I’ve only checked out one of these Pleasureable Troublemakers so far but I’m throwing this here as a reminder for me to visit them all. Love the concept of the Keymoment, the keychain rack that subtly encourages you to bike instead of drive.
In short, if you grab your car key it spits your bike key out on the ground giving you an extra moment and action to think about your decision. Clever. I’d love to see it developed further to not need electricity to operate.
We have been Netflix customers for a while now and have no complaints about the service whatsoever. The wife and I have discussed it before noting that package design and the timeliness of each order must be due to the fact that they are automated in some way or another. Boy was I off.
46 warehouses with approximately 50 employees in each. At an average of 700 DVD’s an hour the sum total of DVD’s sorted and delivered daily is about 1.6 million. Wow. I’m not all for cutting those jobs but surely someone could help them with a better system.
Slightly related:
The Netflix DVD sorter/re-packager job reminds me slightly of a story my buddy Rob told me a while ago.
When he was a kid, he moved to a small Texas town and attempted to make friends. On one occasion he asked a local boy what his father did and the response was something along the following…
Rob: What does your dad do? Kid: You know how some nails are silver? Rob: Yeah Kid: Well, you know how some nails are gold? Rob: Yeah Kid: My dad paints the silver ones gold
Umm, as much as I hate having students loans still, I am slightly thankful for them just in the fact that I’m not painting nails for a living.
Gowalla
iPhone owners, sign up for and play Gowalla. It was created by a local shop here in town called Alamofire who incidentally also launched a pretty new website (and stole my idea for page scrolling) this week and also happen to have a dotcomrade of mine on staff. If you have facebook, they also made a game called PackRat. Apparently it was big and fun.
Google Voice
Only available to those who made the beta of Grand Central (unfortunately, not me) right now, Google is rolling out a new feature that will have both Skype and your local phone company banging their heads on their respective desks. Voicemail, central numbers that all forward to, Voicemail transcribed to your email inbox and text messaging are just a few of the features they boast. World domination to continue.
