October 1st, 2008, 6 Comments »
We bought these frozen shrimp the other day. They’ve still got the shells on, and I noticed that the packaging advertised them as ‘easy-to-peel’:
In what way are these easier to peel than the average shrimp?
On a related note, I’m becoming a bit of a Roland with my iPhone. That is, snapping and automagically uploading photos of random, mildly interesting stuff. You know, stuff like old card catalogs or strange signs or discarded roses or vaguely-yonic yoga posters. If that stuff interests you, you might want to subscribe to my Flickr feed. Or just pay slightly more attention to the thumbnails on the right side of my home page.
6 Comments »
July 15th, 2008, 15 Comments »
About a month ago, we bought a NatureMill indoor composter. It’s a pretty cool device. You load all your food waste (pretty much everything, excepting bones, citrus and fruit pits), it churns it up, and in about a month, you get compost. All for about 50 cents of power a month, according to their website. Here’s a two-and-a-half minute introductory video.
This is obviously a pricier option than the bucket-plus-worms option, but that’s not viable in our current residence. Plus, we’re much better composters when the device is within easy reach. And this thing has an air filter, so it doesn’t smell up the house.
The irony is that we have limited use for the loamy compost that the machine generates. We’ve got some plants, but once they’re filled up, we’re left with only one option: illegal dumping. Of dirt.
I remember talking to Vancouver’s deputy mayor a couple of years ago, and he mentioned that half of all of the city’s waste in landfills is organic. It’s shocking how little garbage we now remove from our apartment. We’re down to, like, one grocery bag’s worth of garbage a week. So, thus far, the experiment is working. Plus, it’s kind of fascinating to watch stuff decompose.
Over-Packaged CFLs and Compostable Cups
Some of that garbage featured the destroyed remnants of some plastic packaging. I thought it was ironic that these eco-friendly CFL bulbs came in this irritating, impossible-to-open, non-recyclable blister pack:
Speaking of plastic and composting, I’ve been spending a lot of time working in the new Serious Coffee location in Cook Street Village. They have some tasty flavoured iced teas. The other day, I noticed some fine print on the ‘plastic’ cup (much like this one). Like a number of cafes and restaurants, they’re using containers made of a corn resin which, while not recyclable, are compostable (not a word, but it should be). I didn’t ask the staff whether they separate the cups out for composting. Instead, I took mine home, cut it into strips and stuck it in our composter. We’ll see if it still looks like bits of plastic in a month.
15 Comments »
April 3rd, 2008, 7 Comments »
After they linked to my old blog post on Michelle Branch’s posterior, I subscribed to a blog called Photoshop Disasters. It’s pretty much exactly what you think it is. This has been the most entertaining example thus far:
How did everybody miss that? Looking at this product shot, I guess that it’s supposed to be an orange-ish undershirt. But it still looks way too close to Caucasian skin tone to be acceptable.
Here’s my thesis (based on the larger originals on this page): the models were originally baring their midriffs. Somebody got a little nervous about being too risqué, so they erased the navels and Photoshopped in some undershirts. They just picked the wrong colour. Why else would they have the models’ shirts fluttering up just so?
7 Comments »
April 26th, 2007, 5 Comments »
John points to Matt’s blog, where (a couple of months back), he documented Dell’s peculiar packaging practices. The photo in Matt’s post pretty much speaks for itself, but here’s an excerpt:
The packaging for these two unremarkable sticks of memory amounted to no less than seven boxes of increasing size (think japanese dolls), 8 peices of packaging foam, and one long strip of “air bubbles”. Two of the boxes contained absolutely nothing except for packaging foam, and were just used to pad out the medium size boxes, so that the boxes containing the actual ram didn’t bounce around. The two sticks could easily have fit in just one of the smaller boxes!
Speaking of packaging, why do those ridiculous bubble packages exist? They’re ubiquitous, impossible to get into and everybody loathes them. Companies that use them (and who doesn’t) are sending the wrong message to their customers–”we like this packaging, and don’t care if you hate it. You don’t matter.”
A company in an undifferentiated gadget market (like, say, memory sticks) should switch packaging to something simpler and more usable, and make a big deal about it. All factors being equal, plenty of consumers would switch brands (and pay a little more) simply for greener and easier to open packaging.
5 Comments »
