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Ever wonder why Mini's have their speedometer in the center of the dashboard?
"During the painting of the shell, a rod was inserted straight through the car allowing the shell to be spun round as it was painted.The speedometer was originally put in the middle of the dashboard, cleverly covering the hole where the pole went."
From A Design Classic by James Dyson.
Seth Godin muses today about having an alarm clock that would have a "weekend" switch so it wouldn't go off on the weekend, letting you sleep in.
Why complicate the simple alarm clock? You don't want the alarm on the weekend? Turn it off. But if you really need this, it already exists.
I'd post a link to the product detail on Emerson's site, unfortunately their entire site is in Flash so you can't directly link to anything.
Branding in a box. Well, sort of.
Graphic design guru Paula Scher worked with HP to allow you to create your own identity templates via her template collections website.
Not bad for small businesses getting started that need something clean. The Building a Brand Identity video is nice too. There's more Paula for your pleasure this month over at Monocle as well.
Just picked up a 4GB iPhone for $299. Ha! Apparently there are some cranky early adopters out there. 
From a post over on Dave Farber's list
"Nobody forced anyone to buy an iPhone. The hype was immense, and only a little of the hype actually came from Apple. The buyers weren't buying a phone, they were buying status and the envy of others. Every buyer got the opportunity to show off their new toy, brag. The iPhone provided a high quality narcissistic supply. Now that the price has been sullied and the status is gone you can hear the sound of egos deflating as that brief bubble of exclusivity popped. The dealer cut the price of their junk."
via Bigpicture
It's been awhile since we were victims of identity theft, when someone from Canada had made hundreds of copies of our personal checks and mailed them out across the US. Luckily our bank caught it in time and shut down our account, but not before dozens of people called us checking to see if the scam was legit. You can read more about the checks from Eric and Carolynn Gockel here.
This post also serves another purpose, to circumvent postings on the ripoffreport.com that appear when googling our name. When some folks got our fake checks in the mail purporting to be Irish Lottery Winnings or Secret Shopper money, they smelled a ruse and went to make a post on ripoffreport.com saying we were the scammers. On sites like these, you're guilty until proven innocent. They will not fact check and will leave posts on their site untouched. You can post a rebuttal, but they will not remove the original post. Well, that is, unless you PAY them to.
Take notes kids, here's a good business model for you. Provide an unchecked forum to let people anonymously post potentially (or purposely) slanderous comments about you or your business. When people call you to have it removed, even if they have proof to the contrary, claim 1st amendment rights and offer up your services on a monthly retainer to "clean up" their reputation you allowed to be marred to begin with.
If this wasn't bad enough, now another website has entered the ring. Repsavior.com to the rescue! They've gone to the trouble of scraping and databasing the complaints on ripoffreport.com . So if you missed your company's name getting bashed on ripoffreport, you may find a copy of it on repsavior.com with a message to contact them about getting their help to get the posting removed from ripoffreport (and presumably their own site).
The irony is, by reposting the ripoffreport content on their website, they're only perpetuating the problem. We went to the trouble of trying to push down the ripoffreport content by posting our own content, and it succeed for awhile until repsavior.com (and complaintrepair.com, et al) showed up.
Companies such as the QED Media Group are utilizing websites like these for lead generation for their own SEO (search engine optimization) and reputation repair services. When speaking with their head guy, Mr. Russo, he had no intention of trying to help.
If you are having similar problems and have a website of your own you can use a little web know-how and fight back against these guys. If you have any questions or suggestions, please add them to the comments and I'll try to give out some pointers that could help your situation.
At nearly 50,900 square feet, the Chase home will be slightly larger than billionaire Bill Gates' home in Washington, about 4,000 square feet smaller than the White House and 20 times larger than the average-size home in America.
Yes, but CEO pay is 364 times more than their workers, so this could have been be a lot bigger.
Sociology Professor Susan Eisenhandler muses,
"Do you actually need to have that amount of space to live a good life? There are homeless people. There are impoverished people. There are serious social concerns, and we're not addressing that."
Eh, "we're not addressing that"? So along with your building permits, you need to run your house plans by your local Sociologist. Apparently she missed Mr. Chase's good deed last year, when he donated 66 miles of fiber optic cable located on utility poles around West Hartford giving residents and government buildings high-speed and wireless internet access.
