I hate the tv

That last post learnt me of FastCompany the magazine, and I ran into this great piece: The Walmart You Don’t Know bashing some more…

Snip snip:

Wal-Mart priced it at $2.97–a year’s supply of pickles for less than $3! “They were using it as a ’statement’ item,” says Pat Hunn, who calls himself the “mad scientist” of Vlasic’s gallon jar. “Wal-Mart was putting it before consumers, saying, This represents what Wal-Mart’s about. You can buy a stinkin’ gallon of pickles for $2.97. And it’s the nation’s number-one brand.”

What really got me going on this topic is the theme of the Snapper post…It hurts companies to sell out their brand names to walmart for whatever the sales numbers are.

I’ve bought one of those enormous things of pickles for $2.97 from walmart last year, they sucked. They were much worse than some others I bought from the regular grocery store. The best part is that they were probably fine before the rediculous Walmart all-night-stocking system got ahold of them (and they were, for example, left outside on a pallette for a week or something).

I have seen Snapper mowers in walmart and figured they were just another has-been ex-American uber-company now relegated to a badge on a chinese product. Well Slashdot’s got a great piece on Jim Wier, CEO of Simplicity, which bought Snapper, on how he came to the decision to not sell his products at Walmart:

Every year, thousands of executives venture to Bentonville, Arkansas, hoping to get their products onto the shelves of the world’s biggest retailer. But Jim Wier wanted Wal-Mart to stop selling his Snapper mowers.What struck Jim Wier first, as he entered the Wal-Mart vice president’s office, was the seating area for visitors. “It was just some lawn chairs that some other peddler had left behind as samples.” The vice president’s office was furnished with a folding lawn chair and a chaise lounge.

And so Wier, the CEO of lawn-equipment maker Simplicity, dressed in a suit, took a seat on the chaise lounge. “I sat forward, of course, with my legs off to the side. If you’ve ever sat in a lawn chair, well, they are lower than regular chairs. And I was on the chaise. It was a bit intimidating. It was uncomfortable, and it was going to be an uncomfortable meeting.”

….

Selling Snapper lawn mowers at Wal-Mart wasn’t just incompatible with Snapper’s future — Wier thought it was hazardous to Snapper’s health. Snapper is known in the outdoor-equipment business not for huge volume but for quality, reliability, durability. A well-maintained Snapper lawn mower will last decades; many customers buy the mowers as adults because their fathers used them when they were kids. But Snapper lawn mowers are not cheap, any more than a Viking range is cheap. The value isn’t in the price, it’s in the performance and the longevity.

On a related note, NPR had a very good piece on China buying our brands names a few months back.

As a response to this inq article, I wrote this to Nick Farrell

“To Sun,

I think an easy way to get some positive talk with your name attach to it into the heads of gamers would be to donate (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) some servers to games which are not yet MMO, like battlefield2 and battlefield 1942. I still play those a bit and we could use some non-suck 64 player servers.

I know for a fact that one of them opteron servers will do nicely. I’m sure this opportunity exists for other games.

It’s just something to think about being as I, and a surprisingly large amount of us engineers, play online games. I used to know a bunch of AMD people who gamed. I’d assume its the same accross the board with us engi-dorks.

Please and Thank You,
Ihatethetv.com”

Looks like someone finally implemented the design Cole and I were talking over a few years back. Click on “Click here to see them in action…” to watch the video.

Bastards.

Snip snip:

“KERA-TV in Dallas was the first PBS station to broadcast Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and it was the Pythons’ first stop in the US after the premier of Monty Python and the Holy Grail in Los Angeles in 1975. This interview footage first aired live on KERA that year, and hasn’t been seen by the public since. It was discovered on an old reel that had been saved by an engineer, and as you can see, it cuts off after about 14 minutes… the engineer taped over the rest. It’s a look at the group being candidly questioned by fans at the peak of their fame and creative powers.”

Video can be seen here.

There’s a good few questions one covering censorship in America vs the UK.

Found through boingboing. Credits from y/t: ” Provided by The Sound of Young America, a public radio show about things that are awesome. On the web at http://www.maximumfun.org ; clip is downloadable at http://tsoya.blogspot.com“

Things like this…

…are great examples of common things that can be done better if someone just some thought put into it. There’s always going to be a need for creative design. Thanks GRYNX

Here are some other examples I ran into some other examples last night while learning about Buckminster Fuller

Boston Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley, seen below, is apparantly known for wearing non-descript brown garb. Now that he’s a cardinal he joked a bit about the new red outfit.

“Cardinal-designate Sean P. O’Malley told Boston reporters that he told the tailor, ‘I could always wear it if I was called to be on a hunting expedition with the vice president,’ Dick Cheney. ‘It’s very red.’”

From here and here. Thanks Chris!

I ran across this in a thread on FW…It details how to build this little guy:

It is a PC connection to a regular old phone. So you can use a regular phone like these at home:

Update:  This looks to be less work and more quick-and dirty.  Probably the way I’d go… They just open it up and solder wires to pads where sound comes in and out.