It's true, the iPod Hi-Fi won't change the world. And the new Mac Mini, although really quite nice, is a predictable revision.

But anybody who knows Apple should know to pay attention to the little things. From the careful announcement phrasing — "fun" new products — to the very small-scale venue, it seemed pretty obvious that this was not the day that Apple will announce the Power Mac Hover Book Tablet Phone. (Which I can 100% confirm is real.)

That doesn't stop the "sell your Apple, it's all over!!!1" threads. And while it's marginally unfair to those threads, every time I read them, and the cyber-freakouts within, I can't help but do one thing:

I bust out Thread 500. Enjoy.

It's a week of music posts here at cabel.name, celebrating and sharing some of the weirder stuff sitting around on my hard drive.

Swinging Nordwest.m4a (2.90 MB)

We'll start with Swinging Nordwest, from the Popshopping compilation of 70's German commercial songs. (There was a time when German advertisers, hoping to create new ways to move product, would create full-length jingle-pop-songs, distributing them as free flexidiscs to customers. And thanks to how awesome the world is, these were collected and rolled into a compilation in 2000.)

Tormented by this catchy, mega-jolly jingle and unable to purge it from my brain, I asked friend Dominik Wagner of the brilliant team TheCodingMonkeys to whip up a German translation to deepen my understanding.

The results were even better than expected. Short story: it's all about the shoes. Sing along!

[Talking] Hey people, you get everything you want, fancy sound and fancy shoes, shoes for swinging life - my shoes, your shoes!

Schuh nordwest / swinging nordwest!
Swinging nordwest, that's the hit, we are making shoe fashion, join in
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEs!

Shoes for you ladies, great chic, sophisticated,
so you present yourself always happy in the morning, midday and evening.

Trendy, chic, trendy, chic

Shoes exist for being happy, baby sing baby sing,
that's your new hit: fancy shoes. Shoes with swing.

Swinging Nordwest, that is the hit, we are making shoe fashion, join in!

[Talking] Hey lords, these are shoes for you, men's shoes, fancy shoes, with them man is absolutely warmly received...?

Schuh nordwest / swinging nordwest
These are shoes for aces, this trend is enormous
that is chic with class trendy chic in super-shape.

Super, classy, super, classy

Hey man, these shoes are chic, every pair? Yes, it's true [jedes paar, ja ist klar - great rhyme!]
[mumbledumble] is a great thing, trendy shoes, shoes with swing

Swinging nordwest, that's the hit, we are making shoe fashion, join in

[12 Bars of Incredibly Groovy Guitar Solo]

[Talking] Everybody listen once again, these shoes are top fashion stars, top and remarkable, a stunner, racy!

Schuh nordwest / swinging nordwest
That's a fashion, that is, yes, our style
Swing it on for being happy, you never have enough of it

Splendid, swinging, splendid, swinging

All my shoes are protesting now...
because I'm buying new ones today, shoes from nordwest

Swinging nordwest, that's the hit, we are making shoe fashion, join in!
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSS! [Party explosion]

(This CD can be purchased at MovieGrooves or Amazon. Recommended!)

From the Cabel Sasser Comedy Archives, two pieces of paper I've had sitting around forever. Now that I have a blog, I can finally throw them out!

First, the best "Lost Pet" poster I've come across, with surprisingly punchy copy. Then, an honest-to-god actual unretouched brochure from Great America, containing a very special "bird surprise". Enjoy!

Special Duchy Postscript

I e-mailed Rosie, who lost Duchy, to find out if Duchy was ever found. She responded within minutes!

Yes, I found her three days after I put the poster up. She was under the neighbor's deck (probably had been the whole time.) She was fine! They had just dug up the earth under my window to plant, so although it was four stories, she landed on soft earth. Very lucky.

Thanks for asking - gosh, you have had that flyer a long time!

Yay hooray!

Just a quick update with this week's fun happenings around PanicTown!

Edge   We got a tiny — but thrilling — mention of our Katamari T-Shirts in what is easily my all-time-favorite magazine, EDGE. (See scan, left.) We also genuinely thank Takahashi for choosing us! (And if you don't read Edge, please do: it's the only video game magazine in the world that seems to be written for adults, using actual articles, with words, about interesting and thought provoking things. And the design! I could go on all day.)

Transmit Review   Here's a nice review of Transmit 3.5 from Paul Stamatiou. (Thanks, Paul!) Let me know if you come across any!

Panic Nano Contest Extension   We've extended the deadline! There are only 12 Panic-branded iPod nanos in the world. Apple made them for us at our request. The Panic logo is etched on the back. They're awesome. Ten of them went to Panic employees. One went to a lucky Unison user named Hans. (Really.) And the last one? It can be yours! Just buy Transmit if you haven't already, before March 1st, and you're automatically entered. The odds are great!

Ultimate Blogger   Panic employee and guy-who-makes-it-happen Mike is launching Season Two of the web's best blogging reality series, The Ultimate Blogger. If you blog, and you blog well, and you have fun blogging, you need to enter. And if you don't like working, you can pull a Gizmondo and just buy your way in. Hurry — time is almost up!

MACTABLET!! WTFBBQ   Steve seems to found exclusive images of the top-secret MacBoard Pro Lite! (Strange that he sits right next to me and he didn't mention this, but whatever!! LOLZ)

I hope everyone is having a nice week!

About six months ago, a new and exciting kiosk opened up at our local Lloyd Center mall. Instead of selling, say, semi-depressing painted hermit crabs, questionable mafia hair straighteners, or buckwheat-filled pillows, it was selling the "Power Player" — a totally classic Chinese 76,000 NINTENDO GAMES-IN-ONE import special.

If you've never seen these things, the idea is that it's a plug-and-play videogame device, and that they're terrible and funny:

(Don't miss the surprising amount of comedy packed into that flyer — I'm a fan of the blockbuster games "Milk & Nut", "Combat Guy", "Donkey Calculator" and, most especially, "Burger Moment".)

Besides the hilarious rip-off industrial design (N64 and Genesis together at last!), and the weird Star Wars packaging photo, and the way-too-realistic gun (which once caused a bit of a problem for me at airport security on a trip back from Los Angeles after once having bought an "AdvanceBoy"), the biggest joke about these products is that they advertise "over 76,000 games!"

Basically, it's the same 30 crusty old games, with different names. For the first few pages, they actually try to put some effort into it — "Donkey Kong" becomes "Kong Don" becomes "Angry Man Donkey" becomes "Donkey Ding Bell Climb", etc. Or something like that. But by the time you get to about page 20, the programmers totally chucked it in and the "original titles" become completely computer-generated: "Donkey Kong 18543" followed by its sequel "Donkey Kong 31950", etc.

Of those 30 games, they're all brazenly pirated Nintendo originals, with minor modifications. Dave once straight-up asked the mysterious lady working our local kiosk: "Aren't these games illegal?" "Oh, no, no, totally legal", she replied. (She had no idea.)

Anyway, one day, the kiosks went away. And this month, the following ad appeared in Electronic Gaming Monthly:

According to the plea agreement Nintendo posted, Yonatan was making out like a bandit: buying the units for $8.50. At Lloyd Center, they were selling them for $60. Now, it seems, the jig is up.

Insert prison/Pooyan joke here.

For those who are interested, I'd like to post a quick update about the latest happenings here at Panic, my employer and the world's #1 Mac software company on the corner of NW 10th and Glisan!

Transmit 3.5   (And, subsequently, 3.5.1.) Wade, Will, Ian and Les put an amazing amount of work into Transmit 3.5 — it's one of our internally-infamous minor-major updates that we probably should have charged for! Oh well — it feels good. We've added some incredible new features (my favorite being "Edit in Whatever"), and fixed a ton of issues, and added Universal Binary (Intel) support. Since it's a free update for Transmit 3 owners, there's literally no reason not to use it. Literally. Steve has a great write-up on what's new.

Katamari T-Shirts Back In Stock   The initial two batches of these Keita Takahashi-designed, Namco-licensed, video-game t-shirts sold out almost ridiculously quickly. Well, good news — our third shipment of Katamari Damacy t-shirts has come in, meaning that every single Katamari shirt is now in stock (at this moment), and ready to ship very quickly! If you haven't ordered one so far, now's your chance! (And don't miss the new flash game...)

Unison 1.7.5   Unison, of course, is our Mac OS X newsreader, allowing you to read and download the shocking wealth of stuff floating around on Usenet. 1.7.5 is even better — Dave and Tim found and fixed a number of issues and weird little things, and have boldly proclaimed this release of Unison to be very good indeed. Again, a free upgrade! (And no, you didn't miss 1.7.4, we skipped to 1.7.5. Don't ask.)

MacBreak   Is there anything in this world more cringe-inducing than hearing your own retarded, recorded voice? Yes: seeing yourself on video! Hooray! If you've always wanted to see an extremely short Macworld Expo interview with yours truly, thanks to the new (and cool) Internet-based MacBreak show, your extremely unlikely wish has been granted. Just download episode one via iTunes, and skip ahead to about 19:50. Genuine thanks to Amber and the MacBreak crew for stopping by our booth! (I can't watch it again so I hope it went OK.)

WWPD   'nuff said.

Marinepolis   Panic's favorite Sushi restaurant. Many locations in Japan. Seven in America. Conveyor belt, cheap food nirvana. And now? A new location — two blocks from our office. Yes, life is incredibly good. Mike has eaten there every day this week. The problem? It's really put a kink in our quest for new office space... because we don't want to move. Ever.

Ok, so it's not really a secret. At all. In fact, I learned this "trick" by reading the Canon PowerShot SD350 manual. (In bed.) That said, none of my PowerShot-owning friends knew about it, so... BLOG POSTIN' TIME!

As the Germans say, this little trick is "like a moustache on a milkmaid" — an unexpected surprise for those who look closely!

1. Hold down the Func/Set (center) button while pressing the Power button.
2. That's all.

You'll get a magical clock! But here's where it gets cooler:

• Gently shake the camera (or, on newer models, press forward/back buttons) to change the clock color!
• Rotate the camera to orient the clock horizontally or vertically!

This works on almost all modern PowerShot [SD] models. I've tried it on an SD300 and an SD450. On other models, including the SD10, SD20, and SD30, it's a little different — you power up the camera and hold down the Func button for two seconds. Read your manual and let me know how it works for yours!

Here are some videos showing it in action. On the left is the PowerShot SD300, and on the right is the SD450. (The SD10 clock, not pictured, looks totally different and Tron-like.)

And that's, er, it. If you have a PowerShot, give it a try. Exciting? Pointless? Old news? Or generally uselawesome / awesless?

Like it or lump it, one thing is for certain: the clock can change colors.

I'm a serious, hopeless magazine addict. In fact, I'm terrified to stop and calculate how much I spend on magazines each month — because I might suffer sudden, explosive heart failure.

So, I was very interested to get a promotional e-mail for Time-Warner's new Maghound service ("The magazine lover's best friend!"), for which you pay a fixed fee per month for a fixed number of magazines, and you can swap out and change the magazines at any time, like a super-flexible multi-magazine subscription. It's almost Netflix-Meets-Magazines, in a seriously-bad-comparison kind of way.

There's only one hitch: I showed the site to a friend, and he got completely different pricing than I did. Like, totally different. And it was consistent — a page refresh gave the same pricing again.

Curious, we pulled up the site on four different computers here at work, and — yes — got four completely different prices!

Seemingly, they're trying to determine which pricing model is most popular, in real-time...

So, magazine freak beware: if you're considering trying out Maghound, I encourage you to try it on a few computers before you sign up, to play a brief game of pricing roulette. (Or, presumably, you could clean your browser cookies between visits, depending or not on if they tie your offer to your IP address...)

PS: Also a deal-killer: no computer or video game magazines available at Maghound? Boo!
PPS: I promise not to only ever write about pricing/retail/sales mysteries. It's just a phase! A phase!

My recent post about Best Buy Mystery Numbers seems to have traveled far and wide. Cool! As the British say, that post "slapped the crown right off the queen" — created a surprising amount of high-profile attention!

So, hooray for blogs! Thanks to those of you who linked it. It's nice to know that some people might also find interesting the extremely dumb things I find interesting. (It's comforting, really.)

Questions Answered

A user posting on Digg filled in some of my missing blanks. In regards "product service/replacement plans":

"A PSP number of 2.22 means 2.22% of dollars spent [are] on PSPable items, so if the store sold $20,000 of items that offer PSP's, they sold $444 worth of PSPs."

Additionally, regarding how shrink works:

"The shrink number of .26 means that they have [lost] .26% of total sales for that period, if the store sells $2,000,000 of product in the 6 month period, the .26 means they lost $5,200 in that period no matter what the reason (stealing, broken products etc.). Another reason they give to CS reps not to let people return product after [the manufacturer's return] period, if you talk a manager into letting you return something after 30 days, the [manufacturer] will not accept it and it's supposed to get thrown away at a distribution center, which hits your shrink."

Thanks, Shane-Z. I had no idea.

Comments Lost

The story also brought out employees of all shapes and sizes who commented on the post. Some (mostly) fascinating anecdotes about the world of retail were revealed, and it's worth at least skimming. Thanks to everyone for taking the time to comment!

However... that said, a minor "incident" with Blogger caused a whole batch of comments to pipe directly into the great binary toilet. I.e., they got deleted. Fortunately, I got e-mail copies. So, I'll re-attach all of the "lost comments" to this post!

If you'd like to hear those (lost) stories from the front line, click on! And thanks again for reading...

You ever noticed the big weird numbers on the wall at Best Buy?

They're usually just to the right of the exit, by the registers. They're yellow. Of course they look like goofy price tags. And they're just up there on the wall, for everyone to see. Some stores have only one or two sets of numbers, while some have quite a few. And they look something like this:


Well, let me tell you — if you put numbers on a wall of your store, with no clear indication of what they mean, I will go insane and become obsessed with them. It's just how it works!

Seeking meaning, I started occasionally asking "so, uh, what are those numbers, anyway?" when I checked out. Usually, I got the shrug-and-sigh double-punch. But sometimes, I got an interesting answer. And, eventually, it came together, helped tremendously by a conveniently annotated store — as well as some serious Googling.

Thus, I present to you, dear reader, a Best Buy Wall Number display — annotated!



Let's start at the top! (Feel free to correct any of this if you actually work for Best Buy)

Shrink Percent: Ahh, shrink. You probably call it "stealing". And this store is doing pretty good with handling it. The shrink percentage is, presumably, the percentage of Best Buy merchandise that is simply prancing right out the door. A shrink percentage of .50% is, apparently, bad news — so this store is doing pretty well.

Shrink Payout: Keep shrink low, and the shrink payout increases! Well, I have no idea how this shrink payout ($469) is distributed to employees (anyone know?), but I'd wager it winds up being a few extra dollars in your paycheck every now and then.

PRP Dollars: That's right: the dreaded product replacement plan, also known as the extended warranty nobody ever buys. Or do they? On this day, they've made a pretty impressive $77 (of almost-all-profit) on product replacement plans. Wow.

PRP Percent: That means that people bought the product replacement plan 2.22% of the time. Apparently, this isn't so good — the other store (pictured above) was rockin' a mighty 10.50% on the PRP. Wow again.

EWSI: I like this one. Extended Windows Sales Initiative? Enhanced Wireless Secure Internet? Nope, it's better — Entertainment Weekly / Sports Illustrated! That's right, good old magazine subscriptions! You know how Best Buy always asks you if you want a subscription when you check out? Well, on this day, the pitched worked seven times. As hard as it is to comprehend that the alleged $12 dollars Best Buy makes from each subscription is worth the semi-uncomfortable sales pitch, I don't have to answer to any shareholders...

Apps: Simple. Best Buy credit card applications. Looks like three have been filled out and turned in so far.

MC Percent: Master Card. Yes, every Best Buy card application includes surprise bonus offer for, uh, a Master Card. Yeah, it's two card applications in one, and this store has successfully up-sold the card 100% of the three times.

AS Percent: Account Shield is another Best Buy card up-sell option. Apparently a unemployment-protection feature that might generate $65 profit for Best Buy, it seems, at least in this store, people took it.

So that's it! The great, one-person-cared mystery has been solved. The next time you're at Best Buy, keep an eye out for these numbers — perhaps useless, perhaps interesting, but always telling, I hope they give you insight into your store, your neighborhood, or even America itself. Although probably not.

Highest shrink percent photo wins a prize! ;)

Bonus Best Buy True Shrink Story

Exiting a Best Buy store once, a small kid leaving in front of me triggered a flurry of furious beeping. Sheepishly, he turned around, slowly, as the loss prevention guy asked him if he might, you know, just in case, have any products on him. The kid's answer was theft-zen beauty: "Oh... I must have accidentally put that movie in my pants."