Friday, April 20, 2007
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
A Fawlty Towers Moment
Recently, we initiated a project to replace a set of ceiling lighting fixtures, horrible Pottery Barn Art Nouveau crap, reflecting the non-existent taste of the previous owners. We got a tremendously competent old friend in the handyperson business to do the high ladder work (one fixture was 15 feet up in the air, dangling from our great room ceiling), and the whole thing was executed with, from my perspective, efficiency and quality.
However, at the same time, we ordered what looked like a simple set of pendent lights to go over the dining room table, one fixture with four halogen low-voltage drops. And since this was just a normal height ceiling and nothing that required risk of life and limb for someone taking doses of steroids that will keep me out of the Olympics for at least the next few sessions, I said, "Oh, I can do that one."
Visualize, if you can, the Fawty Towers episode where John Cleese has to keep running back and forth to a local restaurant to pick up dinner, since the hotel's newly hired cook has had an alcoholic relapse, and the car keep stalling out.
I discover that, in order to shorten the pendent cords to something less than the 17 meters or so of length they come with, you need to strip them carefully (read with a precision wire stripper) to get just the Teflon coating off), then tease the outer wire mesh apart to reveal the inner conductor, twist the mesh into a conductor of its own, wrap with tape ... you get the picture.
Then, force the newly reconfigured pendent cord up through the strain relief, destroying what you've just done. Tighten the strain relief, redo the conductor work, standing on a ladder, and connect each of the four lamps to its transformer, using wire nuts.
Schlep down to the breaker box, turn the power on, and check to see if all lights light. They do not. Power off. Redo the connections on those that don't. Power on. Hooray, all four work.
Slide the cover, through which the lights are dangling, up to the fixture plate (standing on a ladder), tuck cords neatly away, secure cover. Power on. Test. Two of four lights do not light. This is where the John Cleese bit comes in.
"You vicious, vicious bastard! I've given you fair warning! I've been more than patient, and now I'm really fed up. Now, I'm going to give you a damned good thrashing!"
Actually, what I said as this up and down the damn ladder business went on (redoing wire nut connections, one by one) was substantially more graphic and Americanized, until I realized that I had the dining room window open and that our neighbors small children were playing in their back yard, 15 feet away. Oops, stifle.
Anyway, after more test and rework episodes than my many years of software quality planning would suggest, the damn thing works, but two or three clear-cut results have emerged:
 |  |
| The high lights, installed by someone who knows what he's doing and isn't on chemo. | The dining room pendants, those vicious, vicious bastards |
However, at the same time, we ordered what looked like a simple set of pendent lights to go over the dining room table, one fixture with four halogen low-voltage drops. And since this was just a normal height ceiling and nothing that required risk of life and limb for someone taking doses of steroids that will keep me out of the Olympics for at least the next few sessions, I said, "Oh, I can do that one."
Visualize, if you can, the Fawty Towers episode where John Cleese has to keep running back and forth to a local restaurant to pick up dinner, since the hotel's newly hired cook has had an alcoholic relapse, and the car keep stalling out.
I discover that, in order to shorten the pendent cords to something less than the 17 meters or so of length they come with, you need to strip them carefully (read with a precision wire stripper) to get just the Teflon coating off), then tease the outer wire mesh apart to reveal the inner conductor, twist the mesh into a conductor of its own, wrap with tape ... you get the picture.
Then, force the newly reconfigured pendent cord up through the strain relief, destroying what you've just done. Tighten the strain relief, redo the conductor work, standing on a ladder, and connect each of the four lamps to its transformer, using wire nuts.
Schlep down to the breaker box, turn the power on, and check to see if all lights light. They do not. Power off. Redo the connections on those that don't. Power on. Hooray, all four work.
Slide the cover, through which the lights are dangling, up to the fixture plate (standing on a ladder), tuck cords neatly away, secure cover. Power on. Test. Two of four lights do not light. This is where the John Cleese bit comes in.
"You vicious, vicious bastard! I've given you fair warning! I've been more than patient, and now I'm really fed up. Now, I'm going to give you a damned good thrashing!"
Actually, what I said as this up and down the damn ladder business went on (redoing wire nut connections, one by one) was substantially more graphic and Americanized, until I realized that I had the dining room window open and that our neighbors small children were playing in their back yard, 15 feet away. Oops, stifle.
Anyway, after more test and rework episodes than my many years of software quality planning would suggest, the damn thing works, but two or three clear-cut results have emerged:
- I am not an electrician
- I will never do this kind of job with more than one light again
- As long as she avoids the biopsy scar on the back of my head,
Linda is empowered to administer a dope slap each time I say, "I can do
that part," at least until the chemo is over with
Monday, April 16, 2007
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Best of the Worst Ads
Late breaking: after I posted this old stuff, Def Tech supplies us with a recent example of "doesn't anyone review this crap?"
See Boeing Says "Doh!"
Over the years, the Wood-Charles News Service used to run the occasional set
of critiques (read: scathingly sarcastic rants) about bad IT and other advertising. Here's a compendium of some of the more scathing. Enjoy.
Starting off, we reviewed a huge multi-page spread from Gateway. Their
(inspired, no?) buzzphrase was, "Let's Talk." So the ad we're looking at
shows a not-too-bright-looking individual on what we assume is a golf course
in North (or is it South?) Dakota (you can tell because there's no horizon).
The headlines say: "Let's talk about getting connected. Let's talk about
graphite-shafted irons. Let's talk about a nine handicap."
On the facing page, the copy says: "Chris is always looking to improve his
game. We tailor made his PC with a ten gig hard drive and a 19- inch monitor (18" viewable). Now Chris can download tons of files into his "golf tips" folder and view them on a spacious course."
Chris is such a poor golfer that he needs 10 gig of tips? And he needs a 19-inch
monitor to read 'em? Maybe Chris' problem is his eyesight. The conference call -- probably at 5:30 in the afternoon, when the marketing idiot who approved this thing was anxious to get out on the golf course himself -- seems to have mixed up positioning ("... people hate work -- give it a recreational flavor ...") and featurism ("... 10 gig hard drive, 19 inch monitor, all that techie stuff ..."). This is what you get when you hire people who play golf.
Oh, and it goes on. In the following pages, we're introduced to Marne, who appears to have something to do with movies -- at least she poses behind a 16mm camera with her hair in her eyes -- and needed a lap top to "... blow them away;" the Lanphiers, a family whose Gateway "high- resolution TV, DVD player, stereo, gaming station, and PC (Internet ready) keep them on the edge of technology and ahead of their neighbors ('Let's talk about a digital playground ... we'd never have to leave the sofa';" and Emily who decorated the garage with banners to welcome her brother home from college.
So the message is, Gateway's customers are golf-playing slackers, hype artists,
couch-potato families, and annoying, precocious little brats? Um, do you sell servers? Does any of this stuff perform? I need 20 workstations by tomorrow night -- sorry, Sir, you need to talk to Dell. They do that boring business stuff.
The I-don't-give-a-rat's-ass award: Micrografx' FlowCharter ad. "Discover Why Ford Chose the World's Most Productive Diagramming Tool. When Ford's Customer Service Division faced the daunting challenge of documenting all of its business processes to obtain ISO 9000 registration ..."
And finally: the I-was-visualizing-something-quite-else award: Visoneer makes OCR software, and their ad is supposed to pitch the product's capabilities in scanning beat-up, crumpled, stained legacy documents. But what the headline says is, "Visioneer ProOCD100 handles even the most degraded documents ..."
An ad for some kind of ludicrously expensive watch: So here's the concept: the primary illustration is a full-page duotone image, run in dark blue so it looks like twilight. We see a sort of Asian-looking scene -- could be rice paddies, I suppose -- anyway, water with planted rows of vegetation sticking up. There's a tree and mountains in the distance. In the middle ground, seen from behind, is a young woman. She's wearing a white, untucked shirt, and she may or may not have any pants on -- hard to say. She's riding on an elephant, and the elephant is pulling a rustic-looking log raft. On the raft is a Harley-Davidson Motorcycle. Oh, and the headline is "Explore new dimensions in time."
Now, I suppose it's possible (hell, it's certain) that the people who created and paid for this ad weren't aware of Harley's unenviable reputation for spending a lot of time being trucked and trailered around, rather than running under their own power. They probably didn't know that "What's the first thing a new Harley owner buys for his bike? A pickup truck." is a well-worn cheap shot, flung around the net and elsewhere. So we can let 'em off on that point, I guess. But what is this ad supposed to say to the viewer? "If you're going to be incredibly late getting home because you've somehow wandered into Vietnam and off the road on your bike and had to borrow some villager's' elephant and raft, at least you'll know HOW late?" Or, "The next time you're selling Harleys to starving third world refugees, be sure you bring a couple of fantastically expensive watches to bribe the customs officials with?" Or maybe, "This thing costs so much that looking at the price tag will trigger a halucinatory episode much like the one this ad's art director must have been having?" Kind of makes a Swatch look good, don't you think?
And, in the "At least we're being honest with you," category, there's the EDS ad that features a scientist-like fellow, proudly pointing a pointer at a chalk board (how 60's!) on which is scrawled "1 + 1 = 3." Uh-huh. That's certainly the EDS I'm familiar with.
First place in the "What are you trying to tell me?" category goes to Oracle workgroup 2000 (what a great product name! How'd they ever think of that?) for their half-page, across the gutter spread of 10 nude infants with a URL painted on their ethnically diverse arses. I'm not kidding a bit: 10 unclothed juveniles with a web page address on their butts. What does this mean? "Oracle is as slick as a baby's behind?" "Build client server applications with this thing, and you'll wish you were home changing diapers?"
Another good one is AT&T Paradyne's nasty-looking ad that asserts, "Where you are is sick of hearing the word "access" without knowing what it means." Where I am is sick of illiterate-sounding horseshit like this headline.
But the winner had to be Make systems' ad for NetMaker XA. A simple but elegant concept: "At last (don't you love ads that start, "at last?") software tools that'll make any network manager look good." This headline runs next to a photo of a man holding up the product CDROM. His head is in some sort of chrome thing (a hairdryer, I guess, since he's wearing curlers), his cheeks and jaw line have been smeared with white goop, and each eye is covered with a slice of cucumber. I suppose the idea is that he's getting a beauty treatment ...? If so, this has to be the worst concept execution I've seen in years; if not, then I just flat don't get it. "Use this product and you'll get vegetables stuck on your face?" All together, now: "I don't think so."
What we have in front of us, presumably because we're an AMA (M as in "Motorcyclist," not "Medical." How Politically incorrect do you think we are, anyway?) member and they sell their mailing lists, is a catalogue from Harley, specifically their "Motorclothes" catalogue. Now, when I see the word "motorclothes," I tend to think of oily red flannel rags or perhaps deeply stained, railroad-striped overalls with "Vinnie" or "Dick" (or "dick") embroidered on 'em. These items are not listed in Harley's catalogue, however. What we do have here is a wide range of wildly impractical leather jackets, illustrated with a series of feature icons, so you can tell at a glance which ones feature "action back" and "rotated shoulders." There are also leather shirts, leather chaps, leather pants (in black or what looks suspiciously like left-over seventies "wet look" red), leather boots, leather gloves, leather hats, and leather fanny packs, all bearing that Harley logo. For the ladies, there are shirts, sleeveless shirts, shirts meant to be tied off at the midriff, tank tops, denim tank tops, denim shirts with and without sleeves, jacquard lace bodysuits (really), and stretch denim skirts (very practical motorwear there, boy), all, again, Harley- emblazoned.
But what makes this such an interesting document is not the predictable range of merchandise, but the "theme" or whatever you'd like to call it. It's a celebration of Milwaukee, that gritty, working man's town. It features shots of great places around Milwaukee, full of happy Harley owners, doing all that great, rugged stuff Harley guys and gals do. For example, hanging out at an espresso shoppe. Watching the sunrise. Standing around at the Laundromat (The Laundromat!?! Yes, it's true. And the small, rectangular object that "Dana" is holding in his right hand as he leans on a dryer and models the Primary Denim Vest and Race Team Watch is not a pack of smokes, it's an individual-sized package of detergent. But will this bad boy share it with "Mavis" -- Zip-Front Denim Jacket -- and "Joseph" -- RWB II Vest and Long-Sleeve Henley?)
On other pages, we see "Rod" and "Deana," posing on their hawg, having apparently just taken "A Great Short Ride: Holy Hill Area, from Milwaukee, 94 West to 45 North, 20 miles." Twenty whole miles and no pickup truck in sight! Duuude! And then we run across "Antonia," "Tosca," and "Jamie," three naughty girlies if we ever saw any, perched on bar stools at a "Great Late Night Hangout, the Up and Under Pub." Of course, since these are nineties naughty girlies, they're in the no smoking section and the pints on the table are apparently Cokes, but, hey, they've probably got "My Rug Rat is an Honor Student at East Milwaukee Middle School" stickers on their Sportsters.
But our favorite, especially given the graying of your Editorial staff, is the page intended to symbolize (we assume) the older Harley guy. It's "Sam" and "Mike," clearly two old dudes who've been on the long march with Harley, probably have panheads sitting in the garage, and are -- Mike, anyway -- coifed like an Arthur Andersen Senior Partner. They're both showing their independent spirit by wearing jeans and leather vests with NO watch chains, probably planning their next ride-by shooting of a rival corporation -- that is, gang, and ... eating popcorn in a movie theatre lobby. If you look closely, you can just see the wire that Sam's wearing and his BATF badge peeking out from under his Harley Holdout Holster.
See Boeing Says "Doh!"
Over the years, the Wood-Charles News Service used to run the occasional set
of critiques (read: scathingly sarcastic rants) about bad IT and other advertising. Here's a compendium of some of the more scathing. Enjoy.
Starting off, we reviewed a huge multi-page spread from Gateway. Their
(inspired, no?) buzzphrase was, "Let's Talk." So the ad we're looking at
shows a not-too-bright-looking individual on what we assume is a golf course
in North (or is it South?) Dakota (you can tell because there's no horizon).
The headlines say: "Let's talk about getting connected. Let's talk about
graphite-shafted irons. Let's talk about a nine handicap."
On the facing page, the copy says: "Chris is always looking to improve his
game. We tailor made his PC with a ten gig hard drive and a 19- inch monitor (18" viewable). Now Chris can download tons of files into his "golf tips" folder and view them on a spacious course."
Chris is such a poor golfer that he needs 10 gig of tips? And he needs a 19-inch
monitor to read 'em? Maybe Chris' problem is his eyesight. The conference call -- probably at 5:30 in the afternoon, when the marketing idiot who approved this thing was anxious to get out on the golf course himself -- seems to have mixed up positioning ("... people hate work -- give it a recreational flavor ...") and featurism ("... 10 gig hard drive, 19 inch monitor, all that techie stuff ..."). This is what you get when you hire people who play golf.
Oh, and it goes on. In the following pages, we're introduced to Marne, who appears to have something to do with movies -- at least she poses behind a 16mm camera with her hair in her eyes -- and needed a lap top to "... blow them away;" the Lanphiers, a family whose Gateway "high- resolution TV, DVD player, stereo, gaming station, and PC (Internet ready) keep them on the edge of technology and ahead of their neighbors ('Let's talk about a digital playground ... we'd never have to leave the sofa';" and Emily who decorated the garage with banners to welcome her brother home from college.
So the message is, Gateway's customers are golf-playing slackers, hype artists,
couch-potato families, and annoying, precocious little brats? Um, do you sell servers? Does any of this stuff perform? I need 20 workstations by tomorrow night -- sorry, Sir, you need to talk to Dell. They do that boring business stuff.
The I-don't-give-a-rat's-ass award: Micrografx' FlowCharter ad. "Discover Why Ford Chose the World's Most Productive Diagramming Tool. When Ford's Customer Service Division faced the daunting challenge of documenting all of its business processes to obtain ISO 9000 registration ..."
And finally: the I-was-visualizing-something-quite-else award: Visoneer makes OCR software, and their ad is supposed to pitch the product's capabilities in scanning beat-up, crumpled, stained legacy documents. But what the headline says is, "Visioneer ProOCD100 handles even the most degraded documents ..."
An ad for some kind of ludicrously expensive watch: So here's the concept: the primary illustration is a full-page duotone image, run in dark blue so it looks like twilight. We see a sort of Asian-looking scene -- could be rice paddies, I suppose -- anyway, water with planted rows of vegetation sticking up. There's a tree and mountains in the distance. In the middle ground, seen from behind, is a young woman. She's wearing a white, untucked shirt, and she may or may not have any pants on -- hard to say. She's riding on an elephant, and the elephant is pulling a rustic-looking log raft. On the raft is a Harley-Davidson Motorcycle. Oh, and the headline is "Explore new dimensions in time."
Now, I suppose it's possible (hell, it's certain) that the people who created and paid for this ad weren't aware of Harley's unenviable reputation for spending a lot of time being trucked and trailered around, rather than running under their own power. They probably didn't know that "What's the first thing a new Harley owner buys for his bike? A pickup truck." is a well-worn cheap shot, flung around the net and elsewhere. So we can let 'em off on that point, I guess. But what is this ad supposed to say to the viewer? "If you're going to be incredibly late getting home because you've somehow wandered into Vietnam and off the road on your bike and had to borrow some villager's' elephant and raft, at least you'll know HOW late?" Or, "The next time you're selling Harleys to starving third world refugees, be sure you bring a couple of fantastically expensive watches to bribe the customs officials with?" Or maybe, "This thing costs so much that looking at the price tag will trigger a halucinatory episode much like the one this ad's art director must have been having?" Kind of makes a Swatch look good, don't you think?
And, in the "At least we're being honest with you," category, there's the EDS ad that features a scientist-like fellow, proudly pointing a pointer at a chalk board (how 60's!) on which is scrawled "1 + 1 = 3." Uh-huh. That's certainly the EDS I'm familiar with.
First place in the "What are you trying to tell me?" category goes to Oracle workgroup 2000 (what a great product name! How'd they ever think of that?) for their half-page, across the gutter spread of 10 nude infants with a URL painted on their ethnically diverse arses. I'm not kidding a bit: 10 unclothed juveniles with a web page address on their butts. What does this mean? "Oracle is as slick as a baby's behind?" "Build client server applications with this thing, and you'll wish you were home changing diapers?"
Another good one is AT&T Paradyne's nasty-looking ad that asserts, "Where you are is sick of hearing the word "access" without knowing what it means." Where I am is sick of illiterate-sounding horseshit like this headline.
But the winner had to be Make systems' ad for NetMaker XA. A simple but elegant concept: "At last (don't you love ads that start, "at last?") software tools that'll make any network manager look good." This headline runs next to a photo of a man holding up the product CDROM. His head is in some sort of chrome thing (a hairdryer, I guess, since he's wearing curlers), his cheeks and jaw line have been smeared with white goop, and each eye is covered with a slice of cucumber. I suppose the idea is that he's getting a beauty treatment ...? If so, this has to be the worst concept execution I've seen in years; if not, then I just flat don't get it. "Use this product and you'll get vegetables stuck on your face?" All together, now: "I don't think so."
What we have in front of us, presumably because we're an AMA (M as in "Motorcyclist," not "Medical." How Politically incorrect do you think we are, anyway?) member and they sell their mailing lists, is a catalogue from Harley, specifically their "Motorclothes" catalogue. Now, when I see the word "motorclothes," I tend to think of oily red flannel rags or perhaps deeply stained, railroad-striped overalls with "Vinnie" or "Dick" (or "dick") embroidered on 'em. These items are not listed in Harley's catalogue, however. What we do have here is a wide range of wildly impractical leather jackets, illustrated with a series of feature icons, so you can tell at a glance which ones feature "action back" and "rotated shoulders." There are also leather shirts, leather chaps, leather pants (in black or what looks suspiciously like left-over seventies "wet look" red), leather boots, leather gloves, leather hats, and leather fanny packs, all bearing that Harley logo. For the ladies, there are shirts, sleeveless shirts, shirts meant to be tied off at the midriff, tank tops, denim tank tops, denim shirts with and without sleeves, jacquard lace bodysuits (really), and stretch denim skirts (very practical motorwear there, boy), all, again, Harley- emblazoned.
But what makes this such an interesting document is not the predictable range of merchandise, but the "theme" or whatever you'd like to call it. It's a celebration of Milwaukee, that gritty, working man's town. It features shots of great places around Milwaukee, full of happy Harley owners, doing all that great, rugged stuff Harley guys and gals do. For example, hanging out at an espresso shoppe. Watching the sunrise. Standing around at the Laundromat (The Laundromat!?! Yes, it's true. And the small, rectangular object that "Dana" is holding in his right hand as he leans on a dryer and models the Primary Denim Vest and Race Team Watch is not a pack of smokes, it's an individual-sized package of detergent. But will this bad boy share it with "Mavis" -- Zip-Front Denim Jacket -- and "Joseph" -- RWB II Vest and Long-Sleeve Henley?)
On other pages, we see "Rod" and "Deana," posing on their hawg, having apparently just taken "A Great Short Ride: Holy Hill Area, from Milwaukee, 94 West to 45 North, 20 miles." Twenty whole miles and no pickup truck in sight! Duuude! And then we run across "Antonia," "Tosca," and "Jamie," three naughty girlies if we ever saw any, perched on bar stools at a "Great Late Night Hangout, the Up and Under Pub." Of course, since these are nineties naughty girlies, they're in the no smoking section and the pints on the table are apparently Cokes, but, hey, they've probably got "My Rug Rat is an Honor Student at East Milwaukee Middle School" stickers on their Sportsters.
But our favorite, especially given the graying of your Editorial staff, is the page intended to symbolize (we assume) the older Harley guy. It's "Sam" and "Mike," clearly two old dudes who've been on the long march with Harley, probably have panheads sitting in the garage, and are -- Mike, anyway -- coifed like an Arthur Andersen Senior Partner. They're both showing their independent spirit by wearing jeans and leather vests with NO watch chains, probably planning their next ride-by shooting of a rival corporation -- that is, gang, and ... eating popcorn in a movie theatre lobby. If you look closely, you can just see the wire that Sam's wearing and his BATF badge peeking out from under his Harley Holdout Holster.
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