The dream machine
This is where the magic happens. Most nights. I flop down on my pile of carefully placed pillows, pull the comforter over me and drift off to the land of delightful, weird and sometimes disturbing messages from my subconscious.
Oops.
The folks at Coke were already concerned that Pepsi had been slowly gaining market share. Then Pepsi launched The Pepsi Challenge and all hell broke loose.
Coke thought the taste tests might have been rigged. But, when they conducted their own taste tests, the results were the same. Holy crap! They had to do something.
So, New Coke was born, reformulated to be sweeter, mellower and less carbonated—like Pepsi. Because that’s what research showed cola drinkers wanted.
As we all know, New Coke failed. Horribly. Expensively.
Because the taste tests had tested the wrong thing.
It was realized, too late, that what people experience from a sip or two of a beverage is not the same as when they drink a whole can. The tongue starts tasting different aspects of the beverage, and the receptors send different signals to the brain.
The lesson is to make sure to test the right thing, to ask the right questions.
A thing I love
I was reading in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink about the development of the Aeron chair and how the limitations of customer research almost killed it. I am so glad the folks at Herman Miller went with their guts and decided to press on despite the negative feedback. (People rated it as very comfortable, but also very ugly. It turned out "ugly" just meant it was shockingly different. Now everyone copies the look.)
I spend hours a day, every day, in my Aeron chair. And I never get up from it thinking about my butt or back. The chair works so well for me that it essentially disappears.
Seven hundred and something bucks was a lot to pay for a chair, but fifteen years later, it has been worth every penny. I think back to the chairs I had before the Aeron and I cringe. It's a good thing I was young and my body was durable, or I would have been crippled up by them.
Look who's back
This lamp is sort of centrally located in my house. It's not very bright but it serves sufficiently as a nightlight. I never turn it off because the switch is hard to reach and its small compact florescent bulb doesn't use much electricity.
I came home the other evening, flipped off the light in the hall and was startled by total blackness. My brain being slower these days, it took a half second to realize the bulb in my "nightlight" had burned out. Now I know that a small CF light, burning 24 hours a day, can last about four years.
A year later
A year ago I brought home a rotting pile of junk.
The goal was to strip a Suzuki cruiser down to the bones and use a kit from Ryca Motors to turn it into a replica of a British cafe bike. It was my first time with project this extensive.
I had never disassembled an engine before, but a good manual helped.
I did a lot of cutting, grinding and polishing—even a bit of welding.
I ordered parts, sent other parts out to specialists and modified some parts myself. In between parts coming and going and coming back, I did a lot of thinking and rethinking, a lot of manual reading and advice seeking. I finally started rebuilding.
Then there was the wiring to struggle with. Did someone add some extra connectors while I wasn't looking?
But here I am now, a year later. Almost done, with a couple of dozen small things to finish. Just in time to put the bike into winter storage.
Oh, and the nine? It's because this is the ninth motorcycle I've owned.
Oddball temporary fashion accessory of the day
So, you have some fuel line and a filter just sitting there, begging to be put to use, but the gas tank isn't here yet. What would you do?
