Ok, Eppendorf's marketing dept. is brilliant. Not only is the name epMotion now irrevocably burned into my skull, but I'm going to need automated pipetting because now I'm going to have trouble handling a pipette for fear of being molested by a tiny, creepy, deep-voiced, goatee-wearing man:
[via Dr. Cianci]
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Zombie Dance!
Andy Samberg managed to completely avoid being funny in his last movie "Hot Rod," but I can't stop watching this SNL short of his. It's stupid, but it makes me laugh everytime. I still don't know how "Space Chimps" got the greenlight though...
Amazon mp3 and My Media Library
After hearing about it for months, I finally tried Amazon's digital download service to get an album emusic didn't have. I'm not going to be giving up my (grandfathered) 90 downloads for $14/month any time soon, especially with amazon charging nearly as much as the cost of a CD for their downloads ($5-10 for an album), however the service is extremely streamlined and user friendly. If you can't find an album on your usual service it's certainly worth a try.
Using the service also led me to play around with the "your media collection" tool that you can access through your account menu (screen below).
It's kind of cool to look back over all the crap I've bought. My track record is not flawless - it took me a while to find a position on the scroll bar that didn't reveal any terrible books or guilty pleasures - but I really got a kick out of looking at how my shopping patterns have evolved (you can sort by date of purchase). I noticed that in the past couple years I've been trying far more new authors than I did as an undergrad, and several of these new writers have become some of my favorites.
It's also a cool window into how Amazon's marketing techniques have worked on me: My earliest orders were all $25 or greater - the minimum order size for free shipping - and occasionally included a book or cd I might not have bought otherwise, clearly purchased only to get the order over $25. More recently my orders have become arbitrarily small - at about the same time I became a "Prime" member. The total amount of stuff I buy from Amazon didn't seem to have increased too much with getting a Amazon credit card, but joining Amazon Prime has led me to buy things from Amazon I otherwise would have bought elsewhere. The number of pre-orders I buy jumped dramatically with one-click shopping, though the things I've pre-ordered are all things I'd have bought when they came out, and generally I save $5-10 by preordering.
Seeing my shopping patterns laid out like this makes me feel a little guilty about ordering such small orders so frequently - I may start limiting the number of orders I allow myself in order to concentrate my shipments and reduce the packing materials, etc. that I use.
Using the service also led me to play around with the "your media collection" tool that you can access through your account menu (screen below).
It's kind of cool to look back over all the crap I've bought. My track record is not flawless - it took me a while to find a position on the scroll bar that didn't reveal any terrible books or guilty pleasures - but I really got a kick out of looking at how my shopping patterns have evolved (you can sort by date of purchase). I noticed that in the past couple years I've been trying far more new authors than I did as an undergrad, and several of these new writers have become some of my favorites.
It's also a cool window into how Amazon's marketing techniques have worked on me: My earliest orders were all $25 or greater - the minimum order size for free shipping - and occasionally included a book or cd I might not have bought otherwise, clearly purchased only to get the order over $25. More recently my orders have become arbitrarily small - at about the same time I became a "Prime" member. The total amount of stuff I buy from Amazon didn't seem to have increased too much with getting a Amazon credit card, but joining Amazon Prime has led me to buy things from Amazon I otherwise would have bought elsewhere. The number of pre-orders I buy jumped dramatically with one-click shopping, though the things I've pre-ordered are all things I'd have bought when they came out, and generally I save $5-10 by preordering.
Seeing my shopping patterns laid out like this makes me feel a little guilty about ordering such small orders so frequently - I may start limiting the number of orders I allow myself in order to concentrate my shipments and reduce the packing materials, etc. that I use.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
