Hallmark.

I do feel for the people whose job it is to think this shit up day after endless day. Talk about creative burnout! It would be enough to make someone go postal! "Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, If I have to write any more shit like this, I'm going to blow you all to Timbuktu"

Gee, that's big of you, Quark

Just got this email from Quark, the page layout program that I ceremoniously dumped about a year ago. I no longer use the program, except for the occasional update to an old job that I haven't felt like converting to InDesign. Quark just came out with a new version that I have no intention of buying, and know next to nothing about. The email stated with great excitement, Important licensing change: Upgrade to QuarkXPress 7 and continue to run QuarkXPress 6. Yes, it’s true. Your license for QuarkXPress 6 remains alive and well when you upgrade to QuarkXPress 7

Well, what the fuck, Quark. You mean that before this big announcement you were actually forcing people to disable the old version that they had payed $1000 for? When anybody who has ever used Quark knows that any new version will be so full of bugs that they will end up reverting to the old version for the two years it takes Quark to fix all the problems anyways?

That's the bullshit that has caused everybody to abandon this company in droves. The fact that you set up the new release like that in the first place, and now consider it a big gift to your customers to let them keep using the old version shows that nothing has changed in Quarkland.

I'm very happy to be through with you.

[computers] [graphic design] [products] [publishing]

My 4-year old got a hooker doll for her birthday

Here's a picture of a doll that my 4-year old got for her birthday from the mother of a school friend. Now, is it me, or is this just a little bit over the top.

What's next, the whips and chains accessory pack?

Now the little darling often exhibits teenage behavior already, but I thought I had a few years left before I started to have to deal with this kind of stuff.

Public School Silliness Part 1

My kid started kindergarten this week, and so begins my education into ridiculous government regulations. Actually it started somewhat in preschool with my introduction to the concept of peanut-free schools.

Well my son's new elementary school isn't peanut-free, only peanut sensitive. But it is newly homemade bakes goods free, No more bake sales. We got the official regulation today. No goods baked at home will be allowed for any school events. All foods must be prepackaged or cooked in a "licensed kitchen," meaning a restaurant, grocery store, or bakery. So it''s OK to go to the bakery at Stop and Shop, or presumably even Dunkin Donuts, and buy cookies and bring them in. But you are not allowed to bake your own brownies for the school bake sale. What would Betty Crocker say?

Now I first assumed that this ridiculousness was a product of the Massachusetts Democratic Legislature (remember Fluff madness?). But no, it's a new Federal Regulation signed by George W called the Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act.

I'll bet if you follow that legislation back, that somewhere there is a trail of large donations to Senators from the Bakers' Union or whatever lobbying group represents bakery owners. Just gotta cut off that competition from Aunt Betty making her own brownies for the school bake sale. It's threatening bakery owners everywhere.

It's a Fluff Circus

Can't we all just stop talking about Fluff and get along?

• No kids shouldn't be served Fluffernutters every day for school lunch.


• No, our legislators shouldn't be spending time making laws to this effect.


• No, the Fluffernutter shouldn't be the state sandwich.


• Can't you all just get back to important issues like flag burning, and let talk radio get back to immigrant hysteria.

I sort of feel responsible for this, because Sunday at the beach (the day before Fluffmania started) I got all Cambridgey and scolded the wife for bringing Fluffernutters for the kids.

Far from "Fantastic"

This is some disgusting shit. We're not big into packaged foods, but somewhere along the line someone grabbed this from the health food aisle at the supermarket: Fantastic Foods Vegetarian Pad Thai. After a weekend of insanity, bailing out our flooded cellar etc., and home alone for dinner, it was just the kind of night to reach for some prepackaged meal, and shove it in the microwave. Or in this case drop the plastic container in a pot of boiling water for three minutes. Yuk. What shit. Little squares of something that was supposed to be tofu, I guess, but tasted like leather. About 12 noodles with no taste. Three bites and into the trash.

I would have been much better off, eating the three-week old real Pad Thai leftovers from our yummy local Thai place, that was buried in the back of the fridge. Or, I guess in the time it took me to cook, eat, throw away, and then blog about this crap, I could have gone down to the Thai place and ordered a fresh order or the real thing.

Hosed again!

My wife has done it again. Heard some great and wondrous product advertised on the radio, and gone and shelled out 30 bucks for it, and left it for me to deal with it being a piece of shit.

This time it was this wondrous Liquid Lime she heard advertised on her garden god Paul Parent's show. So your lawn can be greener in two days rather than five. Never mind that our lawn is half dirt anyways. Of course it's obvious to me and anyone with a cynical bone in their body that behind every product hyped on any radio talk show is some type of payola deal.

So the stuff comes in this jug, with this little flimsy hose end adapter. The directions on the jug are completely unintelligible. Sort of tells you what area it should cover, but makes no mention of how the "convenient hose end adapter" works or how much to spray in any one place. And the adapter is a complete piece of shit. It doesn't even have a full set of hose threads to hold it on the hose. Just these little grooves, that barely hold it, even if you don't turn the water on or move the thing around at all. Turn the water on and it squirts out the back end all over you. After about a dozen tries, I finally got it to hold and not leak too much. I very cautiously made it through about half the back lawn, and then the piece of shit adapter let loose and soaked me all over. And it hadn't even used barely any of the stuff in the jug, so it doesn't seem like it was even mixing right.

I have no idea if the product in the jug is any good or not. Of course the wife will tell me to go spend another 30 bucks on a garden sprayer and apply it that way, but the fact that they would sell the shit as "just attach to your hose and spray" when you can't even get it to stay attached to your fucking hose, makes it more likely it will just be returned to the store. Actually it will probably end up stuck in the corner of the garage with all the other useless crap we've bought that doesn't work.

What we've got here is failure to communicate

Cell phones suck. I friggin hate talking on them. For some reason lately, everyone has been calling me on the cellphone. And there just always seems to be a disconnect in the communications. There is like a time lag or something, that is just enough to screw up the timing of the conversation. I start to talk. But they had already started to talk. Then we both stop, because we think we are interrupting the other. Or worse, we both talk louder to try to take control of the conversation. Then there is a dead spot, and you miss a vital piece of information. It's just a friggin mess. Call me on the god damn land line next time.

4/19 UPDATE: Here's a technological explaination of what I'm talking about, and why people shout on cellphones.

Stupid Warning Labels

I'm being a cranky Easter Bunny right now. I'm sitting here with a couple dozen Play-Doh easter eggs, and they are annoying in so many ways.

First, each one is tightly shrink-wrapped, so I have to sit here with a steak knife unwrapping each one. Why everything has to be sealed that thoroughly is beyond me. And nothing bugs me more than plastic wrapped in plastic.

Second, there is this little white sticker warning label on each one (of course it had to be printed in three languages, but don't get me started on that!) Didn't pay much attention at first, but then I read what it said: Notice to Parents: Contains Wheat.

Now the people who scolded me when I griped about peanut free schools will probably point out that there are kids with wheat allergies. But it's fucking Play-Doh! If little Junior decides to eat it, I'm sure there are a lot worse things in it than fucking wheat!

And by the way, we are using Play-Doh Easter eggs in the first place because my diabetic nephew will be here, and we are being correctly sensitive by not putting candy in them.

Now when I was a kid, the Easter Bunny only hid real eggs, but that's another issue.

Wipeout

My wife is wipe happy. Not being near as cynical as me, she pretty much falls for any new kind of product marketing scam that comes about. You must have noticed the proliferation of wipes. They are the outgrowth of the moist towelettes that you used to get after eating ribs or something. Now they are everywhere. Any product that you used to be able to buy in a spray bottle and then use with a cloth or paper towel, can now be purchased as a "wipe" Essentially they are presoaked paper towels.

The above photograph clearly demonstrates wipe madness. This is from a web site called PetSafe that sells pet products. They have 10 different types of pet-specific wipes including ear wipes, eye wipes, toothpaste wipes, muddy paws wipes, rabbit & small animal wipes, top and tail wipes etc. If you own an animal, I guess you must get them all, because it just wouldn't be right to wipe Fido's tail with the same product you are wiping his ears with. And you certainly wouldn't want to wipe his teeth with the same thing you wipe his eyes with. Yuk.

In my house it all started with baby wipes (Note that like Colgate, there are many different flavors). We went through thousands, and yes, they were pretty convenient. But now we have Windex wipes, Murphy's wipes. Pledge wipes, Lysol wipes, Clorox wipes, Stainless steel cleaning wipes, 409 wipes, Armor-All wipes, and probably 20 other kinds of wipes.

I'm not even sure why they suck. They are really very convenient, I guess. It's much easier to grab a Windex wipe than to grab the Windex and a roll of paper towels. The main reason they suck has to do with my natural suspicion that these companies are making a killing on them. A package of Windex wipes costs as much as a bottle of Windex, and although I haven't done any scientific research to prove this, I would bet a bundle that there is a hell of a lot less than a bottle of Windex used to make a package of Windex wipes. So where does all the money saved go? Right into the companies pockets, no doubt.

The other reason they suck, is that while the first couple out of the package work fine, by the time you get past halfway, they are always too dried out to work. So now you end up throwing out half of the already overpriced package. And I'd love to know exactly what the difference in ingredients is between doggie ear wipes, and doggie tail wipes. They are probably all just dipped in water, anyways.

Then we have something that is even more ridiculous, called Swiffer wipes. Essentially it is a package of throw-away dust clothes. Of course my wife snapped these up too, because its just so much easier to grab a nice soft static free cloth out of a box, than to go get a rag out of the basement when you need to dust. And then you can just throw it away when you are done.

4/15 UPDATE
More wipe madness today. I have to vent to you my dear readers, because the wife gets mad at me when I point of the ridiculousness of this shit to her.

So I'm cleaning off the patio furniture in time for Easter. Using the old-fashioned method: a sponge and a pail of soapy water. It's working perfectly fine. Until my wife comes home from the store. "Oh, hold on. Look what I got." Fuck no! A $5.00 can of Outdoor Patio Furniture Wipes. Another $5.00 for 1 ounce of some soapy liquid soaked into paper towels. Don't you know I just this week wrote a 500 word essay of why wipes suck! No thanks. I'll stick with the sponge.

Then tonight: "Can you help clean the appliances?" And out come the Stainless Steel Wipes. Of course they are too dried out to work, even though the package is still half full. But she just happened to have bought a new one when she bought the Patio Furniture Wipes. Another 5 bucks. So into the trash go the dried up, half full can, and out come the brand new package. Might as well use them liberally, because by the time we need them again, they will all be dried up anyways.

Packaging Madness

I just ordered a new camera. Through the miracle of the internet/delivery-industry complex, it arrived barely 24 hours after I ordered it via Amazon. Camera arrived in a reasonable sized box, and cost something like $13 for delivery. Small price to pay since the camera cost me $40 less than anywhere else I saw it.

But I also ordered a memory card from a separate vendor. Again, I shopped around and got a super good deal, so I didn't grumble that much about paying $6 for delivery of a $9 item. It's all relative.

But check this picture out. See the little blue spec at the bottom of the box. That is the memory card (1" x 1.25" x 1/32") resting against the box it came in. (12" x 9" x 8")

That's just packaging craziness.

At least it wasn't filled with styrofoam peanuts. That really would have pissed me off.

This could turn into a really long post on this subject, but I just don't have the time right now. My son's birthday isn't too far away, and that might be a better time to get into the whole broader issue of packaging madness. Nothing is nuttier than the way kids toys are packaged.

Disposable everything

I just went shopping for a new digital camera today. The LCD window on my two year old one broke, and it's not worth fixing. Nothing is worth fixing these days. Two years is about the maximum life expectancy of anything electronic. Either it breaks, and costs more to fix than its worth, or it just becomes obsolete. Cameras, cell phones, DVD players. Anything.

I don't know how many DVD and CD players I've gone through over the years. They just stop working, and it always costs more to fix than a new one costs. I don't even look into fixing these things anymore. I just buy a new one. Throw the old one away. More junk for the landfill.

I have a brief guilty conscious about adding more junk to the landfill, some nightmare flashes of humans being crushed out of existence by piles of dead electronics, and then just heave it. Go to Best Buy and buy another one.

It doesn't even pay to buy a good one anymore. Even the good die young. If its gonna die or become obsolete in a year, I might as well just buy the cheap one to begin with, and act like I'm just leasing it for a couple years. At the end of its two year lease, I'll just get another one. Horrible attitude, but that seems to be life in the electronic aisle.

Lost in the supermarket

Do you ever wonder why every drug store is a superstore now? It's because we have 20 different kinds of Colgate. Right next to 15 different kinds of Crest. Next to 50 other brands of toothpaste in a dozen flavors each.

And that's only the toothpaste aisle. Then there is the deodorant aisle. I like one kind of deodorant. The kind that's a gel, but not a liquid gel. Sort of a hard gel. But I can go to the CVS, stand there for ten minutes, looking at 500 kinds of deodorant, and still not find the one I'm looking for. See. I'm adding to the problem, because I have to have just the right kind of deodorant. I guess there are people out there who support each of the other 499 variations too.

And what about the cold medicine aisle. Must be 20 kinds of Robitussin alone. One for each possible symptom: cough, sneezing, congestion, sore throat. Then one with every combination of two symptoms. Then one with all the symptoms. Then each of those possible options in Cherry. Then the generic versions. CVSTussin in all the same options. So you stand there thinking. Well, I have sniffles and a cough, but I don't really have a sore throat. Where's the version for that? Oh, fuck it, just buy the one that covers everything, and get me out of this place!

It's nuts.

You know what causes this. Same thing that causes all the other ills of consumerism. Marketing! It's a thing called shelf-space. If there are more kinds of Colgate, then Colgate will take up more space in the aisle than Crest. And if you walk in and see more Colgate, then chances are you are going to walk out with Colgate. Why do you think I buy Robitussin? Because you walk into the cold aisle, and all you see is fuckin Robitussin.

So this is why the CVS is now as big as the supermarket was when I was a kid. And why the supermarket is the size of football stadium.

Fucking marketing.

[marketing] [products] [society] [suburbia]

Quark, you and I are through

This is going to be a bit of inside baseball for most general readers. Not sure how many people outside the publishing business even know what Quark XPress is. For the uninitiated, it is the software program that has been the standard bearer for producing newspapers, magazines etc., since the publishing world went desktop nearly 20 years ago. I have been essentially married to it since I started using version 1.0 back in about 1987. Do other people whose jobs center around the computer feel that way about the software program they use most? That you know it so well... know all its quirks (a favorite Quark nickname)... know what annoys you about it... how to manipulate it to make it do what you want. It really is like being married. Can't live with it, but can't live without it.

Anyway Friday, after whining (along with most other Quark users) for nearly five years and wasting half the day trying to uncover the reason for it's daily flip-out, I started to switch my largest job over to InDesign, the competing program by Adobe. It's a huge undertaking, because not only do you have to rebuild the entire job template from scratch, but you have to essentially learn a new language at the same time. InDesign, from all my experience so far does everything better, but also does everything different.

Now as to why, I have had to take this drastic step:

Quark Xpress, for at least the last five years has become the suckiest software program on earth, and Quark the most arrogant company. What other program regularly corrupts files beyond repair, rendering a 50 page magazine file useless. Of course anybody who used Quark with any regularity has become so paranoid that they back up files, make duplicates, copy the files to another machine about every ten minutes, just because they know that eventually Quark is going to kill the file.

Five or so years ago, Apple moved its operating system to OS X, a system that required software developers to completely rewrite their software. Every other software company whose clients worked heavily on the Mac, had their software updated within six months to a year. Quark took nearly three years to come up with a release that was compatible with OS X, forcing users to either put off upgrading their systems, and therefore upgrading any other software they owned. Or to run a completely separate system in the background, a process that led to a whole host of other problems.

When Quark finally did come up with a new version three years later, if was so full of bugs, that many people still didn't upgrade. It crashes regularly, displays things on the screen that aren't really there, and many other problems too numerous to even get into.

Quark Inc. has also behaved like the arrogant monopoly that is was. Nobody (except me) ever bought version 5.0, because it came out after OS X, but wasn't OS X compatible. So 90% of users were still using 4.0. When Quark finally did come out with a new version that was OS X compatible three years later (6.0), they purposely put a block on it, so you couldn't downsave to 4.0. Essentially they were forcing everyone to buy the upgrade for every computer they owned.

So anybody that did upgrade right away had to deal with clients that were still on 4.0, and hence, couldn't open the files. Any users with a history with Quark know not to upgrade right away, because every new version they come out with is completely riddled with bugs. So users were in this classic Catch-22. Should I upgrade first, and have my client not be able to open my files, of wait, and have the opposite problem?

Over the past year, most of the publishing industry has been switching over to InDesign. I bought it about a year ago, and have been slowly learning it, and building jobs for new clients in it for six months. It seems like a great program. It may have its own share of problems, and Adobe is an even bigger monopoly than Quark ever was. But if nothing else, I no longer live in quite the fear I always did with Quark, that if I do something it doesn't like, it's going to destroy a week's worth of work.

So goodbye Quark. You were my first software love. We had some good times together. But now its time to leave your sorry ass behind.

One bad Apple

I've been a Mac guy for 20 years. I love Apple. I love Steve Jobs. But I'm really pissed at them right now. I just finally broke down and had to spend $82 on a friggin power cord for my Powerbook. The old one has been held together with electrical tape for the past year, and it finally will hold no longer. It's the most horribly designed thing I've ever seen from them. A cord about 1/32" in diameter that obviously will get pulled on and rip apart. And the fact that it costs $82 is just unbelievable. It's not just me. There are 443 reviews on the Apple Store page that nearly unanimously call it a piece of shit. 443 people took the time to rate a power cord. And the thing is, the new one will be just as bad, and in another year, I'll have to buy another. Here is just a sampling of the reviews on the Apple Store page of this expensive piece of junk:

• This adapter is terrible. It will fray, come loose, spark, and eventually fail to charge your laptop. However, it's the only one made for the powerbooks, so you're screwed. Laptops are meant to be portable, and this cable just can't keep up. I'm disappointed that a company such as apple would make such garbage. AND that they continue to do NOTHING for powerbook owners to resolve this issue. IF I COULD GIVE IT NO STARS I WOULD.


• We are on the third power adapter for my wife's iBook. It's painful having to fork over this much money yet again. If the failure rate for these things is so high, why would they charge so much money? What a disappointment! This weakens my trust in Apple.


• Durability is non-existent. Fire hazard is extreme. After receiving electrical shocks from frayed wires and an obvious defect in design, is it time to hold Apple liable?

This phone sucks

Quick post here. This phone is complete a piece of shit. Don't buy it. VTech model 2656 in case anybody is searching the web for a review. Review is: It sucks.

Honey I squished the picture

No this post isn't about Howard Dean, although there will be plenty of time to comment on that latest attempt at self-destruction by the Democrats. This gripe is about wide-screen TVs, and how people watch regular formatted TV stretched-to-fit a wide screen. It doesn't seem to bother anyone but me.

You go into a bar, and unless it's a sporting event, the TV is always stretch-to-fit. They'll have the news, or an old movie on, and everyone looks like Oomp-Loompas. And nobody is bothered by it. It's the main reason I haven't bought a widescreen TV yet.

Hey, I'm a little anal, but I refuse to even watch the news on certain channels in the winter, because they squish the picture to put the no school announcements at the bottom of the screen. Would much rather they chop off Ed Harding's neck, than to make his head any fatter.

Isn't there anyone else bothered by watching TV like this?

Too Many Remotes

Is it ever really possible to get one remote to control all the features of your TV, DVD & Cable Box? I've never found a way. I've come close, but there is always something you need to do, that can only be done with the one remote that is lost. And why can't I ever learn to put all the remotes back in a place where I can find them?

This Year's Crappiest Toy

Those toys were pretty cheap, but this was the worst toy of the Christmas season in our house. Not faulting the buyer of it-looked like a cool remote control truck for my 4 year old son. Nowhere on the box did it mention that it had a 4-FOOT LEASH. From some company called New Bright Quality Toys. What is it with remote control toys? Last Christmas we took two of them back that absolutely didn't work at all.