As I thought about the branding on the thermostats, it strikes me that nearly every product has branding on it. Often it's a small, unobtrusive label but it seems that many products have added increasingly intrusive branding to the products' design. I certainly understand the traditional theories behind brands and their ongoing, if decreasing, effectiveness. But for many products, the brand really has no value, no recognition and the branding effectively decreases the products' value in my opinion. I've experienced situations where the branding ruined the products' design or look and made me look elsewhere.

The other thing that strikes me as odd, is the smaller players constantly changing brands and images. Even the larger players are often guilty of this. Without a clear, consistent brand and image, there is no hope of generating any benefits from the branding.

I've been thinking about getting a new desktop. The biggest drawback is not spending the cash, but what to do with the old computer and monitor. I have a growing pile of old pieces of technology that are taking up way too much space. They all still work perfectly fine and I may find a use for them in the future, but currently they have no real market value and I have no use for them. The current plan is a non-plan, hold onto them until they are so obsolete that I could have no possible for use them in the future.

I just opened a software product. It had a heat sealed hard plastic outer shell which contained a CD case wrapped in heat sealed plastic. The critical unlock number was contained within the cardboard backer on a sheet just slightly bigger than will fit in the CD jewel case.

Prior to that I opened an Xbox game. It came in shrink wrap, which held the French packaging and manual and another shrink wrapped package. This one contained the normal English package. Then there were 3 plastic security stickers that held the DVD style case closed. Finally there was a magnetic security tag stuck inside.

Before that another Xbox game. It came in a cardboard box, which held another cardboard box. The second box had a cardboard wrapper that needed to be removed before you could open it. Inside that was a shrink wrapped DVD case, security stickers on the case and security tag within.

Is all this really necessary? It's pretty clear after my garbage can is full from just opening one package to reveal a CD, that it is wasteful. And it certainly is annoying spending many minutes unraveling the whole mess.

The second problem I continuously have is that various 'features' of my service 'fall out' of my account. My current contract is made up of a confusing series of charges and credits. The most recent issue involved one of the credits going missing from my account. I had to call up and spend several minutes on the phone to reinstate it. However the agent was very friendly and helpful on the phone. She was the also one who finally was able to tell me why my voice mail was coming up as a net $1 charge and gave me a one month credit ($1) for the trouble.

Finally, while traveling in Texas a few months ago I discovered that my voice mail did not function at all. I rely on the voice mail while traveling to screen calls to avoid the astronomical roaming charges. It wasn't till the end of the trip I found out it wasn't working at all.

The power supply in my desktop computer failed recently also. Luckily I had spares so I took my time to find the right replacement and ordered it. It arrived and within a week failed. Coincidently at the same time as my desktop became infected with a virus. Got both fixed up.

I've been living with some renovations to my apartment for the past 4 months and they continue. It's a growing annoyance and disruption as I constantly have to displace my belongings on short notice and live without some part of my apartment, not to mention the noise and early wake ups. Last week they ripped out the bathtub on less than the required 24 hours notice. It was said this would take 2 days. 9 days later and I could finally use my shower again.

Winter Windshield Washer Fluid
I always fill my car with winter rated windshield washer fluid. My car has a washer tank ~5-6 liters and I end up adding another 4l every year or two. So it just doesn't make sense to put summer fluid in. I've never noticed a cleaning difference and if you're stuck with summer fluid in winter, you're just out of luck as it freezes. Adding the winter fluid at this point doesn't help as the different densities don't tend to mix. Being heavier the summer fluid tends to stick at the bottom, so you gotta use that up first. Someone at a service center put in some low grade summer fluid (freezing point ~ -5 to -10) and it has been frozen solid a lot recently, even when the salted roads are melting and piling up on my windshield.

Always RMAing Something
I seem to be constantly RMAing products back for warranty repair. Mostly electronics. Its quite a pain, takes a lot of time and effort, costs money for the shipping and I need backup products to serve in the meantime. Don't know why everything breaks so often for me.

To start with, I use a 1-wire network to connect several sensors for monitoring. I use Maxim/Dallas DS1920 Temperature iButtons and AAG Electronica TAI8540B Humidity Sensors for the indoor sensing. Outdoors I use a Hobby Boards Humidity/Temp/Solar Sensor in a Davis 7714 Solar Radiation Shield. The sensors are simply connected with telephone cabling. The internal iButtons are mounted to Maxim/Dallas DS1402D-DR8 Blue Dot Receptacles and the Humidity sensors are pre-cabled. A Maxim/Dallas DS9097U-009 adapter provides a serial interface to the 1-wire network and is connected to my server machine. Incidently, all these sensors are parasitically powered from the 1-wire network solely by attempting to read from them. On my server machine I periodically run the DigiTemp software to poll each sensor and store the results in an RRD (Round Robin Database) using RRDtool. I then use RRDtool again to periodically plot the data and produce the graphs displayed. System temperatures are garnered from the onboard motherboard sensors using xmbmon.

It occurred to me that everyone I know has gone to a dealer looking to buy a car, only to get turned off and walk out and end up buying the car at another location. There has to be something wrong if at absolutely every occasion I can remember, the company has turned away a sale, thats just horrible business practice.

The big sticking point always seems to be price. No sales person ever wants to tip their hand too early and actually tell you their price. Give it up already, pick a reasonable money to earn, add it to the invoice and tell people thats the price you'll sell the car for. People are much better informed about the actual prices of the vehicles and what they are selling for these days. Even if they aren't, giving them a good price is likely to do much more to ensure loyalty and bring them and their friends and family back than eeking out a few extra bucks up front.

I know I specifically bought my last vehicle where I did because the salesman was up front with a reasonable price when I asked. I wouldn't have even stuck around if he wasn't.

Saturday we headed out to the Maker Faire, some interesting, some wacky and some weird. Caught a live full scale mouse trap game and an eepybird Diet Coke and Mentos display out in the hot Texas sun.

Sunday morning we dragged ourselves out to watch Nugget, Equiraptor and Petrdoubt in autocross. In the afternoon stopped to do a bit of geocaching. I broke my rules and ended up with a bit of poison ivy. The ivy down there must be different, because I didn't spot any of it.

Nerf and Moike arrived by Monday for a special Nuclear Taco Night, which was a blast.

During the week, we worked on some of the distributed.net Todo items, and got quite a few started and a good number finished. I think I might have scored the highest number of check-ins for the week.

Thursday we took in a Linkedin meet and greet. Austin has a much larger tech community than Winnipeg, and its cool to see all the tech related activities that are generated by that. It felt kinda odd going to a tech event and you actually recognized the companies people worked at.

Saturday we headed to Houston and met up with dbaker at his new house and to round out the meet map. The main purpose of the trip to Houston was to attend the Porcupine Tree concert and that we did with a long late nite return trip in the party bus.

The tail end of the weekend we finalized the notarization of everybody to bring them into the Thawte Web of Trust. Which means that I now am a Thawte Notary and can extend trust to other people. I also managed to become an Assurer for Cacert. Contact me for notarization or assurance on either.

Over the visit we ate at some good, interesting and unique spots. From BBQ to Tex-Mex to beer centric locales, a burger shack dock lakeside where we spotted some turtles sunning themselves, to a huge sprawling series of decks on a cliff side overlooking the lake, to an awesome multi-course fondue restaurant. The customer service was very good at most of the spots. I found it rather nice that there was a good variety of places we visited and all were reasonably priced, with good food and service, each well worth a return.

Some solutions to these problems: A) In hallways walk as though its a highway, stick to the right side (or left depending on location). You'll often see this happen naturally in high schools during class changes. B) Figure out where people are going to and coming from and design accordingly. C) Consider the users and uses when designing, changing and altering facilities that encounter high traffic. D) Monitor usage and problems and readjust. Pretty basic stuff. But its the attention to details that really makes or breaks it.