TQSFOSYDN

Fool that I am, I have taken my own advice and stolen some time to write a new post to this blog. The subject today is the latest catalog from “The Quintessential Source For Overpriced Stuff You Don’t Need” store. Some call it The Sharper Image.

Every time I look through one of their catalogs, I’m struck with the amazing array of expensive products that replace simple manual devices. Many claim to do things you could easily accomplish without any gadget at all. Admittedly I love gadgets, but I also value simplicity in my life and I don’t like to get ripped off. Balance, right?

For a gadget to make it past my screening system it must be well designed, it must empower me to accomplish something I couldn’t otherwise do or save me time, and it should be priced reasonably for what it does. Since I am cursed with an engineering background, I automatically estimate in my head what the thing might cost to make. If they’re asking 25 times my estimate of the manufacturing cost, I get a bad feeling and usually move on.

In the case of the above mentioned catalog, they clearly go to extreme lengths to boost the perceived value of their gadgets through hype and hyperbole. I guess that’s just part of the whole business model: Overpriced stuff + artificially inflated perceived value = sales.

So, after perusing the catalog, I felt compelled to make a short list of items that in my opinion are either highly overpriced for what they deliver, or fundamentally unnecessary for the modern man or woman.

Panasonic Rechargeable Shaver and extra blades: $325
Mach III razor and extra blades: $20

Professional Electronic Weather Station: $250
Stick you head outside: $0

Cobalt Turbo Nose Hair Trimmer: $50
Nose Hair Scissors: $11

Sonicare Electric Toothbrush & one Refill: $142
6 pack of Oral-B toothbrushes and some floss picks: $11

Soap Genie Electric Soap Dispenser: $40
Neutrogena Liquid Soap Pump Dispenser: $2

Automatic Eyeglass Cleaner Gizmo & extra Solution: $60
Tap water, soap and a box of Kleenex: $2

Deluxe Leather Electric Watch Winder: $130
Your Own Index Finger and Thumb: $0

Total QSFOSYDN purchase: $997
The Simple Life: $46

For those who also get the catalog, you will note that I breezed right past the $500 electric picture frame and the $4000 massage chair.

My advice: Chop wood, carry water and travel light.

Mea Culpa

For those who come here and are disappointed in not seeing anything recently published, my apologies. I guess it is some combination of writer’s block, lack of time, and just plain laziness. In my defense, I am trying to start up a small manufacturing business that has sucked up pretty much all of my time and creative juices, leaving precious little for blogging. I know, sorry excuse but there it is.

I can’t promise that I will be able to allocate more time for posting, but you never know, it could happen. I do indeed get a degree of satisfaction out of making observations about cultural anomalies or prognosticating about the demise of life as we know it, so I will try to set aside more time. At least it's therapeutic for me if not for my readers.

Product Reviews

What do you do when you’re thinking about buying a new car or appliance or some new gadget? Do you jump in the car and spend hours or days going around to various stores and asking salesmen their “honest” opinion about their products? I can’t remember when I stopped doing that – probably shortly after I was able to get on the internet.

Truth is, a big percentage of people now go online to do their product research. We visit several online retailers like Amazon or Buy.com and see what all the competing products are and read the reviews. The reviews are particularly interesting, especially when they are negative or marginal.

But have you ever wondered who writes these reviews? I get this weekly e-mail from a place called DealUnion that lists all the specials and discounts offered by various online retailers and I noticed a line for a Bissell spotcarpet cleaner, which I have thinking about getting (we have cats and dogs!). So I clicked on it and it took me to Amazon and I read the manufacturer’s info and automatically scrolled down to read the reviews.

Now I’ve seen this thing advertised on TV and I’ve got to say, it doesn’t look like a very good idea to me. It’s a stationary cleaning machine that you just plunk down on the stain and turn it on. Assuming that it works, what you get is a nice clean circle about 6-7” in diameter in your carpet. Now this is fine if the rest of your carpet looks like the day you had it installed – probably not the case huh?

The point here is that all the reviews focused on how well the thing worked, all glowing reviews in this case. But no one suggested that you’d probably be better off buying an upright carpet cleaning machine for a little more money so you can clean a wider area, even a whole room. If you have pets and you need a spot cleaner machine, you’re going to end up with this polka dot carpet in no time, kind of like a big version of Twister built right into your carpet. So you’re going to have to rent or buy a big machine anyway!

So I started thinking about who writes these reviews, wondering if it could possibly be people working for Bissell? Surely these companies don’t recruit employees to scour the internet (from home of course so the company domain doesn’t show up) and submit glowing reviews about their products to improve the product score! My gosh, that would be dishonest and manipulative and, and, totally plausible. Damn.

After I started thinking about that, I got kind of bummed. Here I’ve been thinking that the internet was a place I could go for honest opinions from real people. You know, people who had tried a product and could tell me what it was really like – not the regular marketing hype I get from store salesmen. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t such a skeptic. There is something to be said for the “ignorance is bliss” state of mind.

Letter To The Editor

Letter to Sandy and Dave Waks who publish http://bbhcentral.com/index.html

Hello Sandy and Dave,

I enjoy receiving your newsletter. It is informative but with a personal touch.

Your “adventures” in getting an array of different products to work together is one of my biggest complaints with the current state of consumer electronics. Fact is, the lack of leadership in trying to simplify the whole mess is really quite sad.

It is a shame that the only solution these days to navigating the maze of settings amongst components is to revert to a Harmony remote. I too have one, and had hoped that it would quiet or at least lessen the bitching of my more technically-impaired family members. Unfortunately that dream never came true. Although I think the online programming feature is brilliant, the unit gets out of sync too easily and has several non-intuitive features that confuse someone who isn’t paying very close attention. Most notibly, it just isn’t very well set up to control my DVR.

My point here is not to discuss band-aid solutions like the Harmony, but to highlight the fact that none of these components can talk to each other yet. Why the heck can’t all the consumer electronics marketing geniuses get together in somebody’s suite during CES and agree on a protocol? There is absolutely no technical reason that all components can’t status each other through a data link and give control over to a “media controller” device.

Then your harmony device will actually work because the controller will “know” what status each component is in as opposed to an educated guess. Then when you pick “Play the last episode of Desperate Cowboys while recording Dancing with the Incontinent Gardener and play compilation #59 in the patio, your trusty media brain will poll each unit, turn on what needs to be turned on, choose all the settings, and voila’ everything works.

I know this would require an unprecedented amount of cooperation amongst all the makers of Audio and Video and computer devices. But with the apparent declining interest in “all-in-one” AV boxes, I see no other option. Someone has to wake up and see the growing frustration levels out there. Any day now I expect people to throw open their windows and start yelling “I’m fed up and I can’t take it anymore.”

Regards, John

RFID Application

I've been thinking again about RFID tags because one of my clients is producing a very large line of collectible "urban vinyl" items. I suggested to them that it might be interesting to imbed an RFID tag into each one so they can be authenticated. Not sure whether it is necessary to serialize each product, but I'm sure it would be cheaper to just create a passive tag with the company ID on it and some sort of encription.

I also am curious if it is possible to create a tag that can withstand the rotocasting process, which involves enough heat to cure the plastic. The other issue is, if you put the tag into the roto mold with the liquid plastic, can you be assured that the tag won't show through the surface of the vinyl somewhere when you pull it out of the roto mold?

In any case, I think that the whole idea of RFID stuff is pretty fascinating. Some people however, are using this new technology as a means to get their names in the paper or just to make noise. I guess I question people who try to twist "right to privacy" to mean the right to anonymity.

Where in fact did this "right to privacy" come from anyway. If you live in a small town where everyone knows who you are and what stores you shop in and how often you buy ice cream at the town's only ice cream parlor, then you accept it and live your life. If you can't handle that, you move to the country. I suppose you could also move to a big city where no one knows you and you can live your life secure in the knowledge that no one really knows or cares how many times a week you buy Starbucks or fill your gas tank. So what?

I'm curious about people who are all up in arms about RFID tags on clothes or RFID tags in student id cards. What are they so paranoid about? They seem totally unconcerned about walking into a store in full view of other people, many of whom may know them including the people who work in the store. But the minute that there exists a technology to identify who you are, they go absolutely berserk and yell foul. These people don't walk around in disguise. They don't hire people to do their shopping for them for fear of being recognized. They don't remove the license plates off their cars for fear of someone tracking their vehicle around town. And they certainly must know that every place they visit on the internet leaves tracks.

So what is this all about? I think it is more about the freedom to screw up without someone catching you. Or maybe about the freedom to do things that you are ashamed of without other people finding out. I think that if you were to lead an open and honorable life and are honest in your dealings with others, then you should have nothing to hide. I know that's oversimplifying things, but never the less I think that is the real force behind all this uproar about RFID.

Of course, I don't intend to get one of those things implanted on my backside, no siree.

Inspiration in the Shower

After a long hiatus, I’m back. Don’t know how often I will be able to pontificate thusly, but I will try to do better this year. Call it a new year’s resolution. No don’t, that will jinx it.
This morning I was taking a shower and noticed for the second time in two days a strange background noise over the shower. I stopped for a moment to listen carefully and it seemed like some sort of really low frequency pulsation. Like yesterday, I passed it off as either the city trash truck idling on the street outside, or the periodic noise from the oil refinery about a mile away towards the harbor.
However, today when I turned off the shower and opened the door to grab a towel, I noticed that the noise almost went away. Curious. I shut the door again and it came back. The strange thing is not that my shower acts as a sort of acoustic amplifier for these strong low frequency sounds, but that this is the first time I have identified it. You see, I have lived in this house for 25 years.
Does this mean that my powers of perception have increased dramatically? That my mental acuity has actually improved over the last 25 years? Most people I know seem to be going the other direction. Perhaps my mental growth just makes it seem like all of them are getting more scatterbrained. That must be it. Ok, let’s move on.
The topic today is my ongoing frustration with by my AV system. My wife got me a DVD recorder for Christmas so I can transfer to disk all my aging family video tapes. Interestingly, it wasn’t that long ago that I transferred my old 8 and 16 mm film movies to tape. In any case, the challenge of hooking up the DVD player/recorder to my system was formidable.
The problem is that my receiver is only designed to select among various inputs, not among outputs. The hang-up is when you have these on-screen menus that you need to access. If I want to select my satellite box as the source, I can’t see the on-screen menus from the DVD recorder to operate the record functions if it is hooked to the amp like a typical video source. I came up with a solution but I had to compromise some functionality and it is totally non-intuitive for the rest of the family. If my system was even slightly smart, I could configure it according to what I want to do. Then I just choose “Record DVD from Satellite” and the little computer in the receiver would do all the routing for you.
The other big payoff is that non-technical people in my house (basically everyone else) could watch a movie or record a DVD with ease, leaving me at peace.
It’s time the big AV manufacturers starting putting some money into the brains of their equipment instead of just the brawn. Who really needs a thousand watts in their family room anyway? I also look forward to the day when all you need to do is to plug a single small fiberoptic cable from each unit to the receiver/controller. Then you can press one button and the brain polls each unit, configures everything, names the sources and destinations, all automatically. No more morass of wires, no more engineering degree required to hook up your system.
If they’re putting microprocessors in running shoes, it’s high time that AV systems got some brains. Truth is, I don’t trust my growing mental powers to be able to keep up with the rate of change in complexity I’m having to deal with.