Product designs seem to be shifting away from the current "messy" look to a more minimalist look with flat colors or gradients. Because all the products are currently using different effects to attract attention - banners, "star explosions", boxes, etc. on the packaging, the whole thing ends up as a mass of eye glazing mess, like this package of Wheat Thins.



Two boxes and a banner. Messy. There was one product I saw with about 8 different banners advertising different merits of the product. Needless to say it was a mess. Now when this effect is multiplied out across every product at the market, it doesn't work well. Too much stuff vying for attention.

Pepsi's new look, on the other hand, is awesome. It's got sufficient brand recognition, so it really doesn't need to put any gimmicky labels on the container (and neither does Wheat Thins). It's got a single flat color and a logo. (Cool detailing, as the size of the white region changes according to type of Pepsi.) It is much more eye catching than before. On display it's a huge wall of blue with logos. Coca-Cola went with this approach a while back too, no more faux water droplets on the bottles and such.

Tropicana made their packaging more clean as well, although theirs seems to have a vaguely retro look that doesn't work well - probably the white on orange, and poor font.

Just an interesting trend.

So I recently read a very nice poem in English class the other day. Thought I'd make note of it.

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying:

And this same flower that smiles to-day

To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,

The higher he's a-getting,

The sooner will his race be run,

And nearer he's to setting.

That age is best which is the first,

When youth and blood are warmer;

But being spent, the worse, and worst

Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,

And while ye may, go marry:

For having lost but once your prime,

You may for ever tarry.

While the entire poem seems to have two entirely different suggestions, this is a great poem for the seize the day spirit.

School's out, due to inclement weather. You know you live in a boring city when the morning news is talking about ice melting. Yeah.
"As you can see here, the ice on our truck is melting, and dripping onto the ground"
I kid you not.
Time to relax, setup some campaigns, etc.

I probably will start posting marketing specific content on this blog. I know I can pull something amazing off... Eventually if I decide to set up that marketing specific blog, I will simply port the posts over to there.

So I've been thinking about the internet recently, mostly because people are always asking me since I'm online more than usual. No, I'm not online endlessly refreshing my Facebook (lame) or watching pointless videos on YouTube of people crashing into fences or something. (On a side note, have you ever seen someone with an iPhone use Facebook? "Shake to Refresh" feature + Endless Refreshing = Endless hilarity for you) The internet is like the revolution that personal computing was. A few of these ideas are taken from Meatball Sundae, which I happened to be reading at the time.

Information At Your Fingertips
Original this was applied to computers individually, but really it's more applicable to networks. There is really no other medium that has such an incredible amount of information with so much variety.

No Physical Limitations
It's all digital. Stores can be infinite in size and distance does not exist. The ways you can now stay connected with people across the world are just amazing, with videos, audio, text, etc. Whatever you create can be as big and wild as you imagine it.

Ease of Publishing
No other form of media makes it so easy to publish content. You pay to publish everywhere else, but on the internet, it's all free. Setup an account on Windows Live Spaces, and instantly you have a presence on the internet.

Power of Voice
There is no other medium where everybody has equal power and has equal opportunity to reach the masses. You don't need to be on a fancy TV channel or get prime spots on a magazine. If you have something new, people will come, the word will spread. Even better ideas go viral.

Scale
All other media is mostly regional, and you can only capture so many eyeballs. The internet has no boundaries, and its scale is enormous. Just recently total world internet users passed 1 billion, and that's only 15%.

Money to Be Made
Basically, there's a massive opportunity here, and everybody has a shot at it. Just like personal computing was back then. Some people took advantage of the opportunity, because it was the perfect time. There's a reason Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were born in the same year. Now is the perfect time to get involved. Ideally, being born in 1985 would be perfect for somebody to latch on to the internet revolution. While I can't say what the trend to latch onto would be, but I have a couple ideas. In fact, if you get started now, it's a tad late. So get to it.

Source Factors
Expertise and trustworthiness
Physical attractiveness
Situational similarity

Increasing Conversion
Mentioning two sides of an issue
Repeating a statement many times
Forewarning reduces effects of argument
Fear works well with persuasion
Giving something for free can increase probability of performing desired action
Foot in door technique levels up individual for larger actions

Great poem I first read in 10th grade.

To the Foot from Its Child
Pablo Neruda

The child's foot doesn't know yet that it's a foot,
and wants to be a butterfly or an apple.

But then stones and pieces of glass,
streets, ladders,
and the paths of the hard earth
go on teaching the foot that it can't fly,
that it can't be round fruit on a branch.
The child's foot then
was overcome, it fell
in the battle,
was a prisoner,
condemned to live in a shoe.

Gradually, without light,
it started to know the world in its own way,
without knowing the other foot, shut in,
exploring life like a blindman.

These soft nails
of quartz, in a bunch,
hardened, changed into
opaque matter, into hard horn,
and the small petals of the child
got crushed, unbalanced,
took the form of eyeless reptiles,
worms' triangular heads.
And then they grew calluses,
they were covered
with tiny volcanoes
of death, unacceptable
hardenings.

But this blind thing walked
without respite, without stopping
hour after hour,
one foot and then the other,
now a man's
or a woman's,
above,
below,
through fields, through mines,
through department stores and ministries,
backward,
outside, inside,
forward,
this foot laboured with its shoe,
it hardly took time
to be naked in love or in sleep,
it walked, they walked
until the whole man stopped.

And then it went down
into the earth and knew nothing,
because there everything was dark,
it didn't know that it had ceased being a foot,
if they had buried it so that it could fly
or so that it could
become an apple.

I'm currently taking AP Psychology. I posted a random conjecture (amusing that I categorized it under "science" as well...) a while back. Although I've only read a chapter in the book, I've gotten a bit more perspective on psychology and consciousness. Surprisingly my idea happens to be pretty much the same as Skinner's idea - that people are not actually in control of their actions - there is no free will. All actions are determined by a combination of nature and nurture.

Here's a few links for some background info on this -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Behaviorism
http://mb-soft.com/believe/text/determin.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

Some of these topics merge with philosophy however, and start getting very confusing, as does the term "consciousness" itself.

But the most important part I forgot to mention about the idea is that because conscious functioning and learning of animals is just based on simple input output like machines, which is what determinism (or at least my previous idea) is, artificial intelligence could easily programmed with any type of code, since all code supports if then statements. All you would need to program any animal is to know every single variable involved, and then provide every variable a certain significance value to determine how important the variable is to the overall equation. For example, if you gave the "hunger" variable a 1/10, the algorithm would not consider than an important factor in making decisions. These default values would be your genes. However, because biological determinism simply cannot be possible, the default values can be overpowered by "nurture". At this point it's too complicated without some crazy diagram or something.

Once you can successfully mimic all the variables on a human level in a machine, all the work is pretty much done. Animals are kind of like OSs, but they are programmed to learn. So once you've got the "OS" ready, it'll just start programming itself as long as you teach it.

Very disorganized idea overall, because there were too many things I wanted to cover. But at least I will remember it.

This is just an idea for now which I will come back to once I've mastered a few other things.

Transferred schools; the new one is a bit more stressful to say the least.

Here's a flowchart of the inescapable cycle that ultimately leads to failure.

Studying hard for your 5 AP courses > Sleep late because of all the studying > Go to school half asleep > poor attention span > more work at home to compensate > sleep gets later

Repeat and enjoy!