jr conlin's ink stained banana

Home again, home again. Sorry about the sporadic posts. That comes with spending most of my time with relatives and forgetting to either bring the laptop or ask for the WEP key. Still, while visiting with said relatives, i did happen upon an interesting example of something that's endlessly bugged me.

We were at a Dunkin' Donuts (sorry, the local mama-san & pop-san donut shop is leagues better than Duncan), i noticed a rack of coffee you can take home, along with "Dunkin' Donuts Retail Merchandise". This week, it appeared to be tea, but there stood a rack, directly aimed at customers proudly proclaiming multiple selling opportunities for "Dunkin' Donuts Retail Merchandise".

i tend to rail against things like focus groups and consumer studies, but honestly, could they come up a worse name? Why not "Dunkin' Donut's Stuff" or heck, leave off the front labels and just add a sticker in the back for the slower employees? The problem here is that they named something that's perfectly logical from the point of view of someone familiar with the process of retail sales and marketing, not from the point of view of folks that eat donuts and drink coffee.

Fact is, i see that stuff all the time. Folks, whether by intention or not, have a really bad habit of thinking that everyone else thinks like they do. Here's another example. Let's say you've got a desktop system. If i ask you to point at the computer, which part would you point to? Which part would a cattleman from Muncie point to? What's the overall likelihood that both of you would agree that the large black box is the computer and not the keyboard or monitor?

While asking 50 people a series of 20 questions about cheese while they're hooked up to pinging heart rate monitors is probably a tad excessive, i'll admit that asking someone from outside what you ought to call something is a pretty good idea. i'm actually thinking that perhaps there's a burgeoning market for on-call six year olds to provide that sort of thing.

Which will probably go toward explaining my next start up, an interactive social networking system that uses dynamic heuristics to determine relative interpersonal values: "Mr. Bubblepants".

Whilst performing god-fatherly duties in Atlanta, (Thomas, Diane, on the occasion of the christening of your beautiful daughters, tell me. Who do you need whacked?) we're staying at a local Holiday Inn Express. Their latest marketing promotion is "Stay Smart", where they decided to label everything with friendly, lowercase, bold Ariel font with things like "rinse", "cleanse", "soft"/"firm", "dry" and other adjectives which makes me wonder what the heck some folks are thinking. "Clem! C'mere. Look, this here tube says tame! This will be great if'n we're attacked by bears!"

The other thing i really can't get over is the fact that they have a price sheet for used linens. In some respects, these are pretty good deals. Granted, if you're ok with having the protein remains of a vast portion of the population festering in your bedroom, $10 for a pillow is a heck of a lot cheaper than swinging by Bed, Bath and Beyond. Ok, that's probably not the best thing to think about, particularly since folks in the hotel industry tend to bring their own sheets and pillows, but that's not what we're talking about right now.

Maybe pouring a vile or two of that "freshen" stuff might help…

and then setting them on fire.

There are some performances that stay in your memory for decades, the performance i attended yesterday was not among those. While i understand that performance art is not traditional theater, per se, i found the actors often paying more attention to their props than clearly delivering their lines, and while one individual could barely be described as performing a dance, overall the rest of the members of the cast seemed more intent on barely observing things or preforming a strange dance around a randomly selected audience members. i'm also not quite certain what the enthrallment is regarding footwear. The production was thankfully short, however i'm well aware of these shows lasting nearly an hour. i also understand that these modern interpretation pieces may not feature as many song and dance numbers as the classic, traditional theater pieces (and probably goes a great deal into explaining the blue gloves), overall it was hard to find a single smile or any other form of entertained expression anywhere in the audience.

Which, considering the ticket prices, and the fact that attendance is mandatory, is truly a crime.

By and large, i'd highly recommend avoiding the cast and crew of "TSA Security Line" at the San Francisco Airport. i've seen better performed renditions of Our Town by third graders.

Sorry for the lack of posts. Kinda packing up the office and heading to atlanta.

The above two items are not related.

i was discussing with a fellow, highly twisted and equally cynical co-worker one of the many personal challenges i've set upon myself, coming up with the worst project names.

Most projects, for whatever reason, refuse to have reasonable, rational names. Instead of something like "Feature Add - Phase II" or "Redesign the UI" folks inevitably wax romantic and long for names that herald much more. So you get things like "Project Storm Hammer" or "Project Acropolis". i suppose that having some heralding name that speaks of something far older and more important than "change the banner to be blue" does make some folks a tad more willing to get up in the morning, but for me, getting to work on "Project Sheboygan" lacks a great deal of the same draw.

This, of course, means that i therefore have a golden opportunity to just screw with people.

yeah, no way i can let that one go.

So, i like to come up with the worst possible project names right from the get-go. That's not as easy as it sounds because inevitably, i have to sell it to a bunch of folks. So calling something "Project Dismal Failure" just won't pass the nod test. No, instead, i have to dig for the cryptic and semi-arcane. Possibly, i may need to pick a name based on a theme as well as an approach.

Let's show an example, shall we? Let's say we're working on a set of projects with city names and the latest one has a highly questionable release date. "Project Philadelphia" (mostly for the effects on the crew). Likewise, say you've got projects named after various mountains, the amateur would probably pick "Helens","Pinatubo" or "Krakatoa", but the artisan would pick "Tambora" (which not only killed 92,000 people and plunged the planet into a "year without summer" resulting in snow in July in New England, but is far less well known by the folks sitting around the table with you.)

My current favorite is a project i'm currently working on called Project Bikini, named for the Bikini Atoll, which in 1954 we blew straight to hell. Sometime later, the once previous residents of the Atoll discovered lawyers and the US was forced to scrape the Atoll clean, resupply it with new, non-radioactive sand, restock the plants and do something about the massive blue hole they formed. Cleanup and recovery continues today, fifty years later. It was a huge, ugly mess that produced more grief than benefit and which has serious repercussions to today.

The precursor project is named "Speedo" which i can take no credit for.

My cohort managed to get a project named "Iceberg" since only 10% of what was being worked on was visible. Oh yeah, and there's a sizable risk that the project might also sink that group into the icy waters without so much as a signal flare.

So, have you managed to get a project named something less than romantic without anyone else noticing?