Archive for category General
Domino’s Channels Nixon
Posted by clifgriffin in General on January 11th, 2010
Domino’s is currently pushing a new advertising campaign that attempts to own some of the criticism they’ve received. The advert uses a combination of focus group poll participants, twitter users, and food reviewers to demonstrate that they are aware people have had issues with their pizza quality and that they are making key changes in response to this.
While I commend their effort to own criticism and improve their product, I believe their commercials may have the opposite effect they are intended to have.
Just like Nixon’s famous defense “I am not a crook” left people feeling sure that he was indeed actually a crook, saying “Our pizza doesn’t take like cardboard anymore” may leave people suspicious that it actually does. The new advertisements may lead people to associate the criticism with their product instead of associating it with their generous response.
There are other reasons this may backfire as well. It is reasonable to assume that a company with 9,000 stores and yearly revenue that surpasses $1 Billion is liked by at least a certain segment of the population. Clearly not everyone is unsatisfied with their product or they would not be able to make money at all, let alone pay for apologetic national ad campaigns.
For those of us who never thought to dislike Domino’s, we now have reasonable cause for concern. This is a bit like a husband assuring his unknowing wife that starting now he will no longer cheat on her. We could certainly forgive the wife for being concerned about formerly secret past sins and not sufficiently comforted by her husband’s new commitment.
Lastly, fast food lives in a special, hypocritical place in our cultural soul. We all eat it. We all portend to loath it. From Domino’s perspective, they should worry about whether people consistently return for more pizza…not what they say about it afterwards. As a national fast food chain, you have to abide these contradictions. Just keep cashing the checks. People are more honest with their wallets than with their conscience easing tweets.
Just my two cents.
$1 Movies At New Theater October 5-7th
Posted by clifgriffin in General on September 29th, 2009
That’s pretty rad.
Photography: To Retouch or Not To Retouch
Posted by clifgriffin in General on May 3rd, 2009
When I first started taking pictures, I refused to edit them significantly. I might play around with the brightness and contrast, or the exposure settings (for RAW format) but beyond that, I didn’t let myself experiment with tone curves, saturation, sharpening, ad infinitum.
I was too afraid that I would a) learn to rely on such devices to prop up a poor first exposure and b) people would notice my edits and think I was using such devices to prop up a poor first exposure.
While there is certainly merit in trying to get the most you can out of that first click, this limitation proved somewhat unrealistic. After awhile I began to notice that my in camera exposures were improving, but my photos lacked that extra pizzaz that I constantly saw in other, more talented photographer’s collections.
Consider these two original, unmodified exposures:
Both are framed decently well. And while they each have their own set of flaws, including slight underexposure, there is nothing terribly debilitating. Using conservative adjustments, we could certainly improve both of these photos but it would be difficult to break that average barrier. For the purposes of demonstration, here are the two photos with exposure and white balance adjustments:
A significant improvement to be sure, but both of these photos are still quite drab. Consider these last two:
The difference and overall effect should be extremely clear. Both of these have been modified only to the extent that Adobe Lightroom allows. Neither have been photoshopped. The second photo has the most editing, persay. I utilized an adjustment airbrush to decrease a blue highlight that bordered her clothing. (You can see an example of what I corrected for in the bottom right corner–I missed a spot!)
It is my goal to improve my photo taking skills and photo editing skills.
Editing is not a substitution for good photography, but, just like a darkroom, it is an aid.
My Windows 7 Experience, thus far…
Posted by clifgriffin in General on November 1st, 2008
Some might call it fool hardy to install an alpha version of an operating system on your Media Center, but after seeing Charlie Owen’s beautiful screenshots, I had no choice.
True, the upgrades might be considered minor, if mostly cosmetic, but the interface, look, and feel of the software continues to improve and mature and that is its biggest selling point to me, right after its feature set.
I spent many hours setting everything up, and everything isn’t perfect yet. At this point, I’m debating whether I should continue wrestling with the things that aren’t working, or admit that this is not finished software and go back to Vista. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
For an alpha operating system, Windows 7 is remarkably quick and stable. It has only rebooted spontaneously once, and that was at some unknown point between the first reboot and when I logged in for the first time. I haven’t actually witnessed it happen.
By contrast, Vista alpha was so unusable I barely made it past the login screen and explorer endlessly died and restarted itself!
Instead of describing what other people have described and posting screenshots you can find anywhere else, I’m just going to list the things I like and the things I don’t like (or are broken at this point).
Things that work…
- While the interface is still lacking coming enhancements like the “superbar”, the improvements this release contains are still…improvements.
- The cosmetic changes are good…I like them. They seem to be steering towards minor changes that make the whole experience “feel” better. Which, like it or not, is a big part of how people perceive an operating system.
- Usability wise, things are continuing to improve. They have reduced the number of steps to some common tasks, and, more importantly they have made finding some screens easier. (But not all)
- The color scheme of Windows 7 seems to be centered around blue…which is good. I like blue.
- Media center looks gorgeous (if I hadn’t mentioned it). The tweaked main menu is great. The music wall is a nice touch. The new “Play Pictures” slide show is mesmerizing.
- Gadgets have been moved off of the sidebar and onto the desktop. Good call.
Things that don’t..
- The interface is still too complicated. Grouping things by task in the control panel is good…but it shouldn’t take me 10 minutes to find the “Network Connections” screen. Each release of Windows seems to bury this one further and further under a maze of “helpful” task oriented lists that make me want to kill a small animal. Make easy things easy to find, and put the not-so-easy tasks in a list for people who have more technical skills than John McCain!
- Adding items to the menu strips in Media Center doesn’t seem to work right now. I tried many ways of doing this and it just doesn’t seem to work like it used to.
- Windows Media Player 12 doesn’t work with Netflix Watch Now.
- nVidia nForce drivers (and all other drivers I found) for my onboard network card (ASUS M2NPV-VM) fail. The adapter resets endlessly. I had to pull out my USB wireless dongle to get consistent Internet acesss.
- Internet Explorer, Windows Media Center, etc hang occasionally.
- Gadgets are still mostly distracting and almost completely useless.
I had to run a couple of other things in compatibility mode to get them working properly, but other than that…no major issues.
All of these things are minor…except for the first item (and the last?), I’m confident all of them will be fixed by release. (Christmas 2009???)
The question for me is: shall I continue to give Microsoft feedback and suffer through the lack of Netflix and slightly reduced stability? Shall I try to hack it to make it do what I want? (at the risk of catastrophically breaking it) Or shall I go back to Vista and wait expectantly for more stable releases in the future?
I have no idea at the moment.
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