After getting cable for the first time since 1992, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t have a 30 second commercial skip button on the Motorola remote. After some internet searching, I found these instructions:
1) Press the “Cable” button at the top of the remote to put it into Cable Box control mode.
2) Press and hold the “Setup” button until the “Cable” button blinks twice.
3) Type in the code 994. The “Cable” button will blink twice
4) Press (do not hold) the “Setup” button
5) Type in the code 00173 (for 30 second Skip)
6) Press whatever button you want to map the skip
I replaced the mute button, since I never run into a need to mute it (I just hit pause instead, since I have a DVR.)
Now this is what I call advertising. After the auto maker Audi ran a national billboard campaign featuring the text “Your move, BMW” a local BMW dealer came up with the perfect counter ad: “Checkmate”
It really is amazing what we can’t see. Todays Astronomy Picture Of the Day takes a 40 hour, wide field, exposure to show what the night sky would look like if we could see what was really there. This isn’t your normal astro-photo and is worth a look.
“Stealing music is not killing music,” said Pittman. “When I talk to people in the music business, most of them will admit that the problem is they’re selling songs and not albums. I mean, you do the math… I realized that as an industry we’d kind of been smoking crack.”
And my personal favorite:
[...] director Steven Soderbergh, who is currently the vice president of the Directors Guild of America, wants us to become more like France. “Litigation is slow and the Internet is fast, so it doesn’t make sense to ask the government to be our police,” he said. “What we would like is to be deputized to solve our own problems, to be granted the kind of pull-down and inspection abilities being proposed in France so we can act swiftly and fairly on our own behalf.”
I’m not quite sure why so many companies undergo rebranding initiatives. Walmart did one recently that made no sense to me, and Tropicana just decided to rebrand as well. In fact, it appears that Tropicana’s rebranding directly caused a 20% reduction in sales. It’s not hard to tell why when you compare the old and the new packages. More on the AdAge article about this blunder.
Branding is expensive. Changing an existing brand is even more expensive. Going from a good brand to what can only be described as “generic” is sheer insanity. Idiots.
“Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.” -Jack Handey
All the content above was randomly generated, according to this meme and slopped together using Photoshop. I can’t help but think that it really does look like it could be a real album.
To add my own twist, I decided to link to the first song I could find that was free… it ended up being pretty good too. Listen to it to complete the experience.
Working with such random content was sort of refreshing. It certainly let me spend some time focusing on getting the typography just the way I wanted it.
During its first decade, the Mac offered clearly superior usability compared to competing personal computer platforms (DOS, Windows, OS/2). Not until Windows 95 did the PC start to approximate Mac-level usability. Despite this Mac advantage, PCs have sold vastly better in every single year since 1984, and the Mac has yet to exceed a single-digit market share.
The Mac’s miserable marketplace performance seems to pose a strong argument against usability. Why bother, if it doesn’t sell? The counter-argument is that usability is the only reason Mac survived.
